The text starts from Sen's conception of rationality as a social commitment and from his criticism of the economic rationality of utilitarianism, confronting them with the characteristics of implicit rationality in solidarity economic initiatives and sustainable development. These economic initiatives and Sen's ethical rationality are reflected in the following aspects: ethical evaluations of these solidarity initiatives, seeking to reduce social inequalities, the need for social commitment by the companies involved, recognition of social diversity, the importance given to the social participation (...) of the people involved in the initiatives, expansion of positive freedom and recognition of the individual as an active agent. These solidarity initiatives, compared to the traditional economy, also entail changes at the political and social level, related to rationality as Sen's social commitment. (shrink)

Empirical philosophers of science aim to base their philosophical theories on observations of scientific practice. But since there is far too much science to observe it all, how can we form and test hypotheses about science that are sufficiently rigorous and broad in scope, while avoiding the pitfalls of bias and subjectivity in our methods? Part of the answer, we claim, lies in the computational tools of the digital humanities, which allow us to analyze large volumes of scientific literature. Here (...) we advocate for the use of these methods by addressing a number of large-scale, justificatory concerns—specifically, about the epistemic value of journal articles as evidence for what happens elsewhere in science, and about the ability of DH tools to extract this evidence. Far from ignoring the gap between scientific literature and the rest of scientific practice, effective use of DH tools requires critical reflection about these relationships. (shrink)

In this paper we present the authors’ experience of teaching a course in Ethics for Engineers, which has been delivered four times in three different universities in Spain and Chile. We begin by presenting the material context of the course, and especially the intellectual background of the participating students, in terms of their previous understanding of philosophy in general, and of ethics in particular. Next we set out the objectives of the course and the main topics addressed, as well as (...) the methodology and teaching resources employed to have students achieve a genuine philosophical reflection on the ethical aspects of the profession, starting from their own mindset as engineers. Finally we offer some results based on opinion surveys of the students, as well as a more personal assessment by the authors, recapitulating the most significant achievements of the course and indicating its underlying Socratic structure. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to analyze investor behavior towards socially responsible mutual funds. The analysis is based on an experimental study where a sample of individuals takes investment decisions under different parameters of information about the investment alternatives and expected returns. In the experiment, each participant decides how to distribute an investment budget between two funds, returns on which are uncertain and change over time. Two treatments are conducted, each providing a different degree of information on the socially (...) responsible (SR) character of one of the two investment alternatives. The results obtained suggest that although individuals’ criteria for investment are essentially guided by returns and diversification, participants invest significantly more in a fund when they are explicitly informed about its SR nature. In particular, participants who declare being concerned about SR actually invest significantly more in the SR alternative. Furthermore, the level of SR faithfulness among a small group of investors is such that they invest the main share of their budget in the SR fund, even when the return differential is highly unfavorable. Providing clear information about the SR characteristics of an investment is crucial to help investors express their preferences. (shrink)

Lucas Matthews and I substantially revised my SEP entry on Heritability. This version includes discussion of the missing heritability problem and other issues that arise from the use of Genome Wide Association Studies by Behavioral Geneticists.

An engineer who becomes an educator in a school of software engineering has the mission to teach how to design and construct software systems, therein applying his or her knowledge and expertise. However, due to their engineering background, engineers may forget that educating a person is not the same as designing a machine, since a machine has a well-defined goal, whilst a person is capable to self-propose his or her own objectives. The ethical implications are clear: educating a free person (...) must leave space for creativity and self-determination in his or her own discovery of the way towards personal and professional fulfillment, which cannot consist only in achieving goals selected by others. We present here an argument that is applicable to most fields of engineering. However, the dis-analogy between educating students and programming robots may have a particular appeal to software engineers and computer scientists. We think the consideration of three different stages in the educational process may be useful to engineers when they act as educators. We claim that the three stages are essential to engineering education. In particular, education is incomplete if the third stage is not reached. Moreover, mentoring is incompatible with an educational assessment framework that considers the goals of the engineer are always given by others. In our view, then, an integral education is not only beyond programming the behavior of students, but also beyond having them reach those given goals. (shrink)

Among the various contemporary schools of moral thinking, consequence-based ethics, as opposed to rule-based, seems to have a good acceptance among professionals such as software engineers. But naïve consequentialism is intellectually too weak to serve as a practical guide in the profession. Besides, the complexity of software systems makes it very hard to know in advance the consequences that will derive from professional activities in the production of software. Therefore, following the spirit of well-known codes of ethics such as the (...) ACM/IEEE’s, we advocate for a more solid position in the ethical education of software engineers, which we call ‘moderate deontologism’, that takes into account both rules and consequences to assess the goodness of actions, and at the same time pays an adequate consideration to the absolute values of human dignity. In order to educate responsible professionals, however, this position should be complemented with a pedagogical approach to virtue ethics. (shrink)

Thinking about what the senses cannot grasp is one of the hallmarks of human cognition. We argue that “intangible abstracta” are represented differently from other products of abstraction, that goal-derived categorization supports their learning, and that they are grounded also in internalized linguistic and social interaction. We conclude by suggesting different ways in which abstractness contributes to cement group cohesion.

This paper reviews the development of socially responsible investment (SRI) in the Spanish financial market. The year, 1997 saw the appearance in Spain of the first SRI mutual fund, but it was not until late 1999, that major Spanish fund managers offered SRI mutual funds on the retail market. The development of SRI in the Spanish financial market has not experienced the high levels of development seen in other European countries, such as France or Italy, where interest in SRI began (...) during the same period. This paper presents an analysis of the impact of SRI mutual funds managed by Spanish fund managers comparing the evolution of managed assets and number of investors. We also analyse the investment strategies adopted by these funds, which mainly use negative screening criteria and the participation of non-governmental organisations as institutional investors. An analysis of the take up of socially responsible investment in the Spanish financial market shows majors deficits in this process. This is due to Spanish investors having limited sensitivity to social issues and knowledge of SRI, and a lack of development of SRI investment strategies, such as engagement or shareholder activism by fund managers. Furthermore, the take-up of SRI mutual funds in the Spanish financial market coincided with a fall in the stock market at the beginning of the 21st Century. We conclude with an analysis of the relationship between SRI and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). (shrink)

Children show increasing control of emotions and behavior during their early years. Our studies suggest a shift in control from the brain’s orienting network in infancy to the executive network by the age of 3—4 years. Our longitudinal study indicates that orienting influences both positive and negative affect, as measured by parent report in infancy. At 3—4 years of age, the dominant control of affect rests in a frontal brain network that involves the anterior cingulate gyrus. Connectivity of brain structures (...) also changes from infancy to toddlerhood. Early connectivity of parietal and frontal areas is important in orienting; later connectivity involves midfrontal and anterior cingulate areas related to executive attention and self-regulation. (shrink)

Artefacts are usually understood in contrast with natural kinds and conceived as a unitary kind. Here we propose that there is in fact a variety of artefacts: from the more concrete to the more abstract ones. Moreover, not every artefact is able to fulfil its function thanks to its physical properties: Some artefacts, particularly what we call “institutional” artefacts, are symbolic in nature and require a system of rules to exist and to fulfil their function. Adopting a standard method to (...) measure conceptual representation (the property generation task), we have experimentally explored how humans conceptualise these different kinds of artefacts. Results indicate that institutional artefacts are typically opposed to social objects, while being more similar to standard artefacts, be they abstract or concrete. (shrink)

Is ethics a computable function? Can machines learn ethics like humans do? If teaching consists in no more than programming, training, indoctrinating… and if ethics is merely following a code of conduct, then yes, we can teach ethics to algorithmic machines. But if ethics is not merely about following a code of conduct or about imitating the behavior of others, then an approach based on computing outcomes, and on the reduction of ethics to the compilation and application of a set (...) of rules, either a priori or learned, misses the point. Our intention is not to solve the technical problem of machine ethics, but to learn something about human ethics, and its rationality, by reflecting on the ethics that can and should be implemented in machines. Any machine ethics implementation will have to face a number of fundamental or conceptual problems, which in the end refer to philosophical questions, such as: what is a human being (or more generally, what is a worthy being); what is human intentional acting; and how are intentional actions and their consequences morally evaluated. We are convinced that a proper understanding of ethical issues in AI can teach us something valuable about ourselves, and what it means to lead a free and responsible ethical life, that is, being good people beyond merely “following a moral code”. In the end we believe that rationality must be seen to involve more than just computing, and that value rationality is beyond numbers. Such an understanding is a required step to recovering a renewed rationality of ethics, one that is urgently needed in our highly technified society. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to discussing the topological structure of the arrow of time. In the literature, it is often accepted that its algebraic and topological structures are that of a one-dimensional Euclidean space \, although a critical review on the subject is not easy to be found. Hence, leveraging on an operational approach, we collect evidences to identify it structurally as a normed vector space \\), and take a leap of abstraction to complete it, up to isometries, to the (...) real line. During the development of the paper, the space-time is recognized as a fibration, with the fibers being the sets of simultaneous events. The corresponding topology is also exposed: open sets naturally arise within our construction, showing that the classical space-time is non-Hausdorff. The transition from relativistic to classical regimes is explored too. (shrink)

Infonorma is a multi-agent system that provides its users with recommendations of legal normative instruments they might be interested in. The Filter agent of Infonorma classifies normative instruments represented as Semantic Web documents into legal branches and performs content-based similarity analysis. This agent, as well as the entire Infonorma system, was modeled under the guidelines of MAAEM, a software development methodology for multi-agent application engineering. This article describes the Infonorma requirements specification, the architectural design solution for those requirements, the detailed (...) design of the Filter agent and the implementation model of Infonorma, according to the guidelines of the MAAEM methodology. (shrink)

Many corporate logos use pictorial metaphors to influence consumer attitudes. Priming concrete concepts—by means of logo exposure or other procedures—changes attitudes toward dissimilar abstract targets in metaphor-consistent ways. It is assumed, however, that observers apply a logo’s metaphor externally to interpret the company and its service. This research examined the possibility that observers may instead apply that metaphor internally to interpret their current condition and hence their need for the company’s service. We hypothesized that the same logo can have divergent (...) effects on company liking depending on the direction of metaphor application. To test this possibility, we built on evidence that people apply available metaphors especially when they feel unsure about the target. We predicted that observers would apply a logo’s metaphor externally when unsure about the company, but internally when unsure about themselves. Three experiments provide convergent support for hypotheses. We discuss impli.. (shrink)

This paper reformulates the analogy between text and action in Paul Ricœur’s philosophy. My hypothesis is that such a reformulation better contextualizes the tensions in Ricœur’s practical philosophy, specifically between the social and the institutional. The aim is to show that Ricœur’s philosophy is tensional because it’s based on the principle of analogy. In order to think about this tension, we must grasp its true horizon: the analogy of text and action. After outlining this analogy’s genesis, we will see that (...) each of these terms—text, action, analogy—is determined by a “grammar of analogy,” which conditions all of Ricœur’s speeches and has its roots in his interpretation of intentionality. (shrink)

HSimulator is a multithread simulator for mass-action biochemical reaction systems placed in a well-mixed environment. HSimulator provides optimized implementation of a set of widespread state-of-the-art stochastic, deterministic, and hybrid simulation strategies including the first publicly available implementation of the Hybrid Rejection-based Stochastic Simulation Algorithm. HRSSA, the fastest hybrid algorithm to date, allows for an efficient simulation of the models while ensuring the exact simulation of a subset of the reaction network modeling slow reactions. Benchmarks show that HSimulator is often considerably (...) faster than the other considered simulators. The software, running on Java v6.0 or higher, offers a simulation GUI for modeling and visually exploring biological processes and a Javadoc-documented Java library to support the development of custom applications. HSimulator is released under the COSBI Shared Source license agreement. (shrink)

Human reproductive cloning has become the most palpable example of the globalization of science. Throughout the world, events and conjectures in the media, such as the birth and death in the United Kingdom of the cloned sheep Dolly and projects to clone human beings by Korean scientists, by members of the Canadian-based Raelian cult, and by the Italian physician Antinori in an undisclosed country, have galvanized the political will of individual countries to ban human reproductive cloning.Yet, international attempts to harmonize (...) policies in the area of biomedical ethics and human research, such as the 1997 Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, and most recently, the United Nations’ efforts to adopt an international convention against human reproductive cloning, have been insufficient to trigger a substantial global policy design process on issues relating to these new technologies. (shrink)

Mindreading (or folk psychology, Theory of Mind, mentalizing) is the capacity to represent and reason about others’ mental states. The Simulation Theory (ST) is one of the main approaches to mindreading. ST draws on the common-sense idea that we represent and reason about others’ mental states by putting ourselves in their shoes. More precisely, we typically arrive at representing others’ mental states by simulating their mental states in our own mind. This entry offers a detailed analysis of ST, considers theoretical (...) arguments and empirical data in favour of and against it, discusses its philosophical implications, and illustrates some alternatives to it. (shrink)

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: (i) faster, lower-level coordination processes of behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at (...) timescale t1; (ii) mid-range collaborative processes which re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; (iii) cooperative processes involved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and (iv) cultural processes and practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales (t1, t2, t3, t4). (shrink)

Bietti, Tilston and Bangerter take an evolutionary approach towards memory transmission and storytelling, arguing that storytelling plays a central role in the creation and transmission of cultural information. They suggest that storytelling is a vehicle to transmit survival‐related information that helps to avoid the costs involved in the first‐hand acquisition of that information and contributes to the maintenance of social bonds and group‐level cooperation. Furthermore, Bietti et al. argue that, going beyond storytelling’s individualist role of manipulating the audience to enhance (...) fitness of the narrator, that these adaptive functions of storytelling may well be assigned to other forms of language use besides narration (e.g., instructional discourse and argumentation). Based on this evidence, Bietti and colleagues claim that the specific adaptive function of storytelling lies in making sense of non‐routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling collective sensemaking. (shrink)

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: faster, lower-levelcoordination processesof behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at timescale t1; mid-rangecollaborative (...) processeswhich re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; cooperative processesinvolved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and cultural processesand practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales. (shrink)

This edited volume systematically addresses the connection between Wilfrid Sellars and the history of modern philosophy, exploring both the content and method of this relationship. It intends both to analyze Sellars’s position in relation to singular thinkers of the modern tradition, and to inquire into Sellars’s understanding of philosophy as a field in reflective and constructive conversation with its past. The chapters in Part I cover Sellars’s interpretation and use of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and Hegel. Part II features essays (...) on his relationship with Peirce, Frege, Carnap, Wittgenstein, American pragmatism, behaviorism and American realism, particularly his father, Roy Wood. Sellars and the History of Modern Philosophy features original contributions by many of the most renowned Sellars scholars throughout the world. It offers an exhaustive survey of Sellars’s views on the historical antecedents and metaphilosophical aspects of his thought. (shrink)

The aim of our introduction is to present the reader with key concepts and paradigms that have been rigorously developed to empirically investigate the dynamics and outcomes of conversational remembering in cognitive research.

Collaborative remembering is essential to enabling teams to build shared understanding of projects and their progress. This article presents an analysis of collaborative remembering sequences in a corpus of interactions collected in a workplace where a team of designers developed a video television commercial. On the basis of coding and analysing linguistic and bodily behaviors in 158 such sequences, extracted from over 45 hours of video recordings, recurrent patterns of collaborative remembering processes were identified, relating to the interplay of work (...) roles. This article shows that collaborative remembering in the design studio is structured by behavioural, interactive and social factors. (shrink)

This paper presents a Heideggerian phenomenological analysis of screens. In a world and an epoch where screens pervade a great many aspects of human experience, we submit that phenomenology, much in a traditional methodological form, can provide an interesting and novel basis for our understanding of screens. We ground our analysis in the ontology of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time [1927/1962], claiming that screens will only show themselves as they are if taken as screens-in-the-world. Thus, the phenomenon of screen is (...) not investigated in its empirical form or conceptually. It is rather taken as a grounding intentional orientation that conditions our engagement with certain surfaces as we comport ourselves towards them “as screens.” In doing this we claim to have opened up the phenomenon of screen in a new and meaningful way. (shrink)

People are more likely to think statements are valid when they agree with them than when they do not. We conducted four studies analyzing the interference of self-reported ideologies with performance in a syllogistic reasoning task. Study 1 established the task paradigm and demonstrated that participants’ political ideology affects syllogistic reasoning for syllogisms with political content but not politically irrelevant syllogisms. The preregistered Study 2 replicated the effect and showed that incentivizing accuracy did not alleviate these differences. Study 3 revealed (...) that syllogistic reasoning is affected by ideology in the presence and absence of such bonus payments for correctly judging the conclusions’ logical validity. In Study 4, we observed similar effects regarding a different ideological orientation: environmentalism. Again, monetary bonuses did not attenuate these effects. Taken together, the results of four studies highlight the harm of ideology regarding people’s logical reasoning. (shrink)

While courtroom examinations are often recognized as a distinct speech-exchange system, little is known about how participants do an examination beyond its unique turn-taking system. This article attempts to shed some light on this issue by studying the question design during the direct examination in an American criminal court case using Conversation Analysis. It shows that attorneys use different question forms compared to casual conversation: declaratives are far less prevalent and questions are often designed as requests for action. In addition, (...) attorneys make use of forms that are not found in other types of interaction, such as the tag correct. The way in which attorneys design their questions additionally shows that the rules of the courtroom have procedural consequences for how the interaction is done. But these rules have to be enacted, and it is in their violation that participants bring about categories such as leading questions. (shrink)

Joint remembering relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, linguistic, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales which we distinguish for analytic purposes with the terms ‘coordination’, ‘collaboration’, ‘cooperation’, and ‘culture’, so as better to study their interanimation in practice. As an illustrative example of the complementary timescales involved in joint remembering in a real-world activity, we present a (...) micro-qualitative analysis of an interactional sequence in which two members of a fourperson team of video designers crafted a memory- scaffolding tool. In order to find the temporal structure of the crafting of the memory-scaffolding tool, we used software for pattern recognition. The analysis suggests that coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture reveal complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which should be considered as complex phenomenon unfolding at multiple interanimating timescales. (shrink)

Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child‐directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We evaluate two sets of features: One set is generated from the distribution of words into frames defined by the two adjacent words. These features primarily encode syntactic aspects of word usage. The (...) other set is generated from non‐adjacent co‐occurrences between words. These features encode complementary thematic aspects of word usage. Regression models using these distributional features to predict age of acquisition of 656 early‐acquired English words indicate that both types of features improve predictions over simpler models based on frequency and appearance in salient or simple utterance contexts. Syntactic features were stronger predictors of children's production than comprehension, whereas thematic features were stronger predictors of comprehension. Overall, earlier acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for nouns and verbs, and by thematic content related to food and face‐to‐face play topics; later acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for pronouns and question words, and by content related to narratives and object play. (shrink)

This paper develops a hermeneutic technology assessment of quantum technologies. It offers a “vision assessment” of quantum technologies that can eventually lead to socio-ethical analysis. Section 2 describes this methodological approach and in particular the concept of the hermeneutic circle applied to technology. Section 3 gives a generic overview of quantum technologies and their impacts. Sections 4 and 5 apply the hermeneutic technology assessment approach to the study of quantum technologies. Section 5 proposes distinguishing three levels in the analysis of (...) the creation and communication of social meanings to quantum technologies: (a) fictions, (b) popularization, and (c) scientific journalism. Section 6 analyzes the results and defines some lines of action to increase social acceptance and trust in quantum technologies. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on quantum technologies by enhancing the reflection on them and their potential, as well as illustrating the complexity of technological innovation and the need to shape it. (shrink)

Digital media and technologies have significantly transformed the ways we relate to the world, in the triple sense of Selbstwelt, Mitwelt, and Umwelt. Think of the quantification of the self, the number of followers and likes on social media, or using Google maps and similar tools to orient ourselves in a city, to find and choose a good restaurant, and so on. One might say that digital media and technologies have actually transformed our interpretation, understanding, and access to the world. (...) Now, if hermeneutics is the philosophy of interpretation, then we might suppose that hermeneutics should pay attention to these transformations. For us, digital hermeneutics is the study of the ways digital media and technologies mediate between humans and the world. It is also the study of the ways digital media and technologies are embedded in non-technological relations between humans and the world – psychological, social, cultural, and so on. (shrink)