MODELS, INFERENCES, AND REPRESENTATIONS IN SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

The research project is proposed by a PRIN group of Italian teams formed in the 1990s, under the leadership of Lorenzo Magnani of the PAVIA Unit, in the framework of intensive international collaborations. The project involves 10 units, representative of Italian Philosophy of Science, and forms a consistent group, involving a cross participation of its members. The program is coherently linked to the activities of the Italian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Sciences (SILFS) - http://www.silfs.it the local coordinator of the BOLOGNA unit is the president of this Society. The connecting thread of the past research work realized by the group has been the role of models and simulations in the rational reconstruction of scientific inquiry. The title proposed this year, although a continuation of this fundamental research line, aims at further extending - especially by strengthening the interdisciplinary aspects - the basic subject of models in science with three goals that are shared by all the local teams: a) the analysis of explanatory and creative inferential/representational strategies from a cognitive, epistemological, and computational perspective, also involving the computational modeling of concepts and the development of experimental studies; b) the refinement of the logical and mathematical tools required to develop the basic ideas and to better analyze the concepts of inference and representation; c) the analysis of modeling with respect to the notions of foundations, multilevel explanation, and emergence in the naturalistic perspective of empirical science including physics - a naturalized model of metaphysical knowledge – biology, and contemporary brain sciences. The project's units of the University of Macerata will focus on the following subject-matter: -MACERATA: Multilevel explanation in science and ontology. Here the others interrelated subject-matters of the other project's units: -PAVIA: Scientific models, representations, and abductive inferences in the light of a new “eco-cognitive epistemology” -BOLOGNA: Reasoning and non-classical inferences: proof theory, semantics and applications -ROME 3: Physical models of the world and naturalism -MILAN: Emergence and fundamentality -PISA: Decision under risk and uncertainty: a logical and epistemological analysis -TRIESTE: Confirmation, verisimilitude, and realism: issues in the logic and epistemology of scientific change -CHIETI/PESCARA Frames of reasoning and limitations of rational behaviour: theoretical and experimental research from the cognitive, social and cultural point of view -CAGLIARI: From models to logic: structures, logification and equivalence between logics -SASSARI: Properties: fundamental, intrinsic, involved in truth-making, grounding causal powers