In these times of walls and razor-wires, open borders appear to be more utopian than always. Nonetheless, philosophers like Joseph Carens and, similarly but earlier, Timothy King and James L. Hudson, famously argued that the major philosophical perspectives in the Western world—libertarian, egalitarian, and utilitarian—would support a right to freedom of international movement of people. What would be the relative default position from the standpoint of natural law theory? In this article, I present a general introduction on natural law theory (...) and its role in and outside philosophy, before presenting claims specific to the migration debate. I then recall the defence of a right to free movement by two authors sympathetic to the natural-law tradition, Ann and Michael Dummett: a defence which is grounded in principles of fairness and reciprocity and develops elements belonging to international law. I also outline John Finnis’s more critical and nuanced position. Finnis is eager to legitimize state authority and the “special relations” binding fellow countrymen: however, I claim that the classic Thomist perspective in which he situates these claims ensure his respect of a right to international movement which could be characterized as a version of “open borders,” with some definitional restrictions and qualifications of this latter phrase. Finally, I deal with the theory of Alasdair MacIntyre. Trying to infer MacIntyre’s attitude toward migration from the classic but short article on patriotism, might turn out to be no less dif ficult than potentially misleading, especially if that article is not read in its details. Complementary elements are offered in MacIntyre’s account of natural law “as subversive.” On these grounds, I claim that, contrary to simplistic misreading of MacIntyre’s alleged “communitarianism,” MacIntyrean Aristotelian Thomism would endorse a theory of migration more compatible with reasonably conceived open borders. I conclude my chapter with a presentation of Aquinas’s concise intervention on the subject, and I show that it further supports my reading of the natural law tradition. (shrink)

This paper explores the way violence is understood and controlled in judo. The analysis is based on historical sources and classic principles of the martial art as well as in the regulations and official guidelines of the main institutions governing sportive judo. The focus is on the apparent tension between the principle of “maximum efficacy” (Seiryoku-Zenyo) and the way violence is addressed at no less than three levels: in sparring and competition, in teaching and training, and in society at large. (...) The conclusion being the claim: judo is a “non-violent martial art”. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has witnessed a substantial opposition between two competing approaches to capturing the notion of non-accidentality in the analysis of knowledge: the explanationist and the modalist. According to the latest advocates of the former, S knows that p if and only if S believes that p because p is true. According to champions of the latter, S knows that p if and only if S's belief that p is true in a relevant set of possible worlds. Because Bogardus and (...) Perrin's explanationism promises to deliver a plausible analysis of knowledge without any need for modal notions, it is an elegant proposal with prima facie appeal. However, such version of explanationism ultimately does not live up to its promises: in this paper, I raise some objections to their explanationist analysis of knowledge while showing that modalism is in much better shape than they think. In particular, I argue that their explanationist condition generates the wrong results in Gettier cases and fake-barn cases. I also offer and defend a novel version of modalism: I introduce a refined safety condition which is shown to successfully handle the same Gettier cases that beset Bogardus and Perrin's version of explanationism. The paper concludes with a reassessment of the explanationist's initial ambition to provide an analysis of knowledge without modal notions. The upshot will be that even if the prospects for such analysis remain dim, our money should be on the modalist, not the explanationist. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, one key challenge is ensuring that AI aligns with certain values. However, in the current diverse and democratic society, reaching a normative consensus is complex. This paper delves into the methodological aspect of how AI ethicists can effectively determine which values AI should uphold. After reviewing the most influential methodologies, we detail an intuitionist research agenda that offers guidelines for aligning AI applications with a limited set of reliable moral intuitions, each underlying a (...) refined cooperative view of AI. We discuss appropriate epistemic tools for collecting, filtering, and justifying moral intuitions with the aim of reducing cognitive and social biases. The proposed methodology facilitates a large collective participation in AI alignment, while ensuring the reliability of the considered moral judgments. (shrink)

The notion of individualised evidence holds the key to solve the puzzle of statistical evidence, but there’s still no consensus on how exactly to define it. To make progress on the problem, epistemologists have proposed various accounts of individualised evidence in terms of causal or modal anti-luck conditions on knowledge like appropriate causation, sensitivity and safety. In this paper, I show that each of these fails as satisfactory anti-luck condition, and that such failure lends abductive support to the following conclusion: (...) once the familiar anti-luck intuition on knowledge is extended to individualised evidence, no single causal or modal anti-luck condition on knowledge can succeed as the right anti-luck condition on individualised evidence. This conclusion casts serious doubts on the fruitfulness of the move from anti-luck conditions on knowledge to anti-luck conditions on individualised evidence. I expand on these doubts and point out further aspects where epistemology and the law come apart: epistemic anti- luck conditions on knowledge do not adequately characterise the legal notion of individualised evidence. (shrink)

This paper illustrates cognitive modeling constructs designed to make learning by instruction more robust, including (1) flexible grounding of language to execution, (2) inference of implicit instruction knowledge, and (3) interactive clarification of instructions during both learning and execution.

Previous accounts of cognitive skill acquisition have demonstrated how procedural knowledge can be obtained and transformed over time into skilled task performance. This article focuses on a complementary aspect of skill acquisition, namely the integration and reuse of previously known component skills. The article posits that, in addition to mechanisms that proceduralize knowledge into more efficient forms, skill acquisition requires tight integration of newly acquired knowledge and previously learned knowledge. Skill acquisition also benefits from reuse of existing knowledge across disparate (...) task domains, relying on indexicals to reference and share necessary information across knowledge components. To demonstrate these ideas, the article proposes a computational model of skill acquisition from instructions focused on integration and reuse, and applies this model to account for behavior across seven task domains. (shrink)

This article describes the path‐mapping theory of how humans integrate analogical mapping and general problem solving. The theory posits that humans represent analogs with declarative roles, map analogs by lower‐level retrieval of analogous role paths, and coordinate mappings with higher‐level organizational knowledge. Implemented in the ACT‐R cognitive architecture, the path‐mapping theory enables models of analogical mapping behavior to incorporate and interface with other problem‐solving knowledge. Path‐mapping models thus can include task‐specific skills such as encoding analogs or generating responses, and can (...) make behavioral predictions at the level of real‐world metrics such as latency or correctness. We show that the path‐mapping theory can successfully account for the major phenomena addressed by previous theories of analogy. We also describe a path‐mapping model that can account for subjects' incremental eye‐movement and typing behavior in a story‐mapping task. We discuss extensions and implications of this work to other areas of analogy and problem‐solving research. (shrink)

Beccaria’s penal philosophy hinges on the doctrinal paradigm of liberty through law. Inconceivable in the absence of laws and unattainable in the presence of arbitrary powers, liberty is profiled as the legal situation of the person who may act, within the sphere of what is not forbidden and not bound, without suffering illicit interference from private individuals or organs of the state. Thus, the form of law becomes an essential matter in the construction of the political space suitable for free (...) living. In the analysis proposed in this article, the notion of “political liberty”–which Beccaria takes from Montesquieu–is declined in relation to the legal order, criminal law and the social contract. (shrink)

The paper seeks to contribute to the discussion of Hume's theory of personal identity, by examining a conflict regarding the vivacity of the self in his writings about sympathy. Although the mechanism of sympathy supposes that self is the liveliest perception of thought, when we consider sympathy through the perspective of the ‘desire of company’, we find that self lacks vivacity and, without alterity, it would be in reality nothing. Our objective is to present the conflict and show that, far (...) from being a contradiction in Hume's thinking, it is consistent with how the philosopher conceives personal identity as a product of imagination, that is, a perception that, like any other, exists within the flow of perceptions. (shrink)

Copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of … Trent Reznor’s formula sounds so much more exciting and seductive than two millennia-old formula of representation and identity also known as A=A. Oversubscribed to central perspective, concerned with clarity and distinctness too content with the content of the image and strongly bonded with its apparatus, photography of the past century repeatedly failed to see the invisible, still acting as a copy of some ideal original, assuming (...) this role from painting. If the painting managed to free itself from representation, what can photography do? With new technologies of image production and dissemination, the pillars of the image of thought begin to crack, with identity and recognition losing the centre stage to difference and repetition. Through the emergence of the ability to photograph everywhere, automated camera and ubiquitous digital dissemination of images, photography is suddenly revealed as the medium of a copy, of uncountable recurrences of the same, and with all of its subjects and objects becoming simulacra, rendering only difference as real and originary. (shrink)

Copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of … Trent Reznor’s formula sounds so much more exciting and seductive than two millennia-old formula of representation and identity also known as A=A. Oversubscribed to central perspective, concerned with clarity and distinctness too content with the content of the image and strongly bonded with its apparatus, photography of the past century repeatedly failed to see the invisible, still acting as a copy of some ideal original, assuming (...) this role from painting. If the painting managed to free itself from representation, what can photography do? With new technologies of image production and dissemination, the pillars of the image of thought begin to crack, with identity and recognition losing the centre stage to difference and repetition. Through the emergence of the ability to photograph everywhere, automated camera and ubiquitous digital dissemination of images, photography is suddenly revealed as the medium of a copy, of uncountable recurrences of the same, and with all of its subjects and objects becoming simulacra, rendering only difference as real and originary. (shrink)

Dynamical systems are mathematical structures whose aim is to describe the evolution of an arbitrary deterministic system through time, which is typically modeled as (a subset of) the integers or the real numbers. We show that it is possible to generalize the standard notion of a dynamical system, so that its time dimension is only required to possess the algebraic structure of a monoid: first, we endow any dynamical system with an associated graph and, second, we prove that such a (...) graph is a category if and only if the time model of the dynamical system is a monoid. In addition, we show that the general notion of a dynamical system allows us not only to define a family of meaningful dynamical concepts, but also to distinguish among a cluster of otherwise tangled notions of reversibility, whose logical relationships are finally analyzed. (shrink)

Despite the substantial appeal of the safety condition, Kelp (J Philos Res 34:21–31, 2009; Am Philos Q 53:27–37; Good Thinking. A Knowledge First Virtue Epistemology, Routledge, London, 2018) has raised a difficult challenge for safety-theoretic accounts of knowledge. By combining Gettier-style fake barn cases with epistemic Frankfurt cases, he concludes that no formulation of safety can be strong enough to predict ignorance in the former and weak enough to accommodate knowledge in the latter. In this note, my contribution is two-fold. (...) Firstly, I take up Kelp’s challenge and I show that, once properly understood, safety successfully rises to it. Secondly, I draw a more general lesson on the safety condition: a satisfactory solution to Kelp’s challenge calls for a revision of the standard formulation of safety, which must be indexed to both methods and environments. My conclusion will be that an environment-relative version of safety not only meets Kelp’s challenge, but it also advances our understanding of the safety condition on knowledge. (shrink)

National, European, and international institutions should implement social policies to help the persons with disabilities. Strategic sectors include education, training, and work, with the equal protection of the laws. In addition, this essay is focused on another crucial “sector" that is part of the primary law, which include tourism along with public transportation and non-discrimination. In conclusion, legislators, and public institutions, as well as transport companies must comply the principles of accessibility, equality, and social justice for the social inclusion of (...) persons with disabilities. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has put a strain on the health system, as well as the social, economic, and cultural ones at the Global level. After the pandemic, the risk is that the process of inclusion of persons with disabilities is grinding to a halt. But the chance is to find new ideas. This paper will define a brief but significant framework of principles that should be taken into consideration in order to support strategies of inclusion of people with disabilities in (...) the fields of health care and cultural life, especially through the research. (shrink)

Recent programs aimed at the independent living of persons with disabilities, allow them to be costumers of sectors in which they have never had full access in the past. The Lisbon Treaty has distinctly recognized the existence of a community tourist area within the primary law, and CRPD has defined the principles of accessibility and accessible tourism as tools for the inclusion. In addition, tourism and transportation stakeholders must guarantee non-discriminatory services; they must approach persons with disabilities as every other (...) customer, by taking in consideration their needs and rights, especially when it comes to their accessibility, assistance, and information. Companies of transportation must cooperate with DPOs in order to define disability-related training procedures. (shrink)

Tracciare una via verso Parmenide è quanto esplicitamente si propone la ri­cerca di Atwood Wilkinson: più esattamente un tentativo di « ascoltare di nuovo la sapienza dei nostri primi testi filosofici » (p. 7). Quella del poeta-filosofo di Elea, infatti, è opera della quale troppo spesso le letture metafisiche e analitiche di­menticano la peculiare collocazione tra la cultura orale della antica tradizione poetica e la allora relativamente recente pratica della scrittura: da quella tradi­zione...

Nel caso di riedizione di opera ormai classica, normalmente le ragioni che hanno spinto l’autore a riproporne o rivederne l’impianto sono proposte nella nuova prefazione o in introduzione: non è facile, invece, imbattersi – anche all’interno del corpo del testo vero e proprio - nella esplicita confessione del travaglio teorico all’origine del ripensamento, della rielaborazione e della revi­sione delle proprie posizioni interpretative. È quello che accade affrontando la lettura della recente t...

Since Kraeplin and Kretschmer, the clarification of the limits between ordinary sadness and clinical depression has been a major concern. Much of the controversy has focused on whether and on which bases can be fixed a boundary in the continuum from the experience of sadness to major depressive episode. The new emphasis on the role of clinical judgment introduced by DSM-5 can be regarded as a way to address these issues, though leaving several questions open. After examining the implications of (...) the main topics raised by this still ongoing discussion, we will argue that in a clinical reality both mobility and intensity of emotional states may account for the discontinuity between ordinary sadness and clinical depression. (shrink)

Moral intuitions are generally understood as automatic strong responses to moral facts. In this paper, I offer a metacognitive account according to which the strength of moral intuitions denotes the level of confidence of a subject. Confidence is a metacognitive appraisal of the fluency with which a subject processes information from a morally salient stimulus. I show that this account is supported by some empirical evidence, explains the main features of moral intuition and is preferable to emotional or quasi-perceptual views (...) of moral intuition. (shrink)

The principle of the common cause claims that if an improbable coincidence has occurred, there must exist a common cause. This is generally taken to mean that positive correlations between non-causally related events should disappear when conditioning on the action of some underlying common cause. The extended interpretation of the principle, by contrast, urges that common causes should be called for in order to explain positive deviations between the estimated correlation of two events and the expected value of their correlation. (...) The aim of this paper is to provide the extended reading of the principle with a general probabilistic model, capturing the simultaneous action of a system of multiple common causes. To this end, two distinct models are elaborated, and the necessary and sufficient conditions for their existence are determined. (shrink)

In "My Own Life," Hume writes:1 During my retreat in France, first at Reims, but chiefly at La Fleche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature. After passing three years very agreeably in that country, I came over to London in 1737. In the end of 1738, I published my Treatise, and immediately went down to my mother and my brother, who lived at his country house, and was employing himself very judiciously and successfully in the improvement of (...) his fortune. It is thus "chiefly" at La Flèche that Hume wrote one of the masterpieces of early modern philosophy. Hume's stay in France extended from July 1734 to August 1737. He spent a few weeks in Paris in the summer of 1734, hosted by Chevalier... (shrink)

Allen Newell (1973) once observed that psychology researchers were playing “twenty questions with nature,” carving up human cognition into hundreds of individual phenomena but shying away from the difficult task of integrating these phenomena with unifying theories. We argue that research on cognitive control has followed a similar path, and that the best approach toward unifying theories of cognitive control is that proposed by Newell, namely developing theories in computational cognitive architectures. Threaded cognition, a recent theory developed within the ACT-R (...) cognitive architecture, offers promise as a unifying theory of cognitive control that addresses multitasking phenomena for both laboratory and applied task domains. (shrink)

The principle of the common cause demands that every pair of causally independent but statistically correlated events should be the effect of a common cause. This demand is often supplemented with the requirement that said cause should screen-off the two events from each other. This paper introduces a new probabilistic model for common causes, which generalises this requirement to include sets of distinct but non-disjoint causes. It is demonstrated that the model hereby proposed satisfies the explanatory function generally attributed to (...) common causes and an existential proof is offered. Finally, the model is compared to other known structures intended to perform a similar function, such as Reichenbachian Common Cause Systems and Bayesian Networks. (shrink)

​This contributed volume gives access to semiotic researches adopting a quantitative stance. European semiotics is traditionally based on immanent methodologies: meaning is seen as an autonomous dimension of human existence, whose laws can be investigated via purely qualitative analytical and reflexive analysis. Today, researches crossing disciplinary boundaries reveal the limitations of such an homogeneous practice. In particular, two families of quantitative research strategies can be identified. On the one hand, researchers wish to naturalize meaning, by making semiotic results interact with (...) those coming from Neurophysiological and psychological sciences. On the other hand, statistical and computational tools are adopted to work on linguistic and multimedia corpora. The book acts to put the two approaches into dialogue. (shrink)

According to Reichenbach’s principle of common cause, positive statistical correlations for which no straightforward causal explanation is available should be explained by invoking the action of a hidden conjunctive common cause. Hofer-Szabó and Rédei’s notion of a Reichenbachian common cause system is meant to generalize Reichenbach’s conjunctive fork model to fit those cases in which two or more common causes cooperate in order to produce a positive statistical correlation. Such a generalization is proved to be unsatisfactory in the light of (...) a probabilistic conception of causation. Accordingly, an alternative model for systems of multiple common causes is offered, which is capable of emulating the explanatory efficacy of Reichenbachian common cause systems, while overcoming their major conceptual shortcomings at the same time. (shrink)

In Mossio & Taraborelli (2008) we challenged the assumption according to which the ecological and sensorimotor approaches are mere conceptual variations on the same enactive theme. We showed, on the contrary, that they endorse substantially different notions of an 'action-dependent perceptual invariant' and we submitted that this distinction has interesting theoretical and empirical implications. This dissimilarity between ecological and sensorimotor theories stems, in our view, from a more fundamental divergence on the nature of perceptual information. Since Gibson's work, the ecological (...) approach has adopted a fundamentally realist stance, according to which this information is 'picked up', 'revealed', 'encountered' and 'exploited' by the organism (as a range of affordances) but not 'constituted' by the activity of the organism. In contrast, sensorimotor approaches take an explicit interactivist position, which sees the perceiver's motor activity as a determinant of perceptual information itself. Pascal & O'Regan (2008) suggest that our analysis of the relationship between ecological, sensorimotor and enactive theories would benefit from a further distinction. The original enactive approach (Varela et al. 1991; Maturana, 2002; Thompson, 2007), they argue, should not be lumped together with contemporary sensorimotor approaches to perception: whereas sensorimotor theories endorse an externalist view of perception, according to which 'perception can only be understood as a form of interaction of the organism with the environment', the original enactive approach by Varela and collaborators would have strong 'idealist underpinnings'. (shrink)