The list of projects that were conducted and completed at the Research Center K&C.
Principal Investigator: Antonella Tramacere
Period: 1st February 2021 - 31st January 2024
An increasing number of people suffer from unsatisfaction with their own bodily appearance. What role do culture, life history and neurobiology play in the experience of disliking one’s own body? And does the deprecation of one’s own body have an impact on social interactions and the use of social media?
Humans evolved sophisticated social competences and are particularly vulnerable to the social image (how others perceive them). The socio-cultural contexts influence our brain and the way we represent ourselves. Also, our relationship with self-representational objects (e.g., classical mirrors, cameras and contents published on social media) is mediated by socio-cultural dynamics. Therefore, inquiring into the use of these objects can uncover how culture influences neuropsychology, shapes the social image, and may translate into various functional and dysfunctional social behaviors.
Knowledge and perspectives from the mirror neuron system (MNS) are crucial in this project. The MNS is a network of brain areas that simultaneously encode self and others’ actions and emotions. Its activity underlies social cognitive skills, such as emotional contagion, mimicry, and empathy. The MNS also underlies self-perception in front of the mirror and is recruited together with the mentalization circuits involved in the conceptual elaboration of ourselves. This makes it important to explore the philosophical and psychological implications of the role of the MNS in various forms of self-representations and in the social image.
The interdisciplinary project Self-image in the age of social media does address these questions also through experimental investigations, as it makes use of tracking technologies and software (such as Noldus Face Reader) coding facial expressions during self-perception with mirror, selfies, and smartphones.
Principal Investigator: Neri Marsili
Period: 2020 - 2021
In 2008, Wayne Riggs diagnosed a ‘value turn’ in epistemology: an increased interest in normative aspects of epistemology. A decade later, epistemology has taken a ‘factive turn’, recently sanctioned by a volume by Veli Mitova – The Factive Turn in Epistemology (2018). This turn is marked by the emergence and elaboration of the view that epistemic norms are essentially factive: truth is required for rational belief, decision, action, and cooperative assertion. To wit: one ought to believe that p only if p is true; deliberate only on the basis of true assumptions; and make only true assertions. Within a factive framework, if you form a false belief, deliberate or act on the basis of a false assumption, or make a false assertion, then you are violating an epistemic norm.
The consolidation of factive views has been determined, amongst other factors, by the emergence of the knowledge-first paradigm in epistemology, following the lead of Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits (2000). A wave of empirical studies has since lent further support to factive views, contending that they closely track folk intuitions.
Epistemologist, however, are far from reaching consensus that all epistemic norms are factive. Factive accounts have attracted strenuous criticism. Critics of factive views contend that epistemic norms do not entail truth: it can be rational to have a false belief, and to deliberate, act or assert on its basis – as long as other epistemic standards (which vary with views) are met.
This project aims to reassess the role of truth in epistemology, providing new grounds to settle the disagreement between factive and non-factive accounts of epistemic norms. Building on previous work, it will elaborate on the idea that truth should have a teleological –rather than deontological– role in epistemology. Truth is here still central to epistemic normativity (meeting some factivist desiderata), but it determines epistemic success, rather than permissibility (satisfying the main desideratum of non-factive views).