•  5
    Two levels in the feeling of familiarity
    Theoria 89 (6): 823-839. 2024.
    This paper explores the role of phenomenology in the understanding of the cognitive processes of coupling/decoupling, defending the Wittgensteinian idea that phenomenology can play a crucial role as a description of immediate (social) experience. We argue that epistemic feelings can provide a phenomenological description of the development of a subject's everyday experience, tracking the transition from the processes of coupling/decoupling and recoupling with the world. In particular, the feelin…Read more
  •  4
    The Communicative Effects of Metaphors for Vaccination as a Collective Health Endeavour
    with Pietro Salis and Rachele Fanari
    In Kristien Hens & Andreas De Block (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Medicine, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 285-304. 2023.
    In health communication, metaphor can be considered as a reasoning device to let people understand an abstract concept in terms of a concrete one (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Bowdle and Gentner 2005). Both the positive and negative communicative effects of metaphors have been largely pointed out in a variety of medical fields, from oncology (Semino et al. 2016, 2018) to mental health (Frezza and Zoccolotti 2019). The use of metaphors in vaccine communication has been less considered, though it migh…Read more
  •  13
    Ignorant Cognition: Limits, Habits and Imaginative Thinking (review)
    Studies in Philosophy and Education 40 (2): 225-229. 2021.
  •  261
    Exploring Metaphor’s Communicative Effects in Reasoning on Vaccination
    with Pietro Salis, Cristina Sechi, and Rachele Fanari
    Frontiers in Psychology 13 (1027733.): 1-15. 2022.
    Introduction: The paper investigates the impact of the use of metaphors in reasoning tasks concerning vaccination, especially for defeasible reasoning cases. We assumed that both metaphor and defeasible reasoning can be relevant to let people understand vaccination as an important collective health phenomenon, by anticipating possible defeating conditions. Methods: We hypothesized that extended metaphor could improve both the argumentative and the communicative effects of the message. We designe…Read more
  •  3
    Feeling the extraordinary in ordinary language
    Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 10 (1): 179-206. 2022.
  •  8
    Comprensione vs. produzione del sarcasmo: il ruolo delle capacità affettive e argomentative in età evolutiva
    with Roberta Cocco
    Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 12 (2): 137-150. 2021.
    Riassunto: Nell’età dello sviluppo, i bambini iniziano a comprendere e a produrre le prime espressioni ironiche, in particolare nel contesto familiare. Sebbene sia comprensione sia produzione di ironia richiedano abilità linguistiche, pragmatiche, di Teoria della Mente e di tipo socio-comunicativo, non è ancora chiaro come tali abilità entrino in gioco nel caso della produzione del sarcasmo. Questo contributo ripercorre gli studi principali sulla comprensione vs. produzione dell’ironia in età ev…Read more
  •  29
    In argumentation, metaphors are often considered as ambiguous or deceptive uses of language leading to fallacies of reasoning. However, they can also provide useful insights into creative argumentation, leading to genuinely new knowledge. Metaphors entail a framing effect that implicitly provides a specific perspective to interpret the world, guiding reasoning and evaluation of arguments. In the same vein, emotions could be in sharp contrast with proper reasoning, but they can also be cognitive …Read more
  • Lexical Ambiguity in Elementary Inferences: an Experimental Study
    Discipline filosofiche. 25 (1): 149-172. 2015.
    In this paper we discuss how common meaning ambiguities influence the understanding of an elementary argument. In order to understand how, and to what extent, participants’ intuitions on the strength of a syllogism are influenced by meaning ambiguities, we present the results of a pilot study. The study specifically focuses on a fallacy of lexical ambiguity, where the meanings of the middle term diverge in the two premises. We hypothesize that the evaluation of the strength of an argument of thi…Read more
  •  12
    Natura multimodale e creatività del linguaggio poetico
    Rivista di Estetica 70 75-91. 2019.
    The exceptional nature of poetic language – testified by its patent untranslatability – represents a problem for philosophy, and particularly for analytic philosophy, which aims to provide an overarching explanation of ordinary language. It is difficult to explain the peculiar creativity of poetic language, starting from a finite basic vocabulary and a finite set of rules to be used by an interpreter who has finite powers. Poetry seems indeed not to respect the semantic innocence, spreading new …Read more
  •  47
    Metaphor has been considered as a cognitive process, independent of the verbal versus visual mode, through which an unknown conceptual domain is understood in terms of another known conceptual domain. Metaphor might instead be viewed as a cognitive process, dependent on the mode, which leads to genuinely new knowledge via ignorance. First, I argue that there are two main senses of ignorance at stake when we understand a metaphor: we ignore some existing properties of the known domain in the sens…Read more
  •  33
    Introduction: Logical Pluralism and Translation
    with Antonio Ledda, Francesco Paoli, and Giuseppe Sergioli
    Topoi 38 (2): 263-264. 2019.
  •  49
    The paper investigates the epistemological and communicative competences the experts need to use and communicate evidence in the reasoning process leading to diagnosis. The diagnosis and diagnosis communication are presented as intertwined processes that should be jointly addressed in medical consultations, to empower patients’ compliance in illness management. The paper presents defeasible reasoning as specific to the diagnostic praxis, showing how this type of reasoning threatens effective…Read more
  •  12
    Argumentation as a Bridge Between Metaphor and Reasoning
    with Maria Rossi and Elisabetta Gola
    In Sarah Bigi & Fabrizio Macagno (eds.), Argumentation and Language — Linguistic, Cognitive and Discursive Explorations, Springer Verlag. 2018.
    The aim of this chapter is to explore the relationship between metaphor and reasoning, by claiming that argumentation might act as a bridge between metaphor and reasoning. Firstly, the chapter introduces metaphor as a framing strategy through which some relevant properties of a source domain are selected to understand a target domain. The mapping of properties from the source to the target domain implicitly forces the interpreter to consider the target from a specific perspective. Secondly, the …Read more
  •  15
    Experts In Meaning Ambiguities
    Humana Mente 8 (28). 2015.
    The discrepancy between the theoretical problems experts raise on polysemy, and the ease with which it is everyday understood by speakers, has been defined as the polysemy paradox. The same could be said for other forms of meaning ambiguity in the non-literal side, as for instance metaphor. A sort of metaphor paradox is raised by the fact that metaphor usually goes unnoticed for most people, even though experts claim that it constitutes a theoretical challenge for understanding human thought. In…Read more
  •  11
    The Experimental Turn in Philosophical Pragmatics
    with Elisabetta Gola
    Humana Mente 5 (23). 2012.
  •  22
    Gender Stereotypes and Figurative Language Comprehension
    with Roberta Cocco
    Humana Mente 5 (22). 2012.
    The paper aims to show how and to what extent social and cultural cues influence figurative language understanding. In the first part of the paper, we argue that social-contextual knowledge is organized in “schemas” or stereotypes, which act as strong bias in speaker’s meaning comprehension. Research in Experimental Pragmatics has shown that age, gender, race and occupation stereotypes are important contextual sources of information to interpret others’ speech and provide an explanation of their…Read more
  •  11
    Introduzione
    with Valentina Cuccio and Paolo Labinaz
    Esercizi Filosofici 6 (1): 1-15. 2011.
    In this Introduction, we provide an overview of the papers included in the special issue of the e-journal Esercizi Filosofici, entitled “La dimensione pragmatica in filosofia, linguistica e semiotica”. The paper is divided into three parts, which are concerned with the application of pragmatics to philosophy, linguistics and semiotics respectively.
  •  505
    Expertise and metaphors in health communication
    with Montibeller Marcello, Rossi Maria Grazia, and Salis Pietro
    Medicina and Storia 9 91-108. 2016.
    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 patien…Read more
  •  6
    L'interprete radicale come" misura" della traduzione in Donald Davidson
    Verifiche: Rivista Trimestrale di Scienze Umane 32 (1): 69-123. 2003.
  •  31
    New Perspectives on Quine’s “Word and Object”
    with Vera Tripodi
    Disputatio 4 (32): 317-322. 2012.
  •  26
    Davidson's Notions of Translation Equivalence
    Journal of Language and Translation 9 (2): 7-29. 2008.
    Francesca Ervas 7 Journal of Language & Translation 9-2September 2008, 7-29 Davidson’s Notions of TranslationEquivalence Francesca Ervas Università Roma Tre Abstract The paper analyses the relationship of semantic equivalence as described by Donald Davidson in his theory of meaning, showing its limits above all in respect to language use in the contextual situation.The notion of equivalence used by the “first” Davidson does not successfully explain why some biconditionals are simply true and why…Read more
  •  47
    This article discusses how, in addition to providing a definition for translation, the concept of equivalence may explain why we can say that sentence S in language L is a translation of sentence S1 in language L1. It analyzes two main kinds of equivalence that are used in analytical philosophy to define translation: semantic equivalence and functional equivalence. This analysis shows that drawing a distinction between semantic and functional equivalence is a way to understand the distinction be…Read more
  •  27
    Introduction
    with Vera Tripodi
    Disputatio 4 (32): 317-322. 2012.
    Vol.IV-No.32_Intro
  • ""The radical interpreter as a" measure" of translation in Donald Davidson
    Verifiche: Rivista Trimestrale di Scienze Umane 32 (1-2): 69-121. 2003.