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Survey on the underrepresentation of women in Philosophy in the Italian Universities and Philosophical Societies.

The seven papers included in this special issue of Argumenta might be ideally divided into two parts. On the one hand, this issue collects four contributions dealing with some important topics in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of language: the modularity of mind (the connections between the “pragmatic” module and epistemic vigilance mechanisms), the problem of perception and its link with action (the alleged anti-representational character of enactivism), the nature of phenomenal content (the plausibility of naïve realism in explaining the phenomenology of veridical visual experience), and the alleged irreducibility of consciousness (the claim that anti-physicalist intuitions are just a by-product of certain epistemological features of phenomenal concepts). On the other hand, there are three more contributions discussing some relevant themes in Logic and Epistemology: the actuality of the ancient Master Argument (its consistency and relationship with contemporary tense logic), the problem of evidence (the kind of evidence, psychological or non-psychological, intuitions actually provide), and that of counterevidence (the possibility that undermining defeaters, contrary to overriding defeaters, require the subject to engage in some higher-order epistemic reasoning).

This paper is an attempt to understand what relationship exists between an original text and its translation. It adopts an analytical approach to the philosophical problem of translation, but it also aims to compare the analytical approach to translation with those of other disciplines, such as linguistic or semiotics. In particular, it considers the relationship between source text and target text a relation of equivalence.This work fulfils the need to make the contemporary debate on equivalence known to the audience interested in the philosophical problem of translation. It also tries to explain why the analysis of the concept of equivalence to a theoretical impasse. The hypothesis of this paper is that the concept of equivalence does not underpin the definition of translation, because it is based on three groundless concepts: 1) the concept of translation unit; 2) the idea that there is a certain relation of sameness/similarity/analogy between translation units;3) the idea that a given "value" or "quality" of a translation unit would remain unchanged in the translation process.

The issue of translation has been pivotal in analytical philosophy of language because it is strictly bound to the problem of meaning. The aim of the paper is introducing and discussing the main translation theories, showing the limits of translation definitions. On the one hand, it aims at understanding why the definition of translation on the basis of other concepts, such as meaning or equivalence, brought to paradoxical outcomes. On the other hand, it aims at showing why such outcomes are not so dramatic and how the notion of translation is instead useful to clarify the deeper mechanisms of language comprehension and linguistic phenomena, in both their semantic and pragmatic aspects. Il tema della traduzione è stato centrale in filosofia analitica del linguaggio perché strettamente legato al problema del significato. Lo scopo di questo articolo è quello di presentare e discutere criticamente le principali teorie della traduzione, mostrando le difficoltà a cui sono andate incontro le varie definizioni di traduzione. Da una parte si cercherà di capire perché la definizione di traduzione in base ad altri concetti, come quello di significato o di equivalenza, abbia portato ad esiti paradossali. D’altra parte, si cercherà di mostrare perché questi esiti non siano così drammatici e come invece questa nozione sia utile a chiarire i meccanismi più profondi sottesi alla comprensione del linguaggio e ai fenomeni linguistici sia di tipo semantico che pragmatico.

For a long time irony has been considered as an antiphrastic mechanism, as saying the opposite of what you mean. The book Irony in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Science Reader (2007), edited by Gibbs and Colston, aims at giving a more complex picture of the studies on this rhetorical figure, by highlighting not only the alternative linguistic theories, but also the cognitive processes involved in irony comprehension. Irony is the overthrow of perspective which opens new alternatives in thought, when reality does not completely satisfy our expectations. L'ironia è stata a lungo vista come un meccanismo antifrastico, come dire il contrario di ciò che pensa. Il libro Irony in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Science Reader (2007), edito da Gibbs e Colston, si propone di dare un'immagine più complessa degli studi su questa figura retorica, che metta in luce non solo le alternative teoriche di stampo linguistico, ma anche i processi cognitivi coinvolti nella comprensione dell'ironia. L'ironia è un rovesciamento di prospettiva che apre nuove alternative di pensiero, di fronte ad una realtà che non soddisfa pienamente le nostre aspettative.

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) was one of the most important analytical philosophers of the 20th century, not only because of the wide range of themes he covered (such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, theory of truth, theory of meaning, epistemology, aesthetics), but also due to the highly unified character of his thought. This essay focuses on the most influential topics of Davidsonian philosophy: the connection between truth and meaning, the central role of interpretation and rationality, the mind-body problem, the nature of beliefs, and the relationship between language and thought. Donald Davidson (1917-2003) è stato uno dei più importanti filosofi analitici del ventesimo secolo, non solo per la varietà dei temi affrontati (che vanno dalla filosofa della mente a quella dell'azione, dalla teoria della verità a quella del significato, da questioni epistemologiche a quelle estetiche), ma anche, e soprattutto, per la complessiva sistematicità del suo pensiero. Il presente saggio si concentra sugli argomenti più significativi della filosofia davidsoniana: il rapporto tra verità e significato, il ruolo centrale dell'interpretazione e della nozione di razionalità, il problema mente-corpo, la natura delle credenze e il legame tra pensiero e linguaggio.

International audience; Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and individuals with schizophrenia (SZ)have in common to be impaired in their social and communication abilities. Their inability to infer intentions and beliefs of others has been supposed to result from their inability to use contextual information. However, recent findings have shown that individuals with ASD are sensitive to stereotypes on gender, race and age. It was also suggested that several factors such as level of incongruity between context and speaker's utterance, prosody, or character's features set in the stimulus situation cue the comprehension of the ironic intent among healthy subjects (Ivanko and Pexman, 2003). The goal of this study was to determine whether individuals with ASD and individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) exhibit the same patterns of performance on a task assessing if stereotypes (type of speaker's occupation) cue comprehension of ironic intent. Thirty SZ individuals, sixteen adults with ASD and fifty matched healthy participants were recruited. Participants were asked to read 48 stories in which the speaker's occupation had been manipulated according to 3 conditions of occupation: occupation that cues ironic intent, occupation that does not cue ironic intent and no occupation. Participants were asked to judge on a 7-point scale (1=not at all, 7=extremely) if the speaker was ironic, if he was mocking someone and if he was polite. The first two questions were used to assess attribution of mental states to the speaker while the last question was used to assess social perception. Main results seem to show that both SZ participants and ASD articipants were not sensitive to stereotypes (type of speaker's occupation) by contrast to healthy participants. However, while ASD participants performed like healthy participants judging irony and mockery, SZ participants gave answer at random (cf. Figure 1). There was no difference between the three groups for social perception.

Claudia Bianchi's book, Pragmatica cognitiva. I meccanismi della comunicazione (2009), provides the reader with a reasoned map of the main stances held by the scholars investigating our beliefs and expectations in the attribution of meaning to others' words. By analysing the possibilities and the limits of the theories in the field, the author wonders whether and to which extent talking about "language as a code" or about "literal meaning" makes sense. To answer this question, the book brings in front of the tribunal of the philosophical analysis - but also in front of the tribunal of the empirical research - the main contemporary trends in philosophy of language. Il libro di Claudia Bianchi, Pragmatica cognitiva. I meccanismi della comunicazione (2009), fornisce al lettore una mappa ragionata delle principali posizioni degli studiosi che indagano il nostro sistema di aspettative nell’attribuzione di significato alle parole altrui. Attraverso un'analisi delle possibilità e dei limiti delle diverse teorie in campo, l'autrice si chiede se e in che misura abbia ancora senso parlare di "lingua come codice" o di "significato letterale". Per dare una risposta a questa domanda, il testo porta di fronte al tribunale, non solo dell'analisi filosofica ma anche della ricerca empirica, le principali correnti contemporanee della filosofia del linguaggio.

B@belonline vol. 4 Europa e Messia. Paure e speranze del XX secolo in eredità