•  9
    Real is the new sexy: the influence of perceived realness on self-reported arousal to sexual visual stimuli
    with Marco Marini, Alessandro Ansani, Alessandro Demichelis, Giovanna Mancini, and Marco Viola
    Cognition and Emotion. forthcoming.
    As state-of-art technology can create artificial images that are indistinguishable from real ones, it is urgent to understand whether believing that a picture is real or not has some import over affective phenomena such as sexual arousal. Thus, in two pre-registered online studies, we tested whether 60 images depicting models in underwear elicited higher self-reported sexual arousal when believed to be (N = 57) or presented as (N = 108) real photographs as opposed to artificially generated. In b…Read more
  •  79
    Enthymematic parsimony
    with John Woods
    Synthese 178 (3). 2011.
    Enthymemes are traditionally defined as arguments in which some elements are left unstated. It is an empirical fact that enthymemes are both enormously frequent and appropriately understood in everyday argumentation. Why is it so? We outline an answer that dispenses with the so called "principle of charity", which is the standard notion underlying most works on enthymemes. In contrast, we suggest that a different force drives enthymematic argumentation—namely, parsimony, i.e. the tendency to opt…Read more
  •  58
    Enthymemes: From Reconstruction to Understanding (review)
    with John Woods
    Argumentation 25 (2): 127-139. 2011.
    Traditionally, an enthymeme is an incomplete argument, made so by the absence of one or more of its constituent statements. An enthymeme resolution strategy is a set of procedures for finding those missing elements, thus reconstructing the enthymemes and restoring its meaning. It is widely held that a condition on the adequacy of such procedures is that statements restored to an enthymeme produce an argument that is good in some given respect in relation to which the enthymeme itself is bad. In …Read more
  •  3
    Accepted by whom? On the Empirical Roots of Aristotle's Dialectic
    Revue Internationale de Philosophie 270 (4): 393-402. 2014.
  •  6
    Untimely Reviews
    Topoi 1-1. forthcoming.
  •  46
    Virtue argumentation theory has been charged of being incomplete, given its alleged inability to account for argument cogency in virtue-theoretical terms. Instead of defending VAT against that challenge, I suggest it is misplaced, since it is based on a premise VAT does not endorse, and raises an issue that most versions of VAT need not consider problematic. This in turn allows distinguishing several varieties of VAT, and clarifying what really matters for them.
  •  5233
    Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which one can identify bad or …Read more
  •  3
    The Topoi they are A-Changin’
    Topoi 42 (1): 1-4. 2023.
  •  3
    Elefanti nani, inesistenti regni medievali, parodie politiche scambiate per vere, panzane virali e dibattiti privi di senso sui social media. Le bufale un tempo erano oggetto di curiosità, bizzarri orpelli della credulità umana di cui discutere fra il serio e il faceto. Oggi causano allarme sociale, come ci dimostra la cronaca recente: la baraonda digitale prodotta dal diffondersi di un'epidemia può minare alla radice i tentativi di combatterla, o al contrario facilitare una risposta colletti…Read more
  •  15
    All We Need Is Trust: How the COVID-19 Outbreak Reconfigured Trust in Italian Public Institutions
    with Rino Falcone, Elisa Colì, Silvia Felletti, Alessandro Sapienza, and Cristiano Castelfranchi
    Frontiers in Psychology 11 561747. 2020.
    The central focus of this research is the fast and crucial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its exceptionally serious consequences in terms of healthcare, state intervention and impositions, radical changes in people’s life, on a crucial psychological, relational, and political construct: trust. In this survey, addressed to 4260 Italian citizens, we tried to analyze and measure such impact, focusing on various aspects of trust. This attention to multiple dimensions of trust constitutes the k…Read more
  •  4
    Response to my commentator
    Proceedings of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation Conference 10. 2013.
    N/A.
  •  19
    Introduction: Theoretical and Technological Perspectives on Online Arguments
    with Chris Reed and Fabio Paglieri
    Philosophy and Technology 30 (2): 131-135. 2017.
  •  2
    The psychology of argument: Cognitive approaches to argumentation and persuasion (edited book)
    with Laura Bonelli and Silvia Felletti
    College Publications. 2016.
  •  16
    Hansen & Pinto: Reason Reclaimed
    Informal Logic 28 (2): 170-192. 2008.
  •  16
    The illusionist and the folk: On the role of conscious planning in intentionality judgments
    with Silvia Felletti
    Philosophical Psychology 29 (6): 871-888. 2016.
    Illusionism is a prominent hypothesis about action control, according to which acts that we consider voluntary are nevertheless caused by unconscious brain events, and thus our subjective experience of consciously willing them is ultimately illusory. Illusionism can be understood as either an ontological thesis or a phenomenological claim, but both versions are vulnerable to a line of attack based on the role of long-term planning in action control. According to this objection, the evidence upon…Read more
  •  2
    The goals of cognition: Essays in honor of Cristiano Castelfranchi (edited book)
    with M. Tummolini, F. Falcone, and M. Miceli
    College Publications. forthcoming.
  •  26
    In this brief commentary of Kamila Debowska-Kozlowska’s insightful analysis of persuasive outcomes (Processing topics from the Beneficial Cognitive Model in partially and over-successful persuasion dialogues. Argumentation, 2014), I articulate some suggestions for future development of her ideas. My main claim is that, while instances of partially and over-successful persuasion are indeed worthy of further theoretical inquiry, the topical analysis proposed by Debowska-Kozlowska may benefit from …Read more
  •  34
    A Plea for Ecological Argument Technologies
    Philosophy and Technology 30 (2): 209-238. 2017.
    In spite of significant research efforts, argument technologies do not seem poised to scale up as much as most commentators would hope or even predict. In this paper, I discuss what obstacles bar the way to more widespread success of argument technologies and venture some suggestions on how to circumvent such difficulties: doing so will require a significant shift in how this research area is typically understood and practiced. I begin by exploring a much broader yet closely related question: To…Read more
  •  47
    False belief understanding and “cool” inhibitory control in 3-and 4-years-old Italian children
    with Francesca Bellagamba, Elsa Addessi, Valentina Focaroli, Giulia Pecora, Valentina Maggiorelli, and Beatrice Pace
    Frontiers in Psychology 6. 2015.
  •  71
    This topos is focused on intentions, with an emphasis on integrating philosophical analysis and empirical findings. Theorizing about human action has a long history in philosophy, and the nature of intention and intentional action has received a lot of attention in recent analytic philosophy. At the same time, intentional action has become an empirically studied phenomenon in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Many results obtained in these areas have been…Read more
  •  69
    Reflections on Plagiarism
    Topoi 34 (1): 1-5. 2015.
    The FactsIt has recently come to light that an article published on this journal in 2007, “On the illuminationist approach to imaginal power: outline of a perspective”, by Mahmoud Khatami, Topoi, 26, 221–229, extensively plagiarized parts of Mikel Dufrenne’s book The phenomenology of aesthetic experience . Entire passages from Sect. 4 of Khatami’s article turned out to be copied from chapter 11 of Dufrenne’s monograph, which was not even included in the list of references. This case of plagiaris…Read more
  •  58
    Introduction
    Topoi 24 (2): 117-123. 2005.
  •  57
    Modes of action readiness Acceptance accepting presence or interaction Non- acceptance not accepting presence or interaction Attending acquiring information Disinterest not acquiring information Affiliate achieving or accepting close ...
  •  14
    Argumentation is a dialogical attempt to bring about a desired change in the beliefs of another agent – that is, to trigger a specific belief revision process in the mind of such agent. However, so far formal models of belief revision widely neglected any systematic comparison with argumentation theories, to the point that even the simplest argumentation structures cannot be captured within such models. In this essay, we endeavour to bring together argumentation and belief revision in the same f…Read more
  •  6
    New Views on Old Issues: The CNCC Essay Award for Junior Scholars
    with Manos Tsakiris and Till Vierkant
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 15 (1). 2009.