Después de una breve caracterización de las ciencias cognitivas, se destaca la existencia de dos enfoques erróneos en filosofía del conocimiento apostando por el enfoque propio de las ciencias cognitivas, donde el sujeto de cognición es procesador de información y tanto puede ser un humano como una máquina o un animal. En segundo lugar se caracteriza el sujeto cognitivo como un sistema físico de símbolos, de acuerdo con la tesis de Allen Newell y Herbert Simon, comentando y ejemplificando tal tesis. (...) Y finalmente se distingue entre diversos grados de cognición en sentido amplio, tanto en animales como en máquinas, así como se destaca la cognición en sentido propio o cognición inteligente, que comprende las operaciones de concebir, juzgar y razonar. (shrink)

Veinte años de Contrastes (y aún antes)Twenty Years of Contrastes (and even Before)PASCUAL MARTÍNEZ-FREIREDirector de Contrastes. Revista Internacional de Filosofía.

RESUMENEn primer lugar, se analiza la teoría clásica, tal como la formuló Aristóteles, de los seres humanos como animales racionales. En segundo lugar, se presenta la caracterización del hombre como no animal e irracional que ofrece Martinho da Vila. En tercer lugar, se consideran las tesis freudianas sobre la mezcla de racionalidad e irracionalidad en los humanos. En cuarto lugar, se señalan algunos puntos de vista recientes, debidos a Simon así como a la psicología y neurociencia actuales, sobre la limitación (...) de la razón humana y su relación con las emociones. Finalmente se argumenta que ni Aristóteles ni Martinho da Vila describen bien la condición humana.PALABRAS CLAVERACIONALIDAD-CONDICIÓN HUMANA-ARISTÓTELES-FREUDABSTRACTFistly the classical theory, as put forward by Aristotle, about the human beings as rational animals is analysed. Secondly the description of man as no animal and irrational offered by Martnho da Vila is presented. Thirly the Freudian thseses on the mixture os rational and irrational aspects in humans are considered. Forurthly some recent points of view, by Simon and the current psychology and neurosciencie, about the limitation of human reason and irs relation with emotions are pointed out. Lastly it is argued that neithert Aristotle nor Martinho da Vila decribe well the human nature.KEYWORDSRATIONALITY-HUMAN NATURE-ARISTOTLE-FREUD. (shrink)

Whereas Wittgenstein rejected the existence of any private language, Fodor defends the existence of the language of thought, which is private in the sense of inner. A comparison is developed between Wittgenstein's and Fodor's ideas about this issue. Likewise a survey of Fodor's language of thought is made pointing out some shortcomings.

La comprensión del conocimiento como sistema en el Tratado de la naturaleza humana de David Hume reconoce tres aspectos: primero, el conocimiento implica su distancia de la idea de sustancia y de ideas generales abstractas. Segundo, el conocimiento comprende la conexión entre impresiones e ideas. El enlace de nuestras impresiones e ideas surge del principio de asociación el cual ordena y reconfigura el conocimiento en virtud de la atracción, conexión articulada por las facultades de la memoria y la imaginación. Tercero, (...) el conocimiento constituye un sistema constituido por la reiteración de hábitos y costumbres configurados por el principio de asociación desde la relación integrada de impresiones e ideas. (shrink)

The tree-based data structure of -tree for propositional formulas is introduced in an improved and optimised form. The -trees allow a compact representation for negation normal forms as well as for a number of reduction strategies in order to consider only those occurrences of literals which are relevant for the satisfiability of the input formula. These reduction strategies are divided into two subsets (meaning- and satisfiability-preserving transformations) and can be used to decrease the size of a negation normal form A (...) at (at most) quadratic cost. The reduction strategies are aimed at decreasing the number of required branchings and, therefore, these strategies allow to limit the size of the search space for the SAT problem. (shrink)

¿Llegarán los ordenadores a sustituir a los seres humanos? Lo que hasta hace unas décadas parecía una pregunta de ciencia-ficción, es ahora defendido con seriedad por algunos especialistas en inteligencia artificial. El presente articulo dibuja las más importantes líneas de investigación en este campo y las posiciones más relevantes respecto de la relación hombre-maquina pensante. La conclusión que propone el autor supone una decidida apuesta por un humanismo en el que quepa integrar el desarrollo tecnológico sin perder de vista sus (...) innegables implicaciones éticas. (shrink)

"Mentoring the Mentor" recreates a Freirian dialogue in a printed format. In this volume, sixteen distinguished scholars engage in a critical and thoughtful exchange with Paulo Freire. While some contributors voice appreciation for Freire's ideas and for what it means to -reinvent Freire- in a North American context, others offer sharp critiques of Freire's philosophy and, of equal importance, of the various interpretations of his work. A variety of chapters describe specific uses which have been made (...) of Freire's ideas in diverse educational contexts, from the New York City public schools to the revolutions in Guinea Bissau and Eritrea. Finally, Paulo Freire himself responds to the major issues which are raised in the volume and invites readers to share in a continuing lively dialogue about the meaning of democratic and revolutionary education. -The fundamental task of the mentor is a liberatory task. It is not to encourage the mentor's goals and aspirations and dreams to be reproduced in the mentees, the students, but to give rise to the possibility that the students become the owners of their own history. This is how I understand the need that teachers have to transcend their merely instructive task and to assume the ethical posture of a mentor who truly believes in the total autonomy, freedom, and development of those he or she mentors.- (from Chapter Sixteen, -A Response- by Paulo Freire)". (shrink)

Transplantation continues to push the frontiers of medicine into domains that summon forth troublesome ethical questions. Looming on the frontier today is human facial transplantation. We develop criteria that, we maintain, must be satisfied in order to ethically undertake this as-yet-untried transplant procedure. We draw on the criteria advanced by Dr. Francis Moore in the late 1980s for introducing innovative procedures in transplant surgery. In addition to these we also insist that human face transplantation must meet all the ethical requirements (...) usually applied to health care research. We summarize the achievements of transplant surgery to date, focusing in particular on the safety and efficacy of immunosuppressive medications. We also emphasize the importance of risk/benefit assessments that take into account the physical, aesthetic, psychological, and social dimensions of facial disfiguration, reconstruction, and transplantation. Finally, we maintain that the time has come to move facial transplantation research into the clinical phase. (shrink)

The aim of this research was to establish linear relations (association and prediction) and inferential relations between three constructs at different levels of psychological research –executive dysfunction(microanalysis),self-regulation(molecular level), andself-vs.external regulation(molar level), in the prediction of emotion regulation difficulties. We hypothesized that personal and contextual regulatory factors would be negatively related to levels of executive dysfunction and emotion regulation difficulties; by way of complement, non-regulatory and dysregulatory personal, and contextual factors would be positively related to these same difficulties. To establish relationships, (...) we used a retrospective,ex postfacto design, where 298 university students voluntarily participated by completing standardized self-reports. Linear and structural correlational, predictive analyses were performed, as well as inferential analyses. Results were consistent and validated the proposed hypotheses, for both association and prediction. The most important result refers to the discriminant value of the five-level combination heuristic for predicting Executive Function and External (contextual) Dys-Regulation. In conclusion: (1) both personal and contextual regulation factors must be analyzed in order to better understand the variation in executive functions and emotion regulation difficulties; (2) it is important to continue connecting the different levels of the constructs referring to self-regulation, given their complementary role in the behavioral analysis of regulation difficulties. (shrink)

Academic achievement is a factor of interest in both psychology and education. Determining which factors have a negative or positive influence on academic performance has produced different investigations. The present study focuses on analyzing the relationship between resilience, emotional intelligence, self-concept and the academic achievement of university students. For this purpose, different self-report tools were administered to a sample of 1,020 university students from Southern Spain. The Structural Equation-based mediational analysis suggests that there is no direct relationship between resilience and (...) academic achievement, nor between emotional intelligence and academic achievement. Likewise, self-concept is positioned as a mediating factor in the relationship between resilience and academic achievement. The findings indicate that university students who exhibit high levels of resilience tend to cope better with difficult moments and understand and value the effort required and invested in study time. This study supports positive beliefs and behaviors for better academic achievement. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe social content of affective stimuli has been proposed as having an influence on cognitive processing and behaviour. This research was aimed, therefore, at studying whether automatic exogenous attention demanded by affective pictures was related to their social value. We hypothesised that affective social pictures would capture attention to a greater extent than non-social affective stimuli. For this purpose, we recorded event-related potentials in a sample of 24 participants engaged in a digit categorisation task. Distracters were affective pictures varying in (...) social content, in addition to affective valence and arousal, which appeared in the background during the task. Our data revealed that pictures depicting high social content captured greater automatic attention than other pictures, as reflected by the greater amplitude and shorter latency of anterior P2, and anterior and posterior N2 components of the ERPs. In addition, social content also provoked greater allocation of processing resour... (shrink)