Rodolfo Sacco developed the idea of “mute behaviours” during his studies on mute law. The notion of “mute behaviours” denotes an action that is able to mould a legal relationship without any use of language. Certainly, this concept may give rise to some doubts in relation to the attribution—to a behaviour qualified as mute—of the capability to affect dynamics involving a plurality of people. Aiming to clarify the idea of “mute behaviours” by this point of view, the authors analysed the (...) semiotic terminology used by Sacco himself to explain this notion and the issue of its silent nature. Therefore, the terms “signifying signs” and “symptoms”, deemed by Sacco—respectively—incompatible and compatible with the theory of mute behaviours were considered. The former term was traced back to the notion of conventional and arbitrary sign, the notion of the latter was reconstructed linking it to the concept of signs based on signification and suggesting a possible framework in view of the idea of “presentative meanings” developed by the philosopher Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue. Clarified this dichotomy by a terminological analysis, the authors noticed—as affirmed by Rodolfo Sacco himself—the impossibility to ascribe the notion of gesture to the mute behaviour’s category, as some exegetes proposed. Consequently to this last remark, the authors tried to analyse the relationship between gestures and “mute behaviours”, identifying the category of “sema-pragmatic acts”, that includes gestures and may be seen as an intermediate phase between “mute behaviours” and legally relevant behaviours operated by speaking. (shrink)

I fatti! I fatti! Caro signore, i fatti sono come siassumono; e allora, nello spirito, non sono più fatti:ma vita che appare, così o in altro modo.Luigi Pirandello 1 Ontologia del giuridico 1.1 Due ontologie del giuridico: ontologia degli oggetti giuridici (Adolf Reinach) vs. ontologia degli enti giuridici (Santi Romano) 1.1.1 Nella filosofia del diritto del xx secolo sono compresenti due ontologie del giuridico:(i) l’ontologia degli oggetti giuridici di Adolf Reinach (1883-1917),(ii) l’ontol...

Zwar kann der Akt – sofern er sich in gesprochenen oder geschriebenen Worten ausdrückt selbst etwas über seine Bedeutung aussagen, seinen eigenen Sinn angeben.Darin liegt sogar eine besondere Eigentümlichkeit des der sozialen und insbesondere der juristischen Erkenntnis gegebenen Materials. Certamente l’atto, in quanto si esprime a voce o per iscritto, di per sé può dire qualcosa attorno al suo senso, può dichiarare il proprio senso.In ciò consiste una speciale caratteristica del materiale og...

According to the Austrian philosopher Hans Kelsen (1881-1973), social and institutional entities are the only entities that can be null, void. The starting point of the article, The “Invalid” and the “Nothing”: At the Origins of Social Ontology, is the analysis of Hans Kelsen’s thesis. But: Why are social entities the only entities that can be null, void? In order to answer this question, in the first part of the article, the author uses two new concepts: validity-imperfection and validity-falsification. The (...) second part of the paper deals with a new ontological question: Are null (void) social entities something? (shrink)

Pragmatic Ambiguity: The Thetic Function of Modality The aim of this paper is to present an overview of the pragmatic aspects of ambiguity present in deontic sentences, which may have three pragmatic functions: a prescriptive or a descriptive or a constitutive function. This type of ambiguity is investigated on the lexical, phrasal, and sentential level. The discussion focuses on the deontic constructions of the German verb sollen and the English shall as they are used in legal texts. It also includes (...) comments on the thetic function of the Latin imperative mood and the subjunctive mood. (shrink)

This book reconsiders the supposed impossibility of deriving "Ought" from "Is". John R. Searle’s 1964 article How to Derive "Ought " from "Is’’ sent shockwaves through the philosophical community by offering a straightforward counterexample to this claim of impossibility: from your promising something- and this is an "is" - it simply follows that you "ought" to do it. This volume opens with a brand new chapter from Searle who, in light of his subsequent philosophical developments, expounds the reasons for the (...) validity of that derivation and its crucial significance for social ontology and moral philosophy. Then, in a fresh interview with the editors of this volume, Searle explores a range of topics including how his derivation relates to constitutive rules, and how he views Wittgenstein’s philosophy, deontic logic, and the rationality of action. The remainder of the volume is dedicated to a deep dive into Searle’s essay and its implications by international scholars with diverse backgrounds ranging from analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and logic, to moral philosophy and the philosophy and sociology of law. With thirteen original chapters, the contributors provide fresh and timely insights on hotly debated issues: the nature of "Ought"; the logical structure of the social world; and the possibility of deriving not only "Ought" from "Is", but "Is" from "Ought". (shrink)

Vi sono varie forme di impossibilità normativa. Una prima forma si incontra quando un fatto naturale al quale il diritto attribuisce un significato normativo è impossibile. Una seconda consiste nell’impossibilità di un atto o fatto la quale derivi dalla presenza o assenza di una norma. Vi è poi una terza forma di impossibilità normativa che si incontra quando si afferma che da una certa realtà oggetto di normazione derivano necessariamente limiti all’attività di normazione stessa. Di una quarta forma si può (...) parlare quando ci si riferisce a un’impossibilità derivante dalle specifiche relazioni che intercorrono tra norme di un sistema normativo dinamico. Le forme di impossibilità normativa sono indagate, nei contributi raccolti in questo volume, da diverse angolazioni: la filosofia del diritto, la filosofia morale, la logica, la filosofia della conoscenza, la scienza del diritto penale. (shrink)

A comparison between the standard adiabatic piston dynamics and that of a perfectly conducting (diathermal) piston helps to clarify their different behaviors and, in particular, the anomalously large random displacement of the adiabatic piston as compared to the diathermal one. It is shown to be associated with a situation where the presence of a single massive “particle” (the piston), acting as an internal constraint in a many-particle system, plays a somewhat unexpected relevant role. A significant physical insight accounting for the (...) above difference is gained by means of a simple analysis of the phase space available to our system. (shrink)

We provide an alternative proof of the sequentialisation theorem for proof nets of multiplicative linear logic. Namely, we show how a proof net can be transformed into a sequent calculus proof simply by properly adding to it some special edges, called sequential edges, which express the sequentiality constraints given by sequent calculus.

In this paper, we propose two agent-based simulation models for the evolution of language in the framework of evolutionary language games. The theory of evolutionary language games arose from the union of evolutionary game theory, introduced by the English biologist John Maynard Smith, and language games, developed by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The first model proposed is based on Martin Nowak’s work and is designed to reproduce and verify the results Nowak obtained in his simplest mathematical model. For the (...) second model, we extend the previous one with the introduction of a world where the languages live and evolve, and which influences interactions among individuals. The main goal of this research is to present a model which shows how the presence of a topological structure influences the communication among individuals and contributes to the emergence of clusters of different languages. (shrink)

Purpose: This article investigates the emergence of subsystems in societies as a solution to the double contingency problem. Context: There are two underlying paradigms: one is radical constructivism in the sense that perturbations are at the centre of the self-organising processes; the other is Luhmann’s double contingency problem, where agents learn anticipations from each other. Approach: Central to our investigation is a computer simulation where we place agents into an arena. These agents can learn to (a) collect food and/or (b) (...) steal food from other agents. In order to analyse subsystem formation, we investigate whether agents use both behaviours or just one of these, which is equivalent to determining the number of self-referential loops. This is detected with a novel measure that we call “prediction utilisation.” Results: During the simulation, symmetry breaking is observed. The system of agents divides itself up into two subsystems: one where agents just collect food and another one where agents just steal food from other agents. The ratio between these two populations is determined by the amount of food available. Key words: Social systems, constructivist paradigm, cybernetics, double contingency, symmetry breaking, emergence. (shrink)

This is a draft of the introduction to the collective volume "The birth of string theory", including the book's index and preface. The book explores the history of the theory’s early stages of development, as told by its main protagonists. It journeys from the first version of the theory in the late 1960s, as an attempt to describe the physics of strong interactions outside the framework of quantum field theory, to its reinterpretation around the mid-1970s as a quantum theory of (...) gravity unified with the other interactions, and its successive developments up to the superstring revolution in 1984. The introductive Chapter summarizes the main developments and contains a chronological synopsis with a list of key results and publications. (shrink)

An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Empirical results already imply that social cognition is not reducible to the workings of individual cognitive mechanisms. To galvanize this interactive turn, we provide an operational definition of social interaction and distinguish the different explanatory roles – contextual, enabling and constitutive – it can play in social cognition. We show that interactive processes are (...) more than a context for social cognition: they can complement and even replace individual mechanisms. This new explanatory power of social interaction can push the field forward by expanding the possibilities of scientific explanation beyond the individual. (shrink)

Colonial ascidians offer opportunities to investigate how developmental events are integrated to generate the animal form, since they can develop similar individuals (oozooids from eggs, blastozooids from pluripotent somatic cells) through very different reproductive processes, i.e. embryogenesis and blastogenesis. Moreover, thanks to their key phylogenetic position, they can help in the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of morphogenesis and their evolution in chordates. We review organogenesis of the ascidian neural complex comparing embryos and buds in terms of topology, developmental mechanisms (...) and terminology. We propose a new interpretation of bud territories, and reconsider nervous system development based on recent results suggesting that ascidians have vertebrate placodal and neural‐crest‐like cells. Comparing embryonic and blastogenic development in Botryllus schlosseri, we propose that the bud has territories with a placodal potentiality, suggesting that chordate ancestors possessed neurogenic placodes, and that the genetic pathways regulating neurogenic placode formation were co‐opted for new developmental processes, such as blastogenesis. BioEssays 28: 902–912, 2006. © 2006 Wiley periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

A novel theoretical framework for an embodied, non-representational approach to language that extends and deepens enactive theory, bridging the gap between sensorimotor skills and language. -/- Linguistic Bodies offers a fully embodied and fully social treatment of human language without positing mental representations. The authors present the first coherent, overarching theory that connects dynamical explanations of action and perception with language. Arguing from the assumption of a deep continuity between life and mind, they show that this continuity extends to language. (...) Expanding and deepening enactive theory, they offer a constitutive account of language and the co-emergent phenomena of personhood, reflexivity, social normativity, and ideality. Language, they argue, is not something we add to a range of existing cognitive capacities but a new way of being embodied. Each of us is a linguistic body in a community of other linguistic bodies. The book describes three distinct yet entangled kinds of human embodiment, organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective; it traces the emergence of linguistic sensitivities and introduces the novel concept of linguistic bodies; and it explores the implications of living as linguistic bodies in perpetual becoming, applying the concept of linguistic bodies to questions of language acquisition, parenting, autism, grammar, symbol, narrative, and gesture, and to such ethical concerns as microaggression, institutional speech, and pedagogy. (shrink)

As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as (...) that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only. (shrink)

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organisms to regulate themselves with respect to their conditions of viability. Adaptivity leads to more articulated concepts of behaviour, agency, sense-construction, health, and temporality than those given (...) so far by autopoiesis and enaction. These and other implications for understanding the organismic generation of values are explored. (shrink)