Bøker av Lorenzo Magnani

This book offers a philosophical account of violence, engaged with both empirical and theoretical debates in disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, political theory, evolutionary biology, and theology. The primary thesis is that violence is intertwined with morality and typically enacted for "moral" reasons. To show this, the book compellingly demonstrates how morality operates to trigger and justify violence and how people, in their violent behaviors, can engage and disengage with discrete moralities. The author's fundamental account of language, and in particular its normative aspects, is particularly insightful as regards extending the range of what is to be understood as violence beyond the domain of physical harm. By employing concepts such as "coalition enforcement", "moral bubbles", "cognitive niches", "overmoralization", and "military intelligence", the book aims to spell out how perpetrators and victims of violence systematically disagree about the very nature of violence. The author's original claim is that disagreement can be understood naturalistically, described by an account of morality informed by evolutionary perspectives as well. This book helps us come to terms with the fact that we are intrinsically "violent beings". To acknowledge this condition, and our stupefying capacity to inflict harm, is a responsibility we must face up to: such understanding could ultimately be of help in order to achieve a safer ownership of our destinies, by individuating and reinforcing those cognitive firewalls that would prevent violence from always escalating and overflowing. This second edition is thoroughly revised and integrated with two new chapters to cover new aspects of violence and its understanding, such as the role of looting finance in facilitating violent outcomes and the attack to scientific cognition and human creativity.

This Handbook offers the first comprehensive reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of abductive cognition, providing readers with extensive information on the process of reasoning to hypotheses in humans, animals, and in computational machines. It highlights the role of abduction in both theory practice: in generating and testing hypotheses and explanatory functions for various purposes and as an educational device. It merges logical, cognitive, epistemological and philosophical perspectives with more practical needs relating to the application of abduction across various disciplines and practices, such as in diagnosis, creative reasoning, scientific discovery, diagrammatic and ignorance-based cognition, and adversarial strategies. It also discusses the inferential role of models in hypothetical reasoning, abduction and creativity, including the process of development, implementation and manipulation for different scientific and technological purposes. Written by a group ofinternationally renowned experts in philosophy, logic, general epistemology, mathematics, cognitive, and computer science, as well as life sciences, engineering, architecture, and economics, the Handbook of Abductive Cognition offers a unique reference guide for readers approaching the process of reasoning to hypotheses from different perspectives and for various theoretical and practical purposes. Numerous diagrams, schemes and other visual representations are included to promote a better understanding of the relevant concepts and to make concepts highly accessible to an audience of scholars and students with different scientific backgrounds.

This book offers a new and externalist perspective in ignorance studies. Agnotology, the epistemology of ignorance, and, more generally, ignorance studies have grown to cover and explore different phenomena and subjects of research, from known events in history and sociology of science to the investigation of ordinary reasoning and cognitive processing. Nonetheless, although interested scholars have discussed ignorance phenomena and their impact on cognition, most of them have only adopted an internalist perspective to approach this theme. Meanwhile, even though externalist perspectives on cognition flourished in recent literature, authors have paid little attention to the emerging field of ignorance studies. Ignorance has been generally left out from the inquiries on the extension of cognitive states, cognitive processes, and predictive reasoning. Thus, in this volume, we seek to merge the two growing areas of research and to fill this research gap fruitfully. By addressing the uncomfortable themes that pertain to ignorance and related phenomena through an externalist perspective, this book aims to provide much food for thoughts to cognitive scientists and philosophers alike, enriching the current range and reach of both ignorance studies and externalist approaches to cognition.

The book analyses the concept of discoverability, and some current epistemological problems related to it, with a special attention to science. It shows that discoverability is closely related to the sustainability of human creativity in an "e;eco-cognitive"e; perspective. Advocating the need of an integral ecology and leveraging the important concept of abduction, it demonstrates that an ecology of human creativity should have priority over other needs, i.e that the first ecological duty is to protect and sustain discoverability. Enhancing discoverability will protect human creativity, and it is exactly human creativity, a form of innovative abductive cognition, that can promote the implementation of the other kinds of ecology. The author guides readers through a comprehensive discussion on the concept of discoverability, eco-cognitive situatedness, and eco-cognitive openness and closure alike. By describing some key real-world examples, he highlights the main challenges that are currently posed to human creativity and epistemic integrity. He also describes future eco-cognitive settings, discussing the problem of overcomputationalism and suggesting a reinterpretation of the role of human knowledge.Overall, this book fills an important gap in the literature on the nexus abduction - creativity - discovery, offering a source of inspiration to philosophers, epistemologists, and cognitive scientists. Yet, it also addresses researchers in other disciplines interested in the problems of scientific discovery and epistemic integrity of research.

This book mainly focuses on the widely distributed nature of computational tools, models, and methods, ultimately related to the current importance of computational machines as mediators of cognition. An entirely new eco-cognitive approach to computation is offered, to underline the question of the overwhelming cognitive domestication of ignorant entities, which is persistently at work in our current societies. Eco-cognitive computationalism does not aim at furnishing an ultimate and static definition of the concepts of information, cognition, and computation, instead, it intends, by respecting their historical and dynamical character, to propose an intellectual framework that depicts how we can understand their forms of ¿emergence¿ and the modification of their meanings, also dealing with impressive unconventional non-digital cases. The new proposed perspective also leads to a clear description of the divergence between weak and strong levels of creative ¿abductive¿ hypothetical cognition: weak accomplishments are related to ¿locked abductive strategies¿, typical of computational machines, and deep creativity is instead related to ¿unlocked abductive strategies¿, which characterize human cognizers, who benefit from the so-called ¿eco-cognitive openness¿.