•  19
    Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 1 From Theory to Practice (edited book)
    with Keith Allan, Jay David Atlas, Brian E. Butler, Alessandro Capone, Marco Carapezza, Denis Delfitto, Michael Devitt, Graeme Forbes, Alessandra Giorgi, Neal R. Norrick, Nathan Salmon, Gunter Senft, Alberto Voltolini, and Richard Warner
    Springer Verlag. 2018.
    This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more em…Read more
  •  19
    Overcoming the acting/reasoning dualism in intelligent behavior
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (4): 709-713. 2017.
    In a paper that recently appeared in this journal, we proposed a model that aims at providing a comprehensive account of our ability to intelligently use tools, bridging sensorimotor and reasoning-based explanations of this ability. Central to our model is the notion of generalized motor programs for tool use, which we defined as a synthesis between classic motor programs, as described in the scientific literature, and Peircean habits. In his commentary, Osiurak proposes a critique of the notion…Read more
  •  3
    On the Embodiment of Negation in Italian Sign Language: An Approach Based on Multiple Representation Theories
    with Giulia Di Stasio and Sabina Fontana
    Frontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.
    Negation can be considered a shared social action that develops since early infancy with very basic acts of refusals or rejection. Inspired by an approach to the embodiment of concepts known as Multiple Representation Theories, the present paper explores negation as an embodied action that relies on both sensorimotor and linguistic/social information. Despite the different variants, MRT accounts share the basic ideas that both linguistic/social and sensorimotor information concur to the processe…Read more
  •  10
    Editorial: Experimental Approaches to Pragmatics
    with Pietro Perconti, Gerard Steen, Yury Shtyrov, and Yan Huang
    Frontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.
  •  4
    Abductive inferences in pragmatic processes
    with Marco Carapezza
    In Keith Allan, Jay David Atlas, Brian E. Butler, Alessandro Capone, Marco Carapezza, Valentina Cuccio, Denis Delfitto, Michael Devitt, Graeme Forbes, Alessandra Giorgi, Neal R. Norrick, Nathan Salmon, Gunter Senft, Alberto Voltolini & Richard Warner (eds.), Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 1 From Theory to Practice, Springer Verlag. pp. 221-242. 2018.
    In pragmatic theories, the notion of inference plays a central role, together with the communicative act in which it is activated. Although some scholars, such as Levinson, Sperber and Wilson, propose detailed and accurate analyses of this notion, we will maintain that these analyses can be better systematized if seen through Peirce’s notion of abduction. We will try to maintain that the variety of inferential processes in play in a linguistic act is mostly of an abductive nature. Moreover, we w…Read more
  •  28
    Types of abduction in tool behavior
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (2): 255-273. 2017.
    Tool-use behavior is currently one of the most intriguing and widely debated topics in cognitive neuroscience. Different accounts of our ability to use tools have been proposed. In the first part of the paper we review the most prominent interpretations and suggest that none of these accounts, considered in itself, is sufficient to explain tool use. In the second part of the paper we disentangle three different types of reasoning on tools, characterized by a different distribution of motor and c…Read more
  •  62
    Is displacement possible without language? Evidence from preverbal infants and chimpanzees
    with Marco Carapezza
    Philosophical Psychology 28 (3): 369-386. 2015.
    Is displacement possible without language? This question was addressed in a recent work by Liszkowski and colleagues . The authors carried out an experiment to demonstrate that 12-month-old prelinguistic infants can communicate about absent entities by using pointing gestures, while chimpanzees cannot. The main hypothesis of their study is that displacement does not depend on language but is, however, exclusively human and instead depends on species-specific social-cognitive human skills. Agains…Read more
  •  28
    In the past few years, behavioural, neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies have been suggesting that Embodied Simulation represents a constitutive feature of language understanding. However, this claim is still controversial, as is the definition of Embodied Simulation. In this paper, I aim at providing a more suitable definition of Embodied Simulation. I will then apply this definition to the study of bodily metaphors. Embodied Simulation gets us attuned with our social world and it provid…Read more
  •  58
    Although ontogeny cannot recapitulate phylogeny, a two-level model of the acquisition of language will be here proposed and its implication for the evolution of the faculty of language will be discussed. It is here proposed that the identification of the cognitive requirements of language during ontogeny could help us in the task of identifying the phylogenetic achievements that concurred, at some point, to the acquisition of language during phylogeny. In this model speaking will be considered a…Read more