Publications

This is the text of a presentation given at the First International Symposium on Philosophy and Science, held in May 2024. The central claim is that the challenge posed by John Haugeland in the 1970s remains valid: the absence of an affective dimension imposes limits on some of the claims of contemporary AI. The article was published in the book Filosofia e ciência: pensando eticamente a sociedade em diálogo com a ciência (ISSN 978-65-5272-214-0), released at the end of 2025....

In this paper we discuss how Robert Brandom’s inferentialist project (as discussed in Between Saying and Doing), illuminates importante aspects of contemporary debates about Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Abstract Classical Artificial Intelligence has a foundational place in Brandom: the practices whose domain constitutes the possession of a vocabulary are the application of a series of algorithms. Making explicit these algorithms provi-des an explanation for Brandom’s project of bringing the inferential commitments implicit in our practices into the game of giving and receiving reasons....

In this paper I argue that the answer is no, for no context-dependent feature can play a significant role in solutions to the frame problem, and that is the case of emotions. Abstract The frame problem, a long-standing issue in Artificial Intelligence (AI), revolves around determining the relevance of information in an ever-changing array of contexts, posing a formidable challenge in modeling human reasoning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that emotions are able to solve, or at least enable a substantial step towards a solution....

This is my PhD’s dissertation. I try to account for the relevance sensitivity presented in a core human cognitive capacities, which is commonsense. Roughly, that’s the capacity to zero in on what’s relevant within an open-ended set of contexts in a non circular way (after all, what’s relevant is context dependent). The key idea is that relevance sensitivity is a kind of cognitive technology (a cognitive gadget, as Cecilia Heyes would put it) that relies heavily on culturally established elements....

Here we argue for a conception of structural representations grounded in isomorphism as an alternative for linguistic representations grounded in causal correlation. We show that this conception can satisfy requirements such as Ramsey’s job description challenge and avoid the so called Hard problem of content and remain compatible with 4E cognition. We also argue that deciding whether a given cognitive capacity or performance is representational is a matter of empirical research on a case by case basis....