We offer a proof of the duality theorem for finitely presented MV-algebras and rational polyhedra, a folklore and yet fundamental result. Our approach develops first a general dual adjunction between MV-algebras and subspaces of Tychonoff cubes, endowed with the transformations that are definable in the language of MV-algebras. We then show that this dual adjunction restricts to a duality between semisimple MV-algebras and closed subspaces of Tychonoff cubes. The duality theorem for finitely presented objects is obtained by a further specialisation. (...) Our treatment is aimed at showing exactly which parts of the basic theory of MV-algebras are needed in order to establish these results, with an eye towards future generalisations. (shrink)

In his late years, Thomas Kuhn became interested in the process of scientific specialization, which does not seem to possess the destructive element that is characteristic of scientific revolutions. It therefore makes sense to investigate whether and how Kuhn’s insights about specialization are consistent with, and actually fit, his model of scientific progress through revolutions. In this paper, I argue that the transition toward a new specialty corresponds to a revolutionary change for the group of scientists involved in such a (...) transition. I will clarify the role of the scientific community in revolutionary changes and characterize the incommensurability across specialties as possessing both semantic and methodological aspects. The discussion of the discovery of the structure of DNA will serve both as an illustration of my main argument and as reply to one criticism raised against Kuhn—namely, that his model cannot capture cases of revolutionary yet non-disruptive episodes of scientific progress. Revisiting Kuhn’s ideas on specialization will shed new light on some often overlooked features of scientific change. (shrink)

This paper outlines an account of conditionals, the evidential account, which rests on the idea that a conditional is true just in case its antecedent supports its consequent. As we will show, the evidential account exhibits some distinctive logical features that deserve careful consideration. On the one hand, it departs from the material reading of ‘if then’ exactly in the way we would like it to depart from that reading. On the other, it significantly differs from the non-material accounts which (...) hinge on the Ramsey Test, advocated by Adams, Stalnaker, Lewis, and others. (shrink)

This paper develops a probabilistic analysis of conditionals which hinges on a quantitative measure of evidential support. In order to spell out the interpreta- tion of ‘if’ suggested, we will compare it with two more familiar interpretations, the suppositional interpretation and the strict interpretation, within a formal framework which rests on fairly uncontroversial assumptions. As it will emerge, each of the three interpretations considered exhibits specific logical features that deserve separate consideration.

One of the challenges confronted by language learners is to master the interpretation of sentences with multiple logical operators, where different interpretations depend on different scope assignments. Five-year-old children have been found to access some readings of potentially ambiguous sentences much less than adults do :73–102, 2006; Musolino, Universal Grammar and the acquisition of semantic knowledge, 1998; Musolino and Lidz, Lang Acquis 11:277–291, 2003, among many others). Recently, Gualmini et al. have shown that, by careful contextual manipulation, it is possible (...) to evoke some of the putatively unavailable interpretations from young children. Their proposal is quite general, but the focus of their work was on sentences involving nominal quantifiers and negation. The present paper extends this investigation to sentences with modal expressions. The results of our two experimental studies reveal that, in potentially ambiguous sentences with modal expressions, the kinds of contextual manipulations introduced by Gualmini and colleagues do not suffice to explain children’s initial scope interpretations. In response to the recalcitrant data, we propose a new three-stage model of the acquisition of scope relations. Most importantly, at the initial stage, child grammars make available only one interpretation of negative sentences with modal expressions. We call this the Unique Scope Assignment stage. (shrink)

The Dunning–Kruger effect focuses our attention on the notion of invisibility of ignorance, i.e., the ignorance of ignorance. Such a phenomenon is not only important for everyday life, but also, above all, for some philosophical disciplines, such as epistemology of sciences. When someone tries to understand formally the phenomenon of ignorance of ignorance, they usually end up with a nested epistemic operator highly resistant to proper regimentation. In this paper, we argue that to understand adequately the ignorance of ignorance phenomenon (...) we have to understand satisfactorily the concept of disbelief and, as we call it, the concept of “radical ignorance”. We propose also prerequisites that a notion of radical ignorance useful for the philosophy of science ought to fulfill, and we sketch a possible formalization of this notion. Finally, we propose some comments on the problem of propagation of ignorance proposed by Fine. (shrink)

This article aims at sketching a philosophical theory of sound based on the perspective of sound designers: unique agents blurring the boundaries between engineering, music, acoustics and sound-based art. After having introduced the general framing in Section 1, focusing on a short history of the theory and practice of sound design, in Section 2 we propose a reading of sound as monad. We derive such intuition from the technology of digital sampling of audio signals, based on the decomposition of complex (...) sound waves in a number of elementary sinusoidal waves. Thus, in Section 3, we attempt at grounding the resulting “sound-atom” on Leibniz’s notion of monad, intended both as a “simple substance without parts” and as a “nucleus of forces in statu possibilitatis.” The insight is resumed and further discussed in Section 4, where we draw our conclusions by demonstrating the fitness of such framing with regards to the standpoint of sound design, while accounting for the work of sound artists Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda. (shrink)

The bioeconomy is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and scholarly literature, but critical examination of the concept is lacking. We argue that the bioeconomy should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. We use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of the bioeconomy through an analysis of an influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development initiative, The Bioeconomy to 2030. We argue (...) that this initiative is a response to some of the most acute challenges facing the current neoliberal-capitalist accumulation regime, which seeks to protect and extend that regime, through both what it occludes and what it promotes. Rather than taking the bioeconomy as a description of some subset of economic activity, we regard it as a promissory construct that is meant to induce and facilitate some actions while deterring others; most explicitly, it is meant to bring about a particular set of political–institutional changes that will shape the parameters of possible future action. The bioeconomy concept highlights the potential dangers of failing to situate ethnographic examinations of horizontal micro-relations within a political–economic macro-context that enables and constrains. Scholarly work in science and technology studies and elsewhere that does not recognize the wider politics of the bioeconomy risks unintentionally contributing to the legitimation of this political project. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the work of Paolo Prodi (1932–2016), which is characterised by a constant reflection on secularisation. As a democratic Catholic, he explored the relationship between the Roman Church and the modern world starting from the Council of Trent and from the dual figure of the pope as a temporal ruler and spiritual guide. His original contribution concerned the conflict between law and conscience: a problem that led him to design a triptych of books on the foundations of the (...) western world. He was influenced not only by Verfassungsgeschichte (German constitutional history), but also by Harold Berman. If for Weber the modern world was born from the Reformation, for Berman it was the ‘Gregorian revolution’ that changed the fate of Latin Europe. For Prodi, too, the medieval conflict between canon and civil law introduced a peculiar structure in Europe that would last until the triumph of the nation states and the so-called ‘political religions’. In his three books (the first dedicated to the oath, the second to justice, the last to economics), Prodi placed at the centre of his analysis the notion of forum; the history of moral theology and casuistry and the relationship between penitence and justice. (shrink)

Is the ubiquity of contemporary popular music akin to a deliberate aggression to the hearing, making the listening experience devoid of any sense? If so, is there any strategy to morph this supposed confusion into meaningful stimuli? Relying on epistemology, we attempt at promoting the act of listening as a proper way of world-making and refer to Mark Reybrouck, Bruno Nettl, Steven Brown and Joseph Jordania—among others—to gather appropriate heuristic tools. In the last part of the essay, we advance the (...) concept of timbral quotation as an additional means to grasp meaningful cues in the timbrical richness of contemporary popular compositions. We shall sustain the particular fitness of this tool especially with regard to nowadays’ Western popular music, more and more timbre-centered rather than harmony-centered. (shrink)

In his mature works, Kuhn abandons the concept of a paradigm and becomes more interested in the analysis of the conceptual structure of scientific theories. These changes are interpreted as resulting from a ‘linguistic turn’ that Kuhn underwent sometimes around the 1980s. Much of the philosophical discussions about Kuhn’s post-‘linguistic turn’ philosophy revolves around his views on taxonomic concepts. Apart from taxonomy, however, the mature Kuhn introduces other concepts, such as conceptual networks and lexicons. This article distinguishes these three concepts (...) and shows that adopting each one of them has different impacts on Kuhn’s model of science. After distinguishing and assessing the concepts of taxonomy, network, and lexicon, it will be argued that the latter not only fits the Kuhnian model of science better, but it also helps capture the wide sense of Kuhn’s early concept of a paradigm. (shrink)

This paper investigates the logic of reasons. Its aim is to provide an analysis of the sentences of the form ‘p is a reason for q’ that yields a coherent account of their logical properties. The idea that we will develop is that ‘p is a reason for q’ is acceptable just in case a suitably defined relation of incompatibility obtains between p and ¬q. As we will suggest, a theory of reasons based on this idea can solve three challenging (...) puzzles that concern, respectively, contraposing reasons, conflicting reasons, and supererogatory reasons, and opens a new perspective on some classical issues concerning non-deductive inferences. (shrink)

The paper lists several editions of Euclid’s Elements in the Early Modern Age, giving for each of them the axioms and postulates employed to ground elementary mathematics.

Al nominalista non manca proprio nulla? La dispensabilità dell’insieme vuoto in mereologia - Quine’s commitment to nominalism has always required set theory to be replaced by an ontologically less dubious tool for the analysis of predication, one that is usually ABSTRACT Rivista di storia della filosofia, n. 1, 2009 mereological in nature, akin to the Calculus of Individuals he and Goodman developed in a seminal paper on nominalism. The problem Quine himself always acknowledged as central in any such replacement arises (...) with the mereological "translation" of numbers. I show here that Quine’s proposed translation strategy, even when successful, raises even more serious issues since it requires mereology to supply a substitute for the empty set. After proving the indispensability, given Quine’s translation, of such an entity, I demonstrate that an exact mereological replica of the empty set cannot be admitted without engendering contradictions. I conclude by discussing some paraphrases of the usual mereological axioms that prima facie might seem to be compatible with the null object and assessing their implausibility. (shrink)

Epistemologists and philosophers of science have often attempted to express formally the impact of a piece of evidence on the credibility of a hypothesis. In this paper we will focus on the Bayesian approach to evidential support. We will propose a new formal treatment of the notion of degree of confirmation and we will argue that it overcomes some limitations of the currently available approaches on two grounds: (i) a theoretical analysis of the confirmation relation seen as an extension of (...) logical deduction and (ii) an empirical comparison of competing measures in an experimental inquiry concerning inductive reasoning in a probabilistic setting. (shrink)

Harrigan and Spekkens, introduced the influential notion of an ontological model of operational quantum theory. Ontological models can be either “epistemic” or “ontic.” According to the two scholars, Einstein would have been one of the first to propose an epistemic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Pusey et al. showed that an epistemic interpretation of quantum theory is impossible, so implying that Einstein had been refuted. We discuss in detail Einstein’s arguments against the standard interpretation of QM, proving that there is a (...) misunderstanding in Harrigan and Spekkens’ attribution of an epistemic perspective to Einstein, whose point of view was actually statistical, but in a quasi-classical sense. (shrink)

Le polbusting est une pratique de recreation et récréation esthétique à travers laquelle les protagonistes de la culture électronique détournent et ridiculisent les messages et les corps de la politique contemporaine. Ces performances incarnent emblématiquement la vocation et la sensibilité transpolitiques de la culture postmoderne, indiquant la fête et le jeu comme les matrices sur lesquelles elle se fonde. Ainsi, il apparaît indispensable, pour comprendre la relation contemporaine entre imaginaire, médias et politique, de prendre sérieusement en considération ce qui se (...) produit dans les nouveaux paysages médiatiques, dans la mise en scène de la vie quotidienne, dans la culture de l’éphémère et dans tout ce qui a, jusqu'à présent, constitué la marge et l’ombre de la vie sociale. (shrink)

Dans la postmodernité, la technologie ne joue plus le rôle d’art du logos, mais devient « technomagie », totem autour duquel les tribus postmodernes actualisent l’expérience de l’extase mystique. Celle-ci se présente comme une simple vibration autour du corps communautaire et à la fois un éclatement du soi vers quelque chose de plus grand. Le lien qui en découle ne repose plus sur un contrat rationnel et abstrait – sur le contrat social – mais sur un pacte dont l’émotion, les (...) passions et les symboles partagés deviennent les nouvelles matrices de l’être-ensemble. (shrink)

Il problema della coscienza, non affrontata in modo scientifico per gran parte del XX secolo, è tornato prepotentemente alla ribalta grazie anche all’enorme sviluppo delle tecniche di indagine non invasive delle funzioni cerebrali. Sorprendentemente questi risultati non hanno portato a una maggiore comprensione della coscienza. Eppure la coscienza (fenomenica) è un fatto empirico: qualcosa che quotidianamente si presenta a ciascuno di noi. Com’è possibile che sia così elusiva e misteriosa? Per risolvere l’enigma è necessario superare la visione cartesiana secondo la (...) quale il mondo da due domini separati: la mente e le cose. Come si legge nella via del Samurai: non è bene quando una cosa diventa due. Per capire la coscienza è importante comprenderne la natura dell’essere in relazione con il mondo. Il cervello fa esperienza del mondo esterno. Com’è possibile? In questo articolo proponiamo una teoria basata, non su oggetti statici, ma su un processo fisico (denominato onfene) che può essere descritto sia da un punto di vista relazionale, che rappresentazionale, che oggettuale. Questo processo fisico non è confinato nei limiti fisici del cervello, ma si estende dagli oggetti di cui siamo consapevoli fino a terminare nelle attivazioni neurali. Secondo questo punto di vista la mente è pertanto “allargata” a comprendere tutto ciò di cui siamo coscienti. (shrink)

La tradizionale distinzione tra i domini dell’ontologia, della fenomenologia e dell’epistemologia ha assunto i caratteri di un dogma la cui esistenza non può venire messa in discussione. Tale dogma determina l’insorgere di una serie di problemi insoluti quali l’unità, la rappresentazione, il rapporto mente-corpo. Ognuno di questi problemi è una manifestazione della contrapposizione tra forma e materia. Il mondo moderno è iniziato, a partire con Cartesio, con l’esclusione dell’aspetto formale dal mondo fisico e la sua esclusiva assegnazione al dominio mentale. (...) In alternativa, proponiamo uno schema di pensiero nel quale forma e materia non sono che due modi diversi di presentarsi di un unico principio a partire dal quale è possibile derivare rappresentato e rappresentazione, esistenza e conoscenza dell’esistente, osservatore e osservato, mente e corpo. (shrink)

A user is a system capable of creating and pursuing individual goals. Is it possible to design and implement an artificial user? Traditional artificial systems focus on how achieving a given goal. Most learning algorithms look for an optimal solution of a problem, given a set of optimization criteria and a goal (or a set of goals). However, real agents and real users have to develop new goals in order to cope with their environment. They must find “what” they want (...) to achieve and not only “how”. The development of completely new goals on the basis of the interaction with the environment is here defined the “what” problem. In this paper we will try to define it and we will propose an architecture capable of addressing it. Such an architecture is proposed as the foundation for an artificial user. (shrink)