Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts—even concepts about action and perception—are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain’s sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about (...) the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called “abstract” concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns. (shrink)

BackgroundAdults with ADHD exhibit a neuropsychological profile that may present deficits in many cognitive domains, particularly attention and executive functions. However, some authors do not consider executive disfunction as an important part of the clinical profile of the syndrome; this could be related to the use of inappropriate neuropsychological tests, probably not adapted and not sufficiently ecological. Moreover, new data are required on specific correlation of attentive-executive symptoms with socio-demographic factors. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyze the (...) neuropsychological performance of a group of adults with ADHD, also evaluating the influence of gender, age and education level.MethodsWe retrospectively collected health-related personal data of 40 adult ADHD patients, clinically diagnosed and evaluated via a battery of 4 neuropsychological tests and 1 self-administered questionnaire. Gender, age and years of education differences were assessed.ResultsAttention and EFs deficits have been highlighted mainly on the d2-R and 5-point neuropsychological tests, which therefore seem to be more sensitive in measuring the attention-executive dysfunction in an adult ADHD population, than TAP Go/No-go and ROCFT. ADHD patients also manifested subjective behavioral impulsivity disorders on BIS-11. There were no statistically significant gender differences in cognitive performance. On the contrary, younger patients performed worse on subscales TAP Go/No-go errors and 5-points number of drawings, while participants with a higher education level performed better on subscales d2-R speed of execution and d2-R errors. This supports a reduction in the number of errors and the execution time as a function of older age and a higher level of education. Finally, patients with higher education also self-reported greater impulsivity in planning.ConclusionOur preliminary findings suggest that adult ADHD is not a lifelong stable disorder, but it may change over time. Moreover, attention-executive deficits may be influenced and partially counterbalanced by experience and a higher level of education. This could underlie the development of specific psycho-behavioral and cognitive compensatory strategies. The use of self-administered questionnaires is therefore recommended to highlight attentional and executive difficulties that may not result in neuropsychological tests. (shrink)

The relationship between consciousness and brain, subject and body, appears today far away from being elucidated. All attempts to reduce consciousness and subject to the brain end up abolishing the subject, i.e., what is evidently most relevant for each one of us. Luigi Giussani proposes a method to investigate human consciousness based on the analysis of oneself personal experience, verifiable by every human being. He is very attentive to avoiding during the experiential analysis interference of prejudices, ideological conceptions, and conjectures. (...) His method remains perfectly coherent and open to all contributions from neuroscience and scientific discoveries. He leaves completely open the major question about the relationship between brain physical-chemical functioning and subjective experience, individual consciousness. A comparison between Giussani’s method and the starting point and the fundamental assumption that lays the basis of various modern neuroscientific conceptions of consciousness is conducted. A discussion about the assumption that stays at the basis of the various neuroscientific currents appears necessary and the method proposed by Giussani may constitute a common and acceptable by everyone background for future development and advances in studying the greatest problem of our culture, the relation between brain and human consciousness. (shrink)

Discusses the possibility of reconciling different articulations of intentionality from a neurobiological perspective. The author analyzes the relationship between agency and representation and how representation is intrinsically related to action control. The author also presents a new account of action, arguing against what is still commonly held as its proper definition, namely the final outcome of a cascade-like process that starts from the analysis of sensory data, incorporates the result of decision processes, and ends up with responses (actions) to externally-or (...) internally-generated stimuli. The author discusses recent findings from the investigation of neural mechanisms that are at the basis of sensorimotor integration. (shrink)

A new class of visuomotor neuron has been recently discovered in the monkey’s premotor cortex: mirror neurons. These neurons respond both when a particular action is performed by the recorded monkey and when the same action, performed by another individual, is observed. Mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system matching observation and execution of goal-related motor actions. Experimental evidence suggests that a similar matching system also exists in humans. What might be the functional role of this matching system? One (...) possible function is to enable an organism to detect certain mental states of observed conspecifics. This function might be part of, or a precursor to, a more general mind-reading ability. Two different accounts of mind-reading have been suggested. According to “theory theory‘, mental states are represented as inferred posits of a naive theory. According to “simulation theory‘, other people’s mental states are represented by adopting their perspective: by tracking or matching their states with resonant states of one’s own. The activity of mirror neurons, and the fact that observers undergo motor facilitation in the same muscular groups as those utilized by target agents, are findings that accord well with simulation theory but would not be predicted by theory theory. (shrink)

In the present paper we address the issue of the role of the body in shaping our basic self-awareness. It is generally taken for granted that basic bodily self-awareness has primarily to do with proprioception. Here we challenge this assumption by arguing from both a phenomenological and a neurophysiological point of view that our body is primarily given to us as a manifold of action possibilities that cannot be reduced to any form of proprioceptive awareness. By discussing the notion of (...) affordance and the spatiality of the body we show that both have to be construed in terms of the varying range of our power for action. Finally, we posit that the motor roots of our bodily self-awareness shed new light on both the common ground for and the distinguishing criterium between self and other. The properties of the mirror mechanism indicate that the same action possibilities constituting our bodily self also allow us to make sense of other bodily selves inasmuch as their action possibilities can be mapped onto our own ones. Our proposal may pave the way towards a general deconstruction of the different layers at the core of our full-fledged sense of self and others. (shrink)

My initial scope will be limited: starting from a neurobiological standpoint, I will analyse how actions are possibly represented and understood. The main aim of my arguments will be to show that, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities, the capacity for understanding others as intentional agents is deeply grounded in the relational nature of action. Action is relational, and the relation holds both between the agent and the object target of the action , as between the agent of (...) the action and his/her observer . Agency constitutes a key issue for the understanding of intersubjectivity and for explaining how individuals can interpret their social world. This account of intersubjectivity, founded on the empirical findings of neuroscientific investigation, will be discussed and put in relation with a classical tenet of phenomenology: empathy. I will provide an 'enlarged' account of empathy that will be defined by means of a new conceptual tool: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

PurposeStarting from the end‐to‐end principle, a founding element of the internet's technical architecture, the paper aims to discuss its extension and effects at the social level. It shows how the internet moves power from governments and private entities to individual citizens, restructuring our societies and creating a new global stakeholder class – individual users of the internet. It connects the advent of this stakeholder class with a traditional principle of internet governance, “rough consensus”. It discusses advantages and risks of this (...) change, suggesting that this shift of power might be beneficial to solve deadlocks in the governance of global phenomena and to ensure that solutions pursue the global public interest. Finally, it discusses how this social evolution can be protected from opposing forces, countering the opinion that the freedom of the internet is intrinsic and not needing regulatory supports.Design/methodology/approachThe paper builds upon observation of case studies, such as the struggle between the industry and users over peer‐to‐peer music downloads, and upon the author's first‐hand experience in global internet governance processes.FindingsThe paper formalizes a social expression of the end‐to‐end principle and demonstrates the need for such principle to be recognized and protected by regulation, to preserve the social model described in the paper and its benefits.Originality/valueThe paper explores the connections between the technical, economic and social architectures of the global network, providing support for understanding the political dynamics of the internet and other global phenomena, and for designing effective governance processes to address them. (shrink)

En el presente ensayo se buscará exponer, a través de una problematización histórica, la radical novedad filosófica que representa la teoría freudiana de la constitución de la autoconsciencia moral a partir de la introyección de la ley paterna. Para esto, se mostrarán, en primer lugar, los hitos históricamente relevantes que permitieron instalar una reflexión sobre la interioridad moral en la filosofía agustiniana, contraponiéndola con el pensamiento helénico clásico. Posteriormente, se expondrá la hipótesis nietzscheana sobre la aparición de la moralidad como (...) una estrategia de poder dentro de la tradición judeo-cristiana para, por un lado, mostrar sus insuficiencias y, por el otro, dar paso a la teoría freudiana de la formación de la consciencia moral como un proceso identificatorio con respecto a la figura del padre, lo que permite explicar el fenómeno de la autocrítica moral como un tipo particular de autodistanciamiento con respecto a sí. (shrink)

In this article we provide a unifying neural hypothesis on how individuals understand the actions and emotions of others. Our main claim is that the fundamental mechanism at the basis of the experiential understanding of others' actions is the activation of the mirror neuron system. A similar mechanism, but involving the activation of viscero-motor centers, underlies the experiential understanding of the emotions of others.

This article rejects the received view that Post-Truth is a new, unprecedented political phenomenon. By showing that Truth and Post-Truth share the same genesis, this article will submit the idea of a Consensus Theory of Post-Truth. Part 1 looks at the difference between Post-Truth, lies and bullshit. Part 2 suggests reasons behind the current preoccupation with Post-Truth. Part 3 focuses on Habermas’s influential consensus theory of truth to suggest that truth and Post-Truth have more in common than is generally assumed. (...) Part 4 puts forward the Consensus Theory of Post-Truth. Part 5 suggests three ways to emasculate the potentially destructive effect of Post-Truth on democratic society. (shrink)

Background The 2020-2021 coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is just the latest epidemic event that requires us to rethink and change our understanding of health. Health should no longer be conceived only in relation to human beings, but in unitary terms, as a dimension that connects humans, animals, plants, and the environment (holistic view, One Health). In general, alterations occurring in this articulated chain of life trigger a domino effect. Methodology In this paper, we review the One Health paradigm in the light (...) of the Covid-19 pandemic and distinguish two approaches within it that might be dubbed the Prudent one and the Radical one. Each approach is structured in three levels – epistemological, medical, and ethical. Results In this way, we show how we humans can better address the pandemic today and how, in the future, we can treat the whole living system better, by renouncing our anthropocentric perspective on health. Conclusion We hold that the Prudent approach can be very helpful, and we discuss the medical and ethical issues related to it. We also consider the Radical view and the epistemological turn it requires compared to the Prudent one. (shrink)

How do we know what violence is? And how do we acquire knowledge of violence? The key to these questions can be found in the epistemology of testimony. Testimonies of violence are first-person narratives of violence, therefore unless first-person narratives are recognized and legitimized as philosophically and epistemologically valuable, our knowledge of violence would be seriously compromised. The value of testimonies of violence lies in part in the transmission of truth-claims, but also crucially in the speech-act of giving a testimony. (...) It is the latter that is the focus of this article. I will argue that the act of giving a testimony of violence, being listed to and believed, is essential for the survivor of violence in the process of rebuilding the sense of self and personhood in the aftermath of the violence endured.By looking at the work of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions worldwide, and highlighting in particular the role of trust within the dynamics of testimonies, I will argue that first-person testimonies of violence are also indispensable for another reason; namely, they prevent acts of violence from turning into instruments of epistemic injustice.Survivors of violence often find themselves being the victims of two forms of violence: apart from enduring the violence being afflicted on them, they also often suffer the epistemic injustice of being marginalized as credible sources of knowledge. Recognizing the validity of testimonies of violence in the form of first-person narratives of violence not only enables us to acquire knowledge of violence, but acknowledging the credibility of the narrator acts as a strong antidote to epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Vittorio Cotesta's Eurasian Visions of the World traces the origin of the images of the world typical of the Graeco-Roman, Ancient Chinese and Medieval Islamic civilisations. Each of them had its own peculiar way of understanding the universe, life, death, society, power, humanity and its destiny. The comparative analysis carried out here suggests that they all shared a common human aspiration despite their differences: human being is unique; differences are details which enrich its image. Today, the traditions derived from (...) these civilisations are often in competition and conflict. Reference to a common vision of humanity as a shared universal entity should lead, instead, to a quest for understanding and dialogue. (shrink)

Summary Embodied simulation, a basic functional mechanism of our brain, and its neural underpinnings are discussed and connected to intersubjectivity and the reception of human cultural artefacts, like visual arts and film. Embodied simulation provides a unified account of both non-verbal and verbal aspects of interpersonal relations that likely play an important role in shaping not only the self and his/her relation to others, but also shared cultural practices. Embodied simulation sheds new light on aesthetic experience and is proposed as (...) a key element for the dialogue between neuroscience and the humanities within the biocultural paradigm. (shrink)

This study aimed at investigating depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms among healthcare workers and examine the role of expressive flexibility and context sensitivity as key components of resilience in understanding reported symptoms. We hypothesized a significant and different contribution of resilience components in explaining depression, anxiety, and stress. A total sample of 218 Italian healthcare workers participated in this study through an online survey during the lockdown, consequently to the COVID-19. The Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 was used to measure depression, (...) anxiety, and stress; the Flexible Regulation of Emotional Expression scale was used to measure the ability to enhance and suppress emotional expression; the Context Sensitivity Index was used to measure the ability to accurately perceive contextual cues and determine cue absence. Demographic and work-related data were also collected. DASS-21 cut-off scores were used to verify the mental status among the respondents. Correlational analyses examined relationships between DASS-21, FREE, and CSI, followed by three regression analyses with depression, anxiety, and stress as dependent variables, controlling for age, gender, and work experience. Enhancement and suppression abilities, cue presence, and cue absence served as independent variables. The results showed a prevalence of moderate to extremely severe symptoms of 8% for depression, 9.8% for anxiety, and 8.9% for stress. Results of correlational analysis highlighted that enhance ability was inversely associated with depression and stress. Suppression ability was inversely associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The ability to perceive contextual cues was inversely associated with depression and anxiety. The regression analysis showed that the ability to enhance emotional expression was statistically significant to explain depression among healthcare workers. In predicting anxiety, age, and the ability to accurately perceive contextual cues and determine cue absence made substantial contributions as predictors. In the last regression model, age, work experience, and the ability to suppress emotional expression were significant predictors of stress. This study’s findings can help understand the specific contributions of enhancement and suppression abilities and sensitivity to stressor context cues in predicting depression, anxiety, and stress among healthcare workers. Psychological interventions to prevent burnout should consider these relationships. (shrink)

Crucial in Girard's Mimetic Theory is the notion of mimetic desire, viewed as appropriative mimicry, the main source of aggressiveness and violence characterizing our species. The intrinsic value of the objects of our desire is not as relevant as the fact that the very same objects are the targets of others' desire. One could in principle object against such apparently negative and one-sided view of mankind, in general, and of mimesis, in particular. However, such argument would misrepresent Girard's thought. Girard (...) himself acknowledged that mimetic desire is also good in itself, because is at the basis of love, and even more importantly because it's the opening out of oneself. Starting from the notion of desire as openness to others I will discuss from a neuroscientific perspective the implications for social cognition of mimesis against the background of Girard's Mimetic Theory, an ideal starting framework to foster a multidisciplinary approach to the study of human intersubjectivity. It will be posited that a different, not mutually exclusive, account of mimesis leads to social identification henceforth to sociality. Mimesis is neither good or bad, but has the potentials to lead not only to mimetic violence but also to the most creative aspects of human cognition. Results of empirical research in neuroscience and developmental psychology show that such account of mimesis finds solid supporting evidence. It will be concluded that a thorough and biologically plausible account of human intersubjectivity requires the integration of both sides of mimesis. (shrink)

The representational dynamics of the brain is a subsymbolic process, and it has to be conceived as an "agent-free" type of dynamical self-organization. However, in generating a coherent internal world-model, the brain decomposes target space in a certain way. In doing so, it defines an "ontology": to have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting the world, possesses an ontology too. It decomposes target space (...) in a way that exhibits certain invariances, which in turn are functionally significant. A challenge for empirical research is to determine which are the functional regularities guiding this decomposition process. What are the explicit and implicit assumptions about the structure of reality, which at the same time shape the causal profile of the brain's motor output and the representational deep structure of the conscious mind arising from it (its "phenomenal output")? How do they constrain high-level phenomena like conscious experience, the emergence of a first-person perspective, or social cognition? By reviewing a series of neuroscientific results, we focus on the contribution the motor system makes to this process. As it turns out, the motor system constructs goals, actions, and intending selves as basic constituents of the world it interprets. It does so by assigning a single, unified causal role to them. Empirical evidence now clearly shows how the brain actually codes movements and action goals in terms of multimodal representations of organism-object relations. Under a representationalist analysis, this process can be interpreted as an internal representation of the intentionality relation itself. We try to show how such a more complex form of representational content, once it is in place, can later function as the building block for social cognition and a for more complex, consciously experienced representation of the first-person perspective as well. The motor system may therefore play a decisive role in understanding how the functional ontology of the human brain could be gradually extended into the subjective and social domains. (shrink)

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The aim of our paper is to show that there is a sense of body that is enactive in nature and that enables to capture the most primitive sense of self. We will argue that the body is primarily given to us as source or power for action, i.e., as the variety of motor potentialities that define the horizon of the world in which we live, by populating it with things at hand to which we can be directed and with (...) other bodies we can interact with. We will show that this sense of body as bodily self is, on the one hand, antecedent the distinction between sense of agency and sense of ownership, and, on the other, it enables and refines such distinction, providing a conceptual framework for the coherent interpretation of a variety of behavioral and neuropsychological data. We will conclude by positing that the basic experiences we entertain of our selves as bodily selves are from the very beginning driven by our interactions with other bodies as they are underpinned by the mirror mechanism. (shrink)

Simulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the last years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accounts and argue that they fail to capture the uniqueness of embodied simulation (ES). ES theory provides a unitary account of basic (...) social cognition, demonstrating that people e their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others. (shrink)

Can we explain why some propositions are necessary? Blackburn (Fact, science, and value. Blackwell, Oxford, 1987) has presented a dilemma aimed at showing that the necessity of a proposition cannot be explained either in the case where the explanans is another necessary proposition (necessity horn) or in the case where the explanans is a contingent proposition (contingency horn). Blackburn’s dilemma is intended to show that necessary truth is an explanatorily irreducible kind of truth: there is nothing that explains why propositions (...) are necessary, nothing that makes necessary necessary truths. In this paper, I criticize the contingency horn of Blackburn’s dilemma. On the one hand, I show that the official reconstruction of the horn uses a principle that is incompatible with the notion of explanation plausibly needed to explain why propositions are necessary; on the other, I show that a simpler formulation of the horn, which does not make use of such a controversial principle, makes essential use of principles that are incompatible with the idea that possibilities can have explanatory roles. I then defend the view that possibilities can have explanatory roles, and that the explanatory role of possibilities is best represented, within possible worlds, as the existence of trans-world relations of explanation. (shrink)

The EU has indicated it intends to pursue legal action against the UK over the extension of grace periods for post-Brexit checks on certain goods entering Northern Ireland from Britain. Vittorio Bufacchi argues that while the UK's approach may bring short-term benefits, these will be insignificant when set against the long-term reputational costs that come with breaking international agreements.

The complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures is one of the core design features of human language. Duality of patterning refers, for instance, to the organization of the meaningful elements in a language at two distinct levels: a combinatorial level, where meaningless forms are combined into meaningful forms; and a compositional level, where meaningful forms are composed into larger lexical units. The question remains wide open regarding how such structures could have emerged. The aim of this paper is to (...) address these two aspects in a self-consistent way. First, we introduce suitable measures to quantify the level of combinatoriality and compositionality in a language, and we present a framework to estimate these observables in human natural languages. Second, we show that a recently introduced multi-agent modeling scheme, namely the Blending Game, provides a mathematical framework to address the problem of how a population of individuals can bootstrap combinatoriality and compositionality. Theoretical predictions based on this model turn out to be in good agreement with empirical data. It is remarkable that the two sides of duality of patterning emerge simultaneously as a consequence of a pure cultural dynamics in a simulated environment that contains meaningful relations, provided a simple constraint on message transmission fidelity is also considered. (shrink)

An assessment and reevaluation of nihilism’s ascendency over metaphysics. Challenging the idea that nihilism has supplanted metaphysics, Vittorio Possenti finds in this philosophical turn the grounds for a mature renewal of metaphysics. Possenti takes the reader on a “third voyage” that goes beyond the “second voyage” indicated by Plato in the Phaedo. He traces the ascendancy of nihilism in philosophy, offering critical examinations of Nietzsche, Gentile, Heidegger, Habermas, Husserl, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Vattimo. With penetrating accounts of philosophical movements such (...) as hermeneutics and logical empiricism, rich with both historical and theoretical insights, Possenti provides a compelling defense of the power of human reason to apprehend the most obvious but also the most profound aspect of things: that they exist. By exploring the ubiquity of nihilism and probing its philosophical roots, Possenti clears the way for a fresh reformulation of metaphysics. (shrink)