Marco Mazzone

In the philosophical and cognitive literature, the word ‘intention’ has been used with a variety of meanings which occasionally have been explicitly distinguished. I claim that an important cause of this polysemy is the fact that intentions are complex entities, endowed with an internal structure, and that sometimes different theories in the field are erroneously presented as if they were in conflict with each other, while they in fact just focus on different aspects of the phenomenon. The debate between Gallese’s embodied simulation theory and Csibra and Gergely’s teleological stance hypothesis is discussed as a case in point, and some misunderstandings occurring in that debate are analyzed. The thesis that intentions are complex entities is argued for by shedding light on the following aspects of intentions: conscious control; perceptual (and not only motoric) representations of end-states; attributions of value to those representations; appreciation of the rational relationships between means and ends.

According to Grice's “Modified Occam's Razor”, in case of uncertainty between the implicature account and the polysemy account of word uses it is parsimonious to opt for the former. However, it is widely agreed that uses can be partially conventionalised by repetition. This fact, I argue, raises a serious problem for MOR as a methodological principle, but also for the substantial notion of implicature in lexical pragmatics. In order to overcome these problems, I propose to reinterpret implicatures in terms of implicature-like effects delivered by non-inferential processes.

Neural plasticity has been invoked as a powerful argument against nativism. However, there is a line of argument, which is well exemplified by Pinker and more recently by Laurence and Margolis The conceptual mind: new directions in the study of concepts, MIT, Cambridge, 2015) with respect to concept nativism, according to which even extreme cases of plasticity show important innate constraints, so that one should rather speak of “constrained plasticity”. According to this view, cortical areas are not really equipotential, they perform instead different kinds of computation, follow essentially different learning rules, or have a fixed internal structure acting as a filter for specific categories of inputs. We intend to analyze this argument, in the light of a review of current neuroscientific literature on plasticity. Our conclusion is that Laurence and Margolis are right in their appeal to innate constraints on connectivity—a thesis that is nowadays welcome to both nativists and non-nativists —but there is little support for their claim of further innate differentiation between and within cortical areas. As we will show, there is instead strong evidence that the cortex is characterized by the indefinite repetition of substantially identical computational units, giving rise in any of its portions to Hebbian, input-dependent plasticity. Although this is entirely compatible with the existence of innate constraints on the brain’s connectivity, the cerebral cortex architecture based on a multiplicity of maps correlating with one another has important computational consequences, a point that has been underestimated by traditional connectionist approaches.