Alberto Voltolini

As many people have underlined, as regards pictures there are at least two different layers of content. In Voltolini, these layers are: i) the figurative content of a picture, i.e., what one can see in it viz. what the picture presents; ii) the pictorial content of a picture, i.e., what the picture represents, as constrained by its figurative content. As regards ii), there undoubtedly ispictorial misrepresentation. Having the possibility of misrepresenting things is a standard condition in order for a picture to be a representation. Yet as regards i), things are more problematic. First, if one intends that a picture is seen in a way that is impossible for the picture to be seen, there definitely is intentional failure, but there is no figurative mispresentation. Second, alleged cases in which one literally sees in a picture something that does not match what the picture presents are not cases of figurative presentational failure either.

Notwithstanding Plato’s venerable opinion, many people nowadays claim either that mirrors are not pictures, or that, if they are such, they are just transparent pictures in Kendall Walton’s sense of a particular kind of picture (causally based representations, Peircean indexes, namely, natural signs, which are grasped by means of a perceptual experience of transparency—seeing-through—that lets one literally see the object perceived through the picture). In this article, however, I want to argue that mirrors are bona fide pictures. For they are grasped via what, as I assume in the article, makes a picture a picture, that is, a representation with a figurative value, namely, a depiction; namely, a certain seeing-in experience. This is the sui generis perceptual experience that Richard Wollheim originally appealed to. Once this experience is suitably reconceived, one can show how it successfully applies to mirrors as well, in order to prove that they are bona fide pictures. From an aesthetical point of view, this is an important result. For it shows that the class of pictures is broader than what people nowadays think and is closer to the original intuition sustaining Plato’s opinion.

That we can learn something from literature, as cognitivists claim, seems to be a commonplace. However, when one considers matters more deeply, it turns out to be a problematic claim. In this paper, by focusing on general revelatory facts about the world and the human spirit, I hold that the cognitivist claim can be vindicated if one takes it as follows. We do not learn such facts from literature, if by “literature” one means the truth-conditional contents that one may ascribe to textual sentences in their fictional use, i.e., in the use in which one makes believe that things unfold in a certain way. What we improperly call learning from literature amounts to knowing actually true conversational implicatures concerning the above facts as meant by literary authors. So, in one and the same shot, we learn both a general revelatory fact and the fact that such a fact is meant via a true conversational implicature by an author. The author draws that implicature from the different truth-conditional content a sentence possesses when the sentence is interpreted in a fictional context, meant as Kaplan’s (1989) narrow context, i.e., a set of circumstantial parameters (agent, space, time, and world).

In this paper I want to hold, first, that one may suitably reconstruct the relevant kind of mental representational states that fiction typically involves, make-beliefs, as contextually unreal beliefs that, outside fiction, are either matched or non-matched by contextually real beliefs. Yet moreover, I want to claim that the kind of make-believe that may yield the mark of fictionality is not Kendall Walton’s invitation or prescription to imagine. Indeed, in order to appeal in terms of make-believe to a specific form of imagination that fiction distinctively involves, one must move away from the realm of norms in order to attain a cognitive realm; namely, one must look at a specific form of metarepresentational state. This metarepresentational state of make-believe is a second-order representation that is about both real beliefs and make-beliefs, as the first-order representations it compares by acknowledging their contextual distinctness.

: In Cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of perception Athanasios Raftopoulos provides a new defense of the thesis that, unlike early vision, late vision is cognitively penetrable, in accordance with a new definition of cognitive penetrability that is centered on the ideas of direct influence of cognition upon perception and of the epistemic role of perception. This new definition allows him to maintain that late vision is a genuinely perceptive stage of the perceptual process. In this paper, I try to discuss not only whether this new definition has plausible consequences that allow only late vision to be cognitively penetrable but also whether the claim that late vision is genuinely perceptual allows it to have the kind of hybrid content, half nonconceptual and half conceptual, that Raftopoulos now wants to ascribe to it. Keywords: Cognitive Penetrability, weak, strong, and superstrong; Early and Late Vision; Nonconceptual Content Penetralibità cognitiva e visione secondaria Riassunto: In Cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of perception Athanasios Raftopoulos dà una nuova difesa della tesi secondo cui, a differenza della visione primaria, la visione secondaria è penetrabile cognitivamente, secondo una nuova definizione della nozione di penetrabilità cognitiva centrata sulle idee di influenza diretta della cognizione sulla percezione e di ruolo epistemico della percezione. Questa nuova definizione gli consente di sostenere che la visione secondaria è una fase genuinamente percettiva del processo percettivo. Nell’articolo, provo a discutere non solo se la nuova definizione ha conseguenze plausibili che consentono solo alla visione secondaria di essere penetrabile cognitivamente, ma anche se l’idea che la visione secondaria sia genuinamente percettiva consente ad essa di avere il contenuto ibrido, in parte nonconcettuale e in parte concettuale, che Raftopoulos vuole ora ascriverle. Parole chiave: Penetrabilità cognitiva debole, forte e superforte; Visione primaria e secondaria; Contenuto nonconcettuale

According to an intuitive claim, in saying that one sees a picture's subject, i.e., what a picture presents, in the picture's vehicle, i.e., the picture's physical basis, by ‘in’ one does not mean the spatial relation of being in, as holding between such items in the real space. For the picture's subject is knowingly not in the real space where one veridically sees the picture's vehicle. Some theories of pictorial experience have actually agreed with this intuition by claiming that the picture's subject lies in a pictorial space of its own, disconnected from the real space that includes the picture's vehicle. Yet, not only linguistic evidence suggests that when used as above, ‘in’ means precisely that very relation, but an appropriate theory of pictorial experience can justify the above claim.

By resuming ideas originally developed in my Voltolini, I will try to show again that demonstrative reference as to pictorial matters provides good examples in favor of contextualism, the position holding that wide context, the concrete situation of discourse, may have the semantic role of fixing truthconditions for an utterance, i.e., a sentence in that context. This time I will focus on complex cases of pictorial reference, those that cases of complex pictorial experiences such as collapsed seeing-in and nested seeing-in exhibit.

In this article, first of all, the author wants to show that a new justification can be provided for the idea, originally maintained in the disjunctivist camp, that genuine perceptions and hallucinations are metaphysically different kinds of mental states, independently of the fact that they all are perceptual experiences. For even if they share their phenomenal character and their representational content is put aside for the purpose of their metaphysical individuation, as some conjunctivists maintain, they still differ in their mode, insofar as they differ in their functional role. Once things are so put at the metaphysical level, moreover, this account of perceptual experiences leaves room for reintroducing content for such experiences from the rear door; namely, as a singular representational content, just as some direct realists have originally suggested. Finally, this move enables the account to explain not only some intuitive data about perceptual experiences, but also to corroborate its viability, even if it does not rely on antiskeptical motivations.

In the philosophy of fiction, a majority view is continuism, i.e., the thesis that ordinary names, or genuine singular terms in general, directly refer to ordinary real individuals in fiction-involving sentences – e.g. “Napoleon” in the sentences that constitute the text of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But there is also a minority view, exceptionalism, which is the thesis that such terms change their semantic value in such sentences, either by directly referring to fictional surrogates of those individuals – what we may call exceptional hyperrealism about fictional characters – or by acquiring a semantic value that turns them into nonreferential terms, involving no ontological commitment to such characters – exceptional irrealism about fictional characters. In this paper, first of all, I want to support hybrid exceptionalism, according to which both parties are partly right and partly wrong. In the fictional use of fiction-involving sentences, those terms directly refer to ordinary real individuals, as continuists claim, while both in the internal and the external metafictional use of fiction-involving sentences, such terms change their semantic value, as exceptionalists claim. (By contrast, for pure exceptionalists such terms either always refer to fictional surrogates or are nonreferring on all such uses.) Moreover, I will argue that hybrid exceptional hyperrealism must be preferred to hybrid exceptional irrealism: in the latter uses, I claim, such terms directly refer to fictional surrogates.

Some people have stressed that there is a close analogy between meaning experiences, i.e., experiences as of understanding concerning linguistic expressions, and seeing-in experiences, i.e., pictorial experiences of discerning a certain item – what a certain picture presents, viz. the picture’s subject – in another item – the picture’s vehicle, the picture’s physical basis. Both can be seen as fusion experiences, in the minimal sense that they are experiential wholes made up of different aspects. Actually, two important similarities between such experiences may lead one to think that they are experiences of the same type. In this paper, however, I will try to show that notwithstanding such similarities, these experiences are typologically different. For there are two dissimilarities between such experiences that are more relevant on this typological concern than their similarities. Indeed, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are first of all recognitional experiences of a sort that makes them perceptual experiences as well. Moreover, again unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are fusion experiences in the substantial sense that the experiential whole is more than the sum of its experiential parts taken in isolation, for when such parts figure in that whole, they interact with each other. In a nutshell, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are proper fusion experiences.

As far as I can see, there are two basic ways of cashing out the claim that intentionality is ultimately phenomenal: an indirect one, according to which the intentional content of an experiential intentional mental state is determined by the phenomenal character that state already possesses, so that intentionality is so determined only indirectly; a direct one, which centers on the very property of intentionality itself and can further be construed in two manners: either that very property is determined by the above phenomenal character, or it is a sui generis phenomenal property, thereby giving its own contribution to the overall phenomenal character of that state. Yet neither way sounds ultimately satisfying. For the indirect way may work only under the assumption that intentionality is monadic. Since the direct way explicitly endorses this assumption, the indirect way must give pride of place to it. Yet the direct way seems to be unsuccessful, in any of its forms. Thus, the phenomenal intentionality research program ought to give way to another research program concerning intentionality.

In questo lavoro intendo mostrare che il cosiddetto programma intenzionalista, secondo il quale gli aspetti qualitativi del mentale vanno ricondotti alle sue caratteristiche intenzionali, non funziona. Infatti, contrariamente a quanto pensava Brentano, la proprietà che costituisce la parte principale di tali caratteristiche intenzionali, l’intenzionalità, non è il marchio del mentale, né in senso propriamente brentaniano, per cui l’intenzionalità è la condizione necessaria e sufficiente del mentale, né in un senso annacquato recentemente difeso da Tim Crane, per cui l’intenzionalità è solo la condizione necessaria del mentale. Questo però non fa sì che essere mentale sia una mera categoria eterogenea. Può esserci infatti qualcos’altro che funge da marchio del mentale, cioè la coscienza, nel senso fenomenologico della proprietà di essere esperito.

Queremos mostrar que ninguno de los argumentos conocidos a favor del externismo fenoménico es convincente. PE es la tesis de que las propiedades fenoménicas de nuestras experiencias se tienen que individuar en modo amplio en la medida en la que están constituidas por propiedades del mundo. Examinamos los que nos parecen los cinco mejores argumentos a favor de PE. Intentamos mostrar que ninguno de ellos puede establecer el resultado deseado. Mientras no aparezcan argumentos mejores en el debate, no tenemos razón para renunciar a una idea que parece intuitiva y atractiva para muchos psicólogos cognitivos: que la fenomenología es estrecha, es decir, que las propiedades fenoménicas son propiedades intrínsecas de nuestras experiencias. Esta idea subyace a la posición filosófica opuesta, el internismo fenoménico.

In this paper I want to claim, first, that despite close similarities, noneism and Crane’s psychological reductionism are different ontological doctrines. For unlike the latter, the former is ontologically committed to objects that are nonentities. Once one splits ontological from existential commitment, this claim, I guess, is rather uncontroversial. Second, however, I want to claim something more controversial; namely, that this ontological interpretation of noneism naturally makes noneism be nonstandardly read as a form of allism, to be however appropriately distinguished from Quinean allism in terms of the different scope of the overall ontological domain on which the only particular/existential quantifier that there is ranges. This may orient a noneist towards a syncretistic view of existence, according to which, appearances notwithstanding, existence as a whole is captured both by means of second-order and by means of first-order related notions.

Maurizio Ferraris’ theory on social entities presents many interesting analogies with artefactualist theories on fictional entities. Like artefactualism, however, it probably needs some integration. As Ferraris himself acknowledges, mere dependence on subjects does not by itself qualify an entity as social. Moreover, the very same definition of a social entity as an inscribed (social) act seems to yield merely necessary, but not sufficient, identity conditions for such an entity. To my mind, what is needed is a normative element. For a social entity is an intrinsically normative entity, which is (inter alia) composed by something like Searle’s constitutive rules.

Recently, various people have maintained that one must revise either the externalistically-based notion of singular thought or the naïve realism-inspired notion of relational particularity, as respectively applied to some thoughts and to some perceptual experiences. In order to do so, one must either provide a broader notion of singular thought or flank the notion of relational particularity with a broader notion of phenomenal particularity. I want to hold that there is no need of that revision. For the original notions can still play the role for which they were invoked. This requires that (i) both the first and the second notion respectively involve a dependence on and a metaphysical relation to the intentional objects of certain mental states once we are ontologically committed to such objects; (ii) both that object-dependence and that metaphysical relation are interpreted in terms of a substantive individuation of the relevant mental state via the object it is about: that object constitutes the state.

We maintain that no extant argument in favor of phenomenal external- ism is really convincing. PE is the thesis that the phenomenal properties of our experiences must be individuated widely insofar as they are constituted by worldly properties. We consider what we take to be the five best arguments for PE. We try to show that none of them really proves what it aims at proving. Unless better arguments in favor of phenomenal externalism show up in the debate, we see no reason to relinquish an idea that seems intuitive and appeals to many cognitive sci- entists: that phenomenology is narrow, i.e., that phenomenal properties are intrinsic properties of our experiences. This idea grounds the opposite philosophical position, phenomenal internalism.

Carnap (1932) famously attacked Heidegger for having constructed an insane metaphysics based on a misconception of both the logical form and the semantics of ordinary language. In what follows, it will be argued that, once one appropriately reads Heidegger’s famous dictum “the nothing nothings” in a Russellian fashion, there is nothing either logically or semantically wrong with it. The real controversy as to how that sentence has to be evaluated – not as to its meaning but as to its truth – lies at the metaphysico-ontological level.

In this paper, I want to address once more the venerable problem of intentional identity, the problem of how different thoughts can be about the same thing even if this thing does not exist. First, I will try to show that antirealist approaches to this problem are doomed to fail. For they ultimately share a problematic assumption, namely that thinking about something involves identifying it. Second, I will claim that once one rejects this assumption and holds instead that thoughts are constituted either by what they are about, their intentional objects, or by what determines their proposition-like intentional contents, one can address the problem of intentional identity in a different way. One can indeed provide a new solution to it that basically relies on two factors: a) what sort of metaphysical nature intentional objects effectively possess, once they are conceived as schematic objects à la Crane (2001, 2013); b) whether such objects really belong to the overall ontological inventory of what there is. According to this solution, two thoughts are about the same nonexistent intentional object iff i) that object satisfies the identity criterion for objects of that metaphysical kind and ii) objects of that kind belong to the overall ontological inventory of what there is, independently of whether they exist (in a suitable first-order sense of existence). As such, this solution is neither realist nor antirealist: only if condition ii) is satisfied, different thoughts can be about the same nonexistent intentionale; otherwise, they are simply constituted by the same intentional content (provided that this content is not equated with that intentionale). Third, armed with this solution, I will hold that one can find a suitable treatment of the specific and related problem of whether different people may mock-think about the same thing, even if there really is no such thing. Finally, I will try to show that this treatment can be also applied to the case in which different thoughts are, according to phenomenology, about the same intentionale and yet this intentionale is of a kind such that there really are no things of that kind. For in this case, such thoughts are about the same intentionale only fictionally.

In a very recent paper (2010), Dominic McIver Lopes has claimed that pictures perceptually ground demonstrative reference to depicted objects. If as I think Lopes is right, this has important consequences for the debate on the semantics/pragmatics divide. For one can exploit Lopes' claim in order to provide one more argument in favour of the well-known contextualist thesis that wide context has not only both a pre- and a post-semantic role, but also a semantic role – to put it in Perry's (1997) terms.

In a recent paper, Anthony Everett has mounted a very serious attack against realism with respect to fictional entities. According to Everett, ficta raise deep logico-ontological worries, for they violate some basic logical laws and are problematically indeterminate with respect to both their existence and identity. Since an antirealist account for sentences apparently committing us to ficta is available, no such committment is really needed. In this paper I will try to show, first, that the antirealist account Everett proposes for those sentences is not convincing. Moreover, by relying on the Meinongians’ distinctions between i) predicative and propositional negation and ii) either modes of predication or kinds of property, I will argue that the logico-ontological problems Everett arises against ficta can be solved. Finally, I will try to show that both the ‘modes of predication’- and the ‘kinds of property’- distinctions (especially the first one) are not so problematic as Everett holds.

In ontology, realism and anti-realism may be taken as opposite attitudes towards entities of different kinds, so that one may turn out to be a realist with respect to certain entities, and an anti-realist with respect to others. In this book, the editors focus on this controversy concerning social entities in general and fictional entities in particular, the latter often being considered nowadays as kinds of social entities. More specifically, fictionalists (those who maintain that we only make-believe that there are entities of a certain kind) and creationists (those who believe that entities of a certain kind are the products of human activity) present themselves as the champions of the anti-realist and the realist stance, respectively, regarding the above entities. By evaluating the pros and cons of both these positions, this book intends to focus new light on a longstanding debate.

In this paper, I will first of all claim that once one takes proper names as indexicals of a particular sort, indexinames for short, one may account for some tensions that affect our desiderata regarding the use of such names in sentences directly or indirectly involving fiction. According to my proposal, a proper name “N.N.” is an indexical whose character is roughly expressed by the description “the individual called ‘N.N.’ (in context)”, where this description means “the individual one’s interlocutor’s attention is called to by means of ‘N.N.’ (in context)”. This character is a partial function that maps narrow contexts onto referents. Such contexts are enriched narrow contexts, for they also include an ‘acquisition’ parameter, i.e., a parameter filled by a naming practice constituted by a dubbing, which consists in calling via the name one’s interlocutor’s attention to something (if any), and usually also by a certain transmission chain. I will also claim that such a proposal works independently of one’s ontological stance on fictional entities, that is, independently of whether one believes either that there are or that there are no such entities. Moreover, I will claim that such a proposal is better than similar indexicalist proposals such as the one put forward by Tiedke (2011), Finally, I will try to show how this proposal can deal with some objections one may raise against an indexicalist treatment of proper names.

There is definitely a family resemblance between what contemporary contextualism maintains in philosophy of language and some of the claims about meaning put forward by the later Wittgenstein. Yet the main contextualist thesis, namely that linguistic meaning undermines truth-conditions, was not defended by Wittgenstein. If a claim in this regard can be retrieved in Wittgenstein despite his manifest antitheoretical attitude, it is instead that truth-conditions trivially supervene on linguistic meaning. There is, however, another Wittgensteinian claim that truly has a contextualist flavour, namely that linguistic meaning is itself wide-contextual. To be sure, this claim does not lead to the eliminativist/intentionalist conception of linguistic meaning that radical contextualists have recently developed. Rather, it goes together with a robust conception of linguistic meaning as intrinsically normative. Yet it may explain why Wittgenstein is taken to be a forerunner of contemporary contextualism.

In (1959), Carnap famously attacked Heidegger for having constructed an insane metaphysics based on a misconception of both the logical form and the semantics of ordinary language. In what follows, it will be argued that, once one appropriately (i.e., in a Russellian fashion) reads Heidegger’s famous sentence that should paradigmatically exemplify such a misconception, i.e., “the nothing nothings”, there is nothing either logically or semantically wrong with it. The real controversy as to how that sentence has to be evaluated—not as to its meaning but as to its truth—lies at the metaphysico- ontological level. For in order for the sentence to be true one has to endorse an ontology of impossibilia and Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles.

In his (2001a) and in some related papers, Tim Crane has maintained that intentional objects are schematic entities, in the sense that, insofar as being an intentional object is not a genuine metaphysical category, qua objects of thought intentional objects have no particular nature. This approach to intentionalia is the metaphysical counterpart of the later Husserl's ontological approach to the same entities, according to which qua objects of thought intentionalia are indifferent to existence. But to buy a metaphysically deflationary approach does not mean to buy an ontologically deflationary approach, according to which we have to accept all the intentional objects there apparently are. Being metaphysically deflationary on intentionalia rather means that from the ontological point of view one must really allow only for those intentionalia for which one is entitled to say that there are such things; typically, for which an ontological proof is available. From metaphysical schematism plus conditional, or partial, ontological committment to intentionalia, further interesting consequences follow. First, this theoretical combination allows one to deal with the ‘too-many entities’ problem (may one fail to accept an ontological proof for an entity of a given kind if she thinks that the entity we would have to be committed to is an entity of another kind?). Second, it allows one to deal with the ‘genuinely true report’ problem (how is it that if we exercise mindreading with respect to a somehow deluded person, we want our reports to come out as really, not merely fictionally, true?)