•  7
    Habits, Motor Representations and Practical Modes of Presentation
    In Raffaela Giovagnoli & Robert Lowe (eds.), The Logic of Social Practices II, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 177-191. 2023.
    Habits usually come in the form of skilled action. Then, accurately explaining the nature of habitual actions requires to say something on skilled actions. Here we focus on the debate on skilled actions in the philosophical literature informed by motor neuroscience. The main question in the literature is whether practical knowledge can be reduced to propositional knowledge and, if not, how these different forms of knowledge can be related when skilled motor performance is in play. But this, ipso…Read more
  •  14
    Philosophers and cognitive scientists have been debating about the nature of practical knowledge in skilled action. A big challenge is that of establishing whether and how practical knowledge (knowledge-how) is influenced by, or related to propositional knowledge (knowledge-that). This becomes even more challenging when trying to understand how propositional and motor representations may cooperate in making action performance flexible, while also remaining rational. In this paper, we offer an ac…Read more
  •  41
    What mental states are required for an agent to know-how to perform an action? This question fuels one of the hottest debates in the current literature on philosophy of action. Answering this question means facing what we call here The Challenge of Format Dualism, which consists in establishing which is the format of the mental representations involved in practical knowledge and, in case they are given in more than one format, explaining how these different formats can interlock. This challenge …Read more
  •  19
    Through the Flat Canvas: The Motor Meaning of Realistic Paintings
    Aisthesis: Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico 9 (2): 197-217. 2016.
    It is well known that common objects in the environment can evoke possibilities of action, but what about their bi-dimensional representation? Do pictures or paintings that represent action-related objects evoke the same possibilities of actions of the objects that they represent? In contemporary cognitive science, there are two contrasting views on this issue. On the one hand, the ecological-dispositional approach to perception supports the idea that viewing depicted objects as endowed with the…Read more
  •  28
    How can we explain the intelligence of behaviors? Radical enactivists maintain that intelligent behaviors can be explained without involving the attribution of representational contents. In this paper, I challenge this view by providing arguments showing that the intelligence of a behavior is reliant on ways of presenting the relative purpose and the environment in which that behavior is performed. This involves that a behavior is intelligent only if intesional contents are ascribed to the relat…Read more
  •  4
    L'io e i suoi sé
    Rivista di Storia Della Filosofia 1 161-163. 2011.
  •  45
    Habitual actions have a history of practice and repetition that frees us from attending to what we are doing. Nevertheless, habitual actions seem to be intentional. What does account for the intentionality of habitual actions if they are automatically performed and controlled? In this paper, we address a possible response to a particular version of this issue, that is, the problem of understanding how the intention to execute a habitual action, which comes in a propositional format, interlocks w…Read more
  •  40
    According to a shared functionalist view in philosophy of mind, a cognitive system, and cognitive function thereof, is based on the components of the organism it is realized by which, indeed, play a causal role in regulating our cognitive processes. This led philosophers to suggest also that, thus, cognition could be seen as an extended process, whose vehicle can extend not only outside the brain but also beyond bodily boundaries, on different kinds of devices. This is what we call the ‘External…Read more
  •  5
    Interview with Adolf Grünbaum
    with Duccio Manetti
    Humana Mente 4 (13). 2010.
  •  12
    L'io E I Suoi Sé
    Rivista di Storia Della Filosofia 66 (1). 2011.
  • Arnaldo Benini
    Humana Mente 3 (9). 2009.
  •  11
    Lo Statuto Metodologico dei Contenuti Intenzionali
    Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 10 (3): 265-281. 2019.
    Riassunto: Il dibattito in filosofia della mente è caratterizzato dal crescente interesse per nuove forme di eliminativismo, note con il nome di teorie enattiviste radicali della mente. Secondo la concezione enattivista radicale, il contenuto intenzionale di uno stato mentale è empiricamente sottodeterminato, pertanto non può essere utilizzato quale elemento di una spiegazione naturalistica del comportamento. Tuttavia, sebbene il riferimento ai contenuti intenzionali non sia conciliabile con il …Read more
  •  28
    Between vision and action: introduction to the special issue
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 17): 3899-3911. 2019.
  •  1
    A Model for the Interlock Between Propositional and Motor Formats
    In Matthieu Fontaine, Cristina Barés-Gómez, Francisco Salguero-Lamillar, Lorenzo Magnani & Ángel Nepomuceno-Fernández (eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology: Inferential Models for Logic, Language, Cognition and Computation, Springer Verlag. 2019.
  •  8
    This book reports on cutting-edge concepts related to Bourbaki’s notion of structures mères. It merges perspectives from logic, philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science, suggesting how they can be combined with Bourbaki’s mathematical structuralism in order to solve foundational, ontological and epistemological problems using a novel category-theoretic approach. By offering a comprehensive account of Bourbaki’s structuralism and answers to several important questions that have arisen in con…Read more
  •  38
    Solving the Interface Problem Without Translation: The Same Format Thesis
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1): 301-333. 2018.
    In this article, we propose a new account concerning the interlock between intentions and motor representations (henceforth: MRs), showing that the interface problem is not as deep as previously proposed. Before discussing our view, in the first section we report the ideas developed in the literature by those who have tried to solve this puzzle before us. The article proceeds as follows. In Sections 2 and 3, we address the views by Butterfill and Sinigaglia, and Mylopoulos and Pacherie, respecti…Read more
  •  26
    Radical Enactivism holds that the best explanation of basic forms of cognition is provided without involving information of any sort. According to this view, the ability to perceive visual affordances should be accounted for in terms of extensional covariations between variables spanning the agent’s body and the environment. Contrary to Radical Enactivism, I argue that the intensional properties of cognition cannot be ignored, and that the way in which an agent represents the world has consequen…Read more
  •  67
    Can Affordances Explain Behavior?
    with Alexandros Tillas, Gottfried Vosgerau, and Tim Seuchter
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2): 295-315. 2017.
    In this paper we secure the explanatory value of affordances by treating them as relational properties and as inherently linked to unintentional movements and possible intentional actions. We distinguish between Basic affordances, which are related to unintentional movements, and Complex affordances, which are subjective and executively controlled by individuals. The linkage between affordances and motor intentions allows for accounting for the infinite number of affordances that any given objec…Read more
  •  76
    Semantic and pragmatic integration in vision for action
    Consciousness and Cognition 48 40-54. 2017.
    According to an influential view, the detection of action possibilities and the selection of a plan for action are two segregated steps throughout the processing of visual information. This classical approach is committed with the assumption that two independent types of processing underlie visual perception: the semantic one, which is at the service of the identification of visually presented objects, and the pragmatic one which serves the execution of actions directed to specific parts of the …Read more
  •  121
    Extending the notion of affordance
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2): 275-293. 2014.
    Post-Gibson attempts to set out a definition of affordance generally agree that this notion can be understood as a property of the environment with salience for an organism’s behavior. According to this view, some scholars advocate the idea that affordances are dispositional properties of physical objects that, given suitable circumstances, necessarily actualize related actions. This paper aims at assessing this statement in light of a theory of affordance perception. After years of discontinuit…Read more