In questo articolo si prendono in esame due Lares bronzei ritrovati negli scavi di Veleia, custoditi presso il locale Antiquarium. Le due statuette, molto diverse tra loro, presentano alcune peculiarità iconografiche: una sembra appartenere a una rara tipologia di Compitales con rhyton e kantharos; l’altra, vicina all’iconografia del Lar Familiaris, presenta gli attributi posti in posizione inversa. Nello studio si cerca di contestualizzare le due statuette nel panorama della piccola bronzistica della Cisalpina, e di approfondire le conoscenze relative a queste (...) due rare iconografie. (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)

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)

We explore the technical details and historical evolution of Charles Peirce's articulation of a truth table in 1893, against the background of his investigation into the truth-functional analysis of propositions involving implication. In 1997, John Shosky discovered, on the verso of a page of the typed transcript of Bertrand Russell's 1912 lecture on ?The Philosophy of Logical Atomism? truth table matrices. The matrix for negation is Russell's, alongside of which is the matrix for material implication in the hand of Ludwig (...) Wittgenstein. It is shown that an unpublished manuscript identified as composed by Peirce in 1893 includes a truth table matrix that is equivalent to the matrix for material implication discovered by John Shosky. An unpublished manuscript by Peirce identified as having been composed in 1883?1884 in connection with the composition of Peirce's ?On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation? that appeared in the American Journal of Mathematics in 1885 includes an example of an indirect truth table for the conditional. (shrink)

Two experiments, one on school-aged children and one on adults, explored the mechanisms underlying responses to an image prime followed by graspable objects that were, in certain cases, dangerous. Participants were presented with different primes and objects representing two risk levels . The task required that a natural/artifact categorization task be performed by pressing different keys. In both adults and children graspable objects activated a facilitating motor response, while dangerous objects evoked aversive affordances, generating an interference-effect. Both children and adults (...) were sensitive to the distinction between biological and non-biological hands, however detailed resonant mechanisms related to the hand-prime gender emerged only in adults. Implications for how the concept of “dangerous object” develops and the relationship between resonant mechanisms and perception of danger are discussed. (shrink)

Ambivalence, i.e., the simultaneous holding of negative and positive evaluations toward the same object, is an empirically well-documented phenomenon and an important aspect of ordinary experience. However, it has not received sufficient philosophical attention. This essay accomplishes two aims: first, a comprehensive and empirically informed account of ambivalence is provided; second, the rationality of ambivalence in practical and nonpractical contexts is defended.

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)

My purpose here is purely historical. It is not an attempt to resolve the question as to whether Russell did or did not countenance nonclassical logics, and if so, which nonclassical logics, and still less to demonstrate whether he himself contributed, in any manner, to the development of nonclassical logic. Rather, I want merely to explore and insofar as possible document, whether, and to what extent, if any, Russell interacted with the various, either the various candidates or their, ideas that (...) Dejnožka and others have proposed as potentially influential in Russell’s intellectual reactions to nonclassical logic or to the philosophical concepts that might contribute to his reactions to nonclassical logics. (shrink)

Behavioural spillovers refer to the influence that a given intervention targeting behaviour 1 exerts on a subsequent, non-targeted, behaviour 2, which may or may not be in the same domain (health, finance etc.) as one another. So, a nudge to exercise more, for example, could lead people to eat more or less, or possibly even to give more or less to charity depending on the nature of the spillover. But what if spillovers also operate backwards; that is, if the expectation (...) of behaviour 1 influences behaviour 0 that precedes it? For example, a person may form an intention to exercise prompted by a policy intervention but overeat at present as a result. We define such a possibility as a "spillunder". In the proposed article, we critically review the few papers that we have identified through a narrative literature review which have demonstrated spillunder effects to date, and we propose a conceptual framework. Based on evidence about the human mind and behaviour from psychology and economics, we argue that spillunder effects may be more common than the limited empirical findings suggest. We propose six representative mechanisms through which the prospect of behaviour 1 may impact behaviour 0: executive functions, moral licensing and moral cleansing, emotion regulation, energization, construal level, and savouring and dread. We further discuss the policy and practical implications of spillunder effects and examine methodological issues that need to be considered when empirically testing these effects. As with our earlier paper on spillovers, we aim to motivate other behavioural scientists to research behavioural spillunders more systematically and extensively, and to prompt decision makers to consider these effects when designing behavioural interventions. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of American history among adolescent Mexican Americans at the eight-grade level in a mid-west town's middle school. This qualitative study shows that multiple contexts influenced the process of teaching and learning history between and among a white teacher and adolescent Mexican Americans at Atkinson Middle School. Those overlapping contexts (the context of the education of minority language students, the context of social studies education, and the school's culture) created a unique (...) totality responsible for shaping the experiences of learning American history by Mexican-American students. These experiences were detrimental for the appreciation by Mexican-American students of American history's potential meanings and significance. (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)

: Self-consciousness is considered in a framework comprising four dimensions which are theoretically defined and supported by clinical neuropsychological evidence. Self-monitoring is defined as the ability to reflect on one’s own behaviour, with supporting evidence for deficits in this capacity noted in anosognosia syndrome. Self-feeling is defined as the capacity to feel all sensations related to one’s own body, with supporting evidence from deficiencies occurring in alexithymia, psychosomatic states and Cotard’s delusion. Identity refers to the capacity to recognize an object (...) as identical to oneself, based on autobiographic memory; pathological conditions related to this dimension include delusions of identity and the Zelig syndrome. Ownership is the capacity to perceive the status of ones’ own body, and is clinically altered in somatoparaphrenia. All four dimensions are related to specific brain networks. Keywords: Self-Monitoring; Self-Feeling; Identity; Ownership; Neurocognitive Dimensions Le dimensioni neurocognitive dell’autocoscienza Riassunto: L’autocoscienza viene inquadrata in base a quattro dimensioni, determinate in via teorica e supportate da evidenze cliniche di carattere neuropsicologico. L’automonitoraggio è definito quale capacità di riflettere sul proprio comportamento ed è sostenuto da evidenze che derivano da quella sindrome denominata anosognosia. Il sentire il proprio sé è la capacità di avvertire tutte le sensazioni del corpo proprio ; questa dimensione è supportata da evidenze derivanti da condizioni cliniche quali l’alessitimia, le affezioni psicosomatiche e il delirio di Cotard. L’identità si riferisce alla capacità di riconoscere come identico a se stesso un oggetto, fondata sulla memoria autobiografica; le condizioni patologiche legate a questa dimensione sono il delirio di identità e la sindrome di Zelig. Il possesso di sé è la capacità di percepire lo stato del proprio corpo, condizione che risulta alterata nella somatoparafrenia. Tutte queste quattro dimensioni sono collegate a specifici network cerebrali. Parole chiave: Automonitoraggio; Sentimento di sé; Identità; Padronanza di sé; Dimensioni neurocognitive. (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)

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 article aims at showing how far the technologies of audiovisual registration affect not only the ontology of images but also our sense of realism in politics and history. As argue Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, historical events have become “tele-events” after the birth of these technologies. Our handling with images has changed accordingly. As argues Pietro Montani, we no longer consider them as “copies” of real objects but rather as “occasions” for initiating processes of “validation” of history. Hannah Arendt’s (...) opposition between the ancient concept of history being based on praxis and the modern concept of history as “fabrication” (poiesis) of the humankind must be therefore reconsidered. History is rather the negotiation between these two attitudes (praxis and poiesis): cinema might be one of the exemplary sources of this negotiation, as epitomized by the documentary work in the audiovisual archives conducted by Esfir Shub (1927) and Harun Farocki (1992). Representation (Louis Martin) becomes thus a dynamical power of imagination dealing with historical and political reality; consequently, the “ideal spectator”, just as the “ideal reader” for novels (Umberto Eco), is charged with a new task of actualizing the sense of images with regard to their historical and political references. (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)

Children’s math self-concepts—their beliefs about themselves and math—are important for teachers, parents, and students, because they are linked to academic motivation, choices, and outcomes. There have been several attempts at improving math achievement based on the training of math skills. Here we took a complementary approach and conducted an intervention study to boost children’s math self-concepts. Our primary objective was to assess the feasibility of whether a novel multicomponent intervention—one that combines explicit and implicit approaches to help children form more (...) positive beliefs linking themselves and math—can be administered in an authentic school setting. The intervention was conducted in Spain, a country in which math achievement is below the average of other OECD countries. We tested third grade students (N= 180;Mage= 8.79 years; 96 girls), using treatment and comparison groups and pre- and posttest assessments. A novelty of this study is that we used both implicit and explicit measures of children’s math self-concepts. For a subsample of students, we also obtained an assessment of year-end math achievement. Math self-concepts in the treatment and comparison groups did not significantly differ at pretest. Students in the treatment group demonstrated a significant increase in math self-concepts from pretest to posttest; students in the comparison group did not. In the treatment group, implicit math self-concepts at posttest were associated with higher year-end math achievement, assessed approximately 3 months after the completion of the intervention. Taken together, the results suggest that math self-concepts are malleable and that social–cognitive interventions can boost children’s beliefs about themselves and math. Based on the favorable results of this feasibility study, it is appropriate to formally test this novel multicomponent approach for improving math self-concepts using randomized controlled trial (RCT) design. (shrink)

A survey is provided of the Soviet-Russian logician and historian Sof'ja A. Janovskaya (1896?1966). She wrote survey articles on logic, and also historical and philosophical essays on logic and on mathematics. A selected bibliography of her writings is appended.

The Philosophy of Umberto Eco. Edited by Beardsworth Sara C., Auxier Randall E..

El objeto de este artículo consiste en señalar las relaciones entre el método, la física y la metafísica cartesianas. Puede afirmarse que a partir de la idea básica de como debe ser la ciencia, Descartes concibe su física y fija el mecanicismo como la condición de toda explicación y de toda inteligibilidad; de estos se siguen las consecuencias metafísicas concernientes a la distinción del cuerpo y del alma y los temas finales de su unión que tanta claridad aportan sobre los (...) sentimientos y la moral. (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)

Male and female participants were instructed to produce an altered response pattern on an Implicit Association Test measure of gender identity by slowing performance in trials requiring the same response to stimuli designating own gender and self. Participants’ faking success was found to be predictable by a measure of slowing relative to unfaked performances. This combined task slowing (CTS) indicator was then applied in reanalyses of three experiments from other laboratories, two involving instructed faking and one involving possibly motivated faking. (...) Across all studies involving instructed faking, CTS correctly classified 75% of intentionally faking participants. Using the CTS index to adjust faked Implicit Association Test scores increased the correlation of CTS-adjusted measures with known group membership, relative to unadjusted (i.e., faked) measures. (shrink)