Abstract
I think that the relationship between moral and violent behavior is still overlooked in current philosophical, epistemological, and cognitive studies. To the aim of clarifying the complex dynamics of this interplay, I will describe, adopting an eco-cognitive perspective, the concepts of salience and pregnance (originally introduced by René Thom s’ catastrophe theory in semiophysical terms), and the concepts of abduction and affordance (this last one originally proposed by Gibson). Showing the interesting relationships between these four basic concepts I will explain the role of abductive cognition and affordances in building and interpreting pregnances. The main theoretical merit of the concepts of salience and pregnance is that they can be at the same time applied to physical, biological, and cognitive phenomena: it is this wide perspective which grants the possibility of presenting an integrated and systemic theory of the social role of morality and violence. Non human and human animals are endowed with internal hardwired and plastic cognitive capacities but they also continuously delegate and distribute cognitive functions to the environment to lessen their limits. Among these functions the ones devoted to produce moral frameworks in a “plastic” way are central: these activities are basically abductive, they create salient and pregnant moral forms, which are thought to be good to follow but that at the same time afford conflicts, from which violent outcomes can derive. The last part of this article addresses the role of pregnances as linguistic functions which are essential in building that “military intelligence” in which moral and violent behaviors, such as bullying and scapegoating, can be simply and naturally explained, in a unified perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
Some topics that powerfully display such entanglement are gossip studies (Bertolotti and Magnani 2014), but also any epistemological approach on religion that cannot overlook how the violence entailed by religious cognition is rooted both in the moral assumptions and in the inferential regime that are typical of religion (Bertolotti 2015), and overall the philosophical approach to the relationships between morality and violence (Magnani 2011).
- 2.
Such appreciation seems to be more strongly nested in applied epistemology: David Coady explicitly connects the origins of applied epistemology to the tradition of applied ethics (Coady 2012, p. 1 and ff.), highlighting a theoretical practice of mutual borrowing that has characterized the different branches of philosophy since the very beginning.
- 3.
Thom considered the use of models in catastrophe theory as illustrating semiophysical processes, which in the case of cognition express what he called a “physics of meaning” (Thom 1988, Foreword).
- 4.
On the violent nature of language in a philosophical, perspective see Magnani (2011, Chap. 1).
- 5.
A list of the classical bibliography on abduction is given in Magnani (2001).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
A further analysis of this important concept is illustrated in Section Magnani (2009, Chap. 2).
- 10.
Cf. the article “The proper treatment of hypotheses: a preliminary chapter, toward an examination of Hume’s argument against miracles, in its logic and in its history” [1901] (in Peirce 1966, p. 692).
- 11.
Instinct is of course in part conscious: it is “always partially controlled by the deliberate exercise of imagination and reflection” (Peirce CP, 7.381).
- 12.
The plastic nature of abductive cognition refers to all the skillful capacities to make hypotheses, which human beings are able to learn and exploit.
- 13.
Some non-human animal behaviors can reasonably be called proto-moral, to lessen the anthropomorphic aura of the adjective “moral” (Waal et al. 2006).
- 14.
In this case we adopt the semiotic/Peircean lexicon which refers to cognition as sign activity.
- 15.
Cf. Magnani (2009, Chap. 6).
- 16.
- 17.
Perception is informationally “semi-encapsulated”, and also pre-wired, i.e., despite its bottom-up character, it is not insulated from plastic cognitive processes and contents acquired through learning and experience, cf. Raftopoulos (2009).
- 18.
The emergence of proto-morality and proto-violence can also be naturalistically seen in an evolutionary perspective, as I have illustrated in Magnani (2011, Chap. 1).
- 19.
As already illustrated above, in this case abduction plays and inferential role similar to the one it plays in physician’s diagnostic reasoning, when a symptom is explained by a hypothesis, a diagnosis, suitably selected among an already available encyclopedia of diagnostic hypotheses referred to the corresponding diseases. On the contrary, when a pregnancy is originally built, the process is akin to the case of creative abductive cognition, for example in science, when a new successful hypothesis is established for the first time. On these aspects of abductive cognition see Magnani (2009, Chap. 2).
- 20.
Also, in many animals alarm calls/cries are the analogue of the second-person singular imperatives typical of human natural languages (Thom 1980, p. 172).
- 21.
- 22.
Magnani (2009).
- 23.
Deception in animals is synthetically illustrated in El-Hani et al. (2009).
- 24.
Basic syntactical mechanisms are intended by Thom as simulated copies (defined on an abstract space) of the fundamental biological functions such as predation and sexuality.
- 25.
For example a verb transfers a pregnance from subject to object and so constitutes an attractor of the cerebral dynamics.
- 26.
It is important to stress that pregnant forms, as they receive names, tend to loose their alienating character.
- 27.
From this perspective the massive moral/violent exploitation of equivocal fallacies in ideological discussions, oratories, and speeches is obvious and clearly explainable.
- 28.
Taylor (2009). Taylor’s book also provides neuroscientific explanations on how brains process emotions, evoke associations, and stimulate reactions, which offer interesting data—at least in terms of neurological correlates—on why it is reactively easy for people to harm other people.
- 29.
Or through the exposure to descriptions and narratives about them and their achievements.
- 30.
- 31.
Some preliminary suggestions concerning the analysis of economical systems as semiocognitive niches is provided in Bertolotti and Magnani (2013).
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Magnani, L. (2015). Violence and Abductive Cognition. In: Magnani, L., Li, P., Park, W. (eds) Philosophy and Cognitive Science II. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18479-1_6
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