A New “Essential Tension” for Rationality and Culture. What Happens if Politics Tries to Encounter Science Again

My intention is not to get into specific, detailed historical observation about the ways that led the term ‘democracy’ to take on its current meaning, in science as much as in politics, but rather to establish a comparison between the models that political science proposes and interprets as important for the existence of democracy and those that science illustrates as indicators of scientific knowledge constructed in a democratic form. The debate about the contemporary meaning of democracy has generated an extraordinary diversification of models of democracy: from technocratic conceptions of government to conceptions of social life that include widespread political participation. And it is exactly for this reason that the assumption of a specific point of view on the question we are dealing with inevitably brings with it the choice of a model suitable to describe democratic form as a form of politics without further explanation, that is, as a political system with which science measures itself as a cultural category. In this sense, we can consider the passage from the concept of democracy to that of politics and generally of science to be a peaceful one, since politics has been appointed with that set of behaviours and democratic practices (including science) that political culture demands for the social benefit. This demand can be met only on condition that structural obstacles are removed and new cultural and epistemological mediators are introduced.     

Functional and anatomical profile of visual motion impairments in stroke patients correlate with fMRI in normal subjects

We used six psychophysical tasks to measure sensitivity to different types of global motion in 45 healthy adults and in 57 stroke patients who had recovered from the initial results of the stroke, but a large subset of them had enduring deficits on selective visual motion perception tasks. The patients were divided into four groups on the basis of the location of their cortical lesion: occipito-temporal, occipito-parietal, rostro-dorsal parietal, or frontal-prefrontal. The six tasks were: direction discrimination, speed discrimination, motion coherence, motion discontinuity, two-dimensional form-from-motion, and motion coherence – radial. We found both qualitative and quantitative differences among the motion impairments in the four groups: patients with frontal lesions or occipito-temporal lesions were not impaired on any task. The other two groups had substantial impairments, most severe in the group with occipito-parietal damage. We also tested eight healthy control subjects on the same tasks while they were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The BOLD signal provoked by the different tasks correlated well with the locus of the lesions that led to impairments among the different tasks. The results highlight the advantage of using psychophysical techniques and a variety of visual tasks with neurological patients to tease apart the contribution of different cortical areas to motion processing.     

Internet Addiction Disorder: Internet Gaming Disorder in a Nonclinical Sample Of Moba And Mmorpg Videoplayers

This study concentrates on two kinds of video games, Massive Online Battle Arena and Massive Multiplayer Online Role Play Game, and examines the scores obtained by the subjects in the sample. Score analyses pointed out that they do not exceed the respective cutoff scores for each scale. The sample was divided into three clusters to differentiate three kinds of users: nonproblematic, problematic, and “addicted” players. The study highlights that the variable “video game typology” relates to some personality traits. Players who excessively use them tend to experience relatively more negative emotions (anxiety and depression), avoid socioemotional involvement, and report bizarre and culturally incongruent thoughts (accompanied by the respective behavioral displays).     

Unrestricted Quantification and the Structure of Type Theory

Semantic theories based on a hierarchy of types have prominently been used to defend the possibility of unrestricted quantification. However, they also pose a prima facie problem for it: each quantifier ranges over at most one level of the hierarchy and is therefore not unrestricted. It is difficult to evaluate this problem without a principled account of what it is for a quantifier to be unrestricted. Drawing on an insight of Russell's about the relationship between quantification and the structure of predication, we offer such an account. We use this account to examine the problem in three different type-theoretic settings, which are increasingly permissive with respect to predication. We conclude that unrestricted quantification is available in all but the most permissive kind of type theory.