We present a syntactical cut-elimination proof for an extended sequent calculus covering the classical modal logics in the \(\mathsf{K}\), \(\mathsf{D}\), \(\mathsf{T}\), \(\mathsf{K4}\), \(\mathsf{D4}\) and \(\mathsf{S4}\) spectrum. We design the systems uniformly since they all share the same set of rules. Different logics are obtained by “tuning” a single parameter, namely a constraint on the applicability of the cut rule and on the (left and right, respectively) rules for \(\Box\) and \(\Diamond\). Starting points for this research are 2-sequents and indexed-based calculi (...) (sequents and tableaux). By extending and modifying existing proposals, we show how to achieve a syntactical proof of the cut-elimination theorem that is as close as possible to the one for first-order classical logic. In doing this, we implicitly show how small is the proof-theoretical distance between classical logic and the systems under consideration. (shrink)

We propose a natural deduction calculus for the modal logic S4.2. The system is designed to match as much as possible the structure and the properties of the standard system of natural deduction for first-order classical logic, exploiting the formal analogy between modalities and quantifiers. The system is proved sound and complete with respect to (w.r.t.) the standard Hilbert-style formulation of S4.2. Normalization and its consequences are obtained in a natural way, with proofs that closely follow the analogous ones for (...) first-order logic. (shrink)

Improvising involves participants adopting attitudes and dispositions that make them welcoming towards what happens, even when it is unforeseen. How is the discourse on improvisation and a disposition to improvise in the community connected to the concept of inquiry? What type of reasoning can be developed? This paper aims to reflect on two different perspectives. On the one hand, we consider the feasibility of improvising inquiry in the community, promoting inquiry as an activity that can be developed extemporaneously when teacher (...) and students form a community with an “improvising” habitus. On the other hand, we underscore the intrinsic improvisational dimension of inquiry that takes shape in philosophical dialogue in the community. To develop these two educational and formative perspectives, participants students and particularly teachers must first acquire a “readiness” for improvisation which is a sort of complex attitude. Some results of previous research on improvisation are presented to explain and emphasize the features of this complex disposition. Teachers who improvise suddenly open a window on events happening in the community, serving as an example for the class which is invited to do the same. Teachers thus become improviser-facilitators within the community, embracing the feature of a new jazz-pedagogy at the same time. (shrink)

Supposition is frequently invoked in many fields within philosophy, including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and epistemology. However, there is a striking lack of consensus about the nature of supposition. What is supposition? Is supposition a sui generis type of mental state or is it reducible to some other type of mental state? These are the main questions Margherita Arcangeli explores in this book. She examines the characteristic features of supposition, along the dimensions of phenomenology and emotionality, (...) among others, in a journey through the imaginative realm. An informed answer to the question “What is supposition?” must involve an analysis of imagination, since supposition is so often defined in opposition to the latter. She assesses rival explanations of supposition putting forward a novel view, according to which the proper way of seeing supposition is as a primitive type of imaginative state. Supposition and the Imaginative Realm: A Philosophical Inquiry will be of great interest to students of philosophy of psychology, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and epistemology. (shrink)

This paper presents the collective reflection of a temporary community of inquiry (COI) created during an international workshop at the 20th biennial ICPIC conference--“Philosophy In And Beyond the Classroom: P4wc Across Cultural, Social, and Political Differences”-- and the suggestions emerging from that event. The workshop, entitled “Pedagojazz—improvising and inquiring, community interplay”, was conducted via Zoom, but participants were both online and present in person. The topic focused on the pedagojazz perspective, and the short activities proposed were aimed at involving the (...) (temporary) COI in a collective discussion about how it would be possible to transform a community of inquiry into an inquiring-jazzing community. Three premises were introduced as common background on which to develop our reflections: the pedagojazz perspective; the connection between pedagojazz idioms and the different roles of the facilitator in P4wC; and the idea that jazz, and collective improvisation in particular, can inform COI development. The principles and practices of pedagojazz and collective improvisation are presented in detail here. During the workshop, Zoom chat and the Wooclap site were used to involve all participants and to gather their contributions and suggestions. A word cloud and three tables were produced and are presented here. Interesting themes, questions and perspectives emerged that can help us reflect in a more complex way on the education of P4wC facilitators across cultural, social and political differences. (shrink)

We discuss two key assumptions of Levelt et al.'s model of lexical retrieval: (1) the nondecompositional character of concepts and (2) lemmas as purely syntactic representations. These assumptions fail to capture the broader role of lemmas, which we propose as that of lexical–semantic representations binding (compositional) semantics with phonology (or orthography).

Dual-mechanism models of language maintain a distinction between a lexicon and a computational system of linguistic rules. In his target article, Clahsen provides support for such a distinction, presenting evidence from German inflections. He argues for a structured lexicon, going beyond the strict lexicon versus rules dichotomy. We agree with the author in assuming a dual mechanism; however, we argue that a next step must be taken, going beyond the notion of the computational system as specific rules applying to a (...) linguistic domain. By assuming a richer lexicon, the computational system can be conceived as a more general binding process that applies to different linguistic levels: syntax, morphology, reading, and spelling. (shrink)

Who is a native signer? Since around 95% of deaf infants are born into a hearing family, deaf signers are exposed to a sign language at various moments of their life, and not only from birth. Moreover, the linguistic input they are exposed to is not always a fully fledged natural sign language. In this situation, is the notion of native signer as someone exposed to language from birth of any use? We review the results of the first large-scale cross-linguistic (...) investigation on the effects of age of exposure to sign language. This research involved about 45 Deaf adult signers in each of three sign languages (Catalan Sign Language, French Sign Language, and Italian Sign Language). Across the three languages, participants were divided into three groups – those exposed from birth, those between 1 and 5 years of age, and those exposed between 6 and 15 years of age – and received a battery of tests designed for each language targeting various aspects of morphosyntactic competence. In particular, the tests focused on both those morphosyntactic phenomena that are known from the spoken language literature to be good detectors of language impairment or delay (i.e.,wh-interrogatives and relative clauses) and on morphosyntactic phenomena that are sign language specific (i.e., role shift and directional verbs). The results showed a clear effect of being native, with significant differences across languages and tests between signers exposed to sign language from birth and those exposed in the 1st years of life. This confirms the life-long importance of language exposure from birth and the reliability of the notion of “nativeness”, at least for syntax. On the other hand, while in most domains the differences observed between populations might be differences in performance, for some specific constructions, signers belonging to the three groups may have different grammars. This latter finding challenges the generalized use of native signers’ grammar as the baseline for language description and language assessment. (shrink)

O'Brien & Opie argue that (1) only explicit representations give rise to conscious experience, and (2) explicit representations depend on stable patterns of activation. In neglect patients, the stimuli presented to the neglected hemifield are not consciously experienced but exert causal effects on the processing of other stimuli presented to the intact hemifield. We argue that O'Brien & Opie cannot account for a nonconscious representation that is stable, as attested by the fact that it affects behavior, but is neither potentially (...) explicit nor tacit. (shrink)

Mental imagery has often been taken to be equivalent to “sensory imagination”, the perception‐like type of imagination at play when, for example, one visually imagines a flower when none is there, or auditorily imagines a music passage while wearing earplugs. I contend that the equation of mental imagery with sensory imagination stems from a confusion between two senses of mental imagery. In the first sense, mental imagery is used to refer to a psychological attitude, which is perception‐like in nature. In (...) the second sense, mental imagery refers to a mental content, which can be grasped via different attitudes. I will show that failure to acknowledge the distinction between these senses of mental imagery has muddled philosophical discussion. This distinction brings much needed clarity to debates where sensory imagination and mental imagery are invoked, shedding light on issues such as the nature of imagistic mental states, and the representational powers and limits of mental imagery. I will conclude by sketching a general attitudinal account of imagination that does justice to both senses of mental imagery, outlining a promising framework for understanding imagination. (shrink)

Awe seems to be a complex emotion or emotional construct characterized by a mix of positive (contentment, happiness), and negative affective components (fear and a sense of being smaller, humbler or insignificant). It is striking that the elicitors of awe correspond closely to what philosophical aesthetics, and especially Burke and Kant, have called “the sublime.” As a matter of fact, awe is almost absent from the philosophical agenda, while there are very few studies on the experience of the sublime as (...) such in the psychological literature. The aim of this paper is to throw light on the complex relationship between awe (as understood by psychologists) and the experience of the sublime (as discussed by philosophers). We distinguish seven ways of conceiving this relationship and highlight those that seem more promising to us. Once we have a clearer picture of how awe and the experience of the sublime are related, we can use it to enhance collaboration between these domains. We would be able to use empirical results about awe in a philosophical analysis of the experience of the sublime, which in turn can help us to design novel experimental hypotheses about the contexts in which we experience awe. (shrink)

Aphantasia, a recently labelled spectrum condition affecting mental imagery, has brought to the fore the centrality of imagination in our lives. Intuitively it may seem that we cannot have a normal life without the possession of imaginative abilities. Yet, aphantasics do not seem to be much affected by their condition. Can aphantasia tell us anything about the nature and role of our imaginative abilities? I contend that an important distinction that can shed light on this question has been largely overlooked, (...) namely that between two senses of mental imagery: as a type of mental content (viz., mental imagery strictly speaking), and as a kind of psychological attitude (viz., sensory imagination). Drawing on this distinction, I suggest three possible conditions: (i) impairment in mental imagery only, (ii) impairment in sensory imagination only, (iii) impairment in both mental imagery and sensory imagination. I show that core cases of aphantasia are better understood as impairments in sensory imagination only, but I indicate empirical strategies to investigate whether some cases of aphantasia rather involve impairments in mental imagery, which would point toward a plurality of forms of aphantasia. Sensory imagination, however, does not exhaust the imaginative realm, therefore we shouldn’t jump to the hasty conclusion that aphantasics have no imagination. Most aphantasics lack sensory imagination, but arguably can exploit other forms of imagination. This would explain in which sense they still possess imaginative abilities. (shrink)

A popular view maintains that supposition is a kind of cognitive mental state, very similar to belief in essential respects. Call this view “cognitivism about supposition”. There are at least three grades of cognitivism, construing supposition as (i) a belief, (ii) belief-like imagination or (iii) a species of belief-like imagination. I shall argue against all three grades of cognitivism and claim that supposition is a sui generis form of imagination essentially dissimilar to belief. Since for good reasons (i) is not (...) supported in the literature, I shall dwell on (ii) and (iii). Without further explanation supposition has been very often merely postulated as being nothing but belief-like imagination—that is, (ii). I shall show that at least two considerations undermine (ii). First, supposition and belief-like imagination are governed by different norms, more precisely the former is freer than the latter and requires minimal or no mental effort. Second, contrary to belief-like imagination, supposition is “cold”, in that it is typically dissociated from emotional reactions. Proponents of (iii) face the pressure of explaining these differences between supposition and belief-like imagination too. I shall argue that they have not sufficiently motivated the claim that supposition is belief-like. In particular they fail to accommodate precisely the dimensions of supposition pertaining to its normativity and emotionality. I shall close with a sketch of a new account of supposition. (shrink)

A widespread claim, which I call ‘the Emotionality Claim’, is that imagination but not supposition is intimately linked to emotion. In more cognitive jargon, imagination is connected to the affect system, whereas supposition is not. EC is open to several interpretations which yield very different views about the nature of supposition. The literature lacks an in-depth analysis of EC which sorts out these different readings and ways to carve supposition and imagination at their joints. The aim of this paper is (...) to fill this gap. I shall argue that existing readings of EC fail to properly account for the emotional asymmetry between imagination and supposition. The tendency is to start from narrow conceptions of both imagination and supposition. I shall argue for a novel interpretation of EC pivoting on different ways a mental state can connect to the affect system. (shrink)

Imagination is widely thought to come in two varieties: perception-like and belief-like imagination. What precisely sets them apart, however, is not settled. More needs to be said about the features that make one variety perception-like and the other belief-like. One common, although typically implicit, view is that they mimic their counterparts along the conceptuality dimension: while the content of belief-like imagination is fully conceptual, the content of perception-like imagination is fully non-conceptual. Such a view, however, is not sufficiently motivated in (...) the literature. I will show that there are good reasons to reject it and I will argue that both varieties of imagination involve fully conceptual contents. I will suggest an alternative way to draw the distinction between perception-like and belief-like imagination along the conceptuality dimension, according to which only perception-like imagination requires observational concepts. (shrink)

Nearly 400 million adults have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Children have been excluded from the vaccination programmes owing to their lower vulnerability to COVID-19 and to the special protections that apply to children’s exposure to new biological products. WHO guidelines and national laws focus on medical safety in the process of vaccine approval, and on national security in the process of emergency authorisation. Because children suffer much from social distancing, it is argued that the harms from containment measures should be (...) factored in a broader perspective on the good of the child. Considering the available knowledge on the disease, vaccine, and coping strategies, the decision about vaccine access to children is a public responsibility. The ultimate choice is a matter of paediatric informed consent. Moreover, jurisdictions that permit non-participation in established childhood vaccination programmes should also permit choice of vaccines outside of the approved programmes. Even if vaccine supply is too short to cover the paediatric population, the a priori exclusion of children is unjust. It may also exacerbate local and global inequalities. The second part of the paper delineates a prudent and ethical scheme for gradual incorporation of minors in vaccination programmes that includes a rigorous postvaccination monitoring. This is a theoretical paper in ethics that uses the Pfizer vaccine as a stock example, without discussing possible differences among existing vaccines. The key purpose is reflection on the good of the child in emergencies and vaccine policymaking. All data relevant to the study are included in the article and in its refernces. (shrink)

In “Combining probability with qualitative degree-of-certainty metrics in assessment,” Helgeson et al. present a mathematical model of the confidence-likelihood relationship in the IPCC uncertainty framework. Their goal is to resolve ambiguities in the framework and clarify the roles of “confidence” and “likelihood” in decision-making. In this paper, I provide a conceptual evaluation of their proposal. I argue that the IPCC cannot implement the model coherently and that adopting it could result in unclear and potentially misleading communication of uncertainty.

The scientist’s toolkit counts at least three practices: real, thought and numerical experiments. Although a deep investigation of the relationships between these types of experiments should shed light on the nature of scientific enquiry, I argue that it has been compromised by at least four factors: (i) a bias for the epistemological superiority of real experiments; (ii) an almost exclusive focus on the links between either thought or numerical experiments, and real experiments; (iii) a tendency to try and reduce one (...) kind to another; and (iv) an excessive attention to the outputs of these types of experiments, more than to their processes. In this paper I support an unbiased triangular comparative analysis that focuses on the processes involved in real, thought and numerical experiments, and claim that all three types of experimentation are fundamental to scientific research. I do so by clarifying different notions of experimental processes, and by introducing a distinction between two varieties of mental simulation that play a role in them (i.e., mental models and imaginings). I then compare real, thought and numerical experiments in light of this distinction, showing their similarities, but also fundamental differences, which suggest that none of them is dispensable. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the influence of war as a metaphor in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. After an introduction on the traditional analysis of the war metaphor, we address the social consequences of using this metaphor, a topic that has been widely debated with regard to public communication in the context of COVID-19. We pay particular attention to a theory that many intellectuals have raised: the possibility that the use of the metaphor in this context is harmful (...) to a democratic society because it may lead citizens to accept limited civil liberties and authoritarian policies. After presenting the extensive literature on the use of the war metaphor before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the final section of the paper, we analyse experimental evidence of the effects of this metaphor. In the conclusion, we hint at open questions and suggest that the current evidence does not support claims of direct liberticidal influence. (shrink)

This article assesses the exploration of the utopian paradigm within the context of technological advancement and its implications for human labor. It engages in this reflection, beginning with John Danaher’s reading of utopian perspectives related to the evolution of the labor domain, and then focusing on the significance of the social element and its dynamics in redefining labor and productive structures. It focuses on utopia as a regulatory ideal, valuing the conjectural contributions from theories throughout the history of utopian thought. (...) The analysis aims to understand how utopian theories arise in contexts of social dissatisfaction, prompting internal reflection on the structure. The article is organized into three sections: the first introduces the concept of utopia, tracing its historical and philosophical roots, with a focus on influential figures such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. Through the study of nineteenth-century social theories, the article explores their radical proposals for societal restructuring in response to the socio-economic upheavals of their time. The second section examines utopia as a form of social critique, emphasizing its critical function in assessing and guiding societal development, by engaging with Norbert Elias’s definitions of utopia. The third section evaluates the relevance of utopia in contemporary discourse on social change, emphasizing the critical examination of utopian visions in relation to the concept of the end of work and aiming to articulate clear parameters defining a utopian model as a social regulatory ideal. (shrink)

Here I critically assess an argument put forward by Kuorikoski et al. (Br J Philos Sci, 61(3):541–567, 2010) for the epistemic import of model-based robustness analysis. I show that this argument is not sound since the sort of probabilistic independence on which it relies is unfeasible. By revising the notion of probabilistic independence imposed on the models’ results, I introduce a prima-facie more plausible argument. However, despite this prima-facie plausibility, I show that even this new argument is unsound in most (...) if not all cases of model-based robustness analysis. This I do to demonstrate that the epistemic import of model-based robust analysis cannot be satisfactorily defended on the basis of probabilistic independence. (shrink)

We attribute the capability of imagination to the madman as to the scientist, to the novelist as to the metaphysician, and last but not least to ourselves. The same, apparently, holds for thought experimentation. Ernst Mach was the first to draw an explicit link between these two mental acts; moreover -in his perspective- imagination plays a pivotal role in thought experimentation. Nonetheless, it is not clear what kind of imagination emerges from Mach’s writings. Indeed, heated debates among cognitive scientists and (...) philosophers turn on the key distinction between sensory and cognitive imagination. Generally speaking, we can say that sensory imagination shares some processes with perception, cognitive imagination with the formation of belief. Both the vocabulary used in the literature on thought experiments and what I refer to as “Machian tradition” indicate imagination as a notion of central importance in the reasoning involved in thought experiments. However, most authors have really focused on sensory (in particular, visual) imagination, but have neglected the second kind. Moreover, some authors attribute to Mach the idea that it is visual imagery that is primarily at work in thought experiments. I claim another interpretation is possible, according to which Mach can be said to deal with cognitive imagination. The main aim of this paper is to retrace Mach’s original arguments and establish a connection with the cognitive literature on imagination. I will argue that imagination tout court could play a role in thought experimentation. Once imagination is seen as the key to the “cognitive black-box” of the thought experiment, we will have moved a step closer to a simulative imagining-based account of thought experimentation. (shrink)

1. It is a fact that developing a good proof theory for modal logics is a difficult task. The problem is not in having deductive systems. In fact, all the main modal logics enjoy an axiomatic prese...

ABSTRACT The paper explores the ethical aspects of introducing cultural circumcision of children into the EU public health system. We reject commonplace arguments against circumcision: considerations of good medical practice, justice, bodily integrity, autonomy and the analogy from female genital mutilation. From the unique structure of patient‐medicine interaction, we argue that the incorporation of cultural circumcision into EU public health services is a kind of medicalization, which does not fit the ethos of universal healthcare. However, we support a utilitarian argument (...) that finds hospital‐based circumcision safer than non‐medicalized alternatives. The argument concerning medicalization and the utilitarian argument both rely on preliminary empirical data, which depend on future validation. (shrink)

When we remember a past situation, the emotional import of the latter often transpires in a modified form at the phenomenological level of our present memory. When it does, we experience what is sometimes called an “affective memory.” Theorists of memories have disagreed about the status of affective memories. Sceptics claim that the relationship between memory and emotion can only be of two types: either the memory is about a past emotion (the emotion is part of what is remembered), or (...) it causes a present emotion (the emotion is a separable effect of the memory). We argue that there is a third option, which points to an emotional way of representing the past situation. Drawing from Peter Goldie’s account of mental narratives, we show that three levels of mental perspective are involved in memories: the perspective of the represented subject (the character, if there is one), the perspective of the representing subject (the author), and the intermediary perspective of the narrator (who may remain virtual). Affective memories are cases in which the narrator’s emotional perspective has direct implications for the author’s emotional perspective, even if the former typically differs from the latter. (shrink)

Among the attempts to oppose tobacco control legislation, the tobacco industry has alleged violations of its right to commercial speech. While the disputes that took place in some jurisdictions like the United States (US), Canada, or the European Union (EU) have been already analyzed, much less is known about how, globally, this doctrine has influenced the adoption of tobacco control measures. This article contributes to filling this gap by illustrating how the commercial speech doctrine influenced the negotiations of the Framework (...) Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Moreover, using the Tobacco Control Database of Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, it shows that arguments on commercial speech have been used to challenge tobacco control measures in an increasing number of countries. (shrink)

This article aims to provide a coherent and comprehensive theoretical framework of the main socio-epistemic features of social media. The first part consists of a concise discussion of the main epistemic consequences of personalised information filtering, with a focus on echo chambers and their many different implications. The middle section instead hosts an analytical investigation of the cognitive and epistemic environments of these platforms aimed at establishing whether, and to what extent, they allow their users to be epistemically vigilant with (...) respect to their sources and the content recommended to them. Finally, in the last part, of a more exquisitely normative nature, some strategies are proposed and discussed that, by reducing the epistemic opacity of social media, could contribute to greater epistemic justice within social media and, concurrently, to augmenting the epistemic autonomy of users. (shrink)

In his *Bāhyārthasiddhikārikā (BASK), “Verses on the Establishment of the External Object”—extant only in Tibetan translation—Śubhagupta (720–780 CE), a philosopher connected with the logical-epistemological school of Buddhism, argues the reality of external objects of cognitions. In this article, I shall provide an account of Śubhagupta's theory of the cognitive process, as expressed in BASK 35–44, particularly in light of his view that the images (ākāra) of those objects do not appear in cognition. BASK is part of an internal Buddhist debate (...) over the reality of external supports of perceptions, wherein Śubhagupta disproves the views of thinkers like Diṅnāga and Vasubandhu. On the other hand, he is one of the main opponents addressed in the Bahirarthaparīkṣā (BAP) of the Tattvasaṅgraha (TS) by Śāntarakṣita (725–788 CE) and the Tattvasaṅgrahapañjikā (TSP) by Kamalaśīla (740–795 CE). Therein, the two authors, while demonstrating the absence of the characteristics of apprehended (grāhya) and apprehender (grāhaka) with regard to cognition, keenly refute his ideas and quote selected Sanskrit verses that can be identified as the original Sanskrit of stanzas in BASK. Accordingly, I shall examine Śubhagupta’s theory of the cognitive process in two steps: (i) analyzing the arguments that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla advance against him based on their interpretation of Śubhagupta’s views; and (ii) analyzing the arguments that he brings forward against his opponents (namely, Diṅnāga and Vasubandhu), by means of the investigation of BASK 35–44 in their original context. (shrink)

In this paper, translation engages not only with metaphors, but the ‘consistent multiplicity’ (Alliez & Feher 1986: 41) of figures of speech that intersemiotically animate Australian artist Brett Whiteley’s (1939-92) verbal and pictorial language. The aim is to address some ‘formative questions […] concerning language, medium and meaning’ (Harrison 2004: 5) by studying the rhetoric devices featuring in two texts: a letter written by Whiteley to his mother in 1979, and the painting Art, life and the other thing (1978). The (...) letter and the painting intersect in a series of hypertextual links, and map language nomadism across words and images. The comparative analysis of Whiteley’s painting and letter displays that the translating process is deeply influenced and sometimes completely transformed by the concurrence of heterogeneous elements. Pictures and words relate to each other: when translation enters, the text is completed. (shrink)

Is it possible to confuse one’s own memories with imaginings? And what about confusing one’s own imaginings with memories? The extensive literature in psychology on memory errors and confabulation suggests positive answers to these questions. However, things are more complicated, and the notion of confusion deserves a more detailed analysis. In this paper, we will do so and provide several scenarios showing that these two types of confusion can occur on two different levels: reflective (the level of self-ascription) and phenomenological (...) (the level of what it is like to be in a certain mental state). To strengthen our case, we will relate at least some of our hypothetical scenarios to known conditions affecting memory or imagination. The genuine possibility of these conditions opens the door to a systematic exploration of the implications of the falsity of the impossibility claims for the adequate account of the relationship between memory and imagination. (shrink)