Nevia Dolcini

Indexical terms, at least the ones on which we shall concentrate here, belong to the category of singular terms. Such linguistic expressions refer singularly, that is, they normally refer to a unique and specific object, in contrast to expressions used to refer to categories of objects or to their properties. The current debate on singular reference is characterized by two rival approaches, namely the descriptivism and the referentialism. According to the descriptivist approach, singular reference is always indirect because mediated by a descriptive content of some sort that fixes the referent. In contrast to this view, referentialism claims that singular terms (at least some of them, such as indexicals and proper names) refer directly by having the object to which they refer as a constituent of the expressed proposition....

The capacity to perform FB tasks successfully is widely regarded as necessary to a child’s possession of a ToM. My claim is that, although numerous high functional capacities need to be present in children succeeding in FB tasks, some of them are not necessarily related to a ToM. I shall propose a strict account of a ToM based on the capacity for ‘inter-subjectivity’. Given the stricter definition, even children younger than four are in possession of one. We shall find that this could be tested without reliance upon the FB task, appealing instead to the way children succeed in comprehending and appropriately producing indexical gestures.

Though it remains controversial and is often the subject of strident criticism, the tradition of sharply dividing Analytic from Continental philosophy persists and is widely accepted. Anglo-American philosophers of the middle twentieth-century are well-known for neglecting Continental ideas by simply appealing to the orthodoxy of an allegedly unbridgeable analytic/continental divide. The same tactic is now prevalent among philosophers who distinguish themselves as being in the “Continental tradition.”...

In this paper I defend a phenomenological approach to consciousness by analyzing some relevant linguistic data. In particular, I focus on the referential mechanisms at work in the subjects’ proper usage of the indexical terms. I distinguish between two kinds of indexical reference: the self-reference displayed in the uses of the first-person pronoun “I”, and the egoless-reference at work in the uses of any other indexical term (“you”, “here”, “this”, “that”, etc.). The analyzed indexical data, I’ll argue, support a view that I call “Minimal Phenomenological Account of Consciousness”. This is a two-level theory of consciousness constituted by the egoless-consciousness, which is ubiquitous, implicit, and unreflective, and the egoic-consciousness of an ephemeral, reflective, and explicit nature. The presented indexical data account for a phenomenological approach to consciousness and lead to the following conclusions: self-reference is irreducible to egoless-reference; the characteristics of the egoless-consciousness are displayed in the egoless-referential mechanisms, and are always present in the subjects’ experience; the characteristics of the egoic-consciousness are displayed in the self-referential mechanisms alone.

The current philosophical debate on self-deception is characterized by a divide between intentionalist and anti-intentionalist views. Despite the differences between the two competing approaches, especially with respect to whether subjects deceive themselves intentionally or unintentionally, I will argue that they tend to converge on, among other aspects, the interpretation of self-deception as a process by which the subjects fail to acquire knowledge. The condition for self-deception that the subject’s acquired (self-deceptive) belief is a false belief gathers wide and transversal agreement from both sides of the divide. I will provide criticism about the validity of such a condition by showing that it doesn’t match our common intuitions; some positive consequences of cutting the false-belief condition out of the set of conditions for self-deception will be explored. Finally, I suggest that self-deceivers manifest a deviant doxastic behavior with respect to the wider (doxastic) context, and I introduce a novel condition - the ‘Deviation Condition’ - which grasps the social and pragmatic dimension of self-deception. e proposed ‘tridimensional’ account is a unified model applying to both individual and collective self-deception.

The increased speed of communication, spatial compression, and the growing possibilities of new high-speed technologies, are among the major features of rapid changes leading the present-day highly interconnected and ‘shrinking’ world. In this context, social practices can benefit from newly emerged spaces of social interaction, which deeply modified the contours of social space, cultural communities, and – last but not least - scholarly activities. In this paper, I engage in a reflection on some of the shifts and innovations brought about by the process globalization in philosophical practices. Doing philosophy in times of globalization comes with a plethora of new opportunities, yet it also gives rise to novel issues which call for further assessment. More specifically, I will focus on two features of current philosophical practices, namely, collaboration and pluralism: while doing philosophy has always involved forms of collaboration and pluralism, the process of globalization widely contributed an unprecedented increase in collaborative research works, as well as a dramatic increase of philosophical pluralism. Lastly, I will suggest that the current status of philosophical practices, characterized with high degrees of diversity and increased levels of both intra-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaboration, encourages and urges metaphilosophical reflection: questions about the disciplinary identity, as well as about the philosophical method, have now become more salient than ever.

Not only do we enjoy the company of fictional characters as we read a novel, watch a movie, or listen to a story, but we also become emotionally involved with them and their adventures. Ordinary interaction with fiction constitutes the starting point for the ongoing philosophical debate on the ontological and metaphysical status of fictional objects. This book addresses the contemporary debate on the ontological status of fiction, while offering a perspective sensitive to the problem of the criterion for discriminating between fiction and reality.

Ci sono alcune parole, come “io”, “tu”, “ora”, “qui”, “questo” o “quello”, che occupano un posto speciale nei dibattiti interni all’odierna filosofia analitica del linguaggio. Si tratta degli indicali, che i filosofi indagano ad almeno due livelli. Al primo livello ci si occupa di costruire una generale teoria del riferimento e del significato degli indicali in grado di descrivere il loro funzionamento. Il secondo livello di indagine è motivato dall’idea che lo studio degli indicali possa chiarire complesse questioni come la prospettiva di prima persona, il senso del sé e la coscienza. In questo volume l’autrice propone una teoria del riferimento indicale basata sulla nozione di salienza percettiva che offre una prospettiva su entrambi i livelli di indagine. Il modello di salienza descrive il meccanismo sotteso all’uso degli indicali sfruttando i contributi della filosofia del linguaggio e della psicologia. L’intersoggettività dei significati espressi dagli enunciati indicali è garantita dal ruolo che il modello affida alla salienza e dalla originale nozione di contesto percettivo, inteso come la zona di accesso percettivo di tutti gli interlocutori impegnati in un evento comunicativo.

The so-called Ubiquity Thesis holds that all conscious states involve some form of minimal self-awareness, or ‘for-me-ness.’ This paper reconsiders this thesis by introducing the notion of perspectival consciousness, by which we mean consciousness insofar as it is structured by perspectival anchoring: the organization of experience relative not to a source but to an origin that need not itself be given first-personally. Drawing on Castañeda’s phenomeno-logical analysis of indexicals, especially his distinction between internal and external reflexivity, we argue that the formal structure of self-reference brings into view a theoretical dissociation between first-personal self-awareness and perspectival anchoring. Classical semantic cases and reports of delusional illeism are used to illustrate such a dissociation. We argue that the structural features exhibited by these cases can be characterized more parsimoniously in terms of perspectival anchoring without building first-personal self-awareness into their description. Perspectival consciousness, we suggest, captures a metaphysically less demanding form of origin-relative organization, thereby motivating a qualified challenge to the Ubiquity Thesis.

Hallucinations sit at the crossroads of philosophy and the empirical sciences, but are often approached with divergent aims. In philosophy, they are mainly treated stipulatively as experiences subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perception and used to probe theories of perception, justification, and consciousness. Empirical research, by contrast, investigates heterogeneous, clinically embedded hallucinatory phenomena, many of which differ phenomenologically from ordinary perception. This paper diagnoses the conceptual misalignment that follows from this divergence and offers a preliminary framework to narrow it through conceptual analysis. Rather than advancing a single unifying theory, I clarify key distinctions, including indistinguishability, insight, sense of reality, agency, and ownership, and sketch points of contact with constructs in the sciences. First, I examine leading empirical models—bottom-up, top-down, and predictive processing— highlighting what each explains and where each is limited. Second, I re-situate hallucinations within core philosophical debates on perception, mental imagery, and phenomenology, showing how empirical findings both inform and complicate current accounts. Third, I assess interdisciplinary developments that challenge unitary models and support pluralist, integrative approaches. Hallucinations are thus recast as a family of related phenomena, and the analysis provides theoretical coordinates for more productive interaction between philosophy and science.

This paper explores the pursuitworthiness of experiments in neurolinguistics by investigating whether criteria for pursuitworthiness can be established for experiments in this field and, if so, which factors are most relevant. Drawing on a detailed analysis of research practices and case studies in neurolinguistics, we propose that pursuitworthiness in this domain should be evaluated along two dimensions: methodological and pragmatic. These dimensions, while both essential, stand in an asymmetrical relationship: methodological criteria primarily serve as non-negotiable thresholds for epistemic adequacy, filtering the space of viable experiments, whereas pragmatic criteria, although context-sensitive, play a role in guiding comparative prioritization within that viable space. Additionally, we critically assess Jamie Shaw’s distinction between luxury and urgent science by exploring its utility in mapping the interplay between methodological and pragmatic criteria. We contend that, while the distinction offers valuable theoretical insights, its applicability to neurolinguistics is limited, mainly due to difficulties in predicting which experiments will yield the most impactful outcomes. Ultimately, our analysis demonstrates the value of adopting a structured yet context-sensitive approach to experimental pursuitworthiness in neurolinguistics, grounded in the interplay of methodological integrity and pragmatic viability.

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.

The advent of experimental philosophy has recently expanded the domain of philosophical debates so as to include discussions about survey-based methodology and the validity of its employment in philosophical inquiry. One of the main criticisms of this approach questions the alleged response-intuition equation, by claiming that ‘pragmatic cues’ might prevent the subjects from reporting their genuine intuitions about the survey scenarios and questions. The pragmatic cues discussed by the literature include aspects of a quite different nature, ranging from thinking-styles to semantic ambiguities. In order to distinguish between language-related pragmatic cues, and other features not strictly dependent on language, the distinction between the ‘response problem’ and the ‘interpretation problem’—potentially triggered by language-related pragmatic cues—is introduced. By employing an illustrated survey, this study aims at revealing the extent to which the use of ‘non-linguistic’ vignettes might constitute a valid aid to the traditional ‘linguistic’ vignette. A positive response would encourage the usage of illustrations and other non-linguistic or minimally-linguistic models in survey-based studies, which considerably restricts the liability of surveys for the interpretation problem.

Conventional electroencephalography (EEG) rarely appears in neuroethical discussions, despite its widespread use in scientific research. This oversight is largely due to its (perceived) harmlessness. There is limited empirical data regarding harm caused by EEG, with concerns mostly confined to its therapeutic applications. The conditions of EEG experiments, however, may require participants to remain still in an enclosed space for extended periods and maintain prolonged attention on monotonous tasks, sometimes while avoiding blinking. To date, there is no evidence of the impact of human electrophysiological research on psychological well-being. Could these demanding conditions impact participants’ well-being beyond the risk of physical harm? Our study represents the first dedicated investigation into this aspect. To assess changes in psychological well-being and contributing factors, we administered the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) to participants in three distinct electrophysiological experiments before the start of the preparation phase (pre-test) and again after the experiment concluded (post-test). Our findings indicate that participants experience significant changes in their affect from pre- to post-experiment, as measured by the PANAS. Specifically, there was a significant reduction in positive affect across the group, while changes in negative affect were not observed. Furthermore, our analysis revealed that the reduction in positive affect was significantly predicted by the duration of the experiment, identifying time as a crucial factor in the negative impact on participants' psychological well-being.

Anorexia Nervosa is widely recognized as having both cognitive and affective dimensions. Current accounts typically explain the perplexing behaviors associated with this eating disorder by emphasizing either its cognitive components—particularly false beliefs related to the denial of the patient’s actual conditions—or its affective components, such as the intense fear of gaining weight. I will argue that neither approach is sufficient to fully capture the complexity of Anorexia Nervosa. This paper explores a more comprehensive approach that goes beyond the cognition-affect dichotomy, aligning better with the DSM-5 criteria for Anorexia Nervosa. These criteria suggest that while both affective and cognitive components play significant roles, neither the cognitive element nor the affective element is necessary or sufficient to define the condition on its own. I propose that this can be achieved by drawing an analogy with addiction, where both conditions can be seen as stemming from and maintained by an all-consuming fixation that permeates individuals’ lives and profoundly influences their behaviors. In Anorexia Nervosa, this fixation manifests as a pervasive preoccupation with body size and weight. What distinguishes these behaviors is their internal self-endorsement, aligning with the well-documented ego-syntonic nature of Anorexia Nervosa: sufferers perceive these behaviors as consistent with their feelings, values, and ideals, making them resistant to change. Understanding Anorexia Nervosa within the framework of addiction, particularly by recognizing the pivotal role of ego-syntonic fixation, allows for a more comprehensive approach to the disorder that sheds light on its high resistance to treatment and the challenges faced in clinical interventions.

This paper focuses on Hector-Neri Castañeda's significant contributions to metaphilosophy. In his 1980 work, On Philosophical Method, Castañeda articulates a unique perspective, characterizing philosophy as fundamentally a dia-philosophical activity. By asserting the supremacy of synthesis over analysis within the metaphilosophical hierarchy, his account provides a purely theoretical defense of philosophical pluralism devoid of any relativistic inclinations. Despite Castañeda's enduring influence and profound impact on ongoing discussions in ontology, logic, and the philosophy of language, his metaphilosophical insights have largely been neglected. In the context of today's increasingly diverse philosophical landscape, this paper posits that Castañeda's pluralist metaphilosophy retains substantial theoretical relevance.

This work addresses the critical discussion featured in the contemporary literature about two well-known paradoxes belonging to different philosophical traditions, namely Frege’s puzzling claim that “the concept horse is not a concept” and Gongsun Long’s “white horse is not horse”. We first present the source of Frege’s paradox and its different interpretations, which span from plain rejection to critical analysis, to conclude with a more general view of the role of philosophy as a fight against the misunderstandings that come from the different uses of language (a point later developed by the “second” Wittgenstein). We then provide an overview of the ongoing discussions related to the Bai Ma Lun paradox, and we show that its major interpretations include—as in the case of Frege’s paradox—dismissive accounts that regard it as either useless or wrong, as well as attempts to interpret and repair the argument. Resting on our reading of Frege’s paradox as an example of the inescapability of language misunderstandings, we advance a similar line of interpretation for the paradox in the Bai Ma Lun: both the paradoxes, we suggest, can be regarded as different manifestations of similar concerns about language, and specifically about the difficulty of referring to concepts via language.

The advent of experimental philosophy has recently expanded the domain of philosophical debates so as to include discussions about survey-based methodology and the validity of its employment in philosophical inquiry. One of the main criticisms of this approach questions the alleged response-intuition equation, by claiming that ‘pragmatic cues’ might prevent the subjects from reporting their genuine intuitions about the survey scenarios and questions. The pragmatic cues discussed by the literature include aspects of a quite different nature, ranging from thinking-styles to semantic ambiguities. In order to distinguish between language-related pragmatic cues, and other features not strictly dependent on language, the distinction between the ‘response problem’ and the ‘interpretation problem’—potentially triggered by language-related pragmatic cues—is introduced. By employing an illustrated survey, this study aims at revealing the extent to which the use of ‘non-linguistic’ vignettes might constitute a valid aid to the traditional ‘linguistic’ vignette. A positive response would encourage the usage of illustrations and other non-linguistic or minimally-linguistic models in survey-based studies, which considerably restricts the liability of surveys for the interpretation problem.

After the recent “cognitive turn” it is commonly assumed that the domain of the cognitive is much broader than the domain of the linguistic. Consequently, the quickly decreasing appeal of “linguistic idealism” is now totally clouded by the view that language is not necessary for thought. I here highlight how the target paper is fully attuned to this mainstream view, which originally and fundamentally rejects any linguistic idealist claim. Furthermore, I propose a new formulation of an “old” methodological concern about psychological explanations, which potentially challenges the efficacy of any argumentative strategy hinging on higher order cognitive capacities.

: The Emotional Perception Model of moral judgment intends to account for experientialism about morality and moral reasoning. In explaining how moral beliefs are formed and applied in practical reasoning, the model attempts to overcome the mismatch between reason and action/desire: morality isn’t about reason for actions, yet moral beliefs, if caused by desires, may play a motivational role in agency. The account allows for two kinds of moral beliefs: genuine moral beliefs, which enjoy a relation to desire, and motivationally inert moral beliefs acquired in ways other than experience. Such etiology-based dichotomy of concepts, I will argue, leads to the undesirable view of cognition as a non-homogeneous phenomenon. Moreover, the distinction between moral beliefs and moral beliefs would entail a further dichotomy encompassing the domain of moral agency: one and the same action might possibly be either genuine moral, or not moral, if acted by individuals lacking the capacity for moral feelings, such as psychopaths. Keywords : Moral Beliefs; Cognitive Homogeneity; Moral Agency; Motivation; Psychopathy Credenze morali e omogeneità cognitiva Riassunto : L’ Emotional Perception Model del giudizio morale offre un approccio esperienzialista alla moralità e al ragionamento morale. Il modello, che propone una spiegazione di come le credenze morali vengano prima formate e poi applicate, intende superare il disallineamento tra ragione e azione/desiderio: la moralità non riguarda le ragioni per agire, tuttavia le credenze morali, se causate dal desiderio o in relazione con esso, svolgono un ruolo motivazionale nell’azione. Questo approccio consente di identificare due tipi di credenza morale: le credenze morali genuine, che trattengono una relazione con il desiderio, e le credenze morali senza relazione alcuna con il desiderio e dunque caratterizzate da inerzia motivazionale. Tale tassonomia, la cui origine è da rintracciare nell’eziologia dei concetti, porta alla sgradita visione della cognizione come fenomeno disomogeneo. Inoltre la distinzione tra credenze morali e credenze morali introdurrebbe una ulteriore possibile dicotomia interna al dominio dell’azione morale: una medesima azione può essere al contempo genuinamente morale oppure no, a seconda che venga agita da un individuo con la capacità di esperire sentimenti morali o da uno che ne sia privo, come nel caso di soggetti psicopatici. Parole chiave : Credenze morali; Omogeneità cognitiva; Agentività morale; Motivazione; Psicopatia.

Action is widely characterized as possessing a teleological dimension. The dominant way of describing goal-directed action and agency is in terms of exploitation, i.e., pursuing pre-specified goals using existing strategies. Recent theoretical developments emphasize the place of exploration, i.e., discovering new goals or acquiring new strategies. The exploitation-exploration distinction poses questions with regard to goals and agency: Should exploration, as some authors have suggested, be regarded as acting without a goal? We argue that recognizing the hierarchical nature of goals is crucial in distinguishing the two kinds of activity, because this recognition prevents the claim that exploration is goal-free, while allowing for a homogeneous account of both exploitative and explorative actions. An action typically causes relatively low-level/proximal (i.e., sensorimotor, immediate) and relatively high-level/distal (i.e., in the environment, at a wider timescale) outcomes. In exploitation, one relies on existing associations between low- and high-level states, whereas in exploration one does not have the ability or intention to control high-level/distal states. We argue that explorative action entails the capacity to exercise control within the low-level/proximal states, which enables the pursuit of indeterminate goals at the higher levels of a goal hierarchy, and the possibility of acquiring new goals and reorganization of goal hierarchies. We consider how the dominant models of agency might accommodate this capacity for explorative action.

: Traditional accounts regard the first-person pronoun as a special token-reflexive indexical whose referent, the utterer, is identified by the linguistic rule expressed by the term plus the context of utterance. This view falls short in accounting for all the I-uses in narrative practices, a domain broader than fiction including storytelling, pretense, direct speech reports, delayed communication, the historical present, and any other linguistic act in which the referent of the indexical is not perceptually accessible to the receiver. I propose a model for the reference of “I” based on the distinction between three functions carried out by indexicals in communication, namely, the anaphoric, perceptual, and phantasmatic functions. The referential mechanism of the phantasmatic “I”, that is, the “I” used in phantasmatic function, is understood as an instance of imagination-oriented pointing exploiting the phantasmatic context, and not the perceptual context relevant in perceptual uses of indexicals. The rule for “I” is revised in light of the perceptual vs. phantasmatic deixis distinction; the resulting rule governing the reference of the phantasmatic “I” allows for a homogeneous treatment of ‘I’-tokens in narrative practices spanning the spectrum from fiction to non-fiction. Keywords : First-person Pronoun; Context; Imagination; Fiction; Indexicals; Narration; L'io fantasmatico. Sull’uso immaginativo del pronome di prima persona tra finzione e realtà Riassunto : Tradizionalmente “io” viene trattato come un indicale token-riflessivo speciale il cui referente, il produttore dell’occorrenza, è identificato attraverso la sola regola linguistica e il contesto di proferimento. Questo approccio, tuttavia, non riesce a rendere conto di quei casi in cui “io” appare all’interno di pratiche di narrazione, un dominio più ampio della finzione e che include lo storytelling, i racconti in discorso diretto e indiretto, la comunicazione differita, il presente storico e ogni altro atto linguistico in cui il referente indicale non è percettivamente accessibile al ricevente. Il modello per il riferimento di “io” qui proposto si basa sulla distinzione tra tre funzioni svolte dagli indicali nella comunicazione: la funzione anaforica, la funzione percettiva, e la funzione fantasmatica. Il meccanismo referenziale dell’io fantasmatico, ovvero del pronome di prima persona usato in funzione fantasmatica, è inteso come una istanza di deissi orientata dall’immaginazione che sfrutta il contesto fantasmatico, piuttosto che il contesto percettivo rilevante negli usi percettivi degli indicali. La regola per “io” è riformulata alla luce della distinzione tra deissi fantasmatica e deissi percettiva; la risultante regola per il riferimento indicale dell’io fantasmatico permette un trattamento omogeneo delle occorrenze di “io” nelle pratiche di narrazione che pertengono indistintamente alla finzione e alla realtà. Parole chiave : Pronome di prima persona; Contesto; Immaginazione; Finzione; Indicali; Narrazione.

In contemporary philosophy and psychology there is an ongoing debate about Theory of Mind, which mainly concerns our ability to understand other people. For almost two decades, authors have argued in favour of a crucial relationship between language and children's development of ToM. Studies based on verbal tasks suggest that children possess a ToM not earlier than about the age of four. Nevertheless, in recent years, this paradigm has been almost replaced by a 'new' nativist paradigm conceiving of mental capacities as part of our purely biological inheritance. In contrast with the traditional tasks, non-verbal task results indicate that children possess ToM at the age of 15 months, or earlier. The contradictory data led to the so-called 'developmental gap': how is it that 15-month-olds already possess ToM, while failing the traditional tasks until the age of four? My thesis is that the data at our disposal, if interpreted in the light of a suitable theoretical framework, do not generate a genuine contradiction. Prior to the interpretation of the research results, a distinction between epistemological and metaphysical levels of investigation, and a clear analysis of notions such as 'representation', 'inference', 'mental state', and the like, is required.