Alger Sans Pinillos

In the current digital age, the proliferation of connected technologies profoundly redefines our interactions, social structures, and perceptions of fundamental concepts such as death. Throughout history, awareness and reflection on mortality have profoundly shaped human social and cognitive development, extending beyond humans to observable behaviors in animals, bacteria, and even plants. In this way, death is both an intrinsic biological reality, tied to entropy and renewal, and a profound subject of inquiry into existence, consciousness, and identity. Thus, this volume approaches death not as a singular entity but as a multifaceted phenomenon, an enigma that evokes both horror and hope. Furthermore, recent advances in robotics and artificial intelligence introduce unprecedented dimensions to this discourse, with a special emphasis on the complex ethical and philosophical challenges emerging as these technologies take on traditionally human roles. With all this in mind, this volume explores questions about the ontological status of artificial entities, their potential self-awareness, and whether their termination constitutes an authentic form of death. The essays collected here represent a pioneering interdisciplinary exploration that brings together philosophical, cultural, ethical, and technological perspectives. As the first work of its kind, the book intends to enrich academic discourse and foster critical reflection on the evolving nature of death in a technology-mediated society.

This paper explores the ethical, ontological, and practical implications of integrating robots and AI systems into human society, particularly within the context of dual-use technologies. By examining the symbolic significance of robot “death” and the emotional connections humans form with artificial entities, we investigate how intelligent systems challenge traditional notions of personhood, agency, and morality. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, including insights from Konrad Lorenz's theories on aggression and rituals and legal cases such as Thaler v. Commissioner of Patents, we demonstrate how robots occupy an emergent space between tools and moral agents. The dual-use nature of AI technologies complicates their roles in both civilian and military applications, raising critical questions about their ethical and legal frameworks. We propose expanding definitions of agency, acknowledging varied forms of intelligence, and integrating ethical rituals as pathways to reframe human–robot relationships and align technological progress with societal values. This approach not only anticipates the future role of robots as autonomous participants but also underscores their potential contributions to reshaping ethical and legal landscapes.

This work pays tribute to the work of Professor Magnani by analyzing and applying his Eco-Cognitive Abduction Model (also known as the EC-Model) to introduce axiological values’ role in the generation of scientific hypotheses. For this purpose, the cognitive dimension of the researcher is proposed in this work as a complementary factor to better understand the scientific paradigm shift. In particular, it is assumed that the experience of discovering a surprising fact that neither current theories nor methodologies can account for generates a state of radical ignorance that can provoke in the agent the emotion of anguish in the face of the imperative need to find a solution. Faced with ignorance as the only available evidence of the fact that triggers anguish, the agent’s abducted hypotheses will be much more fragile than usual because they contain very distant elements, which will imply a more significant commitment to the interpretation of the scientific discipline involved, as well as to the agent’s own vision of how the paradigm should be understood. This fragility, however, does not undermine the process but revitalizes the discipline in crisis with novel proposals that motivate suggestive new lines of investigation.

This article presents the role of anticipations based on axiological information in the eco-cognitive model of abduction (EC-Model). The case explored is the anticipation of not wanting to go to a place based on the bad expectations caused by cases of discrimination, such as the disaffection to go to art museums. In this case, cognitive agents need a specific judgment related to axiological information to evaluate the data of a fact or circumstance that supports their epistemic development. Bad expectations are considered powerful cognitive tools that help us anticipate possible future outcomes. These expectations prompt us to consider alternative scenarios, which in turn influence our present actions, potentially leading to changes in current situations. Likewise, expectations are prospective postures whose plausibility is based on context and past experiences. Thus, anticipations allow agents to consider themselves in situations different from their current circumstances. The relationship between anticipations and expectations can be abductively characterized as the integrating mechanism of the agents’ predisposition to act based on the lived experience and the current perception of the environment. Thus, we employ abductive reasoning to assess the likelihood of an expectation's capacity to anticipate future events. This assessment is based on its epistemic value as a stabilizing hypothesis within a given context. Such expectations serve as guides for determining actions aimed at realizing a desired future outcome. Thus, the prospective plausibility of anticipatory expectation is identified through abductive reasoning because of its epistemic value as a stabilizing hypothesis that guides the actions that should be taken to achieve a desired future.

En las últimas décadas, las sociedades de cualquier parte del mundo han mostrado una madurez significativa en cuanto a la conciencia del valor de la vida en cualquiera de sus manifestaciones. Sin embargo, las diferentes conductas que nos acercan a dicha conciencia se pueden orientar a un bien común a través de la reflexión, nos aproximan a lo más íntimo de nuestra propia y casi exclusiva naturaleza, el humanismo. Las reflexiones que nos brinda este libro, La medicina en vivo. Cuestiones filosóficas sobre la salud y la enfermedad, son una señal de madurez social que se dirige a uno de los factores clave donde el analista puede ser objeto de su propia experiencia. Favorecer la vida ya sea en su concepción, preservación o en su calidad, son competencia de principios que pueden ser arropados desde la perspectiva de la ética. El binomio salud-enfermedad está íntimamente ligado a la toma de decisiones donde lo correcto o lo incorrecto son conceptos que se vuelcan hacia lo tangible, pero que en ciertas condiciones los límites son muy sutiles y que por tanto son necesario fortalecerlos y definirlos. El análisis profundo presentado en los 13 capítulos que comprende este libro ayuda a definir posturas en un amplio abanico temático de reflexiones muy representativas que van de la mano tanto con normativas actuales, así como con lo más fresco de las ciencias biomédicas. La velocidad tan vertiginosa con que los avances científicos se proyectan rebasa en gran medida sus consideraciones éticas. Este desfase tan frecuente, obliga a detenerse y dar un respiro y justamente este libro da ese aliento en temas como la salud, una ciencia de diseño, el concepto actual de la definición de salud, biomedicina y la metafísica de la medicina, hasta dónde confiar en la medicina, la participación de la educación en la práctica clínica, el sentido de la transferencia del conocimiento mentor-aprendiz, el caso de la carcinogénesis, la intersección entre signo, síntoma y ojo clínico, la epidemiología y sus modelos, el vínculo entre animales y el hombre a través de la zoonosis y su prevención, la correlación entre inteligencia artificial y salud, el fenómeno de las adicciones y finalmente la postura ante la fase final como lo es la agonía. El perfil de los autores garantiza una calidad y rigurosidad académica en este texto que genera la confianza en la validez de sus análisis. Igualmente, las distintas procedencias geográficas de los colaboradores reflejan las mismas preocupaciones más allá de nuestras fronteras dado su carácter universal. Este libro será de gran utilidad para apoyo en la formación de profesionistas en ciencias de la salud o estudiosos de la filosofía de las ciencias o los cuerpos colegiados como comités de ética o bioética y seguramente se llegará a considerar un buen referente bibliográfico.

Despite the innovation that evidence-based medicine (henceforth EBM) represents for biomedical sciences today, we argue that its strict evidential hierarchies do not faithfully represent the epistemic and practical reality of the evidence that should be used to make appropriate clinical decisions. We defend that it is necessary to make modifications to the methodology and models of clinical decision-making proposed by EBM and make them more sensitive to the use of different types of evidence and reasoning. Since various types of evidence and reasoning, and medical expertise still play an irreducible role in clinical decision-making, rather than continuing with their strict hierarchies, we argue that those who subscribe to the EBM paradigm should discuss in much greater detail different types of evidence and reasoning. Admitting and advocating the role of other types of evidence and reasoning in clinical decision-making will also be necessary to introduce other types of inference and evaluation, as this generates conclusions that do not rely solely on induction or deduction. Both clinical judgment and the clinical eye play a prominent role in this context, particularly in diagnosis, as uncertainty inherently influences the process. If we hit the nail on the head, effective EBM practice requires other types of reasoning beyond biostatistical reasoning. With this in mind, we characterize clinical judgment based on abductive inference.

La transición digital de nuestro tiempo, favorecida por los avances de la inteligencia artificial, evidencia retos complejos en las sociedades digitales emergentes. Las artes plásticas se han visto influenciadas por esta digitalización, tanto en lo relativo a los procesos creativos como en lo que concierne al acceso y la exposición de las obras artísticas. En este trabajo se presenta un análisis filosófico centrado en el patrimonio, a saber, su almacenamiento, representación y exposición digital de las obras artísticas. Concretamente, nos servimos de la teoría de injusticia epistémica de Miranda Fricker para un estudio ético y epistemológico sobre el uso de las bases de datos en el diseño de los museos virtuales, insistiendo en el papel de estas para la perpetuación o mitigación de las injusticias que pueden darse en este contexto. Finalmente, se propone la abducción como punto de partida para un análisis filosófico futuro más amplio sobre el museo digital, donde se consideren las relaciones entre visitantes y museos y su influencia en la distribución epistémico-moral en estos entornos.

Debido al actual auge de la medicina y de la investigación biomédica y farmacéutica, la filosofía de la medicina se ha posicionado rápidamente entre las ramas filosóficas más relevantes e influyentes del mundo. La innovación en tratamientos y técnicas que se han desarrollado han abierto nuevas cuestiones teóricas y éticas. Mientras que los primeros comprenden cuestiones relacionadas con la metafísica y la epistemología de las ciencias de la salud, los segundos atañen a la ética médica. Aunque independientes entre sí, existe un inevitable acercamiento entre ambas perspectivas por el impacto social que implica la salud. La práctica médica está inherentemente imbuida de cuestiones normativas que hacen imposible un análisis epistemológico y metafísico sin atender a las cuestiones morales que inevitablemente surgen en el curso de la investigación. Por el contrario, la reflexión moral sobre cuestiones médicas suele ser infructuosa sin un análisis de los conceptos cruciales involucrados en las ciencias de la salud y una reflexión detallada sobre la práctica médica. Esta dependencia mutua entre cuestiones epistemológicas, metafísicas y morales queda, creemos, claramente ilustrada en los artículos y discusiones contenidos en este número especial de la revista Euphyía.

This article presents silence as a cognitive tool to comprehend the environment. Two dimensions of silence are addressed: a natural mechanism and human beings' social and cultural construction. There is a link between these two dimensions because, on the one hand, agents' cognitive strategies based on silence influence how meanings and uses of silence have been constructed. The meanings of silence we use are contextual shapers of silence-based cognitive strategies. Silence is analyzed as a resource for coping with ambiguity: situations perceived as uncertain provoke doubt and confusion because they can be understood differently or suggest different interpretations. These situations can occur in the face of epistemic disruption. The consequence is a transfer of the ambiguity property of these situations to the usual ways of relating to the world and people. The cognitive approach is based here on a semiotic-hermeneutic interpretation of silence from a phenomenological perspective. This accounts for a paradox: even if silence does not exist (the world is acoustic), it is real. The silence experience is a non-inferential cognitive capacity located at the base of perception: a stimulus that suggests a particular gesture as an action different from the usual one to deal with the environment.

This work focuses on the virtual museum, understood as the digital transformation of the traditional museum. First, the main conceptualizations of the virtual museum in the specialized literature are reviewed, and based on them, we propose a basic definition. Furthermore, we argue in favor of the insufficiency of the dataist perspective in the study of epistemic injustice associated with the virtual museum. Finally, the exclusion related to the participation and interaction between a museum’s visitors and the institution is analyzed. Este trabajo se centra en el museo virtual entendido como la transformación digital del museo tradicional. En primer lugar, se revisan las principales conceptualizaciones del museo virtual en la literatura especializada y, a partir de las mismas, se propone una definición básica. Asimismo, se presentan argumentos que muestran la insuficiencia de la perspectiva dataísta en el estudio de la injusticia epistémica relativa al museo virtual. Finalmente, se analiza la exclusión relativa a la participación y la interacción entre las visitantes de un museo (tanto virtual como físico) y la propia institución.

Design has usually been linked to art and applied in scenarios related to everyday life. Even when design has, on occasion, made its way into the world of academia, it has always been closely linked to art and scenarios related everyday life. At last, however, the idea of design has reached the field of epistemology: an area within the very heart of philosophy that has always focused, in theory, on the foundations of knowledge. Consequently, design is being studied from different approaches interested in the foundation of knowledge, theoretical and practical. This is one of the reasons why abduction and pragmatism have been considered relevant from a design perspective. This paper first shows the main features of abduction and pragmatism, describes their evolution and considers their mutual implications. Second, the epistemology of design is analysed considering its most relevant characteristics. Third, the connection between abduction and, on the one hand, pragmatism and, on the other, design epistemology is addressed. Finally, the role of abductive inference in grounding a real epistemology for design theory from the naturalised cognitive perspective of abduction is outlined. The central proposition is that this approach is essential as a methodological innovation, as it allows us to analyse both the inquiry process and the design process as interdependent when dealing with practical problems of a social and cultural nature. This approach allows us to analyse how human actions determine changes in the theoretical framework from which we make our inquiry. In short, the world is an open-ended project that humans design through our daily inquiry.

Many parts of the contemporary philosophical debate have been built on the radicalization of conclusions derived from the acceptance of a certain set of classical dichotomies. It also discusses how pragmatism and abduction are currently presented to solve the problems arising from these dichotomies. For this reason, the efforts of this article have been directed to analyze the impact of this fact on the philosophy of science and logic. The starting point is that accepting abduction implies, in many ways, accepting the foundations of pragmatism. Also, that the analysis of such problems from pragmatism and the particular use of abduction dissolve the dichotomies and, with it, also modify the philosophical problems related to them. Therefore, I propose to understand abduction as the right conceptual device to review the problems and debates of the twentieth century’s epistemology from a pragmatic perspective. In doing so, the aim is to propose that the current use of abduction in contemporary debates may imply a change of the philosophical perspective.

What role does language play in the process of building worldviews? To address this question, in the first section of this paper we will clarify what we mean by worldviews and how they differ, in our perspective, from cosmovisions. In a nutshell, we define worldviews as the biological interpretations agents create of the world around them and cosmovision the more general cultural-based reflections on it. After presenting our definition for worldview, we will also present the multi-shaped viewpoint that frames our analysis, adopting three concepts that can help us explain how agents construct and develop their worldviews: saliences, pregnances, and abduction. While the notions of saliences and pregnances will explain how agents recognize anomalies in their worldview, the concept of abduction will help us discuss how they can learn to approach, explain, and use these anomalies to get new skills and abilities. This other point will lead us to discuss the role of language in this process, which will be describe as an artifact that permits the agent to use abduction to “normalize” and exploit anomalies, being now the ultimate artifact to build, develop, and update their worldviews.

In this article I try to show that the epistemological component of abductions is creativity and, to do so, I will use an analysis of Thagard's concept of projected-truth as well as reflections on Łukasiewicz's creativity. In the third part I present a real case, using Thagard's theory and introducing Hanson, to make the transition from logical and computational discourse to philosophy of science. At the end I will address one of the current challenges in order to explain creativity namely the necessary and absolute interaction of each thinking subject, and therefore creative in action, with everything around him. To do this, I intend to introduce Feyerabend into the debate, which cleverly analyzes and dismantles the individualist idea of creation

Machine learning and other types of AI algorithms are now commonly used to make decisions about important personal situations. Institutions use such algorithms to help them figure out whether a person should get a job, receive a loan or even be granted parole, sometimes leaving the decision completely to an automatic process. Unfortunately, these algorithms can easily become biased and make unjust decisions.To avoid such problems, researchers are working to include an ethical framework in automatic decision systems. A well-known example is MIT’s Moral Machine, which is used to extract the basic ethical intuitions underlying extensive interviews with humans in order to apply them to the design of ethical autonomous vehicles.In this chapter, we want to show the limitations of current statistical methods based on preferences, and defend the use of abductive reasoning as a systematic tool for assigning values to possibilities and generating sets of ethical regulations for autonomous systems.