Antonio Scarafone

About me

Antonio Scarafone

I completed my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Reading (UK), and am now a postdoctoral researcher in the Cognition, Values, Behaviour and Crowd Cognition research groups at the LMU Munich. My research lies at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. In particular, I focus on prelinguistic communication, joint attention, and cognitive development. I am primarily interested on how social interactions shape the developing mind, and the role of normativity in these processes.

Areas of interest:
prelinguistic communication, cognitive development, normativity, common ground

I am working on:

Common Ground in Development

I aim to develop a coherent conceptualisation of common ground for prelinguistic communication, where common ground as a normative condition is distinguished from the psychology of the interactants.
Infant Pointing

 I am developing a theory of infant pointing which individuates its communicative function, explains the interplay between pointing and the common ground, and does so in a way that illuminates some of the roles played by pointing in cognitive development.

Communication and “Mindreading” in infancy

I investigate the relationship between infant communicative behaviour and what is measured by experiments on their abilities to reason about others’ intentions and beliefs.

I have worked on:

Creating a Common Ground

I laid the foundations for my current research in my PhD thesis, where I elaborate a commitment-based theory of prelinguistic communication and defend it against popular “Gricean” alternatives, on both philosophical and experimental grounds.

Publications

Scarafone A., What would it be like for prelinguistic communication to be Gricean?, forthcoming in «Language and Communication». 

Scarafone A., Michael J., Getting Ready to Share Commitments, «Philosophical Topics», 50 (1): 135-160.

Borg, E., Shardimgaliev M., Scarafone A., Meaning and Communication, «Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy», 2021. 

Scarafone A., Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, by Michael Tomasello, «Philosophy», 96 (3): 1-5, 2021. 

Borg E., Fisher S., Hansen N., Shardimgaliev M., Scarafone A. (eds.) Applied Philosophy of Language, «Ratio», 33, 2020. 

Scarafone A., What do we know when we learn the meanings of words?, «Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio», 13 (2), 2018, pp. 111-123. 

CVBE Projects