The practice of joint fantasizing concerns interacting participants’ collective construction of imaginary realities with internal consistency and coherence. Based on a corpus of conversations held by an informal Italian prayer community of elderly Catholic women, this contribution aims to show that joint fantasizing is not necessarily a humorous activity and is embedded in the participants’ social and personal background. The analysis also indicates that through joint fantasizing the participants conceptualize themselves as victims and idealized opponents of the unfair present and (...) past societies. Framing joint fantasizing as a cross-contextual activity of social criticism allows us to understand that the participants use this interactional practice as an activity endowed with moral suffering and responsibility. This rhetorical seriousness contrasts with other studies in which joint fantasies are generally connected with playful, jocular and laughable practices. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe discursive analysis of criminal organizations’ family dynamics and ideological devices may provide important insights into the inner functioning of these groups. In this article, we describe and analyze a specific set of discursive strategies and the thematic narratives emerging from a TV interview with Giuseppe Riina, a member of Cosa Nostra and the son of one of the most important mafia bosses. Our analyses demonstrate the existence of recurring ideological devices such as reductionism, amoralism, familism, verticalism, normalism, victimism and (...) religious relativism. The results are discussed in light of previous research that examines how discursive strategies and narratives may represent powerful tools for understanding criminal organizations. Family-related discourses, in particular, reveal meanings, values and ideas that contribute to constructing criminal organizations’ internal structure, as well as their relationship with the external world. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which one (...) can identify bad or invalid types of reasoning, abstracting away from the specific content and dialectical context. Such shortcuts for debunking arguments are tempting, but alas, the promise is hardly if ever fulfilled. Different strands of research on the pragmatics of argumentation, probabilistic reasoning and ecological rationality have shown that almost every known type of fallacy is a close neighbor to sound inferences or acceptable moves in a debate. Nonetheless, the kernel idea of a fallacy as an erroneous type of argument is still retained by most authors. We outline a destructive dilemma we refer to as the Fallacy Fork: on the one hand, if fallacies are construed as demonstrably invalid form of reasoning, then they have very limited applicability in real life. On the other hand, if our definitions of fallacies are sophisticated enough to capture real-life complexities, they can no longer be held up as an effective tool for discriminating good and bad forms of reasoning. As we bring our schematic “fallacies” in touch with reality, we seem to lose grip on normative questions. Even approaches that do not rely on argumentation schemes to identify fallacies fail to escape the Fallacy Fork, and run up against their own version of it. (shrink)

We establish a simple condition, based on the willingness to bet on events, under which two biseparable preferences have cardinally equivalent utilities.

We find a short way to construct a formula which axiomatizes a given finite frame of the modal logicK, in the sense that for each finite frameA, we construct a formula A which holds in those and only those frames in which every formula true inA holds.To obtain this result we find, for each finite model and each natural numbern, a formula which holds in those and only those models in which every formula true in , and involving the firstn (...) propositional letters, holds. (shrink)

Riassunto: In una prospettiva naturalistica, lo studio della religione presenta subito un punto problematico: se essa è così diffusa, tanto da apparire un tratto inscritto nella natura umana, ciò significa che la religione comporta dei vantaggi adattivi o, quantomeno, significa che essa non comporta svantaggi tali da ostacolare la sopravvivenza di chi la pratica. Nel primo caso, si tratta di individuare la possibile funzione della religione, ovvero una qualche utilità che ne giustificherebbe il suo permanere nella storia umana. Alla luce (...) di un modello antropologico che vede l’identità soggettiva segnata da una fragilità ontologica, in questo articolo offriremo una particolare versione della tesi che assegna alla religione, quale byproduct, una funzione positiva, ipotizzando quella che potrebbe essere una sua utilità nella difesa dell’unità dell’autocoscienza. Sarà dunque sulla religione quale insieme di tecniche difensive del self che concentreremo la nostra indagine. Parole chiave : Ernesto De Martino; Naturalismo darwiniano; Meccanismi di difesa; Identità soggettiva; Religione Religion as a Defensive Technique for Subjective Identity: From a naturalistic perspective, the study of religion immediately leads to a problematic point: if religion is so widespread, to the extent that it seems to be a trait inscribed in human nature, then it should have adaptive advantages or, at the very least, it should not have disadvantages that would stand in the way of the survival of those who practice religion. In the former case, we need to understand the function of religion, viz. a utility it confers that may justify its persistence across human history. Against the backdrop of an anthropological model that considers subjectivity identity to be characterized by ontological fragility, this article will offer a special version of the claim that religion, viewed as a byproduct, has a positive function: we will make the hypothesis that it contributes to the defense of the unity of self-consciousness. Thus our focus will be on religion construed as a repertoire of strategies designed to protect the self. Keywords: Ernesto De Martino; Darwinian Naturalism; Defense Mechanisms; Subjective Identity; Religion. (shrink)

SAGGI DI VITTORIO MARCHIS, UMBERTO BOTTAZZINI, FABIO TOSCANO, MASSIMO NEGROTTI, GIUSEPPE O. LONGO, STEFANO A. E. LEONI, ALBERTO CASADEI, SILVANO TAGLIAGAMBE.

This article presents an exploratory analysis of the metaphoric structure of five artistic paintings within “Think aloud” protocols, in which a group of 14 English speakers with a low self-rated level of expertise in art and history of art expertise were asked to verbalize all their thoughts, ideas and impressions of the artworks. The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows: (1) multiple interpretations for the same artwork are possible, (2) the interpretations of the metaphorical structures described (...) by the participants often diverge from those advanced by the researchers. These findings challenge the methods by which metaphor identification and analysis in pictorials is currently approached. As a matter of fact, most of the research in pictorial metaphors tends to reduce stimuli such as artistic paintings to unique metaphoric interpretations generally produced by a single researcher by means of introspection. By addressing this methodological problem in metaphor research, this article contributes to the development of a theoretical and operational participant-based framework that takes into account the role of metaphoric conceptualization within the domain of art and art cognition. (shrink)

In this article, based on a critical metaphor analysis, we identify and describe multimodal metaphors involving the human body and its conceptualizations in five auteur films of the 2010s. Studies on the human body in cinema have documented how it changes according to underlying ideologies. Our research focuses on the role of image schemas and metaphors as they embody meanings and sociocultural paradigms. Metaphors also frame how the body is conceptualized according to dominating ideological practices such as (a) commodification, (b) (...) the integration between artificial and organic, (c) dissatisfaction, (d) dynamics of beautification and idealization, and (e) politicization of the human body. We show how metaphors are creative tools to reframe meanings and representations of the body and how the body is a construct refashioned within the cinematic discourses of these films. (shrink)

This article analyzes how the conceptualization LIFE IS A JOURNEY is conveyed within a series of paintings ranging from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century. While the previous research on visual metaphor generally aims to describe how the domains of metaphorical conceptualization interact or discusses the rhetorical effect that visual metaphor is able to induce, this article takes a historical perspective in order to identify the main conceptual aspects shared by the paintings under consideration. It is proposed that the (...) concept of a JOURNEY is associated with a PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY that involves the start of the journey and its termination as two qualitatively different moments that are faced as a collective/shared experience and that are inspired by some human wish. This article also shows how the conceptual potential of metaphor tends to maintain a coherent representation although the paintings represent different historical sensitivities and artistic approaches. (shrink)

In this article, we examine dark humour in Internet posts commenting on an online Italian newspaper report published by Il Fatto Quotidiano and devoted to the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice. The analysis focuses on the linguistic forms and socio-pragmatic functions of this dark humour in the wake of the tragedy. We argue that the creative humorous posts are meant to communicate Internet users’ ideologies conceptualised as their true beliefs about the sociopolitical situation and that they are oriented primarily towards (...) criticising terrorism-related themes, notably: inept security enforcement, radical Islam, political and public reactions and integration policies. The humour in the Italian posts is used as a means of displaying Internet users’ wit and attracting other users’ attention. (shrink)

This volume brings together a number of previously unpublished essays that will advance the reader's philosophical understanding of specific aspects of causation, agency and moral responsibility. These are deeply intertwined notions, and a large proportion of the volume is taken up by papers that shed light on their mutual connections or defend certain claims concerning them. The volume investigates several important questions, including: Can causation be perceived? If it can, can it be perceived in any way other than visually? Can (...) the interventionist theory developed by James Woodward offer an adequate account of causation? Is a causal relation a necessary condition for moral responsibility? Can there be a responsibility difference without a causal difference? Are causal ascriptions based on the more primitive language game of blame ascriptions? What can be learnt from the analogy between causal interference and unbreakable processes, on one side, and motivational interferences and "unbreakable" resolutions, on the other side? How can humans be routinely considered responsible for non-deliberated omissions? Should the connection between moral responsibility and the epistemic conditions usually required for moral responsibility to be obtained be weakened? What is the connection between awareness of one's doing and intentional action? These essays constitute a valid contribution towards the discovery of reasonable answers to such deep questions as the metaphysics of causal relations, the epistemology of causal explanations, the interventionist theory of causation, and the relationship among causality and moral responsibility, willpower, agency and intentional action. (shrink)

Although philosophers have been concerned with truth since at least the age of Plato, the last thirty years have witnessed a veritable explosion of the philosophical debate on this topic. The touchpaper which lit the fuse for this was undoubtedly the Deflationist Renaissance (half a century after the seminal work of F.P. Ramsey) due, in the Seventies, both to the Quinean disquotational interpretation of the Tarskian truth definitions and to the development of the prosentential theory of truth by D. Grover, (...) J. Kamp and N. Belnap, and, from the second half of the Eighties onwards, to the forceful defences of deflationary conceptions provided by H. Field and P. Horwich. The philosophical struggle on deflationism has been thought-provoking: by arguing on the merits and shortcomings of such a conception, philosophers have come to broaden and deepen the discussion on truth beyond the boundaries of deflationism. The varieties of problems tackled by the essays in this book highlight how the land of Truth is still far from having been totally explored, and how, in this intellectual endeavour, real progresses can be achieved. (shrink)

Complex systems can be characterized by classes of equivalency of their elements defined according to system specific rules. We propose a generalized preferential attachment model to describe the class size distribution. The model postulates preferential growth of the existing classes and the steady influx of new classes. According to the model, the distribution changes from a pure exponential form for zero influx of new classes to a power law with an exponential cut-off form when the influx of new classes is (...) substantial. Predictions of the model are tested through the analysis of a unique industrial database, which covers both elementary units (products) and classes (markets, firms) in a given industry (pharmaceuticals), covering the entire size distribution. The model's predictions are in good agreement with the data. The paper sheds light on the emergence of the exponent tau approximately 2 observed as a universal feature of many biological, social and economic problems. (shrink)

The Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) represents a set of life-long disorders. In particular, subjects with ASD can display momentary behaviors of acute agitation and aggressiveness called crisis behaviors. These events are problematic for the subject and care providers but little is known about their occurrence, namely, possible relations among intensity, frequency, and duration. A group of ASD subjects (n=33) has been observed for 12 months reporting data on each crisis ( n = 1137 crises). Statistical analysis did not find significant (...) results, while the relation between crisis duration and frequency showed a good fit to a “power law” curve, suggesting the application of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) model. The SOC is used to describe natural phenomena as earthquakes, bank failures of rivers, mass extinctions, and other systems where a type of “catastrophic events” is necessary to maintain a critical equilibrium. In a sense, subjects at risk of crisis behavior seem to fit the same model as seismic zones at risk of earthquakes. The employment of the same strategies, as those successfully developed for known SOC systems, could lead to important insights for ASD management. Moreover, the SOC model offers possible interpretations of crisis behavior dynamics suggesting that they are unpredictable and, in a sense, necessary. (shrink)

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a 3-week intervention in which a co-located cooperation enforcing interface, called StoryTable, was used to facilitate collaboration and positive social interaction for six children, aged 8–10 years, with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). The intervention focused on exposing pairs of children to an enforced collaboration paradigm while they narrated a story. Pre- and post-intervention tasks included a “low technology” version of the storytelling device and a non storytelling play situation using a free construction game. The (...) outcome measure was a structured observation scale of social interaction. Results demonstrated progress in three areas of social behaviors. First, the participants were more likely to initiate positive social interaction with peers after the intervention. Second, the level of shared play of the children increased from the pre-test to the post-test and they all increased the level of collaboration following the intervention. Third, the children with ASD demonstrated lower frequencies of autistic behaviors while using the StoryTable in comparison to the free construction game activity. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the effectiveness of this intervention for higher functioning children with ASD. (shrink)

Objective: To assess the psychological distress of healthcare providers working in the field of obstetrics during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and to identify factors associated with psychological distress at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational level.Design: Cross-sectional survey study.Setting: Four University hospitals in Italy.Participants: HCPs working in obstetrics, including gynecologists, residents in gynecology and obstetrics, and midwives.Methods: The 104-item survey Impatto PSIcologico COVID-19 in Ostetricia was created by a multidisciplinary expert panel and administered to HCPs in obstetrics in May 2020 (...) via a web-based platform.Main Outcome Measures: Psychological distress assessed by the General Health Questionnaire-12 included in the IPSICO survey.Results: The response rate to the IPSICO survey was 88.2%, and that for GHQ-12 was 84.4%. Just over half of the GHQ-12 respondents reported a clinically significant level of psychological distress. Psychological distress was associated with either individual, interpersonal, and organizational factors in dealing with the pandemic.Conclusions: Results confirm the need for monitoring and assessing the psychological distress for HCPs in obstetrics. Interventions at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational level may relieve the psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and foster resilience skills in facing emotional distress. (shrink)

The way in which people change and represent their spiritual evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures. Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.

17 lessons in the discipline of desire -- 18 lessons in the discipline of action -- 17 lessons in the discipline of assent.

Este libro ofrece una introducción al análisis de la historia del pensamiento conservador y derechista en América Latina y en la Península Ibérica a través de estudios enfocados en diversas épocas, regiones y temas. Describe cómo este pensamiento se desarrolló desde los comienzos del siglo XIX hasta finales del siglo XX, y cómo legitimaba las acciones y el poder de los conservadores y de la derecha. Asimismo subraya la ambigüedad y heterogeneidad del pensamiento conservador y derechista, a la vez que (...) examina las múltiples conexiones, relaciones y similitudes entre sus diferentes corrientes. (shrink)

L'impianto didattico di questa 'Storia' consente di: conciliare l'esposizione piana dei concetti con il rigore del linguaggio filosofico; favorire la percezione delle strutture concettuali, con il duplice scopo di illustrare adeguatamente sia l'impianto filosofico dei singoli autori sia lo sviluppo storico dei diversi problemi; presentare la storia del pensiero moderno in una chiave di categorie filosofiche, oltre che storico-evolutiva; delineare i contesti storici in cui nascono le diverse espressioni del pensiero moderno; rimarcare la diversità dei generi letterari utilizzati dagli autori, (...) mostrandone la connessione con il loro modo di filosofare. (shrink)

The present study investigates the semantics of a dozen basic smell terms in Indonesian using data from a large corpus of written register. Examining how these smell terms lexicalize some odors but not others raises questions that are central to our understanding of the language of olfaction. How are smell terms structured? What does the structure of smell terms tell us about human behavior? By applying cluster analysis, the present study reveals that the Indonesian odor lexicon is structured based on (...) one dimension correlating with pleasantness. The large dataset of a written corpus enables the present study to reveal the differences in lexicalization and frequency: Indonesian smell terms have more negative types but more positive tokens in texts. This novel approach to investigating smell terms allows us to take a step closer toward our goal of understanding olfactory vocabulary, as data on token frequency are difficult to obtain in studies of minority languages. This key finding supports the Pollyanna Hypothesis: people tend to use positive words more often than negative words, but the negative words convey more information. (shrink)

What things mean to us involves more than what they afford in a straightforward sense (e.g., motor affordances). One can think of bodily adornments, lines, or precious stones. Differently from tools like hammers, these things are used to be displayed, watched etc. The paper investigates this very important feature of human behaviour, focusing especially on the expressive possibilities, or salience, of tools. This is interpreted as an emergent property of our engagement with tools, for which tools matter to us because (...) of what they show, not just because of what we do with them in a strict sense. A phenomenological approach is obtained by building upon Heidegger's view of tools as structured by implicit “indications” of relevance; this approach is developed by engaging with debates on mark making, stone tools, and aesthetic experience. It is argued that the salience of things is a process where indications of relevance become explicit and relatively distanced from motor affordances; this alliance of explicitness and absence of action allows for things to "resonate" in us, inviting us to see tools as invitations to imagine, think, and remember. The paper considers examples of entanglements of salience and affordances, where tools and techniques shape symbols and imaginaries. (shrink)

There has been recent interest in the idea that speakers who appear to be having a verbal dispute may in fact be engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation: they are communicating information about how they believe an expression should be used. For example, individuals involved in a dispute about whether a racehorse is an athlete might be communicating their diverging views about how ‘athlete’ should be used. While many have argued that metalinguistic negotiation is a pervasive feature of philosophical and everyday (...) discourse, the literature currently lacks an account of this phenomenon that can be situated within a ‘mainstream’ view of communication. I propose an independently motivated account where individuals reconstruct metalinguistic propositions by means of a pragmatic, Gricean reasoning process. (shrink)

‘‘Theoretical biology’’ is a surprisingly heter- ogeneous field, partly because it encompasses ‘‘doing the- ory’’ across disciplines as diverse as molecular biology, systematics, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Moreover, it is done in a stunning variety of different ways, using anything from formal analytical models to computer sim- ulations, from graphic representations to verbal arguments. In this essay I survey a number of aspects of what it means to do theoretical biology, and how they compare with the allegedly much more restricted (...) sense of theory in the physical sciences. I also tackle a recent trend toward the presentation of all-encompassing theories in the biological sciences, from general theories of ecology to a recent attempt to provide a conceptual framework for the entire set of biological disciplines. Finally, I discuss the roles played by philosophers of science in criticizing and shap- ing biological theorizing. (shrink)

Genes are often described by biologists using metaphors derived from computa- tional science: they are thought of as carriers of information, as being the equivalent of ‘‘blueprints’’ for the construction of organisms. Likewise, cells are often characterized as ‘‘factories’’ and organisms themselves become analogous to machines. Accordingly, when the human genome project was initially announced, the promise was that we would soon know how a human being is made, just as we know how to make airplanes and buildings. Impor- tantly, (...) modern proponents of Intelligent Design, the latest version of creationism, have exploited biologists’ use of the language of information and blueprints to make their spurious case, based on pseudoscientific concepts such as ‘‘irreducible complexity’’ and on flawed analogies between living cells and mechanical factories. However, the living organ- ism = machine analogy was criticized already by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. In line with Hume’s criticism, over the past several years a more nuanced and accurate understanding of what genes are and how they operate has emerged, ironically in part from the work of computational scientists who take biology, and in particular developmental biology, more seriously than some biologists seem to do. In this article we connect Hume’s original criticism of the living organism = machine analogy with the modern ID movement, and illustrate how the use of misleading and outdated metaphors in science can play into the hands of pseudoscientists. Thus, we argue that dropping the blueprint and similar metaphors will improve both the science of biology and its understanding by the general public. (shrink)