Filosofia Inter-Disciplinare (FID)
Filosofia Inter-Disciplinare (FID) is a series of bi-monthly online-accessible research events devoted to the exploration of the various ways in which philosophy (and its sub-disciplines, including aesthetics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, social and political philosophy etc.) can interact with other academic disciplines (including experimental psychology, neuroscience, mathematics, computer sciences, political theory, art theory and history etc.).
FUTURE EVENTS
FID 5
Friday, 8 November 2024, 2pm–4pm (CET)
Yael Peled (Max Planck)
In person (Sala Martinetti, via Festa del Perdono 7, 20122 Milan) / Online
FID 6
Friday, 13 December 2024, 2pm–4pm (CET)
Guido Bonino & Paolo Tripodi (Turin)
In person (Sala Martinetti, via Festa del Perdono 7, 20122 Milan) / Online
PAST EVENTS
FID 3
Thursday, 27 June 2024, 2pm–4pm (CEST)
Diana Omigie (Goldsmiths)
TITLE: The Role of Epistemic Emotions in Shaping the Music Listening Experience
ABSTRACT: Over the course of a typical music listening episode, most individuals will find their focus switching between the music and other thoughts or actions. In this talk, I will first briefly review what is known about the role of epistemic emotions in aesthetic engagement. I will then present a series of studies demonstrating that the experience of curiosity, and conversely mind-wandering, during music listening is influenced by the heard music’s unfolding structure. Finally, I will present a novel model of time-varying music engagement that seeks to account for how music listening operates in typical real world listening situations, where draws on attention are many. I will end the talk by considering the presented work’s broader implications for empirical aesthetics research and by outlining promising directions for future research.
FID 2
Wednesday, 27 March 2024, 3.30pm–5.30pm (CET)
Daniel Kelly (Purdue)
TITLE: Why is Moral Progress Annoying? Social Change and Affective Friction [joint work with Evan Westra]
ABSTRACT: A heuristic people seem to rely on in everyday life embodies the idea that "people who I find moralistic and preachy are probably wrong and can be safely ignored". While difficult to defend when put so bluntly, this is a recognizable response to, say, the strident vegan, the humorless social justice scold, and the conservative prude. Often deployed with an eyeroll, the underlying intuition seems to be that genuinely important moral arguments will not be annoying, but will ring out with pristine moral clarity; these whiny trifles can be safely dismissed, though.
I will argue that most of the time, the opposite is true, and that we should expect even genuine moral progress to be experienced as annoying. Drawing upon recent insights from the cognitive science and philosophy of norms, I argue that social change generates a misalignment between people's internalized norms, on the one hand, and the social world they inhabit, on the other. This misalignment is experienced as an unpleasant kind of "affective friction". Unpleasant as it is, that affective friction is in no way indicative that the social changes that produce it are not important moral improvements. Eyerolls, it turns out, are morally and epistemically unreliable.
FID 1
Friday, 9 February 2024, 2pm–4pm (CET)
Uwe Peters (Utrecht)
TITLE: Hasty (Algorithmic) Generalizations: A Systematic Analysis of Chatbot Science Communication
ABSTRACT: Large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT have extensive potential as science communicators because they can provide laypeople, governments, and policymakers with easily understandable explanations of scientific findings, thus helping to increase science literacy worldwide. However, it remains unclear whether LLM summaries of scientific texts capture the uncertainties, limitations, and nuances of research, or contain oversimplified texts, omitting qualifiers or quantifiers present in scientific texts. The omission of qualifiers may result in generalizations of scientific findings that are much broader than warranted by the original research, potentially raising significant ethical and epistemic problems (e.g., human users may misinterpret scientific findings). However, the scope and accuracy of the generalizations that LLMs produce in their science communication has not yet been systematically explored. Building (inter alia) on recent philosophical work on generics, we therefore statistically compared the generalizations found in 200 human summaries of scientific texts (i.e., abstracts of scientific articles) with the corresponding 200 summaries produced by four leading LLMs (incl. ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4). This talk presents the preliminary (disconcerting) results of our analyses and highlights normative implications.
Organizers:
Filippo Contesi (Milan/Barcelona) & Elisa Paganini (Milan)
Scientific Committee:
Paolo Babbiotti (Turin), Chiara Brozzo (Birmingham), Laura Caponetto (Cambridge/Milan), Chiara Cappelletto (Milan), Massimiliano Carrara (Padua), Federica Cavaletti (Milan), Pietro Conte (Milan), Filippo Contesi (Milan/Barcelona), Carlotta Cossutta (Milan), Silvia De Bianchi (Milan), Ciro De Florio (Milan Cattolica), Daniel Dohrn (Milan), Jacopo Frascaroli (Turin), Manuel García-Carpintero (Barcelona), Francesco Guala (Milan), Andrea Guardo (Milan), Anna Ichino (Milan), Giorgio Lando (L'Aquila), Teresa Marques (Barcelona), Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis (Milan), John Michael (Milan), Francesca Minerva (Milan), Elisa Paganini (Milan), Andrea Pinotti (Milan), Giuseppe Primiero (Milan), Gemma Schino (Groningen), Enrico Terrone (Genoa), Giuliano Torrengo (Milan)
FID is hosted by the Philosophy Department "Piero Martinetti", Università degli Studi di Milano and PhilTech (Research Center for the Philosophy of Technology), and generously supported by the Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca (PRIN2022 - 2022NTCHYF_003)