Call for Papers
Dialogue and Logos. Thinking between Collective and Individual Dimension
P.O.I. – Points of Interest, No. 13 (December 2023)
Submission Deadline (abstracts): June 30th, 2023
The bi-annual journal P.O.I. – Points of Interest invites submissions from scholars in philosophy and related disciplines for its forthcoming volume. Submissions should address the proposed theme and should conform to the criteria and terms outlined below.
“Thinking would seem to be a completely solitary activity. And so it is for other animal species. But for humans, thinking is like a jazz musician improvising a novel riff in the privacy of his own room. It is a solitary activity all right, but on an instrument made by others for that general purpose, after years of playing with and learning from other practitioners, in a musical genre with a rich history of legendary riffs, for an imagined audience of jazz aficionados. Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix.” (Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking, 2014).
In the past few years, the theme of the social nature of human intelligence returned under the spotlight, after that, for a long time, thinking had been considered as merely computational. Yet this development poses also difficult questions. Is there a collective intelligence deposited in institutions and conventions? Or, at least, is there an individual disposition that would let people act as a “we” (“collective intentionality”, “shared intentionality”) that should be considered the original condition necessary for the emergence of specifically human thinking? And again, to what extent are these social phenomena, such as deliberation and collective choice, prerequisites to the way in which we consider the dialogue and the debate, the inquiry and the reasoning? Can we invert the relationship between “logo” and “dialogue” – as it was pioneeringly proposed years ago by Guido Calogero – and see the latter as the basis on which the former develops itself? These questions invest cognitive philosophy and the philosophy of action through the problem of We-intentions and their nature, but also sociology with the ‘interactionist’ theory of rationality proposed by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier (The Enigma of Reason, 2017), as well as the philosophy of language through Gricean and post-Gricean conversational pragmatics, and then logic itself through the developments of pragmatic and dialogic-communicative approaches related to the argumentation and its logic, from Perelman and Toulmin in the 1950s and to the informal logics and the practical turn in logics presented in the following decades, developments that eventually also involved the didactics of logic and contributed to the emergence of the problematic of ‘thinking education’ (M. Lipman).
This issue of P.O.I. aims at discussing these new approaches to the problem represented by the individual-collective relationship in the noetic and cognitive spheres, to show their points of convergence, but also the difficulties arising from them and possible alternative declinations.
The following is a list of possible themes that could be developed:
- Does collective intentionality exist and what is it like?
- The social dimensions of rationality and irrationality;
- Conversation, discourse, dialogue: the thought-sharing practices and their rules;
- The logic of argumentation from Perelman and Toulmin applied to contemporary informal logics.
For submitting papers, please note the following terms and conditions.
Submissions should be preceded by an abstract of fewer than 2000-characters, including spaces (approximately 350-400 words), which will be pre-evaluated by the editorial staff for relevance to the CfP topic.
The deadline for receipt of abstracts is June 30th, 2023. Communication of decisions regarding the outcome of abstract submissions will take place after that date. Authors of accepted abstracts will then have until September 30th, 2023 to submit the full version of their paper (20,000-60,000-characters, including spaces; approximately 3500-10,500 words).
Contributions must be of original, unpublished work, and must not be under consideration by other journals.
Submissions in the following languages are accepted and will be considered: Italian, English, French, German, Spanish.
The journal employs double-blind peer review process; therefore, the author’s name and affiliation must appear only once in the paper (under the title). The full version of the paper should include an abstract (of max. 250 words, in English), and 5 keywords (in English).
Editorial guidelines can be found at the following webpage: http://poireview.com/en/editorial-guidelines/.
Submissions should be sent to the following address: redazione@poireview.com