Este trabajo tiene como propósito demostrar que la voz indígena presente en Cautiverio feliz y razón individual de las guerras dilatadas del reino de Chile no es una reivindicación de la alteridad sino un instrumento discursivo útil para la consecución del objetivo textual del cronista. Para ello, examinaremos las interferencias -voluntarias o involuntarias- de la voz del soldado Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán en el trasvase lingüístico y cultural que hace en el registro letrado de la memoria araucana. Durante (...) su cautiverio, el cronista tiene acceso a la oralidad que la configura y al modo en que se transmite entre los miembros del grupo. Irrumpirá en este proceso -como actor, durante su experiencia, y en su memorial, décadas más tarde- desde un imaginario criollo que, a pesar de haber madurado en la multicultural frontera araucana, conserva motivaciones de lucha de un pensamiento etnocéntrico. The purpose of this paper is to show that the Indian voice included in Happy Captivity and Reason for the Prolonged Wars of the Kingdom of Chile is not a recognition of otherness, but a useful discursive instrument for achieving the chronicler’s text objective. To that end, we examine the voluntary and involuntary interferences of the soldier’s voice of Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán within the written cultural and linguistic transfer from the Araucanian memory. During his captivity, the chronicler has access to its oral configuration and the way in which it is passed on to the members of the group. He interferes in this process -as an actor, during his experience, and as a memory writer a few decades later- and he always does it from a Creole imaginary that retains the fight motivations of ethnocentric thinking, despite having been shaped in the multicultural Araucanian frontier. (shrink)

This paper aims to improve knowledge about the main factors influencing firm environmental commitment, by examining empirically the relationship between public support for R&D for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and their investment in environmental protection. The empirical analysis was developed using a sample of 1594 Spanish firms, and a binary logistic regression to evaluate the existence of dependency relationships between the analyzed variables. The results show that those companies receiving direct funding from local public entities and those collaborating with (...) research centers and universities, invest more in environmental actions to protect the natural ecosystem. The paper contributes to the academic literature by analyzing the main factors that influence the SMEs environmental commitment. Moreover, showing practitioners and policy makers the effectiveness of different types of financial support depending on the origin of the funds and the form of action taken; showing managers the advantages of collaborating with public administrations, as well as with other research organizations, to obtain better ECSR results. (shrink)

A modo de preámbulo, consideramos importante mencionar que el presente ensayo pretende entrelazar los conceptos mirada y seducción desde distintas ópticas. Se plantean someramente algunas ideas desde la filosofía hasta el psicoanálisis. Se inicia con una “mirada” a las construcciones literarias de creadores de gran importancia, tales como Jean Braudrillard y Georges Bataille, en quienes se estudia la idea del ojo perverso, de la mirada y el deseo, subjetividad que nos atrapa. Se ambiciona articular con teorizaciones psicoanalíticas de lo inconsciente, (...) abundando en investigaciones freudianas y de otros teóricos del psicoanálisis para analizar e interpretar sus “seductoras” aportaciones.By way of preamble, we consider important to mention that this essay intends to link the concepts of look and seduction from different angles. Some ideas are raised from philosophy to psychoanalysis. The article starts with a “look” to the creators of literary constructions of great importance such as Jean Braudrillard and Georges Bataille, in order to study the idea of the evil eye, the gaze and desire, the subjectivity that catch us. The article aspires to articulate psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious, abounding in Freudian investigations and other theorists of psychoanalysis to analyze and interpret “seductive” contributions. (shrink)

Previous evidence has shown that excessive valuing happiness may relate to lower psychological wellbeing across cultures. Considering the lack of data with Spanish population, we examined the relation between tightly holding happiness emotion goals and subjective wellbeing in a sample of Spanish women, and explored the mediation role exerted by psychological inflexibility components in the relation between valuing happiness and subjective wellbeing. A female adult sample filled out measures of excessive valuing happiness, psychological inflexibility, positive affect, negative affect, and life (...) satisfaction. Valuing happiness only showed positive total effects on negative affect and strong direct effects on both cognitive fusion and experiential avoidance. Analyses revealed the mediating roles exerted by psychological inflexibility components, with experiential avoidance leading to lower pleasure; and cognitive fusion leading to greater displeasure and lower life satisfaction. Psychological inflexibility components explained between 40 and 80% of the total effect of valuing happiness on our outcome variables. Our findings highlight the need for further research on the benefits of hedonic vs. values-based approaches to happiness. (shrink)

The experience of losing a child to cancer represents an emotional burden for the parents with extreme individual, family and social effects that do not end with death. This integrative review is intended to identify key aspects in the experience of losing a child to cancer. The results show a pattern surrounding six moments in the mourning process These can serve as elements of intervention to accompany parents as they try to cope. It is concluded this pattern is an important (...) phenomenon for the development of palliative care at the end of life and afterwards. (shrink)

This research was carried out in a classroom of the center of comprehensive family development in the municipality of Durango, Mexico. The center trains young people in making crafts. From these young people, 13 teenage mothers ages 15-23, all victims of abuse as children, were selected. With this group, we implemented the philosophical-pedagogical proposal called "Philosophy for children and teenagers," first developed by the American philosopher Matthew Lipman. The main goal was to form a "community of inquiry," where through philosophical (...) dialogue the participants developed cognitive skills, allowing them to share, in an ethical and moral dialogue, their life experiences within a democratic setting. The results were demonstrated through the disclosures made by the participants during the philosophical dialogues, We also recorded the cognitive abilities detected over 20 sessions. We contrast the results with the theories to demonstrate the participants’ cognitive changes. We also observed unexpected findings in other academic fields that facilitate ethical and moral thinking. (shrink)

One of the objectives in the field of artificial intelligence for some decades has been the development of artificial agents capable of coexisting in harmony with people and other systems. The computing research community has made efforts to design artificial agents capable of doing tasks the way people do, tasks requiring cognitive mechanisms such as planning, decision-making, and learning. The application domains of such software agents are evident nowadays. Humans are experiencing the inclusion of artificial agents in their environment as (...) unmanned vehicles, intelligent houses, and humanoid robots capable of caring for people. In this context, research in the field of machine ethics has become more than a hot topic. Machine ethics focuses on developing ethical mechanisms for artificial agents to be capable of engaging in moral behavior. However, there are still crucial challenges in the development of truly Artificial Moral Agents. This paper aims to show the current status of Artificial Moral Agents by analyzing models proposed over the past two decades. As a result of this review, a taxonomy to classify Artificial Moral Agents according to the strategies and criteria used to deal with ethical problems is proposed. The presented review aims to illustrate (1) the complexity of designing and developing ethical mechanisms for this type of agent, and (2) that there is a long way to go (from a technological perspective) before this type of artificial agent can replace human judgment in difficult, surprising or ambiguous moral situations. (shrink)

The objective of the research is focused on the study of the evolution of sexism as a cultural parameter in the Roma population whose people maintain recognition as an ethnic minority in Europe. The design selected for this study is descriptive. This study involves testing the reliability of the reduced version of the ambivalent sexism inventory (ASI; Glick and Fiske, 1996) scale among a representative group of the Roma population belonging to the city of Toledo. A representative sample of 44 (...) people aged between 16 and 40 years was selected, with an average of 27.3. The results confirm the reliability of the scale and provide little differentiation and sex-disaggregated results. The responses on the items show a high degree of sexism among the participants. The obtained results give a better understanding of the scope of gender roles and, therefore, can help us to reorient interventions in the prevention of gender inequalities or early school dropouts among Roma girls. (shrink)

8 March, now known as International Women’s Day, is a day for feminist claims where demonstrations are organized in over 150 countries, with the participation of millions of women all around the world. These demonstrations can be viewed as collective rituals and thus focus attention on the processes that facilitate different psychosocial effects. This work aims to explore the mechanisms involved in participation in the demonstrations of 8 March 2020, collective and ritualized feminist actions, and their correlates associated with personal (...) well-being and collective well-being, collective efficacy and collective growth, and behavioral intention to support the fight for women’s rights. To this end, a cross-cultural study was conducted with the participation of 2,854 people from countries in Latin America and Europe, with a retrospective correlational cross-sectional design and a convenience sample. Participants were divided between demonstration participants and non-demonstrators or followers who monitored participants through the media and social networks. Compared with non-demonstrators and with males, female and non-binary gender respondents had greater scores in mechanisms and criterion variables. Further random-effects model meta-analyses revealed that the perceived emotional synchrony was consistently associated with more proximal mechanisms, as well as with criterion variables. Finally, sequential moderation analyses showed that proposed mechanisms successfully mediated the effects of participation on every criterion variable. These results indicate that participation in 8M marches and demonstrations can be analyzed through the literature on collective rituals. As such, collective participation implies positive outcomes both individually and collectively, which are further reinforced through key psychological mechanisms, in line with a Durkheimian approach to collective rituals. (shrink)

Reification, fetishism, alienation, mastery, and control – these are some of the key concepts of modernity that have been battered and beaten by postmoderns and nonmoderns alike, with Bruno Latour, a nonmodern, discarding them most recently. Critical of this approach, which creates a rift between moderns and nonmoderns, the author engages in dialogue with modern thinkers – particularly Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann and Stanley Pullberg – with a view to recycling and redefining the concept of reification from a nonmodern perspective. (...) Marxian scholars associate reification with an attitude of detachment and passivity. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Luvale-speaking region of northwest Zambia, Africa, the author seeks to convert the negative and asymmetrical Marxian reading of reification, which places subjects above objects, to a positive symmetry. Marx explained the capitalist economy through the lens of religion. Reversing the direction of symmetrical comparison, the author considers the northwestern Zambian universe of ancestors and their different mahamba manifestations in the form of spiritual beings, diseased bodies and material objects through the lens of Marxian concepts, mainly reification and fetishism. Three aspects of reification understood as a human universal come to light: first, reification and animation entail each other both in the realms of materiality (human bodies and material objects) and immateriality (concepts and spirits), being best perceived as a form of fetishism. Reifacts are fetishes and fetishes are reifacts. Second, because fetishes are animated and do things, reification is a form of engagement with the world, a means to action and a tool for transformation. Third and last, and without contradiction, reification entails engagement and detachment, action and withdrawal, control and surrender. There is much to gain from recycling the old concept of reification. In a non-partisan symmetrical perspective, the redefinition of reification as fetishism yields a new, positive understanding of the place of material and immaterial things in social life and the ways in which we humans apprehend the world and implicate those things in our projects and struggles. Reification is not an impediment to action but a condition for action. (shrink)

This work traces, departing from the method of structures of thought, the influence of the doctrines of Duns Scotus and Ockham in 19 th Century dogmatics. Milestones of this transformation are Windscheid’s doctrine on legal rights and Jellinek’s doctrines on public legal rights and the self-limitation of the state, as well as Laband’s distinction between the material sense of law and the formal. This multiplication of formal distinctions dissolves the modern subject in the system. Only a radical approach enables us (...) to understand the sense of legal modernity: the separation made by Scotus and nominalism between object and subject is what in the final instance explains liberal (possessive) individualism and its legal consequences. (shrink)

In Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute, Daniel Andrés López reassembles Lukács’s philosophy of praxis on a Hegelian basis, as a conceptual-historical totality, both defending him and proposing an unprecedented, immanent critique that raises problems for Marxian philosophy as a whole.

The COVID-19 outbreak has ravaged all societal domains, including education. Home confinement, school closures, and distance learning impacted students, teachers, and parents’ lives worldwide. In this study, we aimed to examine the impact of COVID-19-related restrictions on Italian and Portuguese students’ academic motivation as well as investigate the possible buffering role of extracurricular activities. Following a retrospective pretest–posttest design, 567 parents reported on their children’s academic motivation and participation in extracurricular activities. We used a multi-group latent change score model to (...) compare Italian and Portuguese students’: pre-COVID mean motivation scores; rate of change in motivation; individual variation in the rate of change in motivation; and dependence of the rate of change on initial motivation scores. Estimates of latent change score models showed a decrease in students’ motivation both in Italy and in Portugal, although more pronounced in Italian students. Results also indicated that the decrease in students’ participation in extracurricular activities was associated with changes in academic motivation. Furthermore, students’ age was significantly associated with changes in motivation. No significant associations were found for students’ gender nor for parents’ education. This study provides an important contribution to the study of students’ academic motivation during home confinement, school closures, and distance learning as restrictive measures adopted to contain a worldwide health emergency. We contend that teachers need to adopt motivation-enhancing practices as means to prevent the decline in academic motivation during exceptional situations. (shrink)

John Carvalho’s Thinking with Images, an Enactivist Aesthetics argues that puzzling artworks can draw us into a special activity – thinking when we don’t know what to think – which is valuable because it takes us beyond our skills and understanding. Enactivism is the theory of mind that best explains such thinking. The book illustrates this proposal with four chapters that detail Carvalho’s highly personal or individual encounters with enigmatic works of art. I raise two concerns. First, the four illustrative (...) chapters say that they are enactivist, but they do not show this. The illustrative chapters detail considerations about the works that are not distinguished by a particular theory of mind and might fit with any number of approaches to works of art. The suggestion that the thinking presented in each chapter is skillful is not explained. Second, the book does not just focus on thinking when we don’t know what to think, it also claims that such thinking frees us from mere looking. But enactivism does not require us to deny that our engagement with particular works in their ‘concrete singularity,’ to use Carvalho’s term, is perceptual. If perception is richly integrated or even continuous with what we understand skillfully or cognitively – and enacted in one’s circumstances – this does not erase differences between perception and thought or between their functions. When we ‘think with’ an individual so that we are engaged with it in its concrete singularity, perception is involved either in the present or the past. There is no need to shunt perception or looking aside as life activities that are just rule-bound, just part of knowing what to think rather than part of our response when we don’t know what to think. (shrink)

Dans les sociétés démocratiques, le droit est le texte où s'écrivent nos croyances fondatrices : croyances en une signification de l'être humain, croyances dans la force des lois et l'empire de la justice, croyances dans les valeurs sociales de l'Interdit. Le droit impose donc un sens commun qui permet aux individus de se lier entre eux et de vivre ensemble, il fonctionne aussi comme une vérité du moment. Il se nourrit et accompagne les transformations sociales et culturelles qui touchent non (...) seulement les sociétés nationales, mais également l'espace mondialisé. Le droit enregistre, selon ses propres temporalités, les changements de valeurs, l'émergence de nouvelles inquiétudes, l'évolution des techniques et des connaissances. Depuis quelques années, nous assistons à une "demande" accrue de droit et de régulation juridique. Nous chercherons tout d'abord à repérer et identifier les nouveaux territoires du droit en montrant comment la norme juridique contribue en permanence à réinventer le réel, à fabriquer inlassablement la condition humaine, à se présenter sans cesse comme l'instituteur du social. Ce mouvement de juridicisation du social et du politique se traduit non seulement par une prolifération et une diversification de la règle de droit, mais également par un processus parallèle de judiciarisation qui voit un certain nombre de problèmes être traités par l'institution judiciaire (politiques de santé, de sécurité, phénomènes de criminalité internationale, etc.). Entrons-nous dans un nouvel âge du droit? Ces nouvelles interactions entre la société et le droit inaugurent-elles l'ère d'une future démocratie juridique? C'est à ces questions que cet ouvrage essaie de répondre grâce à des contributions de F. Bellivier, J. Commaille, M. Delmas-Marty, M. Hastings, I. De Lamberterie, S. Leverd, A. Lourdelle, E. Millard, M. Quillé, D. Salas, J-F. Thony. (shrink)

Historical political entities differ in their understanding of sovereignty. This paper studies how conceptualizations of sovereignty clashed during the peace negotiations between the Spanish Monarchy and the United Provinces of the Low Countries held during the 1640s. It argues that these different understandings of sovereignty posed a significant obstacle to the signing of the peace and, once signedm remained a potential source of instability in the relationship not only between both polities but also for the internal equilibrium of the Dutch (...) Republic. (shrink)

Vaesen infers unique properties of mind from the appearance of specific cultural innovation – a correlation without causal direction. Shifts in habitat, population density, and group dynamics are the only independently verifiable incentives for changes in cultural practices. The transition from Acheulean to Late Stone Age technologies requires that we consider how population and social dynamics affect cultural innovation and mental function.

En una época de éxodo masivo global, se explora el documental De Nadie (2005) de Tin Dirdamal, el cual, a través de una variedad de instancias narrativas, presenta la experiencia y condición migrante, aún actual, de centroamericanos en su tránsito por México en su camino hacia EE.UU. Frente a la exclusión en el pasado de personajes migrantes femeninos, el cine y la narrativa literaria contemporánea despliegan significados culturales y sociales que avivan la presencia de mujeres como protagonistas en el vertiginoso (...) cruce entre fronteras, bajo los regímenes de movilidad. Estas narrativas ponen en evidencia la trascendencia identitaria de las mujeres migrantes a partir del desplazamiento. En específico, en este trabajo se examina el documental De Nadie (2005) bajo la lupa de la performatividad de género de la hondureña María, antes y durante su recorrido migratorio. (shrink)

Kendall Walton explains pictures in terms of games of perceptual make-believe. Pictures or depictions are props that draw us to participate in games of make-believe where we imagine seeing what a picture depicts. Walton proposes that one imagines of one’s perceptual experience of the coloured canvas that it is a different perceptual experience. The issue is whether perception and imagination can combine the way Walton suggests. Can one imagine a perception to be different? To get a clearer understanding of the (...) unified perceptual-imaginative experience Walton posits, the paper turns to competing theories that explain perceptual experience in terms of contents, relations to objects, or both contents and relations. Walton appeals to theories of perceptual content and cognitive penetration. But it is also important to examine whether his view fits with recent theories that explain perception only in terms of relations or in terms of both contents and relations. The paper argues that Walton’s view is compatible with content theories of perception and can be defended from some objection once we look at the detail these theories offer. Walton’s view is not compatible with pure relational theories of perception but it can be explained by hybrid content-relational theories of perception that posit de re senses. (shrink)

We begin this article by delineating the explanatory gaps left by prevailing gene‐focused approaches in our understanding of phenotype determination, inheritance, and the origin of novel traits. We aim not to diminish the value of these approaches but to highlight where their implementation, despite best efforts, has encountered persistent limitations. We then discuss how each of these explanatory gaps can be addressed by expanding research foci to take into accountbiological agency—the capacity of living systems at various levels to participate in (...) their own development, maintenance, and function by regulating their structures and activities in response to conditions they encounter. Here we aim to define formally what agency and agents are and—just as importantly—what they are not, emphasizing that agency is an empirical property connoting neither intention nor consciousness. Lastly, we discuss how incorporating agency helps to bridge explanatory gaps left by conventional approaches, highlight scientific fields in which implicit agency approaches are already proving valuable, and assess the opportunities and challenges of more systematically incorporating biological agency into research programs. (shrink)

The Introduction provides an overview of Kendall Walton’s make-believe framework for a variety of representations and his arguments that such representations are dependent on their social or historical context. Walton argues that diverse representations involve our capacities for imagination and make-believe with props; they overlap with the fictional. Focusing on make-believe with props explains paradigmatic representational arts such as paintings and novels, theater and film. But this perspective reaches beyond the arts: it explains pictures and photographs in general not only (...) artistic ones; stories in general as well as literary and performing arts; music; metaphors, and even the claims we make about fictional entities and existence. The first section explains the main points of the make-believe framework in Mimesis as Make-Believe, and it reconstructs Walton’s argument in “Categories of Art” that some aesthetic properties depend on the perceptible and historical categories of art to which a work belongs. The second section outlines Walton’s specific proposals about literary fiction, fictional characters, poetry, pictures, photographs, music and negative existential claims. These explanations are integrated with summaries of the papers. The third section examines Walton’s implicit view of two much-discussed issues: the ontology of art and definitions of art. This discussion clears away some misunderstandings of Walton’s contextualism or historicism and relates Walton’s work to Arthur Danto’s and Frank Sibley’s. (shrink)

El presente artículo describe un proyecto de innovación educativa de aprendizaje de competencias, realizado en el Curso Propio de Liderazgo de la Universidad San Pablo CEU, transversal a toda su oferta educativa. Se trata de nuevo proyecto basa- do en una docencia híbrida, donde las masterclass más teóricas se han complemen- tado con un aprendizaje basado en retos vinculados a materias de comunicación y sostenibilidad, aplicando la metodología Design Sprint. De esta forma, se consigue formar al alumno en las llamadas (...) habilidades blandas, cada vez más demandadas por el entorno laboral. (shrink)

Existentialism and phenomenology seem, at first glance, to constitute one of those rare strands of modern Western philosophy that converges productively with feminism. They form a tradition that opposes abstract, rationalist thought and is instead committed to elucidating concrete, “lived experience,” including experiences of embodiment and emotion. As such, they anticipate much “second‐wave” feminist thought that criticizes abstraction, beginning from accounts of women's concrete experiences and emphasizing the importance of personal politics. However, feminists engaged with the tradition have also cautioned (...) that the main canonical figures remained ensconced in masculinism, since their allegedly generic accounts of “human existence” were tacitly grounded in male experience. During the 1980s interest in existentialism and phenomenology waned, as notions of women's experience increasingly came under suspicion with the poststructuralist, or “postmodern,” turn in feminism. But in the last few years interest has grown again, as theorists have sought insights from the tradition that might move theory beyond the impasses that postmodernism now seems to some to present. (shrink)

El artículo se constituye en una exploración del pensamiento de un escritor, pensador y activista afrocostarricense Dolores Joseph Montout, específicamente en relación con el Caribe. La reconstrucción de sus ideas se basó principalmente en su obra periodística en los años treinta, en The Searchlight y The AtlanticVoice, en los cuales escribió asiduamente sobre sus principales preocupaciones referentes a la población afrocostarricense. Se recuperan tres aspectos fundamentales en su obra: a) sus inquietudes nacionalistas y su lucha por la integración y ciudadanía (...) de los afrodescendientes, b) su relación y controversias con las ideas de Marcus Garvey y la Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) y los ataques producto de su posición y c) la importancia que le brinda a la educación y a la formación intelectual de los jóvenes para el crecimiento de su cultura, por ejemplo, a través del Club Literario Alpha. En las conclusiones, se evidencia lo contradictorio y lo complejo de su pensamiento y de la diversidad y diferencias de la población afrocostarricense entre 1930-1938, sus ideas nacionalistas y patrióticas, así como la importancia de proseguir con este tipo de estudios, tanto del autor como de otros pensadores y pensadoras invisibilizados en la historia del Caribe costarricense. (shrink)

This article argues that conceptual realism – the view that conceptual capacities secure the perceiver’s relation to what she sees – strengthens the appeal of a disjunctive approach to perception. The paper argues for a ‘fresh start’ that takes an explanatory approach to perception – asking for the best explanation of the perceptual capacities of mobile organisms – in place of the first person perspective of the argument from illusion. An explanatory perspective indicates that perception is a form of engagement. (...) The paper addresses two explanatory hurdles for disjunctive approaches. First, it argues that the relational nature of perceptual experience is indicated phenomenologically by the fact that one cannot retain the determinate character or content of a perceptual experience. Second, the paper sketches a realist approach to ‘what’ we perceive. (shrink)

Drawing on managerial discretion and conflicting institutional logics literature, this study investigates the relation between the personal sustainability behaviors of owner–managers and the corporate sustainability practices of SMEs. The research proposes a contingency model that assesses the moderating effects of perceived economic advantages and environmental hostility on this relationship. Based on linear hierarchical multiple regression analyses of a cross-sectoral sample of French SMEs, the results suggest a positive influence of the manager's PSB on the SME's CS practices that appears to (...) be differently moderated depending on the type of practice considered. The influence on environmental practices is fostered through the perception of economic advantages. The influence on workplace practices is only effective when the business environment is deemed benign and the influence on community practices is dampened by the perception of environmental hostility. Highlighting the trade-off between the manager's personal values and the SME's economic constraints, these findings contribute to a better understanding of the critical antecedents of sustainability in small businesses. (shrink)

According to logical theories of meaning, a meaning of an expression can be formalized and encoded in truth conditions. Vagueness of the language and individual differences between people are a challenge to incorporate into the meaning representations. In this paper, we propose a new approach to study truth-conditional representations of vague concepts. For a case study, we selected two natural language quantifiers most and more than half. We conducted two online experiments, each with 90 native English speakers. In the first (...) experiment, we tested between-subjects variability in meaning representations. In the second experiment, we tested the stability of meaning representations over time by testing the same group of participants in two experimental sessions. In both experiments, participants performed the verification task. They verified a sentence with a quantifier (e.g., “Most of the gleerbs are feezda.”) based on the numerical information provided in the second sentence, (e.g., “60% of the gleerbs are feezda”). To investigate between-subject and within-subject differences in meaning representations, we proposed an extended version of the Diffusion Decision Model with two parameters capturing truth conditions and vagueness. We fit the model to responses and reaction times data. In the first experiment, we found substantial between-subject differences in representations of most as reflected by the variability in the truth conditions. Moreover, we found that the verification of most is proportion-dependent as reflected in the reaction time effect and model parameter. In the second experiment, we showed that quantifier representations are stable over time as reflected in stable model parameters across two experimental sessions. These findings challenge semantic theories that assume the truth-conditional equivalence of most and more than half and contribute to the representational theory of vague concepts. The current study presents a promising approach to study semantic representations, which can have a wide application in experimental linguistics. (shrink)

The standards for translating texts in specialized fields have become particularly rigorous with the increasing complexity of material and growing demand for its translation. While translations simply aimed at communication and produced by machine translation are proliferating, the need for reliable and high-quality translations is also increasing. The demand for expert-dependable legal translation is higher than ever, requiring competence-based training in the field of legal translation. This paper describes a guided-task framework for developing subject area competence at the earliest stage (...) of an English–Arabic legal translation course. It presents the three most problematic phases of concept processing in legal translation in terms of: legal systems; branches of law; and genre-based phraseology. The approach presented below is part of a more general study that aims to describe the first course in a series of three graduate courses on legal translation, each of them motivated by a guided-task framework that has the aim of developing three specific competences in legal translation: legal concept processing => subject area competence; documentary research => instrumental competence; and legal rhetorics => communicative and textual competence. In this paper we intend to focus on the first course of legal concept processing as a key prerequisite for legal knowledge development. We illustrate the relevance of addressing specific variables when analysing legal concepts in the text that is to be translated, before proceeding to the information search and communication, according to established formulae and conventions. (shrink)

Most philosophers would agree that loving one’s romantic partner (i.e., being in love) is, in principle, a good thing. That is, romantic love can be valuable. It seems plausible that most would then think that the process leading to being in love—i.e. falling in love—can be valuable too. Surprisingly, that is not the case: among philosophers, falling in love has a bad reputation. Whereas philosophy of love has started to depart from traditional (and often unwarranted or false) tropes surrounding romantic (...) life, this tendency has not yet reached the analysis of falling in love. The phenomenon continues to be looked at mostly through a compendium of generalisations taken as metaphysical truths—the view of falling in love being akin to “losing one’s mind” or “not being able to think about anything else”. Here, I analyse some of these generalisations to show that although they may reflect some experiences of what falling in love feels like, they wrongly reduce falling in love to two related, but distinct, phenomena: limerence and infatuation. My aim is to refine the current terminology to lay the foundations for a neutral view of falling in love. (shrink)