Raffaele Mascella

All logic instruments and tools in possession of, and used by researchers are generally considered as the results of bivalent logic. A common error to people interested in science is that, usually, they don’t known with certainty which things are true and which are false. But they are sure that things are true or false. No ways in the middle. The fuzzy principle asserts that this is completely a question of measure. Fuzziness is the opposite concept to bivalency, while fuzzy quality means polyvalency. Fuzzy logic is able to manage uncertain knowledge and, more precisely, to manage those rules difficult to formalize. In many cases, such rules haven’t got, or cannot have, the necessary precision, required for a whole formalization

In this paper we deepen some aspects of the statistical approach to relevance by providing logics for the syntactical treatment of probabilistic relevance relations. Specifically, we define conservative expansions of Classical Logic endowed with a ternary connective ⇝ - indeed, a constrained material implication - whose intuitive reading is “x materially implies y and it is relevant to y under the evidence z”. In turn, this ensures the definability of a formula in three-variables R(x, z, y) which is the representative of relevance in the object language. We outline the algebraic semantics of such logics, and we apply the acquired machinery to investigate some termdefined weakly connexive implications with some intuitive appeal. As a consequence, a further motivation of (weakly) connexive principles in terms of relevance and background assumptions obtains.

Projects concerning the participation of citizens to the scientific research have become very popular in recent years. However, the literature seems not offer much foundational investigations into the epistemological conditions that make citizens’ contribution to science a fruitful and rigorous activity. Research institutions and citizens, understood as entities bearing generally distinct requests, practices and goals, knowledge and skills, are totally misaligned. In order to participate to collaborative research, citizens need an epistemic and methodological literacy to overcome common sense ideas, towards an ever adequate vision of phenomena under investigation. Besides understanding the social advantages introduced by the participatory dimension, it is therefore necessary to analyze the related epistemological problems, to understand to what extent and in what respect to the participation of citizens to research processes might be regarded as truly advantageous from an epistemological perspective.