In a series of three behavioral experiments, we found a systematic distortion of probability judgments concerning elementary visual stimuli. Participants were briefly shown a set of figures that had two features (e.g., a geometric shape and a color) with two possible values each (e.g., triangle or circle and black or white). A figure was then drawn, and participants were informed about the value of one of its features (e.g., that the figure was a “circle”) and had to predict the value (...) of the other feature (e.g., whether the figure was “black” or “white”). We repeated this procedure for various sets of figures and, by varying the statistical association between features in the sets, we manipulated the probability of a feature given the evidence of another (e.g., the posterior probability of hypothesis “black” given the evidence “circle”) as well as the support provided by a feature to another (e.g., the impact, or confirmation, of evidence “circle” on the hypothesis “black”). Results indicated that participants’ judgments were deeply affected by impact, although they only should have depended on the probability distributions over the features, and that the dissociation between evidential impact and posterior probability increased the number of errors. The implications of these findings for lower and higher level cognitive models are discussed. (shrink)

In March 2016, DeepMind's computer programme AlphaGo surprised the world by defeating the world‐champion Go player, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo exhibits a novel, surprising and valuable style of play and has been recognised as “creative” by the artificial intelligence (AI) and Go communities. This article examines whether AlphaGo engages in creative problem solving according to the standards of comparative psychology. I argue that AlphaGo displays one important aspect of creative problem solving (namely mental scenario building in the form of Monte Carlo (...) tree search), while lacking another (domain generality). This analysis has consequences for how we think about creativity in humans and AI. (shrink)

There is widespread interest in the possibility that music training enhances nonmusical abilities. This possibility has been examined primarily for speech perception and domain-general abilities su...

The current disclosure model of informed consent ignores the linguistic complexity of any act of communication, and the increased risk of difficulties in the special circumstances of informed consent. This article explores, through linguistic analysis, the specificity of informed consent as a speech act, a communication act, and a form of dialogue, following on the theories of J.L. Austin, Roman Jakobson, and Mikhail Bakhtin, respectively. In the proposed model, informed consent is a performative speech act resulting from a series of (...) communication acts which together constitute a dialogic, polyphonic, heteroglossial discourse. It is an act of speech that results in action being taken after a conversation has happened where distinct individuals, multiple voices, and multiple perspectives have been respected, and convention observed and recognized. It is more meaningful and more ethical for both patient and physician, in all their human facets including their interconnectedness. Keywords: communication, dialogism, informed consent, linguistics, performative, physician-patient relationship CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The mental simulation of past and future scenarios allows individuals to understand the past, make predictions about the future, plan and regulate their behavior. A great deal of research has focus...

The author discusses professional teaching ethics and its main principles and values. The theoretical basis of the study is ethics of social consequences and, in its context, primarily the principles and values of humanity and human dignity, including their possible application in the teaching profession and, partially, in the process of teaching foreign languages and Slovak as a foreign language to students from abroad.

This paper aims to differentiate between lying and irony, typically addressed independently by philosophers and linguists, as well as to discuss the cases when deception co-occurs with, and capitalises on, irony or metaphor. It is argued that the focal distinction can be made with reference to Grice’s first maxim of Quality, whose floutings lead to overt untruthfulness, and whose violations result in covert untruthfulness. Both types of untruthfulness are divided into explicit and implicit subtypes depending on the level of meaning (...) on which they are manifest. Further, it is shown that deception may be based on irony or metaphor, which either promote deceptive implicatures or are deployed covertly. Finally, some argumentation is provided in favour of why these cases of deceiving can be conceptualised as lying. (shrink)

This is a study of the effects of a number of background variables on ethical perceptions of Mexican and U.S. marketers. This research investigates how a marketer’s personal religiousness, relativism, and the ethical values influence in perceptions of the degree of ethical problems in hypothetical marketing scenarios. It also examines differences between Mexican and U.S. marketers on these variables. The results show significant differences in perception between the countries, and we discuss the implications of these differences for cross-cultural business activities.

The critical discourse analysis is the tool used in this article, to study how audiovisual media have constructed mental representation about the historical facts occurred in Spain between the final stage of the Spanish Civil War and the late 1980s: the theft of newborn babies. The State has failed in an attempt to establish policies that support truth, justice and reparation as it has been recalled by United Nations experts to the Government of Spain, and the reports and documentaries have (...) become vehicles to capture and recover memories. Our objective is to analyze how this collective awareness has been realized and the contribution of reports and documentaries. Our results show that the Spanish television channels silence the Francoist context to depict the thefts as the product of economical mobs focused on child trafficking. The international channels, however, put the origin of the dictatorship at the center of the discourse. (shrink)

No Aggression, Only Teasing: The Pragmatics of Teasing and Banter A bone of contention among researchers is whether the primary function of humour is the expression of aggression against the hearer or the promotion of solidarity between the interlocutors. It is commonly averred that teasing boasts a dichotomous nature, i.e. malignant and benevolent. The former coincides with the potential for criticising, mocking and ostracising the interlocutor, whereas the latter accounts for playfulness and bonding capacity.The overriding goal of the paper is (...) to expound the rapport-building function, which is here postulated to be inherent to teasing. First and foremost, I will determine the scope of interest differentiating between putdown humour and teases, which may assume the form of retorts and develop into multi-turn teases, i.e. banter. Subtypes of teasing will be discussed with a view to proving that it is inherently devoid of genuine aggressiveness. The underlying premise is that teases, even if ostensibly aggressive, i.e. face-threatening, are geared towards solidarity, in conformity with the framework of politeness, including mock impoliteness, holding between intimates. Also, teases fulfil a few subordinate functions such as defunctionalisation or mitigation of face-threatening messages they may carry. (shrink)

There Is Method in the Humorous Speaker's Madness: Humour and Grice's Model The interdependence between humour and the Cooperative Principle appears to be a bone of contention in pragmatic studies on verbal humour. The wellentrenched approach advocated by Raskin and Attardo is that jokes constitute the non-bona-fide mode of communication standing vis-à-vis the Gricean model and governed by a humour-CP, and that they violate, not merely flout, the maxims and even the CP. The aim of the article is to shed (...) new light on the interdependence between humour and the CP with a view to substantiating that the authors who regard humour as an independent communicative mode and as an intrinsic violation of maxims and the CP appear to labour under a serious misapprehension. It will be argued that the Gricean model of cooperative rationality does allow for humorous verbalisations, which normally rely on maxim flouts. (shrink)

A common strategy in comparative cognition is to require that one reject associative learning as an explanation for behavior before concluding that an organism is capable of causal reasoning. In this paper, I argue that standard causal-reasoning tasks can be explained by a powerful form of associative learning: unlimited associative learning (UAL). The lesson, however, is not that researchers should conduct more studies to reject UAL, but that they should instead focus on 1) enriching the cognitive hypothesis space and 2) (...) testing a broader range of information processing patterns—errors, biases and limits, rather than successful problem solving alone. (shrink)

Una de las principales causas de que el visón europeo, Mustela lutreola, esté en peligro de extinción es la industria peletera. Por un lado, durante los siglos XIX y XX, la caza por su piel causó un grave declive en la especie. Por otro lado, a partir de la década de 1920, la peletería fue substituyendo la caza por la cría en cautividad, y Europa se llenó de granjas de visón americano, Neovison vison; los ejemplares fugados de ellas están colonizando (...) el continente y se han convertido en una amenaza para el visón europeo. Actualmente, algunos países comienzan a prohibir estas granjas, que en cambio aumentan en España. El objetivo de este artículo es analizar este caso concreto como un ejemplo de que nuestros gustos estéticos pueden resultar dañinos e incluso letales para otras especies y la naturaleza en general. (shrink)

RESUMEN: En este artículo se presenta la evaluación eudaimonista como una articulación entre el agente y los objetos del mundo. Sostendremos que, gracias a esta noción, la teoría de las emociones de Nussbaum es adecuada para dar cuenta de la función adaptativa de las emociones, por lo que las teorías no cognitivas no resultarían superiores en este aspecto. Esta noción serviría, asimismo, para no dejar de lado los aspectos cognitivos de la emoción. Veremos cómo las ideas de Nussbaum se basan (...) en las de las teorías evaluativas provenientes de la psicología, para después desplegar su propuesta en detalle. En la exposición, también trataremos otras cuestiones, entre ellas, la racionalidad de las emociones, la relación entre éstas y el florecimiento humano, o la vinculación de las mismas con nuestra condición vulnerable. ABSTRACT: This article presents eudaimonistic evaluation as an articulation between the agent and the objects of the world. We will argue that, thanks to this notion, Nussbaum's theory of emotions is appropriate to accounting for the adaptive function of emotions. This notion is useful for shedding light on the cognitive aspects of emotion. We will see how Nussbaum's ideas are based on evaluative theories from psychology, and we will explain in detail her proposals. In our explanation, we will deal with other questions such as the rationality of emotions, the relationship between emotions and human flourishing, and the link between emotions and our vulnerable nature. (shrink)

Report on the international conference Ethical Thinking: Past and Present entitled Ethics in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

The author of the paper deals with teachers’ professional ethics and the current theoretical and practical implementation. She stresses the need for an ethics of teaching to be included in the theoretical and practical training of future teachers. She discusses ethics theories by Slovak and other authors and demonstrates the extent to which they are applied in practice. The author considers that an ethics of teaching should be a tool of the professional and moral practice of each teacher. The current (...) situation in the Slovak educational system is rather unfavourable, and there is often a contradiction between the theoretical knowledge and its practical implementation in the everyday work of the teacher. (shrink)

Recensión de A. Gutmann, La educación democrática. Una teoría política de la educación, Paidós, Barcelona, 2001 y B. Brick, En defensa de la política, Tusquets, Barcelona, 2001.

Le présent volume rassemble les conférences prononcées dans le IIe Séminaire International de l’AEIHM (Asociación Española de Investigación de Historia de las Mujeres). Tenu en 2005, le séminaire précédent avait été centré sur l’œuvre de la théoricienne américaine Joan Scott. Celui-ci – qui a eu lieu en 2007 – a suivi le même questionnement sur l’inscription internationale des courants épistémologiques féministes en Espagne mais il a abordé l’influence particulière des théoriciennes française...

The professionalization of science is a recent phenomenon. Before the mid-1800s, investigations of the natural world were largely performed by those hobbyists who had the leisure time to do so. Things are very different today. Open one of the over twenty thousand scientific journals currently in circulation, and you would be hard pressed to decipher the technical prose, much less the methodological and conceptual strategies being employed. This is changing, however. People are not only taking greater interest in how science (...) works, but choosing to actively participate in the process, whether this involves discovering new protein configurations , identifying and categorizing cancer cells from tissue samples , or analyzing the vocalizations of canids .Why start a review on what might seem like an academic book in contemporary philosophy of biology with a discussion of citizen science? Craver and Darden’s book, In Search of Mechanisms, is positi .. (shrink)

This article explores the possibilities offered by Collins’ model of interaction rituals to an understanding of the emotional dynamics of art auctions. It argues that whilst it explains how the art object becomes the focus of attention, and thus the repository of solidarity and emotional energy, it also obliterates some of the institutional aspects of the auction market that can influence such outcomes. It discusses the need to include an examination of the specific practices of auction houses operating in an (...) international market in their capacity to target specific audiences for their sales. (shrink)

This article examines the role of citizens in the process of building and managing city brands. A multidisciplinary approach is applied to explain the multifaceted nature of territorial brands and citizen involvement. To this end, theoretical concepts from marketing and corporate branding, public management, and human geography are applied. By conceptualising place branding as a public policy and a governance process, and drawing from the concept of participatory place branding, the author discusses a variety of methods and instruments used to (...) involve citizens. Special attention is given to the importance of modern technologies for effective citizen involvement. (shrink)

Introduction to Special Issue on Humour: A Modest Attempt at Presenting Contemporary Linguistic Approaches to Humour Studies.

On "Revolutionary Road": A Proposal for Extending the Gricean Model of Communication to Cover Multiple Hearers The paper addresses the problem of multiple hearers in the context of the Gricean model of communication, which is based on speaker meaning and the Cooperative Principle, together with its subordinate maxims, legitimately flouted to yield implicatures. Grice appears to have conceived of the communicative process as taking place between two interlocutors, assuming that the speaker communicates meanings, while the hearer makes compatible inferences. A (...) thesis propounded here is that this dyadic account must undergo a number of fundamental modifications to cover a variety of hearer types, both ratified and unratified, partaking in polylogic interactions. (shrink)

This introductory paper aims to demystify the concept of untruthfulness. Drawing on the scholarship on deception, the author reports on a distinction between the (objective) truth and (subjective) truthfulness, as well as their respective opposites: falsehood and untruthfulness. An attempt is made to discriminate between truthfulness and sincerity, to notions which capture similar phenomena but have originated in distinct scholarly traditions. Further, the author depicts untruthfulness as an internally diversified construct and teases out its main subtypes. Some light is shed (...) on overt untruthfulness and covert untruthfulness, as approached in philosophical, cognitive and pragmatic literature. The paper closes with a description of the scope of the present Special Issue entitled “New theoretical insights into untruthfulness”. (shrink)

A Geographical Approach for Measuring the Creative Capital. Case Study: Creative Capital Index of Slovakia Calculation of creativity index is a part of a modern quantification wave, in some cases also formulation of the spatial differentiation of social and economic phenomena required from the academic sphere by the decisive sphere. Policy makers have interest by this means to help themselves in obtaining public for their objectives. The creative capital as a sum of quantifiable creativity indicators is in this contribution operationalized (...) including the social capital, which is out of accord with a traditional understanding of creativity following the Florida's concept of the creative class. Methods for creativity index formation are introduced at the global level of states as well as at the regional level of a given state. There are substantial differences among both indexes results and statistical data on export of creative goods that are well documented on example of USA and China. Terminological chaos associated with the concepts of creative class and economy is thus extended with a chaos in the interpretation of findings, what contributes to the critique of the Florida's concept of creative class. There arise doubts that the quantification of creativity indexes with correlation quantification with other economic and social factors as GDP, entrepreneurship, inequality, Index HDI1) ; is maybe right in terms of mathematics, but it does not reveal the casual connections. The research purpose of the contribution is a geographical approach to the creative capital. The case study incorporates the Slovak regions, creativity index calculation and its spatial differentiation in form of map expression. The scientific goal lies in a confirmation of hypothesis about a dominant position of Bratislava region, and thus the capital of Slovakia. A limit of calculation is the choice of indicators which were strongly determined by the accessibility of statistical data. (shrink)

Should CSR be approached only on a voluntary basis or should it be complemented with a compulsory regulatory framework? What type of government intervention is more effective in fostering CSR among companies? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions, reviewing the debate between proponents of the voluntary case and the obligatory case for CSR, and critically analysing current international government-led initiatives to foster CSR among companies, and national government-led initiatives in the EU area. Finally, the paper focuses on (...) the Spanish case, as an example of the failure of an exclusively voluntary approach. Despite the rapid uprise of CSR, Spain is still far behind late in CSR promotion strategies. Most action has been undertaken by companies themselves with no common guidelines, governmental support, or independent verification. The lack of a regulatory framework for CSR or ethical investment issues and the virtual absence of other indirect incentives, explains the misbalance between private, public and Third Sector initiatives. Based on the Spanish context which is quite similar to other non-OECD countries, the authors call for a more proactive government position in CSR related issues. The conclusions of the paper detail the features of this regulatory framework and other policies to promote CSR in Spain as well as in other OECD countries. (shrink)

The Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) literature tends to focus on bias as a problem that requires ex post solutions (e.g. fairness metrics), rather than addressing the underlying social and technical conditions that (re)produce it. In this article, we propose a complementary strategy that uses genealogy as a constructive, epistemic critique to explain algorithmic bias in terms of the conditions that enable it. We focus on XAI feature attributions (Shapley values) and counterfactual approaches as potential tools to gauge these conditions (...) and offer two main contributions. One is constructive: we develop a theoretical framework to classify these approaches according to their relevance for bias as evidence of social disparities. We draw on Pearl’s ladder of causation (Causality: models, reasoning, and inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, Causality, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511803161) to order these XAI approaches concerning their ability to answer fairness-relevant questions and identify fairness-relevant solutions. The other contribution is critical: we evaluate these approaches in terms of their assumptions about the role of protected characteristics in discriminatory outcomes. We achieve this by building on Kohler-Hausmann’s (Northwest Univ Law Rev 113(5):1163–1227, 2019) constructivist theory of discrimination. We derive three recommendations for XAI practitioners to develop and AI policymakers to regulate tools that address algorithmic bias in its conditions and hence mitigate its future occurrence. (shrink)

Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused by (...) social norms in a relevant sense. These cases draw attention to the normative aspects of the mechanisms of forgetting. This is an important but neglected aspect of cases of everyday forgetting, in particular of those characterized by a social dimension. By investigating some ways in which the psychology of social norms is causally relevant in the mechanisms of retrieval failure, I begin to fill this gap. (shrink)

The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention (...) to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000). (shrink)

Over the last three decades, non-adaptationism has developed as an alternative model to more traditional, adaptationist approaches within Evolutionary Epistemology. Despite its great explanatory strength, non-adaptationist EE finds a potential Achilles heel in its adherence to conceptual relativism, namely the idea that empirical content can be relative to many different and radically incommensurable conceptual schemes. In his seminal essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, Donald Davidson did in fact prove the unintelligibility of an analogous form of conceptual (...) relativism. Although Davidson’s original intent was to debunk a conceptual relativist position which he discerned in the works of authors such as Kuhn, Quine, and Whorf, given the apparent similarity between the conceptual relativism supported by non-adaptationist EE and the one criticised by Davidson, one might well wonder if Davidson’s objections would have the same debunking effect if applied to non-adaptationist EE. In this paper I propose to answer this question by directing Davidson’s critiques of conceptual relativism to non-adaptationist EE and by testing to what extent the latter is de facto undermined by Davidson’s attacks. I demonstrate that Davidson’s arguments do not detract from the reliability of non-adaptationist perspectives and, to some extent, they appear to substantiate the non-adaptationist evolutionary epistemological cause anew. (shrink)

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Soft’ presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while ‘hard’ presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, and (...) question–answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts. (shrink)

This paper examines a little studied type of perspective shift that I call protagonist projection, following Holton :625–628, 1997). PP is a way of describing the mental state of a protagonist that conveys, to some extent, her perspective. Similarly to its better known cousin free indirect discourse, the shift in perspective is achieved without an overt operator. Unlike FID, PP is not based on a presumed speech-act of a protagonist. Rather, it gives a linguistic form to pre-verbal perceptual content, sensations, (...) feelings or implicit beliefs. I propose to analyse PP in a bi-contextual framework, extending Eckardt’s approach to FID. Under the resulting analysis, FID and PP are two instances of a more general category of perspective shift. (shrink)