De apostel Paulus spreekt in één van zijn brieven over ‘de verduistering van het verstand’ — een verduistering die het gevolg is van zonde.1 In het werk van een groot aantal filosofen uit de westerse filosofische traditie heeft dit woord van Paulus op een of andere wijze weerklank gevonden. Bij Augustinus, Anselmus, Thomas van Aquino, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard, John Henry Newman en Franz von Baader bijvoorbeeld, en in ons land bij Abraham Kuyper en Herman Dooyeweerd, vindt men reflecties (...) over de noëtische gevolgen van de zonde.2 Deze denkers hebben de noëtische doorwerking van de zonde onder meer aangewezen in de volgende verschijnselen: dat mensen allerlei onware gedachten hebben dat onze kenvermogens lang niet altijd naar behoren functioneren, zoals onder andere blijkt uit geheugenzwakte, misperceptie en foutief redeneren dat mensen het vaak onderling oneens zijn. (shrink)

As one approach to examining the way ethical decisions are made, we asked experts and novices to review a set of scenarios that depict some important ethical tensions in research. The method employed was “protocol analysis,” a talk-aloud technique pioneered by cognitive scientists for the analysis of expert performance. The participants were asked to verbalize their normally unexpressed thought processes as they responded to the scenarios, and to make recommendations for courses of action. We found that experts spent more time (...) working through the decision-making process than novices and also raised substantially more concerns than novices. Differences also exist among the three groups of experts. (shrink)

In the mid-1260s in Paris, a dispute raged that concerned the relationship between faith and the Augustinian theological tradition on the one side and secular leaning as represented by the arrival in Latin of Aristotle and various Islamic and Jewish interpreters of Aristotle on the other. Masters of the arts faculty in Paris represented the latter tradition, indicated by the phrase "double truth theory." In 1269, Thomas Aquinas wrote the polemical work On There Being Only One Intellect, Against the (...) Averroists (De unitate intellectus contra averroistas). Thomas is intent on countering two views: first, that intellect is not a faculty of the soul that animates our body, and second, that there is a single intellect existing separately that suffices for all people. Brief as it is, this work puts into play all the significant strands of Thomas's teaching on man - historical doctrinal, philosophical, and theological. It is a valuable source for discussing Thomas's views on the relationship between Aristotle and Christianity and puts to rest the misleading claim that Thomas baptized Aristotle." The introduction places the work historically and sketches the controversy to which it was a contribution. Part 2 includes the Latin Leonine text and McInerny's translation. Part 3 analyzes the basic arguments of Thomas's work and provides a series of interpretive essays meant to make Thomas accessible to today's readers. (shrink)

Although most consumers are positive about socially responsible companies, in order to benefit from CSR efforts, effective and clear CSR communication is important. However, due to the constantly rising profusion of eco-labels, based on either own claims from the organization or claims made by an external third party, consumers may encounter difficulties in identifying truly responsible firms, which could result in less effective CSR initiatives, even for those responsible firms. Therefore, building on attribution theory, this study seeks to identify how (...) uncertified internal CSR claims and external third-party CSR labels should be used in order to deter greenwashing and increase positive consumer evaluations. Within a 3 × 2 design, respondents are exposed to different coffee product packages measuring their attitude toward the brand, corporate credibility, purchase intention, and scent perception, as well as perceived attributional CSR motives. Overall, findings indicate that especially an external CSR label affects consumer responses toward the firm. Moreover, perceived CSR motives serve as a mediator between an external CSR label and corporate credibility and brand attitude, respectively. These findings warrant further consideration of introducing an external multilevel rating systems by governmental law. (shrink)

This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind. Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, (...) entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that social cognition reduces to mental representation and social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in. The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions and, the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas maintained that God foreknows future contingent events and that his foreknowledge does not entail that they are necessarily the case. More specifically, he stated that if God knows a future contingent event, this future contingent event will be necessarily the case de sensu composito, but not de sensu diviso. After emphasizing the unified nature of Aquinas’ notion of necessity, we propose an interpretation of his theses by restating them within the framework of non-normal modal logics. In this (...) framework, the K-axiom does not hold, i.e. the necessity operator does not distribute over the material implication. Moreover, assuming that Aquinas rejected the K-axiom is not only consistent, but also leads to a logical framework that allows us to understand other theses maintained by the Doctor Angelicus. In particular, we argue that Aquinas’ remarks on the principle of non-contradiction rest on an impossible worlds semantics for non-normal modal logics. (shrink)

The free energy principle (FEP) portends to provide a unifying principle for the biological and cognitive sciences. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it must minimise its (information-theoretic) free energy. Under the FEP, to minimise free energy is equivalent to engaging in approximate Bayesian inference. According to the FEP, therefore, inference is at the explanatory base of biology and cognition. In this paper, we discuss a specific challenge to this inferential formulation of adaptive (...) self-organisation. We call it the universal ethology challenge: it states that the FEP cannot unify biology and cognition, for life itself (or adaptive self-organisation) does not require inferential routines to select adaptive solutions to environmental pressures (as mandated by the FEP). We show that it is possible to overcome the universal ethology challenge by providing a cautious and exploratory treatment of inference under the FEP. We conclude that there are good reasons for thinking that the FEP can unify biology and cognition under the notion of approximate Bayesian inference, even if further challenges must be addressed to properly draw such a conclusion. (shrink)

The free energy principle is sometimes put forward as accounting for biological self-organization and cognition. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it can be described as minimising its free energy. It is said to be entirely scale-free, applying to anything from particles to organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the abiotic to the biotic. Because the FEP is so general in its application, one might wonder whether this framework can capture anything specific to (...) biology. We take steps to correct for this here. We first explicate the worry, taking pebbles as examples of an abiotic system, and then discuss to what extent the FEP can distinguish its dynamics from an organism’s. We articulate the notion of ‘autonomy as precarious operational closure’ from the enactive literature, and investigate how it can be unpacked within the FEP. This enables the FEP to delineate between the abiotic and the biotic; avoiding the pebble worry that keeps it out of touch with the living systems we encounter in the world. (shrink)

Whether perception involves the manipulation of representations is currently heavily debated. The embedded view advanced by Nico Orlandi seeks a middle passage between representationalism and radical enactivism. In this paper I argue for a non-representational take on EV. I argue that this is the best way to resolve the objections EV has received from both representationalists and non-representationalists. I analyze this debate, and distinguish four sorts of objections: the objection of the wrongfully cut middleman, the argument against explanatory exclusionism, the (...) case for scientific benefits of representations, and the charge of inconsistent ascription of representational status in EV. I argue that the middleman was never cut in EV, and is controversial to boot, otherwise equal, non-representational explanations have primacy over representational explanations, due to the lack of naturalistic grounds for representations and the unnecessarily ascribed cognitive load to the system. Further, I show that puts the cart before the horse, and the arguments on offer are viciously circular. However, the final objection, lays bare a deeper issue for EV. At the cost of giving up the middle position, however, the explanatory tools already available to EV can be shown to cover the work initially thought to require representation. I conclude that EV is best altered to be a non-representational theory of perception. (shrink)

Autism research is increasingly moving to a view centred around sensorimotor atypicalities instead of traditional, ethically problematical, views predicated on social-cognitive deficits. We explore how an enactivist approach to autism illuminates how social differences, stereotypically associated with autism, arise from such sensorimotor atypicalities. Indeed, in a state space description, this can be taken as a skewing of sensorimotor variables that influences social interaction and so also enculturation and habituation. We argue that this construal leads to autism being treated on a (...) par with other sensorimotor atypicalities such as blindness or atypical height. This leads to our conclusion that, insofar there is an ethical call to inclusion in our public sphere regardless of contingent bodily difference, an enactivist take on autism naturally leads to extending such inclusion to autism. Moreover, our analysis suggests a concrete way forward to achieve inclusion of autistics: by being more attentive to autistic sensorimotor specifics. (shrink)

Predictive processing is an increasingly popular approach to cognition, perception and action. It says that the brain is essentially a hierarchical prediction machine. It is typically construed in a representationalist and inferentialist fashion so that the brain makes contentful inferences on the basis of representational models. In this paper, I argue that the predictive processing framework is inconsistent with this epistemic position. In particular, I argue that the combination of hierarchical modeling, contentful inferentialism and representationalism entail an internal inconsistency. Specifically, (...) for a particular set of states, there will be both a representation requirement and not. Yet a system cannot both be required to represent a certain set of states and not be required to represent those states. Due to this contradiction, I propose to reject the standard view. I suggest that predictive processing is best interpreted in terms of reliable covariation instead, entailing an instrumentalist approach to the statistical machinery. (shrink)

Apologetisch overzicht van de wijsgerige en theologisch inzichten van de middeleeuwse filosoof (1224-1274).

This paper presents methods and challenges attendant on the use of protocol analysis to develop a model of heuristic processing applied to research ethics. Participants are exposed to ethically complex scenarios and asked to verbalize their thoughts as they formulate a requested decision. The model identifies functional parts of the decision-making task: interpretation, retrieval, judgment and editing and seeks to reliably code participant verbalizations to those tasks as well as to a set of cognitive tools generally useful in such work. (...) Important difficulties in the reliability and external validity of measurement are evaluated and a small set of illustrative data is used in support of that discussion. Results indicate that both intuitive emotional but also more deliberative cognition is present which is consistent with work in related literatures in expertise and in neuropsychology. Finally, the theoretical and practical potential of the approach is elaborated, particularly through links to a framing in Aristotelian ethics. (shrink)

This paper begins to explore how corporate social responsibility (CSR) has evolved in Mexico. It looks at Mexico's social and political history to see the values that shaped expectations about how Mexican firms should address the needs and desires of their stakeholders in various periods in the 20th century. Particular attention is given to firms in Monterrey because they pioneered a form of company paternalism that reflected early CSR initiatives. Finally the paper briefly examines some contemporary CSR practices by large (...) Mexican firms. The paper begins to fill a gap in the business-andsociety literature about CSR practices outside the U.S. and Western European countries, which have received most attention by business-and-society scholars. (shrink)

ABB words in Chinese, e.g., hēi-qīqī ‘pitch black’, have been studied for a long time. Most traditional studies analyze these words through derivational rules involving empty suffixes. However, this is problematic, as they are better seen as compounds involving a prosaic A and an ideophonic BB part. By treating ABB as a schema sanctioned by collocate–ideophonic constructions, it is possible to investigate other similar patterns. A corpus study (more than 5,000 tokens) revealed that on the level of schemas, ABB truly (...) acts as a prototype of such constructions, but that it is far from the only pattern to be identified. A second corpus-based study on the level of exemplars showed there are different pockets of salience and non-uniformity in the data from four angles: cue validity, frequency, dispersion, and constructional preference. This paper provides evidence that the traditional ABB narrative needs to be complemented with usage-based data, and grapple with the lexical salience effects this brings along for words involving iconicity. (shrink)

Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they (...) are remembered; and (2) how willing participants’ are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task—a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective–meaning pairs—indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow‐up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives. By comparing the findings from our guessing and memory tasks, we conclude that iconicity is more accessible if a task requires participants to actively seek out sound‐meaning associations. (shrink)

This book addresses late modern debates in Christian theology over the question of whether knowledge of God is available only through God's gracious self-revelation or through revelation plus philosophy or natural reason. The author examines the position of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange as an exemplar of the latter, and the countervailing position of Karl Barth as an exemplar of the former, and then shows how Aquinas's grammar of God both dissolves and transcends these contentious debates altogether.

People often use memes to express their ideological stance on real world events. This study departs from a recent COVID-19-related meme which makes use of elements known from the animated televisio...

We target the ontological and epistemological ramifications of the proposed distinction between Friston and Pearl blankets. We emphasize the need for empirical testing next to computational modeling. A peculiar aspect of the free energy principle (FEP) is its purported support of radically opposed ontologies of the mind. In our view, the objective ontological aspiration itself should be rejected for a pragmatic instrumentalist view.

The book Hidden Harmony—The Connected Worlds of Physics and Art by J.R. Leibowitz is critically reviewed. The book is intended for a general audience and does not assume prior knowledge of physics or the arts.

Iconic words are supposed to exhibit imitative relationships between their linguistic forms and their referents. Many studies have worked to pinpoint sound-to-meaning correspondences for ideophones from different languages. The correspondence patterns show similarities across languages, but what makes such language-specific correspondences universal, as iconicity claims to be, remains unclear. This could be due to a lack of consensus on how to describe and test the perceptuo-motor affordances that make an iconic word feel imitative to speakers. We created and analysed a (...) database of 1,860 ideophones across 13 languages, and found that seven articulatory features, physiologically accessible to all spoken language users, pattern according to semantic features of ideophones. Our findings pave the way for future research to utilize articulatory properties as a means to test and explain how iconicity is encoded in spoken language. The perspective taken here fits in with ongoing research of embodiment, motivation, and iconicity research, three major strands of research within Cognitive Linguistics. The results support that there is a degree of unity between the concepts of imitative communication and the spoken forms through cross-domain mappings, which involve physical articulatory movement. (shrink)

It has often been observed that color is a highly preferred attribute for use in distinguishing descriptions, that is, referring expressions produced with the purpose of identifying an object within a visual scene. However, most of these observations were based on visual displays containing only colors that were maximally different in hue and for which the language of experimentation possessed basic color terms. The experiments described in this paper investigate whether speakers’ preference for color is reduced if the color of (...) the target referent is similar to that of the distractors. Because colors that look similar are often also harder to distinguish linguistically, we also examine the impact of the codability of color values. As a third factor, we investigate the salience of available alternative attributes and its impact on the use of color. The results of our experiments show that, while speakers are indeed less likely to use color when the colors in a display are similar, this effect is mostly due to the difficulty in naming similar colors. Color use for color with a basic color term is affected only when the colors of target and distractors are very similar (yet still distinguishable). The salience of our alternative attribute size, manipulated by varying the difference in size between target and distractors, had no impact on the use of color. (shrink)

Theories, Technologies, Instrumentalities of Color is the outcome of a workshop, held in Leuven, Belgium, in May 2000.

Introduction - This paper is aimed at gaining more insight into the effects of camera-surveillance on behavior. This study investigates the effects of three different ways of ‘framing’ camera presence on cheating behavior and pro-social behavior. First, we explore the effect of presenting the camera as the medium through which an intimidating authority watches the participant. Second, we test the effect of presenting the camera as being a neutral, non-intimidating viewer. Third, we investigate whether a participant watching themselves via a (...) camera has an effect on their behavior. In contrast to most studies of camera surveillance, we will conduct our experiments in an indoor setting, enabling us to investigate behavior to a much greater detail. We will also explore possible moderating effects of personality traits. Methods - 86 students participated in this experiment, distributed over four conditions: three different ways of framing the camera presence, plus a control condition. Our main dependent variables were various kinds of cheating and pro-social behavior. We established the participant’s relevant personality traits in a separate session. Results - For cheating behavior, findings showed that the ‘authorative’ way of framing camera presence and the situation in which participants viewed themselves, differed significantly from a situation without camera-surveillance. We did not find significant effects of camera surveillance on pro-social behavior during the experiment. Looking at personality traits, we found an indication that people with an internal locus of control are more inclined to cheat when there is no camera present compared to people with an external locus of control. However, the effects of our manipulations were stronger. Conclusion - These results support the idea that the framing of a camera’s presence does indeed influence cheating behavior, adding to the preventive effects of camera-surveillance. Additionally, this study provides some valuable insights into the influence of camera presence on behavior in general. (shrink)

This study contributes to the growing literature on the intersection between human resource management and corporate sustainability and, in particular, on sustainable human resource management. In particular, this paper claims that the members of the HR professional community can increase their job satisfaction and decrease their intention to leave by implementing sustainable HRM. In addition, we test for the mediating role played by the meaning that HR professionals and managers attach to HR work. Indeed, when HR professionals and managers are (...) involved in sustainable HRM perceive their job to become more meaningful as it has a broader scope which goes beyond the solely focus on economic performance, and that leads then to higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intention. The study, which is based on 176 questionnaires collected through a cross-country survey, has been developed in partnership between the authors and a leading European association of HR managers and professionals. Our findings, which in general extend the knowledge on the employees’ perception of CS—employee attitudes relationships, represent a data-driven argument for a more active role of HRM in developing Sustainable HRM. (shrink)

Philosophy of science has undergone a naturalistic turn, moving away from traditional idealized concerns with the logical structure of scientific theories and toward focusing on real-world scientific practice, especially in domains such as modeling and experimentation. As part of this shift, recent work has explored how the project of philosophically understanding science as a natural phenomenon can be enriched by drawing from different fields and disciplines, including niche construction theory in evolutionary biology, on the one hand, and ecological and enactive (...) views in embodied cognitive science, on the other. But these insights have so far been explored in separation from each other, without clear indication of whether they can work together. Moreover, the focus on particular practices, however insightful, has tended to lack consideration of potential further implications for a naturalized understanding of science as a whole (i.e., above and beyond those particular practices). Motivated by these developments, here we sketch a broad-ranging view of science, scientific practice and scientific knowledge in terms of ecological-enactive co-construction. The view we propose situates science in the biological, evolutionary context of human embodied cognitive activity aimed at addressing the demands of life. This motivates reframing theory as practice, and reconceptualizing scientific knowledge in ecological terms, as relational and world-involving. Our view also brings to the forefront of attention the fundamental link between ideas about the nature of mind, of science and of nature itself, which we explore by outlining how our proposal differs from more conservative, and narrower, conceptions of “cognitive niche construction.”. (shrink)

Although normative systems, or social laws, have proved to be a highly influential approach to coordination in multi-agent systems, the issue of compliance to such normative systems remains problematic. In all real systems, it is possible that some members of an agent population will not comply with the rules of a normative system, even if it is in their interests to do so. It is therefore important to consider the extent to which a normative system is robust, i.e., the extent (...) to which it remains effective even if some agents do not comply with it. We formalise and investigate three different notions of robustness and related decision problems. We begin by considering sets of agents whose compliance is necessary and/or sufficient to guarantee the effectiveness of a normative system; we then consider quantitative approaches to robustness, where we try to identify the proportion of an agent population that must comply in order to ensure success; and finally, we consider a more general approach, where we characterise the compliance conditions required for success as a logical formula. We furthermore introduce a logic for specifying properties of norm compliance in general and norm robustness in particular. (shrink)

According to standard linguistic theory, the meaning of an utterance is the product of conventional semantic meaning and general pragmatic rules on language use. We investigate how such a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics could evolve under general processes of selection and learning. We present a game‐theoretic model of the competition between types of language users, each endowed with certain lexical representations and a particular pragmatic disposition to act on them. Our model traces two evolutionary forces and their (...) interaction: (i) pressure toward communicative efficiency and (ii) transmission perturbations during the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. We illustrate the model based on a case study on scalar implicatures, which suggests that the relationship between underspecified semantics and pragmatic inference is one of coevolution. (shrink)