• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publicationsclose
• Research dataclose
• Research softwareclose
• Other research productsclose
• 050905 science studies close
• IT close
• EU close
• Archivio della ricerca- Università di Roma La Sapienza close
• OpenAIRE close

International audience; Among the scholars who tackled the topic of language origins in the 19th century, the German philosopher Ludwig Noiré (1829–1889) deserves special mention. To him, the unique sociability of humans implies cooperation and cooperation in turn involves language. Remarkably, Noiré’s theory deeply influenced the debate on language origins until the 1950s. Before offering some theoretical and historical explanations for the enduring influence of Noiré’s theory, it is necessary to describe the general features of his theory and the context in which it arose. After dealing with the German-English debate on language origins during the 19th century, a section will be especially devoted to Noiré’s theory of language origins. Finally, a comparison between Noiré’s insights and the naturalistic framework of the 19th century is provided. Article published in: Historiographia Linguistica Vol. 44:1 (2017) pp. 47–71

In this work we investigate the effectiveness of different text mining methods for the task of automated identification of interdisciplinary doctoral dissertations, considering solely the content of their abstracts. In contrast to previous attempts, we frame the interdisciplinarity detection as a two step classification process: we first predict the main discipline of the dissertation using a supervised multi-class classifier and then exploit the distribution of prediction confidences of the first classifier as input for the binary classification of interdisciplinarity. For both supervised classification models we experiment with several different sets of features ranging from standard lexical features such as TF-IDF weighted vectors over topic modelling distributions to latent semantic textual representations known as word embeddings. In contrast to previous findings, our experimental results suggest that interdisciplinarity is better detected when directly using textual features than when inferring from the results of main discipline classification.

We investigate the accuracy of how author names are reported in bibliographic records excerpted from four prominent sources: WoS, Scopus, PubMed, and CrossRef. We take as a case study 44,549 publications stored in the internal database of Sapienza University of Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe. While our results indicate generally good accuracy for all bibliographic data sources considered, we highlight a number of issues that undermine the accuracy for certain classes of author names, including compound names and names with diacritics, which are common features to Italian and other Western languages.

The aim of this article is to explore the impact of Darwinism in metaethics and dispel some of the confusion surrounding it. While the prospects for a Darwinian metaethics appear to be improving, some underlying epistemological issues remain unclear. We will focus on the so-called Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (EDAs) which, when applied in metaethics, are defined as arguments that appeal to the evolutionary origins of moral beliefs so as to undermine their epistemic justification. The point is that an epistemic disanalogy can be identified in the debate on EDAs between moral beliefs and other kinds of beliefs, insofar as only the former are regarded as vulnerable to EDAs. First, we will analyze some significant debunking positions in metaethics in order to show that they do not provide adequate justification for such an epistemic disanalogy. Then, we will assess whether they can avoid the accusation of being epistemically incoherent by adopting the same evolutionary account for all kinds of beliefs. In other words, once it is argued that Darwinism has a corrosive impact on metaethics, what if its universal acid cannot be contained?

The paper analyzes the early theory building process of Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) from the 1910s to the 1930s and the introduction of the invisible gene as a main explanatory unit of heredity. Morgan's work marks the transition between two different styles of thought. In the early 1900s, he shifted from an embryological study of the development of the organism to a study of the mechanism of genetic inheritance and gene action. According to his contemporaries as well as to historiography, Morgan separated genetics from embryology, and the gene from the whole organism. Other scholars identified an underlying embryological focus in Morgan's work throughout his career. Our paper aims to clarify the debate by concentrating on Morgan's theory building-characterized by his confidence in the power of experimental methods, and carefully avoiding any ontological commitment towards the gene-and on the continuity of the questions to be addressed by both embryology and genetics.