We present an account of semantics that is not construed as a mapping of language to the world but rather as a mapping between individual meaning spaces. The meanings of linguistic entities are established via a “meeting of minds.” The concepts in the minds of communicating individuals are modeled as convex regions in conceptual spaces. We outline a mathematical framework, based on fixpoints in continuous mappings between conceptual spaces, that can be used to model such a semantics. If concepts are (...) convex, it will in general be possible for interactors to agree on joint meaning even if they start out from different representational spaces. Language is discrete, while mental representations tend to be continuous—posing a seeming paradox. We show that the convexity assumption allows us to address this problem. Using examples, we further show that our approach helps explain the semantic processes involved in the composition of expressions. (shrink)

Replying to Queen Elizabeth II who in November 2008 asked why so few economists had warned about the emerging financial crisis, a group of eminent economists of the British Academy, claimed that while this failure had many causes, the most important was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, to understand the risks to the system as a whole. The paper suggests that this failure is due also to the still heavy influence of the paradigm of (...) rational expectations, that did not provide the intellectual tools to grasp the signs of the impending financial crisis. The paper explores the development of Muth’s rational expectations hypothesis and the parallel development of Simon’s idea of bounded rationality—two opposite views about economic behavior that originated in the same context, during the early 1960s at Carnegie Mellon. It is shown that the latter, while marginalized for decades from the core economic ideas, generated a wide development in cognitive psychology, problem solving and experimental economics that grew up in the last decades and now permit a more profound analysis of human behavior in economic and organizational contexts, that can be the seed of a new thinking in economics. The challenge for economists is to use this new toolbox to incorporate in their models real human behaviors, getting out from the economy of wishful thinking. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 143-162, January 2022.

Decision-making assisted by algorithms developed by machine learning is increasingly determining our lives. Unfortunately, full opacity about the process is the norm. Would transparency contribute to restoring accountability for such systems as is often maintained? Several objections to full transparency are examined: the loss of privacy when datasets become public, the perverse effects of disclosure of the very algorithms themselves, the potential loss of companies’ competitive edge, and the limited gains in answerability to be expected since sophisticated algorithms usually are (...) inherently opaque. It is concluded that, at least presently, full transparency for oversight bodies alone is the only feasible option; extending it to the public at large is normally not advisable. Moreover, it is argued that algorithmic decisions preferably should become more understandable; to that effect, the models of machine learning to be employed should either be interpreted ex post or be interpretable by design ex ante. (shrink)

A collection of five essays published previously. Partial contents.

The Bible is the Word of God as expressed in human language. The goal of the present article is to develop a hermeneutical approach based in the communicative function of language. It first takes up the constitutive elements of the communicative event and the different patterns of representation. It then focuses in the exact operative function of language so as to clarify the relation between the semantic content and its pragmatic usage. Finally, it analyzes the specific characteristic of a biblical (...) text to apply the above communicative process to the analytical interpretation of a literary text. (shrink)

This contribution offers a reflection on the death penalty in the light of OT Law that enforced and sanctioned it only within the scope of the biblical understanding of justice. Starting therefore with the Torah and moving through the Prophets into the New Testament, the reader is called to question the logic behind retributive justice, as it attempts to re-establish the desecrated order. Retributive justice does so by means of a 'just' punishment, by giving everyone one's due, and through the (...) emendation of the culprit. The cross, though, goes well beyond the understanding of God as symmetry and the concept of a 'matching' justice. In Christ's death, the first place cannot be accorded to an order that needs to be set right again; still less can it be given to the suppression of bad subjects. That first place must belong to the human person who cries out for redemption and asks to be re-created in God's image. This would amount to nothing less than a restitutio principii. (shrink)

Cooperatives are facing the challenge to be competitive in the market, without losing their traditional values of mutuality and democracy. To do that, they need to re-construct open and participative dialogue with their employees and members based on more democratic forms of communication and engagement. From this point of view, the measurement and communication of sustainability aspects may allow a dialogue to be mobilized with shareholders and stakeholders without losing the attention on competitive factors. Based on these premises, the article (...) analyses the experience of a 5-year action research project , carried out within Unicoop Tirreno, an Italian consumers' cooperative, and aimed to implement different tools for sustainability accounting and to embrace a more open dialogue with stakeholders, in particular with employees and members. In this process of change, the tools implemented for sustainability accounting played a key role in supporting the cooperative to reinterpret its own values and in stimulating a new and participative management approach. The results indicate a virtuous circle between the management and measurement of cooperative principles and the management and measurement of sustainability issues. (shrink)

Stoicism Stoicism originated as a Hellenistic philosophy, founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium, c. 300 B.C.E. It was influenced by Socrates and the Cynics, and it engaged in vigorous debates with the Skeptics, the Academics, and the Epicureans. It moved to Rome where it flourished during the period of the Empire, … Continue reading Stoicism →.

Integrated assessment models play a major role in the science and policy of climate change. Similarly to other widely used computational tools for addressing socially relevant problems, IAMs need to account for the key uncertainties characterizing processes and socio-economic responses. In the case of climate change, these are particularly complex given the very long-term nature of climate and the deep uncertainty characterizing technological and human systems. Here we draw from philosophical discussion of mathematical modeling of social problems and review the (...) role of uncertainty in climate-economic modeling. In agreement with the literature, we highlight the crucial role of epistemic uncertainty in IAMs. We posit that the normative components of models, more than the physical and socio-techno-economic ones, are the most fraught by uncertainty and yet the least understood. We suggest a research agenda to explore uncertainties of evaluation frameworks, transcending the current implicit normativity of IAMs. (shrink)

Sewall Wright introduced the metaphor of evolution on “adaptive landscapes” in a pair of papers published in 1931 and 1932. The metaphor has been one of the most influential in modern evolutionary biology, although recent theoretical advancements show that it is deeply flawed and may have actually created research questions that are not, in fact, fecund. In this paper I examine in detail what Wright actually said in the 1932 paper, as well as what he thought of the matter at (...) the very end of his career, in 1988. While the metaphor is flawed, some of the problems which Wright was attempting to address are still with us today, and are in the process of being reformulated as part of a forthcoming Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the tendency to view the extension of the class of social actors, which stems from the process of democratization of data, as also implying the extension of the class of the political actors involved in the process of governance of the Information Society. The paper argues that social actors can upgrade to political actors once they become real interlocutors, namely political actors that can participate in the formation of the political discourse and that this can happen only (...) once they are able to combine, to a greater or lesser degree, the reduction of information asymmetries with the reduction of power differentials. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to focus the function of women in Aristophanes’ theatre and in Plato’s book V of the Republic, in an attempt to compare the different strategies adopted by these two authors in staging the female subject on the scene of their respective writings. This enquiry involves raising some fundamental questions such as : is the world of women, evoked by Aristophanes in his dramas and by Plato in his dialogues, a simple metaphor and a mere (...) instrument, if not an utopian mirage, of political theorizing? If this is not the case, what is the real and practical importance of women within the models of society and collective life outlined by Aristophanes and Plato? Do Aristophanes and Plato share a same perspective about the role of women in their hypothetical ideal cities? If not, what are the differences between Aristophanes’ and Plato’s views on this matter? (shrink)

A socio-cognitive approach to trust can help us envisage a notion of networked trust for multi-agent systems (MAS) based on different interacting agents. In this framework, the issue is to evaluate whether or not a socio-cognitive analysis of trust can apply to the interactions between human and autonomous agents. Two main arguments support two alternative hypothesis; one suggests that only reliance applies to artificial agents, because predictability of agents’ digital interaction is viewed as an absolute value and human relation is (...) judged to be a necessary requirement for trust. The other suggests that trust may apply to autonomous agents because predictability of agents’ interaction is viewed only as a relative value since the digital normativity that grows out of the communication process between interacting agents in MAS has always deal with some unpredictable outcomes (_reduction of uncertainty_). Furthermore, human touch is not judged to be a necessary requirement for trust. In this perspective, a diverse notion of trust is elaborated, as trust is no longer conceived only as a relation between interacting agents but, rather, as a relation between cognitive states of control and lack of control (_double bind_). (shrink)

Identification is a primary need of societies. It is even more central in law enforcement. In the history of crime, a dialectics takes place between felonious attempts at concealing, disguising, or forging identities and societal efforts at unmasking the impostures. Semiotics offers specialistic skills at studying the signs of societal detection and identification, including those of forensics and criminology. In human history, no sign more than the face is attached a value of personal identity. Yet, modern forensics realizes that the (...) face can mislead and, inspired by eastern models, adopts fingerprinting. In the digital era, however, fingerprinting first goes digital, then it is increasingly replaced by facial recognition. The face is back in digital AI forensics, together with a tangle of sociocultural biases. Semiotics can play a key role in studying their surreptitious influence. (shrink)

Lettura prospettica di un caposaldo del pensiero hobbesiano: il sorgere del rapporto tra l'uomo ed il potere, tra la naturale condizione umana e la nozione di civiltà, attraverso due frammenti particolarmente rappresentativi della concezione hobbesiana del passaggio dallo stato di natura alla civiltà: il tredicesimo capitolo del Leviathan, sulla condizione naturale dell'uomo, ed il quinto capitolo, sulle cause ed origini della civitas, del De cive, giacché la mera esistenza dell'uomo ed il suo riconoscimento di una legge naturale, a giudizio di (...) Hobbes, non implica affatto necessariamente una qualsiasi forma consolidata di organizzazione sociale. Sebbene il De cive (pubblicato in latino nel 1642 e, in inglese, nel 1651) preceda cronologicamente il Leviathan (pubblicato, viceversa, dapprima in inglese, nel 1651, poi in latino, nel 1668), nell'ordine logico dell'esposizione qui presentata, il brano del Leviathan può essere considerato propedeutico al quinto capitolo del De cive, delineandone i presupposti, segnatamente la condizione di continuo pericolo per tutti causata dallo stato generale di reciproca guerra, che costituisce forse l'aspetto più noto (e frainteso) del pensiero hobbesiano. Per una migliore comprensione dei testi e delle differenti (spesso opposte) interpretazioni cui hanno dato vita, si è ritenuto di proporre, per quanto concerne i brani di Hobbes, tanto la loro traduzione in lingua italiana quanto le stesure originali in latino e inglese, presentate con i testi a fronte; tale scelta fornisce l'opportunità di osservare l'accurata scelta di alcuni dei vocaboli chiave della filosofia di Hobbes, la cui trasposizione da una lingua all'altra è stata spesso causa di fraintendimenti o volgarizzazioni in tutto o in parte ingiustificate. Allo scopo di offrire una più completa prospettiva del pensiero hobbesiano delineato nei brani selezionati, si è ritenuto di affiancare ad essi dei frammenti di interpreti novecenteschi (con delle sintetiche schede bio-bibliografiche) di alcuni concetti formulati da Hobbes e, segnatamente, di F. Tönnies, M. Horkheimer, L. Strauss, C. Schmitt, T. Parsons, N. Bobbio, H. Warrender. (shrink)

This article examines the place of emotion in art and religion and the place of both in civilization. Art lies at the 'vanishing point of reason', at the point where reason gives way to emotion. This raises the question of how civilization addresses the non-rational, emotional, superstitious aspects of life. In particular, is modern civilization lacking in the vital warmth which can only come from the life of the emotions and which is essential to its continued existence and vitality? Ending (...) with a discussion of Collingwood's interpretation of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, it concludes by arguing that the role of aesthetic experience, together with religion and metaphysics, is of vital service to civilization through its role in overcoming the corruption of consciousness. (shrink)

In an appendix to his 1919 essay on “Croce’s Aesthetic,” Bosanquet criticises Croce’s conception of the ‘death of art’ in Hegel.

The analysis of Hannah Arendt's Socrate opens up the possibility of a fruitful rethinking of the sense and way of conceiving philosophy with children. A way that in this proposal is defined as "Utopian", since it intends to resume, with the Socratic lesson, just how much remains in it open, undetermined, capable of reviving with enchantment in the living of the orality of a philosophical dialogue- absolutely unprecedented and unpredictable - such as that with children. The space given to the (...) unexpected, to listening, to free divergence, then becomes radical, comes to be a paradoxical foundation of a "methodology" that cannot be captured in structured schemes and paths, since it remains open to the "utopian" space of philosophizing. The comparison with Arendt is therefore interleaved, through references to other readings that are contemporary of the Socratic lesson, with the experience lived of the author, who has been leading for years philosophy workshops with primary school children. Of course, Socrates has never been and never wanted to act as a "master": his conducting the dialogue, although always being asymmetric, is aimed at bringing the interlocutor on his line of reasoning and never the opposite, has never had as end the teaching of some doctrine. How much, rather, to lead the interlocutor from the presumed certainty to radical uncertainty, from opinion to doubt, from affirmation to aporia. Thiswe must authentically experiment, before anything else, when we place ourselves inlistening to children's questions, when we try to dialogue with them, to "do philosophy", to "think together". (shrink)

The practice of joint fantasizing concerns interacting participants’ collective construction of imaginary realities with internal consistency and coherence. Based on a corpus of conversations held by an informal Italian prayer community of elderly Catholic women, this contribution aims to show that joint fantasizing is not necessarily a humorous activity and is embedded in the participants’ social and personal background. The analysis also indicates that through joint fantasizing the participants conceptualize themselves as victims and idealized opponents of the unfair present and (...) past societies. Framing joint fantasizing as a cross-contextual activity of social criticism allows us to understand that the participants use this interactional practice as an activity endowed with moral suffering and responsibility. This rhetorical seriousness contrasts with other studies in which joint fantasies are generally connected with playful, jocular and laughable practices. (shrink)