PhD students cycles XXXVIII

Title: Psychiatric knowledge as disputed territory: the case of the Neurodiversity Movement

Abstract: In my research, I use the tools of feminist social epistemology to understand the epistemic power relations that occur in the exchange of knowledge between patient and therapist, with a focus on the issues that the Neurodiversity Movement has raised against the medical field. Specifically, I will address claims that have to do with diagnosis and how its meaning is interpreted differently by the parties. This clash brings out a fundamental question of social epistemology about the legitimization of knowledge between experts, representatives of traditional scientific knowledge, and people with first-person experience (people with lived experience), who support their positions through the new epistemologies born out of postcolonial studies and feminist epistemology. Situating this study within the psychiatric context will allow me to trace the trajectory of the growth of the new emancipatory movements based on psychiatric diagnosis, their relationship to Identity Politics, and the consequences that such claims may entail regarding the controversial and contested concept of psychiatric diagnosis. However, the fundamental purpose of the research will be to try to trace the lines of complexity, risks, and long-term effects that the long-standing and necessary question "who can speak for whom" carries when posed within the psychological and psychiatric context.

ABSTRACT: This project aims to study the reproductive process in ancient Roman medicine, focusing on conception, embryology, and fetal development. The primary sources of evidence will be medical treatises from the imperial age to late antiquity (1st–6th centuries). The main works examined will be: Soranus' gynecological treatise (Gynaecia), Galen’s works on embryology (De semine) and fetal development (De foetuum formatione), accounts of anatomical dissections (e.g., De anatomicis administrationibus), compendia of pathologies and therapies from the imperial and late antique periods (e.g., De Medicina by Celsus and the Byzantine “encyclopedias”).

The research will be divided into three stages, and it will begin with the analysis of physiological medicine concerning the anatomical reconstruction of the reproductive system and its functions. The study will delve into the generation of reproductive seeds, their origin, and their role in the formation of the embryo. The first phase of the project will focus on the prenatal stage, including embryogenesis and fetal development.

The second phase of the research will focus on pathological medicine, including the analysis of sexual diseases and their effects on health and procreative capacity. Proposed therapies for these diseases will be studied according to their different types: pharmacological therapy, surgical therapy, specific diets, and lifestyle changes.

The third and final phase of the research will involve framing the inferred data from a historical-socioeconomic perspective to interpret them in light of the policies of Roman society designed to ensure stable population growth.

Textual sources will be complemented by the study of material sources, such as the anatomical votives belonging to the Gorga collection at the Museum of the History of Medicine in Rome.

Semiotics of decolonial processes. The reinvention of codes in museum institutions

The aim of my research is to study the decolonisation practices of colonial collections held in European museums. These museums have to deal with difficult and dissonant collections acquired during the colonial period. More and more institutions are engaging in a process of critical revision of their holdings, including by developing relationships with former colonies to return stolen objects.

Many contemporary approaches to decolonisation attempt to rethink the ethnographic paradigm of musealisation that has always characterised the colonial period. Very often, however, they re-propose its marginalising logic, which is why the discussion around attempts to reinterpret the role of both collections and museums is particularly heated.

One voice that is missing is that of semiotics, particularly of memory and culture, which is called upon to intervene because that of decolonisation is primarily a problem of re-invention of cultural codes.

The ethnographic paradigm is the consequence of an ethnocentric and patriarchal posture that values the Western, male and heterosexual identity in contrast to an Other to be domesticated within the institutional borders of the museum. Even today, the Other is often represented in a static and anachronistic way and the very display of colonial objects is an act of perpetuating colonial domination. Here, then, the problem of decolonisation becomes that of the representation of exploitation and the removal of white supremacist privilege.

Museums inhabit the fulcrum of the semiosphere: they emerge from the habits of culture but at the same time institutionalise axiologies contributing to the socialisation of human experience. Thus, the problem of the decolonisation of collections is that of the decolonisation of the gaze.

The museums under consideration are the MuCiv (Rome), Quai Branly and de l'Homme (Paris), Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), Afrika Museum (Brussels), Humboldt Forum (Berlin). The analysis of these texts will assess the coherence of resemantisation with movements of inclusion of new subjectivities.

Title: The Paradox of Aesthetic Disagreement
Abstract: My research is mainly about the significance of aesthetic disagreement: how we understand it and why it matters. In general, aesthetic disagreement is the situation when two subjects, with regard to the same object, make different and even contrary aesthetic judgements. On the one hand, aesthetic judgement has a kind of universality in the sense that the subject should believe the judgement is universally valid when making the judgement; on the other hand, aesthetic disagreement is usually faultless in which case we have no good reason to say either of the opposite judgements is at fault. I argue that this paradox is a result of the gap between the a priori principle and the empirical observation of aesthetic judgement. Underlying this paradox is the distinction of the conception of subject in two senses. The universality of aesthetic judgement implies a disinterested subject who is free from any constraint; while the disagreement reveals that the subject is always conditioned on one’s status. This distinction of subject further refers to the critical theory of aesthetics. Following this way, I also intend to delve deeper into Rancière’s theory of aesthetics and politics. 

Discovering and Modeling Knowledge Patterns from Tropes in Scientific Texts

In order to effectively convey concepts, scientific literature often derails or suspends the normal referentiality of language through figurative expressions. It is unsurprising, then, that science itself is rooted in metaphor and analogy for creating meaning. However, to understand the development of these phenomena and their consequences on society, most natural language processing solutions have tended to be merely based on prior quantifications of topics or lower level linguistic features. This work aims at bridging this gap by exploiting state-of-the-art knowledge extraction and representation techniques to discover and model knowledge patterns (KPs) in scientific texts. The hybridization of natural language processing and semantic technologies will foster the formalization and extraction of KPs from text used in a non-literal sense and abstractive form. Specifically, this work will: (i) detect tropes in a curated corpus; (ii) explore their relationship with other structural elements of the text; (iii) identify and formalize invariances into KPs and (iv) populate a knowledge graph based on this metamodel. The resulting insights and techniques will benefit knowledge representation and extraction techniques from texts in different research endeavors.

Abstract: The systems and processes of signification, as well as the sense-making effects produced by texts, practices, and objects on individuals, fall within a semiotic study of subjectivity, culture, and society that is simultaneously empirical, methodological, theoretical, and philosophical. Research interest in these themes are manifested in the development of educational semiotics, pursued on a dual vocation centred on: (i) the analysis of internal and external mediations to the educational system in general, and (ii) the role of semiotics in educational design through practices, environments, and technologies. Within the realm of educational research and innovative teaching approaches focusing on student-centred methodologies, semiotics can provide, on one hand, guiding analytical frameworks for policy makers in the field and, on the other hand, a study of innovative didactic design. From this perspective, semiotics can contribute to the innovation process that education and instruction are undergoing: from the standpoint of the relationship between simulated environments and formal learning contexts, it can study educational architectures and furnishings, both for the design of new educational spaces and for the adaptation of existing learning environments; from the perspective of simulative and multisensory experiences, it can identify the enunciative characteristics of activities and assess how they cognitively and perceptually impact the individual.

Processes of Algorithmic Semiosis and Artificial Intelligence. Instruments to Guide Policies on Digital Competences from a Gender Perspective.

 The research explores the intersection of algorithmic semiosis, artificial intelligence (AI), and gender perspectives in the context of digitalization processes and the dissemination of skills at the regional level.

It seeks to delve into the production of meanings within algorithmic systems, investigating how AI encodes and decodes information and texts. Simultaneously, it analyzes the contexts of digital skills dissemination, particularly in relation to Big Data and AI themes, with the aim of highlighting the ways in which gender stereotypes persist in digital environments.

One of the main outcomes of the research is the development of instruments and interpretation keys that facilitate a gender-sensitive approach in formulating policies in the field of digital skills. In its first year of implementation, the research project, co-funded by ART-ER S. con. p.a., has indeed been embedded into a valorization and scientific framing action for "Integrated Actions for the Dissemination of Digital Skills in Emilia Romagna," as per resolution no. 1608/2022.

Another focus of the research aims to understand, from a semiotic perspective, how AI systems generate and interpret meanings and values. This also involves reference to the theoretical apparatus of differential heterogenesis (Sarti, Citti, Piotrowski, 2022), capable of formalizing the relationship between the content plane and the expression plane, as well as exemplifying the mediation steps among modes of existence, as described by the theory of impersonal and evenemential enunciation (Paolucci, 2020).

The methodology adopts a multidisciplinary approach, encompassing semiotics, philosophy of information, social research, and gender studies. Data collection includes the analysis of large-scale datasets, algorithmic profiling, and the impact assessment of interventions aimed at the dissemination of digital skills.

Title: Leibniz in Marburg Neo-Kantism: Genesis, Development and Critique of a Counter-History of Idealism

Abstract (Eng): The research project consists in the study of the reception of Leibniz's thought in Marburg Neo-Kantism, with particular attention to the developments in the thought of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer. It is intended to contribute both to the deepening of the Leibnizian heritage of the 20th century and to the clarification of still little studied aspects of the Marburg epistemological proposal. In fact, through the concepts of continuity of forms, uniformity of method, and homogeneity of magnitudes, characteristic above all of Leibnizian mathematics, the Marburg authors advance an epistemological proposal aimed at redefining the boundaries of an authentically transcendental critical idealism, which knows how to grasp in their germinal, a priori, and therefore pure moment the fundamental functions proper to scientific procedure. The study avails itself above all of recently published bibliographical material relative to Leibniz's writings on geometry, which partially confirms some of the intuitions of the Marburg reading, to which we owe the merit of having insisted on the profound connection in Leibniz's thought between mathematical and geometric elements and the more strictly metaphysical and logical elements. 

Title: From transcendental subjectivity to narrative identity. Time and subject from Husserl’s phenomenology to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics.

Abstract (eng): The aim of this research project is to study the philosophical path through which Ricoeur claims at once to inherit the authentic tenet of Husserl’s phenomenology while overcoming it towards an hermeneutical phenomenology. According to Ricoeur, the connection between these two philosophies is twofold: hermeneutics, as interrogation of sense, is indebted to phenomenology, which, in its turn, assumes the hermeneutic condition of interpretation. However, for hermeneutics to be grafted on phenomenology, the latter must abandon the idealistic domain of transcendental philosophy. The graft of hermeneutics on phenomenology entails a major shift within the phenomenological domains of temporality and subjectivity: the direct experience of time described by Husserl must be mediated, according to Ricoeur, by the act of narration, whose function contributes furthermore to the constitution of a narrative identity, as a new subjectivity at the crossroad of individual and community, history and fiction, and whose aim is to replace transcendental subjectivity. A critical analysis focusing on the entire theoretical path through which Ricoeur selectively transforms Husserl’s phenomenology into a hermeneutics would allow to address three main questions, which will shed light on the entire relation between the two philosophers. Which traits of Husserl’s phenomenology are the actual targets of Ricoeur’s critique? How effective is Ricoeur’s systematic critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology? Is it still possible to find within Ricoeur’s hermeneutics some traits of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology? By following the thread of temporality and subjectivity, it will be possible to measure the validity of Ricoeur’s critique and to assess his attempt to build a hermeneutics on the ruins of Husserl’s transcendental idealism. The final purpose of the research is to determine whether Ricoeur’s graft necessarily implies the abandonment of the transcendental horizon and the denial of all its consequences, and to measure the effective debt that Ricoeur owes to Husserl.

Title: For an archaeology of social violence. A study on the “denial” of the child

Abstract (Eng): The primary aim of the project is to analyse and reconstruct the history of educational violence in the European context and to investigate the reasons that have made possible for it to persist despite the many transformations it has undergone over the centuries. To this end, two different, interconnected and complementary perspectives of investigation will be adopted. On the one hand, the social and historical-philosophical side of educational violence will be examined by analysing material of a heterogeneous nature that can provide a clear context on the theoretical and practical developments in the pedagogical field from the second half of the 17th century onwards. On the other hand, contemporary legal literature will be scrutinised, trying to highlight the critical points still present within the international debate on Children's Rights. Through the study of these two dimensions, the aim is, among other things, to describe the persistence of the evil embodied by the generational repetition of violence and to fill in the gaps still to be found in the proposed field of investigation, which continues to be extremely difficult to challenge and deconstruct

Title: Models of dialectics and aesthetic truth in Hegel and Adorno
Abstract (Eng): Focus of the research is the relationship of co-implication that subsists, in Hegel and Adorno, between the models of dialectics they propose and the conception of aesthetic truth they elaborate. The analysis is conducted both through an examination of the key points in which this intertwining is established, and through the problematisation of the elements of greatest contrast and convergence between the two authors. The aim is to show not only how both conduct their study of the aesthetic by framing it within the theoretical structure provided by the construction, in the logical-conceptual field, of a precise model of dialectics (“positive” Hegel, “negative” Adorno), but first and foremost to investigate the possibility that, conversely, it is precisely the consideration of the aesthetic – here understood not much or not only as an artistic fact/phenomenon, but rather as a sensible, mimetic, para-linguistic, non-identical element of our experience of the real – that requires, as an aconceptual moment is implicated in every processual conception of truth, the articulation of a specific dialectical paradigm. Such an examination shall also allow to question the need for dialectical thought to move from a more strongly conceptual model, as Hegel’s was, to a more perceptual one, which certainly does not forget the need to make use of concepts in philosophy, but which, at the same time, as Adorno suggests, becomes aware of the violence that knowledge does to things by their use and that, for this reason, moves in the direction of rehabilitating, against an idea of truth as pure rational knowledge, an idea of truth as experience, which dialectically should include, rather thań repress, the truthful moment of the aesthetic.

Aanalysis of cognitive and formal foundations of ontology patterns of cultural heritage domain
Abstract: The project aims to study the modelling solutions used in the domain of cultural heritage ontologies in order to identify their cognitive and formal foundations, as a starting point for adapting the methods currently used by domain experts in ontology modelling.

To achieve this goal, patterns will be analysed from three different perspectives:

• -quantitative perspective: in this phase, ontologies will be compared to identify recurring modelling problems and proposed solutions;
• -cognitive perspective: through laboratory experiments, the adherence of these patterns to the cognitive processes through which humans analyse and interpret specific problems will be evaluated;
• -formal perspective: the formal perspective aims to unify all the entities involved in the specific patterns into a first-order theory, using specific formal ontological theories.

Based on this study, a method will be developed to enable domain experts to represent their ontologies in a logically and inferentially correct manner. Within this method, a simplified language, SKOS-F, will be implemented to translate the patterns into a formal language, extending the standard SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) used in most cultural heritage projects.

The result of applying this methodology will be a dataset that robustly integrates cultural heritage knowledge and is simultaneously easy to read for non-experts while being formally grounded for automated deductive reasoning.