In this paper, I want to deal with the problem of how to find an adequate context of interpretation for indexical sentences that enables one to account for the intuitive truth-conditional content which some apparently puzzling indexical sentences like “I am not here now” as well as other such sentences contextually have. In this respect, I will pursue a fictionalist line. This line allows for shifts in interpretation contexts and urges that such shifts are governed by pretense, which has to (...) be understood in terms of socially shared make-believe games. By appealing to pretense so conceived, I will show that the fictionalist perspective is halfway between an intentionalist perspective, according to which the above indexical sentences have to be interpreted in a shifted intended context, (this perspective is primarily defined by Predelli 1998, Analysis 58, 107; Mind and Language 13, 400) and a conventionalist perspective, according to which indexical reference shifts in accordance with a conventional setting. (For this perspective, cf. Corazza et al. 2002, Philosophical Studies 107, See also Corazza 2004, Reflecting the Mind: Indexicality and Quasi-Indexicality, Oxford University Press). Finally, I will claim that the fictionalist analysis of cases of non-ordinary uses of indexicals like “here” and “now” can be retained in face of a new alternative analysis of those cases in terms of an ‘unbound anaphora’ – theory (cf. Corazza 2004, Synthese 138, 145). (shrink)

In this paper, I will first of all claim that once one takes proper names as indexicals of a particular sort, indexinames for short, one may account for some tensions that affect our desiderata regarding the use of such names in sentences directly or indirectly involving fiction. According to my proposal, a proper name “N.N.” is an indexical whose character is roughly expressed by the description “the individual called ‘N.N.’ (in context)”, where this description means “the individual one’s interlocutor’s attention (...) is called to by means of ‘N.N.’ (in context)”. This character is a partial function that maps narrow contexts onto referents. Such contexts are enriched narrow contexts, for they also include an ‘acquisition’ parameter, i.e., a parameter filled by a naming practice constituted by a dubbing, which consists in calling via the name one’s interlocutor’s attention to something (if any), and usually also by a certain transmission chain. I will also claim that such a proposal works independently of one’s ontological stance on fictional entities, that is, independently of whether one believes either that there are or that there are no such entities. Moreover, I will claim that such a proposal is better than similar indexicalist proposals such as the one put forward by Tiedke (2011), Finally, I will try to show how this proposal can deal with some objections one may raise against an indexicalist treatment of proper names. (shrink)

This is the first monograph to develop a hermeneutic approach to the digital--as both a technological milieu and a cultural phenomenon. While philosophical in its orientation, the book covers a wide body of literature across science and technology studies, media studies, digital humanities, digital sociology, cognitive science, and the study of artificial intelligence. In the first part of the book, the author formulates an epistemological thesis according to which the "virtual never ended." Although the frontiers between the real and the (...) virtual are certainly more porous today, they still exist and endure. In the book's second part, the author offers an ontological reflection on emerging digital technologies as "imaginative machines." He introduces the concept of emagination, arguing that human schematizations are always externalized into technologies, and that human imagination has its analog in the digital dynamics of articulation between databases and algorithms. The author takes an ethical and political stance in the concluding chapter. He resorts to the notion of "digital habitus" for claiming that within the digital we are repeatedly being reconducted to an oversimplified image and understanding of ourselves. Digital Hermeneutics will be of interest to scholars across a wide range of disciplines, including those working on philosophy of technology, hermeneutics, science and technology studies, media studies, and the digital humanities. (shrink)

Some people have stressed that there is a close analogy between meaning experiences, i.e., experiences as of understanding concerning linguistic expressions, and seeing-in experiences, i.e., pictorial experiences of discerning a certain item – what a certain picture presents, viz. the picture’s subject – in another item – the picture’s vehicle, the picture’s physical basis. Both can be seen as fusion experiences, in the minimal sense that they are experiential wholes made up of different aspects. Actually, two important similarities between such (...) experiences may lead one to think that they are experiences of the same type. In this paper, however, I will try to show that notwithstanding such similarities, these experiences are typologically different. For there are two dissimilarities between such experiences that are more relevant on this typological concern than their similarities. Indeed, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are first of all recognitional experiences of a sort that makes them perceptual experiences as well. Moreover, again unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are fusion experiences in the substantial sense that the experiential whole is more than the sum of its experiential parts taken in isolation, for when such parts figure in that whole, they interact with each other. In a nutshell, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are proper fusion experiences. (shrink)

In this essay, I defend a Wollheimian account of a twofold picture perception. While I agree with Wollheim’s objectors that a picture involves three layers that qualify a picture in its complexity -- its vehicle, what is seen in it, and its subject --, I argue that the third layer does not involve perception, even indirectly: what is seen in a picture constrains its subject to be a subject of a certain kind, yet it does not force the latter to (...) be pictorially perceived, not even indirectly. So, even if a picture is three-layered, pictorial experience remains a twofold experience, as Wollheim claimed. Neither the proponents of threefoldness nor Wollheim himself, however, have convincingly explained how the experience really is a perceptual experience. My Wollheimian account thus aims to reconceive the pictorial experience in properly perceptual terms. (shrink)

In this paper, I will claim that fictional works apparently about utterly immigrant objects, i.e., real individuals imported in fiction from reality, are instead about fictional individuals that intentionally resemble those real individuals in a significant manner: fictional surrogates of such individuals. Since I also share the realists’ conviction that the remaining fictional works concern native characters, i.e., full-fledged fictional individuals that originate in fiction itself, I will here defend a hyperrealist position according to which fictional works only concern fictional (...) individuals. (shrink)

According to Crane’s schematicity thesis (ST) about intentional objects, intentionalia have no particular metaphysical nature qua thought-of entities; moreover, the real metaphysical nature of intentionalia is various, insofar as it is settled independently of the fact that intentionalia are targets of one’s thought. As I will point out, ST has the ontological consequence that the intentionalia that really belong to the general inventory of what there is, the overall domain, are those that fall under a good metaphysical kind, i.e., a (...) kind such that its members figure (for independent reasons) in such an inventory. Negatively put, if there are no things of a certain metaphysical kind, thoughts about things of that kind are not really committed to such things. Pace Crane, however, this does not mean that the intentionalia that are really there are only those that exist. For existence, qua first-order property, is no metaphysical kind. Thus, there may really be intentionalia that do not exist, provided that they belong to good metaphysical kinds. (shrink)

That we can learn something from literature, as cognitivists claim, seems to be a commonplace. However, when one considers matters more deeply, it turns out to be a problematic claim. In this paper, by focusing on general revelatory facts about the world and the human spirit, I hold that the cognitivist claim can be vindicated if one takes it as follows. We do not learn such facts from literature, if by “literature” one means the truth-conditional contents that one may ascribe (...) to textual sentences in their fictional use, i.e., in the use in which one makes believe that things unfold in a certain way. What we improperly call learning from literature amounts to knowing actually true conversational implicatures concerning the above facts as meant by literary authors. So, in one and the same shot, we learn both a general revelatory fact and the fact that such a fact is meant via a true conversational implicature by an author. The author draws that implicature from the different truth-conditional content a sentence possesses when the sentence is interpreted in a fictional context, meant as Kaplan’s (1989) narrow context, i.e., a set of circumstantial parameters (agent, space, time, and world). (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Esta experiência interdisciplinar buscou como desafio discutir entre adolescentes de uma escola pública do Município de Vila Velha/ES o conceito de patrimônio cultural e, a partir desse conceito, reconhecer os bens materiais e imateriais formadores do patrimônio daquele município. O trabalho de campo resultou na criação estética coletiva de uma leitura do Convento da Penha, que foi retratado pela técnica de mosaico em papel. A obra encontra-se em exposição permanente no hall da escola (...) denominada Unidade Municipal de Ensino Fundamental” Profa. Nair Dias Barbosa”, situada em Vila Velha – ES. Palavras chave: Convento da Penha. Lugares de memória. Identidade Cultural. (shrink)

The fierce debates surrounding the 'emergence' of Muslim communities in Europe ensued in the resurgence of nationalism. The current article introduces an original criticism to the ongoing debates surrounding the return of Europe's national pride. This article suggests that Muslim demands for freedom of religion that were founded in Islamic theological perspectives, have catalyzed the restriction of liberal universalistic perspectives to such freedoms. In this study I present how such demands facilitated the advancement of a newly crafted liberal form of (...) nationalism, best identified in Europe's progressing limitation of the right of freedom of religion in various European nations. (shrink)

The rise of regional identities in Europe is a process largely welcomed by liberals and especially applauded by radical democratic and postcolonial theorists. Yet this trend towards post-nation-state identity is not only attractive to democratic and postcolonial theories, but is also an integral part of current neo-fascist ideologies. This article examines the intellectual origins of rightwing ethnoregionalism and the idea of ‘exclusionist multiculturalism’ through the works of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Alain de Benoist. It also compares the idea of (...) exclusionist ‘regional’ multiculturalism with liberal multiculturalism and defends a democratic, civic republicanism as an alternative to both. (shrink)

In this paper, I will defend the claim that there are three existence properties: the second-order property of being instantiated, a substantive first-order property (or better a group of such properties) and a formal, hence universal, first-order property. I will first try to show what these properties are and why we need all of them for ontological purposes. Moreover, I will try to show why a Meinong-like option that positively endorses both the former and the latter first-order property is the (...) correct view in ontology. Finally, I will add some methodological remarks as to why this debate has to be articulated from the point of view of reality, i.e., by speaking of properties, rather than from the point of view of language, i.e., by speaking of predicates (for such properties). (shrink)

In this paper, against a new imagination-based account defended by Anna Ichino in some recent works, I defend the intuitive and traditional idea that so-called religious beliefs are indeed those doxastic attitudes that they are traditionally taken to be, i.e., bona fide beliefs. Yet I take that the objects of such beliefs amount to be different from what religious believers consciously take them to be; namely, they are mythological characters, a species of fictional characters – namely, fictional characters not consciously (...) recognized as such – instead of being concrete individuals possibly endowed with supernatural powers. Yet religious believers also unconsciously recognize the fictional nature of religious objects of belief as mythological characters, as their behavior ultimately shows. This account indeed allows me to give a different yet still doxastic explanation of the two main reasons that Ichino advocates in favor of her account; namely, the incompatibility of so-called religious beliefs with other beliefs and their imperviousness to evidence, especially of a negative kind. (shrink)

Today, there is an emerging interest for the potential role of hermeneutics in reflecting on the practices related to digital technologies and their consequences. Nonetheless, such an interest has neither given rise to a unitary approach nor to a shared debate. The primary goal of this paper is to map and synthetize the different existing perspectives to pave the way for an open discussion on the topic. The article is developed in two steps. In the first section, the authors analyze (...) digital hermeneutics “in theory” by confronting and systematizing the existing literature. In particular, they stress three main distinctions among the approaches: between “methodological” and “ontological” digital hermeneutics; between data- and text-oriented digital hermeneutics; and between “quantitative” and “qualitative” credos in digital hermeneutics. In the second section, they consider digital hermeneutics “in action”, by critically analyzing the uses of digital data for studying a classical object such as the political opinion. In the conclusion, we will pave the way to an ontological turn in digital hermeneutics. Most of this article is devoted to the methodological issue of interpreting with digital machines. The main task of an ontological digital hermeneutics would consist instead in wondering if it is legitimate, and eventually to which extent, to speak of digital technologies, or at least of some of them, as interpretational machines. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Anthony Everett has mounted a very serious attack against realism with respect to fictional entities. According to Everett, ficta raise deep logico-ontological worries, for they violate some basic logical laws and are problematically indeterminate with respect to both their existence and identity. Since an antirealist account for sentences apparently committing us to ficta is available, no such committment is really needed. In this paper I will try to show, first, that the antirealist account Everett proposes for (...) those sentences is not convincing. Moreover, by relying on the Meinongians’ distinctions between i) predicative and propositional negation and ii) either modes of predication or kinds of property, I will argue that the logico-ontological problems Everett arises against ficta can be solved. Finally, I will try to show that both the ‘modes of predication’- and the ‘kinds of property’- distinctions (especially the first one) are not so problematic as Everett holds. (shrink)

Maurizio Ferraris’ theory on social entities presents many interesting analogies with artefactualist theories on fictional entities. Like artefactualism, however, it probably needs some integration. As Ferraris himself acknowledges, mere dependence on subjects does not by itself qualify an entity as social. Moreover, the very same definition of a social entity as an inscribed (social) act seems to yield merely necessary, but not sufficient, identity conditions for such an entity. To my mind, what is needed is a normative element. For a (...) social entity is an intrinsically normative entity, which is (inter alia) composed by something like Searle’s constitutive rules. (shrink)

In this paper, I first want to vindicate Wollheim’s idea that seeing-in, taken as the twofold phenomenologically sui generis experience which picture perception consists in, accounts for the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. Following Wollheim’s usage himself, by “perceptual constancy” I will mean a particular phenomenon of perceptual robustness, namely the fact that a picture’s subject is experienced as undistorted from any point of view in which a spectator may regard a picture. Moreover, I will properly take into consideration the specific (...) impression of “being followed” by the gaze of a picture’s subject in portraits (and alike pictures), which in these cases is a consequence of perceptual constancy. For this impression corroborates a particular reading of what the seeing-in experience really consists in. According to such a reading, in the configurational fold of that experience one experiences both the merely visible surface properties and the design properties of the picture’s vehicle, where such design properties also include the so-called grouping properties of the vehicle. On the basis of such a fold, moreover, in the recognitional fold of the seeing-in experience one knowingly illusorily sees the picture as its subject. (shrink)

In this paper I want to hold, first, that one may suitably reconstruct the relevant kind of mental representational states that fiction typically involves, make-beliefs, as contextually unreal beliefs that, outside fiction, are either matched or non-matched by contextually real beliefs. Yet moreover, I want to claim that the kind of make-believe that may yield the mark of fictionality is not Kendall Walton’s invitation or prescription to imagine. Indeed, in order to appeal in terms of make-believe to a specific form (...) of imagination that fiction distinctively involves, one must move away from the realm of norms in order to attain a cognitive realm; namely, one must look at a specific form of metarepresentational state. This metarepresentational state of make-believe is a second-order representation that is about both real beliefs and make-beliefs, as the first-order representations it compares by acknowledging their contextual distinctness. (shrink)

In this paper, I will present several interpretations of Brentano’s notion of the intentional inexistence of a mental state’s intentional object, i.e., what that state is about. I will moreover hold that, while all the interpretations from Section 1 to Section 4 are wrong, the penultimate interpretation that I focus in Section 5, the one according to which intentional inexistence amounts to the individuation of a mental state by means of its intentional object, is correct provided that it is nested (...) into the really right interpretation, the final one I give in Section 6. For it provides one of the merely necessary conditions of this latter interpretation. According to this final interpretation,intentional inexistence amounts to the constitution of a mental state by means of its intentional object. Finally, I will hold that both such interpretations preserve the idea, which strikes everyone as true, that an intentional object exists in the mental state aboutit pretty much as a pictorial character exists in the picture (qua interpreted entity) that depicts it. (shrink)

In his highly regarded history of the rise of clinical trials in America, HarryMarks describes how their widespread adoption resulted largely fromthe efforts of ‘therapeutic reformers’ who sought to replace the individualexpertise of clinicians with the ‘science of controlled experiment’. Thetransition described by Marks resembles in many respects the transition fromthe ‘truth-to-nature’ objectivity of individual experts to a ‘mechanical’ formof objectivity portrayed by Daston and Galison. In particular,Marks details the passage from a regime of trust in expertise and experts to (...) aregime based on the mechanical generation of data, the elimination ofhuman judgement and the adoption of a ‘view from nowhere’ where individual and group idiosyncrasies are systematically suppressedthrough recourse to quantitative methods.[...]. (shrink)

In this paper I want to show that the idea supporters of traditional creationism (TC) defend, that success of a fictional character across different works has to be accounted for in terms of the persistence of (numerically) one and the same fictional entity, is incorrect. For the supposedly commonsensical data on which those supporters claim their ideas rely are rather controversial. Once they are properly interpreted, they can rather be accommodated by moderate creationism (MC), according to which fictional characters arise (...) out of a reflexive stance on a certain make-believe process. For MC, success of a fictional character across different works amounts to the fact that, first, different work-bound ficta are related with each other by means of a relation weaker than numerical identity, transfictional sameness, and second, that all those ficta are related by transfictional inclusion to a fictum that in some sense gather them all, the so-called general character. Since a general character is an abstract constructed entity, moreover, the more those particular ficta are generated, the more general fictional characters including all of them arise. (shrink)

Along with a well-honoured tradition, we will accept that intentionality is at least a property a thought holds necessarily, i.e., in all possible worlds that contain it; more specifically, a necessary relation, namely the relation of existential dependence of the thought on its intentional object. Yet we will first of all try to show that intentionality is more than that. For we will claim that intentionality is an essential property of the thought, namely a property whose predication to the thought (...) is true in virtue of the identity, or nature, of such a thought. More particularly, for us intentionality will again be a relation, yet a relation of ontological dependence of the thought on its intentional object; specifically, the relation for the thought of being constituted by its object. Moreover, we will try to show that if intentionality is such a constitutive relation for the thought that has it, certain metaphysical consequences ensue. First, an objectual thought, a thought whose content basically consists in its intentional object, is nothing but that object in a certain cogitative modality, or, which is the same, as playing a certain motivational role for the subject entertaining the thought itself (at a certain time). Second, if an objectual thought is nothing but an intentional object in a cogitative modality, such a thought, not only as a type, but also as a token, is an abstract entity. More specifically, an objectual thought-type, an abstract object par excellence, is indeed instantiated by objectual thought-tokens which are again abstract particulars, yet of a specific kind: namely, tropes of a relational sort depending for their existence on their bearers (and possibly also on their temporal location). (shrink)

In this paper I will first contend that semantically based arguments in favour of or against problematic entities—like those provided, respectively, in a realist Meinongian and in an antirealist Russellian camp—are ultimately inconclusive. Indeed, only genuinely ontological arguments, specifically addressed to prove (or to reject) the existence of entities of a definite kind, suit the purpose. Thus, I will sketch an argument intended to show that there really are entities of an apparently specific kind, i.e. _intentionalia_, broadly conceived as things (...) that may actually exist as well as actually not exist. Finally, I will try to explain why that argument proves the existence of only some sorts of _intentionalia_, by showing how this is related to the fact that, as some have correctly maintained, _intentionalia_ have no intrinsic nature. (shrink)

Creationism with respect to fictional entities, i.e., the position according to which ficta are creations of human practices, has recently become the most popular realist account of fictional entities. For it allows one to hold that there are fictional entities while simultaneously giving such entities a respectable metaphysical status, that of abstract artifacts. In this paper, I will draw what are the ontological and semantical consequences of this position, or at least of all its forms that are genuinely creationist. For (...) some people, these consequences will sound as plagues against the position; for some others, especially realists on ficta, they are welcome results. Although I hold that all forms of genuine creationism have these consequences, I will conclude by explaining why I take moderate creationism, according to which ficta are created by means of a reflexive stance on the make-believe practice grounding them, to be the best of these forms. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to address once more the venerable problem of intentional identity, the problem of how different thoughts can be about the same thing even if this thing does not exist. First, I will try to show that antirealist approaches to this problem are doomed to fail. For they ultimately share a problematic assumption, namely that thinking about something involves identifying it. Second, I will claim that once one rejects this assumption and holds instead that thoughts are (...) constituted either by what they are about, their intentional objects, or by what determines their proposition-like intentional contents, one can address the problem of intentional identity in a different way. One can indeed provide a new solution to it that basically relies on two factors: a) what sort of metaphysical nature intentional objects effectively possess, once they are conceived as schematic objects à la Crane (2001, 2013); b) whether such objects really belong to the overall ontological inventory of what there is. According to this solution, two thoughts are about the same nonexistent intentional object iff i) that object satisfies the identity criterion for objects of that metaphysical kind and ii) objects of that kind belong to the overall ontological inventory of what there is, independently of whether they exist (in a suitable first-order sense of existence). As such, this solution is neither realist nor antirealist: only if condition ii) is satisfied, different thoughts can be about the same nonexistent intentionale; otherwise, they are simply constituted by the same intentional content (provided that this content is not equated with that intentionale). Third, armed with this solution, I will hold that one can find a suitable treatment of the specific and related problem of whether different people may mock-think about the same thing, even if there really is no such thing. Finally, I will try to show that this treatment can be also applied to the case in which different thoughts are, according to phenomenology, about the same intentionale and yet this intentionale is of a kind such that there really are no things of that kind. For in this case, such thoughts are about the same intentionale only fictionally. (shrink)

RésuméL'emploi inadéquat du terme » primitif « est la conséquence d'une confusion entre la primitivité réelle des formes archaïques et la » primitivité « secondaire des formes spécialisées.Dans toute évolution, la transition du simple au complexe et celle de l'indistinct au distinct suivent des modalités semblables. On y reconnai̊t une phase d'enrichissement lent, une phase de polymorphisme originel, et une phase de ségrégation et de spécialisation. Il est nécessaire de distinguer entre:1. la simplicité archaïque des formes authentiquement primitives et la (...) simplicité secondaire des formes pseudo‐primitives, appauvries et spécialisées;2. le polymorphisme originel et le polymorphisme secondaire, dǔ à l'hybridation.ZusammenfassungDie unangebrachte Anwendung des Ausdruckes » primitiv « ist Folge einer Konfusion zwischen der wirklichen Primitivität der archaischen Formen und der sekundären Primitivität der spezialisierten Formen.In jeder Entwicklung erfolgt der Übergang vom Einfachen zum Komplexen und vom Unbestimmten zum Bestimmten in ähnlicher Art und Weise. Man erkennt eine vorbereitende Phase der langsamen Bereicherung, eine Blütezeit des ursprünglichen Polymorphismus, und eine späte Phase der Absonderung und Spezialisierung.Es ist notwendig zu unterscheiden zwischen:1. Der archaischen Einfachheit der wirklich primitiven Formen und der sekundären Einfachheit der pseudoprimitiven Formen, die verarmt und spezialisiert sind;2. dem ursprünglichen Polymorphismus und dem sekundären Polymorphismus, der durch Vermischung entstanden ist.The inadequate use of the term » primitive « is due to a confusion between archaïc primitivity proper, and secondary » primitivity « or pseudoprimitivity. In any kind of evolution, the transitions from simplicity to complexity and from indistinctness to distinctness follow strictly similar courses. Three phases are recognizable: a pre‐apogean phase of slow enrichment, an apogean phase of original polymorphism, and a post‐apogean phase of segregation and specialization. It is necessary to distinguish between:1. the archaic simplicity of truly primitive forms and secondary simplicity of impoverished and specialized forms;2. original polymorphism and secondary polymorphism due to hybridization. (shrink)

In philosophy of emerging media, several scholars have insisted on the fact that the “new” of new technologies does not have much to do with communication, but rather with the exponential growth of recording. In this paper, instead, the thesis advanced is that digital technologies do not concern memory, but imagination, and more precisely, what philosophers from Kant onwards have called productive imagination. In this paper, however, the main reference will not be Kant, but Paul Ricoeur, who explicitly refers to (...) the Kantian productive imagination in his works, but also offered an externalized, semioticized, and historicized interpretation of it. The article is developed in three steps. In the first section, it deals with Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, based on the notions of mimesis and mythos. In the second section, it is first argued that human imagination is always-already extended. Second, it will be shown how mimesis and mythos are precisely the way software works. In the third section, the specificity of big data is introduced. Big data is the promise of giving our actions and existences a meaning that we are incapable of perceiving, for lack of sensibility and understanding. Scholars have used the Foucauldian concepts of panopticon and confession for describing the human condition in the digital age. In the conclusion, it is argued that big data makes any form of disclosure unnecessary. Big data is an ensemble of technological artifacts, methods, techniques, practices, institutions, and forms of knowledge aiming at taking over the way someone narratively accounts for himself or herself before the others. Hence, another Foucauldian notion is representative of this age: the parrhesia, to speak candidly, and to take a risk in speaking the truth, insofar as such a possibility is anesthetized. (shrink)

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein seems to appeal to the idea that thoughts manage to explain how sentences, primarily elementary sentences, can be such that their subsentential elements refer to objects. In this respect, he seems indeed to appeal to the claim that thoughts, qua endowed with not only original, but also intrinsic, intentionality, lend this intentionality to names, by transforming them into ‘names-of’, i.e., symbols endowed with intrinsic intentionality as well. Such a claim, however, entails that there must be necessary (...) superfacts. Since according to the Tractatus’ ontology there cannot be necessary facts in the world, but at most only in its logical scaffolding, the most likely chance is that such facts are facts for the limit of the world, i.e., the transcendental subject. Curiously enough, in his later critique, in the Investigations, of mentalist semantics, Wittgenstein fails to appeal to this claim, which can block the infinite regress that he there changes the mentalist position with. Since in the Investigations necessary facts seem to be allowed, this failure is even more striking. (shrink)

In this paper I want to claim, first, that despite close similarities, noneism and Crane’s psychological reductionism are different ontological doctrines. For unlike the latter, the former is ontologically committed to objects that are nonentities. Once one splits ontological from existential commitment, this claim, I guess, is rather uncontroversial. Second, however, I want to claim something more controversial; namely, that this ontological interpretation of noneism naturally makes noneism be nonstandardly read as a form of allism, to be however appropriately distinguished (...) from Quinean allism in terms of the different scope of the overall ontological domain on which the only particular/existential quantifier that there is ranges. This may orient a noneist towards a syncretistic view of existence, according to which, appearances notwithstanding, existence as a whole is captured both by means of second-order and by means of first-order related notions. (shrink)

As many people have underlined, as regards pictures there are at least two different layers of content. In Voltolini, these layers are: i) the figurative content of a picture, i.e., what one can see in it viz. what the picture presents; ii) the pictorial content of a picture, i.e., what the picture represents, as constrained by its figurative content. As regards ii), there undoubtedly ispictorial misrepresentation. Having the possibility of misrepresenting things is a standard condition in order for a picture (...) to be a representation. Yet as regards i), things are more problematic. First, if one intends that a picture is seen in a way that is impossible for the picture to be seen, there definitely is intentional failure, but there is no figurative mispresentation. Second, alleged cases in which one literally sees in a picture something that does not match what the picture presents are not cases of figurative presentational failure either. (shrink)

All over Europe, the provision of healthcare services is widely considered a primary duty of the government. Universal access to medical care can be considered a basic ingredient of the so-called “European social model.” But if universal access to medical care is seldom questioned, European governments—faced with expanding costs caused by an increasing demand driven by an aging population and technology-driven improvements—are contemplating the possibility of “rationing”1 treatments, or the possibility of allowing a greater role for private suppliers. If a (...) “multi-tier” healthcare system has long been anathema to the European leadership, guaranteeing a uniform access to state-of-the-art care seems to be well beyond the means of states suffering from persisting debt crisis. Was the failure of state-controlled “adequate” healthcare totally unpredictable? Far-sighted criticisms had been offered by two eminent thinkers in the classical liberal tradition, Herbert Spencer and Friedrich A. von Hayek . Neither author is usually recognized as a forerunner of contemporary critics of the welfare state, and both investigated the issue of the state financing and providing health services well before or right after the establishment of national health services. With the benefit of hindsight, reading Spencer and Hayek helps us to understand how the crisis of state-supplied healthcare is not rooted in the mere progress of clinical technology, but is rather the logical consequence of the theoretical basis of the model itself. Whereas modern theorists of the welfare state tend to offer theories that are impervious to a critical appraisal of their unintended consequences—insofar as they are framed in a language of “rights”—both Hayek and Spencer understood that human systems are complex, and that unwanted effects of public policy should be taken into account. Although Spencer emphasized the moral hazards accruing from the paternalism involved in governmental provision of health services, Hayek explained how modern healthcare systems differ from real, private insurance designed to offer proper coverage against risks. These authors appreciated that the politicization of healthcare was bound to result in both standardization of care and disregard for the responsibility that comes with personal freedom. These two “diagnoses before the illness” can help us in defining the challenges and the potential solutions that healthcare systems face today. Understanding the fatal conceits inherent in the very architecture of national health services can be the first step toward healing our healthcare systems. (shrink)

In his recent book on the philosophy of mind, Tim Crane has maintained that intentional objects are to be conceived as schematic entities, having no particular intrinsic nature. I take this metaphysical thesis as fundamentally correct. Yet in this paper I want to cast some doubts on whether this thesis prevents intentionalia, especially nonexistent ones, from belonging to the general inventory of what there is, as Crane seems to think. If my doubts are grounded, Crane’s treatment of intentionalia may further (...) be freed from a certain tension that seems to affect it, namely the fact that he appeals to nonexistent intentionalia in order to individuate intentional states and at the same time he attempts at dispensing with them. (shrink)

In this paper, I will first try to provide a new argument in favour of the contextualist position on the semantics/pragmatics divide. I will argue that many puns, notably multi-stable ones, cannot be dealt with in the non-contextualist way, i.e., as displaying a phenomenon that effectively involves wide context, the concrete situation of discourse, yet only in a pre-, or at least inter-, semantic sense. For, insofar as they involve ambiguous utterances rather than ambiguous sentences, these puns show that the (...) wide context affecting them has a semantic role: it provides many truth-conditions for a single utterance. Moreover, I will try to show that the contextualist can provide a unitary account of the general phenomenon of puns. On the one hand, this account explains multi-stable puns as well as those puns the non-contextualist claims to deal with successfully, i.e., the ones involving a speaker-induced removal of a well-grounded misunderstanding. On the other hand, it also explains zeugmatic puns, i.e., those involving an ‘impossible’ meaning. (shrink)

In the philosophy of fiction, a majority view is continuism, i.e., the thesis that ordinary names, or genuine singular terms in general, directly refer to ordinary real individuals in fiction-involving sentences – e.g. “Napoleon” in the sentences that constitute the text of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But there is also a minority view, exceptionalism, which is the thesis that such terms change their semantic value in such sentences, either by directly referring to fictional surrogates of those individuals – what we (...) may call exceptional hyperrealism about fictional characters – or by acquiring a semantic value that turns them into nonreferential terms, involving no ontological commitment to such characters – exceptional irrealism about fictional characters. In this paper, first of all, I want to support hybrid exceptionalism, according to which both parties are partly right and partly wrong. In the fictional use of fiction-involving sentences, those terms directly refer to ordinary real individuals, as continuists claim, while both in the internal and the external metafictional use of fiction-involving sentences, such terms change their semantic value, as exceptionalists claim. (By contrast, for pure exceptionalists such terms either always refer to fictional surrogates or are nonreferring on all such uses.) Moreover, I will argue that hybrid exceptional hyperrealism must be preferred to hybrid exceptional irrealism: in the latter uses, I claim, such terms directly refer to fictional surrogates. (shrink)

: In Cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of perception Athanasios Raftopoulos provides a new defense of the thesis that, unlike early vision, late vision is cognitively penetrable, in accordance with a new definition of cognitive penetrability that is centered on the ideas of direct influence of cognition upon perception and of the epistemic role of perception. This new definition allows him to maintain that late vision is a genuinely perceptive stage of the perceptual process. In this paper, I try (...) to discuss not only whether this new definition has plausible consequences that allow only late vision to be cognitively penetrable but also whether the claim that late vision is genuinely perceptual allows it to have the kind of hybrid content, half nonconceptual and half conceptual, that Raftopoulos now wants to ascribe to it. Keywords: Cognitive Penetrability, weak, strong, and superstrong; Early and Late Vision; Nonconceptual Content Penetralibità cognitiva e visione secondaria Riassunto: In Cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of perception Athanasios Raftopoulos dà una nuova difesa della tesi secondo cui, a differenza della visione primaria, la visione secondaria è penetrabile cognitivamente, secondo una nuova definizione della nozione di penetrabilità cognitiva centrata sulle idee di influenza diretta della cognizione sulla percezione e di ruolo epistemico della percezione. Questa nuova definizione gli consente di sostenere che la visione secondaria è una fase genuinamente percettiva del processo percettivo. Nell’articolo, provo a discutere non solo se la nuova definizione ha conseguenze plausibili che consentono solo alla visione secondaria di essere penetrabile cognitivamente, ma anche se l’idea che la visione secondaria sia genuinamente percettiva consente ad essa di avere il contenuto ibrido, in parte nonconcettuale e in parte concettuale, che Raftopoulos vuole ora ascriverle. Parole chiave: Penetrabilità cognitiva debole, forte e superforte; Visione primaria e secondaria; Contenuto nonconcettuale. (shrink)

The paper attempts at yielding a language-independent argument in favour of fictional entities, that is, an argument providing genuinely ontological reasons in favour of such entities. According to this argument, ficta are indispensable insofar as they are involved in the identity conditions of semantically-based entities we ordinarily accept, i.e. fictional works. It will also be evaluated to what extent this argument is close to other arguments recently provided to the same purpose.

In this paper, I want to claim that, in conformity with overall intuitions, there are some aesthetic properties that are perceivable. For they are high-level properties that are not only grasped immediately, but also attended to holistically—just like the grouping properties they depend on and that are responsible for the Gestalt effects or switches through which they are grasped. Yet, unlike such grouping properties, they are holistically attended to in a disinterested modality, where objects and their properties are regarded for (...) their own sake. (shrink)

El propósito de este trabajo es presentar una recons­trucción de cómo se articulan las nociones de finalidad y naturaleza en la física de Aristóteles, así como de la relación que guardan estos principios con la substan­cia eterna e inmóvil que introduce el filósofo griego en _Metaph_. XII. Como es bien sabido, hay un espectro amplio de lecturas acerca de la postura aristotélica sobre el particular, las cuales responden a distintas valoraciones de los argumentos que aparecen en los pasajes que el (...) filósofo griego dedica al estudio de estos temas. La lectura que se defenderá en el presente texto podría describirse como minimalista. (shrink)