Cognitive Niche

En un mundo cada vez más dinámico e incierto, la capacidad de tomar decisiones acertadas es más valiosa que nunca. A menudo nos encontramos ante situaciones con información limitada y un futuro impredecible. En estas circunstancias, nuestras emociones y hábitos de respuesta pueden influir notablemente en nuestras elecciones. Al entender cómo el cerebro procesa la información y genera decisiones, podemos desarrollar habilidades que nos permitan gestionar mejor la complejidad del entorno y aprovechar de manera más eficiente las oportunidades que surgen cotidianamente.

Sentience, as the capacity to feel pleasure and pain, is often understood as a property of an organism, and the main problem is to determine whether an organism possesses this property or not. This is not just an armchair worry. Sentient ethics grounds its normative prescriptions on sentience, so assessing if an organism possesses sentience is crucial for ethical reasoning and behaviour. Assessing if it is the case is far from simple and there is no stable agreement about it. This is the problem of sentience. In this paper, I argue that there is a problem intrinsic to the problem of sentience. I call it the "metaproblem of sentience". I claim that the assumptions that underlie the concept of sentience are what create the "problem of sentience". In the first part of the paper, I list and describe these assumptions and show how they create the problem of sentience in sentient ethics. In the second part, I offer enactive and pragmatist tools for tackling the problem of sentience. I advance a participatory account of sentience and show of relevance of the transcendental argument in ethical discourse. My own contribution is that the transcendental argument should be understood in a relational manner, from the experience of participatory sentience. So it is not just that life can be known only by life. Life can be cared for only by life. So, as in sentient ethics, it is out of my concern for sentient begins that I need to care for them. But, distinct from sentient ethics, may approach to participatory sentience would push to known sentience from how I care for sentient begins, from how I engage with them, from how I take part in their life. I conclude by stressing the significance of a participatory ethics of sentience.

¿Cómo proporcionar un lugar de observación para la noción formal de semiosis? Hemos sugerido que las nociones de nicho y artefacto son especialmente capaces de actualizar la tesis, formulada por Peirce, de que no se puede pensar sin signos externos, asociándola con nuevos métodos y resultados empíricos y teóricos. En este artículo, presentamos la noción de nicho de artefactos semióticos. En nuestro enfoque, la cognición es semiosis, la acción de los signos, en un proceso que toma la forma de construcción de nichos. En comparación con la noción actual de artefacto, los artefactos semióticos son procesos semióticos, signos en acción. Los nichos de artefactos semióticos son espacios estructurados de condiciones fundamentales para la estabilidad de la semiosis, como la situacionalidad (co-ubicación) y la distribución temporal entre comunidades de agentes, artefactos, y sus entornos. Los nichos de artefactos semióticos ofrecen condiciones para el surgimiento del hábito y la sorpresa en la semiosis / cognición. Esta línea de investigación sugiere una semiótica cognitiva basada en relaciones dinámicas, distribuidas y emergentes.

Cumulative transmission and innovation are the hallmark properties of the cultural achievements of human beings. Cognitive scientists have traditionally explained these properties in terms of social learning and creativity. The non-social cognitive dimension of cumulative culture, the so-called technical reasoning, has also been accounted for recently. These explanatory perspectives are methodologically individualistic since they frame cumulative and innovative culture in terms of the processing of inner cognitive representations. Here we show that going beyond methodological individualism could facilitate an understanding of why some inventions are disseminated in a stable form and constitute the basis for further modifications. Drawing on three cases of cognitive history of prominent achievements of Antiquity, i.e., Homerian epics, Euclidean geometry, and Roman law, we investigate which properties of cognitive artifacts shaped cognitive niches for modifying original cognitive tasks or developing new ones. These niches both constrained and enabled the cognitive skills of humans to promote cumulative culture and further innovations. At the same time, we claim that "wide cognition," incorporating both intracranial resources and external cognitive representations, constitutes a platform for building explanations of cognitive phenomena developing over a historical time scale.

Los sesgos cognitivos son un constructo que acuñaron Kahneman & Tveysky (1972) en su Enfoque de Sesgos dentro de la Psicología Cognitiva. Estos son atajos intelectuales que realizan siempre las personas, desde un razonamiento probabilístico intuitivo. El presente trabajo es una primera aproximación que intenta aplicar y describir algunos sesgos cognitivos en el complejo mundo de las representaciones mentales en la experiencia dolorosa, como la ilusión de control; del presente; la confirmación; representatividad; disponibilidad, entre otros. Los sesgos en dolor nos permiten comprender el procesamiento de información frente al dolor y utilizar estrategias comunicacionales más efectivas para su abordaje.

Marta Castello Branco, João Queiroz
El Oído Pensante 11.2 (octubre, 2023 - marzo, 2024): pp. 5-33

ABSTRACT: The emergence of new musical ideas, and new forms of musicality, is described here as the transformation of conceptual spaces in a cognitive niche, a distributed and self-organised set of intergenerational concepts, materials, and actions. According to this approach, there is a direct co-dependence relation, a co-evolutionary causal looping, between new, acceptable (valid) and surprising musical ideas (which define what is creative in a certain context), agents, tools and artifacts (instruments, musical notations, types of equipment, performance space), and conceivable epistemic and pragmatic actions (instrument techniques, dynamics of collaboration, scenic procedures). This co-evolutionary relation defines a conceptual space of musicality. To demonstrate our thesis, we detail the development of extended techniques for transverse flute, a phenomenon strongly dependent on performer-composer collaboration. We focus on Salvatore Sciarrino's L'opera per flauto (1990), which was developed in an intensive work with the flautist Roberto Fabbriciani, through investigation of sounding possibilities of the instrument. The collaboration resulted in new and surprising sounds for the transverse flute, including the combination of extended techniques, and their notation, largely applied by later repertoire.

The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodied turn. Surveying this research provides an opportunity to rethink the relationship between embodiment and genetics, and we argue that the balance of current epigenetic research favours the extension of an enactivist approach to mind and life, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition associated with Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler, which is more substrate neutral.

We discuss a suggestion, made by Harry Heft, that Gibson's ecological approach to perception is compatible with the theory of distributed cognition. We focus on the domain of problem solving. We provide examples of problems in which perception plays a constitutive role in the finding of a solution. We conclude that grounding distributed cognition theory in Gibson's account of direct perception offers a promising avenue for future work seeking to understand human behavior across social and higher cognitive domains.

El periodo de duelo tras la pérdida de un ser querido presenta experiencias y actitudes inusuales que juegan un papel importante en la vida cognitiva de las personas dolientes; por ejemplo, la sensación momentánea de que la persona difunta se encuentra presente, así como creencias de carácter religioso o espiritual. Frecuentemente esto involucra el mantenimiento activo de un vínculo con la persona difunta a través de diversas prácticas en la vida cotidiana. Tanto los estados mentales relacionados con el duelo como las prácticas correspondientes al mantenimiento de vínculos tienen un valor epistémico, en la medida en que proveen un aporte a la funcionalidad del agente en su búsqueda por adquirir conocimiento, comprensión y otros bienes epistémicos. Esto tiene consecuencias éticas y sociales, ya que estos bienes epistémicos pueden ser destruidos o afectados por las intervenciones en el duelo, tanto clínicas como no-clínicas. A pesar de ello, esta dimensión no ha sido suficientemente reconocida por la literatura filosófica. Este trabajo busca motivar el interés por estudiar epistemológicamente el duelo de dos maneras. En primer lugar, ofreciendo una caracterización de los estados mentales asociados con el duelo en términos de estados subdoxásticos (como aliefs). Posteriormente, se muestra el papel que juegan dichos estados mentales en el espacio de affordances estructuradas en un nicho afectivo que permite el desempeño exitoso de la persona doliente en tanto agente epistémico. Con ello se busca proveer un marco de análisis que se pueda desarrollar y extender en futuros trabajos para estudiar los aspectos epistemológicos del duelo.

The first theories of choice under risk and uncertainty describe a man completely rational and able to process the available information thoroughly. Nevertheless, such perfection became under evaluation due to not truly reflecting human behavior (bounded rationality). Aiming to adapt the decision-making models to more realistic premises, behavioral theories are formulated. These theories add the psychological or subjective aspects, that is, the heuristics and biases that keep subjects from making optimal choices. The study of decisions can become the object of study of Administrative Sciences. This is how the present Ph.D. research proposal commences, and its main purpose is to characterize the decision-making processes of small to medium sized business managers. Although there already are diverse experiments that corroborate the presence of biases in human conduct, now it is intended to know which ones are present in the aforementioned particular subjects and under which characteristics. Specifically, the purpose is to determine under which factors, whether rational or heuristic, managers make their decisions. The methodology used is quantitative, descriptive correlational, and quasi-experimental. Among the main results found, it is highlighted that the factors that managers claim to use mostly to make their decisions are the expected performances and the attachment to their business. Based on an index designed and calculated to measure the grade of rationality or heuristics in business decisions, it is observed that those managers who are older, with a minor educational level, and who run also an older SME, are more heuristic in their decision-making choices. On the basis of the quasiexperiments which were carried out, the existence of another heuristic was inferred, that is, affection. The conclusion is that the contribution of this thesis ratifies the need to incorporate the subjective or heuristic component into the analysis of business decisions, thus, giving greater value to the latest behavioral choice theories. This way, a greater field of academic and scientific research may be glimpsed, which is yet scarcely explored, revealing also the importance of considering such aspects by those in charge of developing public and private policies. Finally, it is proposed, as future research guidelines, to continue with the analysis of the subjective component in business decisions and to reproduce it, in an adapted way, in SME managers of other regions and countries, to carry out future comparisons. VI Índice Capítulo 1: INTRODUCCIÓN 1.1 Introducción 1.2 Motivación hacia el objeto y sujeto de estudio 1.3 Hipótesis, pregunta y objetivos de la investigación 1.4 Aporte y pertinencia 1.5 Estructura resumida por capítulos Capítulo 2: MARCO TEÓRICO Primera parte 2.1 La toma de decisiones: Introducción y su aplicación en la Administración 2.2 Elecciones en condiciones de riesgo e incertidumbre 2.2.1 Teoría bayesiana y criterio del valor esperado 2.2.1.1 La probabilidad: Su importancia en la toma de decisiones 2.2.1.2 Probabilidades condicionales: Definición, uso e implicancias 2.2.1.3 Teorema de Bayes 2.2.1.4 Criterio del valor esperado 2.2.2 Teoría de la utilidad esperada 2.2.2.1 Postulados de la teoría 2.2.2.2 Críticas generales al modelo y aportes relevantes 2.2.3 Teoría de las perspectivas 2.3 Las heurísticas Segunda parte 2.4 Las PyMEs 2.4.1 Criterios para su definición 2.4.2 Importancia de las PyMEs en el contexto en donde operan 2.4.3 Caracterización 2.4.4 Revisión del estudio de las heurísticas aplicado en empresarios PyMEs Capítulo 3: METODOLOGÍA Primera parte 3.1 Fundamentos conceptuales de la metodología 3.2 Diseño metodológico 3.3 Panel de expertos 3.3.1 Diseño 3.3.2 Procesamiento y análisis: Métodos empleados 3.3.2.1 Estadística descriptiva: Tabla de frecuencias 3.3.2.2 Fuzzy logic: Funciones de pertenencia VII Segunda parte 3.4 Cuestionario a empresarios PyMEs 3.4.1 Diseño 3.4.1.1 Caracterización 3.4.1.2 Decisiones de inversión 3.4.1.3 Casos hipotéticos 3.4.2 Tamaño de muestra y recolección de datos Tercera parte 3.5 Índice Heurístico 3.6 Análisis estadístico 3.6.1 Análisis estadístico bivariado 3.6.2 Análisis estadístico multivariado Capítulo 4: PRESENTACIÓN DE RESULTADOS Primera parte 4.1 Panel de expertos 4.1.1 Análisis estadístico: Frecuencias acumuladas 4.1.2 Análisis borroso: Funciones de pertenencia 4.1.3 Resultado final del panel Segunda parte 4.2 Relevamiento a empresarios PyME 4.2.1 Caracterización empresario-PyME 4.2.1.1 Variables que responden a características del empresario 4.2.1.2 Variables que responden a características de la PyME 4.2.1.3 Factores que inciden en las decisiones de los empresarios de PyMEs 4.

The extended mind thesis claims that at least some cognitive processes extend beyond the organism’s brain in that they are constituted by the organism’s actions on its surrounding environment. A more radical move would be to claim that social actions performed by the organism could at least constitute some of its mental processes. This can be called the socially extended mind thesis. Based on the notion of affordance as developed in the ecological psychology tradition, I defend the position that perception extends to the environment. Then I will expand the notion of affordance to encompass social affordances. Thus, perception can in some situations also be socially extended.

El presente trabajo forma parte de una investigación mayor que buscó caracterizar la toma de decisiones de los empresarios de pymes de Bahía Blanca, Argentina. En las últimas décadas, estudios mayormente experimentales han probado la existencia de heurísticas y sesgos en el accionar humano. Por consiguiente, el objetivo de este artículo fue determinar qué heurísticas son más propensas a presentarse en las elecciones de un universo particular de sujetos: los empresarios de pymes de la citada ciudad. En consecuencia, se recurrió a un panel de expertos en pymes. Para el procesamiento de los datos en él obtenidos se emplearon dos técnicas: probabilística (frecuencias absolutas y acumuladas) y no probabilística o borrosa (método directo con múltiples expertos). Se concluye que las

Design thinking has been heavily promoted as a powerful tool for human-centred innovation and as a versatile problem-solving method for any issue involving sociotechnical systems. Recently, however, some critical voices within design and science & technology studies have called bullshit on the soundness of such claims, accusing design thinking of essentially trivialising design methods to serve purely commercial goals. Through an analysis of the recent history of design research and an overview of some (philosophical) accounts on the concept of “bullshit”, this paper aims to clarify whether there are sufficient reasons to dismiss and belittle design thinking in such terms. Designers, educators, and anyone concerned with how obfuscatory and vacuous discourse threatens deep reflection on design perhaps will be interested in this account.

A complete theory of human evolution needs to explain not only our genetic development but also our cultural developments. Two interesting theories that have been put forward in this regard are Memetics and Cultural Niche Construction. In this paper, first memetic theory will be presented, as introduced by Richard Dawkins, and subsequently developed by Susan Blackmore. Then, two fatal objections by Boyd & Richerson and by Plotkin will be raised. Accordingly, we will focus on Cultural Niche Construction and provide reasons why this explanatory framework does not suffer from the same drawbacks as memetics. Furthermore, we will show how Cultural Niche Construction stands on stronger epistemological grounds, as it accords with the most recent developments in Cognitive Anthropology, as argued by Andy Clark.

Stoffregen (2003) has proposed a formal definition of affordances as emergent or relational properties of animal-environment systems. This definition contrasts with Turvey's (1992) formal definition of affordances as properties of the environment. In this commentary, my purpose is not to take sides on this issue but instead to bring to light what I believe to be a crucial flaw in Stoffregen's definition. Specifically, I show that Stoffregen's definition places no constraint on which relational or emergent properties legitimately deserve to be counted as affordances, thus allowing any relational property that can be predicated of an animal-environment system to be considered as an affordance. As such, Stoffregen's definition lacks any substantive linkage to the "opportunity for action" notion that has accounted for the scientific utility of the concept to date, a linkage I suggest should be preserved in any definition of affordances.

The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodied turn. Surveying this research provides an opportunity to rethink the relationship between embodiment and genetics, and we argue that the balance of current epigenetic research favours the extension of an enactivist approach to mind and life, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition associated with Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler, which is more substrate neutral.

Introduction: Organicist philosophies Artificial Life research raises philosophical questions, just as cognitive science involves philosophy of mind. No clear demarcation line can be drawn between science and philosophy; every scientific research programme involves metaphysical assumptions and decisions about how to interpret the relations between experiment, observation, theoretical concepts and models (this was also evident when Artificial Life originally was formulated by C.G. Langton in the late 1980s; cf. Emmeche 1994). Yet we should not conflate questions that may be answered by science with questions that by their very nature are conceptual and metaphysical. The aim of this paper is to address from the perspective of biosemiotics a subset of the open problems (as described by Bedeau et al. 2000) raised by Artificial Life research, including 'wet Alife', about the general characteristics of life; the role and nature of information; how life and mind are related; and their relations again to culture and machines. Biosemiotics as the study of communication and information in living systems may provide some inspiration and conceptual tools for inquiry into these theoretical and philosophical issues. Firstly it is apt briefly to introduce organicism as a mainstream position in philosophy of biology, and also a variant called qualitative organicism, and then introduce biosemiotics as a non-standard philosophy of biology. Neither qualitative nor mainstream organicism is specific research paradigms; they are more like general and partly intuitive stances on how to understand living systems in the context of theoretical biology. The body of physics The body of biology The body of 'evo-devo'research The body of zoology The body of anthropology The body of sociology Complex dissipative, selforganizing structures Physiologic-homeostatic units with a genetic code-plurality, and irritability Vegetative swarm of cells coordinating multi-cellular communication with multiple organic codes Self-moving, actionperception cycles, animation, kinesthetics Language, culture-specific Lebenswelt The life in societal institutions, habit formation

Introduction: Organicist philosophies Artificial Life research raises philosophical questions, just as cognitive science involves philosophy of mind. No clear demarcation line can be drawn between science and philosophy; every scientific research programme involves metaphysical assumptions and decisions about how to interpret the relations between experiment, observation, theoretical concepts and models (this was also evident when Artificial Life originally was formulated by C.G. Langton in the late 1980s; cf. Emmeche 1994). Yet we should not conflate questions that may be answered by science with questions that by their very nature are conceptual and metaphysical. The aim of this paper is to address from the perspective of biosemiotics a subset of the open problems (as described by Bedeau et al. 2000) raised by Artificial Life research, including 'wet Alife', about the general characteristics of life; the role and nature of information; how life and mind are related; and their relations again to culture and machines. Biosemiotics as the study of communication and information in living systems may provide some inspiration and conceptual tools for inquiry into these theoretical and philosophical issues. Firstly it is apt briefly to introduce organicism as a mainstream position in philosophy of biology, and also a variant called qualitative organicism, and then introduce biosemiotics as a non-standard philosophy of biology. Neither qualitative nor mainstream organicism is specific research paradigms; they are more like general and partly intuitive stances on how to understand living systems in the context of theoretical biology. The body of physics The body of biology The body of 'evo-devo'research The body of zoology The body of anthropology The body of sociology Complex dissipative, selforganizing structures Physiologic-homeostatic units with a genetic code-plurality, and irritability Vegetative swarm of cells coordinating multi-cellular communication with multiple organic codes Self-moving, actionperception cycles, animation, kinesthetics Language, culture-specific Lebenswelt The life in societal institutions, habit formation

Biosemiotics is the synthesis of biology and semiotics, and its main purpose is to show that semiosis is a fundamental component of life, i.e., that signs and meaning exist in all living systems. This idea started circulating in the 1960s and was proposed independently from enquires taking place at both ends of the Scala Naturae. At the molecular end it was expressed by Howard Pattee's analysis of the genetic code, whereas at the human end it took the form of Thomas Sebeok's investigation into the biological roots of culture. Other proposals appeared in the years that followed and gave origin to different theoretical frameworks, or different schools, of biosemiotics. They are: (1) the physical biosemiotics of Howard Pattee and its extension in Darwinian biosemiotics by Howard Pattee and by Terrence Deacon, (2) the zoosemiotics proposed by Thomas Sebeok and its extension in sign biosemiotics developed by Thomas Sebeok and by Jesper Hoffmeyer, (3) the code biosemiotics of Marcello Barbieri and (4) the hermeneutic biosemiotics of Anton Markoš. The differences that exist between the schools are a consequence of their different models of semiosis, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. In reality they go much deeper and concern the very nature of the new discipline. Is biosemiotics only a new way of looking at the known facts of biology or does it predict new facts? Does biosemiotics consist of testable hypotheses? Does it add anything to the history of life and to our understanding of evolution? These are the major issues of the young discipline, and the purpose of the present paper is to illustrate them by describing the origin and the historical development of its main schools.

The genetic code appeared on Earth at the origin of life, and the codes of culture arrived almost 4 billion years later, at the end of life's history. Today it is widely assumed that these are the only codes that exist in Nature, and if this were true we would have to conclude that codes are extraordinary exceptions because they appeared only at the beginning and at the end of evolution. In reality, various other organic codes (codes between organic molecules) have been discovered in the past few decades. In 1975, the American biochemist Gordon Tomkins published a paper entitled The Metabolic Code. Biological symbolism and the origin of intercellular communication (Tomkins 1975). That was the very first announcement of a new organic code after the discovery of the genetic code, but tragically Tomkins died that very year and his new world of organic symbolism remained unexplored. Some 10 years later, Edward Trifonov started a lifelong campaign in favour of the idea that genomes carry several overlapping codes simultaneously, not just the classic triplet code, and gave them the collective name of sequence codes (Trifonov 1987, 1989, 1999). Finally, at the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, a whole set of new organic codes came to light. Among them: the adhesive code (

Human beings, after all, provide for each other the most ingenious obstacles to what partial knowledge and minimal rationality they can hope to command.-Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life ROMANTIC LIE W e tend to have a romantic view of liars, or rather of those who lie, and of how and of why they and we lie. A romantic view in the sense in which Girard uses that term in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, whose French title was Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, that is, "Romantic lie and novelistic truth. " Our common paradigm of the lie is willful deceit. We think the liar knows the truth, but he or she willfully hides it. The liar misrepresents what is the case to manipulate others to his or her own advantage. The liar knows something that we do not know; otherwise, he could not deceive us, for we would know the truth. Or she successfully claims an authority that she does not have, to trick us and declare that what we know is false.

How have online communities affected the ways their users construct , view, and define their identity? In this paper, we will approach this issue by considering two philosophical set of problems related to personal identity: the "Characterization Question" and the "Self-Other Relations Question." Since these queries have traditionally brought out different problems around the concept of identity, here we aim at rethinking them in the framework of online communities. To do so, we will adopt an externalist and cognitive point of view on online communities, describing them as virtual cognitive niches. We will evaluate and agree with the Attachment Theory of Identity, arguing that there is continuity between offline and online identity and that usually the latter contributes to the alteration of the former. Finally, we will discuss ways users can enact self-reflection on online frameworks, considering the impact of the Filter Bubble and the condition of Bad Faith.

How have online communities affected the ways their users construct, view, and define their identity? In this paper, we will approach this issue by considering two philosophical sets of problems related to personal identity: the "Characterization Question" and the "Self-Other Relations Question." Since these queries have traditionally brought out different problems around the concept of identity, here we aim at rethinking them in the framework of online communities. To do so, we will adopt an externalist and cognitive point of view on online communities, describing them as virtual cognitive niches. We will evaluate and agree with the Attachment Theory of Identity, arguing that there is continuity between offline and online identity and that usually the latter contributes to the alteration of the former. Finally, we will discuss ways users can enact self-reflection on online frameworks, considering the impact of the Filter Bubble and the condition of Bad Faith.

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of knowledge where the most significant scientific breakthroughs take place in the 21st century. They are significant both for the development of convergent technologies and for the dissemination of interdisciplinary and integrative trends in research that connect areas previously thought of as completely incompatible, including natural sciences and the humanities. The author shows that in cognitive science,
despite the highly theorized and narrowly special focus of many its areas of research, visual images are quite often and productively used. Some of them, such as cognitive map, cognitive niche, cognitive landscape, cognitive field that echoes the concept of dynamic field in Gestalt psychology, the wandering around the field of meanings, search tree are discussed in the article. A special role is also played by mental imagery, which form a basis for the work of productive imagination and creative thinking, studied in cognitive psychology. It is substantiated in the article that such visualization tools are essential not only as initial “scaffolding” for the development of theoretical concepts, but also for clarifying the nuances of the meaning of complex scientific onstructions. In addition, in today’s cognitive science, the phenomenological approach and the so-called “first-person methodology” are gaining popularity, taking into account that the meaning of theoretical constructions begins to live and work, being unpacked in the lifeworld of each particular personality. Thus, the inseparability of figurative visual knowledge and abstract verbal knowledge gets additional justification through the understanding of the inseparability of the ordinary and scientific knowledge.

El capítulo de libro expone algunos casos que pueden estar llevando a que las personas no tomen las medidas adecuadas de cuidado en la actual pandemia. Esto puede explicarse por algunos sesgos cognitivos involucrados en la percepción del riesgo de contagios del virus Sars-Cov2, así como a severos problemas de autocontrol. En el texto se realiza una revisión rápida de la literatura actual de economía del comportamiento sobre la actual pandemia, y finalmente, se propone una serie de recomendaciones basadas en pequeños empujones (nudges) que involucran cambios en las arquitecturas de las decisiones para llevar a las personas a tomar decisiones más adecuadas que promuevan el bienestar público. El libro donde aparece nuestra contribución se llama "Emergencia sanitaria por COVID-19: Constructivismo jurídico, gobierno, economía y cambio conductual", Opiniones técnicas de relevancia nacional núm. 29, coordinado por Nuria Gonzáles y Enrique Cáceres. Se puede consultar aquí: https://www.juridicas.unam.mx/publicaciones/detalle-publicacion/166

Code biology, as an offshoot of biosemiotics, opens up avenues to explore the possible emergence of meaning-making within a substrate of biological processes. Kravchenko’s focus on language and metaphysical baggage places a burden on code biology as a theory, but constrains philosophical dialogue because of far-reaching adjudicated implications.

The purpose of this commentary is to elucidate the various roles that affordances play in Den-nett's (2017) From Bacteria to Bach and Back. By looking at the multitude of ways that af-fordances are mentioned throughout the book, this commentary hopes to uncover the fruitful ways of talking about affordances in the philosophy of cognitive science.

This paper aims to elucidate a kind of ignorance that is more fundamental than a momentary lack of information, but also not a kind of ignorance that is built into the subject's cognitive apparatus such that the subject can't do anything about it (e.g. color blindness). The paper sets forth the notion of cognitive confinement, which is a contingent, yet relatively stable state of being structurally or systematically unable to gain information from an environment, determined by patterns of interaction between the subject and the world. In order to unpack the idea of cognitive confinement the paper discusses niche construction theory, and then, in greater detail, the notion of cognitive niche once proposed by John Tooby and Irven DeVore. Cognitive confinement is here imagined as a pathologized form of cognitive niche. This posit is substantiated by referring to a case that has come to the fore in recent years and raised debate around the world: the rise of so-called filter bubbles. They turn out to be instantiations of a more general phenomenon of cognitive confinement.

En este trabajo estudio las implicaciones que diferentes nociones de racionalidad acotada, razonamiento heurístico y sesgos cognitivos tienen para la elaboración de políticas públicas. Reviso con especial interés la discusión sobre el paternalismo libertario, donde la noción de empujones suaves (nudges), basada en las heurísticas y sesgos de Kahneman y Tversky, se ve cuestionada por los partidarios de las heurísticas rápidas y frugales del grupo ABC (liderados por Gigerenzer), quienes proponen la noción de "impulsos" (boosts) educativos en abierta oposición a los empujones. Mientras que los primeros buscan usar los sesgos para llevar a los agentes a tomar decisiones predecibles, los segundos buscan hacer desaparecer los sesgos por medio de educación. Planteo que esta discusión tiene que verse en0 un contexto más amplio, donde ambos proyectos, si bien tienen importantes diferencias, tienen algunos supuestos comunes que los hacen ser parte de una misma tradición de pensamiento que puede remontarse a los trabajos pioneros de Herbert Simon. Dentro de esos supuestos hay uno que es muy problemático: el supuesto de cognición individualista, que ha llevado a la idea de que las heurísticas están en la cabeza de los agentes, y que estas son fijas y ya dadas. Cuestionar ese supuesto nos puede llevar a tener una noción más social del razonamiento heurístico, donde podemos ver que estas están estructuradas por lo que otros agentes consideran conomiento, hábitos, instituciones y artefactos, que en su conjunto forman nichos cognitivos que llevana  los agentes a tener patrones de comportamiento recurrentes. Esto nos lleva a plantear la idea de que las heurísticas descritas por Gigerenzer y Kahneman  refieren a diferentes contextos de inferencia (estructuras heurísticas), que los llevan desarrollar diferentes propuestas de política pública que abordan diferentes problemas. Sin embargo, si ponemos en el centro del diseño de las políticas públicas el cambio de hábitos, esto nos lleva a a la ideade que podemos usar de manera complementaria y coordinada diferentes empujones e impulsos. Esto podemos hacerlo mediante el diseño de planes integrales de política pública que busquen usar de manera complementaria empujones, impulsos, incentivos, política de redistribución de la riqueza, prohibiciones selectivas entre otros instrumentos que nos ayuden a modificar los nichos cognitivos que estructuran los patrones de comportamiento de los agentes

Design thinking has been heavily promoted as a powerful tool for human centred innovation and as a versatile problem-solving method for any issue involving sociotechnical systems. Recently, however, some critical voices within design and science & technology studies have called bullshit on the soundness of such claims, accusing design thinking of essentially trivialising design methods to serve purely commercial goals. Through an analysis of the recent history of design research and an overview of some (philosophical) accounts on the concept of " bullshit " , this paper aims to clarify whether there are sufficient reasons to dismiss and belittle design thinking in such terms. Designers, educators, and anyone concerned with how obfuscatory and vacuous discourse threatens deep reflection on design perhaps will be interested in this account.

The last sentence in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale There is no doubt about it reads: 'It got into the papers, it was printed; and there is no doubt about it, one little feather may easily grow into five hens.' In September 2015 a process very similar to the rumour-mill in Andersen's satire swept across the internet. An inaccurate–and on inspection highly implausible–report was picked up and amplified by several British and US news organisations. Thus, an improbable claim about the Japanese government's decision to effectively abolish the social sciences and humanities quickly became established as a morally reprehensible truth. Once the 'facts' of the matter were reported by authoritative English-language media organisations, the outrage spread to other languages, and an online petition was launched to make the government 'reconsider' a decision it had not taken. In light of the 'misunderstandings' that had circulated in the foreign press, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology eventually felt compelled to issue a statement, in English, to clarify that it had no intention of closing social science and humanities faculties. What transpired in these transactions between Times Higher Education, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, Time, the Guardian, and other news outlets is of more than passing anecdotal interest. Consideration of the case offers insights into the dominant role of the English-using media in constituting Japan and Asia as an object of Western knowledge and of the part played in this by what Harry Frankfurt theorised as the sociolinguistic phenomenon of " bullshit ". The Times Higher Education article and the ones that followed were all examples of the " bullshit " that arguably increasingly proliferates in both journalistic and academic discourse, especially when " circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about " (Frankfurt 2005: 63). It would appear that the kind of " bullshit journalism " represented by the global media storm in question is more likely to be produced when the West reports about 'the rest'. The paper uses the case of the purported existential threat to the social science and humanities in Japan to discuss wider arguments about the role of 'bullshit' in journalistic and academic knowledge production and dissemination about the non-Western world.

The paper discusses the concept of the cognitive niche and distinguishes the latter from the metabolic niche. By using these posits I unpack certain ideas that are crucial for the enactivist movement, especially for its original formulation proposed by Varela, Thompson and Rosh. Drawing on the ontology of location, boundaries, and parthood, I argue that enacting the world can be seen as the process of cognitive niche construction. Moreover, it turns out that enactivism—as seen through the lens of the conceptual framework proposed in the paper—considers cognition as a kind of connection between the subject and the world. This post is pointed to as the key idea laid down in enactivism.

18 diciembre, 2017 ibdehereComentarios Jurisprudencia, Comentarios Legislación, Opinión Publicado en: http://ignasibeltran.com/2017/12/18/behavioral-economics-y-si-introducimos-pequenosempujones-nudges-en-el-derecho-del-trabajo/ En entradas anteriores he expuesto la necesidad de introducir la variable de la eficiencia en la evaluación de las normas (junto con los otros parámetros propios de la dogmática jurídica). Especialmente porque creo que es razonable tratar de saber cuál va a ser la reacción de los ciudadanos ante las reglas (y, de este modo, poder determinar no sólo si se alcanzan los objetivos perseguidos, sino también si se hace de una forma razonable). Y, en este sentido, el Derecho ha pecado de autosuficiencia al pensar que por el mero hecho de edictar las normas los ciudadanos las iban a cumplir ciegamente. Lejos de esta creencia, es claro que actúan de un modo estratégico.

In this paper we aim at discussing cognitive and epistemic features of online communities, by the use of cognitive niche constructions theories, presenting them as virtual cognitive niches. Virtual cognitive niches can be considered as digitally-encoded collaborative distributions of diverse types of information into an environment performed by agents to aid thinking and reasoning about some target domain. Discussing this definition, we will also consider how online communities, as networks displaying a social bias, can both foster civic awareness and promote problematic group-led behaviors in the virtually aggregated crowds. To support this affirmation, we will take into account the use of online communication networks during crises and we will argue that it can lead to ethically dubious consequences.