During his lifetime, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490-1573) only published two epigrams: In Stunicam and Maximilianum archiducem Austriae. On the basis of an eighteenth-century manuscript, preserved at Real Academia la Historia (Madrid), Losada ascribed to further Aelium Nebrissensem Paniza. The former has certainly be rejected, taking into account chronological ecdotic arguments. With respect lat...

Active avoidance of information is gaining attention in the behavioural sciences. We explore motivations for active carbon emissions information. In first stage a stated preference survey, respondents indicated whether they wished to access (info-takers) or not (info-decliners) when selecting protein source. second stage, all were provided with The info-takers reduced from their food choices by...

What are the mechanisms enabling primates to display their complex social skills? And in particular, what makes humans different? A common view prefigures a sharp distinction between humans as mind readers and all nonhuman primates species, confined to behavior reading. This distinction is held to be the result of a discontinuity in the evolution of social cognition. We challenge this view by p...

Artifactual functions are related to means-end relations. Whatever else a functional ascription conveys, it expresses the expectation that artifacts of the appropriate type may be used to achieve the functional goal. We use our existing work on means-end semantics to make this relationship precise and present a preliminary formal account of artifactual functions. We adapt our work on probabilis...

Research on minority authority attainment tends to stress top-down processes of social closure, whereby the dominant social group produces and preserves positions of power and inuence by excluding out-group members. We argue that this view, while helpful, is incomplete. Returning to Weber’s original conceptualization of social closure, we argue that top-down exclusion often generates pressures...

The 'self' is increasingly used as a variable in cognitive experiments and correlated with activity in particular areas in the brain. At first glance, this seems to transform the self from an ephemeral theoretical entity to something concrete and measurable. However, the transformation is by no means unproblematic. We trace the development of two important experimental paradigms in the study of...

The correlates and structure of prosocial behaviors in late adolescents were examined using a newly constructed, multidimensional measure. In Study 1, 249 college students (145 women; M age = 19.9 years) were administered the Prosocial Tendencies Measure (PTM) which assesses 6 types of prosocial behaviors: altruistic, compliant, emotional, dire, public, and anonymous. Measures of sympathy, pers...

This paper presents the results of endowing the social parameter, autonomy, on a distributed sensor network used for surveillance of multiple targets that crisscross a rectangular surveillance zone. Crossing targets are ascribed priorities by a priority ascription scheme based on fuzzy inference methods. The scheme fuses local and global priorities of a target through the parameter autonomy tha...

We outline some components of a mentalist theory of human communicative competence. Communication in our species is an intentional and overt type of social interaction, based on each agent's capability of entertaining shared mental states and of acting so as to make certain mental states shared with the other. Communicative meaning is a matter of ascription: it is not an intrinsic property of a...

People suffering from severe monothematic delusions, such as Capgras, Fregoli, or Cotard patients, regularly assert extraordinary and unlikely things. For example, some say that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors. A popular view in philosophy and cognitive science is that such monothematic delusions aren’t beliefs because they don’t guide behaviour and affect in the way that belie...