Paola Pennisi | University of Messina (original) (raw)

Papers by Paola Pennisi

Perspectives in pragmatics, psychology & philosophy, Dec 31, 2022

Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 2018

Reti, saperi, linguaggi, Italian Journal of Cognitive Sciences, 2016

I discuss the classic autism case study of Nadia, who became famous in 1977 thanks to Lorna Selfe... more I discuss the classic autism case study of Nadia, who became famous in 1977 thanks to Lorna Selfe. I examine it in light of new studies on the philosophi- cal concept of inner speech and on more recent phenomenological observations on autism. I specifically consider two thesis, that of Nicholas Humphreys published in 1998 that compared Nadia’s drawings with pre-modern humans’ art, and that of John Willats (2005) that proposed a comparison between the linguistic and the drawing development based on chomskian theoretical background. To accept both of them Nadia’s drawings (in her genial phase) as a result of her absence of language must be considered. In the last paragraph, I discuss this question. Although the so- lution is not definitive, I tend to exclude both hypothesis, and in doing this I use the vygotskijian concept of inner speech and some of numerous empirical studies produced in the last decade about the alteration of the use of inner speech in the autistic population. The gist of my argumentation is that, even if there is an alteration in the use of linguistic intelligence in the autistic population, there is never a compe- tition between linguistic and visual intelligence nor in autistic neither in non-autistic population; also in cases in which the two intelligences seem to grow together as in the case of Stephen Wiltshire (Sacks 1995).

Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 2018

When speakers speak they presuppose certain things, and what they presuppose guides both what the... more When speakers speak they presuppose certain things, and what they presuppose guides both what they choose to say and how they intend what they say to be interpreted.

Behavioural Brain Research

The Extended Theory of Cognitive Creativity, 2019

In this paper I will discuss a key concept in philosophy of language, the one of performativity, ... more In this paper I will discuss a key concept in philosophy of language, the one of performativity, which has evolved accordingly to the process of change that cognitive science went through over the last decades due to the influence of the embodied approaches to cognition. The discussion starts with a summary of the many definitions of performativity (Sect. 21.1) and goes on with the analysis of the consequences that such differences had on the characterization of “happiness” and “unhappiness” of performative acts (Sect. 21.2). Then I have tried to show how the performativity of a linguistic behavior might be “happy” in the context of a second language acquisition (Sects. 21.2.1, 21.2.2, 21.2.3 and 21.2.4) and, conversely, how dysfunctional performative acts can be “unhappy” and lead to psychopathological behaviors, such as eating disorders (Sects. 21.2.5, 21.2.6 and 21.2.7).

Reti, saperi, linguaggi, 2019

Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2018

A great part of current philosophy of language is testing some ideas borrowed from the recent "di... more A great part of current philosophy of language is testing some ideas borrowed from the recent "distributed" approaches to cognition (extended/embodied/ situated cognition, etc…) in order to solve the classical mind-body problem. John E. Joseph's book, titled Language, Mind and Body, A Conceptual History and edited by Cambridge University Press, is a very interesting contribution to such question, putting together historical and contemporary concerns. The book runs through the historical attempts to answer a specific question: what is language and where is it located? In line with modern cognitive sciences, the author addresses the issue through an interdisciplinary perspective that encompasses philosophy of language, linguistics, medicine, psychology and literature. The book consists of ten chapters. The first one starts in medias res, focusing on the decline of the consensus on Chomskyan innatism. The author explains this failure in light of Bruno Latour's concept of hybrids. Against the

Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2018

One of the possible ways to get rid of the rhetoric of anniversaries is to resort to the listener... more One of the possible ways to get rid of the rhetoric of anniversaries is to resort to the listener's benevolence by providing curiosity and usefulness for what he is celebrating. This happens a bit like when we look for didactic methods to avoid being boring and therefore to favor associative processes that arouse creativity, which is an original variant of imitation. This is the climate in which the Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology was born, as for the purpose to compose music starting from seven notes and the relative semitones. I will propose short reflections, the longest of which places this Journal in the panorama of open journals, this product from our university, which places itself first of all on ethical issues, scientific research in general, specifically in the clinic that is a relationship, specifically in the dissemination with issues that involve themes such as conflict of interest and responsibility in training and updating of professionals. According to Braga F., Graziani M.S. and Panteghini (2013) the role of the Editor can be summarized as follows:

Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications, 2019

One of the roles of philosophy in the age of the third generation of cognitive scientists is to i... more One of the roles of philosophy in the age of the third generation of cognitive scientists is to integrate data and theories from many different research fields (neuroscience, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, linguistics, etc…).The second step is to integrate them into the development of more general theoretical backgrounds in order to evaluate if the latter seems to be prolific for human thought. Recently, thanks to clinical pragmatics studies, we have a growing corpus of empirical data regarding pragmatic anomalies of subjects with autism.

Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications, 2019

A relatively new discipline is being born. Clinical pragmatics is a new research field mainly ded... more A relatively new discipline is being born. Clinical pragmatics is a new research field mainly dedicated to investigate cognitive underpinnings of pragmatics, using as a starting point of investigations the alterations showed by patients in which pragmatics is, in such a way, altered.

Resumen The mission of cognitive sciences is to understand cognitive processes. In order to do th... more Resumen The mission of cognitive sciences is to understand cognitive processes. In order to do that, a first wave of studies tried to simulate thought through computers; after many failed attempts, a second wave tried to study mind through a strictly reductionist neuroscientific approach. Today, both approaches appear as dualist and incomplete due to their blindness to the role of body, human societies and external environment. Analysing the reciprocal influences between photography-based technologies and cognitive studies, we will try to shed light on a frequently recurring process in the history of cognitive sciences: the creation of a polarity between the ones who study cognitive functions separating them from physical substrate and those who study cognitive processes in a reductionistic way. In the final part, we will suggest an alternative approach to the problem, based on practical principles. While doing that, we will discuss some of the most recent studies on second language...

For many years various computational studies have attempted to bring deficits into inferential de... more For many years various computational studies have attempted to bring deficits into inferential deficits in integrating top-down inputs. However, in this study we aim to show via the concept of interoceptive inference that in individuals with ASD a malfunction in the processes of synchronization with others may also explain part of their language deficits. To do that, we have shown that there is an inverse correlation between the amount of time spent by children with ASD observing the interlocutor’s mouth and their social skills. This data, combined with the observation (now widely accepted by scientific literature) that individuals with ASD usually do not integrate information from lipreading with the linguistic message, has led us to hypothesize that an inability to interpret as biological motion the complex articulatory movements necessary for speech production, caused by a deficit in interoceptive inferential processes, could be the effect of a dispersion of attention that impede...

Cognitive Processing, 2021

Perspectives in pragmatics, psychology & philosophy, Dec 31, 2022

Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 2018

Reti, saperi, linguaggi, Italian Journal of Cognitive Sciences, 2016

I discuss the classic autism case study of Nadia, who became famous in 1977 thanks to Lorna Selfe... more I discuss the classic autism case study of Nadia, who became famous in 1977 thanks to Lorna Selfe. I examine it in light of new studies on the philosophi- cal concept of inner speech and on more recent phenomenological observations on autism. I specifically consider two thesis, that of Nicholas Humphreys published in 1998 that compared Nadia’s drawings with pre-modern humans’ art, and that of John Willats (2005) that proposed a comparison between the linguistic and the drawing development based on chomskian theoretical background. To accept both of them Nadia’s drawings (in her genial phase) as a result of her absence of language must be considered. In the last paragraph, I discuss this question. Although the so- lution is not definitive, I tend to exclude both hypothesis, and in doing this I use the vygotskijian concept of inner speech and some of numerous empirical studies produced in the last decade about the alteration of the use of inner speech in the autistic population. The gist of my argumentation is that, even if there is an alteration in the use of linguistic intelligence in the autistic population, there is never a compe- tition between linguistic and visual intelligence nor in autistic neither in non-autistic population; also in cases in which the two intelligences seem to grow together as in the case of Stephen Wiltshire (Sacks 1995).

Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 2018

When speakers speak they presuppose certain things, and what they presuppose guides both what the... more When speakers speak they presuppose certain things, and what they presuppose guides both what they choose to say and how they intend what they say to be interpreted.

Behavioural Brain Research

The Extended Theory of Cognitive Creativity, 2019

In this paper I will discuss a key concept in philosophy of language, the one of performativity, ... more In this paper I will discuss a key concept in philosophy of language, the one of performativity, which has evolved accordingly to the process of change that cognitive science went through over the last decades due to the influence of the embodied approaches to cognition. The discussion starts with a summary of the many definitions of performativity (Sect. 21.1) and goes on with the analysis of the consequences that such differences had on the characterization of “happiness” and “unhappiness” of performative acts (Sect. 21.2). Then I have tried to show how the performativity of a linguistic behavior might be “happy” in the context of a second language acquisition (Sects. 21.2.1, 21.2.2, 21.2.3 and 21.2.4) and, conversely, how dysfunctional performative acts can be “unhappy” and lead to psychopathological behaviors, such as eating disorders (Sects. 21.2.5, 21.2.6 and 21.2.7).

Reti, saperi, linguaggi, 2019

Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2018

A great part of current philosophy of language is testing some ideas borrowed from the recent "di... more A great part of current philosophy of language is testing some ideas borrowed from the recent "distributed" approaches to cognition (extended/embodied/ situated cognition, etc…) in order to solve the classical mind-body problem. John E. Joseph's book, titled Language, Mind and Body, A Conceptual History and edited by Cambridge University Press, is a very interesting contribution to such question, putting together historical and contemporary concerns. The book runs through the historical attempts to answer a specific question: what is language and where is it located? In line with modern cognitive sciences, the author addresses the issue through an interdisciplinary perspective that encompasses philosophy of language, linguistics, medicine, psychology and literature. The book consists of ten chapters. The first one starts in medias res, focusing on the decline of the consensus on Chomskyan innatism. The author explains this failure in light of Bruno Latour's concept of hybrids. Against the

Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2018

One of the possible ways to get rid of the rhetoric of anniversaries is to resort to the listener... more One of the possible ways to get rid of the rhetoric of anniversaries is to resort to the listener's benevolence by providing curiosity and usefulness for what he is celebrating. This happens a bit like when we look for didactic methods to avoid being boring and therefore to favor associative processes that arouse creativity, which is an original variant of imitation. This is the climate in which the Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology was born, as for the purpose to compose music starting from seven notes and the relative semitones. I will propose short reflections, the longest of which places this Journal in the panorama of open journals, this product from our university, which places itself first of all on ethical issues, scientific research in general, specifically in the clinic that is a relationship, specifically in the dissemination with issues that involve themes such as conflict of interest and responsibility in training and updating of professionals. According to Braga F., Graziani M.S. and Panteghini (2013) the role of the Editor can be summarized as follows:

Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications, 2019

One of the roles of philosophy in the age of the third generation of cognitive scientists is to i... more One of the roles of philosophy in the age of the third generation of cognitive scientists is to integrate data and theories from many different research fields (neuroscience, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, linguistics, etc…).The second step is to integrate them into the development of more general theoretical backgrounds in order to evaluate if the latter seems to be prolific for human thought. Recently, thanks to clinical pragmatics studies, we have a growing corpus of empirical data regarding pragmatic anomalies of subjects with autism.

Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications, 2019

A relatively new discipline is being born. Clinical pragmatics is a new research field mainly ded... more A relatively new discipline is being born. Clinical pragmatics is a new research field mainly dedicated to investigate cognitive underpinnings of pragmatics, using as a starting point of investigations the alterations showed by patients in which pragmatics is, in such a way, altered.

Resumen The mission of cognitive sciences is to understand cognitive processes. In order to do th... more Resumen The mission of cognitive sciences is to understand cognitive processes. In order to do that, a first wave of studies tried to simulate thought through computers; after many failed attempts, a second wave tried to study mind through a strictly reductionist neuroscientific approach. Today, both approaches appear as dualist and incomplete due to their blindness to the role of body, human societies and external environment. Analysing the reciprocal influences between photography-based technologies and cognitive studies, we will try to shed light on a frequently recurring process in the history of cognitive sciences: the creation of a polarity between the ones who study cognitive functions separating them from physical substrate and those who study cognitive processes in a reductionistic way. In the final part, we will suggest an alternative approach to the problem, based on practical principles. While doing that, we will discuss some of the most recent studies on second language...

For many years various computational studies have attempted to bring deficits into inferential de... more For many years various computational studies have attempted to bring deficits into inferential deficits in integrating top-down inputs. However, in this study we aim to show via the concept of interoceptive inference that in individuals with ASD a malfunction in the processes of synchronization with others may also explain part of their language deficits. To do that, we have shown that there is an inverse correlation between the amount of time spent by children with ASD observing the interlocutor’s mouth and their social skills. This data, combined with the observation (now widely accepted by scientific literature) that individuals with ASD usually do not integrate information from lipreading with the linguistic message, has led us to hypothesize that an inability to interpret as biological motion the complex articulatory movements necessary for speech production, caused by a deficit in interoceptive inferential processes, could be the effect of a dispersion of attention that impede...

Cognitive Processing, 2021

. In: Advances in Genetic Research, vol.. 14, chapter id 32719. , 2015