Le origini sintattico-vocali del linguaggio

2011

language: syntax. We believe that comparative studies on animal cognition may help us in throwing light on its evolutionary path, if we refer to this term as the basic ability to connect elements in a regulated order. Non-human animals, indeed, lack the ability to connect tokens yielding an infinite variety of meaningful sentence-frames. This is due (at least) to anatomical or neural reasons. Nonetheless, the study of evolutionary convergences and phylogenetical dynamics, namely the analysis of monkeys' and birdsongs' utterances - reveal evidences for the presence of a “phonic” syntax, interestingly evolved in both species as a mean to modulate social contacts and spaces.

Do Women Prefer More Complex Music around Ovulation?

2012

The evolutionary origins of music are much debated. One theory holds that the ability to produce complex musical sounds might reflect qualities that are relevant in mate choice contexts and hence, that music is functionally analogous to the sexually-selected acoustic displays of some animals. If so, women may be expected to show heightened preferences for more complex music when they are most fertile. Here, we used computer-generated musical pieces and ovulation predictor kits to test this hypothesis. Our results indicate that women prefer more complex music in general; however, we found no evidence that their preference for more complex music increased around ovulation. Consequently, our f…

Pragmatic and Informative “Wholes”: the Evolutionary Roots of the Human Language

2011

The study of the origins of language has been the interest of several ungrounded debates which have often affected its scientific plausibility. In this paper, aiming at an internally consistent interdisciplinary approach, I will adopt Botha´s “Windows Approach" (2006) in order to justify the following two assumptions concerning the evolutionary roots of human language: a) despite the uniqueness of human language in sharing and conveying utterances with an open-ended structure, some isolated components of our linguistic competence are somehow shared with non-human primates, grounding a line of evolutionary continuity; b) the evolutionary thesis which sustains that the very first “linguistic”…

L’evoluzione del linguaggio proposizionale: dai vocalizzi dei primati non umani ai messaggi olistici

2010

Epistemologia della formazione. Il sapere articolato

2008

Bertrand Russell, alle porte del secolo scorso, fa riferimento ad una speranza che sia fonte di ispirazione e motore della moderna educazione. Quello che qui ci si appresta ad affrontare e analizzare è un problema che ha impegnato, durante tutta la storia dell’uomo, la riflessione delle menti più attive e geniali. Ciò significa che coloro i quali si sono occupati di riflettere sulle condizioni dell’uomo, sulla sua vita, e sui beni che costitutivamente la rendono migliore, hanno visto nell’educazione dei giovani il nucleo sostanziale, insostituibile e necessario alla vita buona. Le parole di Russell ci riportano direttamente al presente e all’obiettivo che deve raggiungere la scuola del nuov…