This paper reviews four attempts throughout the history of quantum mechanics to explicitly employ dispositional notions in order to solve the quantum paradoxes, namely: Margenau’s latencies, Heisenberg’s potentialities, Maxwell’s propensitons, and the recent selective propensities interpretation of quantum mechanics. Difficulties and challenges are raised for all of them, and it is concluded that the selective propensities approach nicely encompasses the virtues of its predecessors. Finally, some strategies are discussed for reading dispositional notions into two other well-known interpretations of quantum mechanics, (...) namely the GRW interpretation and Bohmian mechanics. (shrink)

1Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, 9 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TB, UKScience Without Laws Ronald Giere Chicago, IL University of Chicago Press 1999 x + 285 Hardback£17.50.

Reseña: Díaz Tejo, Javier. Espiritualidad ¡Ahora! Para un desarrollo humano integral y sostenido. Santiago de Chile: Universidad Finis Terrae, 2017.

Depersonalization is characterised by a profound disruption of self-awareness mainly characterised by feelings of disembodiment and subjective emotional numbing.It has been proposed that depersonalization is caused by a fronto-limbic suppressive mechanism – presumably mediated via attention – which manifests subjectively as emotional numbing, and disables the process by which perception and cognition normally become emotionally coloured, giving rise to a subjective feeling of ‘unreality’.Our functional neuroimaging and psychophysiological studies support the above model and indicate that, compared with normal and clinical (...) controls, DPD patients show increased prefrontal activation as well as reduced activation in insula/limbic-related areas to aversive, arousing emotional stimuli.Although a putative inhibitory mechanism on emotional processing might account for the emotional numbing and characteristic perceptual detachment, it is likely, as suggested by some studies, that parietal mechanisms underpin feelings of disembodiment and lack of agency feelings. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es presentar el problema triple (trilema) de Agripa que cuestiona la posibilidad de alcanzar una justificación epistemológica del conocimiento empírico. Una posible reconstrucción del problema es la que se apoya en el problema del regreso al infinito -uno de los modos de..

Agrippa’s Problem: The purpose of this paper is to present the triple problem of Agrippa that questions the possibility of reaching an epistemological justification of empirical knowledge. A possible reconstruction of such problem is one that is based on the problem of the regresum ad infinitum –one of Agripa’s modes. In this paper, a reconstruction of this problem will be presented by means of a reduction ad absurdum argument. The attempts of solving the absurd lead to the remaining two modes (...) of Agrippa’s triple problem. (shrink)

El presente texto desea dar cuenta, a partir de aquellos aspectos fenomenológicos de la teoría del conocimiento de Thomas Hobbes, el fundamentoy justificación de la génesis del Estado civil. Sin lugar a dudas, serán la percepción o la intuición, lo sensible, la imaginación o la memoria, el lenguaje, el movimiento, el cómputo, el deseo, el miedo, entre otros, lo que lleva al sujeto a comprender su propia naturaleza y a partir de ella, a pactar con otros sujetos cediendo sus derechos (...) naturales a un tercero para dar fin al estado de naturaleza y poder conservar su vida y vivir en paz. (shrink)

IntroductionThe idea of video recording in the operating room with panoramic cameras and microphones is a new concept that is changing the approach to medical activities in the OR. However, VR in the OR has brought up many concerns regarding patient privacy and has highlighted legal and ethical issues that were never previously exposed.AimTo review the literature concerning these aspects and provide a better ethical and legal understanding of the new challenges concerning VR in the OR.ConclusionsThere is a disparity between (...) the two main legal models concerning VR in the OR, namely the European legal system ) and the American legal framework ). This difference mainly deals with two distinct bioethical paradigms: GDPR places a strong emphasis on protecting patients’ privacy to improve the public health system, whereas HIPAA indicates the need to generate protocols to safeguard the risks connected to medical activity and patient privacy. Following from this point, we may argue that, at the ethical and bioethical level, GDPR and HIPAA depend mainly on two different ethical models: a perspective based on moral acquaintances and weak proceduralism, respectively. It is worth noting the importance of developing additional guidelines concerning different world regions to avoid the ethical problems that may emerge when simply applying a foreign paradigm to a very different culture. (shrink)

The article turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of state capitalism and their theorization of money and debt in their critique of capitalism to develop an analysis of the governmental management of the current crisis determined by ordo- and neoliberalism. The paper argues that analyses which fail to properly recognize the power of capital to determine both state apparatuses and economic policy thereby fail to grasp the real functioning of money, debt and the Euro in the crisis and end up (...) unwittingly supporting liberalism. This is true of positions such as heterodox theory that, though critical of conventional and neoliberal political economy, nevertheless continue to uphold the state as an independent or mediating mechanism in relation to the power of capital. The neglect of the role which money plays in the strategies of capital to control both the creation of value and the functioning of the state is to be found even in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism, a neglect which undermines his analysis of power. The paper highlights the implications of the standpoint of state capitalism for a more incisive analysis of the current crisis that reveals what is at stake for political struggles. (shrink)

This paper is in three parts. In Part One we briefly explain that an unsophisticated form of utilitarianism—economic rationalism (ER)—has become dominant in many health systems. Its proponents argue that one of ER’s most important effects is to increase consumer choice. However, evidence from New Zealand does not support this claim. Furthermore, the logic of ER requires the construction of systems which tend to restrict individual participation.In Part Two we argue that although some have advocated an ‘ethic of care’ in (...) an attempt to counteract ER’s utilitarianism, two decades of campaigning have had little influence on health policy. ER’s pro-care adversaries have failed to make an impact because they have not developed a taxonomy of care—they have not established a language compatible with, or as powerful as, ER’s.In Part Three, in an attempt to raise the conceptual and practical status of caring in contemporary health systems, we distinguish four different forms of care. In opposition to those who believe the ‘ethic of care’ can adequately direct health care practice, we demonstrate that care is a secondary notion. We show that in order for a carer to decide which form of care to adopt in different situations she requires a more powerful idea. We contend further that health care ought to be governed by a theory of health, and suggest that ‘the foundations theory of health’ should be adopted by planners searching for a more humane alternative to ER. We conclude that ER’s dominance can and must be challenged. However, only those arguments which offer detailed theoretical analyses of health care, as well as meticulously derived practical policies, have any chance of success. (shrink)

En el presente articulo se aborda la persona de Mauricio Beuchot, uno de los filósofos mexicanos más relevantes de la actualidad, en su aspecto de tomista analítico.

In the logic of theory change, the standard model is AGM, proposed by Alchourrón et al. (J Symb Log 50:510–530, 1985 ). This paper focuses on the extension of AGM that accounts for contractions of a theory by a set of sentences instead of only by a single sentence. Hansson (Theoria 55:114–132, 1989 ), Fuhrmann and Hansson (J Logic Lang Inf 3:39–74, 1994 ) generalized Partial Meet Contraction to the case of contractions by (possibly non-singleton) sets of sentences. In this (...) paper we present the possible worlds semantics for partial meet multiple contractions. (shrink)

Consideraciones introductorias Presentamos aquí un avance de análisis de un proyecto de investigación sobre enseñanza y aprendizaje de la argumentación que realizamos observando clases de filosofía y de biología de seis profesores de cada disciplina en cuatro Liceos públicos y dos privados. Además organizamos actividades argumentativas de aula a comienzos y finales de los cursos en el año 2012, con el fin de observar los eventuales avances en lo argumentativo. Presentamos en este trabajo los (...) - Sciences de l'éducation et (...) de la formation – Nouvel article. (shrink)

This paper defends an inferential conception of scientific representation. It approaches the notion of representation in a deflationary spirit, and minimally characterizes the concept as it appears in science by means of two necessary conditions: its essential directionality and its capacity to allow surrogate reasoning and inference. The conception is defended by showing that it successfully meets the objections that make its competitors, such as isomorphism and similarity, untenable. In addition the inferential conception captures the objectivity of the cognitive representations (...) used by science, it sheds light on their truth and completeness, and it explains the source of the analogy between scientific and artistic modes of representation. (shrink)

Francisco Suárez claims that forms may be efficient causes. There is an action whose proximate efficient cause is a substantial form, namely, the natural resulting. Also a substantial form is the principal efficient cause of the eduction of other forms, although it causes this through the substance’s own accidents. The souls insofar as substantial forms participate of both features. However, they pose a new complexity because of the actions they are exclusively principles of, namely vital actions. This kind of actions (...) may seem no different from natural resulting, if vitality is mainly described as some sort of immanence. However, there is a Suarezian approach to vital actions that does not rely completely on the immanence and therefore allows to consider souls as efficient causes without turning their actions into natural. (shrink)

Mauricio Suárez and Agnes Bolinska apply the tools of communication theory to scientific modeling in order to characterize the informational content of a scientific model. They argue that when represented as a communication channel, a model source conveys information about its target, and that such representations are therefore appropriate whenever modeling is employed for informational gain. They then extract two consequences. First, the introduction of idealizations is akin in informational terms to the introduction of noise in a signal; for (...) in an idealization we introduce ‘extraneous’ elements into the model that have no correlate in the target. Second, abstraction in a model is informationally equivalent to equivocation in the signal; for in an abstraction we “neglect” in the model certain features that obtain in the target. They conclude that it becomes possible in principle to quantify idealization and abstraction in informative models, although precise absolute quantification will be difficult to achieve in practice. (shrink)

The discovery of transgenes in maize landraces in Mexico, a center of diversity for this crop, raises questions about the potential impact of transgene diffusion on maize diversity. The concept of diversity and farmers’ role in maintaining diversity is quite complex. Farmers’ behavior is expected to have a significant influence on causing transgenes to diffuse, to be expressed differently, and to accumulate within landraces. Farmers’ or consumers’ perceptions that transgenes are “contaminants” and that landraces containing transgenes are “contaminated” could cause (...) these landraces to be rejected and trigger a direct loss of diversity. (shrink)

The following text is a concise narration of the construction of identities in the subordinate sectors of Colombia during the first half of the 20th century. We are mainly interested in the ‘collective identity’ as it deals with the cultural elements which give a sense of being part of a group and differentiate one from the other. Another important area that we want to explore is the subordinate sectors, wich comes from Antonio Gramsci’s conception on hegemony.

Scientific representation is a currently booming topic, both in analytical philosophy and in history and philosophy of science. The analytical inquiry attempts to come to terms with the relation between theory and world; while historians and philosophers of science aim to develop an account of the practice of model building in the sciences. This article provides a review of recent work within both traditions, and ultimately argues for a practice-based account of the means employed by scientists to effectively achieve representation (...) in the modelling sciences. (shrink)

Social commerce as a subset of e-commerce has been emerged in part due to the popularity of social networking sites. Social commerce brings new challenges to marketing activities. And social commerce transactions like e-commerce transactions can be dangerous and cause harmful losses to personal finances, time, and information privacy. This article examines ethical issues and consumer assessments of the risks of using an e-service and how risk affects consumer evaluations and usage of Internet-based services and self-service technologies. Results from two (...) surveys totaling 1024 consumers indicated that as usage risk concerns increased, the perceived usefulness of an e-service and intention to use it decreased. Additionally as usage risk concerns increased the effect of subjective norm on PU and intention to use an e-service strengthened, and the effect of perceived ease of use on PU and intention to use an e-service weakened. These findings advance theory and contribute to the foundation for future research aimed at improving our understanding of how consumers evaluate new e-services, new commerce systems and settings, and self-service technologies in the social commerce era. (shrink)

In 2016, Béziau introduced the notion of genuine paraconsistent logic as logic that does not verify the principle of non-contradiction; as an important example, he presented the genuine paraconsist...

Scientific representation is a booming field nowadays within the philosophy of science, with many papers published regularly on the topic every year, and several yearly conferences and workshops held on related topics. Historically, the topic originates in two different strands in 20th-century philosophy of science. One strand begins in the 1950s, with philosophical interest in the nature of scientific theories. As the received or “syntactic” view gave way to a “semantic” or “structural” conception, representation progressively gained the center stage. Yet, (...) there is another, older, strand that links representation to fin de siècle modeling debates, particularly in the emerging Bildtheorie of Boltzmann and Hertz, and to the ensuing discussion among philosophers thereafter. Both strands feed into present-day philosophical work on scientific representation. There are a number of different orthogonal questions that philosophers ask regarding representation. One set of questions concerns the nature of the representational relation between theories or models, on the one hand, and the real-world systems they purportedly represent. Such questions lie at the more metaphysical and abstract end of the spectrum—and they are often addressed with the abstract tools of the analytical metaphysician. They constitute what we may refer to as the “analytical inquiry” into representation. On the other hand there are questions regarding the use that scientists put some representations to in practice—these are questions that are best addressed by means of some of the favorite tools of the philosopher of science, including descriptive analysis, illustration by means of case studies, induction, exemplification, inference from practice, etc., and are best referred to as the “practical inquiry” into representation. The notion of representation invoked in such inquiries may be “deflationary” or “substantive”—depending on whether it construes representation as a primitive notion, or as susceptible to further reduction or analysis in terms of something else. (shrink)

This paper defends the deflationary character of two recent views regarding scientific representation, namely RIG Hughes’ DDI model and the inferential conception. It is first argued that these views’ deflationism is akin to the homonymous position in discussions regarding the nature of truth. There, we are invited to consider the platitudes that the predicate “true” obeys at the level of practice, disregarding any deeper, or more substantive, account of its nature. More generally, for any concept X, a deflationary approach is (...) then defined in opposition to a substantive approach, where a substantive approach to X is an analysis of X in terms of some property P, or relation R, accounting for and explaining the standard use of X. It then becomes possible to characterize a deflationary view of scientific representation in three distinct senses, namely: a “no-theory” view, a “minimalist” view, and a “use-based” view – in line with three standard deflationary responses in the philosophical literature on truth. It is then argued that both the DDI model and the inferential conception may be suitably understood in any of these three different senses. The application of these deflationary ‘hermeneutics’ moreover yields significant improvements on the DDI model, which bring it closer to the inferential conception. It is finally argued that what these approaches have in common – the key to any deflationary account of scientific representation – is the denial that scientific representation may be ultimately reduced to any substantive explanatory property of sources, or targets, or their relations. (shrink)

El estudio se centró en los textos de las resoluciones de acreditación de alta calidad de las Instituciones de Educación Superior en Colombia. La metodología condujo a un panorama descriptivo y posibilitó la construcción de categorías cualitativas que permitieron analizar fortalezas y debilidades. Los resultados evidencian la brecha urbano- rural; una tendencia de las instituciones oficiales a recibir más años de acreditación que las privadas y la no incidencia del carácter académico en el número de años de acreditación otorgados. Mejorar (...) las condiciones laborales de los profesores y atender las zonas rurales son prioridades que deben atender las políticas nacionales. (shrink)

In “The Toolbox of Science” (1995) together with Towfic Shomar we advocated a form of instrumentalism about scientific theories. We separately developed this view further in a number of subsequent works. Steven French, James Ladyman, Otavio Bueno and Newton Da Costa (FLBD) have since written at least eight papers and a book criticising our work. Here we defend ourselves. First we explain what we mean in denying that models derive from theory – and why their failure to do so should (...) be lamented. Second we defend our use of the London model of superconductivity as an example. Third we point out both advantages and weaknesses of FLBD’s techniques in comparison to traditional Anglophone versions of the semantic conception. Fourth we show that FLBD’s version of the semantic conception has not been applied to our case study. We conclude by raising doubts about FLBD’s overall project. (shrink)