Autour de la grande conference de Jacques Derrida, intitulee Justices, prononcee en 2003 et demeuree inedite en francais a ce jour, cet ouvrage collectif convoque certains des meilleurs specialistes de son oeuvre. Il s'agit moins ici de commemorer ou de dresser un etat des lieux que de penser, a partir de Derrida et avec lui, ce qui vient et de repondre a l'appel, aux appels pluriels qui resonnent dans son travail philosophique. Sont ainsi examines les principaux legs de sa pensee (...) dans les differents domaines (philosophie, politique, science des religions, esthetique, litterature) qu'elle a profondement transformes. Autant de reponses et de responsabilites, autant de provocations a lire et a relire l'oeuvre de Jacques Derrida a sa hauteur, comme elle nous y engage toujours. Avec les textes de: Gil Anidjar, Philip Armstrong, Fernanda Bernardo, Mireille Calle-Gruber, Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Gianfranco Dalmasso, Francoise Dastur, Jacques Derrida, Silvano Facioni, Edoardo Ferrario, Jerome Lebre, Georges Leroux, Michel Lisse, Rene Major, Marie-Louise Mallet, Serge Margel, Joana Maso, Ginette Michaud, J. Hillis Miller, Raoul Moati, Jean-Luc Nancy, Evando Nascimento, Francois Nault, Laura Odello, Jean-Michel Rabate, Marta Segarra, Peter Szendy, Chantal Talagrand, Francesco Vitale et Hent de Vries. (shrink)

Real engines of the artificial intelligence revolution, machine learning models, and algorithms are embedded nowadays in many services and products around us. As a society, we argue it is now necessary to transition into a phronetic paradigm focused on the ethical dilemmas stemming from the conception and application of AIs to define actionable recommendations as well as normative solutions. However, both academic research and society-driven initiatives are still quite far from clearly defining a solid program of study and intervention. In (...) this contribution, we will focus on selected ethical investigations around AI by proposing an incremental model of trust that can be applied to both human-human and human-AI interactions. Starting with a quick overview of the existing accounts of trust, with special attention to Taddeo’s concept of “e-trust,” we will discuss all the components of the proposed model and the reasons to trust in human-AI interactions in an example of relevance for business organizations. We end this contribution with an analysis of the epistemic and pragmatic reasons of trust in human-AI interactions and with a discussion of kinds of normativity in trustworthiness of AIs. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) have now entered the realm of medical ethics. In a recent study, Balaset alexamined the performance of GPT-4, a commercially available LLM, assessing its performance in generating responses to diverse medical ethics cases. Their findings reveal that GPT-4 demonstrates an ability to identify and articulate complex medical ethical issues, although its proficiency in encoding the depth of real-world ethical dilemmas remains an avenue for improvement. Investigating the integration of LLMs into medical ethics decision-making appears to be (...) an interesting avenue of research. However, despite the promising trajectory of LLM technology in medicine, it is crucial to exercise caution and refrain from attributing their expertise to medical ethics. Our thesis follows an examination of the nature of expertise and the epistemic limitations that affect LLM technology. As a result, we propose two more fitting applications of LLMs in medical ethics: first, as tools for mining electronic health records or scientific literature, thereby supplementing evidence for resolving medical ethics cases, and second, as educational platforms to foster ethical reflection and critical thinking skills among students and residents. The integration of LLMs in medical ethics, while promising, requires careful consideration of their epistemic limitations. Consequently, a well-considered definition of their role in ethically sensitive decision-making is crucial. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are quickly gaining ground in healthcare and clinical decision-making. However, it is still unclear in what way AI can or should support decision-making that is based on incapacitated patients’ values and goals of care, which often requires input from clinicians and loved ones. Although the use of algorithms to predict patients’ most likely preferred treatment has been discussed in the medical ethics literature, no example has been realised in clinical practice. This is due, arguably, to the (...) lack of a structured approach to the epistemological, ethical and pragmatic challenges arising from the design and use of such algorithms. The present paper offers a new perspective on the problem by suggesting that preference predicting AIs be viewed as sociotechnical systems with distinctive life-cycles. We explore how both known and novel challenges map onto the different stages of development, highlighting interdisciplinary strategies for their resolution. (shrink)

In so-called ethorobotics and robot-supported social cognitive neurosciences, robots are used as scientific tools to study animal behavior and cognition. Building on previous epistemological analyses of biorobotics, in this article it is argued that these two research fields, widely differing from one another in the kinds of robots involved and in the research questions addressed, share a common methodology, which significantly differs from the “synthetic method” that, until recently, dominated biorobotics. The methodological novelty of this strategy, the research opportunities that (...) it opens, and the theoretical and technological challenges that it gives rise to, will be discussed with reference to the peculiarities of the two research fields. Some broad methodological issues related to the generalization of results concerning robot-animal interaction to theoretical conclusions on animal-animal interaction will be identified and discussed. (shrink)

The high predictive accuracy of contemporary machine learning-based AI systems has led some scholars to argue that, in certain cases, we should grant them epistemic expertise and authority over humans. This approach suggests that humans would have the epistemic obligation of relying on the predictions of a highly accurate AI system. Contrary to this view, in this work we claim that it is not possible to endow AI systems with a genuine account of epistemic expertise. In fact, relying on accounts (...) of expertise and authority from virtue epistemology, we show that epistemic expertise requires a relation with understanding that AI systems do not satisfy and intellectual abilities that these systems do not manifest. Further, following the Distribution Cognition theory and adapting an account by Croce on the virtues of collective epistemic agents to the case of human-AI interactions we show that, if an AI system is successfully appropriated by a human agent, a _hybrid_ epistemic agent emerges, which can become both an epistemic expert and an authority. Consequently, we claim that the aforementioned hybrid agent is the appropriate object of a discourse around trust in AI and the epistemic obligations that stem from its epistemic superiority. (shrink)

The "myside bias'' in evaluating arguments is an empirically well-confirmed phenomenon that consists of overweighting arguments that endorse one's beliefs or attack alternative beliefs while underweighting arguments that attack one's beliefs or defend alternative beliefs. This paper makes two contributions: First, it proposes a probabilistic model that adequately captures three salient features of myside bias in argument evaluation. Second, it provides a Bayesian justification of this model, thus showing that myside bias has a rational Bayesian explanation under certain conditions.

Robots are being extensively used for the purpose of discovering and testing empirical hypotheses about biological sensorimotor mechanisms. We examine here methodological problems that have to be addressed in order to design and perform “good” experiments with these machine models. These problems notably concern the mapping of biological mechanism descriptions into robotic mechanism descriptions; the distinction between theoretically unconstrained “implementation details” and robotic features that carry a modeling weight; the role of preliminary calibration experiments; the monitoring of experimental environments for (...) disturbing factors that affect both modeling features and theoretically unconstrained implementation details of robots. Various assumptions that are gradually introduced in the process of setting up and performing these robotic experiments become integral parts of the background hypotheses that are needed to bring experimental observations to bear on biological mechanism descriptions. (shrink)

In their theoretical and experimental reflections on the capacities and behaviours of living systems, neuroscientists often formulate generalizations about the behaviour of neural circuits. These generalizations are highly idealized, as they omit reference to the myriads of conditions that could perturb the behaviour of the modelled system in real-world settings. This article analyses an experimental investigation of the behaviour of place cells in the rat hippocampus, in which highly idealized generalizations were tested by comparing predictions flowing from them with real-world (...) experimental results. The aim of the article is to identify under what conditions even single prediction failures regarding the behaviour of single cells sufficed to reject highly idealized generalizations, and under what conditions prima facie counter-examples were deemed to be irrelevant to the testing of highly idealized generalizations. The results of this analysis may contribute to understanding how idealized models are tested experimentally in neuroscience and used to make reliable predictions concerning living systems in real-world settings. (shrink)

Primary goal of this paper is to show that counterfactual reasoning, as many other kinds of common sense reasoning, can be studied and analyzed through what we can call a cognitive approach, that represents knowledge as structured and partitioned into different domains, everyone of which has a specific theory, but can exchange data and information with some of the others. Along these lines, we are going to show that a kind of ``counterfactual attitude'' is pervasive in a lot of forms (...) of common sense reasoning, as in theories of action, beliefs/intentions ascription, cooperative and antagonistic situations, communication acts. The second purpose of the paper is to give a reading of counterfactual reasoning as a specific kind of contextual reasoning, this latter interpreted according to the theory of MultiContext Systems developed by Fausto Giunchiglia and his group. (shrink)

Questo contributo tratta della perifrasi ‘εἶναι + participio’ in greco omerico all’interfaccia fra morfosintassi e semantica. I dati sono analizzati con riferimento al quadro teorico elaborato da Nardi e Romagno (2022), che considerano la perifrasi con εἶναι in greco antico come una categoria prototipica: secondo questa prospettiva, la categoria sovraordinata ‘εἶναι + participio’ include due manifestazioni formalmente diverse ma funzionalmente equivalenti, un costrutto con una copula espressa, cioè una perifrasi vera e propria, e un costrutto senza copula espressa, cioè un (...) participio predicativo (fondamentalmente, un participio che funziona come una forma finita). Questa indagine mira a valutare se si possano individuare fattori che determinano o soggiacciono all’uso di queste costruzioni participiali in greco omerico. L’analisi dei dati raccolti nei poemi omerici mostra che le costruzioni participiali codificano la funzione specifica di significare lo stato, inerente o acquisito, del soggetto del predicato, costituendo pertanto un’alternativa (più o meno libera) al perfetto originario (cfr. Romagno 2005). (shrink)

Nicola Guarino is widely recognized as one of the founders of applied ontology. His deep interest in the subtlest details of theoretical analysis and his vision of ontology as the Rosetta Stone for semantic interoperability guided the development and understanding of this domain. His motivations in research stem from the conviction that all science must be for the benefit of society at large, and his motto has always been that ontologies are not just for making information systems interoperable, but – (...) more importantly – for ensuring that systems’ users understand each other. He was among the first to recognize that applied ontology must be an interdisciplinary enterprise if it is to capture the intended meaning of the terms used by an information system. (shrink)

This volume collects the papers presented at the 9th edition of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems conference, FOIS 2016, held July 6–9, 2016, in Annecy, France. As in the previous editions, FOIS 2016 included keynote addresses, full paper presentations, an Ontology Competition, an Early Career Symposium in its scientific program and was preceded by the Interdisciplinary Summer School on Ontological Analysis, now at its third edition and held June 27–July 1 in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy.

This book focuses on the relationship between different epistemological and theoretical advances in archaeology within different academic and philosophical traditions."--Publisher's web site.

What kinds of mental states are emotions? A common philosophical view says that they are episodic states. Some philosophers conceive of these states as bodily feelings or experiences of some sort, others as judgements or states very similar but not identical to judgements. I argue that emotions are not episodic states; like beliefs and desires, they are standing dispositional states that may manifest themselves in consciousness and behaviour. But emotions are neither beliefs nor desires; they are sui generis mental states. (...) We understand the nature of these states when we consider the role they play in ordinary folk-psychological explanations. (shrink)

We address an open problem in the philosophy of artificial intelligence (AI): how to justify the epistemic attitudes we have towards the trustworthiness of AI systems. The problem is important, as providing reasons to believe that AI systems are worthy of trust is key to appropriately rely on these systems in human-AI interactions. In our approach, we consider the trustworthiness of an AI as a time-relative, composite property of the system with two distinct facets. One is the actual trustworthiness of (...) the AI and the other is the perceived trustworthiness of the system as assessed by its users while interacting with it. We show that credences, namely, beliefs we hold with a degree of confidence, are the appropriate attitude for capturing the facets of the trustworthiness of an AI over time. Then, we introduce a reliabilistic account providing justification to the credences in the trustworthiness of AI, which we derive from Tang’s probabilistic theory of justified credence. Our account stipulates that a credence in the trustworthiness of an AI system is justified if and only if it is caused by an assessment process that tends to result in a high proportion of credences for which the actual and perceived trustworthiness of the AI are calibrated. This approach informs research on the ethics of AI and human-AI interactions by providing actionable recommendations on how to measure the reliability of the process through which users perceive the trustworthiness of the system, investigating its calibration to the actual levels of trustworthiness of the AI as well as users’ appropriate reliance on the system. (shrink)

We study, in an abstract and general framework, formal representations of dependence and groundedness which occur in semantic theories of truth. Our goals are: (a) to relate the different ways in which groundedness is defined according to the way dependence is represented; and (b) to represent different notions of dependence as instances of a suitable generalisation of the mathematical notion of functional dependence.

The advancement of computing technology makes it possible to build extremely accurate digital reconstructions of brain circuits. Are such unprecedented levels of biological accuracy essential for brain simulations to play the roles they are expected to play in neuroscientific research? The main goal of this paper is to clarify this question by distinguishing between various roles played by large-scale simulations in contemporary neuroscience, and by reflecting about what makes a simulation biologically accurate. It is argued that large-scale simulations may play (...) model-oriented and prediction-oriented roles in brain research, and that the concept of biological accuracy can be interpreted as related to the plausibility of the theoretical model implemented in the simulation system, to the accuracy of the computer implementation, and to the level of details of the implemented model. Building on these observations and distinctions, it is argued that biological accuracy is not essential for a computer simulation to play the epistemic roles it is expected to play in brain research. (shrink)

Revision sequences were introduced in 1982 by Herzberger and Gupta as a mathematical tool in formalising their respective theories of truth. Since then, revision has developed in a method of analysis of theoretical concepts with several applications in other areas of logic and philosophy. Revision sequences are usually formalised as ordinal-length sequences of objects of some sort. A common idea of revision process is shared by all revision theories but specific proposals can differ in the so-called limit rule, namely the (...) way they handle the limit stages of the process. The limit rules proposed by Herzberger and by Belnap show different mathematical properties, called periodicity and reflexivity, respectively. In this paper we isolate a notion of cofinally dependent limit rule, encompassing both Herzberger’s and Belnap’s ones, to study periodicity and reflexivity in a common framework and to contrast them both from a philosophical and from a mathematical point of view. We establish the equivalence of weak versions of these properties with the revision-theoretic notion of recurring hypothesis and draw from this fact some observations about the problem of choosing the “right” limit rule when performing a revision-theoretic analysis. (shrink)

In his recent article ‘Limits of trust in medical AI,’ Hatherley argues that, if we believe that the motivations that are usually recognised as relevant for interpersonal trust have to be applied to interactions between humans and medical artificial intelligence, then these systems do not appear to be the appropriate objects of trust. In this response, we argue that it is possible to discuss trust in medical artificial intelligence (AI), if one refrains from simply assuming that trust describes human–human interactions. (...) To do so, we consider an account of trust that distinguishes trust from reliance in a way that is compatible with trusting non-human agents. In this account, to trust a medical AI is to rely on it with little monitoring and control of the elements that make it trustworthy. This attitude does not imply specific properties in the AI system that in fact only humans can have. This account of trust is applicable, in particular, to all cases where a physician relies on the medical AI predictions to support his or her decision making. (shrink)

Sometimes we speak of behaviours and actions as reactions, just as we speak of physical conditions and mental states as reactions. But what do we mean when we say that emotions are reactions? I answer this question by developing an account of emotions as psychological reactions to presentations or representations of states of affairs. I show that this account may provide a novel conceptual framework for explaining aspects of the intentionality, phenomenology and behavioural manifestation of emotions. I conclude by showing (...) that this account is compatible with the view that emotions can be assessed on grounds of justification and correctness. (shrink)

Human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI) advocates for the integration of social aspects into AI explanations. Central to the HCXAI discourse is the Social Transparency (ST) framework, which aims to make the socio-organizational context of AI systems accessible to their users. In this work, we suggest extending the ST framework to address the risks of social misattributions in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in sensitive areas like mental health. In fact LLMs, which are remarkably capable of simulating roles and personas, may lead (...) to mismatches between designers' intentions and users' perceptions of social attributes, risking to promote emotional manipulation and dangerous behaviors, cases of epistemic injustice, and unwarranted trust. To address these issues, we propose enhancing the ST framework with a fifth 'W-question' to clarify the specific social attributions assigned to LLMs by its designers and users. This addition aims to bridge the gap between LLM capabilities and user perceptions, promoting the ethically responsible development and use of LLM-based technology. (shrink)

Human attention is limited in its capacity and duration. In language, this is manifested in many ways, but more conspicuously in the strategies by which information is distributed in utterances, that is, their information structures. We contend that the pragmatic categories of Topic and Presupposition precisely meet the necessity to modulate attentional resources on sentence contents, and they do this by “directing” certain contents to automatic and others to controlled processing mechanisms. We discuss experimental findings suggesting that presupposed or topicalized (...) information correlates with automatic processing, and we suggest that this association grounded for the emergence of topic and presupposition units in human communication. We also put forth the processing automaticity induced by these units as the rationale behind their persuasiveness in some specific contexts of language use. (shrink)

Simulation studies have been carried out in robotics for a variety of epistemic and practical purposes. Here it is argued that two broad classes of simulation studies can be identified in robotics research. The first one is exemplified by the use of robotic systems to acquire knowledge on living systems in so-called biorobotics, while the second class of studies is more distinctively connected to cases in which artificial systems are used to acquire knowledge about the behaviour of autonomous mobile robots. (...) The two classes pertain to sub-areas of robotics which are apparently quite distant from one another in terms of goals, methodologies, technologies, and theoretical backgrounds. Still both are concerned with building, running, and experimenting on simulations of other systems. This paper aims to reveal and discuss some methodological commonalities between the two classes of studies. Philosophical literature on simulation methodologies has been traditionally focused on studies carried out in research fields other than robotics: this article may therefore contribute to shedding light on how the concept of simulation is used in robotics, and on the role simulation methodologies play in this research field. (shrink)

The my-side bias is a well-documented cognitive bias in the evaluation of arguments, in which reasoners in a discussion tend to overvalue arguments that confirm their prior beliefs, while undervaluing arguments that attack their prior beliefs. The first part of this paper develops and justifies a Bayesian model of myside bias at the level of individual reasoning. In the second part, this Bayesian model is implemented in an agent-based model of group discussion among myside-biased agents. The agent-based model is then (...) used to perform a number of experiments with the objective to study whether the myside bias hinders or enhances the ability of groups to collectively track the truth, that is, to reach the correct answer to a given binary issue. An analysis of the results suggests the following: First, whether the truth-tracking ability of groups is helped or hindered by myside bias crucially depends on how the strength of myside bias is differentially distributed across subgroups of discussants holding different beliefs. Second, small groups are more likely to track the truth than larger groups, suggesting that increasing group size has a detrimental effect on collective truth-tracking through discussion. (shrink)

We examine the relationship between scientific knowledge and the legal system with a focus on the exclusion of expert testimony from trial as ruled by the Daubert standard in the US.We introduce a simple framework to understand and assess the role of judges as “gatekeepers”, monitoring the admission of science in the courtroom. We show how judges face a crucial choice, namely, whether to limit Daubert assessment to the abstract reliability of the methods used by the expert witness or also (...) to check whether the application of those methods was correct. Undesirable outcomes result from both choices, thereby giving rise to the “gatekeeper’s dilemma.” We illustrate the dilemma by analyzing in some detail two well-known cases of Daubert challenges to economic experts. Finally, we present reasons for the absence of straightforward solutions to the dilemma and for its likely endurance. (shrink)

In recent decades, the analysis of phraseology has made use of the exploration of large corpora as a source of quantitative information about language. This paper intends to present the main lines of work in progress based on this empirical approach to linguistic analysis. In particular, we focus our attention on some problems relating to the morpho-syntactic annotation of corpora. The CORIS/CODIS corpus of contemporary written Italian, developed at CILTA – University of Bologna (Rossini Favretti 2000; Rossini Favretti, Tamburini, De (...) Santis in press), is a synchronic 100-million-word corpus and is being lemmatised and annotated with part-of-speech (POS) tags, in order to increase the quantity of information and improve data retrieval procedures (Tamburini 2000). The aim of POS tagging is to assign each lexical unit to the appropriate word class. Usually the set of tags is pre-established by the linguist, who uses his/her competence to identify the different word classes. The very first experiments we made revealed how the traditional part-of-speech distinctions in Italian (generally based on morphological and semantic criteria) are often inadequate to represent the syntactic features of words in context. It is worth noting that the uncertainties in categorisation contained in Italian grammars and dictionaries reflect a growing difficulty as they move from fundamental linguistic classes, such as nouns and verbs, to more complex classes, such as adverbs, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions. This latter class, that groups together elements traditionally used to express connections between sentences, appears inadequate when describing cohesive relations in Italian. This phenomenon actually seems to involve other elements traditionally assigned to different classes, such as adverbs, pronouns and interjections. Recent studies proposed the class of ‘connectives’, grouping all words that, apart from their traditional word class, have the function of connecting phrases and contributing to textual cohesion. From this point of view, conjunctions can be considered as part of phrasal connectives, that can in turn be included in the wider category of textual connectives. The aim of this study is to identify elements that can be included in the class of phrasal connectives, using quantitative methods. According to Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) observation that words are linked by dependent probabilities, corroborated by Halliday’s (1991) argument that the grammatical “system” (in Firth’s sense of the term) is essentially probabilistic, quantitative data are introduced in order to provide evidence of relative frequencies. Section 2 presents a description of word-class categorisation from the point of view of grammars and dictionaries arguing that the traditional category of conjunctions is inadequate for capturing the notion of phrasal connective. Section 3 examines the notion of ‘connective’ and suggests a truth-function interpretation of connective behaviour. Section 4 describes the quantitative methods proposed for analysing the distributional properties of lexical units, and section 5 comments on the results obtained by applying such methods drawing some provisional conclusions. (shrink)

The model of self-referential truth presented in this paper, named Revision-theoretic supervaluation, aims to incorporate the philosophical insights of Gupta and Belnap’s Revision Theory of Truth into the formal framework of Kripkean fixed-point semantics. In Kripke-style theories the final set of grounded true sentences can be reached from below along a strictly increasing sequence of sets of grounded true sentences: in this sense, each stage of the construction can be viewed as an improvement on the previous ones. I want to (...) do something similar replacing the Kripkean sets of grounded true sentences with revision-theoretic sets of stable true sentences. This can be done by defining a monotone operator through a variant of van Fraassen’s supervaluation scheme which is simply based on ω-length iterations of the Tarskian operator. Clearly, all virtues of Kripke-style theories are preserved, and we can also prove that the resulting set of “grounded” true sentences shares some nice features with the sets of stable true sentences which are provided by the usual ways of formalising revision. What is expected is that a clearer philosophical content could be associated to this way of doing revision; hopefully, a content directly linked with the insights underlying finite revision processes. (shrink)

This paper introduces a comprehensive logical framework to reason about threshold-driven diffusion and threshold-driven link change in social networks. It considers both monotonic dynamics, where agents can only adopt new features and create new connections, and non-monotonic dynamics, where agents may also abandon features or cut ties. Three types of operators are combined: one capturing diffusion only, one capturing link change only, and one capturing both at the same time. We first characterise the models on which diffusion of a unique (...) feature and link change stabilise, whilst discussing salient properties of stable models with multiple spreading features. Second, we show that our operators (and any combination of them) are irreplaceable, in the sense that the sequences of model updates expressed by a combination of operators cannot always be expressed using any other operators. Finally, we analyse classes of models on which some operators can be replaced. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that transparency of machine learning algorithms, just as explanation, can be defined at different levels of abstraction. We criticize recent attempts to identify the explanation of black box algorithms with making their decisions (post-hoc) interpretable, focusing our discussion on counterfactual explanations. These approaches to explanation simplify the real nature of the black boxes and risk misleading the public about the normative features of a model. We propose a new form of algorithmic transparency, that consists in (...) explaining algorithms as an intentional product, that serves a particular goal, or multiple goals (Daniel Dennet’s design stance) in a given domain of applicability, and that provides a measure of the extent to which such a goal is achieved, and evidence about the way that measure has been reached. We call such idea of algorithmic transparency “design publicity.” We argue that design publicity can be more easily linked with the justification of the use and of the design of the algorithm, and of each individual decision following from it. In comparison to post-hoc explanations of individual algorithmic decisions, design publicity meets a different demand (the demand for impersonal justification) of the explainee. Finally, we argue that when models that pursue justifiable goals (which may include fairness as avoidance of bias towards specific groups) to a justifiable degree are used consistently, the resulting decisions are all justified even if some of them are (unavoidably) based on incorrect predictions. For this argument, we rely on John Rawls’s idea of procedural justice applied to algorithms conceived as institutions. (shrink)

BackgroundThe present study aimed at assessing the diagnostic properties of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment in non-demented ALS patients and at exploring the MoCA administrability according to motor-functional status.MaterialsN = 348 patients were administered the MoCA and Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioural ALS Screen. Administrability rates and prevalence of defective MoCA scores were compared across King’s and Milano-Torino clinical stages. Regression models were run to test whether the non-administrability of the MoCA and a defective score on it were predicted, net of the (...) ECAS-Total, by disease duration, ALS Functional Rating Scale-Revised and progression rate, computed as /disease duration. Intrinsic and post-test diagnostics were tested against a below-cut-off ECAS-total score.ResultsThe 79.9% of patients successfully underwent the MoCA, whose administrability rates decreased with advanced clinical stages, at variance with its defective score prevalence. The probability of the FAB not being administrable was predicted only by lower ALSFRS-R-bulbar and-upper-limb scores; no motor features, but the ECAS-Total, predicted a defective MoCA performance. The MoCA showed high accuracy and good intrinsic and post-test properties—being slightly more specific than sensitive.DiscussionIn non-demented ALS patients, the MoCA is featured by optimal diagnostics as a screener for cognitive impairment, especially for ruling-out its occurrence, as long as patients are in the early stages of the disease and have sufficiently spared bulbar and upper-limb functions. (shrink)

BackgroundThis study aimed at standardizing and providing preliminary evidence on the clinical usability of the Italian telephone-based Verbal Fluency Battery, which includes phonemic, semantic and alternate verbal fluency tasks.MethodsThree-hundred and thirty-five Italian healthy participants and 27 individuals with neurodegenerative or cerebrovascular diseases were administered the t-VFB. Switch number and cluster size were computed via latent semantic analyses. HPs underwent the telephone-based Mental State Examination and Backward Digit Span. Construct validity, factorial structure, internal consistency, test-retest and inter-rater reliability and equivalence with (...) the in-person Verbal Fluency tasks were assessed. Norms were derived via Equivalent Scores. Diagnostic accuracy against clinical populations was assessed.ResultsThe majority of t-VFB scores correlated among each other and with the BDS, but not with the MMSE. Switch number correlated with t-PVF, t-SVF, t-AVF scores, whilst cluster size with the t-SVF and t-AVF scores only. The t-VFB was underpinned by a mono-component structure and was internally consistent. Test-retest and inter-rater reliability were optimal. Each t-VFB test was statistically equivalent to its in-person version. Education predicted all t-VFB scores, whereas age t-SVF and t-AVF scores and sex only some t-SVF scores. Diagnostic accuracy against clinical samples was optimal.DiscussionThe t-VFB is a valid, reliable and normed telephone-based assessment tool for language and executive functioning, equivalent to the in-person version; results show promising evidence of its diagnostic accuracy in neurological populations. (shrink)

Summary My paper aims to clarify the subsequent steps of Rome’s encroachment on Etruria in the aftermath of the Pyrrhic War. As is well known, the Latin colony of Cosa was founded in 273 BC on the Tyrrhenian coast to the north of Vulci; moreover, in the years 264–245 BC, four citizen colonies were founded on the Caeretan coast, namely Castrum Novum, Pyrgi, Alsium and Fregenae. Unfortunately, it is not easy to reconstruct precisely what the Roman movements in Etruria were, (...) or how the Etruscans reacted to them. Above all, it is difficult to determine whether a colonial foundation like Cosa – which was contemporary with the establishment of Paestum in Lucania – was part of a broader and coherent strategy that the Romans had been following in their expansion into the Italian peninsula. By evaluating all the available evidence, I will try to demonstrate that the foundation of Cosa depended more upon particular contingencies than upon any preconceived plan for the conquest of Italy. (shrink)

This is a short editorial, maybe introducing editorial board members' changes.