Matteo Motterlini

Last updated

Matteo Motterlini (born 6 January 1967) is an Italian philosopher of science, behavioral and neuroeconomist. He teaches at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan, Italy.

Contents

Academic career and publications

Former Adviser for Social and Behavioral Sciences for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers in Italy (appointed 5 May 2016 - ended March 2018)

Motterlini holds graduate degrees in Logic & Scientific Method and Economics from The London School of Economics and Political Science. He held teaching and research positions at Carnegie Mellon University (Dept. of Social and Decision Sciences, 1999–2000) and University of California Los Angeles (Dept. of Psychology, 2011–2012).

He is perhaps best known for his contribution to the field of philosophy of science and the history of ideas, mainly to the issue of the rationality of science and the debate “for and against method” with respect to the philosophical ideas of Imre Lakatos and Paul K. Feyerabend. [1]

Based on the original material in the Lakatos Archive, he edited For and Against Method (1999, University of Chicago Press), including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence. [2] [3]

He investigates the neurological basis of human irrationality. His research focuses on the neural correlations of financial decision making, with a special reference to the role of emotions, regret, [4] social learning [5] and loss aversion. [6]

He is director of the Center for Experimental and Applied Epistemology (CRESA) where he and his team design and the test ways in which neuro-behavioral economics findings may inform more effective evidence-based public policy. [7]

He is also a prolific writer for general public and contributes regularly to several Italian newspapers, notably Il Corriere della sera and Il Sole 24 Ore. His pop-science books Economia emotiva (Emotional Economics) (2006, Rizzoli) and Trappole mentali (Mental Traps) (2008, Rizzoli) are worldwide best sellers with translations into Spanish, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. He was Scientific Advisor of AC Milan football club for six seasons from 2004 to 2010.

Related Research Articles

Falsifiability Property of a theory/hypothesis/statement that can be logically contradicted by an empirical test

Falsifiability is a standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses that was introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934). He proposed it as the cornerstone of a solution to both the problem of induction and the problem of demarcation. A theory or hypothesis is falsifiable if it can be logically contradicted by an empirical test that can potentially be executed with existing technologies. The purpose of falsifiability, even being a logical criterion, is to make the theory predictive and testable, thus useful in practice.

Imre Lakatos Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science

Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its "methodology of proofs and refutations" in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the "research programme" in his methodology of scientific research programmes.

Cognitive neuroscience Scientific field

Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.

Paul Feyerabend Austrian-born philosopher of science (1924–1994)

Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades (1958–1989). At various points in his life, he lived in England, the United States, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, and finally Switzerland. His major works include Against Method (1975), Science in a Free Society (1978) and Farewell to Reason (1987). Feyerabend became famous for his purportedly anarchistic view of science and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules. He was an influential figure in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Asteroid (22356) Feyerabend is named in his honour.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to neuroscience:

Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to explain human decision making, the ability to process multiple alternatives and to follow a course of action. It studies how economic behavior can shape our understanding of the brain, and how neuroscientific discoveries can constrain and guide models of economics.

Loss aversion Cognitive bias

Loss aversion is the tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. The principle is prominent in the domain of economics. What distinguishes loss aversion from risk aversion is that the utility of a monetary payoff depends on what was previously experienced or was expected to happen. Some studies have suggested that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. Loss aversion was first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.

In philosophy of science and epistemology, the demarcation problem is the question of how to distinguish between science and non-science. It examines the boundaries between science, pseudoscience, and other products of human activity, like art and literature, and beliefs. The debate continues after over two millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields. The debate has consequences for what can be called "scientific" in fields such as education and public policy.

Behavioral sciences explore the cognitive processes within organisms and the behavioral interactions between organisms in the natural world. It involves the systematic analysis and investigation of human and animal behavior through naturalistic observation, controlled scientific experimentation and mathematical modeling. It attempts to accomplish legitimate, objective conclusions through rigorous formulations and observation. Examples of behavioral sciences include psychology, psychobiology, anthropology, and cognitive science. Generally, behavioral science primarily has shown how human action often seeks to generalize about human behavior as it relates to society and its impact on society as a whole.

The history and philosophy of science (HPS) is an academic discipline that encompasses the philosophy of science and the history of science. Although many scholars in the field are trained primarily as either historians or as philosophers, there are degree-granting departments of HPS at several prominent universities.

In computer science, the scientific community metaphor is a metaphor used to aid understanding scientific communities. The first publications on the scientific community metaphor in 1981 and 1982 involved the development of a programming language named Ether that invoked procedural plans to process goals and assertions concurrently by dynamically creating new rules during program execution. Ether also addressed issues of conflict and contradiction with multiple sources of knowledge and multiple viewpoints.

The Vita-Salute San Raffaele University is a private university in Milan, Italy. It was founded in 1996 and is organized in three departments; Medicine, Philosophy and Psychology.

John Worrall (philosopher) Philosopher

John Worrall is a professor of philosophy of science at the London School of Economics. He is also associated with the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the same institution.

Andrea Moro Italian linguist

Andrea Carlo Moro is an Italian linguist, neuroscientist and novelist.

Gianvito Martino is an Italian neuroscientist.

Bold hypothesis or bold conjecture is a concept in the philosophy of science of Karl Popper, first explained in his debut The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935) and subsequently elaborated in writings such as Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963). The concept is nowadays widely used in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of knowledge. It is also used in the social and behavioural sciences.

Russell Poldrack

Russell "Russ" Alan Poldrack is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of Psychology at Stanford University, Associate Director of Stanford Data Science, member of the Stanford Neuroscience Institute and director of the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience and the SDS Center for Open and Reproducible Science.

Roberto Burioni Italian doctor known for his strong stand against the antivaccination movement.

Roberto Burioni is an Italian virologist, physician and academic, Professor of Microbiology and Virology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan where he runs a lab developing human monoclonal antibodies against human infectious agents, the study of pathogen-host interplay, and the use of molecular tools in the early diagnosis of infectious diseases. Burioni has risen to fame in Italy for his strong stance against the antivaccination movement and has been described as the "most famous virologist in Italy".

Stefano Sandrone Italian neuroscientist

Stefano Sandrone (1988) is an Italian neuroscientist and a Senior Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London.

Giorgio Coricelli is professor of economics and psychology at the University of Southern California, specializing in neuroeconomics. Having done his undergraduate studies at La Sapienza in Rome, he then completed his Ph.D. at the Economic Science Laboratory of the University of Arizona studying with Vernon Smith, shortly before Smith received his Nobel Prize in economics in 2002.

References

2019. “Testing donation menus: on charitable giving for cancer research – evidence from a natural field experiment ” (con Marianna Baggio), Behavioural Public Policy, Page 1 of 22, Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/bpp.2019.13