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Book reviews: issue 14, volume 2022

The recent book Putnam by Massimo Dell’Utri concerns the philosophical and argumentative journey of Hilary Putnam, that lead him to explore the implications of Quine’s views about analyticity and the many ways in which realism can be understood in epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, its main entailments for the philosophy of mind, and more recently about issues concerning ethics, meta-ethics, and value-theory. The present critical review briefly recollects the reading presented in the book, and then highlights some of the implications of this reconstruction, especially those concerning a key passage in the evolution of Putnam’s thought: Putnam’s abandonment of internal realism and the endorsement of natural realism. Hilary Putnam è stato inequivocabilmente uno dei protagonisti di primis-simo piano del panorama filosofico dalla seconda metà del Novecento in poi, con contributi fondamentali in campi quali la filosofia della scienza, la filosofia della matematica, la filosofia della logica, la filosofia della mente, la computer science, l'epistemologia, la filosofia del linguaggio, e nelle de-cadi più recenti anche l'etica e le questioni legate ai valori. Il suo pensiero rimane indissolubilmente, ma non esclusivamente, legato alla questione del realismo in tutti i vari ambiti del pensiero filosofico, e nel corso del tempo si è spesso modificato con l'obiettivo di elaborarne una concezione via via sempre più plausibile: si tratta dell'idea per cui il linguaggio e la conoscenza trovano nella realtà extralinguistica un elemento di riferimento ineliminabile e un termine di paragone irriducibile. Ha senso pensare che al di fuori delle nostre pratiche conoscitive vi sia una realtà indipendente da noi – ma che esercita su di noi un'influenza fondamentale – e che può tuttavia essere conosciuta, spiegata e compresa in linea di principio per mezzo dei nostri sforzi conoscitivi.

Robert Brandom has developed an account of conceptual content as instituted by social practices. Such practices are understood as being implicitly normative. Brandom proposed the idea of implicit norms in order to meet some requirements imposed by Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following: escaping the regress of rules on the one hand, and avoiding mere regular behavior on the other. Anandi Hattiangadi has criticized this account as failing to meet such requirements. In what follows, I try to show how the correct understanding of sanctions and the expressivist reading of the issue can meet these challenges., Phenomenology and Mind, No. 17 (2019): Rules without Words: Inquiries into Non-Linguistic Normativities

Wittgenstein’s Investigations proposed an egalitarian view about language games, emphasizing their plurality (“language has no downtown”). Uses of words depend on the game one is playing, and may change when playing another. Furthermore, there is no privileged game dictating the rules for the others: games are as many as purposes. This view is pluralist and egalitarian, but it says little about the connection between meaning and use, and about how a set of rules is responsible for them in practice. Brandom’s Making It Explicit attempted a straightforward answer to these questions, by developing Wittgensteinian insights: the primacy of social practice over meanings; the idea that meaning is use; the idea of rule–following to understand participation in social practices. Nonetheless, Brandom defended a non–Wittgensteinian conception of discursive practice: language has a “downtown”, the game of “giving and asking for reasons”. This is the idea of a normative structure of language, consisting of advancing claims and drawing inferences. By means of assertions, speakers undertake “commitments” that can be challenged/defended in terms of reasons (those successfully justified can gain “entitlement”). This game is not one among many: it is indispensable to the very idea of discursive practice. In this paper, my aim will be that of exploring the main motivations and implications of both perspectives.

Among the many features that go hand in hand with the recent onset of populism in many countries, an interesting phenomenon is surely the shift of public discourse in the direction of social media. Is there anything special about communication in social media that is particularly suitable for the development of such movements and ideas? In what follows, I provide an attempt to read Facebook comments as showing an anaphoric structure. This analysis permits me to give emphasis on a number of interesting features that such communications exhibit. Finally, I try also to highlight some of the main implications of this model in comparison with ordinary communication., Critical Hermeneutics, 2019: (Re-)defining Populism

The review presents Alva Noë’s enactivist view, and aims at discussing some of its ideas. Thought, consciousness, and cognition are not understandable, Noë claims, without taking into proper consideration the role played by the body and the environment. It would be wrong indeed to go on thinking that our brain alone is responsible for human cognitive processes: the program searching for the neural correlates of consciousness is hopeless in principle, because it neglects from the beginning the body and the environment; research programs in artificial intelligence are as well compromised, not only with a computationalist view of cognition, but also with the old idea that an artificial brain will suffice for cognition just like a natural one. Thereafter, two experimental perspectives, that Noë uses to support his view, are examined: Mriganka Sur’s studies on neural plasticity of ferrets (certain newborn ferrets have undergone a rewiring of their nervous connection, permitting vision thanks to the system constituted by their eyes and auditory cortex), and Paul Bach-Y-Rita’s tactile-visual substitution system (it connects a camera to somatosensory cortex allowing a kind of vision). Noë argues that these results are crucial in supporting his view, but, as the discussion highlights, their pro-enactivism meaning is not so clear and unambiguous. Finally, a balance of the book follows, where the many elements of interest are presented together with the acknowledgment of some weak points, that the book shares with the majority of the proposals that deal with the embodiment’s insight: on the one hand, a structural difficulty concerns the possibility to identify clearly the constitutive elements of the mental; on the other hand, the reference to radical versions of externalism seems to entail many difficulties as well. La recensione presenta la prospettiva enattivista difesa da Alva Noë, e ne discute alcuni aspetti specifici. Il pensiero, la coscienza e la cognizione non sono pienamente comprensibili, secondo l’enattivismo di Noë, senza un’adeguata considerazione del ruolo ricoperto dal corpo e dall’ambiente. Sarebbe quindi sbagliato continuare a pensare che il cervello da solo sia responsabile dei processi cognitivi umani: il programma che ricerca i correlati neurali della coscienza sarebbe quindi destinato al fallimento dal principio, perché tralascia in partenza corpo e ambiente; i programmi di ricerca nel campo dell’intelligenza artificiale sarebbero ugualmente compromessi, non solo con una concezione computazionalista della cognizione, ma anche con la vecchia idea che un cervello artificiale sia sufficiente alla cognizione quanto un cervello naturale. Di seguito si prendono in esame due prospettive sperimentali su cui Noë fa grande affidamento: gli studi sulla plasticità neurale dei furetti svolti da Mriganka Sur e altri (ad alcuni furetti neonati viene ricablata la connessione nervosa, permettendo la visione grazie al sistema costituito da occhi e corteccia uditiva), e la realizzazione di un sistema di sostituzione visuo-tattile da parte di Paul Bach-Y-Rita (un sistema che permette di vedere mediante la connessione tra una fotocamera e la corteccia somatosensoriale). Per Noë si tratta di elementi cruciali in supporto alla propria prospettiva: in realtà, come emerge dalla breve analisi, l’attribuire loro un significato così chiaro e univoco pro-enattivismo è qualcosa di molto meno scontato. Infine, segue un breve bilancio del libro di Noë, dove gli elementi d’interesse del volume sono presentati insieme all’individuazione di alcuni punti deboli, che il testo condivide con la gran parte degli studi che in vario modo fanno leva sull’intuizione legata all’embodiement: da un lato una difficoltà strutturale riguarda la possibilità di identificare con chiarezza gli elementi costitutivi del mentale; dall’altro lato, il riferimento a forme di esternalismo radicale sembra ugualmente comportare diversi problemi.

nonPeerReviewed