The modal articulation of human experience. A semiotic and psychodynamic construct-Starting from a broad examination of the use of modal categories in psychology, psychoanalyisis and semiotics to support human experience, the author presents and develops the notion of modal articulation in the processes of sensemaking (inherently to the sense of identity, intersubjective relations, and agency). Modal categories (i.e. must, can, will, to know, etc.) allow articulating, negotiating and modulating the experience of a subject distancing oneself from a purely denotative and referential level. The proposed model is declined through the presentation of three specific semiotic functions that modal articulation allows to realize: (1) the function of connection between affects, cognition and language; (2) the function of mediation between subjectivity and otherness; (3) the function of vectorization in temporally orienting the action. Taking into account these three functions and enhancing their flexibility, it is believed that modal articulation can vary within a continuum whose extremes are excess rigidity and pulverization.
In Aristotle's works, magnanimity is portrayed as a moral virtue with features that might seem contradictory today. On the one hand, this character trait is described as the crowning achievement and perfection of the other virtues, based on selfknowledge and awareness of one's own value. On the other, however, it appears to be linked to material well-being, honour, and a system of social and political inequality. This first philosophical discussion of megalopsychia has triggered different and even conflicting interpretations throughout the history of Western thought. Starting from these considerations, the article aims at retracing some of the most important stages of how magnanimity was viewed by various philosophers, from the post-Aristotelian period to most recent philosophical discussions. In addition to reconstructing the nature of magnanimity and its variegated interpretations throughout the ages, I ask the question whether magnanimity can still today be considered a moral virtue or an ethical model for living well and achieving happiness.
The aim of this paper is to challenge Michael Smith's influential "fetishism charge" against motivational externalism - the view that moral judgments motivate only in the presence of a distinct conative state. Smith argues that externalists must explain the reliable connection between moral judgment and moral motivation by attributing to the morally good agent a de dicto desire to "do whatever is right", a desire he regards as morally defective or fetishistic. On the other hand, the virtuous agent, according to Smith, responds directly to the right-making features of actions, such as charity, kindness, or fairness. If the externalist is indeed committed to portraying good agents as moved primarily by the abstract status of rightness, then externalism yields an implausible moral psychology and should be rejected. I argue that Smith's central assumption - what I call the fetishist platitude, the claim that de dicto motivation is intuitively vicious - is far less secure than he suggests. After outlining the internalism/externalism debate and surveying responses to Smith from Svavarsdottir, Olson, Dreier, Miller, and others, I offer two novel objections. First, I show that in non-moral normative domains (such as prudence or health), de dicto motivation is not normally regarded as fetishistic; thus, Smith's purported conceptual truth about virtue cannot be taken for granted. Second, I present cases in which a de dicto moral motivation is precisely what enables an agent to act rightly in the face of conflicting non-moral reasons. In such scenarios, it is counterintuitive to describe the agent as vicious or morally flawed. Taken together, these objections weaken Smith's claim that de dicto motivation is inherently defective and therefore challenge his reductio of externalism. If de dicto motivation can be permissible - or even admirable - then externalists can avoid the fetishism charge without losing a plausible account of moral psychology.
In this paper a solution to the problem of freedom of the will is proposed which treats it not as antithetical to determinism, but as admitting of degrees that run parallel to the degrees of control we exercise over thought, movement and action. We begin by examining the viability of Benjamin Libet’s solution to the problem of the freedom of the will, as consisting in vetoing-and-halting an action already originated in the brain. We are arguing that this solution is possible if refraining acts (intentional “not-doing”) can be considered not only as different kinds of actions from performing acts (“doing”), but also as peculiar actions that have causal consequences without having a result component. Such a commitment to an odd model of action makes plausible Daniel Wegner’s interpretation of Libet’s experimental findings as supporting the idea that freedom of the will is to be explained away as an illusion. We argue instead that voluntary actions are ones in which variable to maximal controls are exercised, and this is a learned set of procedures enhanced by experience towards better control and more freedom.
center dot Abstract According to Luciano Floridi, philosophy must function as conceptual design in order to effectively fulfil its role in the context of the revolution brought about by the global spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs). To do so, it must be grounded in two key assumptions: the ontological significance of the diffusion of ICTs, and the importance of addressing the governance challenges that arise from this phenomenon. In this article, I argue that the French philosopher Henri Bergson's reflections on the relationship between nature and technology remain highly relevant for addressing these issues and can offer a valuable theoretical framework through which to engage with them. Indeed, Bergson situates the production of artificial tools within the broader evolution of natural life, rejecting any dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, and emphasizing the ontological relevance of technology. In this way, his philosophical proposal contributes to a way of thinking in terms of ontoethics, a conceptual category that proves useful for grounding an ethics of artificial intelligence.
It is quite possible that early human attempts at communication were primarily aimed at telling stories to others. Nonetheless, such an ability, at least in its full-fledged, modern form, seems unlikely without certain key cognitive innovations. In particular, it requires, enhanced cross-modal thinking, which allows for the creation of concepts, characters, and scenarios (and ultimately, plots) that are only indirectly related to the real world. Additionally, storytelling flourishes in (and depends on) a rich social environment, which might have been absent in previous, more aggressive hominin species. Overall, it may be more accurate to suggest that the ability for storytelling evolved gradually, as a result of a complex feedback loop between our increasingly sophisticated cognition and our increasingly prosocial behaviour.
center dot Abstract Within the framework of cognitive science, a naturalised model of language must pass the test of both cognitive and evolutionary plausibility. Underlying this paper is the idea that the theme of the origins of language is the litmus test through which the cognitive and evolutionary plausibility of a model of language, and thus its possibility of naturalisation, can be assessed. Specifically, in this paper, two models of language are examined. The first, focused on the propositional character of thought, is the basis of a conception of language founded on the primacy of the sentence and on the computational architectures used to process the sentence; the second, centred on the narrative foundation of thought, is the basis of a conception of language that sees in discourse and in the computational systems that process the plot and character of stories the constitutive trait of human communication. From the point of view of the topic of origins, the result of the analysis of the first model is negative, since the reference to sentence syntax does not turn out to be the feature of language from which to describe the starting point of human communication. The narrative model of the origin of language, on the contrary, offers a perspective of origins in line with both cognitive and evolutionary plausibility. The latter model, therefore, appears to be congruent with a naturalised perspective of human language.
This Commentary integrates lessons from the Mirror System Hypothesis of the origin of language and Ferretti's emphasis on the centrality of narrative as both precursor and expression of language. It qualifies the notion that "stories came first" by showing that stories expressible in pre-language pantomime are very much simpler than narratives of the scope we can share in modern languages. We thus insist on the term "protonarrative" and explore how the path from pantomime via protolanguages to modern languages formed an expanding spiral with the path from protonarratives to the richness of narratives as we know them today. Additionally, pre-language pantomime served for social coordination and simple forms of teaching. In short, protonarrative was one of the precursors of modern languages but a crucial one, while present-day narratives provide powerful expressions of the capabilities of modern human languages.
I critically engage with Francesco Ferretti's hypothesis that narratives are the primary evolutionary driver of human language. Ferretti argues that language evolved from gestural storytelling used for persuasion, positioning narrative as prior to and independent of propositional structures. While I acknowledge the merits of this approach and its contrast with the Chomskyan model, I question the theoretical clarity of the concept of "narrative" and its supposed universal persuasive function. I also doubt that pantomimed stories could have played such a central evolutionary role. Instead, I propose a "mosaic" view of language evolution, in which multiple interacting factors-cognitive, social, and biological-contributed gradually and non-linearly to the emergence of language. I conclude that Ferretti's narrative-centred model, though suggestive, is overly reductive and underestimates the complex, multifactorial nature of language development.
In recent decades, the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and the Epistemology of Emotions has grown in three main ways: through the development of these concepts, their critical evaluation, and the adoption of their findings and perspectives. This paper focuses on the relationship between different theoretical perspectives on emotions and their potential to address a key issue in Artificial Intelligence: the frame problem, which questions the simulation of cognitive processes involved in determining relevance. In addition to the relatively scarce research focussed specifically on this relationship, most existing studies lack clarity in defining which aspect of the frame problem they are addressing. The aim of this paper is to examine the limits and scope of the epistemic function of salience/relevance of emotions in tackling the two main challenges of the efficient aspect of the frame problem. We argue that some epistemological positions are effective in overcoming both the difficulty of regression and the challenges of the vastness of information, while others address only the latter. These divergences show that advances in the epistemological understanding of emotions can have a direct practical application in the advancement of Artificial Intelligence, since they collaborate, through different epistemic degrees, to simulating cognitive processes involved in determining relevance.
Conflict and insufficiency starting with Ehrenberg. Ethics in the face of today's "Pathologies of freedom"- In this paper, we address the reflection of the French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg on the theme of subjectivity and depression in the transition from modernity to postmodernity. Our goal is to extrapolate a broader consideration on the changing conception of the individual and their current difficulties in shaping a new selfhood-one that begins with newly acquired freedom and results in its own pathologies, precisely the "pathologies of freedom". Our analysis begins with Ehrenberg's book The weariness of the self: Diagnosing the history of depression in the contemporary age, where depression plays the role of a revolving platform that allows the author to address the progressive modifications of subjectivity in the course of recent history, at least in advanced Western societies. In particular, we revisit the distinction between the Janetian paradigm of insufficiency and the Freudian one of conflict, highlighting how the former proves to be more representative of the individual in postmodernity, compared to the latter, which characterized modernity. Once this shift is defined-in the subject-illness relationship, in the idea of healing, and in the relationship with society-we come to see depression as that chronic identity illness typical of postmodernity, corresponding to the pathological counterpart of addiction. In line with this dual characterization of the postmodern subject, never enough in themself and compulsively tied to something else, we will finally address the issue of a new conception of ethics. This new ethics must respond to the individual need to base their identity not on duties and constraints, but on initiative and freedom, without, however, becoming entirely detached from the social (and natural) realm, at the risk of losing one's place in the world and further falling into the depression-addiction binomial.
This contribution discusses Ferretti's view of language origins, based on a gradualist model of language evolution and on the cognitive prominence of a narrative representation of reality, enhanced by the role played by pantomimes in early stages of hominin evolution. It is argued that Ferretti's model correctly strives to incorporate key properties of language, such as sentence structure and propositional thought, within a broader model of human cognition, without relegating word order and other parameters of linguistic diversity into the systems by means of which language is "externalised" in communication. At the same time, it is also argued that the narrative view of language origins does not adequately account for two key properties of human syntax, that is, the presence of a (fixed) array of functional words, and the hierarchical reanalysis of language strings in graph-theoretic (or set-theoretic) terms. Moreover, a sentence-based analysis of language should not be equated with a bias towards propositional thought, since current models of both syntax and semantics are by no means constrained by sentence boundaries. All in all, it is fair to conclude that neither Chomskian theories of language evolution (including the view of language as a spandrel or as exaptation) nor narrative theories based on the role of gestural expression and communication are entirely satisfactory as solution to the Hard Problem of language origins.
In his piece Stories come first, Francesco Ferretti offers a bold and fresh philosophical perspective on language and its evolutionary origins, arguing that human thought is discursive (narrative, specifically) rather than propositional, and that "thinking in stories" is therefore phylogenetically prior to thinking in sentences or similar linguistic structures. In our article, we comment on the key points of Ferretti's account. We agree with the main claims regarding the important cognitive role that stories have played in the evolution of human cognition, and continue to play even today. We also offer three caveats, or points we believe warrant further discussion. Firstly, we emphasize that today's stories are necessarily different from the "prototypes" shared in our ancestral past. Secondly, we suggest that Ferretti's account of the evolution of the persuasiveness of stories should be strengthened by a more thorough analysis of the adaptiveness of listening to (and being persuaded by) stories. A third, minor point relates to the usefulness of a clear distinction between pantomime and gesture in the context of language origin theories.
The society of anxiety. A phenomenological inquiry on human relations, sense, and technology-The present paper presents a critical reinterpretation of Vincenzo Costa's La society dell'ansia in the light of both classical and contemporary phenomenology. The analysis focuses on the interplay between the erosion of affective bonds, the loss of symbolic orientation, and the increasing technicization of everyday life, with particular attention to the intersubjective dynamics shaped by digital technologies. After reconstructing Costa's theoretical framework, the essay addresses several phenomenological and psychological objections to his reading of anxiety as a structural feature of the present age. In conclusion, it proposes a phenomenology of anxiety as a form of resistance, aiming to understand the changing modalities of human dwelling in an increasingly artificial, disembodied, and algorithmically governed world.
Artificial Intelligence and world models. Epistemic perspectives between heuristics and semantics-The emergence of neural architectures has revolutionised the concept of artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional GOFAI models, whose mark was a syntactic and rigid information processing, artificial neural networks can exhibit extraordinary dynamism and flexibility in relation to environmental inputs. This is due to their sub-symbolic nature and connectionist architecture, which allows the model to remodulate the configuration of its parameters and autonomously learn the best response to contextual stimuli. This revolution in the field of intelligent machines brings with it the epistemological question of whether they understand the semantic constraints that characterise natural language. To offer an answer, the issue of generalisation will be discussed, examining three machine learning models: open-set networks, hybrid ontology-based models and multi-class recognition architectures in which abstract representations are emergent. Are these systems capable of processing models of the world? And does such a model imply a form of semantic understanding? To answer these questions, a tight dialectic between artificial and cognitive agents, between emergent representations in neural models and concepts of embodied cognition will be proposed.
This article responds to the comments and criticisms raised in relation to my previous work “Stories come first. The origins of human communication from a naturalized perspective of language”. The feedback can be broadly divided into “internal” criticisms, offered by scholars who share many of the underlying assumptions of my model, and “external” criticisms, advanced by those who reject its premises. Internal critiques largely emphasize that while narrative plays a crucial role in language, it should not overshadow other constitutive aspects of linguistic competence. I acknowledge the view of language as a mosaic of properties but argue that such a perspective risks conflating the study of language evolution with that of its origins. My focus remains on identifying the triggering factor of language, which I contend is the narrative function, rooted in persuasion rather than information. External critiques instead reject narrative as the origin of language, privileging sentence-level syntax as the defining feature of linguistic capacity. Against this view, I maintain that discourse structures logically and temporally precede sentence syntax, with grammar emerging secondarily to strengthen narrative efficacy. By distinguishing between internal and external criticisms, this article clarifies the theoretical implications of my model and situates narration as the most plausible starting point for understanding the origins of human communication.
Immediately after introducing transformational grammar in Syntactic structures, Noam Chomsky began to employ the formal grammar he developed to investigate language from an internalist and nativist perspective. In doing so, he proposed that linguistics could be integrated into the core natural sciences. This ambitious project was met with immediate criticism, particularly targeting the abstract nature of the entities posited by linguistic theory. Chomsky responded by articulating the methodological principles underlying his work, known as methodological naturalism. According to Chomsky, in order for linguistics to qualify as a core natural science, it must adopt the same methodological framework as the hard sciences (e.g., biology, physics). In principle, Chomsky's argument is persuasive; however, when applied to assess the validity of linguistic theory, it reveals a certain degree of arbitrariness. This issue is explored in 2. In 3, I address a deeper problem in Chomsky's approach. After summarizing Lakatos's concept of a research program, I turn to the theory of Universal Grammar (UG) and the Minimalist Program (MP) to argue that both lack the scientific status attributed to them by Chomsky and others. Specifically, following Lakatos, I propose replacing the notion of a UG theory with that of a UG research program. I argue that both the UG program and the MP should be considered unscientific, as the cores (in Lakatos's sense) of these programs consist of unfalsifiable hypotheses, which prevent us from determining whether the programs are progressive or degenerative.
Il presente contributo offre una rilettura critica del saggio La società dell’ansia di Vincenzo Costa, alla luce della tradizione fenomenologica classica e contemporanea. L’analisi si sofferma sul nesso tra l’erosione dei legami affettivi, la perdita di orientamento simbolico e la crescente tecnicizzazione della vita quotidiana, con particolare attenzione alle dinamiche intersoggettive mediate dalle tecnologie digitali. Dopo aver ricostruito l’impianto teorico offerto dall’autore, il saggio discute una serie di obiezioni fenomenologiche e psicologiche alla sua interpretazione riguardo all’ansia intesa come cifra strutturale del presente. In conclusione, si propone una fenomenologia dell’ansia intesa anche come fenomenologia della resistenza, ossia capace di interrogare le nuove forme dell’abitare umano in un mondo sempre più precario, disincarnato e algoritmico.
L’avvento delle architetture neurali ha rivoluzionato il concetto di intelligenza artificiale. A differenza dei tradizionali modelli GOFAI, la cui cifra era un trattamento dell’informazione su algoritmi formali ed espliciti, le reti neurali artificiali sono in grado di esibire una straordinaria dinamicità e flessibilità in relazione agli input ambientali. Ciò in virtù della loro natura sub-simbolica e dell’architettura connessionista, che permette al modello di rimodulare la configurazione dei propri parametri e di apprendere automaticamente la migliore risposta agli stimoli contestuali. Questa rivoluzione nel campo delle macchine intelligenti porta con sé l’interrogativo epistemologico circa la loro eventuale comprensione dei vincoli semantici che caratterizzano il linguaggio naturale. Per cercare di offrirne una risposta, verrà affrontato il tema della generalizzazione, prendendo in esame tre modelli di apprendimento automatico: le reti open-set, i modelli ibridi ontology-based e le architetture per riconoscimento multi-classe nelle quali sono emergenti rappresentazioni astratte. Questi sistemi sono in grado di elaborare un modello del mondo? E tale modello implica una forma di comprensione semantica? Per rispondere a questi interrogativi, verrà proposta una serrata dialettica tra agenti artificiali e cognitivi, tra rappresentazioni emergenti in modelli neurali e concetti della cognizione embodied.
