TITOLO: Ricerche
di Filosofia della logica, filosofia del linguaggio ed epistemologia
RESPONSABILI: Massimiliano
Carrara, Vittorio Morato e Giuseppe Mario Spolaore
ALTRI
PARTECIPANTI: Filippo Ferrari (U. di Padova), Giorgio Volpe (U.
di Bologna), Sebastiano Moruzzi (U. di Bologna), Elke Brendel (U. di
Bonn)
FREQUENZA: settimanale
CALENDARIO:
12/10/2020
— Filippo
Ferrari & Sebastiano
Moruzzi:
“Anti-Exceptionalism and its Varieties”
19/10/2020
— Neri
Marsili:
“Beyond testimony: speech acts and the epistemology of
communication”
26/10/2020
— Filippo
Ferrari & Luca
Incurvati:
“The varieties of agnosticism”
02/11/2020
— Ole
Höffken:
“How to avoid the Myth of the Given”
09/11/2020
— Massimiliano
Carrara & Andrea
Strollo “Not
all logics are created equal”
16/11/2020
— Erik
Stei “Logical
pluralism and logical consequence”
23/11/2020
— Yvonne
Hütter-Almerigi:
“Realism – what is it? What do we want it to be?”
07/12/2020
— Stefano
Pugnaghi:
“Metasemantics and its Role in Meaning Fixing”
14/12/2020
— Michael
Vollmer:
“Epistemic Authorities and How (Not) to Doubt Them”
21/12/2020
— Sebastian
Speitel:
“Logical Meanings between Reference and Inference”
11/01/2021
— Moritz
Müller:
“Attitudes and Their Aims”
18/01/2021
— Filippo
Mancini:
“The Logical Form of Fractional Counting Sentences”
25/01/2021
— Giorgio
Volpe:
“Contrastivism, closure, and epistemic modesty”
01/02/2021
— Viktoria
Knoll:
“Metalinguistic negotiations and conceptual ethics”
08/02/2021
— Enrico
Liverani:
“Argumentation Theory: a pluralistic approach based on
Austin’s speech acts”
15/02/2020
— Giuseppe
Spolaore:
“Epistemic Entanglement”
22/02/2020
— Christian
Molyneux:
“Problem resolving. An attempt to resolve philosophical problems by
criticizing the use of intuitions”
Altri
incontri saranno segnalati ai dottorandi via email
SEDE: online
(vedi la pagina web dedicata: https://bobopa.wordpress.com)
***
Autumn 2020 Meetings on
Polarization of irrational collective beliefs
Place: https://unipd.zoom.us/j/7400749838
25 November 2020, 18-20
Marco Fasoli (IUSS Pavia)
Title: The role of digital technologies in the dynamics of disinformation
Abstract: In the public debate technology is often considered as something intrinsically “neutral” that has no ends of its own and does not influence our behaviour in any way. On the one hand, according to this view technology is simply a tool that users are free to employ as they prefer, and no responsibility can be attributed to artifacts with respect to subjective phenomena such as overuse, disinformation and misinformation. On the other hand, the user of technology seems to be conceived as a homo technologicus, characterized by a pure rationality that renders him impervious to any external influence. However, in recent years cognitive sciences have clearly demonstrated that the behaviour of real human beings is sometimes incoherent, and easily influenced by fast and frugal heuristics and biases. I will argue that this means also that the behaviour of homo sapiens can be steered by technological design expedients in several ways. By means of the notions of affordance (Gibson 1979), proper function (Preston 1998), and hypernudge (Yeung 2017), in this talk I will try to explain in which sense technology can be considered as non-neutral and prescriptive, identifying some forms of manipulation that can be carried out through the web and digital technologies
2 december 2020, 18-20
Anna Elisabetta Galeotti (Università del Piemonte Orientale)
Title: Political Disinformation in the Era of Fake News
Abstract: The paper discusses the political effects of disinformation induced by fake news. It will be claimed that the belief-distortion specifically induced by fake news affects democratic politics only marginally, while the influence of partisan affiliation on political disinformation has a deeper impact. Such influence is certainly sustained and amplified by the new media that are feeding and disseminating fake news, but it is an independent phenomenon, ingrained in motivated reasoning. This argument, however, does not imply that the spread of fake news is irrelevant for democracy. Yet, its main threat does not regard the distortion of people’s voting behavior, by twisting their political beliefs, but rather: a) the capacity to affect the agenda setting in the public discourse; b) the opacity caused by unknown agents making use of what has been called the “stealth media”. Moreover, the generalized reference to fake news in public discourse has engendered and deepened a wide distrust of political information relative to politicians’ discourses and traditional or new media, as well as a mistrust of politics and of experts in general. In light of these considerations, the treatment of fake news should not be focused on forms of control of the contents spread by social media, but on issues of source’s transparency and on education.
9 December 2020, 18-20
Francesca Marin (Università di Padova)
Title: Promoting the trust-medicine-uncertainty interdependency in ordinary times and in extraordinary circumstances
Abstract: In this talk I will promote the idea of mutual dependence between trust, medicine and uncertainty, and I will critically analyze those approaches that either partially recognize such interdependence or propose a misrepresented view of medicine in terms of its relationship with uncertainty, negatively affecting trust in medicine. Indeed, on the one hand, nowadays the trust-medicine dyad is sometimes recognized without the acknowledgment of the medicine-uncertainty dyad, or vice versa. In other words, the role of trust in medical practice and the presence of uncertainty in medicine could be approached as issues which are unrelated to each other. In this way, the process of planning to promote trust in medicine and strategies for responding to medical uncertainty might be separately addressed. On the other hand, intolerance or even a refusal of medical uncertainty could affect trust in medicine because, by considering medicine itself as a science and a practice characterized by full certainty, claims of infallibility on the one side, and suspicions as well as incredulity on the other, might be fostered.
In order to avoid all these reductive views and to promote a well-placed trust in medicine, I will argue for the need for a change from a dual scheme, i.e. trust-medicine or medicine-uncertainty, to a triple pattern, that is, the trust-medicine-uncertainty interdependency. It will be shown why this pattern should be promoted in ordinary times and ever more in extraordinary circumstances, such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
16 December 2020
Tommaso Piazza (Università di Pavia)
Title: Can we be criticized if we consume fake news?
Abstract: In this talk I attempt to do two things. Firstly, I propose an account of epistemic blameworthiness––of what it takes to deserve intellectual blame for what one believes––based on a distinction drawn by W. Alston between a proper and a derivative sense of blameworthiness. According to this account, roughly, we can be blamed (in the derivative sense) for believing P iff we should have exercised due control on the belief-influencing factor(s) resulting in our believing P, and we can be blamed (in the proper sense) for having failed to do so. Secondly, I resort to this account in addressing the question whether ordinary consumers of fake news––namely, social media users who believe the fake news they are fed with within their favorite social media––are blameworthy for their beliefs. Here I apply the results of a different paper (Croce & Piazza ms.) where we argue that by simply acquiring the habit of consuming mainstream media, one would considerably reduce one's tendency to believe in fake news. Within the normative framework delineated in the first part of the paper, this result motivates the conclusion that ordinary consumers of fake news are mostly criticizable for their beliefs, for they are criticizable for their failure to enlarge their information diet in feasible ways.