Salvador Bucca fue Profesor Titular de Lingüística de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, entre 1955 y 1983. Se formó en Italia y Estados Unidos. En calidad de docente y director del Centro de Estudios Lingüísticos, visitó en reiteradas ocasiones el nordeste argentino, para estudiar las lenguas de las comunidades locales. En este artículo nos enfocamos en sus viajes a la provincia de Formosa para realizar trabajo de campo en 1961, 1964 y 1968. En este sentido, (...) señalamos la importancia de su figura en torno a la gestación de los primeros estudios sobre las lenguas indígenas chaqueñas. Este trabajo forma parte de un estudio más amplio de los documentos donados por la familia del Dr. Salvador Bucca al Archivo del Laboratorio de Documentación e Investigación en Lingüística y Antropología (DILA), tarea iniciada en 2019 por parte de un equipo de la Universidad Nacional de Formosa con la transcripción de los cuadernos de campo del Dr. Bucca. La fuente que presentamos corresponde a un extracto del Cuaderno N° 4, donde el lingüista describe su viaje a través de la predominantemente rural provincia de Formosa en el invierno de 1964. En este sentido, se destacan los problemas de movilidad y hospedaje, y la reticencia de algunos funcionarios y miembros de las fuerzas de seguridad a colaborar con la investigación. La contracara está representada por los misioneros de los distintos cultos cristianos que le facilitaron el contacto con sus informantes locales. (shrink)

My aim in this short essay is both to critically examine the nature and extent of Jonathan Matheson's disagreement-based skepticism in his book, The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement, and to consider three ways not discussed by him in which disagreement may pose, or contribute to posing, skeptical challenges. The essay will therefore be organized around four issues.

Scholarship on ancient Pyrrhonism has made tremendous advances over the past three decades, thanks especially to the careful reexamination of Sextus Empiricus’ extant corpus. Building on this momentum, the authors of the eight essays collected here examine some of the most vexed and intriguing exegetical and philosophical questions posed by Sextus’ presentation of this form of skepticism. The essays explore in a new light the skeptical interpretation of Plato, the differences between Pyrrhonism and Cyrenaicism, the Pyrrhonist’s stance on ordinary life, (...) religion, language, and ethics, Sextus’ discussion of our access to our own mental states, and the relationship between Pyrrhonism and epistemic internalism and externalism. These new essays represent a substantial contribution to the advancement of scholarship on Pyrrhonian skepticism. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider an evolutionary debunking argument (EDA) that purports to undermine the epistemic justification of the belief in the reliability of our belief-forming processes, and an evolutionary vindicating argument (EVA) that seeks to establish that such a belief is epistemically justified. Whereas the EDA in question seems to fall prey to crippling self-defeat, the EVA under consideration seems to fall prey to vicious circularity. My interest in those arguments and the problems they face lies in what they (...) might tell us about the possibly aporetic nature of reason. For, if we take the EDA and the EVA in question to consist of true or plausible premises and valid inferences at which we arrive through a meticulous use of reason, then their falling victim to either crippling self-defeat or vicious circularity might be regarded as a sign that, when we push rational reflection on the reliability, or lack thereof, of our belief-forming capacities to the limit, we end up in a situation of aporia from which there seems to be no escape. (shrink)

En el antiguo comentario a la lógica aristotélica, el término griego συζυγία (syzygía) se refiere a la combinación de dos proposiciones que tienen uno o ambos términos relacionados. El término resulta ser el género desde donde se especifican las tres reglas deductivas de la lógica aristotélica: conversión (si ambos términos son comunes, pero cambian su orden), oposición (si ambos términos son comunes, pero no cambian su posición) y silogismo (si un solo término es común). Tal enseñanza no es explícita en (...) Aristóteles, pero ya es conocida por su principal comentarista Alejandro de Afrodisias junto con otros autores de su tiempo y posteriores. Este trabajo muestra que Alejandro introduce este término junto con un modelo dialéctico que identifica al silogismo con la prueba que resuelve un problema, que a su vez se define como aquello que no tiene una prueba. Este énfasis cambia la perspectiva del comentario hacia la tarea de encontrar las combinaciones de premisas que resuelven un problema. El artículo sugiere que este modelo dialéctico se deriva de la noción de combinación y proviene de autores anteriores, ya que el uso del término está atestiguado en Cicerón e incluso el propio Aristóteles lo usa en los Tópicos. El artículo sugiere la importancia de Teofrasto en el desarrollo de este término. (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)

In this introductory chapter, I not only present the essays that make up this volume but also I offer an extensive critical overview of moral skepticism with the hope that it will turn out to be useful particularly to the uninitiated reader. I first provide a taxonomy of varieties of moral skepticism, then discuss the main arguments advanced in their favor, and finally summarize the ten essays here collected, which deal with one or more of those skeptical stances and arguments.

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)

It has been claimed that a key difference between ancient and contemporary skepticism is that, unlike the ancient skeptics, contemporary skeptics consider ordinary beliefs to be insulated from skeptical doubt. In the case of metaethics, this issue is related to the following question: what attitude towards ordinary moral thought and discourse should one adopt if one is a moral skeptic? Whereas moral abolitionists claim that one should do away with ordinary moral thought and discourse altogether, moral fictionalists maintain that, given (...) that morality produces practical benefits, one should continue to make moral utterances and have moral thoughts, while at the same time refraining from asserting such utterances and believing such thoughts. Focusing particularly on Mackie’s skeptical stance, the present essay considers whether the view that first-order moral beliefs are unaffected by moral skepticism is defensible, whether moral fictionalism is compatible with moral insulation, and whether contemporary moral skeptics are in general committed to there being insulation between first- and second-order levels. (shrink)

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)

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)

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.

_Riassunto_: Diversi studi hanno posto in risalto le affinità tra la filosofia critica di Wittgenstein e la psicoanalisi di Lacan. Questo lavoro passa in rassegna alcuni aspetti comuni ai due autori, delineando una prospettiva d’incontro teoretica e concettuale. Un punto d’incontro tra questi due pensatori comprende la fondamentale attenzione per il linguaggio e un atteggiamento critico verso la concettualizzazione classica della soggettività. Questo saggio tenta di sviluppare teoreticamente questi punti di contatto introducendo il concetto di soggettività senza interiorità, un soggetto (...) senza psicologia. In effetti, l’affidamento di Wittgenstein sulla grammatica e il ricorso di Lacan al significante portano allo stesso risultato: considerare il linguaggio in sé come matrice della soggettività. Da questa prospettiva la fondazione della soggettività non risiede più in una certa supposta sostanza metafisica bensì in una esteriorità radicale, nei giochi linguistici. _Parole chiave_: Wittgenstein; Lacan; Inconscio; Linguaggio; Grammatica _A subjectivity without interiority: Wittgenstein with Lacan_ _Abstract_: Several studies highlight affinities between Wittgenstein’s critical philosophy and Lacan’s psychoanalysis. The following article revisits certain points of both authors, proposing a theoretical and conceptual encounter between them. Indeed, the common ground between these two thinkers includes a fundamental focus on language and a critical approach to classic conceptualisation of subjectivity. This contribution attempts to theoretically developing this encounter by introducing the concept of subjectivity without interiority, a subject without psychology. In fact, Wittgenstein’s reliance on grammar and Lacan’s use of the signifier yield the same result: pointing to language itself as the matrix of subjectivity. From this perspective, the foundation of subjectivity no longer resides in some supposed metaphysical substance, but rather in a radical exteriority, in linguistic games. _Keywords_: Wittgenstein; Lacan; Unconscious; Language; Grammar. (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)

: 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)

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)

Particularly during the past twenty five years, there has been an outstanding advance in the study of ancient skepticism, both in its Pyrrhonian and Academic varieties. This is reflected in the publication of a considerable number of works about the nature and consistency of those philosophical outlooks, as well as about their influence on the development of early modern philosophy and their relevance to present day epistemological discussions. Most of these works concern Pyrrhonian skepticism. This predominance of interest in Pyrrhonism (...) over Academic skepticism also manifests itself in the fact that, whereas in recent years several new translations of Sextus Empiricus' writings (our principal source for Pyrrhonism) have appeared in the most important European languages, the same has not happened with Cicero's Academica, which is our main source of information about the philosophy of the skeptical Academy. Even though Sextus'. (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)