Lots of Websites offer the possibility to donate human beings. Another problem of ethics of communications.

The book sets out to analyse the notion of a priori justification and of a priori knowledge.

Lots of Websites offer the possibility to donate human beings. Another problem of ethics of communications.

All humans share a universal, evolutionarily ancient approximate number system (ANS) that estimates and combines the numbers of objects in sets with ratio-limited precision. Interindividual variability in the acuity of the ANS correlates with mathematical achievement, but the causes of this correlation have never been established. We acquired psychophysical measures of ANS acuity in child and adult members of an indigene group in the Amazon, the Mundurucú, who have a very restricted numerical lexicon and highly variable access to mathematics education. (...) By comparing Mundurucú subjects with and without access to schooling, we found that education significantly enhances the acuity with which sets of concrete objects are estimated. These results indicate that culture and education have an important effect on basic number perception. We hypothesize that symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical thinking mutually enhance one another over the course of mathematics instruction. (shrink)

In a recent article M. Colyvan has argued that Quinean forms of scientific realism are faced with an unexpected upshot. Realism concerning a given class of entities, along with this route to realism, can be vindicated by running an indispensability argument to the effect that the entities postulated by our best scientific theories exist. Colyvan observes that among our best scientific theories some are inconsistent, and so concludes that, by resorting to the very same argument, we may incur a commitment (...) to inconsistent entities. Colyvan's argument could be interpreted, and in part is presented, as a reductio of Quinean scientific realism; yet, Colyvan in the end manifests some willingness to bite the bullet, and provides some reasons why we shouldn't feel too uncomfortable with those entities. In this paper we wish to indicate a way out to the scientific realist, by arguing that no indispensability argument of the kind suggested by Colyvan is actually available. To begin with, in order to run such an indispensability argument we should be justified in believing that an inconsistent theory is true; yet, in so far as the logic we accept is a consistent one it is arguable that our epistemic predicament could not be possibly one in which we are justified in so believing. Moreover, also if our logic admitted true contradictions, as Dialetheism does, it is arguable that Colyvan's indispensability argument could not rest on a true premise. As we will try to show, dialetheists do not admit true contradictions for cheap: they do so just as a way out of paradox, namely whenever we are second-level ignorant as to the metaphysical possibility of evidence breaking the parity among two or more inconsistent claims; Colyvan's examples, however, are not of this nature. So, even under the generous assumption that Dialetheism is true, we will conclude that Colyvan's argument doesn't achieve its surprising conclusion. (shrink)

Many stored beliefs, like beliefs in one’s personal data or beliefs in one’s area of expertise, intuitively amount to knowledge, and so are justified. This uncontroversial datum arguably tells against evidentialism, the position according to which a belief is justified if it fits the available evidence: stored beliefs are normally not sustained by one’s available evidence. Conee and Feldman have tried to meet this potential objection by relaxing the notion of available evidence. According to their proposal, stored beliefs are dispositionally (...) justified, because they are justified by the evidence one has the disposition to retrieve; such evidence, as a consequence, is to be characterize as available, though in a derivative sense. Goldman has criticized this proposal, by offering a counterexample to the claim that a disposition to generate a piece of evidence may qualify as a justifier. In this paper I critically examine two possible replies to Goldman’s example stemming from Conee and Feldman, and finally propose my own, based on a distinction, inspired by Audi, between dispositional evidence and the disposition to have evidence. Though this proposal differs from Conee and Feldman’s one, I will conclude that it fits pretty well their intuitions. (shrink)

This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other definitions on the market. The account locates the fakeness of an alleged news report in two main aspects related to its production, namely that its creators do not think to have sufficient evidence in favor of what they divulge and they fail to display the appropriate attitude towards the truth of the information they share. A key feature of our analysis is that it does (...) not require that fake news must be circulated with the intention to deceive one’s audience. In this way, our account overcomes a potential limitation of the current philosophical discussion about fake news, which appears to individuate the main problem with this phenomenon in the fact that fake news consumers are misled and misinformed. In contrast, the proposed analysis shows that an additional (and perhaps equally fundamental) problem uncovered by the spread of fake news is a widespread pathological relationship with information, one on which we consume information not to satisfy our interest in the truth but to strengthen our social identities and quench our hunger for social recognition. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on transmission and failure of transmission of warrant. We identify three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for transmission of warrant, and we show that their satisfaction grounds a number of interesting epistemic phenomena that have not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. We then scrutinise Wright’s analysis of transmission failure and improve on extant readings of it. Nonetheless, we present a Bayesian counterexample that shows that Wright’s analysis is partially incoherent with our analysis of (...) warrant transmission and prima facie defective. We conclude exploring three alternative lines of reply: developing a more satisfactory account of transmission failure, which we outline; dismissing the Bayesian counterexample by rejecting some of its assumptions; reinterpreting Wright’s analysis to make it immune to the counterexample. (shrink)

One important issue in moral psychology concerns the proper characterisation of the folk understanding of the relationship between harmful transgressions and moral transgressions. Psychologist Elliot Turiel and associates have claimed with a broad range of supporting evidence that harmful transgressions are understood as transgressions that are authority independent and general in scope which, according to them, characterises these transgressions as moral transgressions. Recently many researchers questioned the position advocated by the Turiel tradition with some new evidence. We entered this debate (...) proposing an original, deflationary view in which perceptions of basic-rights violation and injustice are fundamental for the folk understanding of harmful transgressions as moral transgressions in Turiel's sense. In this article we elaborate and refine our deflationary view, while reviewing the debate, addressing various criticisms raised against our perspective, showing how our perspective explains the existent evidence, and suggesting new lines of inquiry. (shrink)

The subject of this work is Maine de Biran’s theory about nature, origin and function of language, and about signs in general. Such theoretical reflection is a not very well explored aspect of Biran’s thought, whereas it is extremely important because of its connections with Biran’s doctrine of the active nature of human being. In the present article we have tried to make a reconstruction of this reflection that shows in deep the connections between Biran’s thought and the doctrines of (...) his main interlocutors: Condillac, Maupertuis, Rousseau, Destutt de Tracy. (shrink)

Spacetime measurements and gravitational experiments are made by using objects, matter fields or particles and their mutual relationships. As a consequence, any operationally meaningful assertion about spacetime is in fact an assertion about the degrees of freedom of the matter (i.e. non gravitational) fields; those, say for definiteness, of the Standard Model of particle physics. As for any quantum theory, the dynamics of the matter fields can be described in terms of a unitary evolution of a state vector in a (...) Hilbert space. By writing the Hilbert space as a generic tensor product of “subsystems” we analyse the evolution of a state vector on an information theoretical basis and attempt to recover the usual spacetime relations from the information exchanges between these subsystems. We consider generic interacting second quantized models with a finite number of fermionic degrees of freedom and characterize on physical grounds the tensor product structure associated with the class of “localized systems” and therefore with “position”. We find that in the case of free theories no spacetime relation is operationally definable. On the contrary, by applying the same procedure to the simple interacting model of a one-dimensional Heisenberg spin chain we recover the tensor product structure usually associated with “position”. Finally, we discuss the possible role of gravity in this framework. (shrink)

This paper focuses on extant approaches to counteract the consumption of fake news online. Proponents of structural approaches suggest that our proneness to consuming fake news could only be reduced by reshaping the architecture of online environments. Proponents of educational approaches suggest that fake news consumers should be empowered to improve their epistemic agency. In this paper, we address a question that is relevant to this debate: namely, whether fake news consumers commit mistakes for which they can be criticized and (...) that they could easily avoid by reforming their doxastic conduct. Proponents of structural approaches, like R. Rini and B. Millar, have defended in different ways a negative answer to this question. In this paper, we criticize their views and suggest that individual users could improve on their epistemic practice by widening their information diet. (shrink)

Evidentialism says that a subject S’s justification is entirely determined by S’s evidence. The plausibility of evidentialism depends on what kind of entities constitute a subject S’s evidence and what one takes the support relation to consist in. Conee and Feldman’s mainstream evidentialism incorporates a psychologist answer to and an explanationist answer to. ME naturally accommodates perceptual justification. However, it does not accommodate intuitive cases of inferential justification. In the second part of the paper, I consider and reject a reply (...) based on a refined explanationist theory of the support relation proposed by K McCain. (shrink)

According to David Lewis, the predicate ‘knows’ is context-sensitive in the sense that its truth conditions vary across conversational contexts, which stretch or compress the domain of error possibilities to be eliminated by the subject’s evidence. Our concern in this paper is to thematize, assess, and overcome within a neo-Lewisian contextualist project two important mismatches between our use of ‘know’ in ordinary life and the use of ‘know’ by ‘Lewisian’ ordinary speakers. The first mismatch is that Lewisian contextualism still overgenerates (...) the error possibilities which cannot be ignored in a given context, since it is oblivious to the distinction between ‘invented’ and ‘discovered’ possibilities. The second mismatch is a full-scale one: an adequate account of knowledge attribution is not exhausted by the subject’s negative capacity of pruning branches off the tree of counterpossibilities. We therefore introduce a new vector of value, which explains how ‘know’ comes in degrees: the satisfaction of ‘know better’ is made to depend on the capacity of imagining possibilities connected in a relevant way with the subject’s beliefs. (shrink)

According to the implicit commitment thesis, once accepting a mathematical formal system S, one is implicitly committed to additional resources not immediately available in S. Traditionally, this thesis has been understood as entailing that, in accepting S, we are bound to accept reflection principles for S and therefore claims in the language of S that are not derivable in S itself. It has recently become clear, however, that such reading of the implicit commitment thesis cannot be compatible with well-established positions (...) in the foundations of mathematics which consider a specific theory S as self-justifying and doubt the legitimacy of any principle that is not derivable in S: examples are Tait’s finitism and the role played in it by Primitive Recursive Arithmetic, Isaacson’s thesis and Peano Arithmetic, Nelson’s ultrafinitism and sub-exponential arithmetical systems. This casts doubts on the very adequacy of the implicit commitment thesis for arithmetical theories. In the paper we show that such foundational standpoints are nonetheless compatible with the implicit commitment thesis. We also show that they can even be compatible with genuine soundness extensions of S with suitable form of reflection. The analysis we propose is as follows: when accepting a system S, we are bound to accept a fixed set of principles extending S and expressing minimal soundness requirements for S, such as the fact that the non-logical axioms of S are true. We call this invariant component the semantic core of implicit commitment. But there is also a variable component of implicit commitment that crucially depends on the justification given for our acceptance of S in which, for instance, may or may not appear reflection principles for S. We claim that the proposed framework regulates in a natural and uniform way our acceptance of different arithmetical theories. (shrink)

In questo saggio l'Autore studia l'influenza che i pensatori scozzesi, da Hume a Smith, da Dugald Stewart a Reid, hanno esercitato sulla riflessione di Maine de Biran , figura chiave nella transizione dal sensismo condillachiano e dal fisiologismo idéologique verso l'eclettismo e lo spiritualismo francesi del Secondo Ottocento. Tale influenza, ben più corposa di quanto non sia finora parso agli studiosi del filosofo di Bergerac, agisce su Biran in specie sulle prime fasi del suo pensiero attraverso la mediazione, qui ampiamente (...) ricostruita, dei divulgatori in lingua francese delle opere degli illuministi scozzesi. (shrink)

According to a common presentation, Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics is the view according to which the entities with which mathematics is concerned, numbers, are abstract objects which exist independently of the mind. The latter feature, in particular, is alleged to secure the “realist” component of mathematical Platonism. Surprisingly enough, however, this characterization of Platonism is not normally paired with a philosophical explanation of the implicated notion of mind-dependent existence. Since there seems to be more than one metaphysically relevant (...) sense in which an entity may be said to depend on the mind, this is not a minor lack; for not every such sense seems to be relevant to the realism issue. This paper is aimed to fill this gap, and to provide the Platonist with a conceptual analysis of the realism-relevant sense in which her claim that numbers exist mind-independently should be understood. Result of this analysis will also be the conclusion that Non-Gödelian Platonism, a view recently proposed by J. Divers and A. Miller, should not be really regarded as a form of Platonism. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the existence of expert knowledge potentially poses a problem for Evidentialism, the view that a person’s justification supervenes on the evidence this person has. An expert is the kind of person from which knowledge (or justified belief) is expected in situations in which a non-expert would normally not attain knowledge (or justified belief); so, potentially, the epistemic status of their beliefs differ even if the evidence they possess seems to be the same. A viable (...) solution to this problem has to show that, appearances to the contrary, the expert and the non-expert, in the problematic cases, do not possess the same evidence. I propose a solution to this problem by defending a principle that specifies the conditions under which a piece of information should be counted as evidence. (shrink)

We argue that Cohen Kadosh & Walsh's (CK&W's) definitions of neural coding and of abstract representations are overly shallow, influenced by classical cognitive psychology views of modularity and seriality of information processing, and incompatible with the current knowledge on principles of neural coding. As they stand, the proposed dichotomies are not very useful heuristic tools to guide our research towards a better understanding of the neural computations underlying the processing of numerical quantity in the parietal cortex.

Anger and disgust may have distinct roles in sexual morality; here, we tested hypotheses regarding the distinct foci, appraisals, and motivations of anger and disgust within the context of sexual offenses. We conducted four experiments in which we manipulated whether mutual consent (Studies 1–3) or desire (Study 4) was present or absent within a counter-normative sexual act. We found that anger is focused on the injustice of non-consensual sexual acts, and the transgressor of the injustice (Studies 1 and 3). Furthermore, (...) the sexual nature of the act was not critical for the elicitation of anger—as anger also responded to unjust acts of violence (Study 3). By contrast, we hypothesised and found that disgust is focused on whether or not a person voluntarily engaged in, desired or consented to a counter-normative sexual act (Studies 2–4). Appraisals of abnormality and degradation were the primary appraisals of disgust, and the sexual nature of the act was a critical elicitor of disgust (Study 3). A final study ruled out victimisation as the mechanism of the effect of consent on disgust and indicated that the consenter's sexual desire was the mechanism (Study 4). Our results reveal that anger and disgust have differential roles in consent-related sexual offenses due to the distinct appraisals and foci of these emotions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1758 in London, Swedish natural philosopher and mystic theologian Emanuel Swedenborg published De Telluribus in Mundo nostro Solari, a treatise on the plurality of worlds and life on other planets. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these topics formed a heterogenous literary genre which encompassed theology, astronomy, philosophy and satire. In De Telluribus, Swedenborg made detailed claims of communication with extraterrestrial spirits in the afterlife, through which he sought to spread his theology to new audiences. The paper will (...) explore the role of De Telluribus in Swedenborg's career, explain its content and analyse its polarized reception. It will show that De Telluribus combined for the first time the literary codes of two popular genres during the period, namely those concerning the plurality of worlds and the dialogues of the dead. By doing so, the paper revises current scholarly understanding of Swedenborg by showcasing him as a versatile yet ill-fated recombiner of literary genres. More broadly, the paper will shed light upon previously unnoticed eighteenth-century literary interactions along with a wider overview on the reception of themes such as the plurality of worlds, mysticism and satire in Scandinavia and Germany. (shrink)

We propose a coevolutionary model of secrecy and stigmatization. According to this model, secrecy functions to conceal potential fitness costs detected in oneself or one’s genetic kin. In three studies, we found that the content of participants’ distressing secrets overlapped significantly with three domains of social information that were important for inclusive fitness and served as cues for discriminating between rewarding and unrewarding interaction partners: health, mating, and social-exchange behavior. These findings support the notion that secrecy functions primarily as a (...) defense against stigmatization by suppressing information about oneself or one’s kin that evolutionarily has been devalued in mating and social exchange. (shrink)

La mobilisation par les pouvoirs publics de fichiers contenant des informations à caractère personnel à des fins de sécurité s'ancre dans une histoire longue. Ces dernières décennies, on constate pourtant une évolution significative de ces fichiers du fait de l'extension de leur nombre, de leur ampleur et de leur champ d'application. Cet article s'intéresse à ce phénomène en analysant certains problèmes dont il est à l'origine. Tout d'abord, les dysfonctionnements que l'exploitation de ces fichiers occasionne. Ensuite, l'accroissement des pouvoirs de (...) police résultant de la transformation de la finalité de certains de ces fichiers. Enfin, le caractère insatisfaisant de la protection des individus face à l'utilisation qui est faite de leurs données personnelles.Public authorities have used records containing personal information for security reasons fora long time. However, there have been significant developments in recent decades, with records increasing in number, including more data and covering a broader scope. This paper analyses some of the problems caused by this process of expansion. Firstly, we review the administrative dysfunctions that the exploitation of such records may cause. Secondly, we look into the increase in police powers that result from changes in the aims pursued by some filing systems. Finally, we examine the issue of inadequate protection of individual privacy and liberties against the misuse of personal data. (shrink)

Cet article soulève la question de savoir si le réaliste sémantique doit soutenir le principe selon lequel : (R) toute raison de penser qu’un énoncé est vrai est une raison de penser que l’énoncé est soutenable de manière garantie. A l’inverse de ce qui est proposé par W. Alston, qui dit que l’acceptation de (R) impose l’identification de l’extension du « vrai » et du « soutenable de manière garantie », l’article soutient que (R) peut être dérivé de l’hypothèse neutre (...) entre le réalisme et l’antiréalisme selon laquelle il faut accepter toute illustration par des exemples non-pathologiques du schéma d’équivalence ES (il est vrai que p ssi p) pour comprendre le prédicat « vrai ». En outre, l’article argumente en faveur de la thèse selon laquelle le réaliste a des motivations positives pour accepter (R), car ce principe est la prémisse d’un argument très général pour la thèse que la signification d’un énoncé ne peut pas être donnée par les conditions dans lesquelles l’énoncé est soutenable. (shrink)

Transmission of justification across inference is a valuable and indeed ubiquitous epistemic phenomenon in everyday life and science. It is thanks to the phenomenon of epistemic transmission that inferential reasoning is a means for substantiating predictions of future events and, more generally, for expanding the sphere of our justified beliefs or reinforcing the justification of beliefs that we already entertain. However, transmission of justification is not without exceptions. As a few epistemologists have come to realise, more or less trivial forms (...) of circularity can prevent justification from transmitting from p to q even if one has justification for p and one is aware of the inferential link from p to q. In interesting cases this happens because one can acquire justification for p only if one has independent justification for q. In this case the justification for q cannot depend on the justification for p and the inferential link from p to q, as genuine transmission would require. The phenomenon of transmission failure seems to shed light on philosophical puzzles, such as Moore's proof of a material world and McKinsey's paradox, and it plays a central role in various philosophical debates. For this reason it is being granted continued and increasing attention. (shrink)

Abductive reasoning involves finding the missing premise of an “unsaturated” deductive inference, thereby selecting a possible _explanans_ for a conclusion based on a set of previously accepted premises. In this paper, we explore abductive reasoning from a structural proof-theory perspective. We present a hybrid sequent calculus for classical propositional logic that uses sequents and antisequents to define a procedure for identifying the set of analytic hypotheses that a rational agent would be expected to select as _explanans_ when presented with an (...) abductive problem. Specifically, we show that this set may not include the deductively minimal hypothesis due to the presence of redundant information. We also establish that the set of all analytic hypotheses exhausts all possible solutions to the given problem. Finally, we propose a deductive criterion for differentiating between the best _explanans_ candidates and other hypotheses. (shrink)

We define an interpretation of modal languages with polyadic operators in modal languages that use monadic operators (diamonds) only. We also define a simulation operator which associates a logic $\Lambda^{sim}$ in the diamond language with each logic Λ in the language with polyadic modal connectives. We prove that this simulation operator transfers several useful properties of modal logics, such as finite/recursive axiomatizability, frame completeness and the finite model property, canonicity and first-order definability.

In this paper we argue that Michael Huemer’s phenomenal conservatism—the internalist view according to which our beliefs are prima facie justified if based on how things seems or appears to us to be—doesn’t fall afoul of Michael Bergmann’s dilemma for epistemological internalism. We start by showing that the thought experiment that Bergmann adduces to conclude that is vulnerable to his dilemma misses its target. After that, we distinguish between two ways in which a mental state can contribute to the justification (...) of a belief: the direct way and the indirect way. We identify a straightforward reason for claiming that the justification contributed indirectly is subject to Bergmann’s dilemma. Then we show that the same reason doesn’t extend to the claim that the justification contributed directly is subject to Bergmann’s dilemma. As is the view that seemings or appearances contribute justification directly, we infer that Bergmann’s contention that his dilemma applies to is unmotivated. In the final part, we suggest that our line of response to Bergmann can be used to shield other types of internalist justification from Bergmann’s objection. We also propose that seeming-grounded justification can be combined with justification of one of these types to form the basis of a promising version of internalist foundationalism. (shrink)

Structure entails arrangements and interrelations of parts that organize the whole (i.e., personality). It involves stability of traits over time. Extraversion varies along a continuum towards introversion. Multiple behavioral and biological variables in several systems vary and are regulated homeostatically within the normal range. If there is a fixed point for an individual, what inhibits variation in the biological parameter?

Philosophers of science today by and large reject the cataclysmic and irrational interpretation of the scientific enterprise claimed by Kuhn. Many computational models have been implemented to rationally study the conceptual change in science. In this recent tradition a key role is played by the concept of abduction as a mechanism by which new explanatory hypotheses are introduced. Nevertheless some problems in describing the most interesting abductive issues rise from the classical computational approach. It describes a cognitive process (and so (...) abduction) by the manipulation of internal symbolic representations of external world. This view assumes a discrete set of representations fixed in discrete time jumps, and cannot adequately account for the issue of anticipation and causation of a new hypothesis. An integration of the traditional computational view with some ideas developed inside the so-called dynamical approach can suggest some important insights. The concept of attractor is very significant. It permits a description of the abductive generation of new hypotheses in terms of a catastrophic rearrangement of the parameters responsible for the behavior of the system. (shrink)

In March 1808 at the Institut de France, the German physician Franz Joseph Gall, together with his assistant Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, unveiled his rather controversial doctr...

In this paper we will discuss the first order multiplicative intuitionistic fragment of linear logic, MILL1, and its applications to linguistics. We give an embedding translation from formulas in the Lambek Calculus to formulas in MILL1 and show this translation is sound and complete. We then exploit the extra power of the first order fragment to give an account of a number of linguistic phenomena which have no satisfactory treatment in the Lambek Calculus.

A subject S's belief that Q is well-grounded if and only if it is based on a reason of S that gives S propositional justification for Q. Depending on the nature of S's reason, the process whereby S bases her belief that Q on it can vary. If S's reason is non-doxastic––like an experience that Q or a testimony that Q––S will need to form the belief that Q as a spontaneous and immediate response to that reason. If S's reason (...) is doxastic––like a belief that P––S will need to infer her belief that Q from it. The distinction between these two ways in which S's beliefs can be based on S's reasons is widely presupposed in current epistemology but––we argue in this paper––is not exhaustive. We give examples of quite ordinary situations in which a well-grounded belief of S appears to be based on S's reasons in neither of the ways described above. To accommodate these recalcitrant cases, we introduce the notion of enthymematic inference and defend the thesis that S can base a belief that Q on doxastic reasons P1, P2, …, Pn via inferring enthymematically Q from P1, P2, …, Pn. (shrink)

This article presents a new semantics for classical propositional logic. We begin by maximally extending the space of sequent proofs so as to admit proofs for any logical formula; then, we extract the new semantics by focusing on the axiomatic structure of proofs. In particular, the interpretation of a formula is given by the ratio between the number of identity axioms out of the total number of axioms occurring in any of its proofs. The outcome is an informational refinement of (...) traditional Boolean semantics, obtained by breaking the symmetry between tautologies and contradictions. (shrink)

This paper is dedicated to extending and adapting to modal logic the approach of fractional semantics to classical logic. This is a multi-valued semantics governed by pure proof-theoretic considerations, whose truth-values are the rational numbers in the closed interval $[0,1]$. Focusing on the modal logic K, the proposed methodology relies on three key components: bilateral sequent calculus, invertibility of the logical rules, and stability (proof-invariance). We show that our semantic analysis of K affords an informational refinement with respect to the (...) standard Kripkean semantics (a new proof of Dugundji’s theorem is a case in point) and it raises the prospect of a proof-theoretic semantics for modal logic. (shrink)

Questo articolo prende in esame il fenomeno della proliferazione di fake news da un punto di vista filosofico—anzi, per meglio dire, prettamente epistemologico—con particolare attenzione a tre questioni fondamentali: cosa sono le fake news e come debbano essere definite; quali meccanismi ne favoriscono la proliferazione sui social media; chi debba essere ritenuto responsabile e degno di biasimo nel processo sotteso alla generazione, pubblicazione e diffusione di fake news. A partire dall'analisi dei principali lavori nella letteratura filosofica sul tema, ci proponiamo (...) di: offrire una definizione di fake news che eviti le obiezioni sollevate contro altre definizioni discusse dalla letteratura (§1); mettere in luce le principali cause della propagazione di fake news, con particolare riferimento ai bias cognitivi e alle strutture comunitarie in cui si organizzano gli utenti dei social media (§2); infine, presentare una analisi originale della responsabilità epistemica dei consumatori di fake news (§3). (shrink)

This article analyzes the characteristics and the purposes that the object “photography” has in Proust’s Rechercheand in Roland Barthes’ La chambre claire, by recognizing within these two texts a the double challenge represented by photography itself: that of being a transparent object and that of allowing the fruition of the extra-temporality. Barthes’ realism, however, prevents the critic from considering in its full extent the cognitive value of photography, as configured in Proust’s text, which is placed in watermark in relation to (...) the Barthes’ discourse. Proust’s complex position with respect to the object “photography”, which he criticizes, among many other reasons, for thesnap-shot platitude, includes even a possible parallelism with the involuntary memory, since the heuristic meaning of photography is connected to the cognitive and affective dinamycs which guide our processes of remembrance and creative relationship with our own past. (shrink)

Cells mitigate the detrimental consequences of DNA damage on genome stability by attempting high fidelity repair. Homologous recombination templates DNA double‐strand break (DSB) repair on an identical or near identical donor sequence in a process that can in principle access the entire genome. Other physiological processes, such as homolog recognition and pairing during meiosis, also harness the HR machinery using programmed DSBs to physically link homologs and generate crossovers. A consequence of the homology search process by a long nucleoprotein filament (...) is the formation of multi‐invasions (MI), a joint molecule in which the damaged ssDNA has invaded more than one donor molecule. Processing of MI joint molecules can compromise the integrity of both donor sites and lead to their rearrangement. Here, two mechanisms for the generation of rearrangements as a pathological consequence of MI processing are detailed and the potential relevance for non‐allelic homologous recombination discussed. Finally, it is proposed that MI‐induced crossover formation may be a feature of physiological recombination. (shrink)