Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Review of: Chantal Maillard, La compasión difícil. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2019. 218 pp.

Review of: B. Spinoza (2020), Ética demostrada según el orden geométrico. Traducción y edición de Pedro Lomba. Madrid: Trotta.

This paper critically analyzes the main ideas of the theory of social acceleration exposed by Hartmut Rosa in Alienation and acceleration. The absence of an analysis of capitalism as a cause of acceleration is criticized. This absence also negatively affects the alternatives to alienation that Rosa proposes in Resonance. Key words: Hartmut Rosa, alienation, acceleration, resonance  

Review of: S. Müller-Doohm (2020), Jürgen Habermas. Una biografía, Madrid: Taurus

Review of: J.L. Nancy, Banalidad de Heidegger, Madrid: Trotta, 2019, 93 pp.

  This article presents a characterization of human language and its evolution from a biolinguistic point of view. According to this point of view, language is a biological property of the human species (an instinct) and, therefore, the result of natural evolution. Despite this, it is argued that there is an evolutionary discontinuity between human language and the language of other species, although it is also argued that cognitive discontinuity does not imply biological discontinuity. The essential idea is that human language is special because it is not a communication system (which would have evolved from ancestral communication systems), but a thought system that, additionally, is used for social interaction (including communication). According to this approach, we can speculate that the evolution of specific aspects of human language was relatively sudden and recent in the history of our kind.

Recently several views in cognitive sciences and philosophy have argued that human capacity to ascribe mental states to predict and explain human behavior is a product of cultural evolution; that is, its emergence is not the product of the selection of genetically inherited structures but the product of hereditary variation through mechanisms of social learning.  The aim of this article is to propose a model of the theory of mind as a linguistic mechanism of social cover and reputation management within the framework of cultural evolution. This position, called The Social Cover Model, is presented and defended in contrast to three other positions that will be critically evaluated. Finally, the model of two possible objections will be defended.

The topic of this paper is the problem of abstract concept grounding, i.e., how they can be grounded in experience. I argue that, even if modal, embodied approaches can refer concept acquisition to distinct types of world experiences, they still have a problem accounting for the suitable mental representations that articulate them. I will offer a brief panoramic of treatments of abstract concepts in some contemporary theories that I will divide into two groups: unitary and pluralistic. Even though current research points towards pluralistic approaches as the most plausible ones, there is still a problem to explain how the plurality of representations are combined. I will present this in terms of the combination of concrete and abstract concepts. I will argue that, in contrast to the abstract-to-concrete strategy, a concrete-to-abstract strategy is possible. This strategy may be well in accordance with the nature of abstract properties themselves.

The empirical development of the neo-Whorfian programme has been very fertile in the last decade. In this work, I review the most outstanding studies within this programme, and discuss the results, in order to establish the version of the relativistic hypothesis that is vindicated. I argue that the conclusion best supported by the evidence is that language plays a reconfigurational role, transforming previous thinking capacities, in terms of greater abstraction and flexibility. The relativistic effects identified, though, don't support a grand conclusion regarding the importance of the cognitive differences that stem from linguistic differences among speakers of different languages.

In this paper we argue that there is a translation problem from the conceptual representational system to the linguistic one that has not traditionally been taken into account. Such a problem has gone unnoticed possibly because an intermediate representational system adapted to the expressive needs of language has been postulated to exist. However, we explain that, far from solving the problem, postulating this intermediate system makes the translation problem more difficult to solve. Consequently, we propose a model of speech production that does not resort to the representation level known as “thinking for speaking” (Slobin, 1996).