In this paper, I give an analysis of neg-raising inferences as scalar implicatures. The main motivation for this account as opposed to a presupposition-based approach like Gajewski (Linguist Philos 30(3):289–328, 2007) comes from the differences between presuppositions and neg-raising inferences. In response to this issue, Gajewski (2007) argues that neg-raising predicates are soft presuppositional triggers and adopts the account of how their presuppositions arise by Abusch (J Semantics 27(1):1–44, 2010). However, I argue that there is a difference between soft triggers (...) and neg-raising predicates in their behavior in embeddings; a difference that is straightforwardly accounted for in the present approach. Furthermore, by adopting Abusch’s (2010) account of soft triggers, Gajewski (2007) inherits the assumptions of a pragmatic principle of disjunctive closure and of a non-standard interaction between semantics and pragmatics—assumptions that are not needed by the present proposal, which is just based on a regular theory of scalar implicatures. I also show that the arguments that Gajewski (2007) presents in favor of the presuppositional account can be explained also by the scalar implicatures-based approach proposed here. Finally, while the main point of the paper is a comparison with the presuppositional account, I sketch a preliminary comparison with more syntactic approaches to neg-raising. (shrink)

While the debate on values in science focuses on normative questions on the level of the individual (e.g. should researchers try to make their work as value free as possible?), comparatively little attention has been paid to the institutional and professional norms that researchers are expected to follow. To address this knowledge gap, we conduct a content analysis of leading national codes of conduct for research integrity of European countries, and structure our analysis around the question: do these documents allow (...) for researchers to be influenced by “non-epistemic” (moral, cultural, commercial, political, etc.) values or do they prohibit such influence in compliance with the value-free ideal (VFI) of science? Our results return a complex picture. On the one hand, codes of conduct consider many non-epistemic values to be a legitimate influence on the decision-making of researchers. On the other, most of these documents include what we call _VFI-like positions_: passages claiming that researchers should be free and independent from any external influence. This shows that while many research integrity documents do not fully endorse the VFI, they do not reject it and continue to be implicitly influenced by it. This results in internal tensions and underdetermined guidance on non-epistemic values that may limit some of the uses of research integrity codes, especially for purposes of ethical self-regulation. While codes of conduct cannot be expected to decide how researchers should act in every instance, we do suggest that they acknowledge the challenges of how to integrate non-epistemic values in research in a more explicit fashion. (shrink)

In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the predictive processing (PP) framework. This convergence has so far proven fruitful for both sides: while PP is increasingly adopted as a framework for understanding aesthetic phenomena, the arts and aesthetics, examined under the lens of PP, are starting to be seen as important windows (...) into our mental functioning. The result is a vast and fast-growing research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic encounters as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest. Here, we present this developing research programme, describing its grounds and highlighting its prospects. We start by clarifying how the study of the arts and aesthetics encounters the PP picture of mental functioning (§1). We then go on to outline the prospects of this encounter for the fields involved: philosophy and history of art (§2), psychology of aesthetics and neuroaesthetics (§3) and psychology and neuroscience more generally (§4). The upshot is an ambitious but well-defined framework within which aesthetics and cognitive science can partner up to illuminate crucial aspects of the human mind. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’. -/- . (shrink)

Les positions philosophiques d'Anthony Collins étaient audacieuses et novatrices, de son rejet de l'idée d'un Dieu doué d'intelligence et de volonté à celui de l'existence d'une âme immatérielle, en passant par sa conception déterministe de la nature et sa vision de l'homme comme machine proche de l'animal, et mue par des pulsions tout aussi hédonistes.

This work investigates one of the most widespread yet elusive ideas about our experience of art: the idea that there is something cognitively valuable in engaging with great artworks, or, in other words, that we learn from them. This claim and the age-old controversy that surrounds it are reconsidered in light of the psychological and neuroscientific literature on learning, in one of the first systematic efforts to bridge the gap between philosophical and scientific inquiries on the topic. The work has (...) five chapters. Chapter 1 lays down its conceptual bases: it explains what learning is taken to be in the current philosophical debate and it points out how Bayesian cognitive science (particularly in its predictive processing formulations) might be well-suited to capture the kind of learning involved in our engagement with the arts. The following chapters test this latter hypothesis with respect to particular art forms, namely literature and literary language (Chapter 2), narrative (Chapter 3), and visual art, music and motor activities (Chapter 4). The fine-grained discussions conducted in each of these areas will enable us to see that the relationship between art and learning is indeed fundamental and pervasive. The final chapter (Chapter 5) examines the consequences of this fact for our understanding of the role of art in our epistemic practices, its ultimate usefulness and value, and its place in the interdisciplinary study of the human mind. The upshot is a novel and wide-ranging picture, both philosophically informed and empirically sound, that bypasses many of the problems and dead ends of the current philosophical debate on the topic and captures the deep sense in which art and learning are interrelated. (shrink)

Even if the “value-free ideal of science” (VFI) were an unattainable goal, one could ask: can it be a useful fiction, one that is beneficial for the research community and society? This question is particularly crucial for scholars and institutions concerned with research integrity (RI), as one cannot offer normative guidance to researchers without making some assumptions about what ideal scientific research looks like. Despite the insofar little interaction between scholars studying RI and those working on values in science, the (...) overlap of topics and interests make collaboration between the two fields promising for understanding research and its ethics. Here, we identify—for the use of RI scholars—the non-epistemic reasons (societal, political, professional) for and against the VFI considered in the literature. All of these are concerned with the beneficial or detrimental consequences that endorsing the VFI would have on society, policy-making, or the scientific community, with some authors appealing to the same principles to argue for opposite positions. Though most of the reviewed articles do not endorse the VFI, it is generally agreed that some constraints have to be put on the use of non-epistemic values. Disagreement on the utility of the VFI lies both on the different epistemic-descriptive positions taken by different authors, and on the scarcity of relevant empirical studies. Engaging critically with the reasons here identified and more in general with the values in science debate will help the RI community decide whether the VFI should be included in future codes of conduct. (shrink)

Esseri umani, paesi, paesaggi, sono alcuni dei maggiori oggetti del nostro amore. Lo stesso si può dire di certi ideali, per esempio dell’ideale di giu­stizia. Harry Frankfurt ha dedicato par­te della sua riflessione alla feno­me­no­logia dell’amore, ma dice relativamente poco riguardo al­la possibilità che sorgano conflitti tra i nostri oggetti d’amore – specialmente quando è in gio­­co la giustizia. Questo saggio prende spunto, ancora una volta, dal caso del­l’uomo su una bar­ca troppo piccola per trasportare tre persone, che si tro­va (...) a dover decidere chi salvare tra le due che sono con lui, una delle qua­li è sua moglie. Il problema è più arduo di quanto pensi Frankfurt.Human beings, countries, landscapes, are among the things most of us love. So are some ideals, such as that of justice. Harry Frankfurt has some ar­res­ting thoughts about the phenomenology of love. He says comparatively lit­tle about the possibility that conflicts arise between the objects of our love – especially when justice is involved. In this paper, the case will be taken up once again of the man on a boat too small to take three, who has to de­cide whom to rescue of two persons – one being his wife. The case is har­der than Frankfurt thinks it is. (shrink)

Opera logica.--De doctrinae ordine apologia.

Institutions represent a solid basis to organize and stabilize human life in diferent social contexts. They are external events in the world, but they also have a strong anchorage in the mind and in last years many scholars tried to explore their cognitive ground. Starting from the original attempt of Douglass C. North, who at the end of his career tried to establish a program called “Cognitive Institutionalism”, we discuss the merits and the limits of this approach. First, we show (...) that his statements are cognitively onerous as they imply the notions of mental models and beliefs. Instead, we argue that shared institutions do not require such a convergence and that coordination takes place in the form of social practices and habits. Second, we clarify some aspects of North’s cognitive theory avoiding the ontological reading, i.e. explaining in what sense institutions might depend on the human mind and how people are joined into a practice made possible via institutions. (shrink)

We propose to develop the problems of selfness, of the tension between the other and the same, and of the singularity, by questioning the philosophies of Kant, Levinas and Stirner, and by reading them trough the theoretical eyes of Jacques Derrida. We will reflect on the irreducibility of the Levinasian other, trying to find out how, to what extent and with what difficulties, the emphasis on singularity can open a dialogical field between, on the one hand, the demand for ethical (...) transcendence required by the encounter with the other, and, on the other hand, the unconditional nature of the moral law in Kantian practical philosophy. After having underlined the limits of the latter, we will compare the non-conceptual and un-graspable character of the other with the radical Stirnerian uniqueness and his need to open the way to what escapes any logocentric chain. The relation between language, singularity and encounter will follow a resumption of Levinasian alterity under a more critical perspective. (shrink)

Quine is one of the most influential of contemporary philosophers, whose work has ranged broadly across a great number of topics and issues in a career spanning some fifty years. In this collection a group of distinguished philosophers offer a sustained critical evaluation of the full range of Quine's writings. Amongst the topics addressed are interpretation, epistemology, ontology, modality, and mathematical truth. This collection will certainly influence all future discussion of Quine. The contributors include: George Boolos, H-N. Castaneda, Donald Davidson, (...) Umberto Eco, Dagfinn Follesdal, James Higginbotham, Charles Parsons, Hilary Putnam, Barry Stroud, and Bas van Fraassen. However, Quine is given the last word, responding to the essays in the final contribution. (shrink)

Ignorance about political related issues has long been considered a threat to democracy. This paper revolves around the concept of political ignorance, focusing especially on Ilya Somin’s book Democracy and Political Ignorance and going beyond his standpoint in two ways. First of all, it moves away from the notion of factual knowledge by showing that political ignorance cannot be limited to a matter of information quality. On the contrary, it shows that ignorance concerns the formation of opinions about political facts, (...) which are the bricks with which disagreement is built. Then, using the insights of the Moral Foundation Theory by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, the paper argues that moral intuitions represent an additional source of bias that current research on the problem of voters’ ignorance should address. While Somin argues that biased moral values are the outcome of ignorance, Moral Foundation Theory suggests that moral intuitions are a robust determinant of people’s political views as they make factual knowledge partially irrelevant and also make people with different moral minds unable to understand the basis of reciprocal factual argumentations. (shrink)

Ignorance about political related issues has long been considered a threat to democracy. This paper revolves around the concept of political ignorance, focusing especially on Ilya Somin’s book Democracy and Political Ignorance and going beyond his standpoint in two ways. First of all, it moves away from the notion of factual knowledge by showing that political ignorance cannot be limited to a matter of information quality. On the contrary, it shows that ignorance concerns the formation of opinions about political facts, (...) which are the bricks with which disagreement is built. Then, using the insights of the Moral Foundation Theory by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, the paper argues that moral intuitions represent an additional source of bias that current research on the problem of voters’ ignorance should address. While Somin argues that biased moral values are the outcome of ignorance, Moral Foundation Theory suggests that moral intuitions are a robust determinant of people’s political views as they make factual knowledge partially irrelevant and also make people with different moral minds unable to understand the basis of reciprocal factual argumentations. (shrink)

Ignorance about political related issues has long been considered a threat to democracy. This paper revolves around the concept of political ignorance, focusing especially on Ilya Somin’s book Democracy and Political Ignorance and going beyond his standpoint in two ways. First of all, it moves away from the notion of factual knowledge by showing that political ignorance cannot be limited to a matter of information quality. On the contrary, it shows that ignorance concerns the formation of opinions about political facts, (...) which are the bricks with which disagreement is built. Then, using the insights of the Moral Foundation Theory by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, the paper argues that moral intuitions represent an additional source of bias that current research on the problem of voters’ ignorance should address. While Somin argues that biased moral values are the outcome of ignorance, Moral Foundation Theory suggests that moral intuitions are a robust determinant of people’s political views as they make factual knowledge partially irrelevant and also make people with different moral minds unable to understand the basis of reciprocal factual argumentations. (shrink)

Esseri umani, paesi, paesaggi, sono alcuni dei maggiori oggetti del nostro amore. Lo stesso si puň dire di certi ideali, per esempio dell'ideale di giustizia. Harry Frankfurt ha dedicato parte della sua riflessione alla fenomenologia dell'amore, ma dice relativamente poco riguardo alla possibilitÀ che sorgano conflitti tra i nostri oggetti d'amore - specialmente quando č in gioco la giustizia. Questo saggio prende spunto, ancora una volta, dal caso dell'uomo su una barca troppo piccola per trasportare tre persone, che si trova (...) a dover decidere chi salvare tra le due che sono con lui, una delle quali č sua moglie. Il problema č piů arduo di quanto pensi Frankfurt. (shrink)

Many philosophers who thought about democracy in the Twentieth century haverejected the notion of absolute truth and even that of truth as such. Hans Kelsendraws a parallel between, on the one hand, philosophical absolutism and autocracy and, on the other, relativism and democracy. For the very same reasons, Hannah Arendt directly infers from her democratic conception of politics that truth is to be rejected. It seems that such views are closely reminiscent of some statements by John Rawls about the notion (...) of truth. I claim that the similarity is only superficial. Joshua Cohen’s interpretation of some passages of Political Liberalism concerning truth will be discussed, in an attempt at showing that Rawls’ view is not the No Concept View, which Cohen ascribes to him. Rawls endorses no particular conception of truth, but he freely uses the notion with its ordinary meaning. The arguments of public reason should start not just from agreed premises, but from true ones, if that is possible. This is quite consistent with the view that the conclusions of those arguments are put forward as being only reasonable – not as being true.Relativism about truth, on the other hand, is definitely inconsistent with Rawls’conception of public reason and, in particular, cannot jibe with his notion of over-lapping consensus. (shrink)

Ce qu’on désigne du nom de « complotisme » mérite d’être considéré comme un symptôme – un symptôme de dynamiques et de désirs profondément ambivalents – bien davantage que comme un ennemi « inédit ». L’anti-conspirationnisme nous semble aussi dangereux et ridicule que ce qu’il dénonce sous la catégorie de « complotistes ». Comment nourrir les conspirations émancipatrices qui se tissent dans l’ombre sans se laisser aveugler par des fantasmes de complot embrasés par les élites réactionnaires et certaines viralités toxiques?

In the present paper we use the theory of exact completions to study categorical properties of small setoids in Martin-Löf type theory and, more generally, of models of the Constructive Elementary Theory of the Category of Sets, in terms of properties of their subcategories of choice objects. Because of these intended applications, we deal with categories that lack equalisers and just have weak ones, but whose objects can be regarded as collections of global elements. In this context, we study the (...) internal logic of the categories involved, and employ this analysis to give a sufficient condition for the local cartesian closure of an exact completion. Finally, we apply this result to show when an exact completion produces a model of CETCS. (shrink)

El texto bíblico de Sap 11:21 tuvo una notable influencia en la historia de la filosofía medieval. Un ejemplo interesante de su importancia para la especulación teológica de la época se puede encontrar en la doctrina del vestigio de la Trinidad que Agustín elabora y configura en el sentido de una triple correspondencia entre Dios y la criatura. Esta doctrina se extenderá hasta los siglos XIII y XIV donde será central en el contexto del debate sobre el estado de las (...) esencias creaturales, así como sobre el tema de la relación entre Dios y las criaturas. La teoría de Juan Duns Escoto será examinada en profundidad por su originalidad respecto de la tradición agustiniana y de las doctrinas de sus contemporáneos. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the many challenges and difficulties of healthcare systems caring for older frail people. This public health crisis has indeed jeopardised the concept of the welfare state, in particular the right of older people to uncompromised healthcare. Together with the clinical challenges facing the geriatric patient and the organisational difficulties of the healthcare systems, sociocultural factors may have also played a substantial role in the strategies that countries have applied in coping with the pandemic. In this (...) opinion article, we report attitudes towards the older populations of two countries, Italy and Israel, during the COVID-19 pandemic as viewed through the looking-glass of the media. (shrink)

Un nouveau cinéma italien, illustré ici par le film Le quattro volte de Michelangelo Frammartino, propose une redéfinition radicale d’une éthique documentaire qui se situe aux confins de l’esthétique et de l’écopolitique. En l’absence d’une construction fictionnelle, la vie s’expose dans sa totalité multiple et non hiérarchique où tout acte, tout objet, toute sensation (aussi humble, minime et singulière soit-elle) garde un droit de perception et conséquemment de pensée.

A rational subject who believes that a = b, and also believes that j, cannot at the same time disbelieve that j, i.e. believe that not-j. John Searle points out that no such constraint holds for desire and some other propositional attitudes. Which ones, exactly? Where is the divide located and what determines it? These are no minor questions, as they directly bear on the larger issue of how far rationality reaches and the extent to which practical reasoning obeys logical (...) rules. It will be argued that there is no reason for despairing that deductive logic will find a way of dealing with practical reasoning, contrary to Searle’s pessimistic attitude. (shrink)

Jacopo Zabarella’s two treatises On Methods and On Regressus (1578) are among the most important Renaissance discussions of how scientific knowledge should be acquired, arranged, and transmitted. They belong to a lively debate about the order in which sciences should be taught and the method to be followed in scientific demonstration that roiled the Late Renaissance world for decades. In these famous works Zabarella rejected the views of Ramists and modern Galenists in favor of the pure doctrine of Aristotle, (...) freed from misunderstandings foisted upon it by medieval interpreters. The influence of these works on Galileo’s scientific method and Descartes’ famous Discourse on Method (1637) has long been debated. They are here translated into English for the first time, along with a new Latin text based on the corrected 1586 edition. -/- Volume 1 contains On Methods, Books I-II. (shrink)

Jacopo Zabarella’s two treatises On Methods and On Regressus (1578) are among the most important Renaissance discussions of how scientific knowledge should be acquired, arranged, and transmitted. They belong to a lively debate about the order in which sciences should be taught and the method to be followed in scientific demonstration that roiled the Late Renaissance world for decades. In these famous works Zabarella rejected the views of Ramists and modern Galenists in favor of the pure doctrine of Aristotle, (...) freed from misunderstandings foisted upon it by medieval interpreters. The influence of these works on Galileo’s scientific method and Descartes’ famous Discourse on Method (1637) has long been debated. They are here translated into English for the first time, along with a new Latin text based on the corrected 1586 edition. Volume 1 contains On Methods, Books I-II. Volume 2 contains On Methods, Books III-IV, and On Regressus. (shrink)

C’est en regardant le portrait aberrant de la planétarité reflétée sur le miroir des complotismes environnementaux que la difficulté collective d’assumer cette échelle écologique se dévoile impitoyablement. Un tel malaise n’est pas seulement lié à une incapacité humaine et individuelle d’accepter la complexité de la crise planétaire. Elle émane de l’ensemble des rapports socio-politiques (verticaux, élitistes) que nous entretenons avec les méditations techniques qui permettent la perception, mais aussi la réparation, de notre planète.

In this article, I contrast two of the main schools of thought within eco-Marxism, namely Metabolic Rift (MR) and World-Ecology (WE). These differ above all else in their accounts of the ontological status of society and nature. The Covid-19 pandemic constitutes a moment of concretisation of this long-standing debate, which is able to dissolve at least in part its issues. The article consists of four parts. I begin with a summary of the two schools of thought and their core stances, (...) before proceeding to unpack their respective theoretical points of contention. I subsequently proceed to explore the conceptualisation of health according to the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin through the model of dialectical biology. In the third section, I unpack the conceptualisation of the Covid-19 pandemic by the epidemiologist Robert Wallace, before finally concluding with the contrasts of the two schools in the light of dialectical biology. (shrink)