-
6Recensione di M. Viola, La mente nel cervello. Introduzione all’ontologia cognitivaRivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 15 (1): 77-78. 2024.
-
13Experiences of silent readingPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1-18. forthcoming.In The Performance of Reading, Peter Kivy introduces, on a purely phenomenological basis, an interesting and potentially fruitful analogy between the experience of silently reading literary texts and the experience of silently reading musical scores. In Kivy’s view, both mental experiences involve a critical element of auditory mental imagery, consisting in having a performance “in the head” or the mind’s ear. This analogy might have significant implications for the ontological status of literar…Read more
-
39Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in the Philosophy of Neuroscience (edited book)Springer. 2020.This volume brings together new papers advancing contemporary debates in foundational, conceptual, and methodological issues in cognitive neuroscience. The different perspectives presented in each chapter have previously been discussed between the authors, as the volume builds on the experience of Neural Mechanisms Online – webinar series on the philosophy of neuroscience organized by the editors of this volume. The contributed chapters pertain to five core areas in current philosophy of neurosc…Read more
-
23Critique of pure Bayesian cognitive science: A view from the philosophy of scienceEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (3): 1-17. 2023.Bayesian approaches to human cognition have been extensively advocated in the last decades, but sharp objections have been raised too within cognitive science. In this paper, we outline a diagnosis of what has gone wrong with the prevalent strand of Bayesian cognitive science (here labelled pure Bayesian cognitive science), relying on selected illustrations from the psychology of reasoning and tools from the philosophy of science. Bayesians’ reliance on so-called method of rational analysis is a…Read more
-
18The Different Bases of the Meaning and of the Seeing-in ExperiencesReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1-24. forthcoming.There are some complex experiences, such as the experiences that allow us to understand linguistic expressions and pictures respectively, which seem to be very similar. For they are stratified experiences in which, on top of grasping certain low-level properties, one also grasps some high-level semantic-like properties. Yet first of all, those similarities notwithstanding, a phenomenologically-based reflection shows that such experiences are different. For a meaning experience has a high-level f…Read more
-
29The empirical status of semantic perceptualismMind and Language 38 (4): 1000-1020. 2022.Semantic perceptualism is the thesis that meaning experiences are forms of perceptual experiences. According to its defenders, this view is motivated not only by philosophical considerations, but also by empirical evidence. In the present article, I shall provide the first comprehensive and critical review of the empirical evidence in support of semantic perceptualism, including a detailed analysis of the relevant neuroanatomical data. The conclusions of my analysis are largely pessimistic. I be…Read more
-
54Perception of Faces and Other Progressively Higher-Order PropertiesTopoi 41 (4): 671-684. 2022.On the basis of a new criterion for a property to be perceivable–a property is perceivable iff it is not only given immediately and non-volitionally, but also grasped via a holistic form of attention–in this paper we will claim that not only facial properties, but other high-order properties located in a hierarchy of high-order properties, notably gender and racial properties, are perceivable as well. Such claims will be both theoretically and empirically justified.
-
35The semantic view of computation and the argument from the cognitive science practiceSynthese 200 (2): 1-24. 2022.According to the semantic view of computation, computations cannot be individuated without invoking semantic properties. A traditional argument for the semantic view is what we shall refer to as the argument from the cognitive science practice. In its general form, this argument rests on the idea that, since cognitive scientists describe computations (in explanations and theories) in semantic terms, computations are individuated semantically. Although commonly invoked in the computational litera…Read more
-
58Abductive reasoning in cognitive neuroscience: weak and strong reverse inferenceSynthese 200 (2): 1-26. 2022.Reverse inference is a crucial inferential strategy used in cognitive neuroscience to derive conclusions about the engagement of cognitive processes from patterns of brain activation. While widely employed in experimental studies, it is now viewed with increasing scepticism within the neuroscience community. One problem with reverse inference is that it is logically invalid, being an instance of abduction in Peirce’s sense. In this paper, we offer the first systematic analysis of reverse inferen…Read more
-
271La modellizzazione computazionale della competenza inferen-ziale e della competenza referenzialeSistemi Intelligenti. forthcoming.In philosophy of language, a distinction has been proposed by Diego Marconi between two aspects of lexical competence, i.e. referential and inferential competence. The former accounts for the relation-ship of words to the world, the latter for the relationship of words among themselves. The aim of the pa-per is to offer a critical discussion of the kind of formalisms and computational techniques that can be used in Artificial Intelligence to model the two aspects of lexical competence, and of th…Read more
-
Inferential and referential lexical semantic competence: A critical review of the supporting evidenceJournal of Neurolinguistic 44 163-189. 2017.In philosophical semantics, a distinction has been proposed between inferential and referential lexical semantic competence. The former accounts for the relationship of words to the world, the latter for the relationship of words among themselves. Recent neuroscience research suggests that the distinction might be actually neurally implemented. That is, that inferential and referential abilities might be underpinned by two functionally independent cognitive architectures, with partly different n…Read more
-
43Brain and the Lexicon: The Neural Basis of Inferential and Referential CompetenceSpringer International Publishing. 2019.This monograph offers a novel, neurocognitive theory concerning words and language. It explores the distinction between inferential and referential semantic competence. The former accounts for the relationship of words among themselves, the latter for the relationship of words to the world. The author discusses this distinction at the level of the human brain on both theoretical and neuroscientific grounds. In addition, this investigation considers the relation between the inf/ref neurocognitive…Read more
-
34The Empirical Status of the Pictorial View of MeaningJournal of Consciousness Studies 26 (11-12): 33-59. 2019.Advocates of the pictorial theory of meaning claimed that the meaning of a word is a mental picture and that lexical semantic competence --i.e. knowledge of word meaning -- is closely connected to visual imagery. As a philosophical theory of meaning, the pictorial theory was discredited in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, there is evidence that visual imagery -- the generation of visual mental images -- does play a role in semantic processing and is not just a possible side effect of it. The…Read more
-
31Truth-Conditional Cognitivism and the Lexical ProblemTopoi 40 (1): 43-54. 2019.When dealing with ‘meaning’ or related notions, one cannot ignore what for a long time was the dominant paradigm in semantics. According to such paradigm, truth-conditional formal semantics for natural language is a theory of semantic competence. In this article, I shall discuss a foundational problem for such semantic program. I shall first be following authors who claim that truth-conditional formal semantics is unable to provide a complete account of lexical competence, and, therefore, it suf…Read more
-
16Un dialogo tra neuroscienze e filosofiaRivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 9 (3): 208-212. 2018.
-
218AISC 2018 - Extended Abstract Pavia - December 2018In Cristiano Chesi (ed.), AISC Proceedings, Pavia.. pp. 20-23. forthcoming.Extended abstract presented at the AISC 2018 Conference, 15th International Conference of the Italian Association of Cognitive Science, Pavia.
-
289The computational modeling of inferential and referential competenceIn Fabrizio Calzavarini & Antonio Lieto (eds.), AISC 2018 Proceedings. 2018.Abstract.
Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy