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321Wittgenstein's Thought Experiments and Relativity TheoryIn Newton Da Costa & Shyam Wuppuluri (eds.), Wittgensteinian : Looking at the World From the Viewpoint of Wittgenstein's Philosophy, Springer Verlag. 2019.In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity th…Read more
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2Wittgenstein’s Thought Experiments and Relativity TheoryIn A. C. Grayling, Shyam Wuppuluri, Christopher Norris, Nikolay Milkov, Oskari Kuusela, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Beth Savickey, Jonathan Beale, Duncan Pritchard, Annalisa Coliva, Jakub Mácha, David R. Cerbone, Paul Horwich, Michael Nedo, Gregory Landini, Pascal Zambito, Yoshihiro Maruyama, Chon Tejedor, Susan G. Sterrett, Carlo Penco, Susan Edwards-Mckie, Lars Hertzberg, Edward Witherspoon, Michel ter Hark, Paul F. Snowdon, Rupert Read, Nana Last, Ilse Somavilla & Freeman Dyson (eds.), Wittgensteinian : Looking at the World From the Viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Springer Verlag. pp. 341-362. 2019.In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity th…Read more
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2Wittgenstein and our timesIn Rosaria Egidi (ed.), n Search of a New Humanism: the Philosophy of Georg Henrik von Wright, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1999.In "Wittgenstein in relation to his times" Von Wright1 poses a dilemma regarding the relationship between three wittgensteinian tenets: (i) the view that individual's beliefs and thoughts are entrenched in accepted language games and socially sanctioned forms of life (ii) the view that "philosophical problems are disquietudes of the mind caused by some malfunctioning in the language games, and hence in the way of life of the community". (iii) the "rejection of the scientific-technological civili…Read more
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85New Perspectives on Analytic PragmatismPhilosophia 40 (1): 1-11. 2012.Analytic pragmatism is a framework of analysis elaborated by Robert Brandom, whose goal is to explain the relations between meaning and use according to a systematic and general method of inquiry. In April 2009, a workshop was organized to discuss the recent developments of this new theoretical approach. Brandom delivered three lectures, where he explored some aspects of analytic pragmatism and addressed the motivating themes of this enterprise, while the contribution from the other speakers ran…Read more
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122Wittgensteinian : Looking at the World From the Viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2019.“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philos…Read more
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14Discussione su "Lexical Competence" di Diego MarconiIride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 11 (2): 389-402. 1998.
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284Wittgenstein's Non-non-cognitivismIn Roberta Dreon (ed.), SENZA TRAMPOLI Saggi filosofici per Luigi Perissinotto, Mimesis. pp. 1-8. 2023.In this paper, we present one of the main starting points of naturalism in ethics: Geach’s challenge against non-cognitivism. We try to find an answer to Geach’s challenge in the notion of family resemblance applied to ethics. In doing so we recover a not much-discussed influence of Moore on Wittgenstein’s conception of family resemblance, which leads us to define Wittgenstein as non-non-cognitivist in ethics. Pre print (some changes in the published edition)
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358Gottlob Frege and Gongsun Long in DialogueAsian Studies 11 (1): 267-295. 2023.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…Read more
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452Default Reasoning and the Law: A DialogueRevus. Journal for Constitutional Theory and Philosophy of Law / Revija Za Ustavno Teorijo in Filozofijo Prava 47. 2022.Reasoning by default is a relevant aspect of everyday life that has traditionally attracted the attention of many fields of research, from psychology to the philosophy of logic, from economics to artificial intelligence. Also in the field of law, default reasoning is widely used by lawyers, judges and other legal decision-makers. In this paper, a philosopher of language (Carlo Penco) and a philosopher of law (Damiano Canale) attempt to explore some uses of default reasoning that are scarcely con…Read more
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266Recovering the European dimension in the philosophy of language. The Italian analytic traditionBlityri 10 (2): 159-189. 2021.The paper presents the history of Italian scholars and research centres that contributed to the emergence of the analytic philosophy of language in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century. After a brief description of the work completed in the fifties, I describe the formation of a network of people interested in those contents and methods, trace the origins to the influence of different centres of research in the US and Europe and shortly describe the main events, seminars, conferences …Read more
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14Indexicals and essential demonstrationsSemiotica 2021 (240): 261-284. 2021.In this paper, I discuss some of Maximilian de Gaynesford’s arguments regarding indexicals. Although I agree with his treatment of the first singular personal pronoun as a prototype of demonstrative expressions, I challenge his refusal to treat indexicals as complex demonstratives. To offer an alternative to this refusal I try to develop a common ground from different theories that consider indexicals as linguistic constructions that embed a nonlinguistic element, following an original idea in F…Read more
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110John Perry Frege's Detour. An Essay on Meaning, Reference, and Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 148. ISBN 978–0–19–881282–1 (review)Theoria 86 (3): 413-424. 2020.
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435Wittgenstein’s Thought Experiments and Relativity TheoryIn A. C. Grayling, Shyam Wuppuluri, Christopher Norris, Nikolay Milkov, Oskari Kuusela, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Beth Savickey, Jonathan Beale, Duncan Pritchard, Annalisa Coliva, Jakub Mácha, David R. Cerbone, Paul Horwich, Michael Nedo, Gregory Landini, Pascal Zambito, Yoshihiro Maruyama, Chon Tejedor, Susan G. Sterrett, Carlo Penco, Susan Edwards-Mckie, Lars Hertzberg, Edward Witherspoon, Michel ter Hark, Paul F. Snowdon, Rupert Read, Nana Last, Ilse Somavilla & Freeman Dyson (eds.), Wittgensteinian : Looking at the World From the Viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Springer Verlag. pp. 341-362. 2019.In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity th…Read more
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152Some Reflections on ConventionsCroatian Journal of Philosophy 19 (3): 375-402. 2019.In Overlooking Conventions Michael Devitt argues in defence of the traditional approach to semantics. Devitt’s main line of argument is an inference to the best explanation: nearly all cases that linguistic pragmatists discuss in order to challenge the traditional approach to semantics are better explained by adding conventions into language, in the form of expanding the range of polysemy or the range of indexicality (in the broad sense of linguistically governed context sensitivity). In this pa…Read more
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28Meaning and Context-SensitivityInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020.Meaning and Context-Sensitivity Truth-conditional semantics explains meaning in terms of truth-conditions. The meaning of a sentence is given by the conditions that must obtain in order for the sentence to be true. The meaning of a word is given by its contribution to the truth-conditions of the sentences in which it occurs. What a speaker … Continue reading Meaning and Context-Sensitivity →
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598Pragmatic ambiguity and Kripke’s dialogue against DonnellanÁgora Filosófica 19 (1): 103-134. 2019.DOIhttps://doi.org/10.25247/P1982-999X.2019.v19n1.p103-134• Esta obra está licenciada sob uma licençaCreative Commons Atribuição 4.0 InternacionalISSN 1982-999x|Pragmatic ambiguity and Kripke’s dialogue against DonnellanAmbiguidade Pragmática e o diálogo de Kripke contra DonnellanCarlo Penco (Universidade de Genova, Itália)AbstractIn this paper I discuss Donnellan’s claim of the pragmatic ambiguity of the distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite …Read more
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396Sense and Linguistic Meaning: A solution to the Burge-Kripke ConflictParadigmi 3 75-89. 2013.When “Sinning Against Frege” was published in 1979 I thought it should have given a real turn in the discussion on Frege’s ideas. Actually the impact was less then I imagined, and the problem was that – at the end of the story – Tyler Burge’s interpretation should have posed a shadow on the direct reference theories and the Millean criticism of descriptivist theories of proper names, based on the criticism of the identification of Frege’s notion of sense with linguistic meaning or connotation1. …Read more
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323Kaplan's Sloppy Thinker and the Demonstrative Origine of IndeicalsQuaderni di Semantica 137-157. 2018.In this paper we give some suggestions from etymology on the contrast between Kaplan’s direct reference theory and a neo-Fregean view on indexicals. After a short summary of the philosophical debate on indexicals (§1), we use some remarks about the hidden presence of a demonstrative root in all indexicals to derive some provisional doubts concerning Kaplan’s criticism of what he calls “sloppy thinker” (§2). To support those doubts, we will summarise some etymological data on the derivation of th…Read more
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277After presenting Kripke’s criticism to Frege’s ideas on context dependence of thoughts, I present two recent attempts of considering cognitive aspects of context dependent expressions inside a truth conditional pragmatics or semantics: Recanati’s non-descriptive modes of presentation (MOPs) and Kaplan’s ways of having in mind (WHIMs). After analysing the two attempts and verifying which answers they should give to the problem discussed by Kripke, I suggest a possible interpretation of these atte…Read more
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44Contexts in Philosophy: Pragmatic competence as filterModeling and Using Context 2 (1): 1-19. 2018.This programmatic paper is an attempt to connect some worries in the philosophy of language with some traditional views in artificial intelligence. After a short introduction to the notion of context in philosophy (§1), starting from the inventor of mathematical logic, Gottlob Frege, I list three debates in the philosophy of language where the solution is strongly undecided: §2 treats the debate between holism and molecularism; §3 describes the debate on the boundaries between semantics and prag…Read more
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578Refusing to Endorse. A must Explanation for Pejoratives.In Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Eva Picardi on Language, Analysis and History, Palgrave. pp. 219-239. 2018.In her analysis of pejoratives, Eva Picardi rejects a too sharp separation between descriptive and expressive content. I reconstruct some of her arguments, endorsing Eva’s criticism of Williamson’s analysis of Dummett and developing a suggestion by Manuel Garcia Carpintero on a speech act analysis of pejoratives. Eva’s main concern is accounting for our instinctive refusal to endorse an assertion containing pejoratives because it suggests a picture of reality we do not share. Her stance might be…Read more
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742Donnellan's Misdescriptions and Loose TalkIn Maria De Ponte Kepa Korta (ed.), Reference and Representation in Language and Thought, Oxford University Press. pp. 104-125. 2017.Keith Donnellan wrote his paper on definite descriptions in 1966 at Cornell University, an environment where nearly everybody was discussing Wittgenstein’s ideas of meaning as use. However, his idea of different uses of definite descriptions became one of the fundamental tenets against descriptivism, which was considered one of the main legacies of the Frege–Russell– Wittgenstein view; and I wonder whether a more Wittgensteinian interpretation of Donnellan’s work is possible.
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193Keeping track of individuals: Brandom's analysis of Kripke's puzzle and the content of beliefPragmatics and Cognition 13 (1): 177-201. 2005.This paper gives attention to a special point in Brandom
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Gottlob Frege |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Gottlob Frege |
Complex Demonstratives |
Demonstratives, Misc |