This is a draft of the introduction to the collective volume "The birth of string theory", including the book's index and preface. The book explores the history of the theory’s early stages of development, as told by its main protagonists. It journeys from the first version of the theory in the late 1960s, as an attempt to describe the physics of strong interactions outside the framework of quantum field theory, to its reinterpretation around the mid-1970s as a quantum theory of (...) gravity unified with the other interactions, and its successive developments up to the superstring revolution in 1984. The introductive Chapter summarizes the main developments and contains a chronological synopsis with a list of key results and publications. (shrink)

We show in rather informal terms how witness sets can be useful in both explicating some basic intuitions about scope and understanding how particular denotational semantic differences between noun phrases affect their abilities to bear out certain scopal patterns. More generally we suggest that the usual notion of scope needs to be factored into variation distributivity and maximality. This part lays some groundwork for several of the subsequent chapters and is thus of interest to all readers. The second part shows (...) that already in this initial raw form the above insights can be applied to make a novel claim concerning the availability of so-called branching readings. In logical terms a branching reading can be defined for any sentence with a subject and a direct object. However speakers of English accept only a fraction of these readings, so the question arises how the data can be predicted from the meanings of the participating quantifiers and the syntactic structure of the sentence. We propose that thinking about the behavior of quantifiers along the lines introduced in the first part leads to a simple answer to this question. (shrink)

Within the framework of Meinongianism, nothingness turns out to have contradictory features—it seems to be an object and not. In this paper, we explore two different kinds of Meinongian accounts of nothingness. The first one is the consistent account, which rejects the contradiction of nothingness, while the second one is the inconsistent account, which accepts the contradiction of nothingness. First of all, after showing that the consistent account of nothingness defended by Jacquette fails, we express some concerns on the general (...) possibility of consistently characterizing nothingness. Secondly, starting from Priest’s inconsistent characterization of nothingness :146–158, 2014b), we will introduce our own inconsistent account. The key idea of our account is to take nothingness as the complement of the totality. Finally, we will make formal sense of it by constructing an inconsistent mereological system, which is the development of the paraconsistent mereology proposed by Weber and Cotnoir. (shrink)

The last quarter of a century has featured a surge in interest and studies on the commons, spearheaded, of course, by the efforts of Elinor Ostrom. These efforts have problematized the once well-established paradigm of the tragedy of the commons most clearly described by Garrett Hardin in 1968. One could say that the commons, thus, have become a fundamental field of study in most social sciences. This is not the case in the field of legal scholarship, which leads me to (...) the overarching issue of this essay, namely the difficult relationship between jurists and the commons. The phrase?difficult relationship? does not refer to an explicit antagonism, but to something even worse: complete indifference and a scandalous lack of knowledge. While my main purpose is to try to explain this sorry state of affairs, I also hope to make a more general point on the nature of law and legal change. In this sense, the commons can be considered a case-study in legal theory. The main issue of this paper is to tackle following sub-questions. What is the status of commons in the Western European legal discourse? Why do most legal scholars pay such a poor attention to the growing literature on the commons in other disciplines? What factors contribute to this peculiar case of cultural deafness? What promise of improvement does the future hold? nema. (shrink)

This book offers a clear, analytic, and innovative interpretation of Heidegger's late work. This period of Heidegger's philosophy remains largely unexplored by analytic philosophers, who consider it filled with inconsistencies and paradoxical ideas, particularly concerning the notions of Being and nothingness. This book takes seriously the claim that the late Heidegger endorses dialetheism--namely the position according to which some contradictions are true--and shows that the idea that Being is both an entity and not an entity is neither incoherent nor logically (...) trivial. The author achieves this by presenting and defending the idea that reality has an inconsistent structure. In doing so, he takes one of the most discussed topics in current analytic metaphysics, grounding theory, into a completely unexplored area. Additionally, in order to make sense of Heidegger's concept of nothingness, the author introduces an original axiomatic mereological system that, having a paraconsistent logic as a base logic, can tolerate inconsistencies without falling into logical triviality. This is the first book to set forth a complete and detailed discussion of the late Heidegger in the framework of analytic metaphysics. It will be of interest to Heidegger scholars and analytic philosophers working on theories of grounding, mereology, dialetheism, and paraconsistent logic. (shrink)

Truth and Norms develops a novel pluralistic view of the normative role that truth exerts on judgements. This view, labeled normative alethic pluralism, provides the best explanation of the variable normative significance that disagreement exhibits in different areas of discourse and is fully compatible with a minimalist conception of truth.

We hypothesize that heritable epigenetic changes can affect rates of fitness increase as well as patterns of genotypic and phenotypic change during adaptation. In particular, we suggest that when natural selection acts on pure epigenetic variation in addition to genetic variation, populations adapt faster, and adaptive phenotypes can arise before any genetic changes. This may make it difficult to reconcile the timing of adaptive events detected using conventional population genetics tools based on DNA sequence data with environmental drivers of adaptation, (...) such as changes in climate. Epigenetic modifications are frequently associated with somatic cell differentiation, but recently epigenetic changes have been found that can be transmitted over many generations. Here, we show how the interplay of these heritable epigenetic changes with genetic changes can affect adaptive evolution, and how epigenetic changes affect the signature of selection in the genetic record. (shrink)

Can someone who suspends judgement about a certain proposition <p> be in a relational state of disagreement with someone who believes <p> as well as with some- one who disbelieves <p>? This paper argues for an af- firmative answer. It develops an account of the notions of suspended judgement and disagreement that explains how and why the suspender is in a relational state of disagreement with both the believer and the disbeliever about the very same proposition <p>. More specifically, the (...) paper first provides a characterisation of the norma- tive profile associated with the state of suspended judge- ment in terms of the set of normative commitments that it engenders in the context of inquiry. It then provides a characterisation of the notion of disagreement in terms the incompatibility between the sets of normative com- mitments characteristic of the three states in question— belief, disbelief, and suspension. (shrink)

A series of recent experimental studies have cast doubt on the existence of a traditional tension that aestheticians have noted in our aesthetic judgments and practices, viz. the problem of taste. The existence of the problem has been acknowledged since Hume and Kant, though not enough has been done to analyse it in depth. In this paper, we remedy this by proposing six possible conceptualizations of it. Drawing on our analysis of the problem of taste, we argue that the experimental (...) results in question are not a real challenge to its existence. By contrast, they provide empirical evidence in its support. (shrink)

In Truth and Objectivity, Crispin Wright argues that because truth is a distinctively normative property, it cannot be as metaphysically insubstantive as deflationists claim.1 This argument has been taken, together with the scope problem,2 as one of the main motivations for alethic pluralism.3 We offer a reconstruction of Wright’s Inflationary Argument (henceforth IA) aimed at highlighting what are the steps required to establish its inflationary conclusion. We argue that if a certain metaphysical and epistemological view of a given subject matter (...) is accepted, a local counterexample to IA can be constructed. We focus on the domain of basic taste and we develop two variants of a subjectivist and relativist metaphysics and epistemology that seems palatable in that domain. Although we undertake no commitment to this being the right metaphysical cum epistemological package for basic taste, we contend that if the metaphysics and the epistemology of basic taste are understood along these lines, they call for a truth property whose nature is not distinctively normative—contra what IA predicts. This result shows that the success of IA requires certain substantial metaphysical and epistemological principles and that, consequently, a proper assessment of IA cannot avoid taking a stance on the metaphysics and the epistemology of the domain where it is claimed to be successful. Although we conjecture that IA might succeed in other domains, in this paper we don’t take a stand on this issue. We conclude by briefly discussing the significance of this result for the debate on alethic pluralism. (shrink)

We provide a framework for understanding agnosticism. The framework accounts for the varieties of agnosticism while vindicating the unity of the phenomenon. This combination of unity and plurality is achieved by taking the varieties of agnosticism to be represented by several agnostic stances, all of which share a common core provided by what we call the minimal agnostic attitude. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the framework by showing how it can be applied to several philosophical debates. In particular, several philosophical (...) positions can be aptly conceived of as instances of agnosticism whilst retaining their differences and distinguishing features. (shrink)

In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to the underrepresentation, exclusion or outright discrimination experienced by women and members of other visible minority groups in academic philosophy. Much of this debate has focused on the state of contemporary Anglophone philosophy, which is dominated by the tradition of analytic philosophy. Moreover, there is growing interest in academia and society more generally for issues revolving around linguistic justice and linguistic discrimination (sometimes called ‘linguicism’ or ‘languagism’) (see e.g. Van Parijs 2011). Globalization (...) and the increasing adoption of English as global linguistic vehicle or lingua franca push these issues at the forefront of much of the world’s attention. The convergence of these two trends suggests the appropriateness of an analysis of the condition of non-native speakers of English in analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued that truth is a norm of judgement and have provided a variety of formulations of this general thesis. In this paper, I shall side with these philosophers and assume that truth is a norm of judgement. What I am primarily interested in here are two core questions concerning the judgement-truth norm: (i) what are the normative relationships between truth and judgement? And (ii) do these relationships vary or are they constant? I argue for a pluralist picture—what (...) I call Normative Alethic Pluralism (NAP)—according to which (i) there is more than one correct judgement-truth norm and (ii) the normative relationships between truth and judgement vary in relation to the subject matter of the judgement. By means of a comparative analysis of disagreement in three areas of the evaluative domain—refined aesthetics, basic taste and morality—I show that there is an important variability in the normative significance of disagreement—I call this the variability conjecture. By presenting a variation of Lynch’s scope problem for alethic monism, I argue that a monistic approach to the normative function of truth is unable to vindicate the conjecture. I then argue that normative alethic pluralism provides us with a promising model to account for it. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEcumenical Alethic Pluralism is a novel kind of alethic pluralism. It is ecumenical in that it widens the scope of alethic pluralism by allowing for a normatively deflated truth property alongside a variety of normatively robust truth properties. We establish EAP by showing how Wright’s Inflationary Arguments fail in the domain of taste, once a relativist treatment of the metaphysics and epistemology of that domain is endorsed. EAP is highly significant to current debates on the nature of truth insofar as (...) it involves a reconfiguration of the dialectic between deflationists and pluralists. (shrink)

In 1895 in the Project for a Scientific Psychology Freud tried to integrate psychology and neurology in order to develop a neuroscientific psychology. Since 1880 Freud made no distinction between psychology and physiology. His papers from the end of the 1880s to1890 were very clear on this scientific overlap: as with many of its contemporaries, Freud thought about psychology essentially as the physiology of the brain. Years later he had to surrender, realizing a technological delay, not capable to pursue its (...) ambitious aim, and until that moment psychoanalysis would have to use its more suitable clinical method. Also, he seemed skeptical about the phrenology drift, typical of that time, in which any psychological function needed to be located in its neuroanatomical area. He could not see the progresses of neurosciences and its fruitful dialogue with psychoanalysis, occurred also thanks to the improvements in the field of neuroimaging, which has made possible a remarkable advance in the knowledge of the mind-brain system and a better observation of the psychoanalytical theories. After years of investigations, deriving from research and clinical work of the last century, the discovery of neural networks, together with the free energy principle, we are observing under a new light the psychodynamic neuroscience in its exploration of the mind-brain system. In this narrative review we summarize the important developments of the psychodynamic neuroscience, with particular regard to the free energy principle, the resting state networks, especially the Default Mode Network in its link with the Self; finally we suggest a discussion by approaching the concept of Alpha Function, proposed by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, trying to speculate about the connection with neuroscience. (shrink)

The economic and social thinking of Latin America was enriched by the Latin American Development School (LDS). That is the name given in this essay to the contributions from distinguished social scientists who, during fifty years (1950-2000), articulated their ideas around the, so called, Center-P..

In this article, we explore the impact of non-epistemic factors, such as social identity and cultural biases, on the formation and revision of beliefs. This type of impact is evident in contexts of opinion polarisation where the acceptance of scientific theses by groups of non-experts is at stake. Im these contexts digital media and social networks often play a central role. To analyse the impact of non-epistemic factors from an epistemological perspective, we employ a non-ideal approach to epistemology that takes (...) into account some key non-epistemic factors through the concept of epistemic filter. By means of this concept we explain the selective acceptance of information, and we show how background assumptions and social values which are deeply rooted in an inquiring subject influence the selection and evaluation of evidence and sources of information. Through this non-ideal approach, we analyse the dynamics of scientific denialism, framing it as an epistemic phenomenon in which social and cultural influences shape and distort epistemic practices. We conclude that understanding these underlying mechanisms is crucial to addressing the challenges posed by misinformation and the deep social divisions that result from it. (shrink)

Currently, the autonomy of artificial systems, robotic systems in particular, is certainly one of the most debated issues, both from the perspective of technological development and its social impact and ethical repercussions. While theoretical considerations often focus on scenarios far beyond what can be concretely hypothesized from the current state of the art, the term autonomy is still used in a vague or too general way. This reduces the possibilities of a punctual analysis of such an important issue, thus leading (...) to often polarized positions. The intent of this paper is to clarify what is meant by artificial autonomy, and what are the prerequisites that can allow the attribution of this characteristic to a robotic system. Starting from some concrete examples, we will try to indicate a way towards artificial autonomy that can hold together the advantages of developing adaptive and versatile systems with the management of the inevitable problems that this technology poses both from the viewpoint of safety and ethics. Our proposal is that a real artificial autonomy, especially if expressed in the social context, can only be achieved through interdependence with other social actors, through continuous exchanges and interactions which, while allowing robots to explore the environment, guarantee the emergence of shared practices, behaviors, and ethical principles, which otherwise could not be imposed with a top-down approach, if not at the price of giving up the same artificial autonomy. (shrink)

I present a novel strategy to account for two thoughts concerning disagreements about taste: (i) that they need not involve any substantive fault (faultlessness); (ii) that the faultlessness of a contrary opinion can be coherently appreciated from within a committed perspective (parity). Under the assumption that judgments of taste are truth-apt and governed by the truth-norm, I argue that understanding how exactly truth is normative offers a strategy for accounting for both thoughts. I distinguish between different ways in which truth (...) governs judgment to substantiate the thesis that truth’s normative function varies according to the subject matter at issue. I then argue that truth’s normative guidance in the domain of taste is characteristically weak. I introduce an intuitive distinction between basic and refined taste, and show how this distinction affects questions of faultlessness and parity. Last, I discuss the idea of alethic suberogation in connection with disagreement about refined taste. (shrink)

Some time ago, the philosopher Luciano Floridi suggested that Western philosophy, and the mainstream contemporary approach to it traditionally called ‘analytic philosophy’, is in dire need of a reboot. The concern was that the discipline might be in a period of decadence. Analytic philosophy would be benefited by greater internationalization, wider and more transparent decision-making, and the reduction (as much as possible) of conflicts of interest as well as of its current habit of hiring and providing publication opportunities on the (...) basis of contacts, networking, and academic pedigree. If we are right, then we need a reconditioning of the institutional framework of analytic philosophy that adjusts it to the current global and interconnected world. (shrink)

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been a widespread affirmation of economic ideologies that conceive the market as an autonomous sphere of human practice, holding that market principles should be applied to human action at large. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the ascendance of market reason has been countered by calls for reforms of financial markets and for the consideration of moral values in economic practice. This book intervenes in these debates by showing how (...) neoliberal market practices engender new forms of religiosity, and how religiosity shapes economic actions. It reveals how religious movements and organizations have reacted to the increasing prominence of market reason in unpredictable, and sometimes counterintuitive, ways. Using a range of examples from different countries and religious traditions, the book illustrates the myriad ways in which religious and market moralities are closely imbricated in diverse global contexts. (shrink)

What happens when painting emancipates itself from all physical mediums, the piece of art disappears from the exposition site and it becomes immaterial, indiscernible within its surrounding space? What type of esthetic experience and embodied understanding of art is possible under these programmed and produced conditions, maybe dissimulated, and finally enunciated and affirmed next to and in place of that which presents itself with the title of art masterpiece? What type of description, definition and interpretation is necessary? What type of (...) phenomenology, pragmatic, rhetoric, and ontology is called upon? What type of percepts, of effects and affects, of appearance and apparatus, are put into play in this esthetic relation lacking an artistic object? When there is nothing to see and to touch, what living forms, what beliefs, what qualities are dealt with? Until this day, after more than 50 years, the “Exposition of Void” of Yves Klein doesn’t quit asking these and other questions on aesthetics and to the history of art. (shrink)

1. Ricerche informali -- 2. La verità trascendentale.

In the past two decades academic and research literature on “corruption” has flourished. During the same period organizations and initiatives fighting against corruption have also significantly expanded, turning “anti-corruption” into a new research subject. However, despite a few exceptions there is a division of labor between scholars who study corruption itself and those who study the global anti-corruption industry. Juxtaposing corruption’s local discourses and anti-corruption international practices, this article is an attempt to bring together these two intertwined research dimensions and (...) explore how an ethnographic approach might contribute to framing them together. Firstly, it describes how corruption in Romania is often conceptualized and explained in terms of national heritage, something related to old and recent cultural history, including traditional folklore. Secondly, it explores how anti-corruption works in practice, focusing on international legal cooperation projects monitoring the progress and shortcomings both prior to and post Romania’s accession to the European Union. Finally, revealing the articulations of these two apparently unrelated research fields, the article argues that corruption’s local explanations and the circular logic of auditing observed within the anti-corruption industry share a common developmental ideology mirroring the crypto-colonialist structure of power relations and dependency among European nation-states emerging out of the Cold War. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's philosophy is famous for being unusually rich. It ranges over technology, poetry, theology, history, and many other subjects. In this paper, I focus my attention on two topics which are particularly close to the hearts of analytic philosophers: logic and language. I show that Heidegger faces two different kinds of paradoxes: an ontic paradox and an ontological paradox. Moreover, for each one of these paradoxes, I give an overview of how both Heidegger and the philosophers who engage with (...) his thought have tried to overcome them by challenging either a certain account of language or the authority of logic in philosophical discourse. (shrink)