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18Mechanistic explanations and the ethics of nudgingRivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 13 (3): 175-186. 2022._Abstract_: Nudges have proven to be effective tools for steering citizens toward desirable behaviors and make valuable additions to any policy-maker’s toolbox. Disappointingly, however, there are no mechanistic explanations for how nudges work, leaving policy-makers unable to explain what happens when they are implemented. This paper identifies some neglected ethical implications of the resulting citizens lack of awareness of such mechanisms. We first examine mechanistic explanations in relatio…Read more
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23Careful with those scissors, Eugene! Against the observational indistinguishability of spacetimesStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 89 (C): 103-113. 2021.
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8Gino Tarozzi philosopher of physics: studies in the philosophy of entanglement on his 60th birthday (edited book)FrancoAngeli. 2014.
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20Experience, abstraction and the scientific image of the world: Festschrift for Vincenzo Fano (edited book)FrancoAngeli. 2021.
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40A Logical Modeling of Severe IgnoranceJournal of Philosophical Logic 52 (4): 1053-1080. 2023.In the logical context, ignorance is traditionally defined recurring to epistemic logic. In particular, ignorance is essentially interpreted as “lack of knowledge”. This received view has - as we point out - some problems, in particular we will highlight how it does not allow to express a type of content-theoretic ignorance, i.e. an ignorance of φ that stems from an unfamiliarity with its meaning. Contrarily to this trend, in this paper, we introduce and investigate a modal logic having a primit…Read more
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17Evolutionary Dynamics and Accurate Perception. Critical Realism as an Empirically Testable HypothesisPhilosophia Scientiae 25 157-178. 2021.Mathematical models can be profitably used to establish whether our perception of the external world is accurate. Donald Hoffman and his collaborators have developed a promising mathematical framework within which this question can be addressed and which is based on an exhaustive taxonomy of the different possible relations between perceptual representations and the external world. After reformulating their framework by means of an improved formal system, we discuss their application of evolutio…Read more
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29Williamson On the Margins of Knowledge: A CriticismFoundations of Science 28 (1): 273-285. 2020.In this paper, we argue that Williamson’s arguments against luminosity and the KK principle do not work, at least in a scientific context. Both of these arguments are based on the presence of a so-called “buffer zone” between situations in which one is in a position to know p and situations in which one is in a position to know ¬p. In those positions belonging to the buffer zone ¬p holds, but one is not in a position to know ¬p. The presence of this buffer zone triggers two types of sorites argu…Read more
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20Melissus as an Analytic MetaphysicistAxiomathes 32 (3): 1105-1127. 2022.The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the logical structure of Melissus philosophy, building on Laks Most’s translation and Barnes’ seminal work on the Samian. This will allow us to shed some light on the subtle argumentations of Melissus. On top of that, we frame Melissus’ metaphysics employing modern logical instruments. On one side, this reformulation makes clear a few assumptions hidden in the deductions made by the Samian; on the other side, our paper shows that contemporary analytic meta…Read more
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37A working hypothesis for the logic of radical ignoranceSynthese 199 (1-2): 601-616. 2020.The Dunning–Kruger effect focuses our attention on the notion of invisibility of ignorance, i.e., the ignorance of ignorance. Such a phenomenon is not only important for everyday life, but also, above all, for some philosophical disciplines, such as epistemology of sciences. When someone tries to understand formally the phenomenon of ignorance of ignorance, they usually end up with a nested epistemic operator highly resistant to proper regimentation. In this paper, we argue that to understand ad…Read more
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19J. Faye and H.J. Folse, eds, Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Physics: Twenty‐First Century Perspectives, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, 384 pp., US$114.00 , ISBN 9781350035126 (review)Dialectica 73 (1-2): 267-273. 2019.
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47Is Einstein’s Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Ψ-Epistemic?Axiomathes 29 (6): 607-619. 2019.Harrigan and Spekkens, introduced the influential notion of an ontological model of operational quantum theory. Ontological models can be either “epistemic” or “ontic.” According to the two scholars, Einstein would have been one of the first to propose an epistemic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Pusey et al. showed that an epistemic interpretation of quantum theory is impossible, so implying that Einstein had been refuted. We discuss in detail Einstein’s arguments against the standard inte…Read more
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14ContentsIn Giovanni Macchia, Francesco Orilia & Vincenzo Fano (eds.), Space and Time: A Priori and a Posteriori Studies, De Gruyter. 2014.
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5About the authorsIn Giovanni Macchia, Francesco Orilia & Vincenzo Fano (eds.), Space and Time: A Priori and a Posteriori Studies, De Gruyter. pp. 273-276. 2014.
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22Lucas-Penrose type arguments have been the focus of many papers in the literature. In the present paper we attempt to evaluate the consequences of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for the philosophy of the mind. We argue that the best answer to this question was given by Gödel already in 1951 when he realized that either our intellectual capability is not representable by a Turing Machine, or we can never know with mathematical certainty what such a machine is. But his considerations became known…Read more
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19Abstract. An opposition between two conceptions of our knowledge of the external world is outlined. On the one hand physicists, like Dirac and Heisenberg, maintain that only what Physics considers real is actually real. On the other hand, psychologists, like Metzger, Kanizsa and Bozzi, believe that every sensible content is real, so that the Psychology of perception is the real Physics. We attempt to sketch a critical perspective, based on a reasonable criterion, in order to prospect a different…Read more
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34In the present essay Kantian prohibition against scientific cosmology is discussed. It is shown that the possibility of such a science is based essentially on a hypothetico-deductive use of the cosmological principle. Moreover the epistemological character of the latter is investigated, in order to prove that it has no a priori character, against the received view on the topics.
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39Different realistic attitudes towards wavefunctions and quantum states are as old as quantum theory itself. Recently Pusey, Barret and Rudolph on the one hand, and Auletta and Tarozzi on the other, have proposed new interesting arguments in favor of a broad realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics that can be considered the modern heir to some views held by the fathers of quantum theory. In this paper we give a new and detailed presentation of such arguments, propose a new taxonomy of diffe…Read more
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74A New Taxonomy of Persisting (Relativistic) ObjectsTopoi 34 (1): 283-294. 2015.The paper presents a thorough exploration of the problem of persistence in a relativistic context. Using formal methods such as mereology, formal theories of location and the so called intrinsic formulation of special relativity we provide a new, more rigorous and more comprehensive taxonomy of persisting entities. This new taxonomy differs significantly from the ones that are present in the recent literature
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1519Oltre la fisica normale. Interpretazioni alternative e teorie non standard nella fisica moderna (edited book)ISONOMIA - Epistemologica. 2013.Nella sua straordinaria opera scientifica, Franco Selleri si è sempre opposto alla rinuncia alla comprensione della struttura della realtà e della natura degli oggetti fisici, che egli considera come l’elemento caratterizzante delle principali teorie della fisica del Novecento e che è stata stigmatizzata da Karl Popper come tesi della “fine della strada in fisica”. Sin dalla fine degli anni ’60, egli ha sviluppato quella riflessione critica nei confronti delle teorie fondamentali della fisica mo…Read more
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"Strutture dello spazio tra fisica e psicologia" Teorie e Modelli XII, III (edited book)Pitagora. 2007.
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1321Complessità e RiduzionismoISONOMIA - Epistemologica Series Editor. 2012.The enormous increasing of connections between people and the noteworthy enlargement of domains and methods in sciences have augmented extraordinarily the cardinality of the set of meaningful human symbols. We know that complexity is always on the way to become complication, i.e. a non-tractable topic. For this reason scholars engage themselves more and more in attempting to tame plurality and chaos. In this book distinguished scientists, philosophers and historians of science reflect on the top…Read more
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58Holism as an empirically meaningful metaphysical hypothesisEpistemologia 2 221-233. 2012.Quantum mechanics is often credited for having clearly shown that the whole is something over and above the sum of its parts. We want to assess whether this is really the case, and if so, in what sense. We argue that there is indeed a sense in which this is true. Our argument is that even a weak realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics renders a particular metaphysical principle about property instantiation, that we label Property Compositional Determinateness, untenable. Yet there is anoth…Read more
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25Ontology and Mathematics in Classical Field Theories and Quantum MechanicsHumana Mente 4 (13). 2010.A draft of a possible comparison between the use made of mathematics in classical field theories and in quantum mechanics is presented. Hilbert’s space formalism, although not only elegant and powerful but intuitive as well, does not give us a spatio-temporal representation of physical events. The picture of the electromagnetic field as an entity which is real in itself– i.e., as a wave without support – fostered by the emergence of special relativity can be…Read more
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The Categories of Consciousness: Brentano's EpistemologyBrentano Studien 4 101-130. 1992.The present investigation reformulates a few Brentanian ideas concerning what is mental. In particular, an attempt to define the categorial structure implicit in the notion of consciousness and in that of inner perception, keeping in mind their connections with external perception and with unconscious, is outlined. Within the mental field is observed a formal violation of some elementary rules of ontology and mereology, and such violation can be interpreted in terms of an infinite multiplicity o…Read more
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111Non-Materiality of Non-LocalityFoundations of Physics 34 (12): 2005-2013. 2004.In the present paper we show that in a certain sense the violation of Bell’s inequality does not entail a real non-locality. We define materiality as the capacity to be modified; and it results that in the case of the singlet state the non-locality previewed by quantum mechanics and experimentally confirmed is not material
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43Abstract: It seems that from an epistemological point of view comparative probability has many advantages with respect to a probability measure. It is more reasonable as an evaluation of degrees of rational beliefs. It allows the formulation of a comparative indifference principle free from well known paradoxes. Moreover it makes it possible to weaken the principal principle, so that it becomes more reasonable. But the logical systems of comparative probability do not admit an adequate probabili…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Physical Science |
General Philosophy of Science |