Many of us assume that all the free editing and sorting of online content we ordinarily rely on is carried out by AI algorithms — not human persons. Yet in fact, that is often not the case. This is because human workers remain cheaper, quicker, and more reliable than AI for performing myriad tasks where the right answer turns on ineffable contextual criteria too subtle for algorithms to yet decode. The output of this work is then used for machine learning (...) purposes to generate algorithms constructed from large data sets containing thousands of correctly coded observations. The fact that ghost workers are treated as consumers distorts the basic logic of the employment relationship, effectively placing the worker-as-consumer in the worst of both worlds, in which they hold the legal rights of neither group. This puts them in a regulatory limbo position in which they have little or no protection, control, or guarantee of return on investment. This is because the platforms that facilitate ghost work have orchestrated a three-way virtual relationship that absolves all parties of responsibility, while placing nearly all the risks and opportunity costs squarely on the shoulders of the workers. As a result, we believe such a work arrangement as it stands, does not uphold basic standards of Rawlsian justice as fairness. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a philosophical and theoretical account of biological communication grounded in the notion of organisation. The organisational approach characterises living systems as organised in such a way that they are capable to self-produce and self-maintain while in constant interaction with the environment. To apply this theoretical framework to the study of biological communication, we focus on a specific approach, based on the notion of influence, according to which communication takes place when a signal emitted by a (...) sender triggers a change in the behaviour of the receiver that is functional for the sender itself. We critically analyse the current formulations of this account, that interpret what is functional for the sender in terms of evolutionary adaptations. Specifically, the adoption of this etiological functional framework may lead to the exclusion of several phenomena usually studied as instances of communication, and possibly even of entire fields of investigation such as synthetic biology. As an alternative, we reframe the influence approach in organisational terms, characterising functions in terms of contributions to the current organisation of a biological system. We develop a theoretical account of biological communication in which communicative functions are distinguished from other types of biological functions described by the organisational account (e.g. metabolic, ecological, etc.). The resulting organisational-influence approach allows to carry out causal analyses of current instances of phenomena of communication, without the need to provide etiological explanations. In such a way it makes it possible to understand in terms of communication those phenomena which realise interactive patterns typical of signalling interactions – and are usually studied as such in scientific practice – despite not being the result of evolutionary adaptations. Moreover, this approach provides operational tools to design and study communicative interactions in experimental fields such as synthetic biology. (shrink)

An account of assertion along truth-relativistic lines is offered. The main lines of relativism about truth are laid out and the problematic features that assertion acquires in the presence of relative truth are identified. These features are the possibility of coherently formulating norms of assertion and the possibility of grounding a rational practice of assertion upon relative truth. A solution to these problems is provided by formulating norms for making and assessing assertions that employ a suitably relativized truth predicate and (...) a perspectival notion of correctness. Two potential objections to this proposal are addressed. (shrink)

Neutral Counterpart Theories of slurs hold that the truth-conditional contribution of a slur is the same as the truth-conditional contribution of its neutral counterpart. In, DiFranco argues that these theories, even if plausible for single-word slurs like ‘kike’ and ‘nigger’, are not suitable for complex slurs such as ‘slanty-eyed’ and ‘curry muncher’, figurative slurs like ‘Jewish American Princess’, or iconic slurring expressions like ‘ching chong’. In this paper, we argue that these expressions do not amount to genuine counterexamples to neutral (...) counterpart theories of slurs. We provide a positive characterization of DiFranco's examples that doesn't deviate from the core of those theories. (shrink)

El presente texto es un intento por presentar el pensamiento del filósofo político más significativo del primer tercio del siglo XX peruano. José de la Riva-Agüero y Osma, Marqués de Montealegre de Aulestia (1885- 1944) es famoso en la historia del pensamiento peruano por haber liderado la así llamada “Generación del 900”, pero más aún por sus discursos políticos y sus teorías sobre la historia y la literatura, orientadas al nacionalismo. Montealegre va a ser recuperado aquí desde el (...) punto de vista de sus contactos sociales españoles. Ésta es una clave para interpretar la dimensión de fondo, uno de los presupuestos hermenéuticos más básicos de su tesis principal en política: el nacionalismo tradicionalista. En lugar de la crítica de fuentes, se va a intentar dar un marco a las ideas del pensador sobre la base de sus relaciones biográficas, en particular las entabladas con la intelectualidad y la nobleza españolas, un trabajo que ha sido posible a través de su correspondencia. La clave biográfica de los contactos españoles mostrará claramente su influjo en el orden de las ideas. (shrink)

The explanatory role of natural selection is one of the long-term debates in evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, the consensus has been slippery because conceptual confusions and the absence of a unified, formal causal model that integrates different explanatory scopes of natural selection. In this study we attempt to examine two questions: (i) What can the theory of natural selection explain? and (ii) Is there a causal or explanatory model that integrates all natural selection explananda? For the first question, we argue that (...) five explananda have been assigned to the theory of natural selection and that four of them may be actually considered explananda of natural selection. For the second question, we claim that a probabilistic conception of causality and the statistical relevance concept of explanation are both good models for understanding the explanatory role of natural selection. We review the biological and philosophical disputes about the explanatory role of natural selection and formalize some explananda in probabilistic terms using classical results from population genetics. Most of these explananda have been discussed in philosophical terms but some of them have been mixed up and confused. We analyze and set the limits of these problems. (shrink)

This paper analyses conceptual and experimental work in synthetic biology on different types of interactions considered as minimal examples or models of communication. It discusses their pertinence and relevance for the wider understanding of this biological and cognitive phenomenon. It critically analyses their limits and it argues that a conceptual framework is needed. As a possible solution, it provides a theoretical account of communication based on the notion of organisation, and characterised in terms of the functional influence exerted by the (...) sender upon the receiver. It shows that this account can be operationalised in synthetic biology, and that it can supply criteria and guidelines for the design and evaluation of synthetic models. (shrink)

The research team measured the enterprise web accessibility levels of the Forbes 250 largest enterprises using the fully automatic accessibility evaluation tool Sortsite, and presented the compliance of the evaluated websites to WCAG 1.0, WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 accessibility levels. Given the recent attention to organizational leaders having ethical duties towards their dedicated employees, we propose that ‘societal citizenship behaviour’ concerns ethical duties of organizational leaders towards society in general and in particular to those who have less means to (...) assert their needs. In effect, we found enterprise website accessibility levels to be in need of significant improvement. An interpretation of a positive path forward to better enterprise website accessibility levels is put forth based on a focus-group interaction and using BNML—a novel Business Narrative Modelling Language. (shrink)

Resumen Debido a la polisemia que la complejidad exhibe, se pretenden exponer las distintas posturas, definiciones, descripciones y debates acerca de esta, a la luz de lo descrito por Carlos Maldonado, Edgar Morin, Ilya Progogine, Murray Gell-Mann, Leonardo Rodríguez y Julio Aguirre, quienes comportan un principio dialógico y translúcido, que integraría la lógica clásica teniendo en cuenta sus límites de facto y de jure, que además llevaría en sí el principio de la Unitas Multiplex, que escapa a la unidad abstracta (...) por lo alto y por lo bajo. Luego de la presentación de las posturas de los autores mencionados se pasa a describir los encuentros y desencuentros que de estos aparecen sobre este concepto; y finalizar al proponer una definición y caracterización personal de la complejidad.Due to the polysemy of Complexity, it is intended to expose different postures, definitions, descriptions and debates about It, in the light of what was described by Carlos Maldonado, Edgar Morin, Ilya Prigogine, Murray Gell-Mann, Leonardo Rodríguez and Julio Aguirre. For them it implies a dialogical and translucent principle that would integrate classical logic considering its de facto and de jure limits, and that in addition would take in himself the principle of Unitas Multiplex that escapes to the abstract unity by the high and by the low. After the presentation of the positions of the mentioned authors the paper goes on to describe encounters and disagreements about this concept finally proposing a definition and characterization of complexity. (shrink)

Resumen Debido a la polisemia que la complejidad exhibe, se pretenden exponer las distintas posturas, definiciones, descripciones y debates acerca de esta, a la luz de lo descrito por Carlos Maldonado, Edgar Morin, Ilya Progogine, Murray Gell-Mann, Leonardo Rodríguez y Julio Aguirre, quienes comportan un principio dialógico y translúcido, que integraría la lógica clásica teniendo en cuenta sus límites de facto y de jure, que además llevaría en sí el principio de la Unitas Multiplex, que escapa a la unidad abstracta (...) por lo alto y por lo bajo. Luego de la presentación de las posturas de los autores mencionados se pasa a describir los encuentros y desencuentros que de estos aparecen sobre este concepto; y finalizar al proponer una definición y caracterización personal de la complejidad.Due to the polysemy of Complexity, it is intended to expose different postures, definitions, descriptions and debates about It, in the light of what was described by Carlos Maldonado, Edgar Morin, Ilya Prigogine, Murray Gell-Mann, Leonardo Rodríguez and Julio Aguirre. For them it implies a dialogical and translucent principle that would integrate classical logic considering its de facto and de jure limits, and that in addition would take in himself the principle of Unitas Multiplex that escapes to the abstract unity by the high and by the low. After the presentation of the positions of the mentioned authors the paper goes on to describe encounters and disagreements about this concept finally proposing a definition and characterization of complexity. (shrink)

El objetivo a perseguir por el presente artículo, es analizar tres de las principales teorías humanístico-filosóficas, respecto a la concepción del ciclo vital de que han sido participes diversas comunidades humanas a lo largo de la historia. Con base en tres propuestas de periodización histórica, se expondrán los enfoques temporales sobre los procesos y el fin de la historia teorizados por los filósofos e historiadores Giambatista Vico, Oswald Spengler y Arnold Joseph Toynbee.

Perner and Roessler Causing human action: new perspectives on the causal theory of action, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 199–228, 2010) hold that children who do not yet have an understanding of subjective perspectives, i.e., mental states, explain actions by appealing to objective facts. In this paper, we criticize this view. We argue that in order to understand objective facts, subjects need to understand perspectives. By analysing basic fact-expressing assertions, we show that subjects cannot refer to facts if they do (...) not understand two types of perspectivity, namely, spatial and doxastic perspectivity. To avoid conceptual confusion regarding different ways of referring to facts, we distinguish between reference to facts de re and de dicto. (shrink)

La reconstrucción de la cotidianidad en la prisión política, a partir de casos de violaciones a los DD.HH. en Chile y Uruguay, supone recurrir a la memoria --con su pluralidad, diversidad y vacilaciones-- como la principal fuente de conocimiento que contribuye a recrear y a resignificar los espacios evocados. Entendiendo la realidad y la memoria que la reconstruye como construcciones sociales, que incluyen el conocimiento de sentido común, el texto advierte sobre los procesos de transferencias y deformaciones presentes en los (...) testimonios ilustrando esto con la presencia del imaginario del Holocausto en los testimonios de prisión política del cono sur de América Latina. The reconstruction of everyday life for political prisoners, starting with the cases of violations of Human Rights in Chile and Uruguay, supposedly occurs in the memory-with its plurality, diversity and hesitations-as the principle area of understanding that contributes to recreating and reassigning those images evoked. Knowing the reality and the memory that reconstruct them as social constructs, including the realizations of common sense, the text warns against the process of transfers and deformations present in the testimonies illustrating this with the presence of the Holocaust imaginary in the testimonies of political prisoners in the Southern Cone of Latin America. (shrink)

La grabación con teléfonos móviles de las masivas movilizaciones estudiantiles del año 2011 y del terremoto-tsunami del 27 de febrero de 2010 en Chile, y la divulgación de estos acontecimientos por Internet -especialmente a través de imágenes de YouTube-, permite la reflexión sobre la incorporación de las Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (TICs) a los procesos de registro de memorias. En este caso se toma como referencia el imaginario “marino” de la navegación en el ciberespacio, con los respectivos (...) campos semánticos que ofrece la metáfora de una “sociedad líquida”. En este contexto se aborda la utilización del patrimonio digital -el acervo virtual y universal de imágenes- como fuente de memorias y de vestigios históricos: mensajes aislados, registrados por individuos y colectivos, que componen un archipiélago de culturas. (shrink)

Presento una extensión del marco de Stalnaker para modelar los efectos conversacionales de la aserción, de modo que este pueda aplicarse a la aserción de proposiciones cuya verdad es relativa a parámetros adicionales respecto de un mundo posible. Desarrollo dos maneras de aplicar este marco a la aserción de proposiciones evaluativas, según la apreciación de las emisiones evaluativas mismas refleje una concepción relativista moderada de sus condiciones de corrección o una concepción radical. Argumento que, en virtud de la diferencia que (...) existe a la hora de concebir la aserción, el relativismo radical tiene una ventaja por sobre el relativismo moderado, dado que el relativismo moderado tiene inconvenientes a la hora de interpretar los desacuerdos evaluativos. I present an extension of Stalnaker's framework for modeling the conversational effects of assertion, so that it may be applied to the assertion of propositions whose truth is relative to parameters beyond a possible world. I develop two ways in which the new framework may be applied to the assertion of evaluative propositions, depending on whether the assessment of evaluative utterances reflects a moderate or a radical conception of their correctness conditions. I argue that, in virtue of this difference in the conceptualization of assertion, radical relativism has an advantage over moderate relativism, for moderate relativism faces problems with respect to the interpretation of evaluative disagreement. (shrink)

A diferencia de todos los demás sistemas de imputación, Jakobs ubica el acento de la relevancia jurídico-penal del hecho en su significado normativo, como algo que trasciende la mera causalidad exterior y la finalidad del autor, de manera que lo decisivo para la imputación jurídico-penal no es ni lo psíquicoreal querido por el autor, ni la causalidad desplegada por su conducta, sino el significado normativo de esa conducta como la expresión de un sentido objetivo de desautorización de la vigencia de (...) la norma en un determinado contexto social. (shrink)

Political communication in modern democratic societies often requires the speaker to address multiple audiences with heterogeneous values, interests and agendas. This creates an incentive for communication strategies that allow politicians to send, along with the explicit content of their speech, concealed messages that seek to secure the approval of certain groups without alienating the rest of the electorate. These strategies have been labeled dogwhistling in recent literature. In this article, we provide an analysis of overt intentional dogwhistling. We recognize two (...) main stages within the OIDs’ way of conveying a concealed message: the expression of a perspective together with the transmission of an accompanying positioning message vis-à-vis the OID targeted sub-audience, and the inferential extraction of a set of cognitive and non-cognitive contents inferred on the basis of the former stage. Furthermore, we identify three linguistic mechanisms whereby these contents may be transmitted: conventional meaning, conversational implicature and perlocutionary inferencing. Hence, on our view OIDs are not a uniform category, as they may differ as to what extent the concealed content is speaker-meant, and thus actually communicated by the speaker. (shrink)

This dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise – in the spirit of those of Carroll and Hofstadter – argues against the idea, identified with the “traditional” interpretation of Aristotle’s “sea battle argument”, that future contingents are an exception to the Principle of Bivalence. It presents examples of correct everyday predictions, without which one would not be able to decide and to act; however, doing this is incompatible with the belief that the content of these predictions lacks a truth-value. The cost (...) of using a non-classical logic to cope with that may be too high for Stagirite’s defenders, and they would still need to explain why our ordinary predictions seem to have a binary truth-value. In the end, the paper suggests that the problem of future contingents – and of free will – is not a logical problem at all, but rather a limit on what an agent can believe before taking a decision. (shrink)

El cóndor es una presencia común que vuela y se posa en nuestro territorio mental, como parte de esa memoria simbólica que se alimenta por generaciones a través del relato oral. Estas imágenes –visuales y orales- se nos reiteran en el tiempo desde el relato inmemorial hasta las redes de comunicación del siglo XXI. En ese contexto, el cóndor -más como símbolo que como patrimonio natural tangible- concita una afinidad de miradas y de identificaciones adquiridas, que convergen en las piedras, (...) las cavernas, los ritos, los objetos utilitarios, la heráldica, la numismática, la filatelia, los productos de consumo, las imágenes en el ciberespacio: del ave sagrada, a la institucional ave nacional; de la sordidez de la Operación Cóndor al cómic representado por Condorito. En el humor y en el horror. En la reverencia y la irreverencia. En la cotidianidad. En la atmósfera cultural, el cóndor es parte de la «respiración» del imaginario común. (shrink)

e presenta el debate entre reduccionismo y no reduccionismo respecto de la probabilidad objetiva y se identifican las cargas dialécticas adquiridas por cada posición: el problema de la motivación y el problema de la explicación. Se argumenta que, mientras que el problema de la motivación no presenta ningún desafío para los no reduccionistas, los reduccionistas no son capaces de responderlo exitosamente. Contrariamente a lo que se ha sugerido, ambos lados comparten el problema de la explicación. Se argumenta que los no (...) reduccionistas pueden responderlo exitosamente, mientras que los reduccionistas no son capaces de hacerlo. Por lo tanto, el lado no reduccionista tiene una ventaja dialéctica importante. (shrink)

The present work explores the possibility of conciliating the truth-conditional relevance of referential uses of definite descriptions with the assignment of a univocal linguistic meaning to these constructions. It is argued that conciliation is possible if we reject the thesis, central to the debate between Russellians and ambiguity theorists, according to which referential uses are truth-conditionally relevant if and only if they constitute referential meanings. We sketch a framework within which the denial of that thesis has theoretical content, by drawing (...) on the conceptual resources of Relevance Theory and on a pragmatic conception of reference, following Strawson. The linguistic meaning of definite descriptions is analyzed as a procedural meaning that is semantically underdetermined with respect to both referential and attributive readings, and a pragmatic strategy for understanding this ambiguity is sketched. El presente trabajo explora una posible conciliación de la relevancia para las condiciones de verdad de los usos referenciales de descripciones definidas con la postulación de un significado lingüístico unívoco para tales construcciones. Se argumenta que dicha conciliación es posible si se abandona la tesis, central en el debate entre russellianos y teóricos de la ambigüedad, según la cual los usos referenciales son relevantes para las condiciones de verdad si y sólo si constituyen significados referenciales. Se esboza un marco dentro del cual la negación de esta tesis tiene contenido teórico, apelando a los recursos conceptuales de la Teoría de la Relevancia y a una concepción pragmática de la referencia en la línea de Strawson. Se analiza el significado de las descripciones definidas como un significado procedimental, semánticamente subdeterminado respecto de una lectura referencial o atributiva, y se esboza una manera pragmática de entender esta ambigüedad. (shrink)

Como han puesto de relieve Evans y García-Carpintero, uno de los problemas más importantes respecto de la aserción en el marco de una concepción relativista radical de los discursos evaluativos es dar un tratamiento coherente de los compromisos y de las responsabilidades que la aserción misma genera cuando sus condiciones de corrección son inestables. Construyendo sobre la base de un trabajo de Losada, el presente trabajo busca ofrecer dicho tratamiento.

El presente trabajo busca defender la tesis de la subdeterminación semántica de las emisiones lingüísticas. Se argumenta a favor de esta tesis al tratar las aserciones suboracionales como casos paradigmáticos de la existencia de constituyentes no articulados. Se defiende la existencia de aserciones suboracionales genuinas frente a análisis alternativos que se han desarrollado para dar cuenta de este tipo de emisiones y se muestra cómo tiene lugar la interpretación pragmática de este tipo de emisiones. In this paper, I defend the (...) semantic underdetermination thesis for linguistic utterances. I argue in favor of this thesis by treating subsentential assertions as paradigmatic cases of the existence of unarticulated constituents. I defend the existence of genuine subsentential assertions against alternative analyses that have been developed to cope with this kind of utterances, and I explain how the pragmatic interpretation of this kind of utterances goes. (shrink)