Francesco Galofaro | Università di Bologna (original) (raw)

Books by Francesco Galofaro

Lexia, 2012

Non è solo teologicamente che si pone la trascendenza, o nel foro interiore degli individui, ma a... more Non è solo teologicamente che si pone la trascendenza, o nel foro interiore degli individui, ma anche, e forse soprattutto, nella comunicazione: è at-traverso la parola, financo quella interiore, come pure attraverso i gesti, le posture, le espressioni del volto, che gli esseri umani proiettano nello spa-zio e nel tempo il simulacro di un essere superiore, o perlomeno di una su-periore dimensione dell'esistenza, cui accedere solo in occasioni extra-or-dinarie, e secondo percorsi accuratamente codificati. È poi sempre nella co-municazione, largamente intesa, che questi simulacri dell'"ontologicamente altro" sono condivisi e potenziati nell'afflato di un gruppo, di una comu-nità, di una fede. Il numero 11-12 di «Lexia» getta uno sguardo partecipe ma rigoroso sulle forme semiolinguistiche di questa interazione, caratte-ristica dell'umano attraverso i secoli e le culture. Contemporaneamente si interessa al destino di tali forme nell'epoca delle società secolarizzate, o di quelle in cui le vie tradizionali del sacro convivono e competono con nuo-vi modi di porre la trascendenza. Da un lato, dunque, ci si interroga su cosa siano (e su come siano) la preghiera, il rituale e il culto nelle religioni tra-dizionalmente intese. Dall'altro lato si investigano le metamorfosi di que-sta comunicazione nelle avventure postmoderne del sacro, quando il sen-so della trascendenza si tramuta in quello di una trascendenza del senso. Ne deriva un mosaico complesso di saggi e analisi, che spaziano dalla pre-ghiera nelle Religioni del Libro sino ai culti civili, mediatici, consumistici, artistici delle società contemporanee.

A new glance on Cultural Heritage. A three-years research which uses semiotic tools to analyse th... more A new glance on Cultural Heritage. A three-years research which uses semiotic tools to analyse the new languages of interactive media comparing italian heritage and the global horizon.

My doctoral thesis on metalanguage and its semiotics. It is subdivided in two parts. The first is... more My doctoral thesis on metalanguage and its semiotics. It is subdivided in two parts. The first is a criticism to Hjelmslev's model of metalanguage and metasemiotics. The second one is a semiotic analysis of a real metalanguage used by doctors in the interpretation of radiograms, and a comparison with pseudo-metalanguages. Metalanguage is not just an old-fashioned theoretical construction: different metalanguages are used in science and they play an important role in structuring our culture and in limiting the possible interpretations of scientific texts.

Saggi: Umberto Eco "Gli embrioni fuori dal paradiso"; Armando Massarenti "Staminalia. La neolin... more Saggi:

Umberto Eco
"Gli embrioni fuori dal paradiso";

Armando Massarenti
"Staminalia. La neolingua contro la libertà di ricerca";

Francesco Galofaro
"Etica medica e cultura";

Lucia Galvagni
"Narrazione e creatività morale: nuovi approcci etici in medicina";

Vito Cagli,
"Un medico per il nostro tempo. Solo un tecnico efficiente o anche un uomo di cultura?";

Carlo Alberto Defanti
"Il dibattito sulla morte cerebrale e sui trapianti";

Elena Del Grosso
"Nuove tecnologie biomediche tra bioscienze e biopolitiche: la metafora del corpo femminile";

Federico Montanari
"L'immanenza e l'affetto. Il problema della bioetica in senso spinoziano";

Sono circa tremila le persone che in Italia vivono in uno stato vegetativo persistente. Per dicia... more Sono circa tremila le persone che in Italia vivono in uno stato vegetativo persistente. Per diciassette anni Eluana Englaro è stata una di queste. La sua drammatica vicenda, il dolore della famiglia e le battaglie legali e civili del padre per il rispetto della volontà di Eluana si sono consumati, in tutto questo tempo, sotto i riflettori dei media che, complici il silenzio della politica e i tempi lunghi della magistratura, hanno contribuito a ridurre il dibattito a uno scontro.

Francesco Galofaro ha seguito negli anni la storia di Eluana ed esaminato i commenti che ne ha proposto la stampa; ha di-scusso con medici che assistono persone in “stato vegetativo persistente” e ha osservato analogie e differenze tra i vari casi; ha studiato la legislazione italiana e quella europea in materia e ne ha confrontato efficacia e coerenza.
In questo volume ci propone una sintesi del suo lavoro, a partire da alcune convinzioni basilari:
- ogni decisione irreversibile sulla conclusione della nostra vita riguarda prima di tutto la nostra coscienza;
- è necessario che la medicina, la legge e l’etica ci sostengano, e che la politica crei le condizioni per consentirci una decisione consapevole, senza sostituirsi alla nostra libertà di giudizio;
- tra le opposte posizioni di laici e cattolici un accordo è pos- sibile, a partire dal riconoscimento di uno spessore etico autonomo della medicina;
- riflettere sulla storia di Eluana Englaro può aiutarci a maturare scelte che riguardano la vita di tutti.

L’autore si augura che il libro possa essere utile ad avviare un confronto concreto tra quanti, pur da posizioni oggi molto distanti, hanno a cuore l’individuazione di risposte convincenti e condivise sulla definizione stessa di vita umana.

Papers by Francesco Galofaro

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2015

Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science

Quaderni di Etnosemiotica, 2015

Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, 2014

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique

The paper presents a semiotic interpretation of the phenomenological debate on the notion of pers... more The paper presents a semiotic interpretation of the phenomenological debate on the notion of person, focusing in particular on Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Edith Stein. The semiotic interpretation lets us identify the categories that orient the debate: collective/individual and subject/object. As we will see, the phenomenological analysis of the relation between person and social units such as the community, the association, and the mass shows similarities to contemporary socio-semiotic models. The difference between community, association, and mass provides an explanation for the establishment of legal systems. The notion of person we inherit from phenomenology can also be useful in facing juridical problems raised by the use of non-human decision-makers such as machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence applications.

Entangled Bell states have been represented in quantum computation by a CNOT gate whose control Q... more Entangled Bell states have been represented in quantum computation by a CNOT gate whose control Qbit is in an undetermined state. This basic circuit can be useful to represent semantic relationships between two words (lexemes) in a text. Entangled states have been used to detect semantic relationships in Information Retrieval (IR). A lexeme can be represented as a vector in a Hilbert space. Each element of the vector represents the weight of a semantic relation with a second vector : the context of a second lexeme. Two query operators are defined in a way that they attribute the value +1 to the component of the state that corresponds to the word meaning we are interested in, and -1 in the orthogonal direction: they correspond to Pauli spin matrices x and z. In
particular, since the first operator corresponds to negation and the conditional gate corresponds to an implication in classical logic, they can represent two basic semantic relationships : hyponymy (e.g. genus-species) and antonymy (e.g. masculine-feminine). In fact, according to Semantics, if A and B are antonymic terms, then A is an hyponym of (i.e. implies) not-B as in the semiotic square.
For example, if we consider the New Testament, Matthew, 7, 24 27, "sand" is antonymically opposed to "rock" as it concerns the groundworks of houses. We can represent the relation of entanglement between "rock" and "house" as a CNOT gate between two Qbits. The control Qbit represents the presence/absence of the lexeme "rock". A similar relation of entanglement can represent the relation between "sand" and "house". The antonymy relation can be described by the Z gate. The control Qbits will be in an undetermined state, whose amplitude of probability can represent the strength of the semantic relation, which depends on the distance between the two lexemes in the text according to IR models. We underline how the relations of a given semantic universe, and the corresponding result of our operators, depends only on the considered text : for example, wikipedia defines "sand" as an hyponym of "rock". In terms of structural semantics, entanglement represents the presence/absence of contextual semantic relations (classemes). The reason consists in the fact that linguistic categories are relational : for example, a "subject" exists only in opposition to an "object" and does not show any independent, positive identity. Among others, this analogy suggests the application of quantum-based models to language and IR.

VISIBLE 10, 2014

A semiotic-based epistemological criticism on fMRI imaging techniques used in persistent vegetati... more A semiotic-based epistemological criticism on fMRI imaging techniques used in persistent vegetative state research.

SIGNATA 4, 2014

According to the author, Hjelmslev’s Glossematics is not adequate to base Greimas’s narrative str... more According to the author, Hjelmslev’s Glossematics is not adequate to base Greimas’s narrative structures for several reasons. First, Glossematics could be effectively encoded as a Turing Machine. Unfotunately, it would be generative only in a weak sense: it could generate every sort of narrative structure, not their structural description. A comparison with Propp’s model underlines another lack of Glossematics: it is not recursive. For these reasons, it cannot generate the infinite hierarchical self-embedded structures which represent the relation between base-narrative programs and use-narrative programs. The author shows a sketch of a formal grammar generating all, and only the narrative structures represented through Greimas’s metalanguage. Finally, after a critical balance on this generative model, its goals and its lacks, the author expresses his sympathy for a morphodynamic framework

Lexia, 2012

Saggi: Umberto Eco "Gli embrioni fuori dal paradiso"; Armando Massarenti "Staminalia. La neolin... more Saggi:

Umberto Eco
"Gli embrioni fuori dal paradiso";

Armando Massarenti
"Staminalia. La neolingua contro la libertà di ricerca";

Francesco Galofaro
"Etica medica e cultura";

Lucia Galvagni
"Narrazione e creatività morale: nuovi approcci etici in medicina";

Vito Cagli,
"Un medico per il nostro tempo. Solo un tecnico efficiente o anche un uomo di cultura?";

Carlo Alberto Defanti
"Il dibattito sulla morte cerebrale e sui trapianti";

Elena Del Grosso
"Nuove tecnologie biomediche tra bioscienze e biopolitiche: la metafora del corpo femminile";

Federico Montanari
"L'immanenza e l'affetto. Il problema della bioetica in senso spinoziano";

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2015

Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science

Quaderni di Etnosemiotica, 2015

Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, 2014

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique

VISIBLE 10, 2014

SIGNATA 4, 2014

Placing sense in the plane of immanence is a response to the crisis of cognitivism and the diffic... more Placing sense in the plane of immanence is a response to the crisis of cognitivism and the difficulty involved in placing the encounter with the subjectivity of the other within a phenomenological framework (Marsciani, Landowski). To date, this solution makes it necessary to clarify the statements of the plane of immanence by virtue of its constitutive model. In this regard, we propose a generative-transformational grammar of metalanguage developed by Greimas, Courtés, Marsciani and Zinna for the analysis of narrative structures. In showing some of the characteristics of narrativity that do not immediately appear in the plane of manifestation, certain topological features of the plane of immanence are placed in relief: the infinite capacity to generate recursive structures, self-similarity and the problematic link with the plane of manifestation This means that there might still be room in semiotics for the “discovery” of immanent properties, which while not apparent on the surface of the text, are at least sufficient for explaining its characteristics.

Nouveaux Actes Sémiotiques 117, Jan 28, 2014

The paper discusses the category of "animacy" used to analyze the linguistic representation of th... more The paper discusses the category of "animacy" used to analyze the linguistic representation of the intersubjective relation. Thanks to the category of animacy, languages distinguish the case in which the enunciator grants to the Other the status of Subject or Object. From the point of view of structural semantics, "animacy" does not represent the world in a figurative way; it reflects our experience of the world through the interface represented by our body. For this reason, it is related to the proprioceptive and somatosensory dimension.

E/C VIII, 15-16, pp. 39 - 43, Sep 1, 2013

The biography of 10 patients suffering of schizophrenia is analysed through semiotic theory. The ... more The biography of 10 patients suffering of schizophrenia is analysed through semiotic theory. The focus is on their relation with the space in which they live (an innovative experiment in social housing) seen as a modal dispositive which regulates their will, their actions and power.

Versus, Quaderni di Studi Semiotici, 115, 2012

Influenced by Hilbert metamathematical program, Hjelmslev states that linguistic theory must com... more Influenced by Hilbert metamathematical program, Hjelmslev
states that linguistic theory must come to contain within itself its
own definition. Using a goedelization technique, the article shows
how this position leads to a paradox. Hjemslev’s refusal of infinity
is old fashioned, whereas his conception of metalanguage and
identity is innovative if compared to the logical one, also inherited
by Chomsky. These features are still interesting in order to comprehend
the morphodynamical development of semiotic systems.

ESTHÉTIQUE ET COGNITION, 2013

Le travaille sémiotique de A. J. Greimas et de son école a reconnu dans les sémiotiques visuelles... more Le travaille sémiotique de A. J. Greimas et de son école a reconnu dans les sémiotiques visuelles une importante modalité de signification, appelée « semi-symbolique ». Dans cette modalité, chaque catégorie au plan de l’expression est liée à une catégorie différente au plan du contenu. Par exemple, dans le « Jugement universel » de Giotto, il y a une opposition entre la droite et la gauche au plan de l’expression, qui correspond a une opposition entre judicandi et judicati au plan du contenu. La musique a la possibilité de construire l’architecture structurale du plan de l’expression selon des oppositions catégorielles qui ressemblent à certains systèmes visuels comme la peinture ou le cinéma : les oppositions entre le haut et le bas, l’antécédent et le conséquent, aussi bien que les symétries typiques des canons font de la musique un système plastique (qui possède sa propre spécificité). L’écriture musicale, en tant que sémie substitutive, révèle la plasticité du système entier. La disponibilité d’oppositions catégorielles au plan de l’expression mène à la possibilité de l’utiliser pour véhiculer de pareilles oppositions au plan du contenu. Par exemple, la plus part des madrigalismes dans la musique de la Renaissance utilise le même mécanisme, et aussi la rhétorique des affects.
La structuration semi-symbolique dans un système plastique n’implique pas un actant-foyer, un spectateur ou bien un auditeur qui connaît le code, parce que l’ouvrage pose le code chaque fois selon une articulation différente. Au contraire, un système plastique présuppose un foyer qui peut reconnaître cette structuration élémentaire et s’interroger sur les différentes possibilités d’interprétation. Cela n'implique pas la connaissance a priori d’un code, mais plutôt d’un fond culturel
commun, une encyclopédie, qui nous permet de reconstruire les opérations de codage.
On peut donc parler avec Roman Ingarden d’une autonomie ontologique du texte musical, qui présuppose un auditeur phénoménologique qui remplisse les différents niveaux textuels avec les significations nécessaires. À cet égard, Umberto Eco parle d’un lecteur-modèle impliqué par le texte, lecteur qui explore les différentes interprétations permises par l’ouverture de l’œuvre artistique, en écartant celles qui sont interdites.

The interpretation of the scientific image is related to the specific metalanguage we use to anal... more The interpretation of the scientific image is related to the specific metalanguage we use to analyze it. In the case of the researches on Permanent Vegetative State (PVS), we found some scientific papers that make use of the categories of cognitive science in order to interpret the output of different imaging tecniques (fMRI, FDG-PET, MEG). We'll try to demostrate that the cognitive speech doesn't match those properties that a scientific metalanguage should have (explanatory coherence and empirical adequacy), hiding old and unsatisfactory philosophical opinions under a pseudo-scientifc form of rethorics.

Le travaille sémiotique de A. J. Greimas et de son école a reconnu dans les sémiotiques visuel... more Le travaille sémiotique de A. J. Greimas et de son école a reconnu dans les sémiotiques visuelles une importante modalité de signification, appelée « semi-symbolique ». Dans cette modalité, chaque catégorie au plan de l’expression est liée à une catégorie différente au plan du contenu. Par exemple, dans le « Jugement universel » de Giotto, il y a une opposition entre la droite et la gauche au plan de l’expression, qui correspond a une opposition entre judicandi et judicati au plan du contenu. La musique a la possibilité de construire l’architecture structurale du plan de l’expression selon des oppositions catégorielles qui ressemblent à certains systèmes visuels comme la peinture ou le cinéma : les oppositions entre le haut et le bas, l’antécédent et le conséquent, aussi bien que les symétries typiques des canons font de la musique un système plastique (qui possède sa propre spécificité). L’écriture musicale, en tant que sémie substitutive, révèle la plasticité du système entier. La disponibilité d’oppositions catégorielles au plan de l’expression mène à la possibilité de l’utiliser pour véhiculer de pareilles oppositions au plan du contenu. Par exemple, la plus part des madrigalismes dans la musique de la Renaissance utilise le même mécanisme, et aussi la rhétorique des affects.
La structuration semi-symbolique dans un système plastique n’implique pas un actant-foyer, un spectateur ou bien un auditeur qui connaît le code, parce que l’ouvrage pose le code chaque fois selon une articulation différente. Au contraire, un système plastique présuppose un foyer qui peut reconnaître cette structuration élémentaire et s’interroger sur les différentes possibilités d’interprétation. Cela n'implique pas la connaissance a priori d’un code, mais plutôt d’un fond culturel
commun, une encyclopédie, qui nous permet de reconstruire les opérations de codage.
On peut donc parler avec Roman Ingarden d’une autonomie ontologique du texte musical, qui présuppose un auditeur phénoménologique qui remplisse les différents niveaux textuels avec les significations nécessaires. À cet égard, Umberto Eco parle d’un lecteur-modèle impliqué par le texte, lecteur qui explore les différentes interprétations permises par l’ouverture de l’œuvre artistique, en écartant celles qui sont interdites.