Lorenzo Magnani
Biographic Data
| ID | 460066 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lorenzo Magnani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lorenzo |
| FAMILY NAME | Magnani |
| SIGNATURE | MAGNANI L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pavia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2344-4379 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Enhancing or Jeopardizing Human Creativity? Will Humans Be Able to Defend Themselves Against AI Superpowers in an Age of Ethics Washing and Law Washing
I recently introduced the concept of eco-cognitive openness and situatedness to explain how cognitive systems—human or artificial—dynamically interact with their environments to generate information and creative outputs through abductive cognition. Humans display high eco-cognitive openness, integrating tools and cultural contexts through “unlocked strategies” that also enable exceptional creativity. By contrast, generative AI like LLMs operates …
Threatening Happiness: “No One Can Compel Me to Be Happy Their Way”
Starting from classical philosophical suggestions about the status of happiness recipes that suggest the optimal ways to reach it, I will soon illustrate the fundamental Kantian suggestion: “No one can coerce me to be happy in his way”, that is, an individual has the right to choose their own kind of happiness “provided he does not infringe upon that freedom of others to strive for a like end which can coexist with the freedom of everyone”. I wil…
Understanding Violence: The Intertwining of Morality, Religion, Capitalism and Violence: A Philosophical Stance
Religion, Morality, and Violence: Faith, Violent Mediators, Overmoralization
Handbook of Abductive Cognition
The Handbook of Abductive Cognition offers the first comprehensive guide to reasoning to hypotheses in humans, animals, and in computational machines.
Possibilities in an abductive perspective: Creating affordances as cognitive chances
Recent studies on the so-called EEEE (extended, embodied, embedded, and enacted) cognition have demonstrated that the “environmental situatedness” of human cognition and its evolutionary component may be used to better understand cognition in general. This indicates that humans do not keep in their memory ample representations of the surroundings and their variables, but instead, they richly manipulate it by picking up information and resources, …
Handbook of Abductive Cognition
Human Abductive Cognition Vindicated: Computational Locked Strategies, Dissipative Brains, and Eco-Cognitive Openness
Locked and unlocked strategies are illustrated in this article as concepts that deal with important cognitive aspects of deep learning systems. They indicate different inference routines that refer to poor (locked) to rich (unlocked) cases of creative production of creative cognition. I maintain that these differences lead to important consequences when we analyze computational deep learning programs, such as AlphaGo/AlphaZero, which are able to …
Creating New “Enclosures”: Violently Mimicking the Primitive Accumulation through Degradation of Women, Lockdowns, Looting Finance, War, Plunder
Starting from the analysis of Marx’s Chapter 26 of the first volume of Capital, this article describes Marxian emphasis on the extremely violent aspects—a list of the main cases is also provided—of the so-called “enclosures” as fundamental procedures that favored the “primitive accumulation”, that is, the first social and economic step that led to capitalism. The “enclosures” that characterized the primitive accumulation process, violently exprop…
Naturalizing Morality to Unveil the Status of Violence: Coalition Enforcement, Cognitive Moral Niches, and Moral Bubbles in an Evolutionary Perspective
I propose that the relationship between moral and violent behavior is overlooked in current philosophical, epistemological, and cognitive studies. To the aim of clarifying the complex dynamics of this interplay, I will describe, adopting an evolutionary perspective, the concepts of coalition enforcement, cognitive moral niche, and of what I call moral bubbles. Showing the interesting relationships between these three basic concepts, I will explai…
Conceptualizing Machines in an Eco-Cognitive Perspective
Eco-cognitive computationalism explores computing in context, adhering to some of the key ideas presented by modern cognitive science perspectives on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. First of all, when physical computation is seen from the perspective of the ecology of cognition it is possible to clearly understand the role Turing assigned to the process of “education” of the machine, paralleling it to the education of human brains,…
Diagrams, Conceptual Space and Time, and Latent Geometry: Towards the Development of Euclidean Axiomatics
The “origins” of (geometric) space is examined from the perspective of the so-called “conceptual space” or “semantic space”. Semantic space is characterized by its fundamental “locality” that generates an “implicit” mode of geometrizing. This view is examined from within three perspectives. First, the role that various diagrammatic entities play in the everyday life and pragmatic activities of selected ethnic groups is illustrated. Secondly, it i…
Social Practices and Embubblement
The present contribution describes the nature of social practices based on habitual behavior. The first part concerns the notion of “habit” from a perspective that crosses philosophy and science. Habits structure our daily life and possess a social nature, as shown by informally shared habits and institutionalized rituals. After a brief reference to the philosophical debate, we point out the fundamental dimensions of habitual behavior, i.e., rout…
Computational domestication of ignorant entities
Introduction: Knowing the unknown
Autonomy and the Ownership of Our Own Destiny: Tracking the External World and Human Behavior, and the Paradox of Autonomy
Research on autonomy exhibits a constellation of variegated perspectives, from the problem of the crude deprivation of it to the study of the distinction between personal and moral autonomy, and from the problem of the role of a “self as narrator”, who classifies its own actions as autonomous or not, to the importance of the political side and, finally, to the need of defending and enhancing human autonomy. My precise concern in this article will…
Online communities as virtual cognitive niches
Theoretical considerations on cognitive niche construction
Christ, Batman, and Girard: A Philosophical Perspective on Self-Sacrifice
Contemporary finance as a critical cognitive niche: An epistemological outlook on the uncertain effects of contrasting uncertainty
Gossip as a model of inference to composite hypotheses
In this paper we seek an inferential and cognitive model explaining some characteristics of abduction to composite hypotheses. In the first section, we introduce the matter of composite hypotheses, stressing how it is coherent with the intuitive and philosophical contention that a single event can be caused not only by several causes acting together, but also by several kinds of causation. In the second section, we argue that gossip could serve a…
Camouflaging Truth: A Biological, Argumentative and Epistemological Outlook from Biological to Linguistic Camouflage
Camouflage commonly refers to the ability to make something appear as different from what it actually is, or not to make it appear at all. This concept originates from biological studies to describe a range of strategies used by organisms to dissimulate their presence in the environment, but it is frequently borrowed by other semantic fields as it is possible to camouflage one’s position, intentions, opinion etc.: an interesting conceptual contin…
An epistemological analysis of gossip and gossip-based knowledge
Scientific innovation as eco-epistemic warfare: The creative role of on-line manipulative abduction
External diagrammatization and iconic brain co-evolution
Our brains make up a series of signs and are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds.” An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of “externalization of the mind” that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underlying the semiotic emergence of abductive processes of meaning formation. I c…
Understanding Violence: The Intertwining of Morality, Religion and Violence: A Philosophical Stance
Theoretical considerations on cognitive niche construction
An epistemological analysis of gossip and gossip-based knowledge
Contemporary finance as a critical cognitive niche: An epistemological outlook on the uncertain effects of contrasting uncertainty
Online communities as virtual cognitive niches
The Internet as a Moral Mediator. The Quest for Democracy
Recently the impressive growth of the Web, and the Internet in general, has been considered as a promise that may both challenge and boost our representation of democratic institutions. It is well known that modern democracies are based on the possibility to control and even replace who rules by the force of the best arguments. More generally, the control of the government, and the effectiveness of democracy, is possible, if the citizens can acce…
Conjectures and manipulations: External representations in scientific reasoning
A response to Dr. Weinstein
An Abductive Theory of Scientific Reasoning
More than a hundred years ago, the American philosopher C. S. Peirce suggested the idea of pragmatism as a logical criterion to analyze what words and concepts express through their practical meaning. Many words have been spent on creative processes and reasoning, especially in the case of scientific practices. In fact, philosophers have usually offered a number of ways of construing hypotheses generation, but all aim at demonstrating that the ac…
La moralidad distribuida y la tecnología. Cómo las cosas nos hacen morales
En el presente artículo se sostiene que, a través de la tecnología, las personas podemos simplificar y resolver tareas morales incluso en presencia de información incompleta o de una capacidad insuficiente para la acción moral. Muchas cosas externas, normalmente concebidas como inertes desde un punto de vista moral, pueden considerarse lo que aquí se denominarán mediadores morales. Por lo tanto, no todas las herramientas morales están en el inter…
Symposium on “Cognition and Rationality: Part I” The rationality of scientific discovery: abductive reasoning and epistemic mediators
Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning
Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology: Abduction, Logic, and Computational Discovery
Model-based reasoning in science and technology: Abduction, Logic, and Computational Discovery
The appeal of gossiping fallacies and its eco-logical roots
In this paper we show how some reasoning, though fallacious, can appear to be attractive and useful for beings-like-us. Although they do not provide conclusive evidence to support or reject a certain claim the way scientific statements do, they tell us something interesting about how humans build up their arguments and reasons. First of all, we will consider and investigate three main types of fallacies: argumentum ad hominem (argument against pe…
External diagrammatization and iconic brain co-evolution
Our brains make up a series of signs and are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds.” An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of “externalization of the mind” that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underlying the semiotic emergence of abductive processes of meaning formation. I c…
Understanding Violence: The Intertwining of Morality, Religion and Violence: A Philosophical Stance
Scientific innovation as eco-epistemic warfare: The creative role of on-line manipulative abduction
Gossip as a model of inference to composite hypotheses
In this paper we seek an inferential and cognitive model explaining some characteristics of abduction to composite hypotheses. In the first section, we introduce the matter of composite hypotheses, stressing how it is coherent with the intuitive and philosophical contention that a single event can be caused not only by several causes acting together, but also by several kinds of causation. In the second section, we argue that gossip could serve a…
Camouflaging Truth: A Biological, Argumentative and Epistemological Outlook from Biological to Linguistic Camouflage
Camouflage commonly refers to the ability to make something appear as different from what it actually is, or not to make it appear at all. This concept originates from biological studies to describe a range of strategies used by organisms to dissimulate their presence in the environment, but it is frequently borrowed by other semantic fields as it is possible to camouflage one’s position, intentions, opinion etc.: an interesting conceptual contin…
An epistemological analysis of gossip and gossip-based knowledge
Christ, Batman, and Girard: A Philosophical Perspective on Self-Sacrifice
Contemporary finance as a critical cognitive niche: An epistemological outlook on the uncertain effects of contrasting uncertainty
Theoretical considerations on cognitive niche construction
Online communities as virtual cognitive niches
Autonomy and the Ownership of Our Own Destiny: Tracking the External World and Human Behavior, and the Paradox of Autonomy
Research on autonomy exhibits a constellation of variegated perspectives, from the problem of the crude deprivation of it to the study of the distinction between personal and moral autonomy, and from the problem of the role of a “self as narrator”, who classifies its own actions as autonomous or not, to the importance of the political side and, finally, to the need of defending and enhancing human autonomy. My precise concern in this article will…
Social Practices and Embubblement
The present contribution describes the nature of social practices based on habitual behavior. The first part concerns the notion of “habit” from a perspective that crosses philosophy and science. Habits structure our daily life and possess a social nature, as shown by informally shared habits and institutionalized rituals. After a brief reference to the philosophical debate, we point out the fundamental dimensions of habitual behavior, i.e., rout…
Computational domestication of ignorant entities
Introduction: Knowing the unknown
Human Abductive Cognition Vindicated: Computational Locked Strategies, Dissipative Brains, and Eco-Cognitive Openness
Locked and unlocked strategies are illustrated in this article as concepts that deal with important cognitive aspects of deep learning systems. They indicate different inference routines that refer to poor (locked) to rich (unlocked) cases of creative production of creative cognition. I maintain that these differences lead to important consequences when we analyze computational deep learning programs, such as AlphaGo/AlphaZero, which are able to …
Psychology (25 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Cognition (14 works) · Cognitive science (12 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Philosophy of science (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Artificial Intelligence (8 works)