Carlo Penco

The aim of this collection of papers is to present different philosophical perspectives on the mental, exploring questions about how to define, explain and understand the various kinds of mental acts and processes, and exhibiting, in particular, the contrast between naturalistic and non-naturalistic approaches. There is a long tradition in philosophy of clarifying concepts such as those of thinking, knowing and believing. The task of clarifying these concepts has become ever more important with the major developments that have taken place over the last century in the human and cognitive sciences - most notably, psychology, sociology, linguistics, neurophysiology, AI, and cognitive science itself. In all these sciences, there is a need to delineate the domain of the mental and to elucidate the key concepts and underlying assumptions. This need is widely recognized, but approaches and answers vary significantly. Some stress the representational features involved in most of our mental processes, others the inferential dimension; some stress the necessity of using empirical data, others the need to refine ideas before pursuing and drawing on empirical research. The papers collected in this volume are grouped into four parts, on language and thought, on knowledge, belief and action, on intentionality, and on naturalism. The volume will be welcomed by all those engaged and interested in debates about the mental in philosophy and the human and cognitive sciences. Table of Contents PART I: LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT Andrew Woodfield, Public Words Considered as Vehicles of Thinking Andrea Bianchi, Speaking and Thinking (Or: A More Kaplanian Way to a Unified Account of Language and Thought) Stefano Predelli, The Strange Case of the Missing Constituent PART II: KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF AND ACTION Pascal Engel, Taking Seriously Knowledge as a Mental State Carlo Gabbani, Epistemology and the Eliminative Stance Jennifer Hornsby, Knowledge, Belief and Reasons for Acting Wolfgang Kunne, Some Varieties of Deception PART III: INTENTIONALITY Sandro Nannini, Intentionality Naturalised Elisabetta Sacchi, Thought and Thinking: the Ontological Ground of Intentionality Elisabeth Pacherie, Is Collective Intentionality Really Primitive? PART IV: NATURALISM Marcello Frixione, Do Concepts exist? A Naturalistic Point of View Tim Crane, Cosmic Hermeneutics vs. Emergence: the Challenge of the Explanatory Gap Achim Stephan and Robert C. Richardson, What Physicalism Should Provide Us With Mario De Caro, The Claims of Naturalism

In this paper we give some theoretical links between the wittgensteinian strategy of language-games and the strategy followed by students in Artificial Intelligence in the seventies. We refer also to the interpretation given by Dummett and Prawitz to the Wittgenstein's slogan of "meaning as use", showing the link of this ideas with the needs of Artificial Intelligence. We sustain that the concept of "procedure" as developed in early Artificial Intelligence is still one of the main attempt, realized in that field of research, to give a definition of meaning , which gives good hopes to be a suitable explicatum of the idea of "meaning as use".

In what follows I consider the apparent contrast between two kinds of theories of context: a theory of objective context - exemplified in the works of Kaplan and Lewis - and a theory of subjective context -exemplified in the works of McCarthy and Giunchiglia. I consider then some difficulties for the objective theory. I don't give any formalization; instead I give some theoretical points about the problem. A possible result could be the abandon of the double indexing for a development a multi-context theory (I give an example of a case). However other results could be possible and a challenge is posed to solve problems using the best results from each tradition of research.

This paper is devoted to discuss a general tendency in contextualism which is known as "radical contextualism". In the first part I state the well known paradox of semantic holism, as discussed in philosophy of language: if meaning is holistic there is no possibility to share any meaning. In the second part I present the different answers to this paradox, from atomism to different forms of holism. In the third part I give a criticism of the traditional interpretation of Wittgenstein as a supporter of global holism. I stress some similarities between Wittgenstein's thought and Multi Context theories in artificial inteligence. In the last part I give some argument against a rigid interpretation of "local holism": I claim the need to give restrictions to local holim and to develop a study of the connections between "default" properties and high level rules which are studied in Multi−Context theories.

This volume contains essays that explore explicit and implicit communication through linguistic research. Taking as a framework Paul Grice's theories on "what is said," the contributors explore a number of areas, including: the boundary between semantics and pragmatics; the concept of implicit communication; the idea of the logical form of our assertions; the notion of conventional meaning; the phenomenon of deixis, which refers to when an utterance require context in order to be understood fully; the treatment of definite descriptions; and the different kinds of pragmatic processes.

The paper "Does Epistemological Holism lead to Meaning – Holism" (Cozzo, 2002) touches one of the main problems of a molecularist theory of meaning: how to restrict the class of inferences connected with a word, in order to define the sense of the word. I will discuss the starting point of this approach, mainly the pre-theoretical criterion against meaning holism: meaning holism, following a well-known argument by Dummett, reduces communication to a mystery. However there is a strong background assumption of this argument: communication is sharing the same meanings. Accepting this assumption without acknowledging it makes the entire proposal more problematic than it appears at first sight. In what follows I will try to clarify the possibility of a different reaction to meaning holism, putting forward some distinctions which come to light when the above stated assumption is made explicit. Then, some other comments will follow on the difficulty of avoiding extreme meaning holism, even within Cozzo's elegant attempt to implement a molecularist vision; in the end, his notion of the sense of a word will appear to be difficult to define, if these holistic aspects of language take the space they deserve even in his theory. I conclude with two remarks regarding two relevant requirements for a theory of meaning (conservativeness and harmony)

Context is a concept used by philosophers and scientists with many different definitions. Since Dummett we speak of "context principle" in Frege and Wittgenstein: "an expression has a meaning only in the context of a sentence". The context principle finds an extension in some of Wittgenstein's ideas, especially in his famous passage where he says that "to understand a sentence is to understand a language". Given that Wittgenstein believes that "the" language does not exist but only language games exist, we should conclude that he is speaking of the need to consider any sentence always in the context of a language game1. This general attitude is certainly attuned with the contemporary tendency to place contextual restrictions to the interpretations of our sentences. However we find so many kinds and forms of restrictions that this general attitude is not enough to give us a viable tool to find an order in the web of so many different theories of context. To look for an order or, at least a clarification, we may start with two contrasting paradigms of theories: the "objective" theory of contexts, where context is a set of features of the world, and the "subjective" theories of context, where context is the cognitive background of a speaker or agent in respect to a situation2. We have here not only two different ways of using the term "context" but also two different conceptions of semantics and philosophy. The different conceptions are normally associated, respectively, with the classical paradigm of model theoretic semantics (Kaplan, Lewis Stalnaker) on one hand and with the A.I. paradigm (McCarthy, Buvac, Giunchiglia) on the other hand. For sake of simplicity I will restrict my attention3 mainly to Kaplan 1989 and to McCarthy 1993 and Giunchiglia 1993. The two different conceptions can be summarised with the following schema: a) context as: set of features of the world..

In this paper, I will discuss a well-known oscillation in Frege’s conception of sense. My point is only partially concerned with his two different criteria of sense identity, and touches upon a more specific point: what happens if we apply Frege’s intuitive criterion for the difference of thoughts to logically equivalent sentences? I will try to make a schematic argument here that will preempt any endeavor to make Frege more coherent than he really is. In sections A and B, I will present two alternative Fregean ways to treat the sense of logically equivalent sentences. Frege really oscillated between two alternative conceptions of sense, and his inability to detect the contrast between the two alternative conceptions is partly due to his strong conception of rationality. To apply the criterion of difference of thoughts to logical matters, we may also use a weak notion of rationality, or at least a notion of rationality of human agents, with limited computational resources. The distinctions towards which Frege was striving are better understood nowadays from the point of view of the treatment of limited rationality, which imposes itself even in logical matters.

Insieme a John McDowell, Robert Brandom è uno dei filosofi emergenti della reazione al naturalismo filosofico; seguace Wilfrid Sellars, è l'autore americano che più si avvicina al dialogo con la filosofia continentale e propone una rivalutazione di Kant e Hegel nella filosofia analitica. Già allievo di Richard Rorty, Brandom è diventuo famoso con la pubblicazione di Making it Explicit. Questo ponderoso volume di 900 pagine non ha avuto però ancora una sufficiente attenzione nel dibattito filosofico italiano (a parte alcuni inteventi pubblicati su Iride). Forse questo dipende in parte dalla peculiarità e difficoltà del suo approccio, in parte dalla mole stessa del citato volume. Anche per questo motivo Brandom ha presentato una serie di lezioni2 ove riprende i temi del libro maggiore e ne approfondisce alcune parti. In quanto segue si presentano i temi fondamentale di Making it Explicit, arricchiti con elementi presi dal nuovo approfondimento.

This paper is a comparison of Kripke’s and Künne’s interpretations of Frege’s theory of indexicals, especially concerning Frege’s remarks on time as “part of the expression of thought”. I analyze the most contrasting features of Kripke’s and Künne’s interpretations of Frege’s remarks on indexicals. Subsequently, I try to identify a common ground between Kripke’s and Künne’s interpretations, and hint at a possible convergence between those two views, stressing the importance given by Frege to nonverbal signs in defining the content of thought. I conclude by indicating a possible direction for further research.

Nel febbraio 1912 Wittgenstein venne ammesso al Trinity College con Russell come supervisor, e iniziò a seguire le lezioni di Moore. E’ probabile che leggesse il libretto di Moore, Ethics, pubblicato al suo arrivo a Cambridge, o che ritrovasse nelle lezioni di Moore alcune delle suggestioni presenti nel libro. Ma dopo il Tractatus Wittgenstein dedicò poco spazio alle riflessioni sull’etica e quel poco in un periodo ristretto di tempo, agli inizi degli anni ‘30, dalla Conferenza sull’etica2 alle lezioni del ’32-33. Alle lezioni del 32-33 assistettero sia Alice Ambrose che George E. Moore, che ci lascianpo diversi tipi di appunti:3 Ambrose riporta frasi di Wittgenstein, Moore presenta e rielabora le sue idee. Una lettura comparata di questi appunti dà un’idea abbastanza chiara di quanto Wittgenstein in quegli anni riuscisse a fondere le sue idee sui giudizi morali con le sue idee sulla grammatica filosofica che veniva elaborando nel Big Typescript.

A traditional argument is often used against Mill's theory of names (the meaning of a name is exhausted by its referent). Mill's theory implies transparency of proper names (coreferring proper names are substitutable salva veritate); but examples like Frege's and Quine's show that proper names are not transparent in belief contexts. This could be thought to be a reductio ad absurdum of Mill's theory. In " A puzzle about Belief" (1979; 1988) Kripke builds up an argument which aims to show that the same problems, given by the principle of transparency of proper names, can also be generated without the use of that principle, but with some weaker and more general principles, which seem to be difficult to reject. (see Donellan) Therefore, the traditional argument against Mill's theory does not work. If you want to reject Mill's theory with some reductio ad absurdum, you should reject two very intuitive and apparently valid principles. The well known puzzle is based on the assumption that our speaker is normal non omniscient, sincere, reflective and not conceptually confused. The two principles used are the Disquotational Principle (DP) and the Translation Principle (TP).

Riassunto: in queste note presentouna breve panoramica della scienza cognitiva, che costituisce a tutt'oggi, a più di vent'anni dalla sua nascita, un coacervo di novità rilevanti nell'ambito della ricerca interdisciplinare. Dopo una prima presentazione generale (§1), traccio una breve storia della disciplina (§2) per passare poi a descrivere nel § 3 uno dei nuclei di fondo della scienza cognitiva: il funzionalismo e l'idea di mente come sistema di rappresentazioni o mappe cognitive. Nel § 4. accenno ad alcune tensioni interne alla scienza cognitiva. Essa è tuttora un campo disciplinare con forti contrasti sui paradigmi da seguire nella descrizione dell'architettura della mente. Una sfida recente è venuta dalla robotica "situata" e dalla tesi che occorre fare a meno delle rappresentazioni mentali nella costruzione di robot intelligenti. Nel § 5 discuto questa sfida mostrando che, nonostante l'entusiasmo suscitato dai primi successi della nuova robotica, il cardine della scienza cognitiva resta solido, anche se bisognoso di completamento. Nella conclusione, al § 6, tocco di sfuggita il tema della coscienza dei sistemi intelligenti (umani e artificiali) e invito a cercare strade per affrontare i problemi che si porranno alle nuove generazioni di studiosi, ormai al di là della frattura tra cultura umanistica e scientifica, frattura che forse trova in Italia uno degli ultimi ambienti in cui sopravvivere.

According to the Common Ground account proposed by Stalnaker, speakers involved in a verbal interaction have different propositional attitudes towards presuppositions. In this paper we propose an experimental study aimed at estimating the psychological plausibility of the Stalnakerian model. In particular, the goal of our experiment is to evaluate variations in accepting as appropriate a sentence that triggers a presupposition, where different attitudes are taken towards the presupposition required. The study conducted suggests that if a speaker has the attitude of belief towards the content of a presupposition, she may evaluate an utterance as more appropriate in a shorter time than in cases where she holds an attitude of presumption or of assumption. Therefore, data collected support the psychological soundness of what might be considered the main, but also most debated, theory of presupposition on the market.

Questa conferenza offre una presentazione semplificata del concetto di contesto nella filosofia analitica,in particolare nella filosofia del linguaggio. E' semplificata perché tralascia una serie di discussioni rilevanti per fermarsi alle grandi linee che segnano l'emergenza del concetto di contesto in filosofia del linguaggio. Inoltre mi concentro su un aspetto particolare del dibattito: la linea di confine tra pragmatia e semantica e il ruolo che il concetto di contesto ha in questo dibattito, cercando di evidenziare i punti di disaccordo tra le parti in causa. Nel primo paragrafo riprendo brevemente alcune idee di Frege, mostrando come aiutano a individuare una tripartizione abbastanza standard del concetto di contesto. Nel secondo paragrafo riespongo una tripartizione fatta da John Perry, cercando di "generalizzare" quello che Perry chiama "contesto postsemantico". Nella serie di esempi che seguono, mostro dove si situa il punto di discrimine tra la teorie più vicine alla semantica tradizionale e le teorie contestualiste radicali, che danno maggior rilevanza agli aspetti cognitivi rispetto a quelli semantici. Riprendo quindi in generale le due strategie alternative che si contrappongono sul modo di considerare i rapporti tra semantica e pragmatica. Nell'ultimo paragrafo provo a indicare quali sono i principali problemi dell'assunzione di una prospettiva radicalmente contestualista.