Brandom a Pisa

Giovedì 27 maggio, alle ore 10, Bob Brandom darà a Pisa un talk dal titolo: "How analytic philosophy has failed cognitive science". Clicca qui per maggiori info.

Questo è l'abstract. Mi sembra molto interessante.

Concept-use is intrinsically stratified. It exhibits at least four basic layers, with each capacity to deploy concepts in a more sophisticated sense of `concept' presupposing the capacities to use concepts in all of the more primitive senses. The three lessons that generate the structural hierarchy oblige us to distinguish between:

- concepts that only label and concepts that describe,
- the content of concepts and the force of applying them, and
- concepts expressible already by simple predicates and concepts expressible only by complex predicates.

This hierarchy is not a psychological one, but a logical and semantic one. Concepts at the higher levels of complexity presuppose those at lower levels not because creatures of a certain kind cannot in practice, as a matter of fact, deploy the more complex kinds unless they can deploy the simpler ones, but because in principle it is impossible to do so. Nothing could count as grasping or deploying the kinds of concepts that populate the upper reaches of the hierarchy without also grasping or deploying those drawn from its lower levels. The dependencies involved are not empirical, but (meta)conceptual. AI researchers and cognitive, developmental, and animal psychologists need to take account of the different grades of conceptual content made visible by these distinctions.