-
12Perceiving the infinite and the infinitesimal world: unveiling and optical diagrams and the construction of mathematical conceptsFoundations of Science 10 (1): 7--23. 2005.Many important concepts of the calculus are difficult to grasp, and they may appear epistemologically unjustified. For example, how does a real function appear in “small” neighborhoods of its points? How does it appear at infinity? Diagrams allow us to overcome the difficulty in constructing representations of mathematical critical situations and objects. For example, they actually reveal the behavior of a real function not “close to” a point but “in” the point. We are interested in our research…Read more
-
16Artificial Minds: How Brains Make UpIn R. Gudwin & J. Queiroz (eds.), Semiotics and Intelligent Systems Development, Idea Group. pp. 1. 2007.
-
489Multimodal Abduction in Knowledge DevelopmentPreworkshop Proceedings, IJCAI2009International Workshop on Abductive and Inductive Knowledge Development (Pasadena, CA, USA, July 12, 2009). 2009.From the perspective of distributed cognition I will stress how abduction is essentially multimodal, in that both data and hypotheses can have a full range of verbal and sensory representations, involving words, sights, images, smells, etc., but also kinesthetic – related to the ability to sense the position and location and orientation and movement of the body and its parts – and motor experiences and other feelings such as pain, and thus all sensory modalities. The presence of kinesthetic and …Read more
-
Agent-Based AbductionIn Model Based Reasoning in Science and Engineering, College Publications. pp. 415--439. 2006.
-
9
-
95An epistemological analysis of gossip and gossip-based knowledgeSynthese 191 (17): 4037-4067. 2014.Gossip has been the object of a number of different studies in the past 50 years, rehabilitating it not only as something worth being studied, but also as a pivotal informational and social structure of human cognition: Dunbar (Rev Gen Psychol 8(2):100–110, 2004) interestingly linked the emergence of language to nothing less than its ability to afford gossip. Different facets of gossip were analyzed by anthropologists, linguists, psychologists and philosophers, but few attempts were made to fram…Read more
-
64This volume sets out to give a philosophical "applied" account of violence, engaged with both empirical and theoretical debates in other disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, political theory, ...
-
27Computing, Philosophy and Cognition: Proceedings of the European Computing and Philosophy Conference (ECAP 2004) (edited book)College Publications. 2005.This volume is a collection of papers that explore various areas of common interest between philosophy, computing, and cognition. The book illustrates the rich intrigue of this fascinating recent intellectual story. It begins by providing a new analysis of the ideas related to computer ethics, such as the role in information technology of the so-called moral mediators, the relationship between intelligent machines and warfare, and the new opportunities offered by telepresnece, for example in tea…Read more
-
30Scientific innovation as eco-epistemic warfare: the creative role of on-line manipulative abductionMind and Society 12 (1): 49-59. 2013.Humans continuously delegate and distribute cognitive functions to the environment to lessen their limits. They build models, representations, and other various mediating structures, that are thought to be good to think. The case of scientific innovation is particularly important: the main aim of this paper is to revise and criticize the concept of scientific innovation, reframing it in what I will call an eco-epistemic perspective, taking advantage of recent results coming from the area of dist…Read more
-
Abductive reasoning: philosophical and educational perspectives in medicineIn David Andreoff Evans & Vimla L. Patel (eds.), Advanced Models of Cognition for Medical Training and Practice, Springer. pp. 21--41. 1992.
-
10La moralidad distribuida y la tecnología. Cómo las cosas nos hacen moralesIsegoría 34 63-78. 2006.En el presente artículo se sostiene que, a través de la tecnología, las personas podemos simplificar y resolver tareas morales incluso en presencia de información incompleta o de una capacidad insuficiente para la acción moral. Muchas cosas externas, normalmente concebidas como inertes desde un punto de vista moral, pueden considerarse lo que aquí se denominarán mediadores morales. Por lo tanto, no todas las herramientas morales están en el interior de nuestra cabeza, sino que muchas están distr…Read more
-
Prefiguring ethical chances: the role of moral mediatorsIn Y. Oshawa & S. Tsumoto (eds.), Chance Discoveries in Real World Decision Making: Data-Based Interaction of Human and Artificial Intelligence, Springer. pp. 205--229. 2006.
-
37An Abductive Theory of Scientific ReasoningSemiotica 2005 (153 - 1/4): 261-286. 2005.More than a hundred years ago, the American philosopher C. S. Peirce suggested the idea of pragmatism as a logical criterion to analyze what words and concepts express through their practical meaning. Many words have been spent on creative processes and reasoning, especially in the case of scientific practices. In fact, philosophers have usually offered a number of ways of construing hypotheses generation, but all aim at demonstrating that the activity of generating hypotheses is paradoxical, il…Read more
-
Il convegno internazionale "Peirce in Italia"Rivista di Storia Della Filosofia 46 (4): 781. 1991.Review
-
101Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery (edited book)Kluwer/Plenum. 1999.The book Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery, aims to explain how specific modeling practices employed by scientists are productive methods of ...
-
69Theoretical considerations on cognitive niche constructionSynthese 194 (12): 4757-4779. 2017.Cognitive niche theories consist in a theoretical framework that is proving extremely profitable in bridging evolutionary biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and anthropology by offering an inter-disciplinary ground, laden with novel approaches and debates. At the same time, cognitive niche theories are multiple, and differently related to niche theories in theoretical and evolutionary biology. The aim of this paper is to clarify the theoretical and epistemological relationships between cogn…Read more
-
25Violence HexagonLogica Universalis 10 (2-3): 359-371. 2016.In this article I will show why and how it is useful to exploit the hexagon of opposition to have a better and new understanding of the relationships between morality and violence and of fundamental axiological concepts. I will take advantage of the analysis provided in my book Understanding Violence. The Intertwining of Morality, Religion, and Violence: A Philosophical Stance. Springer, Heidelberg/Berlin, 2011) to stress some aspects of the relationship between morality and violence, also rewor…Read more
-
Designing Human Interfaces. The Role of AbductionIn Lorenzo Magnani & Riccardo Dossena (eds.), Computing, Philosophy and Cognition: Proceedings of the European Computing and Philosophy Conference (ECAP 2004), College Publications. pp. 131--146. 2005.
-
Multimodal abduction in knowledge developmentIn Multimodal Abduction in Knowledge Development, Preworkshop Proceedings, Ijcai2009international Workshop On Abductive and Inductive Knowledge Development (pasadena, Ca, Usa, July 12, 2009). pp. 21--26. 2009.
-
31Medical diagnostic reasoning: Epistemological modeling as a strategy for design of computer-based consultation programsTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 14 (1). 1993.The complexity of cognitive emulation of human diagnostic reasoning is the major challenge in the implementation of computer-based programs for diagnostic advice in medicine. We here present an epistemological model of diagnosis with the ultimate goal of defining a high-level language for cognitive and computational primitives. The diagnostic task proceeds through three different phases: hypotheses generation, hypotheses testing and hypotheses closure. Hypotheses generation has the inferential f…Read more
-
60Conjectures and manipulations. Computational modeling and the extra- theoretical dimension of scientific discoveryMinds and Machines 14 (4): 507-538. 2004.Computational philosophy (CP) aims at investigating many important concepts and problems of the philosophical and epistemological tradition in a new way by taking advantage of information-theoretic, cognitive, and artificial intelligence methodologies. I maintain that the results of computational philosophy meet the classical requirements of some Peircian pragmatic ambitions. Indeed, more than a 100 years ago, the American philosopher C.S. Peirce, when working on logical and philosophical proble…Read more