Ricerc@Sapienza

The aim of this paper is exploring how the kata of Shotokan karate constitute an embodied intentionality. Kata, a traditional way of training in karate for more than a century, consists in fighting without the presence of a real opponent. The article enquires about the origin of its meaning and the way in which its intentionality is expressed. Kata can be considered a narrative text that tells the story of a fight while mimicking it in such a way that every pre-established technique bears a specific meaning.

It has been suggested that agency signals generated by enactment provide memories with an enduring, episodic, marker that can successively be exploited to facilitate recall. Current theories of motor awareness highlight the role of prospective and retrospective sensorimotor cues in the construction of sense of agency (SA). To explore how these signals impact on memory for actions, we studied the effect of enactment in a patient with complete loss of somatic sensation below nose level, and compared her performance to that of a group of neurologically intact individuals.

Notes on semiotics and ethology: a (partially interrrupted diagolgue. The success of the chomskyan paradigm, combined with the anthropocentric turn of semiotics, has determined, since the seventies, a sort of divorce between semiotic studies and the ethological research. However, ethology, especially in its variant known as ‘cognitive’ ethology, has continued to use semiotic terminology in its approach to the communicative behavior of non-human animals.

Are the communication systems of non-human animals endowed with the property of symbolism or are they merely expressions of emotional states? The question has pervaded the philosophical debate at least since the time of Descartes and is now abundantly discussed in the field of cognitive ethology. In this paper, the topic is summarized both from the philosophical point of view (reconsidering Brentan’s notion of 'intentionality', often referred to by ethologists, too) and from the experimental point of view, referring to some well-known case-studies of the last decades.