Cognitive niche theories consist in a theoretical framework that is proving extremely profitable in bridging evolutionary biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and anthropology by offering an inter-disciplinary ground, laden with novel approaches and debates. At the same time, cognitive niche theories are multiple, and differently related to niche theories in theoretical and evolutionary biology. The aim of this paper is to clarify the theoretical and epistemological relationships between cognitive and ecological niche theories. Also, by adopting a constructionist approach we will try (...) to explain the shift from ecological to cognitive niches and their actual and theoretical overlaps. In order to do so, we will take two concepts expressing loose forms of causation in the interaction between organisms and their environment: the biological notion of “enablement” and the psycho-cognitive one of “affordance”. (shrink)

Gossip has been the object of a number of different studies in the past 50 years, rehabilitating it not only as something worth being studied, but also as a pivotal informational and social structure of human cognition: Dunbar (Rev Gen Psychol 8(2):100–110, 2004) interestingly linked the emergence of language to nothing less than its ability to afford gossip. Different facets of gossip were analyzed by anthropologists, linguists, psychologists and philosophers, but few attempts were made to frame gossip within an epistemological (...) framework (for instance Ayim in (Good gossip, pp. 85–99, 1994)). Our intention in this paper is to provide a consistent epistemological (applied and social) account of gossip, understood as broadly evaluative talk between two or more people, comfortably acquainted between each other, about an absent third party they are both at least acquainted with. Hence, relying on the most recent multidisciplinary literature about the topic, the first part of this paper will concern the epistemic dynamics of gossip: whereas the sociobiological tradition individuates in gossip the clue for the (theoretically cumbersome) group mind and group-level adaptations Wilson et al. (The evolution of cognition, pp. 347–365, 2002), we will suggest the more parsimonious modeling of gossip as a soft-assembled epistemic synergy, understood as a function-dominant interaction able to project a higher organizational level—in our case, the group as group-of-gossips. We will argue that the aim of this synergy is indeed to update a Knowledge Base of social information between the group (as a projected whole) and its members. The second and third part will instead focus on the epistemological labeling of the inferences characterizing gossip: our contention is that the ever-present moral/evaluative dimension in gossip—be it tacit or explicit, concerning the objects or the partners of gossip—is best analyzed through the epistemological framework of abduction. Consequently, we will suggest that a significant role of gossip is to function as a group-based abductive appraisal of social matter, enacted at various levels. (shrink)

Cyber-bullying, and other issues related to violence being committed online in prosocial environments, are beginning to constitute an emergency worldwide. Institutions are particularly sensitive to the problem especially as far as teenagers are concerned inasmuch as, in cases of inter-teen episodes, the deterrent power of ordinary justice is not as effective as it is between adults. In order to develop the most suitable policies, institution should not be satisfied with statistics and sociological perspectives on the phenomenon, but rather seek a (...) deep ethical understanding—also referring to the biological and evolutionary past of human beings. The aim of this paper is to show a way to fill this theoretical gap, offering some answers that can illuminate future policy-oriented research and reflection. In order to do so, we will start by connecting our argument to evolutionary studies carried out in the past two decades, focusing on gossip as a tool for social assortment, thus endowed with a dual function: protect the group from free riders, intruders and bullies but also bully the deviant members. In the “Mediating gossip through social networks” section, we will see which aspects of gossip, vital for bullying, are co-opted by social network scenarios. A fundamental trait of human social life, that is the subdivision in smaller coalitions, or sub-groups, will be shown as missing in social networks dynamics—therefore constituting themselves as structurally violent. The “Why and how do social networks empower bullying?” section will deal with techno-ethical and epistemological concerns regarding how gossip, mediated by SN, manages to empower cyber-bullying. The “Self-gossip and self-mobbing in the light of the disruption of sub-moralities” section will characterize cyber-bullying as often sparked by self-gossip in a scenario where familiar sub-groups, which also mediate defense and mutual understanding, are disrupted. The “Discussion and conclusion” section will consist of a philosophical summary, divided in two parts: a pars destruens analyzing whether SN, in their actual configurations, are fit for being used by humans-like-us, and a pars construens examining the broad potential consequences of highly enforced regulation aimed at contrasting cyber-bullying. (shrink)

The book is an epistemological monograph written from a multidisciplinary perspective. It provides a complex and realistic picture of cognition and rationality, as endowments aimed at making sense and reacting smartly to one's environment, be it epistemic, social or simply ecological. The first part of the book analyzes scientific modeling as products of the biological necessity to cope with the environment and be able to draw as many inferences as possible about it. Moreover, it develops an epistemological framework which will (...) be exploited in both the second part of the book, focusing on social cognition and cognitive niche construction, and the third part, dealing with the apparent irrationality of magical and religious belief. The book also discusses how both social networking and online religion influence cognition, rationality and irrational belief. (shrink)

Cognitive niche construction theory provides a new comprehensive account for the development of human cultural and social organization with respect to the management of their environment. Cognitive niche construction can be seen as a way of lessening complexity and unpredictability of a given environment. In this paper, we are going to analyze economic systems as highly technological cognitive niches, and individuate a link between cognitive niche construction, unpredictability and a particular kind of economic crises.

During the second half of the last century, the importance of serendipitous events in scientific frameworks has been progressively recognized, fueling hard debates about their role, nature, and structure in philosophy and sociology of science. Alas, while discussing the relevance of the topic for the comprehension of the nature of scientific discovery, the philosophical literature has hardly paid attention to the cognitive significance of serendipity, accepting rather than examining some of its most specific features, such as its game-changing effect, the (...) unexpectedness of its occurrence, and its affinity with the concept of “luck”. Thus, in this paper we aim at analyzing these characteristics in the light of their cognitive implications in the recognition, performance, and possible stimulation of serendipitous events in relation to scientific discoveries. (shrink)

This handbook offers the first comprehensive reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of model-based reasoning. It highlights the role of models as mediators between theory and experimentation, and as educational devices, as well as their relevance in testing hypotheses and explanatory functions. The Springer Handbook merges philosophical, cognitive and epistemological perspectives on models with the more practical needs related to the application of this tool across various disciplines and practices. The result is a unique, reliable source of information that guides (...) readers toward an understanding of different aspects of model-based science, such as the theoretical and cognitive nature of models, as well as their practical and logical aspects. The inferential role of models in hypothetical reasoning, abduction and creativity once they are constructed, adopted, and manipulated for different scientific and technological purposes is also discussed. Written by a group of internationally renowned experts in philosophy, the history of science, general epistemology, mathematics, cognitive and computer science, physics and life sciences, as well as engineering, architecture, and economics, this Handbook uses numerous diagrams, schemes and other visual representations to promote a better understanding of the concepts. This also makes it highly accessible to an audience of scholars and students with different scientific backgrounds. All in all, the Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science represents the definitive application-oriented reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of model-based reasoning. (shrink)

In this paper we aim at discussing cognitive and epistemic features of online communities, by the use of cognitive niche constructions theories, presenting them as virtual cognitive niches. Virtual cognitive niches can be considered as digitally-encoded collaborative distributions of diverse types of information into an environment performed by agents to aid thinking and reasoning about some target domain. Discussing this definition, we will also consider how online communities, as networks displaying a social bias, can both foster civic awareness and promote (...) problematic group-led behaviors in the virtually aggregated crowds. To support this affirmation, we will take into account the use of online communication networks during crises and we will argue that it can lead to ethically dubious consequences. (shrink)

Camouflage commonly refers to the ability to make something appear as different from what it actually is, or not to make it appear at all. This concept originates from biological studies to describe a range of strategies used by organisms to dissimulate their presence in the environment, but it is frequently borrowed by other semantic fields as it is possible to camouflage one’s position, intentions, opinion etc.: an interesting conceptual continuum between the multiple denotations of camouflage seems to emerge from (...) the multiple homologies. Following this outlook, the first part of this paper aims at sketching out the main forms of camouflage as understood within their biological framework, insisting on the inferential dynamics underdetermined and allowing camouflage, making use of the concept of abduction as received from the Peircean heritage. The second part explores some of the most relevant occurrences of camouflage in dialectical and rhetorical perspectives. The third section aims at drawing the sums of the comparison between linguistic and biological camouflage, showing how strategies aimed at debunking verbal camouflage correspond to their respective countermeasures in biologically-intended camouflage. (shrink)

Superstitious practices have been considered since the ancient times as signs of deviating cognitive forms, concerned with irrelevant causal relationships, and/or reducible to religious beliefs. Recent theories such as the extended mind and cognitive niche construction, though, can shed new light on superstition and its apparently unreasonable success. The trigger is to observe how most superstitions are not mere “beliefs” hosted in a naked mind, but rather involve a strong coupling between the mind and some external props allowing its extensions (...) away from the skull: from bodily gestures, to artifacts and other agents. The mind’s capability to extend into the environment supports the related theory of cognitive niche construction, suggesting that human agents achieved better and better performances by creating external structures able to provide better and persistent scaffoldings for their cognitive performances. When it is not possible to detect and exploit the presence of a cognitive niche in the environment, superstitious practices can be identified as the possibility to deploy an emergency-cognitive niche projected by the superstitious agent into the world by means of a superstitious prop. It is poorer and less reliable but preferable to utter blank, and most important it is still coupled with the external world, thus maintaining the fundamental characteristic of cognitive niches, that is distribution. (shrink)

In this paper we seek an inferential and cognitive model explaining some characteristics of abduction to composite hypotheses. In the first section, we introduce the matter of composite hypotheses, stressing how it is coherent with the intuitive and philosophical contention that a single event can be caused not only by several causes acting together, but also by several kinds of causation. In the second section, we argue that gossip could serve as an interesting model to study the generation of composite (...) hypotheses at a larger scale: several characteristics of gossip make it extremely prone to produce composite hypotheses considering different levels of causation. In the third and final section, we try to illustrate some specificities of abduction to composite hypotheses for individual agents basing on the analysis of collective agents. (shrink)

The broad aim of this paper is to question the ambiguous relationship between technology and intelligence. More specifically, it addresses the reasons why the ever-increasing reliance on smart technologies and wide repositories of data does not necessarily increase the display of “smart” or even “intelligent” behaviors, but rather increases new instances of “brutality” as a mix of ignorance and violence. We claim that the answer can be found in the cyborg theory, and more specifically in the possibility to blend different (...) kinds of intentionality. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to offer a non-trivial reflection about the violence embedded in self-sacrifice. Firstly, we will suggest a definition of violence which does not make self-sacrifice necessarily violent, but rather aims at being consistent with the common sense conception of sacrifice as actually violent. Framing this initial claim within the vectorial conception of sacrifice offered by Derrida, we will individuate in the violence against intellect the core of the violent dimension of self-sacrifice, insofar as the author (...) of the sacrifice does not limitedly commit part of her understanding in the sacrificial practice, but all of it, since she is both the agent and the patient of sacrifice. At this point, we will have gathered enough material to spell out two fundamental violent aspects of self-sacrifice. The first concerns the exemplar of self-sacrifice in Western tradition, that is, Jesus Christ’s. The self-sacrifice committed by God’s own lógos is the epitome of sacrifice as sacrificium intellectus, therefore the highest gradient of intellectual violence. At the same time, this is crucial as it further corroborates the interpretation of Jesus’ sacrifice as the last sacrifice: no mimetic attempt to reenact His sacrifice can hold the comparison under the fundamental aspect of intellectual violence. The second “mirror” to reflect about the violence of self-sacrifice will concern the sacrifice enacted by superheroes, namely Batman, and the extent to which the sacrifice of intellect is at play when kenotic self-sacrifice and scapegoating processes become hard to tell one from the other. (shrink)

Volume 32, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 65-67.

The series is devoted to the study of scientific and philosophical texts from the Classical and the Islamic world handed down in Arabic. Through critical text editions and monographs, it provides access to ancient scientific inquiry as it developed in a continuous tradition from Antiquity to the modern period. All editions are accompanied by translations and philological and explanatory notes.

This study explores social enterprises’ strategies for addressing mission drift. Relying on an inductive comparative case study of two Italian social enterprises, we show how stakeholder engagement combined with social accounting can successfully support a social venture to re-balance its positioning between wealth generation and social value creation. Indeed, stakeholder engagement helps the internal actors of a social enterprise to rationalize and embody pro-social values previously abandoned, while social accounting reinforces this embodiment process by showing the reintroduced social commitment of (...) the social enterprise to external audiences. Conversely, strategies focused only on social accounting and without significant engagement of external stakeholders prove to be unsuccessful in counterbalancing mission drift because they fail to activate the necessary process of internal re-introduction and operationalization of pro-social values and objectives. (shrink)

Tommaso Campanella’s dignitas hominis acquires its own autonomous and innovative historiographical value in recognizing the connection between mens and religion as a distinctive element of human be...

Il volume analizza il pensiero trascendentale di Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) nei suoi elementi costitutivi. In particolare viene messo in evidenza che l’intento principale della filosofia fichtiana è quello di edificare un “sistema della libertà”, fondato sul primato del pratico (das Praktische) e dei costitutivi pratici della coscienza umana: l’intuizione intellettuale, l’immaginazione produttiva, lo Streben ed in primis il volere. Viene quindi sottolineato che uno dei vertici della speculazione di Fichte è rappresentato dal concetto di “volere puro” che costituisce il (...) fondamento del conoscere e dell’agire, determinando la natura stessa dell’uomo e dell’assoluto. Nel volume vengono ampiamente utilizzati i nuovi testi messi a disposizione dall’edizione critica delle opere fichtiane curata da Reinhard Lauth: particolare attenzione viene data ai manoscritti di lezioni Dottrina della scienza nova methodo (1796-99) e all’epistolario intercorso tra Fichte e F.H. Jacobi sul rapporto tra la riflessione filosofica e la fede religiosa. Nella parte finale del libro compaiono due Appendici: la prima è dedicata al filosofo bretone Jules Lequier (1814-1862), autore che - ispirandosi a Fichte - elabora una filosofia della libertà tesa a superare una concezione della natura umana deterministica e positivistica; la seconda Appendice è incentrata sull’originale interpretazione del pensiero cartesiano data da Reinhard Lauth (1919-2007): quest’ultimo scorge nel cogito cartesiano il fondamento di una filosofia trascendentale ante litteram che anticipa le posizioni di Kant e di Fichte e che pone le basi per un “pensiero trascendentale della libertà”. -/- AUTORE Tommaso Valentini (Spoleto, 1979) è professore associato di “Filosofia politica” presso l’Università degli Studi “Guglielmo Marconi” di Roma, dove insegna anche “Storia della filosofia moderna”. È docente incaricato di “Ermeneutica filosofica” presso la Pontificia Università Antonianum. Nel 2003 si è laureato in Filosofia sotto la guida del Prof. Armando Rigobello; nel 2008 ha conseguito il titolo di Dottore di ricerca (PhD) in “Etica e antropologia filosofica” presso l’Università degli Studi del Salento. Dal 2006 al 2008, grazie ad una borsa di studio, ha condotto le sue ricerche sul pensiero classico tedesco a Monaco di Baviera presso la Ludwig-Maximilians Universität e la Fichte-Kommission dell’Accademica Bavarese delle Scienze. Dal 2015 è membro del Consiglio nazionale dell’ADIF (Associazione Docenti Italiani di Filosofia). È co-direttore della rivista scientifica on line «Aretè. International Journal of Philosophy, Human & Social Sciences». Ha pubblicato numerosi articoli su Kant, J.G. Fichte, il personalismo e l’ermeneutica filosofica (in particolare Paul Ricoeur). Tra le sue pubblicazioni: Soggetto e persona nel pensiero francese del Novecento, Editori Riuniti university press, Roma 2011; I fondamenti della libertà in J.G. Fichte, Editori Riuniti university press, Roma 2012; Filosofia e cristianesimo nell’Italia del Novecento, Drengo Edizioni, Roma 2012; nel 2015 è stato curatore del volume Natura umana, persona, libertà. Prospettive di antropologia filosofica ed orientamenti etico-politici, LEV, Roma 2015; nel 2017 è stato curatore (con il Prof. Luca Mencacci) del volume collettaneo dal titolo “La dialettica esaurita? A 100 anni dalla Rivoluzione d’Ottobre. Interpretazioni politiche, filosofiche, estetiche”, Presentazione del Prof. Rocco Pezzimenti, Drengo Edizioni, Roma; per la rivista «Aretè» ha curato (con il Prof. Andrea Gentile) due numeri monografici: nel 2017 il volume dal titolo “A partire da Kant: interpretazioni e metamorfosi del trascendentale”, nel 2019 il volume dal titolo “Dialettica. Sui molteplici significati di un concetto teoretico e storico-politico”. (shrink)

L'autore espone un confronto tra Jean-Luc Nancy, forse il filosofo francese vivente di maggior successo della sua generazione (è nato nel 1940), e alcune figure del pensiero contemporaneo: Merleau-Ponty, Agamben, Sartre, Bataille, Lévinas. Questo esame aiuta a meglio comprendere il significato di novità, recupero e contestazione dei maggiori temi della filosofia del XX secolo che la riflessione di Nancy rappresenta. Il concetto-guida della comunicazione serve per presentare in modo organico una speculazione che la maggior parte degli studi critici finora comparsi (...) si accontenta di passare in rassegna e di ridurre a un cumulo più o meno interessante di motivi "postmoderni". (shrink)

A quasivariety of algebras has the joint embedding property (JEP) if and only if it is generated by a single algebra A. It is structurally complete if and only if the free ℵ0‐generated algebra in can serve as A. A consequence of this demand, called ‘passive structural completeness’ (PSC), is that the nontrivial members of all satisfy the same existential positive sentences. We prove that if is PSC then it still has the JEP, and if it has the JEP and (...) its nontrivial members lack trivial subalgebras, then its relatively simple members all belong to the universal class generated by one of them. Under these conditions, if is relatively semisimple then it is generated by one ‐simple algebra. We also prove that a quasivariety of finite type, with a finite nontrivial member, is PSC if and only if its nontrivial members have a common retract. The theory is then applied to the variety of De Morgan monoids, where we isolate the sub(quasi)varieties that are PSC and those that have the JEP, while throwing fresh light on those that are structurally complete. The results illuminate the extension lattices of intuitionistic and relevance logics. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to assess the effects of visual aesthetic perception on event-related potentials . Eight subjects assigned an aesthetic judgment and a 10-step beauty estimation to the target stimuli, consisting of famous artistic pictures and geometric shapes. In a further task, the subjects performed a motor response to the previously judged pictures and geometric shapes. ERPs were recorded through 54 scalp electrodes during both tasks. The P3b amplitude was increased during the categorization of the geometric shapes (...) compared to the artistic figures and during the vision of the beautiful targets preceding the motor response. The categorization of the aesthetic qualities of geometrical shapes seems to induce a higher level of attention, while a higher arousal variation was elicited by the recognition of beauty, in any form that was presented. (shrink)