This project has been funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (PRIN 2022SYAW7A) and is jointly run by two research unit at the universities of Milan and Bologna. A follow-up project , with a budget of over two million euros, will be run from October 2025 by Francesco Guala and John Michael. This page hosts information about research activities and outputs of the first phase.
Members
- Francesco Guala (PI, Milano)
- Raffaella Campaner (PI, Bologna)
- Martina Bacaro (Bologna)
- Francesco Bianchini (Bologna)
- Silvia Camporesi (now at KU Leuven)
- Davide Serpico (Milano)
Final Workshop (Milano 3-4 September 2025)
With Anna Alexandrova, Martina Bacaro, Francesco Bianchini, John Dupré, Muhammad Khalidi, Geneveva Martì, Don Ross, Joshua Rust, David Teira. The programme is available here.
Normative Kinds Seminar (9 June 2025)
Till Gruene-Yanoff (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm): “Modalities in Modeling: A Separate Scientific Practice?”. 16.30-18.00, Sala Martinetti, Dipartimento di filosofia, Università deglI Studi di Milano.
Normative Kinds Seminar (9 May 2025)
Malvina Ongaro (Politecnico di Milano), ” Inductive risk qua risk: Mitigating the impacts of inductive errors”. Stefano Canali (Politecnico di Milano), “Disambiguating Health Personalisation: From Personalised and Precision Medicine to Big Data and Machine Learning”. 14.30-17.00, Sala Martinetti, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Milano.
Normative Kinds Seminar (22 April 2025)
Caterina Marchionni (University of Helsinki), “Rethinking Values in the Study of Interactive Human Kinds”. 14.30-16.00, Sala Martinetti, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Milano.
Normative Kinds + Culinary Minds Seminar (24 March 2025)
Jonathan Sholl (University of Bordeaux) & Claudio Bandi (Università di Milano). 14.30-17.00, Sala Martinetti, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Milano. Info: https://www.culinarymind.org/normative-kind
Normative Kinds Seminar (24 October 2024)
Jaakko Kuorikoski (University of Helsinki), “Contrastive Evidence and Inductive Risk”. Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Milano.
Symposium (Krakow, 9-10 September 2024)
Special session on “Normative Kinds: Values and Classificatory Decisions in Science and Policymaking”, held at the 5th Biennial Conference of the East European Network for Philosophy of Science (with Martina Bacaro, Raffaella Campaner, Francesco Guala, Davide Serpico).
Workshop: Values and Classificatory Decisions in Biomedicine (Bologna 1-2 July 2024)
Project summary
Normative Kinds: Values and Classificatory Decisions in Science and Policy-Making
Contemporary philosophical debates about kinds are dominated by a broadly inferentialist perspective: real kinds are clusters of properties that support systematic and reliable (i.e. causally grounded) predictions, explanations and interventions. This conception has an important implication for the debate about values in science: it implies that the extension of scientific concepts and categories is contested and constantly negotiated not only because of our epistemic limitations, but also due to the inherently statistical nature of the relations that hold between properties which, in principle, may clustered in multiple ways. Many kinds-concepts and categories, moreover, are used not only to describe but also to prescribe: they carry positive or negative connotations which may influence the behaviour of lay people, scientists and policy-makers. Such “normative kinds” are the principal targets of our project.
We will start from the assumption that scientists, lay people and policy-makers are constantly engaged in classificatory decision-making, that is, they constantly make decisions concerning the extension and intension of categories that are used for explanatory, predictive, and pragmatic purposes. Such decisions cannot be based on purely epistemic considerations, but inevitably also involve value judgments. Although describing and prescribing seem to be distinct activities, attempts to draw a sharp line dividing normative and descriptive aspects in the language and concepts of science have been notoriously problematic. Contemporary attempts to vindicate (and regulate) the influence of non-epistemic values on science – as in the classic “Inductive Risk Argument” – typically appeal to uncertainty. Our project in contrast will explore, articulate and assess the thesis that values play an ineliminable role in scientific practice for ontological reasons – i.e. independently of our epistemic limitations.
We shall use a new “topological model” to explore trade-offs between inductive power, cost of error, and to study how norms may influence clustering and the projectability of kinds. We expect to identify tensions between epistemic and non-epistemic goals, and by means of the topological model to bring clarity to the problem of classificatory decision-making. We shall also use the model to examine what, if anything, can be saved of scientific realism: Does the success of our inferential practices support any conclusions about the reality of the structures that make such inferences possible? Is realism undermined by the fact that values play a necessary role in classificatory decisions? Finally, the theory will be tested and refined using case studies from areas of science where normative considerations play important but different functions, such as bio-medicine, psychiatry, social and cognitive science.
Publications
Serpico, D. & Guala, F. (2025) “Natural Kinds as Homeorhetic Dynamic Systems”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, online first.
Guala, F., Noyes, A. & Keil, F. (2025) “Money on My Mind: A Case Study of the Folk Ontology of Money”, in Philosophy and Finance: Ten Open Questions, edited by E. Ippoliti, M. Vergara-Fernandez & F. Zennaro. Springer, pp. 69-101.
Guala, F. (2025) “When Yip met Yup: A Dialogue on the Ontology of Money”, in Vonken van Inzicht: Liber Amicorum Filip Beukens, edited by Hans Dooremalen, pp. 95-108.
Serpico, D. (2026) “Intelligence“. In The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, edited by T. Teo. Palgrave MacMillan.
Work in Progress
Bacaro, M. & Bianchini, F. “Normativity for Machine Learning: The Role of Normative Kinds in Learning from Demonstration”.
Campaner, R. “On the Pathology Problem in the Age of Clustering: The Case of ADHD”.