Digital Humanities is a research field engaged in exploring how humanities scholarship is transformed and extended by the digital and vice versa. The core practice of DH research is modelling which implies the translation of complex systems of knowledge into computationally processable models. In our work we contextualise DH practices within a semiotic framework; namely we consider modelling as a strategy to make sense via practical thinking. A semiotic approach of this kind contributes to stress the dynamic nature of models (...) and modelling, and to reinstate in renewed terms the understanding of modelling as open process of signification enacting a triadic cooperation. Referring to Peirce classification of hypoicons, we reflect on some DH examples of modelling in the form of images, diagrams and metaphors, claiming that a semiotic understanding of modelling could ultimately allow us to surpass the duality object versus model. We thus propose to consider modelling as a creative and highly pragmatic process of thinking and reasoning in which metaphors assume a central role and where meaning is negotiated through the creation and manipulation of external representations combined with an imaginative use of formal and informal languages. (shrink)

Much of the recent work on epistemology of inquiry defends two related theses. First, inquiry into a question rationally prohibits believing an answer to that question. Second, knowledge is the aim of inquiry. I develop a series of cases which indicate that inquiry is not as narrow as these views suggest. These cases can be accommodated if we take a broader approach and understand inquiry as aiming at epistemic improvement, described more generally. This approach captures a wider range of inquiring (...) phenomena because it accounts for forms of epistemic improvement that fall short of, or go beyond, coming to know the answer to a question. (shrink)

A puzzle arises when combining two individually plausible, yet jointly incompatible, norms of inquiry. On the one hand, it seems that one shouldn’t inquire into a question while believing an answer to that question. But, on the other hand, it seems rational to inquire into a question while believing its answer, if one is seeking confirmation. Millson (2021), who has recently identified this puzzle, suggests a possible solution, though he notes that it comes with significant costs. I offer an alternative (...) solution, which doesn’t involve these costs. The best way to resolve the puzzle is to reject the prohibition on inquiring into a question while believing an answer to it. Resolving the puzzle in this way makes salient two fruitful areas in the epistemology of inquiry which merit further investigation. The first concerns the nature of the inquiring attitudes and the second concerns the aim(s) of inquiry. (shrink)

What is the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence? Recently, philosophers have defended zetetic approaches to higher-order evidence, which appeal to factors related to inquiry. According to such views, in response to higher order evidence, one should open inquiry and deliberate on the question further. While it can often be productive to inquire in response to higher-order evidence, whether one should inquire is settled on primarily practical—not purely epistemic—grounds. I defend various cases where one can rationally respond to higher-order evidence without (...) engaging in zetetic activity of any kind. Zetetic responses to higher-order evidence are thus bound to be incomplete. Reflection on these cases suggests a deeper lesson: epistemic norms never require us to engage in inquiry or to perform any action whatsoever. Zetetic proposals give rise to an overly demanding and implausible picture of normative epistemology, according to which epistemic norms are in the business of helping us to settle the answers to our questions. However, epistemic norms do not—and importantly should not—be expected to fulfill this role. (shrink)

The paper [Tarski: Les fondements de la géométrie des corps, Annales de la Société Polonaise de Mathématiques, pp. 29—34, 1929] is in many ways remarkable. We address three historico-philosophical issues that force themselves upon the reader. First we argue that in this paper Tarski did not live up to his own methodological ideals, but displayed instead a much more pragmatic approach. Second we show that Leśniewski's philosophy and systems do not play the significant role that one may be tempted to (...) assign to them at first glance. Especially the role of background logic must be at least partially allocated to Russell's systems of Principia mathematica. This analysis leads us, third, to a threefold distinction of the technical ways in which the domain of discourse comes to be embodied in a theory. Having all of this in place, we discuss why we have to reject the argument in [Gruszczyński and Pietruszczak: Full development of Tarski's Geometry of Solids, The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 481—540] according to which Tarski has made a certain mistake. (shrink)

What is the relationship between inquiry and epistemology? Are epistemic norms the norms that guide us as inquirers—as agents in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding? Recently, there has been growing support for what I, following Friedman (Philosophical Review 129(4):501–536, 2020), will call the zetetic turn in epistemology, the view that all epistemic norms are norms of inquiry. This paper investigates the prospects of an inquiry-centered approach to epistemology and develops several motivations for resisting it. First, I argue that the (...) norms of inquiry are most plausibly seen as practical, not as distinctively epistemic. Second, I argue that a zetetically-grounded epistemology is unable to properly account for the rationality of belief. It fails to account for cases where intuitively irrational beliefs promote inquiry, or where intuitively rational beliefs are zetetically useless or counterproductive to inquiry. The main upshot is this: there must be a source of epistemic normativity that isn’t ultimately zetetic. (shrink)

How can we best reconstruct the origin of a notion, its development, and possible spread to multiple fields? We present a pilot study on the spread of the notion of conceptual scheme. Though the notion is philosophically important, its origin, development, and spread are unclear. Several purely qualitative and competing historical hypotheses have been offered, which rely on disconnected disciplinary traditions, and have never been tested all at once in a single comprehensive investigation fitting the scope of its subject matter. (...) As a step toward such an investigation, we trace the use of the bigram “conceptual scheme” in about 42,000 US journal articles in social sciences from 1888-1959 by using a novel method combining a quantitative procedure aided by basic computational techniques with qualitative elements informed by Betti and van den Berg (2014)’s ‘model approach to the history of ideas’. (shrink)

Since it is now broadly acknowledged that ethics should receive early consideration in discourse on emerging technologies, ethical debates tend to flourish even while new fields of technology are still in their infancy. Such debates often liberally mix existing applications with technologies in the pipeline and far-reaching visions. This paper analyses the problems associated with this use of ethics as “preparatory” research, taking discourse on human enhancement in general and on pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement in particular as an example. The paper (...) will outline and discuss the gap between the scientific and technological state of the art and the ethical debates, pointing out epistemic problems in this context. Furthermore, it will discuss the future role of genuine ethical reflection in discourse on human enhancement, arguing also that such discourse needs to include a technology assessment—in the broad sense of the term—which encompasses, inter alia, anthropological perspectives and aspects of social theory. (shrink)

Recent pragmatic accounts of slurs argue that the offensiveness of slurs is generated by a speaker's free choice to use a slur opposed to a more appropriate and semantically equivalent neutral counterpart. I argue that the theoretical role of neutral counterparts on such views is overstated. I consider two recent pragmatic analyses, Bolinger (Noûs, 51, 2017, 439) and Nunberg (New work on speech acts, Oxford University Press, 2018), which rely heavily upon the optionality of slurs, namely, that a speaker exercises (...) a deliberate lexical choice to use a slur when they could have easily used a neutral counterpart instead. Against such views, I argue that across a range of different offensive uses of slurs, a speaker's choice to use a slur opposed to a neutral counterpart plays little to no role in accounting for why the slur generates offence. Such cases cast serious doubt upon the explanatory depth of these pragmatic analyses, and raise more general concerns for views which draw upon the relationship between a slur and its neutral counterpart. The main upshot is this: theorists should exercise caution in assuming that neutral counterparts play any fundamental or systemic role in explaining why slurs are offensive. (shrink)

An argument that the major metaphysical theories of facts give us no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world. -/- In this book Arianna Betti argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. She claims that neither of these theories is tenable—neither the theory according to which facts are special structured building blocks of (...) reality nor the theory according to which facts are whatever is named by certain expressions of the form “the fact that such and such.” There is reality, and there are entities in reality that we are able to name, but, Betti contends, among these entities there are no facts. -/- Drawing on metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, Betti examines the main arguments in favor of and against facts of the two major sorts, which she distinguishes as compositional and propositional, giving special attention to methodological presuppositions. She criticizes compositional facts (facts as special structured building blocks of reality) and the central argument for them, Armstrong's truthmaker argument. She then criticizes propositional facts (facts as whatever is named in “the fact that” statements) and what she calls the argument from nominal reference, which draws on Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. Betti argues that metaphysicians should stop worrying about facts, and philosophers in general should stop arguing for or against entities on the basis of how we use language. (shrink)

Leśniewski’s systems deviate greatly from standard logic in some basic features. The deviant aspects are rather well known, and often cited among the reasons why Leśniewski’s work enjoys little recognition. This paper is an attempt to explain why those aspects should be there at all. Leśniewski built his systems inspired by a dream close to Leibniz’s characteristica universalis: a perfect system of deductive theories encoding our knowledge of the world, based on a perfect language. My main claim is that Leśniewski (...) built his characteristica universalis following the conditions of de Jong and Betti’s Classical Model of Science (2008) to an astounding degree. While showing this I give an overview of the architecture of Leśniewski’s systems and of their fundamental characteristics. I suggest among others that the aesthetic constraints Leśniewski put on axioms and primitive terms have epistemological relevance. (shrink)

The relationship between the neurobiology of speech and music has been investigated for more than a century. There remains no widespread agreement regarding how (or to what extent) music perception utilizes the neural circuitry that is engaged in speech processing, particularly at the cortical level. Prominent models such as Patel’s Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH) and Koelsch’s neurocognitive model of music perception suggest a high degree of overlap, particularly in the frontal lobe, but also perhaps more distinct representations in (...) the temporal lobe with hemispheric asymmetries. The present meta-analysis study used activation likelihood estimate analyses to identify the brain regions consistently activated for music as compared to speech across the functional neuroimaging (fMRI and PET) literature. Eighty music and 91 speech neuroimaging studies of healthy adult control subjects were analyzed. Peak activations reported in the music and speech studies were divided into four paradigm categories: passive listening, discrimination tasks, error/anomaly detection tasks and memory-related tasks. We then compared activation likelihood estimates within each category for music versus speech, and each music condition with passive listening. We found that listening to music and to speech preferentially activate distinct temporo-parietal bilateral cortical networks. We also found music and speech to have shared resources in the left pars opercularis but speech-specific resources in the left pars triangularis. The extent to which music recruited speech-activated frontal resources was modulated by task. While there are certainly limitations to meta-analysis techniques particularly regarding sensitivity, this work suggests that the extent of shared resources between speech and music may be task-dependent and highlights the need to consider how task effects may be affecting conclusions regarding the neurobiology of speech and music. (shrink)

A Bilingual International Conference on the History and Actuality of the Polish Contribution, from the Lvov-Warsaw school to phenomenology, to Twentieth Century Philosophy. Colloque international bilingue portant sur l'histoire et l'actualité de la contribution polonaise, de l'école de Lvov-Varsovie à la phénoménologie, à la philosophie du vingtième siècle.

La presse italienne a suivi de très près l'agonie et la mort du pape Jean-Paul II. Il s'agit certainement de l'événement le plus médiatisé depuis les attentats terroristes du 11 septembre 2001. Les quatre titres italiens, malgré leur positionnement politique différent, analysent l'événement avec le même degré de dramatisation et d'intensité. Ils proposent un récit fortement sentimental à travers le recours à un langage émotionnel, à des images touchantes ou, encore, à une mise en page spécifique. Les thèmes qui reviennent (...) le plus souvent font appel au caractère et au charisme de Jean-Paul II, à son recours aux médias dans le but de véhiculer le message chrétien. Son rapport avec les jeunes est également un des sujets privilégiés par la presse italienne, pour cela son Pontificat est qualifié de révolutionnaire. Si les quatre quotidiens italiens étudiés proposent une analyse similaire, à travers leur récit d'un « événement d'émotion planétaire », des différences persistent. S'adressant à un public spécifique, chaque titre emploie son propre langage, il renvoie à des références précises et touche des sensibilités diverses. Malgré une uniformisation substantielle, le clivage droite-gauche semble persister.The Italian press has closely followed the agony and death of Pope John Paul II. It is certainly the most publicized event since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The four Italian titles, despite their different political positions, analyze the event with the same degree of intensity and drama. They offer a highly sentimental story through the use of emotional language, images or touching, even to a specific layout. The themes that recur most often involve the character and charisma of John Paul II, in his use of the media in order to convey the Christian message. His relationship with young people is also one of the subjects favored by the Italian press for his pontificate that is called revolutionary. If the four studied Italian newspapers offer a similar analysis, through their narrative of a "global event emotion", differences persist. Addressing a specific audience, each title uses its own language, it refers to specific references and touches different sensibilities. Despite a substantial uniformity, the left-right divide seems to persist. (shrink)

The step to e-research in philosophy depends on the availability of high quality, easily and freely accessible corpora in a sustainable format composed from multi-language, multi-script books from different historical periods. Corpora matching these needs are at the moment virtually non-existing. Within @PhilosTei, we have addressed this corpus building problem by developing an open source, web-based, user-friendly workflow from textual images to TEI, based on state-of-the-art open source OCR software, to wit Tesseract, and a multi-language version of TICCL, a powerful (...) OCR post-correction tool. We have demonstrated the utility of the tool by applying it to a multilingual, multi-script corpus of important eighteenth to twentieth-century European philosophical texts. (shrink)

Cultural code-switching concerns how we adjust our overall behaviours, manners of speaking, and appearance in response to a perceived change in our social environment. We defend the need to investigate cultural code-switching capacities in artificial intelligence systems. We explore a series of ethical and epistemic issues that arise when bringing cultural code-switching to bear on artificial intelligence. Building upon Dotson’s (2014) analysis of testimonial smothering, we discuss how emerging technologies in AI can give rise to epistemic oppression, and specifically, a (...) form of self-silencing that we call “cultural smothering.” By leaving the sociodynamic features of cultural code-switching unaddressed, AI systems risk negatively impacting already-marginalised social groups by widening opportunity gaps and further entrenching social inequalities. (shrink)

We propose a new method for the history of ideas that has none of the shortcomings so often ascribed to this approach. We call this method the model approach to the history of ideas. We argue that any adequately developed and implementable method to trace continuities in the history of human thought, or concept drift, will require that historians use explicit interpretive conceptual frameworks. We call these frameworks models. We argue that models enhance the comprehensibility of historical texts, and provide (...) historians of ideas with a method that, unlike existing approaches, is susceptible neither to common holistic criticisms nor to Skinner's objections that the history of ideas yields arbitrary and biased reconstructions. To illustrate our proposal, we discuss the so-called Classical Model of Science and draw upon work in computer science and cognitive psychology. (shrink)

No evidence of “new physics” was found so far by LHC experiments, and this situation has led some voices in the physics community to call for the abandonment of the “naturalness” criterion, while other scientists have felt the need to break a lance in its defense by claiming that, at least in some sense, it has already led to successes and therefore should not be dismissed too quickly, but rather only reflected or reshaped to fit new needs. In our paper (...) we will argue that present pro-or-contra naturalness debates miss the fundamental point that naturalness, despite contrary claims, is essentially a very hazily defined, in a sense even mythical notion which, in the course of more than four decades, has been steadily, and often not coherently, shaped by its interplay with different branches of model-building in high-energy physics and cosmology on the one side, and new incoming experimental results on the other. In our paper we will endeavor to clear up some of the physical and philosophical haze by taking a closer look back at (real or alleged) origin of naturalness in the 1970s and 1980s, with particular attention to the early work of Kenneth Wilson. In doing this, we aim to bring to light how naturalness belongs to a long tradition of present and past physical and philosophical criteria for effectively guiding theoretical reflection and experimental practice in fundamental research. (shrink)

Libraries provide access to large amounts of library metadata. Unfortunately, many libraries only offer textual interfaces for searching and browsing their holdings. Visualizations provide simpler, faster, and more efficient ways to navigate, search and study large quantities of metadata. This paper presents GlamMap, a visualization tool that displays library metadata on an interactive, computer-generated geographic map. We provide detailed discussion of how GlamMap benefits the work of librarians and researchers. We show how geographic representations help librarians to perform tasks such (...) as collection assessment and how geographic information helps researchers to identify important scientific resources. (shrink)

Il contributo si propone di indagare lo scandaglio euristico di un mezzo espressivo sempre più frequentato, il graphic novel. In ragione di ciò, analizzare l’ibridazione tra parola e immagine da un lato rispetto all’immediatezza del disegno, dall’altro in relazione al grado di approfondimento psicologico dei personaggi, permette di mettere in luce la possibilità di considerare il romanzo a fumetti come un genere letterario in dialogo con la più classica forma narrativa. Dunque, privilegiare un lavoro di stampo metodologico-teorico può porre delle (...) premesse adeguate a una successiva focalizzazione su un caso di studio. In particolare, «La linea dell’orizzonte». Un ethnographic novel sulla migrazione tra Bangladesh, Italia e Londra dialoga non soltanto con la forma romanzo in generale, ma anche con il reportage narrativo, l’autobiografia e il Bildungsroman, o romanzo di formazione. È evidente che questo stretto dialogo con la critica letteraria non possa non prendere in considerazione, oltre a uno studio dei generi letterari maggiormente in dialogo con La linea dell’orizzonte, anche un’analisi delle peculiarità stilistiche e tematiche presenti nell’ethnographic novel, con particolare attenzione al tema della migrazione. (shrink)

This paper presents the current state of development of GlamMap, a visualisation tool that displays library metadata on an interactive, computer-generated geographic map. The focus in the paper is on the most crucial improvement achieved in the development of the tool: GlamMapping Trove. The visualisation of Trove’s sixtymillion book records is possible thanks to an improved database structure, more efficient data retrieval, and more scalable visualisation algorithms. The paper analyses problems encountered in visualising massive datasets, describes remaining challenges for the (...) tool, and presents a use case demonstrating GlamMap’s ability to serve researchers in the history of ideas. (shrink)

What are the most useful lenses to wear and from which positioning is most effective to speak today, in order to answer the need for a paradigm shift within the critical thinking concerning the culture of Capitalism? An increasing number of authors support an interdisciplinary approach carried out, not only in academic environments, by political ecology and ecofeminism, connecting the critique of capitalism with that of patriarchy, and re-establishing a relationship between theory and praxis, in which the latter produces knowledge (...) through embodied experience. The following article agrees with this hypothesis, but its aim is not so much to delineate the contours of what feminist political ecology is and what new conceptual categories it introduces, but to understand instead what is the dialectical necessity that produces this approach and what it distances itself from. To do so, I will use the process of resignifying the category of vulnerability in the contemporary feminist debate in the poststructuralist approach, as an antithetical example to the feminist political ecology lens and posture. The aim is to begin paving an autonomous path for this critical matter, beginning by delineating the antagonism toward poststructural feminism as one of the conflicts which produces it. (shrink)

Throughout more than two millennia philosophers adhered massively to ideal standards of scientific rationality going back ultimately to Aristotle’s Analytica posteriora. These standards got progressively shaped by and adapted to new scientific needs and tendencies. Nevertheless, a core of conditions capturing the fundamentals of what a proper science should look like remained remarkably constant all along. Call this cluster of conditions the Classical Model of Science. In this paper we will do two things. First of all, we will propose a (...) general and systematized account of the Classical Model of Science. Secondly, we will offer an analysis of the philosophical significance of this model at different historical junctures by giving an overview of the connections it has had with a number of important topics. The latter include the analytic-synthetic distinction, the axiomatic method, the hierarchical order of sciences and the status of logic as a science. Our claim is that particularly fruitful insights are gained by seeing themes such as these against the background of the Classical Model of Science. In an appendix we deal with the historiographical background of this model by considering the systematizations of Aristotle’s theory of science offered by Heinrich Scholz, and in his footsteps by Evert W. Beth. (shrink)