Sometimes we speak of behaviours and actions as reactions, just as we speak of physical conditions and mental states as reactions. But what do we mean when we say that emotions are reactions? I answer this question by developing an account of emotions as psychological reactions to presentations or representations of states of affairs. I show that this account may provide a novel conceptual framework for explaining aspects of the intentionality, phenomenology and behavioural manifestation of emotions. I conclude by showing (...) that this account is compatible with the view that emotions can be assessed on grounds of justification and correctness. (shrink)

The "myside bias'' in evaluating arguments is an empirically well-confirmed phenomenon that consists of overweighting arguments that endorse one's beliefs or attack alternative beliefs while underweighting arguments that attack one's beliefs or defend alternative beliefs. This paper makes two contributions: First, it proposes a probabilistic model that adequately captures three salient features of myside bias in argument evaluation. Second, it provides a Bayesian justification of this model, thus showing that myside bias has a rational Bayesian explanation under certain conditions.

Aristotle and Eudemus report a Speusippean argument to the effect that defining anything requires knowing everything. Scholars have failed to make sense of this argument. This paper argues that the main preoccupations to which the Puzzle is meant to respond are: (i) to ensure the co-extensiveness of the definition with the definiendum; (ii) to rule out a particular definitional mistake—underdivision. The implications of the Puzzle for Speusippus’ conception of knowledge are further explored.

This paper defends the viability of de-idealization strategies in economic modeling against recent criticism. De-idealization occurs when an idealized assumption of a theoretical model is replaced with a more realistic one. Recently, some scholars have raised objections against the possibility or fruitfulness of de-idealizing economic models, suggesting that economists do not employ this kind of strategy. We present a detailed case study from the theory of industrial organization, discussing three different models, two of which can be construed as de-idealized versions (...) of the first. We conclude that recent pessimism about de-idealization in economics is largely unfounded, and that de-idealization strategies are not only possible but also widely employed in economics. (shrink)

This article examines Wittgenstein’s criticism of Moore’s use of “know”, as he developed it in On Certainty. Arguing against much of the literature, the author claims that, by Wittgenstein’s own lights, Moore was not talking nonsense. He does so by showing, first, that the standard reading is based on the idea that hinge propositions are non-epistemic, and second, that Wittgenstein’s alleged adoption of the non-epistemic view is not adequately supported by the textual evidence. The author argues that claims to the (...) contrary depend on an undue conflation, on the part of interpreters, of Wittgenstein’s treatment of psychological avowals in Philosophical Investigations and his discussion of hinge propositions in On Certainty. Moreover, a closer look at Wittgenstein’s objections to Moore shows that Wittgenstein himself repeatedly charged Moore with a similar confusion between the status of psychological statements and the status of his common-sense truisms. (shrink)

Bionic systems, connecting biological tissues with computer or robotic devices through brain–machine interfaces, can be used in various ways to discover biological mechanisms. In this article I outline and discuss a “stimulation-connection” bionics-supported methodology for the study of the brain, and compare it with other epistemic uses of bionic systems described in the literature. This methododology differs from the “synthetic”, simulative method often followed in theoretically driven Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science, even though it involves machine models of biological systems. (...) I also bring the previous analysis to bear on some claims on the epistemic value of bionic technologies made in the recent philosophical literature. I believe that the methodological reflections proposed here may contribute to the piecewise understanding of the many ways bionic technologies can be deployed not only to restore lost sensory-motor functions, but also to discover brain mechanisms. (shrink)

Ninety-one right brain-damaged patients with left neglect and 43 right brain-damaged patients without neglect were asked to extend horizontal segments, either left- or rightward, starting from their right or left endpoints, respectively. Earlier experiments based on similar tasks had shown, in left neglect patients, a tendency to overextend segments toward the left side. This seemingly paradoxical phenomenon was held to undermine current explanations of unilateral neglect. The results of the present extensive research demonstrate that contralesional overextension is also evident in (...) most right brain-damaged patients without contralesional neglect. Furthermore, they show that in a minority of left neglect patients, the opposite behavior, i.e., right overextension can be found. The paper also reports the results of correlational analyses comprising the parameters of line-extension, line-bisection, and cancellation tasks, as well as the parameters relative to the Milner Landmark Task, by which a distinction is drawn between perceptual and response biases in unilateral neglect. A working hypothesis is then advanced about the brain dysfunction underlying neglect and an attempt is made at finding an explanation of neglect and the links between the mechanisms of space representation and consciousness through the study of the changes induced by unilateral brain lesions in the characteristics of space-coding neurons. Abbreviations: C, control group;GN+91,full group of neglect patients;GN+27,group of neglect patients with relative left overextension;GN+14,group of neglect patients with relative right overextension;GN-43,full group of non-neglect patients;GN-9,group of non-neglect patients with relative left overextension; H canc, H cancellation task; LE, left extension; LE/RE, ratio of left-right extension; N+, neglect patients; N-, non-neglect patients; PB Land-M, perceptual bias on Landmark motor task; PB Land-V, perceptual bias on Landmark verbal task; RB Land-M, response bias on Landmark motor task; RB Land-V, response bias on Landmark verbal task; RE, right extension. (shrink)

In so-called ethorobotics and robot-supported social cognitive neurosciences, robots are used as scientific tools to study animal behavior and cognition. Building on previous epistemological analyses of biorobotics, in this article it is argued that these two research fields, widely differing from one another in the kinds of robots involved and in the research questions addressed, share a common methodology, which significantly differs from the “synthetic method” that, until recently, dominated biorobotics. The methodological novelty of this strategy, the research opportunities that (...) it opens, and the theoretical and technological challenges that it gives rise to, will be discussed with reference to the peculiarities of the two research fields. Some broad methodological issues related to the generalization of results concerning robot-animal interaction to theoretical conclusions on animal-animal interaction will be identified and discussed. (shrink)

BackgroundThis study aimed at standardizing and providing preliminary evidence on the clinical usability of the Italian telephone-based Verbal Fluency Battery, which includes phonemic, semantic and alternate verbal fluency tasks.MethodsThree-hundred and thirty-five Italian healthy participants and 27 individuals with neurodegenerative or cerebrovascular diseases were administered the t-VFB. Switch number and cluster size were computed via latent semantic analyses. HPs underwent the telephone-based Mental State Examination and Backward Digit Span. Construct validity, factorial structure, internal consistency, test-retest and inter-rater reliability and equivalence with (...) the in-person Verbal Fluency tasks were assessed. Norms were derived via Equivalent Scores. Diagnostic accuracy against clinical populations was assessed.ResultsThe majority of t-VFB scores correlated among each other and with the BDS, but not with the MMSE. Switch number correlated with t-PVF, t-SVF, t-AVF scores, whilst cluster size with the t-SVF and t-AVF scores only. The t-VFB was underpinned by a mono-component structure and was internally consistent. Test-retest and inter-rater reliability were optimal. Each t-VFB test was statistically equivalent to its in-person version. Education predicted all t-VFB scores, whereas age t-SVF and t-AVF scores and sex only some t-SVF scores. Diagnostic accuracy against clinical samples was optimal.DiscussionThe t-VFB is a valid, reliable and normed telephone-based assessment tool for language and executive functioning, equivalent to the in-person version; results show promising evidence of its diagnostic accuracy in neurological populations. (shrink)

Eduardo Fugali möchte in seinem Beitrag „Die Aktualität der empirischen Psychologie Brentanos in der heutigen Philosophie des Geistes“ Brentanos Denkansätze und wissenschaftliches Selbstverständnis für die aktuelle Philosophie des Geistes bzw. die Kognitionswissenschaften wieder fruchtbar machen, wozu es jedoch zunächst nötig ist, mit bestehenden Missverständnissen und Reduktion hinsichtlich des Denkens Brentanos aufzuräumen. Darüber hinaus gilt es, die Probleme innerhalb des Feldes der Philosophie des Geistes selbst zu beheben, die nach Fugali zur Nivellierung geistiger Tätigkeit in eben diesen Wissenschaften führt. Um dieser (...) Tendenz zu begegnen, stellt Fugali der vermeintlich angenommenen Losgelöstheit von Intentionalität und Bewußtsein deren ursprüngliche Verbundenheit entgegen, um das Missverständnis zu beseitigen. So räumt Fugali mit dem Missverständnis auf, dass Intentionalität analog dem sprachlichen Ausdruck ist. Diesem folgt der Erweis, dass alle Bewußtseinszustände intentional strukturiert sind, was er anhand von Vorstellen und Urteilen exemplifiziert. Weiterhin hebt Fugali die Einheit des Bewußtseins trotz der Mannigfaltigkeit der physischen Erscheinungen hervor, um abschließend die Belastbarkeit Brentanos Theorie von der selbstrepräsentationalen Auffassung des Bewußtseins anhand anderer Ansätze zu prüfen. (shrink)

O artigo visa mostrar como Eric Weil (1904-1977) recompreendeu a famosa tese do “fim da história”, elaborada por Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) desde os anos de 1930, propondo uma nova versão de caráter essencialmente “kantiano pós-hegeliano”: um elemento teórico fundamental do inter histórico- filosófico weiliano, que emergiria claramente dos estudos específicos sobre Kant aos quais Weil se dedicou de modo pontual a partir da década de 1960. Veremos, portanto, como as reviravoltas “práticas” de tal recompreensão tenham de fato indicado a estrada (...) para a constituição de uma nova filosofia política, eminentemente crítica e antidogmática. (shrink)

Not only did André Gorz have a political conception of ecology that links it to history and social struggles, he also proposed a full-fledged ecological alternative at the service of individual autonomy. Though he may have appeared a traitor to his own camp on several occasions, it was always to remain faithful over the long run. His critique of the alienation of labor led him to look for an exit from salaried productivism in the forms of guaranteed income and « (...) cooperation circles » – perhaps as a prelude to the free interchange of the immaterial economy. (shrink)

Un spectre hante les cauchemars du monde marchand globalisé : le spectre de l'écologie. Toutes les puissances politiques, religieuses ou commerciales du vieux et du nouveau monde se sont regroupées dans une sainte alliance pour y faire allégeance, verbalement du moins, en faisant étalage de sommets internationaux en conférences mondiales de leur souci constant des questions écologiques.. tout en continuant, la plupart du temps, comme si de rien n'était! Dans la plus grande confusion se mêlent développement durable, sauvegarde de la (...) nature, crise de l'énergie et altermondialisme pour réduire l'écologie à une vague menace qui plane sur nos têtes tout en restant complètement inconsistante et insaisissable, tiraillée entre tendances contradictoires. Chacun semble persuadé de la nécessité d'une alternative écologiste sans avoir la moindre idée de la façon d'y parvenir, jusqu'à dénier son caractère politique et social pour se contenter d'un catastrophisme sans nuances, de bonnes intentions, de grandes déclarations et de petits gestes... (shrink)

The main argument of the chapter is that Trendelenburg had an important mediating role in the post-Aristotelian tradition, which developed further and culminated in idealistic theories of subjectivity and self-consciousness.

In their theoretical and experimental reflections on the capacities and behaviours of living systems, neuroscientists often formulate generalizations about the behaviour of neural circuits. These generalizations are highly idealized, as they omit reference to the myriads of conditions that could perturb the behaviour of the modelled system in real-world settings. This article analyses an experimental investigation of the behaviour of place cells in the rat hippocampus, in which highly idealized generalizations were tested by comparing predictions flowing from them with real-world (...) experimental results. The aim of the article is to identify under what conditions even single prediction failures regarding the behaviour of single cells sufficed to reject highly idealized generalizations, and under what conditions prima facie counter-examples were deemed to be irrelevant to the testing of highly idealized generalizations. The results of this analysis may contribute to understanding how idealized models are tested experimentally in neuroscience and used to make reliable predictions concerning living systems in real-world settings. (shrink)

Résumé Le revenu garanti s’impose à l’ère de l’information, du travail autonome et du développement humain mais aussi pour des raisons écologistes de sortie du salariat productiviste. Cependant, pour assurer effectivement une production alternative, il ne faut pas seulement s’occuper des revenus mais aussi de la production elle-même, des moyens de production comme des moyens monétaires et des circuits marchands. Dans une perspective écologiste de relocalisation de l’économie, revenu garanti, coopératives municipales et monnaies locales se révèlent ainsi indissociables pour construire (...) un nouveau système de production, sur d’autres rapports sociaux que le salariat, à l’ère du travail immatériel et de la globalisation marchande. (shrink)

The my-side bias is a well-documented cognitive bias in the evaluation of arguments, in which reasoners in a discussion tend to overvalue arguments that confirm their prior beliefs, while undervaluing arguments that attack their prior beliefs. The first part of this paper develops and justifies a Bayesian model of myside bias at the level of individual reasoning. In the second part, this Bayesian model is implemented in an agent-based model of group discussion among myside-biased agents. The agent-based model is then (...) used to perform a number of experiments with the objective to study whether the myside bias hinders or enhances the ability of groups to collectively track the truth, that is, to reach the correct answer to a given binary issue. An analysis of the results suggests the following: First, whether the truth-tracking ability of groups is helped or hindered by myside bias crucially depends on how the strength of myside bias is differentially distributed across subgroups of discussants holding different beliefs. Second, small groups are more likely to track the truth than larger groups, suggesting that increasing group size has a detrimental effect on collective truth-tracking through discussion. (shrink)

Generally speaking, political theory avoids considering the kind of damage suffered by he who lives excluded from any political community or perhaps sees such damage as a juridical and political phenomenon that is the loss of nationality. One must instead be aware that they who are compelled to live within the circumscribed space of a set of regulations, institutions and spaces that can be labelled under the umbrella term of camp are subject to a specific existential deprivation and not only (...) to a juridical damage. To justify this argumentation it is worth going back to Hannah Arendt's works where the condition of people without citizenship is understood under ontological-existential terms thus offering a wiser perspective to understand one's moral obligations towards stateless people and refugees. (shrink)

Citation-based metrics are increasingly used as a proxy to define representative, considerable, or significant papers. We challenge this belief by taking into account factors that may play a role in providing citations to a manuscript and whether/how those highly cited studies could shape a scientific field. A different approach to summarisation of relevant core publications within a topic is proposed.

In this paper the contribution of Robert R. Palmer to the now booming Atlantic history is put into perspective. It describes the main features of the political and historiographical context that inspired the writing of his book, The Age of the Democratic Revolution in the early 1950s (first volume published in 1959, second volume in 1964). It also argues that the war experience Palmer had in the historical section of the Army Ground Forces has been important in reviving the interest (...) for the transatlantic dimension in modern history that was central in his PhD dissertation. This paper shows how the liberal-tocquevillian approach that Palmer adopted to explain the multiple revolutions that shook North America and Europe in the last quarter of the 18th century earned him the attacks of the Marxist historians. In its last part this paper makes use of private letters to claim that in the 1970s and 1980s the Italian historian Franco Venturi revived the scholarly interest in Palmer's perspective despite methodological differences between his Settecento riformatore and Palmer's analysis. Settecento riformatore and The Age of the Democratic Revolution have contributed to the interest in a transatlantic approach to 18th-century history that is now pursued under the heading of “entangled histories”. (shrink)

Parmi les différents types d’implicite, les implicatures portent sur le niveau du contenu, les présuppositions et les topicalisations sur le niveau de la responsabilité, en provoquant ce que Givón appelle la unchallengeability d’une information, c’est-à-dire la difficulté pour le destinataire d’y appliquer un “défi” cognitif qui puisse aboutir au doute sur sa vérité. Cette fonction des implicites se trouve de façon massive dans les textes persuasifs. L’article vise à quantifier l’implicitation du contenu et de la responsabilité dans quelques textes de (...) propagande politique et commerciale, au moyen d’un système d’indices d’implicitation assignés aux dites catégories. On propose ce procédé comme un exemple du rôle que l’analyse linguistique peut jouer pour l’amélioration des conditions de transparence et de garantie dans la pratique de la communication commerciale, et dans les processus où se forme le consentement démocratique. (shrink)

Looking at a person’s expression is a good way of telling what she feels—what emotions she has. Why is that? Is it because we see her emotion, or is it because we infer her mental state from her expression? My claim is that there is a sense in which we do see the person’s emotion. I first argue that expressions are physical events that carry information about the emotions that produce them. I then examine evidence suggesting that specific brain areas (...) and structures are involved in the process that extracts such information and makes it available in the content of visual experience. I consider only what happens in early stages of visual processing and make no claim about the role of simulation and empathy. (shrink)

What can interactive robots offer to the study of social behaviour? Philosophical reflections about the use of robotic models in animal research have focused so far on methods involving robots which do not interact with the target system. Yet, leading researchers have claimed that interactive robots may constitute powerful experimental tools to study collective behaviour. Can they live up to these epistemic expectations? This question is addressed here by focusing on a particular experimental methodology involving interactive robots which has been (...) often adopted in animal research. This methodology is shown to differ from other robot-supported methods for the study of animal behaviour analysed in the philosophical literature, chiefly including the synthetic method. It is also discussed whether biomimicry and acceptability are necessary for an interactive robot to be sensibly used in animal research according to this method. (shrink)

The model of self-referential truth presented in this paper, named Revision-theoretic supervaluation, aims to incorporate the philosophical insights of Gupta and Belnap’s Revision Theory of Truth into the formal framework of Kripkean fixed-point semantics. In Kripke-style theories the final set of grounded true sentences can be reached from below along a strictly increasing sequence of sets of grounded true sentences: in this sense, each stage of the construction can be viewed as an improvement on the previous ones. I want to (...) do something similar replacing the Kripkean sets of grounded true sentences with revision-theoretic sets of stable true sentences. This can be done by defining a monotone operator through a variant of van Fraassen’s supervaluation scheme which is simply based on ω-length iterations of the Tarskian operator. Clearly, all virtues of Kripke-style theories are preserved, and we can also prove that the resulting set of “grounded” true sentences shares some nice features with the sets of stable true sentences which are provided by the usual ways of formalising revision. What is expected is that a clearer philosophical content could be associated to this way of doing revision; hopefully, a content directly linked with the insights underlying finite revision processes. (shrink)

Robots are being extensively used for the purpose of discovering and testing empirical hypotheses about biological sensorimotor mechanisms. We examine here methodological problems that have to be addressed in order to design and perform “good” experiments with these machine models. These problems notably concern the mapping of biological mechanism descriptions into robotic mechanism descriptions; the distinction between theoretically unconstrained “implementation details” and robotic features that carry a modeling weight; the role of preliminary calibration experiments; the monitoring of experimental environments for (...) disturbing factors that affect both modeling features and theoretically unconstrained implementation details of robots. Various assumptions that are gradually introduced in the process of setting up and performing these robotic experiments become integral parts of the background hypotheses that are needed to bring experimental observations to bear on biological mechanism descriptions. (shrink)

This paper studies an argument in the prologue of the Charmides which defends the view that it is impossible to cure the body independently of the soul. I argue that Socrates is committed to an account of the psychē as an embodied soul, causally responsible for the biological condition of the body. Furthermore, the prescription of kaloi logoi as a treatment for the soul’s biological failures suggests that Socrates appears to initially regard the ethical and biological dimensions of the soul (...) as intimately connected. But I also show that Socrates is unable to maintain this position consistently throughout the passage. A similar conflation of functions can be traced in R. X.608d–611a. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of the ontology of occurrent happiness. The main claim is that occurrent happiness is a state that obtains in virtue of the occurrence of conscious episodes that are intentionally directed at the object of happiness. This account draws on Wittgenstein’s remarks about emotions and builds on recent developments in the ontology of mind.