Although gains in generational intelligence test scores have been widely demonstrated around the world, researchers still do not know what has caused them. The cognitive stimulation and nutritional hypotheses summarize the several diverse potential causes that have been considered. This article analyses data for a sample of 499 children tested in 1930 and one equivalent sample of 710 children tested 72 years later, the largest gap ever considered. Both samples comprised children aged between 7 and 11 who were assessed by (...) the Draw-a-Man test in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Further, one additional sample of 132 children was assessed in 2004 in a rural area very similar in several diverse factors to the 1930 urban sample. The results are consistent with both the cognitive stimulation and the nutritional hypotheses. (shrink)

En diversas religiones o filosofías, sobre todo aquellas de tendencia oriental, el Silencio ha sido un punto de partida para poder entablar un diálogo con lo Sagrado, lo Trascendente, o Dios, y un elemento esencial de la experiencia hierofánica. En este artículo se expone que tres creencias espirituales enraizadas en el mundo oriental: judaísmo, islamismo sufí y taoísmo, convergen en la idea del Silencio como un metalenguaje donde lo Sagrado se manifiesta. A pesar de la divergencia doctrinal que existe entre (...) dichas religiones, el Silencio genera en sus practicantes una experiencia abrumadora ante algo que los trasciende, trastocando lo más íntimo de su ser y que en el lenguaje convencional les es difícil expresar. (shrink)

The current predominant conception of human rights implies that human beings have objective intrinsic value. In this paper, we defend that there is no satisfactory justification of this claim. In spite of the great variety of theories aimed at explaining objective intrinsic value, all of them share one common problematic feature: they pass from a non-evaluative proposition to an evaluative proposition by asserting that a certain entity has intrinsic value in virtue of having certain non-evaluative features. This is a step (...) that cannot be justified. In light of this negative result, we offer a radically different approach to intrinsic value. Our proposal reinterprets the claim that human beings have intrinsic value in terms of a commitment to value human beings intrinsically. This commitment provides both objective practical reasons for, and a rational explanation of, efforts aimed at defending and promoting human rights, without need to appeal to the existence of objective intrinsic value. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Este trabajo tiene por finalidad analizar la vision de dos autores sobre aspectos del poder y de la justicia entre los estados. Para ello tomamos dos de sus obras representativas que buscan comprender la politica de su tiempo: Leviatän escrito por el ingles Thomas Hobbes, publicado en 1651, y Politica entre las naciones escrito por el alemän Hans Morgenthau, publicado en 1948. El poder es la razön del soberano, su büsqueda estarä por encima de la justicia. Pero la instituciön de (...) principios normativos que regulan el comportamiento de la sociedad es imperativa para mantener el orden y la paz. Esta paz es fruto del poder y no de la justicia, es fruto de la imposiciön del mäs fuerte y su capacidad para mantener el orden dependerä de la normativa juridica y de la fuerza coactiva para defenderla. Las pasiones humanas terminan en la razön que sostiene al Estado hobbesiano, las pasiones de los estadistas terminan en el orden juridico internacional morgenthauniano. El realismo de la büsqueda del poder constituye la base filosöfica para el desarrollo de una teoria emprrico-normativa que sirve de base a los analistas de politica exterior para comprender los actos de los estadistas e incluso adelantarse a sus acciones. La teoria en Morgenthau es la verificaciön de los hechos histöricos para darles sentido, mediante un metodo, a traves de la razön. La historia humana atravesada por el concepto de lucha por el poder es el enlace metodolögico que une a los dos autores. (shrink)

The goal of this research is to know and compare the emotions and reactions to confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic in children and adolescents with high abilities and community samples. This is a mixed study with an exploratory reach that is descriptive, and which combines survey and qualitative methodologies to examine the emotions and reactions to confinement experiences of children and adolescents aged between 5 and 14 years. An online poll was designed with 46 questions, grouped into three sections: (...) General Data, Reactions to the health contingencies of COVID-19, and Positive and negative emotions. This last section was included the Oros’ positive emotions questionnaire and the scales of the negative effect of the PANAS Schedule positive and negative affect on children and adolescents between 8 and 14 years old. Data were collected online with a convenience sample. Quantitative data were analyzed with the SPSS statistics program and qualitative data with Alceste software. Among the main findings is the fact that there are no significant differences between the groups by ability in terms of reactions and emotions; however, there are differences between age groups and sex. The study discusses the implications for educational intervention in situations like the current pandemic. (shrink)

The theme of Aesthetics in Present Future concerns the new chances the arts have and the deep changes they are undergoing, due to the new media, and the digital world in which we are growingly immersed. That this world is to be understood from an aesthetic point of view, become clear if we think of how much of what we produce, and observe and study is offered through images in particular and perceptual means in general.

Contents: List of Contributors VII; Roberto Poli: Foreword IX-X; Roberto Poli: The Brentano puzzle: an introduction 1; Dallas Willard: Who needs Brentano? The wasteland of philosophy without its past 15; Claire Ortiz Hill: Introduction to Paul Linke's 'Gottlob Frege as philosopher' 45; Paul F. Linke: Gottlob Frege as philosopher 49; John Blackmore: Franz Brentano and the University of Vienna Philosophical Society 1888-1938 73; Alf Zimmer: On agents and objects: some remarks on Brentanian perception 93; Liliana Albertazzi: Perceptual (...) saliences and nuclei of meaning 113; Jan Srzednicki: Brentano and the thinkable 139; Claire Ortiz Hill: From empirical psychology to phenomenology. Edmund Husserl on the 'Brentano puzzle' 151; Serena Cattaruzza: Brentano and Boltzmann: the Schubladenexperiment 169; Karl Schuhmann: Johannes Daubert's theory of judgement 179; Evelyn Dölling: On Alexius Meinong's theory of signs 199; Robin Rollinger: Linguistic expressions and acts of meaning: comments on Marty's philosophy of language 215-225. (shrink)

Using limpid language and citing abundant documentary evidence, the two authors demonstrate two fundamental and closely interconnected theses. The first is that Frege in no wise influenced Husserl in the manner and to the extent believed by many analytic philosophers. The second is that Husserl’s logical ideas were formally, ontologically and cognitively more advanced than Frege’s.

Este artículo aporta al conocimiento de la fonología suprasegmental del Mapudungun (específicamente, del acento), aspecto que ha sido escasamente abordado, en comparación con la fonía segmental de esta lengua. Sus focos principales son determinar cómo se distribuye el acento léxico en el Lafkenche hablado en la localidad de Los Álamos, Octava Región de Chile; y la comparación con el trabajo de Ortiz (2021), el cual se ocupa de este aspecto prosódico en el cordón cordillerano de habla Pewenche. Para ello, (...) se determinaron las sílabas tónicas de palabras monomorfémicas bisilábicas y trisilábicas elicitadas a 6 hablantes adultos bilingües de Mapudungun-español. Los resultados muestran una clara tendencia a emplear una acentuación paroxítona, lo que difiere del habla del cordón cordillerano de habla Pewenche, donde predomina la acentuación oxítona. Esta diferencia puede explicarse por el mayor grado de contacto del Lafkenche con el español. Además, se estableció que la ocurrencia de la sílaba CVC no cumple un rol prominente en la asignación del acento en la zona. (shrink)

This paper explores the proposals of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, two of the top representatives of the Italian Thought, around the notion of community and commons. Starting from an analysis of the community based on the munus, the statute of the commons is examined as opposed to the right of property. Next, the discussion around the notion of use of the commons and its difficult reconciliation with the legal apparatus is presented. Finally, the notion of inappropriateness that underpins (...) the Italian study of the commons is studied. (shrink)

Cultural studies, which arose in England and were later moved to the United States, have achieved a strong presence in Latin American social sciences during the last two decades in their local versions, as expressed by authors such as N. Farcía Canclini, R. Ortiz or Jesús M. Barbero. Their pos..

La recepción durante el siglo XX se preguntó si la filosofía nietzscheana era a-, im- o anti-política, es decir, si podía ser asimilada por la democracia, o si era antimoderna, elitista y reaccionaria. El italiano Roberto Esposito ha propuesto leerla como formando e informando el paradigma de la biopolítica. Se discuten cuatro lecturas de esa biopolítica: como formadora del paradigma de la inmunidad, como tanatopolítica, como liberal y neoliberal, y como biopolítica afirmativa. Twentieth-century readers wondered if Nietzschean philosophy was (...) apolitical, impolitic, or anti-political; that is, if it could be assimilated by democracy or if it was antimodern, elitist, and reactionary. The Italian philosopher Robert Esposito has proposed reading Nietzsche's philosophy as forming and informing the biopolitical paradigm. Four readings of these biopolitics are discussed: as part of the paradigm of immunity, as thanatopolitics, as liberal and neoliberal, and as affirmative biopolitics. (shrink)

The concept of “magic realism” raises many problems, both theoretical and historical. I first encountered it in the context of American painting in the mid-1950s; at about the same time, Angle Flores published an influential article in which the term was applied to the work of Borges;1 but Alejo Carpentier’s conception of the real maravilloso at once seemed to offer a related or alternative conception, while his own work and that of Miguel Angel Asturias seemed to demand an enlargement (...) of its application.2 Finally, with the novels of Gabriel García Márquez in the 1960s, a whole new realm of magic realism opened up whose exact relations to preceding theory and novelistic practice remained undetermined. These conceptual problems emerge most clearly when one juxtaposes the notion of magic realism with competing or overlapping terms. In the beginning, for instance, it was not clear how it was to be distinguished from that vaster category generally simply called fantastic literature; at this point, what is presumably at issue is a certain type of narrative or representation to be distinguished from realism. Carpentier, however, explicitly staged his version as a more authentic Latin American realization of what in the more reified European context took the form of surrealism: his emphasis would seem to have been on a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself—not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived . In García Márquez, finally, these two tendencies seemed to achieve a new kind of synthesis—a transfigured object world in which fantastic events are also narrated. But at this point, the focus of the conception of magic realism would appear to have shifted to what must be called an anthropological perspective: magic realism now comes to be understood as a kind of narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society, drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village or even tribal myth. Recent debates, meanwhile, have complicated all this with yet a different kind of issue: namely, the problem of the political or mystificatory value, respectively, of such texts, many of which we owe to overtly left-wing revolutionary writers .3 In spite of these terminological complexities—which might be grounds for abandoning the concept altogether—it retains a strange seductiveness which I will try to explore further, adding to the confusion with reference points drawn from the work of Jacques Lacan and from Freud’s notion of the “uncanny,” and compounding it by an argument that magic realism is to be grasped as a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism.4 1. See Angel Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” Hispania 38 : 187-92.2. See Alejo Carpentier, “Prólogo” to his novel El Reino de este mundo ; the most useful survey of the debate remains Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria, “Carpentier y el realism magico,” in Otros Mundos, otros fuegos, ed. Donald Yates, Congreso International de Literature Iberoamericana 16 , pp. 221-31.3. See Angel Rama, La Novel en America Latina , and especially Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, De Mitólogos y novelistas , in particular the discussions of Gabriel García Márques and Alejo Carpentier.4. My own general frame of reference for “postmodernism” is outlined in my “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 : 53-92. Frederic Jameson, William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, is the author of The Prison-House of Language and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. He is also a member of the editorial collective of Social Text. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis” and “Ideology and Symbolic Action”. (shrink)

In the standard Okishio-Morishima approach, the existence of profits is proved to be equivalent to the exploitation of labor. Yet, it can also be proved that the existence of profits is equivalent to the “exploitation” of any good. Labor and commodity exploitation are just different numerical representations of the productiveness of the economy. This paper presents an alternative approach to exploitation theory which is related to the “New Interpretation” (Duménil 1980; Foley 1982). In this approach, labor exploitation captures unequal social (...) relations among producers. The equivalence between the existence of profits and labor exploitation holds, whereas it is proved that there is no relation between profits and commodity “exploitation.”. (shrink)

Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin argue for a revolution in our cosmological ideas. Ideal for non-scientists, physicists and cosmologists.

In this paper I draw on Einstein's distinction between “principle” and “constructive” theories to isolate two levels of physical theory that can be found in both classical and (special) relativistic physics. I then argue that when we focus on theoretical explanations in physics, i.e. explanations of physical laws, the two leading views on explanation, Salmon's “bottom-up” view and Kitcher's “top-down” view, accurately describe theoretical explanations for a given level of theory. I arrive at this conclusion through an analysis of explanations (...) of mass—energy equivalence in special relativity. (shrink)

The present article delineates how the Roman and Christian dispositif of the person has increasingly brought about a neat division between persons and things. This has had devastating effects for both. On the one hand, things are reduced not only to servile objects but also to disposable commodities. On the other, the process of derealization of things is paralleled by that of depersonalization of persons; different typologies of persons emerge, historically reproduced by the distinction between real persons and those that (...) are declared non-persons, almost-persons, temporary persons or anti-persons. It is, however, possible to develop a new anti-hierarchical conception of things and persons by focusing on the human body and by taking into account the findings of anthropology as well as the works of philosophers such as Spinoza, Simondon and Latour. (shrink)

There is much effort nowadays to protect communication networks against different cybersecurity attacks (which are more and more sophisticated) that look for systems’ vulnerabilities they could exploit for malicious purposes. Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) are popular tools to detect and classify such attacks, most of them based on ML models. However, ML-based NIDSs cannot be trained by feeding them with network traffic data as it is. Thus, a Feature Engineering (FE) process plays a crucial role transforming network traffic raw (...) data onto derived one suitable for ML models. In this work, we study the effects of applying one such FE technique in different ways on the performance of two ML models (linear and non-linear) and their selected features. This the Feature as a Counter approach. The derived observations are computed from either with the same number of raw samples, (batch-based approaches) or by aggregating them by time intervals (timestamp-based approach). Results show that there is no significant differences between the proposed approaches neither in the performance of the models nor in the selected features that validate our proposal making it feasible to be widely used as a standard FE method. (shrink)

In this article, Roberto Esposito lays out the genealogical pathways linking the three major concepts around which his most recent work has wound its way: community, immunity, and biopolitics. Although immunity is necessary to the preservation of our life, when driven beyond a certain threshold it forces life into a sort of cage where not only our freedom gets lost but also the very meaning of our existence – that opening of existence outside itself that takes the name of (...) communitas. A hermeneutics informed by immunity can allow the category of community to regain a new political significance, without ending up in a substantialist metaphysics. This task is dictated by the urgent need for an affirmative biopolitics – a horizon of meaning – in which life would no longer be the object but somehow the subject of politics. But what sort of shape would this take? Where would we trace its symptoms? And with what objectives? A preliminary answer focuses on breaking the vise grip between public and private that threatens to crush the common, by seeking instead to expand the space of the common, in the fight, for example, against the planned privatization of water and the battle over energy sources. (shrink)

The notion of the "impolitical" developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of modernity's political categories, which have become incapable of giving voice to any genuinely radical perspective. The impolitical is not the opposite of the political but rather its outer limit: the border from which we might glimpse a trajectory away from all forms of political theology and the depoliticizing tendencies of a completed modernity. The book's reconstruction of the impolitical lineage-which is anything but uniform-begins with (...) the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendt's On Revolution to Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power; from Simone Weil's The Need for Roots to Georges Bataille's Sovereignty to Ernst Junger's An der Zeitmauer. The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories. (shrink)

Both the commonsensical and leading theoretical accounts of entrepreneurship, democracy, and solidarity fail to describe adequately entrepreneurial, democratic, and solidarity?building practices. These accounts are inadequate because they assume a faulty description of human being. In this article we develop an interpretation of entrepreneurship, democratic action, and solidarity?building that relies on understanding human beings as neither primarily thinking nor desiring but as skillful beings. Western human beings are at their best when they are engaged in producing large?scale cultural or historical changes (...) in the way people and things are dealt with. The three domains of human activity where these historical changes are most clearly accomplished are entrepreneurship, democratic action, and solidarity. Section I, guided by a roughly Kuhnian notion of holding on to an anomaly until it re?gestalts the way we see things, offers a general interpretation of how skillful human beings open up new worlds by changing their shared background practices in three ways: reconfiguring, which makes a marginal practice central; cross?appropriation, in which one domain of practices takes over useful practices from another domain; and articulating, whereby dispersed or confused practices are brought into clearer focus. An entrepreneur creates a product which reconfigures the practices. This interpretation of entrepreneurial skills is contrasted with current accounts that overlook ehtrepreneurship to concentrate on instrumental or theoretical models of business activities. Section II claims that the most exemplary kind of political action in a liberal democracy is that of political action groups. Such groups produce a change in a nation's background practices through a kind of speaking that leads to massive cross?appropriation. We describe Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and suggest that it both satisfies the requirements for genuine democratic action that we have established in our examination of other views and lacks their disadvantages. We conclude that the relatively detached action suggested by current theories of liberal democracy fail to do justice to democratic practice. The final section argues that those who claim that a single highest value or procedure provides a source of solidarity that satisfies all the competing interests in a multi?cultural nation always arrive at a solidarity that is too thin to provide for the serious sort of commitments that one would be willing to die for. We propose that solidarity in multi?cultural states implies commitment to a set of thick values, and that when one realizes that these thick values construct one's identity one is willing to die for them. While political action concerns itself with ordering values, solidarity involves the cultivation of them in such a way that no ordering of them matters. But solidarity is not to be understood as a subjective feeling. It is rather the experience of a group identity, a ?we?, that sees things and deals with things in terms of shared concerns. This ?we? comes to recognize itself when the actions it engages in transform it. The paradigmatic action that transforms such a ?we? occurs when a culture figure articulates some forgotten concern or value. As in the cases of entrepreneurship and democratic action, a culture figure cultivates solidarity by changing the background practices in a historical manner. It is concluded that traditional theoretical accounts, by overlooking the primacy of involved skillful activities and the importance of background change, fail to capture the source, the function, and the point of entrepreneurship, liberal democracy, and solidarity. (shrink)

This paper argues that some of the misunderstandings surrounding the meaning and function of the concept of human dignity in bioethics arise from a lack of distinction between two different roles that this notion plays: one as an overarching policy principle, and the other as a moral standard of patient care. While the former is a very general concept which fulfils a foundational and a guiding role of the normative framework governing biomedical issues, the latter reflects a much more concrete (...) and context-specific understanding of the patient as a “person”. The importance of dignity as a policy principle will be described by appealing to the distinction between principles and rules as developed by some legal philosophers. The value of dignity as a standard of patient care will be illustrated with the help of concrete examples and by drawing on the taxonomies of dignity proposed by Jonathan Mann and other scholars. The overall scope of the article is to highlight this double and complementary role of human dignity in bioethics. (shrink)

We investigate certain Brouwer-Zadeh lattices that serve as abstract counterparts of lattices of effects in Hilbert spaces under the spectral ordering. These algebras, called PBZ*-lattices, can also be seen as generalisations of orthomodular lattices and are remarkable for the collapse of three notions of “sharpness” that are distinct in general Brouwer-Zadeh lattices. We investigate the structure theory of PBZ*-lattices and their reducts; in particular, we prove some embedding results for PBZ*-lattices and provide an initial description of the lattice of PBZ*-varieties.

O presente ensaio parte dos questionamentos construídos por Machado de Assis no artigo “Notícia da atual literatura brasileira: instinto de nacionalidade”, para analisar o lugar que o discurso marginal ocupa na produção literária contemporânea. Nesta perspectiva, utilizando como referência o conceito construído por Machado de Assis, investigo a possibilidade de observarmos a presença de um “Instinto de Marginalidade” na atual literatura brasileira, que não mais se baseia no intuito de formação de uma “literatura nacional”, isto é, unificadora e essencialista, mas (...) como vozes da dissonância e da alteridade. Assim, se o “Instinto de nacionalidade”, detectado por Machado em sua época, serviria a uma busca de independência, não estaríamos igualmente presenciando um ensejo de diferenciação das minorias? E, dessa forma, ainda seguindo os passos do crítico, não correríamos o risco da busca de uma “cor local” que salvaguardaria as fronteiras entre margem e centro? (shrink)

The classical Glivenko theorem asserts that a propositional formula admits a classical proof if and only if its double negation admits an intuitionistic proof. By a natural expansion of the BCK-logic with negation we understand an algebraizable logic whose language is an expansion of the language of BCK-logic with negation by a family of connectives implicitly defined by equations and compatible with BCK-congruences. Many of the logics in the current literature are natural expansions of BCK-logic with negation. The validity of (...) the analogous of Glivenko theorem in these logics is equivalent to the validity of a simple one-variable formula in the language of BCK-logic with negation. (shrink)

O presente artigo busca demonstrar a estreita relação entre as culturas de consumo e as mídias —entendidas como mediadoras das relações socioculturais— na contemporaneidade, na medida em que colocam em ação processos de formação de significações simbólicas, a partir das diferentes práticas, bens e hábitos de consumo. Esses processos produzem “jogos de aparência” que permitem a negociação na construção da própria imagem por meio dos usos e consumos referentes à vestimenta, a estilos e também ao corpo. Além disso, a própriaabordagem (...) antropológica sobre o consumo e a aparência é problematizada ao evidenciar que essas relações são construções simbólicas onde os termos utilizados devem ser entendidos a partir do contexto da sua produção. (shrink)

Supervaluationism holds that the future is undetermined, and as a consequence of this, statements about the future may be neither true nor false. In the present paper, we explore the novel and quite different view that the future is abundant: statements about the future do not lack truth-value, but may instead be glutty, that is both true and false. We will show that (1) the logic resulting from this “abundance of the future” is a non-adjunctive paraconsistent formalism based on subvaluations, (...) which has the virtue that all classical laws are valid in it, while no formula like φ ∧ ¬φ is satisfiable (though both φ and ¬φ may be true in a model); (2) The peculiar behaviour of abundant logical consequence has an illuminating analogy in probability logic; (3) abundance preserves some important features of classical logic (not preserved in supervaluationism) when it comes to express those important retrogradations of truth which are presupposed by the argument de praesenti ad praeteritum. (shrink)

We analyse the liberal ethics of noninterference in social choice. A liberal principle, capturing noninterfering views of society and inspired by John Stuart Mill's conception of liberty, is examined. The principle expresses the idea that society should not penalise individuals after changes in their situation that do not affect others. An impossibility for liberal approaches is highlighted: every social decision rule that satisfies unanimity and a general principle of noninterference must be dictatorial. This raises some important issues for liberal approaches (...) in social choice and political philosophy. (shrink)

Using the theory of BL-algebras, it is shown that a propositional formula ϕ is derivable in Łukasiewicz infinite valued Logic if and only if its double negation ˜˜ϕ is derivable in Hájek Basic Fuzzy logic. If SBL is the extension of Basic Logic by the axiom (φ & (φ→˜φ)) → ψ, then ϕ is derivable in in classical logic if and only if ˜˜ ϕ is derivable in SBL. Axiomatic extensions of Basic Logic are in correspondence with subvarieties of the (...) variety of BL-algebras. It is shown that the MV-algebra of regular elements of a free algebra in a subvariety of BL-algebras is free in the corresponding subvariety of MV-algebras, with the same number of free generators. Similar results are obtained for the generalized BL-algebras of dense elements of free BL-algebras. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that qualitative theories (Q-theories) can be used to describe the statistical structure of cross classified populations and that the notion of verisimilitude provides an appropriate tool for measuring the statistical adequacy of Q-theories. First of all, a short outline of the post-Popperian approaches to verisimilitude and of the related verisimilitudinarian non-falsificationist methodologies (VNF-methodologies) is given. Secondly, the notion of Q-theory is explicated, and the qualitative verisimilitude of Q-theories is defined. Afterwards, appropriate measures for the (...) statistical verisimilitude of Q-theories are introduced, so to obtain a clear formulation of the intuitive idea that the statistical truth about cross classified populations can be approached by falsified Q-theories. Finally, it is argued that some basic intuitions underlying VNF-methodologies are shared by the so-called prediction logic, developed by the statisticians and social scientists David K. Hildebrand, James D. Laing and Howard Rosenthal. (shrink)

The interpretation of propositions in Lukasiewicz's infinite-valued calculus as answers in Ulam's game with lies--the Boolean case corresponding to the traditional Twenty Questions game--gives added interest to the completeness theorem. The literature contains several different proofs, but they invariably require technical prerequisites from such areas as model-theory, algebraic geometry, or the theory of ordered groups. The aim of this paper is to provide a self-contained proof, only requiring the rudiments of algebra and convexity in finite-dimensional vector spaces.

Egalitarian theorists, since Rawls, have in the main advocated equalizing some objective measure of individual well-being, such as primary goods, functionings, or resources, rather than subjective welfare. This discussion, however, has assumed, implicitly, a static environment. By analyzing a society that survives for many generations, we demonstrate that equality of opportunity for some objective condition is incompatible with human development over time. We argue that this incompatibility can be resolved by equalizing opportunities for welfare. Thus, “subjectivism” seems necessary if we (...) are to hope for a society that can both equalize opportunities and support the development of human capacity over time. (shrink)

Este artículo desafía la narrativa tradicional de la historia de las mujeres colombianas en la filosofía. Para ello se evita el recurso de la historia heroica de los “grandes pensadores” y se propone el método de pensar causas comunes. Como se trata de una apuesta del feminismo filosófico, se subraya la importancia de una ontología corporal y una política de posicionamiento, a partir del estudio de caso del IV Congreso Internacional femenino realizado en Bogotá (1930). En el cierre, el método (...) de la causa común nos permitió sortear lo que la filósofa Kristie Dotson denomina “la cultura de la justificación” que encierra la filosofía en una serie de normas disciplinarias y en cambio apostamos por lo que ella también llama una cultura de la praxis que permite visibilizar múltiples formas del ejercicio filosófico. (shrink)

This paper analyses the temporal unit of egalitarian concern. In the intertemporal context, the differences between egalitarian views can be appreciated not only in inequality analysis but also as regards the ideal egalitarian distribution to be established. In this paper, three intergenerational egalitarian principles (Complete Lives Egalitarianism, Corresponding Segments Egalitarianism and Simultaneous Segments Egalitarianism) are analysed and CSE is argued to be the appropriate egalitarian benchmark. The relations between the three principles and other moral ideals, namely maximin and utilitarianism, are (...) also analysed. It is proved that CLE and CSE are compatible with a concern for the worst off and, partially, with a utilitarian concern, while the adoption of SSE implies a worse trade-off between egalitarianism and the other moral ideals. (shrink)

This paper uses a computational framework to analyse the equilibrium dynamics of exploitation and inequality in accumulation economies with heterogeneous labour. A novel index is presented which measures the intensity of exploitation at the individual level and the dynamics of the distribution of exploitation intensity is analysed. Various taxation schemes are analysed which may reduce exploitation or inequalities in income and wealth. It is shown that relatively small taxation rates may have significant cumulative effects on wealth and income inequalities. Further, (...) taxation schemes that eliminate exploitation also reduce disparities in income and wealth but in the presence of heterogeneous skills, do not necessarily eliminate them. The inegalitarian effects of different abilities need to be tackled with a progressive education policy that compensates for unfavourable circumstances. (shrink)

This paper tries to clarify the logical structure of the relationship between labor values and prices from an axiomatic perspective. The famous “transformation problem” is interpreted as an impossibility result for a specific interpretation of value theory based on specific assumptions and definitions. A comprehensive review of recent literature is provided, which shows that there are various theoretically relevant and logically consistent alternative interpretations based on different assumptions and definitions.

Aim of this paper is to provide a self-contained presentation of the natural equivalence between MV-algebras and lattice-ordered abelian groups with strong unit.

This paper extends the analysis of liberal principles in social choice recently proposed by Mariotti and Veneziani (2009a) to infinitely-lived societies. First, some novel characterisations of inegalitarian leximax social welfare relations are derived based on the Individual Benefit Principle (IBP), which incorporates a liberal, non-interfering view of society. This is surprising because the IBP does not explicitly incorporate any preference for inequality, nor does it assign priority to well-off members of society. Second, some impossibility results are derived that highlight a (...) general tension between standard fairness and efficiency axioms in social choice, and a liberal Principle of Non-Interference that generalises IBP. (shrink)