This review evaluates pros and cons of the schema theory as a general framework for expressing what Arbib et al. call “systems neuroscience.” We discuss the software/hardware duality of the schema concept and the relative neglect of the mechanical properties of muscles. We propose a computational alternative to the functional decomposition in terms of schemas.

Generalizing the notion that muscles are positional frames of reference, a high-dimensional muscle space is defined for multi-muscle systems with an embedded low-dimensional motor manifold of functional articulators. A central representation of such a manifold is proposed as computational body schema. The example of the jaw-tongue system is presented, discussing the relation of functional articulators with kinematic invariances and control problems.

In field computing a topologic organization of CFs is necessary to support sensorimotor planning. A simple model of cortical dynamics can exploit such topologic organization.

A deep investigation of proprioceptive processes is necessary to understand the relationship between sensory afferent inputs and motor outcomes. In this work, we investigate whether and how perception of wrist position is influenced by the direction along which the movement occurs. Most previous studies have tested Joint Position Sense through 1 degree of freedom wrist movements, such as flexion/extension or radial/ulnar deviation. However, the wrist joint has 3-DoF and many activities of daily living produce combined movements, requiring at least 2-DoF (...) wrist coordination. For this reason, in this study, target positions involved movement directions that combined wrist flexion or extension with radial or ulnar deviation. The chosen task was a robot-aided Joint Position Matching, in which blindfolded participants actively reproduced a previously passively assumed target joint configuration. The JPM performance of 20 healthy participants was quantified through measures of accuracy and precision, in terms of both perceived target direction and distance along each direction of movement. Twelve different directions of movement were selected and both hands tested. The left and right hand led to comparable results, both target extents and directions were differently perceived according to the target direction on the FE/RUD space. Moreover, during 2-DoF combined movements, subjects’ perception of directions was impaired when compared to 1-DoF target movements. In summary, our results showed that human perception of wrist position on the FE/RUD space is symmetric between hands but not isotropic among movement directions. (shrink)

Proprioception has a crucial role in promoting or hindering motor learning. In particular, an intact position sense strongly correlates with the chances of recovery after stroke. A great majority of neurological patients present both motor dysfunctions and impairments in kinesthesia, but traditional robot and virtual reality training techniques focus either in recovering motor functions or in assessing proprioceptive deficits. An open challenge is to implement effective and reliable tests and training protocols for proprioception that go beyond the mere position sense (...) evaluation and exploit the intrinsic bidirectionality of the kinesthetic sense, which refers to both sense of position and sense of movement. Modulated haptic interaction has a leading role in promoting sensorimotor integration and it is a natural way to enhance volitional effort. Therefore, we designed a preliminary clinical study to test a new proprioception-based motor training technique for augmenting kinesthetic awareness via haptic feedback. The feedback was provided by a robotic manipulandum and the test involved 7 chronic hemiparetic subjects over three weeks. The protocol included evaluation sessions, that consisted of a psychometric estimate of the subject’s kinesthetic sensation, and training sessions, in which the subject executed planar reaching movements in the absence of vision and under a minimally assistive haptic guidance made by sequences of graded force pulses. The bidirectional haptic interaction between the subject and the robot was optimally adapted to each participant in order to achieve a uniform task difficulty over the workspace. All the subjects consistently improved in the perceptual scores as a consequence of training. Moreover, they could minimize the level of haptic guidance in time. Results suggest that the proposed method is effective in enhancing kinesthetic acuity, but the level of impairment may affect the ability of subjects to retain their improvement in time. (shrink)

Léon Brunschvicg's contribution to philosophical thought in fin-de-siècle France receives full explication in the first English-language study on his work. Arguing that Brunschvicg is crucial to understanding the philosophical schools which took root in 20th-century France, Pietro Terzi locates Brunschvicg alongside his contemporary Henri Bergson, as well as the range of thinkers he taught and influenced, including Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Brunschvicg's deep engagement with debates concerning spiritualism and rationalism, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the role of mathematics in (...) philosophy made him the perfect supervisor for a whole host of nascent philosophical ideas which were forming in the work of his students. Terzi outlines Brunchvicg's defence of neo-Kantian judgement, historical analysis and the inextricability of the natural and humanist sciences to any rigorous system of philosophy, with wide-ranging implications for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

Les Méditations sur le bonheur (1763), dont le destin éditorial se mêle étroitement à celui des Délits et des peines de Beccaria (1764), inaugurent la carrière littéraire de Verri. Synthèse de sa formation intellectuelle nourrie de la philosophie politique et morale du XVIIIe siècle européen, de Locke à Helvétius, de Hutcheson à Rousseau, elles sont aussi un vivier d'idées et de thèmes qui vont forger l'identité de l'École de Milan, l'un des grands foyers italiens des Lumières. Ce petit traité offre (...) une leçon d'humanité mue par un idéal égalitaire. Assignant la quête du bonheur, fondée sur un travail d'analyse de soi et de connaissance des autres, comme objectif de la vie sociale, de la politique et de la législation, l'auteur expose les prémisses de sa pensée réformatrice et progressiste, qui traversa le siècle jusqu'aux lendemains de la Révolution. C'est l'avènement de l'économie politique comme science du bonheur public. (shrink)

La complessità della tradizione letteraria sui primi secoli della vita di Roma è ormai nota, e proverbiale è quella sulla biografia romulea, imperniata su informazioni ambigue e contrastanti che, tra luci e ombre, rendono affascinante lo studio della sua figura, fin dall’antichità. Non da meno il caso della sua scomparsa, che presenta due varianti principali: in effetti, se in una il primo sovrano di Roma era assunto in cielo tra gli dei, nell’altra era brutalmente smembrato dalla furia dei patres. Nel (...) presente contributo, che si colloca solo in coda a una lunga storia di studi storiografici, attraverso una prospettiva prettamente politica, si è cercato di comprendere le motivazioni sottostanti alla presenza di queste due, non solo diverse, ma diametralmente opposte tradizioni sulla scomparsa di Romolo. Il taglio politico conferito intende giustificare tale doppia esistenza partendo dallo sfruttamento del mito di Romolo all’interno dell’evoluzione e degli sconvolgimenti politici del I secolo a.C., divenendo oggetto centrale nel dibattito politico repubblicano: nella lotta tra le fazioni o negli scontri tra gli imperatores che dominarono la scena. (shrink)

This paper sets out to explore the relation between social argumentation and inner debate by taking into account suggestions from argumentation studies and from social and discursive psychology. It develops Dascal’s (2005) claim that there are metonymical and structural relations between the two realms of debate by substantiating it with data taken from international migrants’ inner debates at moments of difficult decisions. The data are drawn from the experience of migrating mothers who have to decide whether to go back or (...) to remain in their host country (the UK). I show that others are present in migrants’ multivoiced decisions in two important senses: first, inner debates can be reconstructed as critical discussions (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1984). Second, the locus from analogy has the special function of allowing the comparison between the migrant’s experience and someone else’s experience. (shrink)

This paper sets out to explore the relation between social argumentation and inner debate by taking into account suggestions from argumentation studies and from social and discursive psychology. It develops Dascal’s claim that there are metonymical and structural relations between the two realms of debate by substantiating it with data taken from international migrants’ inner debates at moments of difficult decisions. The data are drawn from the experience of migrating mothers who have to decide whether to go back or to (...) remain in their host country. I show that others are present in migrants’ multivoiced decisions in two important senses: first, inner debates can be reconstructed as critical discussions. Second, the locus from analogy has the special function of allowing the comparison between the migrant’s experience and someone else’s experience. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments, generally referred to as argument scheme. After outlining our approach, denominated Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT, see Rigotti and Greco Morasso 2006, 2009; Rigotti 2006, 2008, 2009), we compare it to other modern and contemporary approaches, to eventually illustrate some advantages offered by it. In spite of the evident connection with the tradition of topics, emerging also from AMT’s denomination, its involvement in the contemporary dialogue on argument schemes should not (...) be overlooked. The model builds in particular on the theoretical and methodological perspective of pragma-dialectics in its extended version, reconciling dialectic and rhetoric; nevertheless, it also takes into account numerous other contributions to the study of argument schemes. Aiming at a representation of argument schemes able to monitor the inferential cohesion and completeness of arguments, AMT focuses on two components of argument scheme that could be distinguished, readapting pragma-dialectical terms, as procedural and material respectively. The procedural component is based on the semantic-ontological structure, which generates the inferential connection from which the logical form of the argument is derived. The material component integrates into the argument scheme the implicit and explicit premises bound to the contextual common ground (Rigotti 2006). In this paper, the comparison of the AMT to other approaches focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments and not on the typologies of argument schemes and on the principles they are based on, which the authors intend to tackle in a further paper. (shrink)

This paper aims at clarifying the ontology of conflict as a preliminary for constructing a conflict mapping guide. After recalling the main definitions elaborated in different disciplines, the meaning of conflict is elicited through semantic analysis based on corpus evidence. Two fundamental meanings emerge: conflict as an interpersonal hostility between two or more human subjects, and conflict as a propositional incompatibility. These two states of affairs are significantly related, because the latter tends to generate the former whenever the incompatible positions (...) are embodied by as many parties who feel personally questioned. The semantic analysis allows to sketch the ontology of the conflictual situation that can serve to generate a conflict mapping guide, and to face several crucial aspects that are relevant both to the study and to the management of conflicts. In the former perspective, it allows for a comparison of the situation of interpersonal conflict with the seemingly similar process of controversy. (shrink)

By presenting a case study based on the argumentative analysis of news in the press, this article introduces and discusses strategic manoeuvring with contextual frames. Drawing on the linguistic notion of frame, I introduce the concept of contextual frame to refer to the news context, that is, the background against which a certain event is presented as a piece of news. I argue that newspapers and journalists make use of contextual frames in the apparently neutral genre of news reporting to (...) propose specific interpretations of the facts at issue, which become the basis for explicit comments and editorials. To show how this works, I investigate in detail a case of newspaper coverage of a complex episode using the pragma-dialectical notion of strategic manoeuvring and the Argumentum Model of Topics to analyse argument schemes. I show that, in the use of contextual frames, there is a prominent relation between presentational devices and topical potential; contextual frames provide the implicit material premises which are at the basis of argumentations through which newspapers interpret and comment on the news. (shrink)

Reciprocal libertarianism is a version of left-wing libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian distribution of resources according to reciprocity. In this paper, I show that reciprocal libertarianism is a coherent and appealing view. I discuss how reciprocal libertarians can handle conflicts between self-ownership and reciprocity, and I show that reciprocal libertarianism can be realised in a framework of individual ownership of external resources or in a socialist scheme of common ownership (libertarian socialism). I also compare reciprocal libertarianism with left-libertarian (...) approaches: I argue that a reciprocity-sensitive version of left-libertarianism (reciprocal left-libertarianism) is coherent and morally superior to traditional left-libertarianism, on grounds of incorporating a distinctively solidaristic and recognition-oriented aspect of equality. The policy implications of reciprocal libertarianism will differ depending on which rights people can have over external resources, but all reciprocal libertarian views acknowledge the existence of social rights that people have as co-operators. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ denunciation of the Myth of the Given was meant to clarify, against empiricism, that perceptual episodes alone are insufficient to ground and justify perceptual knowledge. Sellars showed that in order to accomplish such epistemic tasks, more resources and capacities, such as those involved in using concepts, are needed. Perceptual knowledge belongs to the space of reasons and not to an independent realm of experience. Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently presented the Hard Problem of Content as an (...) ensemble of reasons against naturalistic accounts of content. In a nutshell, it states that covariance relations—even though they are naturalistically acceptable explanatory resources—do not constitute content. The authors exploit this move in order to promote their preferred radical enactivist and anti-representationalist option, according to which, basic minds—the lower stratum of cognition—do not involve content. Although it is controversial to argue that the Hard Problem of Content effectively dismisses naturalistic theories of representation, a central aspect of it—the idea that information as covariance does not suffice to explain content—finds support among the defenders of classical cognitive representationalism, such as Marcin Miłkowski. This support—together with the acknowledgment this remark about covariance is a point already made by Sellars in his criticism of the Myth of the Given—has a number of interesting implications. Not only is it of interest for the debates about representationalism in cognitive science, where it can be understood as an anticipatory move, but it also offers some clues and insights for reconsidering some issues along Sellarsian lines—a conflation between two concepts of representation that is often assumed in cognitive science, a distinction between two types of relevant normativities, and a reconsideration of the naturalism involved in such explanations. (shrink)

Léon Brunschvicg's contribution to philosophical thought in fin-de-siècle France receives full explication in the first English-language study on his work. Arguing that Brunschvicg is crucial to understanding the philosophical schools which took root in 20th-century France, Pietro Terzi locates Brunschvicg alongside his contemporary Henri Bergson, as well as the range of thinkers he taught and influenced, including Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Brunschvicg's deep engagement with debates concerning spiritualism and rationalism, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the role of mathematics in (...) philosophy made him the perfect supervisor for a whole host of nascent philosophical ideas which were forming in the work of his students. Terzi outlines Brunchvicg's defence of neo-Kantian judgement, historical analysis and the inextricability of the natural and humanist sciences to any rigorous system of philosophy, with wide-ranging implications for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

This book is an investigation of the ideological dimensions of the disciplinary discourses on science in line with the scholarly tradition of historical epistemology. It offers a programmatic treatment of the political-epistemological problematic along three entangled lines of inquiry: socio-historical, epistemological and historiographical. The book aims for a meta-level integration of the existing scholarship on the social and cultural history of science in order to consider the ways in which struggles for hegemony have constantly informed scientific discourses. This problematic is (...) of primary relevance for scholars in Science Studies, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, but would also be relevant for anybody interested in scientific culture and political theory. (shrink)

Orthodox decision theory is fanatical in the way it treats small probabilities of enormous value, if unbounded utility functions are allowed. Some have suggested a fix, Nicolausian discounting, according to which outcomes with small enough probabilities should be ignored when making decisions. However, there are lotteries involving only small-probability outcomes, none of which should intuitively be ignored. So the Nicolausian discounter needs a procedure for distinguishing the problematic cases of small-probability outcomes from the unproblematic ones. In this paper, I present (...) a dilemma for Nicolausian discounting: the view must be coupled either with a procedure that delivers fanatical verdicts of its own, as bad as those of orthodox decision theory, or with one that entails intransitive cyclic preferences. (shrink)

L’articolo intende proporre una lettura del _Breve trattato sulle cause che possono far abbondare li regni d’oro e d’argento_ di Antonio Serra incentrata su una storia delle arti di governo. Ricostruendo il dibattito napoletano sulle cause della crisi monetaria degli inizi del XVII secolo e focalizzando l’attenzione sul problema delle pratiche di governo della moneta, l’obiettivo del saggio è quello di sottrarre il trattato di Serra all’ipoteca di una retrospettiva sulla scienza economica per inquadrarlo all’interno dei problemi politici del proprio (...) tempo. (shrink)

As consumers represent a key actor for the success of businesses implementing socially responsible strategies, companies need to gain further insights on the determinants of responsible behaviors. In this study, we provide a contribution to the ongoing debate on responsible consumers by means of an integrative literature review, which analyzes a set of competing models mainly from social psychology and marketing. Stemming from this preliminary analysis of the existing evidence, we develop a new conceptual model, that is, a framework based (...) on (i) a flexible setting of the boundaries of analysis, (ii) a broader lens taking into account interrelations across behaviors, and (iii) a dynamic approach. The framework, for which an exemplary use is illustrated, represents the basis for advancing a rich agenda for future research. The latter is aimed at overcoming current criticalities in responsible consumer research, and it develops around the need for an integrative, dynamic, and cross-cultural approach on the one hand, and the elaboration of new perspectives on single antecedents, on the other. (shrink)

This paper explores the trajectories of food and how culinary practices evolve over time in relation to a migrant’s experience. Our focus is on international mothers adjusting to life in London. We identify a connection between eating practices and evolving identities. In line with a stream of research in cultural psychology, we consider food as a symbolic resource mobilized by migrants to provide some material support to their processes of adaptation to a new country. In this respect, we introduce the (...) notion of malleable symbolic resource in order to highlight the ductility of food in relation to an individual’s evolving personal culture. On this basis, we propose to describe ductile trajectories of food in relation to three important steps: where food and eating practices come from; with whom food is consumed and for what goal it is chosen. (shrink)

The paper provides both a description of conspiracy beliefs and an insight into their cultural significance. On one side, it highlights their specific formal features, on the other, and this constitutes its peculiarity in the recent literature on the topic, it considers them within the broader genre of general conceptual beliefs, whose main characteristics are weak methodology and logical structure, strong affective and dispositional constraints, epistemic closure and mauvaise foi, and whose main function is practical and self-representative (not epistemic). The (...) paper also claims that political theory and social sciences had some influence in legitimizing certain ideas and stereotypes that are exacerbated in conspiracy beliefs, while other te(le)ological conceptions, such as finalism and providence, may be an important source of ideas that turn out to be widely spread in contemporary criticism towards those same beliefs. (shrink)

The knowledge of truth, in Plato, is an experience that calls for conversion of the soul (μεταστροφή, περιστροφή). The basic feature of this experience consists in some sort of connection, which is constantly at work, between rational arguments and their non-rational conditions, briefly, lógos and páthos. How does this connection show up in Plato? Its crucial importance emerges many times at both narrative (récit) and theoretical level. In the three parts of my contribution, I show how logos-pathos intertwines with Plato's (...) notion of conversion considered as a double-sided phenomenon, as both "process" of moral education and "noetic event". (shrink)

This paper considers the complex relation between migrants’ interest in their host country and their consequent civic or social engagement in the framework of processes of transition following the rupture of international migration (cf. Zittoun 2006). In phases of transition, migrants live processes of identity definition, sense-making of the situation and learning new knowledge and social, cognitive and practical skills. I argue that learning may be considered a precondition for a migrant’s interest and engagement with the host country culture and (...) institutions. In this connection, I use Eade’s (2007) notion of migration strategy to describe migrant profiles based on learning. My case is supported by a qualitative analysis of two paradigmatic case studies. (shrink)

The sequence-in/sequence-out cerebellar machinery is considered from the computational point of view. We outline a learning framework which discriminates short-term from long-term learning and is able to explain single-trial adaptation to unexpected loads.

Fitts' law and the [Delta][Lambda] model are theories of motor control because they are limited to the kinematic aspects of movement and do not capture its essential dynamic nature. The internal source of that determines the speed/accuracy trade-off can be associated with the partial compensation of movement-generated forces.