Pietro Salis

In recent years, the social world is quickly gaining the focus of attention within the philosophical debates. The work of authors such as John Searle, Barry Smith, Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, to name just a few, is becoming increasingly important within the philosophical community. Hence, topics in social ontology dealing with the nature of institutions, collective actions, collective self/personhood, collective intentionality, shared goals and commitments, etc. are increasingly addressed by contemporary philosophical investigations. The discussion on these topics is today sprawling of mainstream ambitious views, contributing to a complete understanding of the proper structures and dynamics of the social world. The present collection of essays aims at exploring side-issues in social ontology, trying somehow to go beyond mainstream topics. Another important aim of this book is connecting the typical discussions of social ontology to the philosophical tradition, and to debates in the social sciences and in anthropology. The collection of essays does not offer a perspective on the social world which is shared among the authors, and it is rather pluralistic in nature: our shared belief is that pluralism and openness, especially in explorative attempts, are methodologically fit to promote dialogue and interaction between different ideas, strategies, and perspectives. According to this spirit, the book comprises a number of articles and critical notes that target different problems, traditions, and methodologies.

This paper highlights the fundamental difference in the criteria adopted to explain original intentionality, which is the basic stratum of intentional phenomena, between the mentalist mainstream and the minority inspired by the rejection of the Myth of the Given. Among the attempts on the latter, inferentialism has become a view of particular interest. According to inferentialism, full intentionality is a feature of cognitive subjects who participate in normative discursive practice. Therefore, the criteria to which the basic intentionality of the mind can be attributed are fundamentally linguistic and not mentalist; for example, perception alone is not sufficient to ground full intentional states. This situation is an interesting challenge to mainstream intentionalism. Furthermore, it can be argued that this view can be a good basis to develop a different conception of collective intentionality in social ontology. In fact, inferentialism makes use of the basic normative notion of discursive commitment to track and evaluate the inferential moves of speakers. This notion can be easily extended hypothetically in the direction of the idea of a ‘joint commitment’ developed by Margaret Gilbert. In what follows, a number of questions and remarks are raised as a first explorative attempt. The role that language plays in social ontology through this approach is of particular interest because of its strict connection with collective intentionality: it is an ‘active’ institution (maybe a meta-institution), the medium and the practice to create and establish other institutions.

Siamo ormai lontani dalla stagione in cui la forza propulsiva della “svolta linguistica” si impose come tendenza dominante nel dibattito filosofico. Da varie angolazioni si è potuto parlare negli ultimi anni di pictorial turn come antidoto all’egemonia del paradigma linguistico in filosofia. Il volume Verità, Immagine, Normatività. Truth, Image, and Normativity non si inserisce direttamente in questa nuova tendenza, ma ruota comunque intorno a questioni che derivano dal medesimo sfondo. I 24 saggi qui raccolti tengono conto dei diversi ruoli che le immagini possono svolgere, a seconda che si focalizzi la loro dimensione descrittiva o normativa, e indagano alcuni aspetti del rapporto tra immagine e linguaggio. Questi problemi di filosofia dell’immagine, intesa sia come immagine cognitiva sia come immagine grafica, costituiscono il fil rouge di questo volume. Una tale riflessione sui linguaggi figurati e sulla comunicazione visiva non-linguistica costringe a riformulare in termini nuovi le grandi domande concernenti le tradizionali nozioni di verità, oggettività, normatività, consenso e persuasione.

Persuasion is a special aspect of our social and linguistic practices – one where an interlocutor, or an audience, is induced, to perform a certain action or to endorse a certain belief, and these episodes are not due to the force of the better reason. When we come near persuasion, it seems that, in general, we are somehow giving up factual discourse and the principles of logic, since persuading must be understood as almost different from convincing rationally. Sometimes, for example, we can find persuasion a political speech that relies on our feelings, emotions and values, but we can also find a persuasive person a dodger, busy in his own questionable activities that are intentionally performed in order to mislead and manipulate other people. However, I do not want to try to define a general notion of persuasion from the beginning. I would rather start with a conception that already has a place, even if controversial, in the philosophical debate. In particular, the version that I have always found particularly provocative is that provided by Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. This peculiar version of the idea of persuasion, which is often associated with the possibility of overcoming deep disagreements, is quite famous in the literature and often understood as indicating certain intrinsic limits of our reason-giving practices. The following are Wittgenstein’s famous remarks on persuasion: 608. Is it wrong for me to be guided in my actions by the propositions of physics? Am I to say I have no good ground for doing so? Isn’t precisely this what we call a ‘good ground’? 609. Suppose we met people who did not regard that as a telling reason. Now, how do we imagine this? Instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it? If we call this “wrong” aren’t we using our language-game as a base from which to combat theirs? 611. Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. 612. I said I would ‘combat’ the other man, – but wouldn’t I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives.) This paper is not devoted, as far as possible, to focus on interpretative matters about Wittgenstein’s late philosophy. Rather, it aims to investigate whether there are problems and incompatibilities between this particular conception of persuasion and our contemporary understanding of our reason-giving practices and of our belief-revision procedures. The first part of this study will be concerned about assessing this conception of persuasion and trying to shed new light on it (and on its consequences); most of the work here is done by looking at some truisms and normative features of our practices regarding the rational updating of our beliefs. It also addresses the question: Is the resistance to reasons of Wittgenstein’s persuasion capable to avoid the strict dynamics of belief revision? The second section of this study concerns the possibility of limiting the scope of this conception of persuasion, thanks to some of our contemporary ways of understanding rational discursive practices (I will focus especially on Robert Brandom’s game of “giving and asking for reasons”). If our rational practices require at least a certain degree of epistemic responsibility, then how is it possible that one invokes the end of reasons (that would explicitly mean giving up this responsibility)? A third section is the attempt, on this basis, to try to revise our contrasting conception(s) of persuasion (with an eye open on the near doxastic territory). Are there other conceptions of persuasion which are more compatible with our rational practices and do not entail any version of the “end of reasons” that are so compatible with our individual and social epistemic responsibility?

Cosa vuol dire “fare uso di concetti”? Che relazione sussiste tra l’uso di un sistema concettuale e l’uso di un linguaggio naturale? Esiste un’influenza delle pratiche sociali in cui sono coinvolti gli esseri umani sui significati delle loro espressioni linguistiche? Che rapporto lega il ragionamento con l’uso di concetti? Queste sono alcune delle domande centrali per il lavoro del filosofo statunitense Robert Brandom. Sulla scorta di simili interrogativi, e mediante un confronto articolato con autori quali Kant, Hegel, Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars e Dummett, Brandom ha elaborato una complessa teoria del linguaggio e della pratica discorsiva. Questo volume è dedicato, in primo luogo, a presentare le linee guida e le principali strategie argomentative della teoria di Brandom; in secondo luogo, a discutere alcune questioni chiave per il modello inferenzialista, selezionate con particolare attenzione alle principali discussioni suscitate dal dibattito teorico negli ultimi decenni.

It is often argued that inferential role semantics (IRS) entails semantic holism as long as theorists fail to answer the question about which inferences, among the many, are meaning-constitutive. Since analyticity, as truth in virtue of meaning, is a widely dismissed notion in indicating which inferences determine meaning, it seems that holism follows. Semantic holism is often understood as facing problems with the stability of content and many usual explanations of communication. Thus, we should choose between giving up IRS, to avoid these holistic entailments, and defending holism against this charge, to rescue IRS. I try to pursue the second goal by analyzing certain patterns of counterfactual reasoning. Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom claim that, to defend IRS, content-constitutive inferences are those counterfactually robust. While it is difficult to assess the goodness of such a view, it nonetheless entails that counterfactually non-robust inferences (which I call “modally ruled out inferences”) are not content-constitutive. If this is true, and if we take certain remarks about the grasp of concepts on board, there is a way to restrict the scope of the holism entailed by IRS to the extent of reshaping problems with the stability of content.

Ita La recensione presenta la prospettiva enattivista difesa da Alva Noë, e ne discute alcuni aspetti specifici. Il pensiero, la coscienza e la cognizione non sono pienamente comprensibili, secondo l’enattivismo di Noë, senza un’adeguata considerazione del ruolo ricoperto dal corpo e dall’ambiente. Sarebbe quindi sbagliato continuare a pensare che il cervello da solo sia responsabile dei processi cognitivi umani: il programma che ricerca i correlati neurali della coscienza sarebbe quindi destinato al fallimento dal principio, perché tralascia in partenza corpo e ambiente; i programmi di ricerca nel campo dell’intelligenza artificiale sarebbero ugualmente compromessi, non solo con una concezione computazionalista della cognizione, ma anche con la vecchia idea che un cervello artificiale sia sufficiente alla cognizione quanto un cervello naturale. Di seguito si prendono in esame due prospettive sperimentali su cui Noë fa grande affidamento: gli studi sulla plasticità neurale dei furetti svolti da Mriganka Sur e altri, e la realizzazione di un sistema di sostituzione visuo-tattile da parte di Paul Bach-Y-Rita. Per Noë si tratta di elementi cruciali in supporto alla propria prospettiva: in realtà, come emerge dalla breve analisi, l’attribuire loro un significato così chiaro e univoco pro-enattivismo è qualcosa di molto meno scontato. Infine, segue un breve bilancio del libro di Noë, dove gli elementi d’interesse del volume sono presentati insieme all’individuazione di alcuni punti deboli, che il testo condivide con la gran parte degli studi che in vario modo fanno leva sull’intuizione legata all’embodiement: da un lato una difficoltà strutturale riguarda la possibilità di identificare con chiarezza gli elementi costitutivi del mentale; dall’altro lato, il riferimento a forme di esternalismo radicale sembra ugualmente comportare diversi problemi. -/- Abstract Eng The review presents Alva Noë’s enactivist view, and aims at discussing some of its ideas. Thought, consciousness, and cognition are not understandable, Noë claims, without taking into proper consideration the role played by the body and the environment. It would be wrong indeed to go on thinking that our brain alone is responsible for human cognitive processes: the program searching for the neural correlates of consciousness is hopeless in principle, because it neglects from the beginning the body and the environment; research programs in artificial intelligence are as well compromised, not only with a computationalist view of cognition, but also with the old idea that an artificial brain will suffice for cognition just like a natural one. Thereafter, two experimental perspectives, that Noë uses to support his view, are examined: Mriganka Sur’s studies on neural plasticity of ferrets, and Paul Bach-Y-Rita’s tactile-visual substitution system. Noë argues that these results are crucial in supporting his view, but, as the discussion highlights, their pro-enactivism meaning is not so clear and unambiguous. Finally, a balance of the book follows, where the many elements of interest are presented together with the acknowledgment of some weak points, that the book shares with the majority of the proposals that deal with the embodiment’s insight: on the one hand, a structural difficulty concerns the possibility to identify clearly the constitutive elements of the mental; on the other hand, the reference to radical versions of externalism seems to entail many difficulties as well.

Nel dibattito teorico, la metafora della mappa è stata spesso usata per esplorare il ruolo della nozione di verità nel rapporto tra linguaggio, rappresentazioni, realtà. Le mappe sono sempre prospettiche, legate a interessi (cognitivi e non cognitivi) di chi le elabora; come ha osservato Michael Lynch, "il mondo non si mappa da sé". Per quanto diverse esse siano, assumiamo in genere che le pratiche descrittive possano aspirare a qualche forma di verità e corrispondere al modo in cui le cose stanno. Non è facile spiegare in che cosa consista questa "corrispondenza", anche perché è controversa la possibilità di distinguere quanto, nelle rappresentazioni linguistiche, dipende dal mondo e quanto dai nostri schemi concettuali. Il ruolo del concetto di verità diventa sempre più complesso, se si prendono sul serio le differenze nei modi di accedervi e nei campi oggettivi di riferimento; ciò dà spazio ad uno spettro molto ampio di posizioni filosofiche, fra loro contrastanti, che rimescolano le carte delle tradizionali controversie tra realisti, antirealisti, relativisti. I saggi compresi in questo volume costituiscono un momento di incontro volto ad afferrare e discutere la fisionomia di queste controversie.

The paper focuses on the kind of expertise required by doctors in health communication and argues that such an expertise is twofold: both epistemological and communicative competences are necessary to achieve compliance with the patient. Firstly, we introduce the specific epistemic competences that deal with diagnosis and its problems. Secondly, we focus on the communicative competences and argue that an inappropriate strategy in communicating the reasons of diagnosis and therapy can make patient compliance unworkable. Finally, we focus on the case of diabetes metaphor and propose the deliberate use of metaphors in health communication as an educational tool. On the one hand, metaphors might help doctors in explaining the disease in simpler terms and framing the experience of illness according to patient’s specific needs. On the other hand, metaphors might encourage a change in patient’s beliefs on their own experience of illness, and enable them to reach a shared decision making with doctors.

La realtà del passato rappresenta uno dei principali problemi riguardanti la semantica giustificazionista proposta da Michael Dummett. L’antirealismo tipico di questa prospettiva determina una concezione del passato piuttosto controintuitiva secondo cui esso «cessa di esistere» quando non lascia tracce e testimonianze. In Truth and the Past, Dummett è tornato sulla questione abbandonando l’antirealismo sul passato con l’obiettivo di evitare questa concezione. Questa svolta rappresenta un inedito spostamento in direzione del realismo, limitato tuttavia dal netto rifiuto di aderire ad una nozione di verità bivalente. Il mio intervento intende ricostruire e analizzare criticamente le ragioni di questa svolta di Dummett e cercare di sondare la solidità e la coerenza di questa rimodulazione del giustificazionismo.

Inferentialism, especially Brandom’s theory, is the project aimed at understanding meaning as determined by inferences, and language as a social practice governed by rational discursive norms. Discursive practice is thus understood as the basic rational practice, where commitments undertaken by participants are evaluated in terms of their being correct/incorrect. This model of explanation is also intended to rescue, by means of reasons, the commitments we undertake ourselves and assess the commitments we attribute to others, in an objective sense: starting from our subjective normative and doxastic attitudes we should be able to use the normative discursive resources apt to assess our commitments, not only referring to what we take to be correct, but also referring to how things actually are.My hypothesis is that this objectivity is not achieved only on the basis of the rational structure of discursive practice. The main worry concerns the fact that material inferences, those responsible for the content of our concepts (and commitments), are in general non-monotonic. These inferences put experts in an advantageous position,namely as those capable of defeasible reasoning. I propose a view by which this asymmetry among language users is the crucial factor in assessing the objectivity of claims within discursive practice.