Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), esprit universel et promoteur des sciences, est à la fois philosophe, mathématicien et diplomate. Passionné par le langage et le monde, il cherche en encyclopédiste à rendre compte de toutes les inventions et de tous les savoirs. Lors de son séjour à Paris - quatre années pendant lesquelles il rencontre Huygens et étudie Pascal -, il conçoit, en 1675, un projet original de création d'académies, plusieurs spectacles de divertissement. Imaginant des mises en scène ou cherchant à (...) régler la direction des casinos, le philosophe raisonne toujours en stratège. Pour lui, tout dans le monde est combinatoire. D'où son amour pour les jeux, qui associent signes et réseaux. Ainsi se dévoile une Europe savante et inventive qui anticipe notre monde relationnel et numérique. (shrink)

In this paper, we present some experimental findings whose best explanation, first of all, provides a positive answer to a philosophical question in ontology as to whether, in the overall domain of beings, there are fictional characters (_ficta_) over and above concrete individuals. Moreover, since such findings arise out of different comparisons between fictional characters and concrete individuals on the one hand and fictional characters again and non-items that do not belong at all to such an overall domain on the (...) other hand, they also suggest that _ficta_ are allowed as inhabiting a particular subrealm of that domain distinct from the one inhabited by concrete individuals, as previous findings in cognitive psychology had suggested. (shrink)

We analyze the causal-observational languages that were introduced in Barbero and Sandu (2018), which allow discussing interventionist counterfactuals and functional dependencies in a unified framework. In particular, we systematically investigate the expressive power of these languages in causal team semantics, and we provide complete natural deduction calculi for each language. Furthermore, we introduce a generalized semantics which allows representing uncertainty about the causal laws, and we analyze the expressive power and proof theory of the causal-observational languages over this enriched (...) semantics. (shrink)

Although researchers studying human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) share a common interest in how information processing systems (human or machine) recognize spoken language, there is little communication between the two disciplines. We suggest that this lack of communication follows largely from the fact that research in these related fields has focused on the mechanics of how speech can be recognized. In Marr's (1982) terms, emphasis has been on the algorithmic and implementational levels rather than on the (...) computational level. In this article, we provide a computational-level analysis of the task of speech recognition, which reveals the close parallels between research concerned with HSR and ASR. We illustrate this relation by presenting a new computational model of human spoken-word recognition, built using techniques from the field of ASR that, in contrast to current existing models of HSR, recognizes words from real speech input. (shrink)

Carola Barbero | : Je m’intéresse dans cet article aux émotions que nous ressentons lorsque nous lisons une oeuvre de fiction. Certains philosophes pensent que notre implication émotionnelle dans la fiction constitue un paradoxe, et implique soit une forme d’irrationalité, soit la participation à un jeu de « faire semblant ». Ici, je soutiendrai qu’une Théorie de l’Objet à la Meinong, en défendant une approche réaliste des émotions liées la fiction, permet de résoudre adéquatement ce paradoxe de la fiction. (...) | : This essay concerns the emotions that we feel when reading a work of fiction. Some philosophers think that our emotional engagement with fiction gives rise to a paradox and involves either irrationality or participation in a game of make believe. The aim of this work is to show how the paradox of fiction can be dissolved by making use of an Object Theory in a Meinongian style. (shrink)

Although researchers studying human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) share a common interest in how information processing systems (human or machine) recognize spoken language, there is little communication between the two disciplines. We suggest that this lack of communication follows largely from the fact that research in these related fields has focused on the mechanics of how speech can be recognized. In Marr's (1982) terms, emphasis has been on the algorithmic and implementational levels rather than on the (...) computational level. In this article, we provide a computational-level analysis of the task of speech recognition, which reveals the close parallels between research concerned with HSR and ASR. We illustrate this relation by presenting a new computational model of human spoken-word recognition, built using techniques from the field of ASR that, in contrast to current existing models of HSR, recognizes words from real speech input. (shrink)

In ontology, realism and anti-realism may be taken as opposite attitudes towards entities of different kinds, so that one may turn out to be a realist with respect to certain entities, and an anti-realist with respect to others. In this book, the editors focus on this controversy concerning social entities in general and fictional entities in particular, the latter often being considered nowadays as kinds of social entities. More specifically, fictionalists (those who maintain that we only make-believe that there are (...) entities of a certain kind) and creationists (those who believe that entities of a certain kind are the products of human activity) present themselves as the champions of the anti-realist and the realist stance, respectively, regarding the above entities. By evaluating the pros and cons of both these positions, this book intends to focus new light on a longstanding debate. (shrink)

We analyze the behaviour of declarations of independence between existential quantifiers in quantifier prefixes of Independence-Friendly (IF) sentences; we give a syntactical criterion to decide whether a sentence beginning with such prefix exists, such that its truth values may be affected by removal of the declaration of independence. We extend the result also to equilibrium semantics values for undetermined IF sentences.

El debate sobre el fin del arte o del arte en el fin del siglo, pasa por las contradicciones de una modernidad impregnada aún de componentes premodemos, lo cual ha desembocado en un desordenamiento cultural que se revela en la composición híbrida de la sociedad, así como en el intento de entender cómo se constituyeron las diferencias sociales y los elementos de inclusión y exclusión que distinguen lo culto de lo popular y a ambos de lo masivo. Este desordenamiento cultural (...) se manifiestó por medio de la relación cada vez más estrecha de los modos de simbolización y de ritualización del lazo social con la red comunicacional y el flujo audiovisual. (shrink)

There are some others whom we will never have the chance to meet because they do not exist: Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Nana, for instance. The reason they are something different from us may seem obvious; they are, after all, fictional entities. But what does it mean when we say that they do not exist? That they are nothing at all, or that they are simply different from us? By assuming a realist ontological perspective we will explain what sort (...) of things fictional literary entities are, comparing them both to existing and to non-existing entities that resemble them in some respects (what is the difference between the historical Napoleon and the Napoleon in War and Peace? Are there similarities between fictional entities as created entities and other artifacts?). Finally, we will determine which theory gives the best account of fictional entities as things other than ourselves. (shrink)

Il cosiddetto “paradosso della finzione” nasce dal tentativo di spiegare quale tipo di emozioni proviamo verso quegli oggetti che troviamo nei romanzi e nei film e che sappiamo perfettamente essere fittizi. Si tratta di un paradosso classico, tornato alla ribalta nel 1975 dopo la pubblicazione di un articolo di Colin Radford che partiva precisamente dall’interrogativo riguardante le lacrime che versiamo per ciò che non è reale (come un personaggio fittizio, appunto). Perché ci commuoviamo per il suicidio di Anna Karenina se (...) sappiamo che non esiste? Che differenza c’è tra piangere per Anna Karenina, piangere per una bugia, piangere per la depressione e fare finta di piangere perché si vuol fare credere a chi ci guarda che siamo sinceramente commossi? In Piangere e ridere davvero (2009) Maurizio Ferraris offre un’interessante proposta teorica per dissolvere il paradosso in questione e si sofferma su alcune distinzioni fondamentali riguardanti le nostre reazioni emotive a stimoli reali e fittizi. In questo saggio si prende spunto dalla teoria di Ferraris e ci si propone di chiarire che cosa significhi fare finta di rispondere emotivamente a qualcosa nella vita di tutti i giorni e quale sia la differenza tra queste “finte” emozioni e quelle che invece proviamo durante la fruizione di opere che sappiamo essere di finzione. Saranno scelti come esempi paradigmatici il caso Fenaroli (al centro della cronaca italiana alla fine degli anni Cinquanta), Il vedovo di Dino Risi e Scusate il ritardo di Massimo Troisi. (shrink)

Dans ce texte tiré d'un ouvrage , l'auteur décrit les transformations du champ. Face à la technologie et à la transnationalisation, les paradigmes anciens ne suffisent plus à décrire la communication. Celle-ci permet d'observer l'ensemble de la société, une fois abandonnés le médiacentrisme et les idéologies globalisantes. La responsabilité sociale et morale du spécialiste en communication devient alors fondamentale.This paper, taken from a book , describes the transformations in the field of communication sciences. Transformations in technology and transnationalisation mean old (...) paradigms no longer suffice to describe communication. Communication might be «the» vantage point from which society as a whole may be studied once mediacentrism and all-embracing claims have been discarded. Then the social and moral responsibility of the communication specialist is proven to become fundamental. (shrink)

Computational modelling has proven to be a valuable approach in developing theories of spoken-word processing. In this paper, we focus on a particular class of theories in which it is assumed that the spoken-word recognition process consists of two consecutive stages, with an `abstract' discrete symbolic representation at the interface between the stages. In evaluating computational models, it is important to bring in independent arguments for the cognitive plausibility of the algorithms that are selected to compute the processes in a (...) theory. This paper discusses the relation between behavioural studies, theories, and computational models of spoken-word recognition. We explain how computational models can be assessed in terms of the goodness of fit with the behavioural data and the cognitive plausibility of the algorithms. An in-depth analysis of several models provides insights into how computational modelling has led to improved theories and to a better understanding of the human spoken-word recognition process. (shrink)

Team semantics is a highly general framework for logics which describe dependencies and independencies among variables. Typically, the dependencies considered in this context are properties of sets of configurations or data records. We show how team semantics can be further generalized to support languages for the discussion of interventionist counterfactuals and causal dependencies, such as those that arise in manipulationist theories of causation. We show that the “causal teams” we introduce in the present paper can be used for modelling some (...) classical counterfactual scenarios which are not captured by the usual causal models. We then analyse the basic properties of our counterfactual languages and discuss extensively the differences with respect to the Lewisian tradition. (shrink)

El problema del valor cognitivo de las obras literarias ha recibido fundamentalmente dos tipos de respuesta, la cognitivista y la anti-cognitivista, la primera sostiene que la literatura es vehículo de verdades universales y la segunda mantiene que no transmite nada salvo falsedades y trivialidades. Entre estas posiciones opuestas, este ensayo defiende una forma de cognitivismo débil afirmando por una parte, con los cognitivistas, la idea de que aprendemos de la literatura, y por otra parte, con los anti-cognitivistas, la intuición de (...) que la literatura no nos transmite verdades sobre nosotros mismos o sobre el mundo. La idea es que una solución basada en dos niveles, de acuerdo con lo que aprendemos de la literatura, se deriva de una combinación de knowing that y knowing what. En primer lugar, para aprender algo de la literatura necesitamos comprender, y por tanto saber, de qué hablan los textos literarios, tenemos que ser capaces de aferrar el estado de cosas descrito. Este es el primer nivel, relativo a la verdad literaria y al knowing that. En un segundo nivel, nuestro aprendizaje a partir de los textos literarios tiene que ver con imaginar cómo es ser esos personajes involucrados en esos eventos, por lo tanto, knowing what es como vivir una vida diferente de la propia. En este nivel aprendemos de la literatura del mismo modo en que aprendemos de los experimentos mentales, ejemplos o contraejemplos. Esto es lo que Hilary Putnam ha llamado “conocimiento conceptual de vidas posibles. (shrink)

La notion de «populaire» est saisie différemment en Amérique latine et en Europe, puisque là, le populaire est une forme d'hybridation des cultures indiennes, des programmes médiatiques et de la civilisation urbaine. Il s'agit d'abord de penser masse et populaire de manière autonome, en se gardant de tout discours de dénonciation, pour saisir en quoi les telenovelas, par exemple, produisent une oralité seconde porteuse d'une nouvelle dynamique culturelle pour le plus grand nombre. La culture populaire est ainsi un lieu de (...) réappropriation, dans un artisanat indien remodelé par le design mondialisé, autre exemple, où l'hétérogénéité des productions n'empêche pas une reconstruction identitaire qui retisse des liens avec un passé qu'il est indispensable de réinterpréter.The concept of "popular" is seized differently in Latin America and Europe, since there, the popular one is a form of hybridization of the Indian cultures, programs media and urban civilization. It is initially a question of thinking mass and popular in an autonomous way, while keeping itself of any speech of denunciation, to seize in what the telenovelas, for example, produce a second orality carrying a new cultural dynamics for the greatest number. The popular culture is thus a place of reappropriation, in an Indian craft industry reorganized by the mondialized design, another example, where the heterogeneity of the productions does not prevent an identity rebuilding which weaves new links with a past which it is essential to reinterpret. (shrink)

Disenchantment, disillusion and despair reign in a world where technical rationality and globalization create a market culture and the merchandise of audio-visual images to close the order of symbols and the hermeneutics of meaning. Techno-digital ignorance; the repression of sensitivity by an ideol..

Reading starts with the act of perception and rapidly moves into an area concerning the recognition of written words. Word recognition consists of two aspects (functioning simultaneously and working in parallel): the phonological—converting groups of letters into sounds—and the lexical— giving access to a mental dictionary of the meaning of words. But what does the act of reading consist of? According to Peter Kivy, there is a parallel between reading texts and reading scores. And what about the reasons for reading? (...) When we read, we are not just interested in understanding what the signs stand for, but we also activate memory, perception, problem-solving, and reasoning, and our attention is also devoted to identifying those characteristics of texts which help categorize them as works of a specific genre. Readers play a central role: without them and their activity, there would be nothing but a page of black spots. As they read and understand, readers propositionally imagine what is written and, at a further level, they may also imagine objectually and simulatively. These objects come into being thanks to the words that we imagine are similar to what Roman Ingarden sees as a skeleton, needing the experience of reading to be appropriately concretized. (shrink)

A dichotomy result of Sevenster (2014) [29] completely classified the quantifier prefixes of regular Independence-Friendly (IF) logic according to the patterns of quantifier dependence they contain. On one hand, prefixes that contain “Henkin” or “signalling” patterns were shown to characterize fragments of IF logic that capture NP-complete problems; all the remaining prefixes were shown instead to be essentially first-order. In the present paper we develop the machinery which is needed in order to extend the results of Sevenster to non-prenex, regular (...) IF sentences. This involves shifting attention from quantifier prefixes to a (rather general) class of syntactical tree prefixes. We partially classify the fragments of regular IF logic that are thus determined by syntactical trees; in particular, a) we identify four classes of tree prefixes that are neither signaling nor Henkin, and yet express NP-complete problems and other second-order concepts; and b) we give more general criteria for checking the first-orderness of an IF sentence. (shrink)

We analyze the expressive resources of \ logic that do not stem from Henkin quantification. When one restricts attention to regular \ sentences, this amounts to the study of the fragment of \ logic which is individuated by the game-theoretical property of action recall. We prove that the fragment of prenex AR sentences can express all existential second-order properties. We then show that the same can be achieved in the non-prenex fragment of AR, by using “signalling by disjunction” instead of (...) Henkin or signalling patterns. We also study irregular IF logic and analyze its correspondence to regular IF logic. By using new methods, we prove that the game-theoretical property of knowledge memory is a first-order syntactical constraint also for irregular sentences, and we identify another new first-order fragment. Finally we discover that irregular prefixes behave quite differently in finite and infinite models. In particular, we show that, over infinite structures, every irregular prefix is equivalent to a regular one; and we present an irregular prefix which is second order on finite models but collapses to a first-order prefix on infinite models. (shrink)

1 Il Brillo Box Alla Galleria Stable di New York, nel 1964, è stata esposta per la prima volta l’opera di Andy Warhol, Brillo Box. Secondo Arthur Danto, la ragione per la quale non si tratta di una semplice scatola di spugnette abrasive (al di là del fatto che quella di Warhol è di dimensioni differenti, non è di cartone, bensì di legno, e poi, ovviamente, non contiene il prodotto pubblicizzato all’esterno) è che tale oggetto deve essere letto (per non (...) dire “visto”) alla luce di una determina... (shrink)

C’è una domanda che sorge spontaneamente: perché mai dovremmo essere interessati a generi di opere quali il terrore e la tragedia? Com’è possibile che questi generi continuino a persistere? Come possiamo spiegare la loro stessa esistenza? O meglio, perché mai qualcuno dovrebbe voler provare emozioni negative quali la paura, il terrore e la tristezza? Poi, come funziona, che più c’è da soffrire e più gli spettatori sono contenti? Si ammetterà che, se le cose stanno davvero così, si tratta di u...

“Naturalismo” è una parola che si dice in molti modi, almeno tanti quanti nella storia della filosofia e nel sentire comune sono i modi in cui si è parlato di “natura” e di espressioni simili. Oggi, il tema del naturalismo in filosofia e della cosiddetta naturalizzazione che una filosofia dovrebbe eventualmente attrezzare determinate nozioni e teorie è tornato prepotentemente alla ribalta della riflessione filosofica, sulla scia dei successi provenienti dalle scienze cognitive (linguistica, n...

(2013). Open Access Digital Data Sharing: Principles, Policies and Practices☆. Social Epistemology: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 47-67. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2012.760663.

In The Performance of Reading, Peter Kivy introduces, on a purely phenomenological basis, an interesting and potentially fruitful analogy between the experience of silently reading literary texts and the experience of silently reading musical scores. In Kivy’s view, both mental experiences involve a critical element of auditory mental imagery, consisting in having a performance “in the head” or the mind’s ear. This analogy might have significant implications for the ontological status of literary works, as well as for the theoretical relations (...) between music and language. Nevertheless, Kivy’s hypothesis has never been investigated and discussed in its empirical merits. In the present paper, we shall claim that neuroscience data support, at least in part, Kivy’s phenomenological observations about the relation between reading musical scores and reading texts. Despite being functionally and anatomically dissociated at the cognitive level, the two reading experiences both involve an auditory simulation of the content, which seems to be functionally critical for a deep and rich experience of literary texts and musical scores. (shrink)

Gli oggetti fittizi sono quegli oggetti presenti nelle opere di finzione, dalla letteratura al cinema, dal teatro ai dipinti. Questo saggio prende in con­siderazione, prevalentemente, gli oggetti della finzione letteraria. Tali og­getti pongono interessanti quesiti tanto sul versante ontologico quanto sul versante semantico: in primo luogo occorre fare chiarezza sulle condizioni alle quali essi possono legittimamente essere considerati degli oggetti, in se­condo luogo è importante individuare il valore semantico degli enunciati de­signanti oggetti di tal sorta e infine è in­di­spensabile esplicitare (...) lo statuto on­tologico di tali entità al fine di spiegare come avviene che pro­viamo emo­zioni nei loro confronti.Fictional entities are those entities we find in fictional works, from li­te­rature to cinema, from theatre to paintings. This essay will mostly concern li­terary fictional entities. These entities pose interesting questions both for se­mantics and for ontology: first we need to clarify the conditions ac­cording to which they can legitimately be considered as objects, secondly we need to understand the semantical value of sentences referring to ob­jects of that sort, and finally we need to emphasize the importance of those en­tities in order to explain how does it happen that we prove emotions to­wards them. (shrink)

According to Alexius Meinong, in order to give a philosophical explanation of the world we need to consider both existent and nonexistent objects, lest we fall into the "prejudice in favour of the real". The paper starts by examining some basic concepts of object theory seen as an existence-free science (modes of being, principle of independence of so-being from being, "Aussersein" and Meinong's paradox). There follows an exposition of Bertrand Russell's position, characterized by a "robust sense of reality", and afterwards (...) an analysis of differences and similarities between the two philosophers. The paper ends with a short account of Meinongian semantics and a comparison between object theory and metaphysics. (shrink)