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)

Eduardo Fugali möchte in seinem Beitrag „Die Aktualität der empirischen Psychologie Brentanos in der heutigen Philosophie des Geistes“ Brentanos Denkansätze und wissenschaftliches Selbstverständnis für die aktuelle Philosophie des Geistes bzw. die Kognitionswissenschaften wieder fruchtbar machen, wozu es jedoch zunächst nötig ist, mit bestehenden Missverständnissen und Reduktion hinsichtlich des Denkens Brentanos aufzuräumen. Darüber hinaus gilt es, die Probleme innerhalb des Feldes der Philosophie des Geistes selbst zu beheben, die nach Fugali zur Nivellierung geistiger Tätigkeit in eben diesen Wissenschaften führt. Um dieser (...) Tendenz zu begegnen, stellt Fugali der vermeintlich angenommenen Losgelöstheit von Intentionalität und Bewußtsein deren ursprüngliche Verbundenheit entgegen, um das Missverständnis zu beseitigen. So räumt Fugali mit dem Missverständnis auf, dass Intentionalität analog dem sprachlichen Ausdruck ist. Diesem folgt der Erweis, dass alle Bewußtseinszustände intentional strukturiert sind, was er anhand von Vorstellen und Urteilen exemplifiziert. Weiterhin hebt Fugali die Einheit des Bewußtseins trotz der Mannigfaltigkeit der physischen Erscheinungen hervor, um abschließend die Belastbarkeit Brentanos Theorie von der selbstrepräsentationalen Auffassung des Bewußtseins anhand anderer Ansätze zu prüfen. (shrink)

Citation-based metrics are increasingly used as a proxy to define representative, considerable, or significant papers. We challenge this belief by taking into account factors that may play a role in providing citations to a manuscript and whether/how those highly cited studies could shape a scientific field. A different approach to summarisation of relevant core publications within a topic is proposed.

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.

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)

What can interactive robots offer to the study of social behaviour? Philosophical reflections about the use of robotic models in animal research have focused so far on methods involving robots which do not interact with the target system. Yet, leading researchers have claimed that interactive robots may constitute powerful experimental tools to study collective behaviour. Can they live up to these epistemic expectations? This question is addressed here by focusing on a particular experimental methodology involving interactive robots which has been (...) often adopted in animal research. This methodology is shown to differ from other robot-supported methods for the study of animal behaviour analysed in the philosophical literature, chiefly including the synthetic method. It is also discussed whether biomimicry and acceptability are necessary for an interactive robot to be sensibly used in animal research according to this method. (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)

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)

This paper is concerned with the issue of authenticity in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology. In the manuscripts published as Letzte Schriften über die Philosophie der Psychologie – Das Innere und das Äußere, the German term Echtheit is mostly translated as ‘genuineness’. In these manuscripts, Wittgenstein frequently uses the term as referring to a feature of the expression of feeling and emotion: -/- […] I want to say that there is an original genuine expression of pain; that the expression of pain (...) therefore is not equally connected to the pain and to the pretence. (LW II, p. 55) -/- “This weeping gives the impression of being genuine” – so there is such a thing as genuine weeping. […]. (LW II, p. 87) -/- […] Genuineness and falseness are not the only essential characteristics of an expression of feeling. […]. (LW II, p. 90) -/- Wittgenstein contrasts the genuineness of the expressions with the possibility that the expressions are feigned. It seems to me that Wittgenstein is trying to discredit a specific version of the sceptical claim that we do not know other minds. I will refer to it as the sceptical innuendo. The sceptical innuendo says that every expression of feeling and emotion may be pretended. Wittgenstein’s approach to the issue reflects his later interest in the philosophy of psychology and, in particular, the problem of the ascription of psychological states (P-ascriptions) on the basis of someone else’s expression of feeling or emotion. Thus, the attempt to reject the sceptical innuendo is done mainly by means of conceptual and psychological arguments. Let’s look at this short dialogue between the sceptic and Wittgenstein. The former asks „How do you know that someone else is in a certain psychological state?“ Wittgenstein’s first reply is „I know that he is glad because I see him“. But the sceptic cannot be very happy with this reply. The sceptic’s next question is: „How do you know that he is really glad and he is not pretending?“ Wittgenstein’s response is not a direct refutation but is composed of a number of related reasons. These may be summed up in three arguments: -/- (i) A psychological argument from the very nature of the expressions. The expressions are meant to be natural symptoms of someone else’s psychological state (P-state). -/- (ii) A conceptual argument about the nature of pretence. It claims that pretence is a psychological property which is rightly ascribed when an observer has evidence for it. -/- (iii) A psychological argument from genuineness. It claims that we are committed to accept people’s expressions of feeling and emotion as genuine. (shrink)

Aristotle and Eudemus report a Speusippean argument to the effect that defining anything requires knowing everything. Scholars have failed to make sense of this argument. This paper argues that the main preoccupations to which the Puzzle is meant to respond are: (i) to ensure the co-extensiveness of the definition with the definiendum; (ii) to rule out a particular definitional mistake—underdivision. The implications of the Puzzle for Speusippus’ conception of knowledge are further explored.

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)

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 classical theory of definitions bans so-called circular definitions, namely, definitions of a unary predicate P, based on stipulations of the form $$Px =_{\mathsf {Df}} \phi,$$where ϕ is a formula of a fixed first-order language and the definiendumP occurs into the definiensϕ. In their seminal book The Revision Theory of Truth, Gupta and Belnap claim that “General theories of definitions are possible within which circular definitions [...] make logical and semantic sense” [p. IX]. In order to sustain their claim, they (...) develop in this book one general theory of definitions based on revision sequences, namely, ordinal-length iterations of the operator which is induced by the definition of the predicate. Gupta-Belnap’s approach to circular definitions has been criticised, among others, by D. Martin and V. McGee. Their criticisms point to the logical complexity of revision sequences, to their relations with ordinary mathematical practice, and to their merits relative to alternative approaches. I will present an alternative general theory of definitions, based on a combination of supervaluation and ω-length revision, which aims to address some criticisms raised against revision sequences, while preserving the philosophical and mathematical core of revision. (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)

In this contribution I aim at developing some critical considerations about the possibility of establishing a dialogue between Husserlian phenomenology and embodied cognitive science to which both partners can participate with equal dignity, apart from any concession to radical forms of naturalism. Phenomenology and cognitive science are different theoretical enterprises, each of which relies autonomously on its own methods and categorial apparatus. This does not prevent of course that both disciplines can influence each other by exerting some kind of constraints. (...) Phenomenology alone cannot provide a full explanation of our conscious experiences as regards their sub-personal mechanisms and needs therefore to be integrated in a unitary framework which allows for its communication with the empirical sciences of mind, without any need to distort phenomenology’s transcendental features. On the other side, cognitive science should seriously take into account phenomenological and eidetic descriptions of first-person experience and avoid superimposing on it its own ontological and methodological assumptions. In the first part of the paper, I try first of all to highlight how Husserl’s phenomenology amounts to a theory of experience which keeps itself equidistant from both extremes of scientism and idealism and then to illustrate the necessity of downplaying Husserl’s transcendental philosophy through a critical assessment on its attitude toward natural sciences and by highlighting at the same time its right to conduct its inquiries autonomously. In the second part I explore the mediating role of psychological phenomenology in allowing a mutual exchange between phenomenology and embodied cognitive sciences, as far as it falls on the side of naturalistic attitude. In the third part I proceed to a critical evaluation of the encounter between embodied phenomenology and embodied cognitive sciences by underlining some ontological and methodological shortcomings in which some of their representatives incur. In the fourth part, I argue for a mild naturalization of phenomenology by confronting it with some forms of non-reductionist naturalism (e.g. liberal and enactive naturalism) for the purpose of safeguarding its fundamental tenets. In the fifth and final part I discuss the topic of lived body and embodiment as the turning point which allows for the mutual transition from the transcendental to the empirical level. To this aim, I try to focus on the intrinsic belongingness of lived body to the essential features of transcendental subject to the extent that it plays a major role in disclosing an oriented worldly space through its kinaesthetic powers. (shrink)

The application of legal hermeneutics could be a constructive tool for interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Yet hermeneutics is virtually never used or mentioned by Supreme Court Justices. The two worlds, hermeneutics and constitutional law, seem to inhabit different silos. Still, the Justices and other judges could profit from the application of the discipline. This article examines the views of two leading theoreticians of hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, which undermine the textualist and originalist approach to the Constitution, and highlights (...) hermeneutic tools for constitutional interpreters. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the intrinsically technical nature of visual perception and pictorial performance through their common anchorage in the corporeity that brings them into existence. As with any other artistic technique, painting reveals itself to be the natural extension of a technological attitude already rooted in the sensorimotor devices of the body in action; painting is led to inhabit a world that is of the same nature as corporeal agents, because the objects that populate it (...) share with it the ontological element of the “flesh”. Through Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of Cezanne’s pictorial works, I demonstrate that the main purpose of painting is, analogically with the descriptive analyses made possible by the phenomenological reduction, to render intersubjectively evident the hidden work of vision before its sedimentation in an accomplished perceptual scene. As the experiments of contemporary neuroscience also demonstrate, perception is by and large a reconstructive process of “image-making” rather than an allegedly accurate reproduction of the spectacle of the world. Painting, on the other hand, both in terms of creation and for the observer, employs the same sensorimotor resources as instruments. (shrink)

This poem is evidence of a fifty-year long artistic partnership whose origins are to be found in the texts that the great Genoese poet devoted to the first Ugo Nespolo’s exhibition (1966).

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

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)

The significance of consciousness in modern science is discussed by leading authorities from a variety of disciplines. Presenting a wide-ranging survey of current thinking on this important topic, the contributors address such issues as the status of different aspects of consciousness; the criteria for using the concept of consciousness and identifying instances of it; the basis of consciousness in functional brain organization; the relationship between different levels of theoretical discourse; and the functions of consciousness.

Ninety-one right brain-damaged patients with left neglect and 43 right brain-damaged patients without neglect were asked to extend horizontal segments, either left- or rightward, starting from their right or left endpoints, respectively. Earlier experiments based on similar tasks had shown, in left neglect patients, a tendency to overextend segments toward the left side. This seemingly paradoxical phenomenon was held to undermine current explanations of unilateral neglect. The results of the present extensive research demonstrate that contralesional overextension is also evident in (...) most right brain-damaged patients without contralesional neglect. Furthermore, they show that in a minority of left neglect patients, the opposite behavior, i.e., right overextension can be found. The paper also reports the results of correlational analyses comprising the parameters of line-extension, line-bisection, and cancellation tasks, as well as the parameters relative to the Milner Landmark Task, by which a distinction is drawn between perceptual and response biases in unilateral neglect. A working hypothesis is then advanced about the brain dysfunction underlying neglect and an attempt is made at finding an explanation of neglect and the links between the mechanisms of space representation and consciousness through the study of the changes induced by unilateral brain lesions in the characteristics of space-coding neurons. Abbreviations: C, control group;GN+91,full group of neglect patients;GN+27,group of neglect patients with relative left overextension;GN+14,group of neglect patients with relative right overextension;GN-43,full group of non-neglect patients;GN-9,group of non-neglect patients with relative left overextension; H canc, H cancellation task; LE, left extension; LE/RE, ratio of left-right extension; N+, neglect patients; N-, non-neglect patients; PB Land-M, perceptual bias on Landmark motor task; PB Land-V, perceptual bias on Landmark verbal task; RB Land-M, response bias on Landmark motor task; RB Land-V, response bias on Landmark verbal task; RE, right extension. (shrink)

The most complete edition yet published of Wittgenstein’s1929 lecture includes a never-before published first draft andmakes fresh claims for its significance in Wittgenstein’soeuvre. The first available print publication of all known drafts ofWittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics Includes a previously unrecognized first draft of the lectureand new transcriptions of all drafts Transcriptions preserve the philosopher’s emendationsthus showing the development of the ideas in the lecture Proposes a different draft as the version read by Wittgensteinin his 1929 lecture Includes introductory essays on (...) the origins of the material andon its meaning, content, and importance. (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)

Bionic systems, connecting biological tissues with computer or robotic devices through brain–machine interfaces, can be used in various ways to discover biological mechanisms. In this article I outline and discuss a “stimulation-connection” bionics-supported methodology for the study of the brain, and compare it with other epistemic uses of bionic systems described in the literature. This methododology differs from the “synthetic”, simulative method often followed in theoretically driven Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science, even though it involves machine models of biological systems. (...) I also bring the previous analysis to bear on some claims on the epistemic value of bionic technologies made in the recent philosophical literature. I believe that the methodological reflections proposed here may contribute to the piecewise understanding of the many ways bionic technologies can be deployed not only to restore lost sensory-motor functions, but also to discover brain mechanisms. (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)

In recent years, a number of research projects have been proposed whose goal is to build large-scale simulations of brain mechanisms at unprecedented levels of biological accuracy. Here it is argued that the roles these simulations are expected to play in neuroscientific research go beyond the “synthetic method” extensively adopted in Artificial Intelligence and biorobotics. In addition we show that, over and above the common goal of simulating brain mechanisms, these projects pursue various modelling ambitions that can be sharply distinguished (...) from one another, and that correspond to conceptually different interpretations of the notion of “biological accuracy”. They include the ambition to reach extremely deep levels in the mechanistic decomposition hierarchy, to simulate networks composed of extremely large numbers of neural units, to build systems able to generate rich behavioural repertoires, to simulate “complex” neuron models, to implement the “best” theories available on brain structure and function. Some questions will be raised concerning the significance of each of these modelling ambitions with respect to the various roles played by simulations in the study of the brain. (shrink)

This article outlines the constitution of a disciplinary field called ‘philosophy of design’. The roots of this philosophical branch can be traced back to the one of the first theoretical consideration about the “sciences of the artificial” (Simon 1996 [1969]) – which in opposition to natural sciences should deal with non-natural entities which populates our world, namely artifacts. These considerations have been extended and discussed starting from a research program aimed at changing the route within philosophy of technology: the so (...) called “empirical turn in philosophy of technology” (Kroes, Meijers 2000). Following this, two issues have been debated in the subsequent years: the first is related to the definition of ‘design’ and to the philosophical questions that arise (like the reference of design terms and their truth-value); the second is a problem of demarcation between science and design (are these two activities different?). The aim of the article is presenting an overview of the debate and showing some possible future developments for the philosophy of design. (shrink)