Roberto Gronda

University of Pisa, Department of Civiltà e Forme del Sapere, Faculty Member

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Supervisors: Massimo Mugnai, Paolo Parrini, and Rosa Calcaterra

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Papers by Roberto Gronda

Pragmatism and the Writing of History

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2016

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Natura e storia

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

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Scientific Experts and Citizen's Trust: Whwew the Third Wave of Social Studies Goes Wrong

by pierluigi barrotta and Roberto Gronda

Teoria, 2019

Collins and Evans’s Third Way of Social Studies of Science is an ambitious attempt to counteract ... more Collins and Evans’s Third Way of Social Studies of Science is an ambitious attempt to counteract the de-legitimation of scientific experts that is going on in contemporary Western societies and which, on a theoretical level, represents an unfortunate consequence of the corrosive approach championed by many proponents of Social Studies of Science. Collins and Evans argue that the importance of science in technical decision-making should be defended on purely moral grounds, without having recourse to epistemic notions. The goal of this article is to criticize Collins and Evans’s moral defense of the role of science in democracy, and to point out that, contrary to what they believe, the notion of scientific expertise is epistemic through and through. Our pragmatist account of expertise revolves around the idea that being a scientific expert is a social status that is to be earned and preserved: scientific experts are those who are perceived as trustworthy by the citizens. We argue, therefore, that trust is a bidirectional relationship. Trust is a normative concept that puts constraints on the kinds of behavior that both citizens and scientific experts are legitimate to perform.
Keywords: pragmatism; expertise; third wave of social studies of science; scientists; philosophy of competence.

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Filosofie della praxis: Preti e Dewey

Normativity and Objectivity The Semantic Nature of Objects and the Potentiality of Nature

In this paper, I address the question of the nature and ground of objectivity, with the aim to de... more In this paper, I address the question of the nature and ground of objectivity, with the aim to develop a pragmatist account of its distinctive features. Traditionally, pragmatism has been considered as an alternative to Kantian approaches. The aim of the paper is to argue that, contrary to the received view, a consistent pragmatist theory of objectivity should preserve many insights of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. My thesis is that Kantian notions of spontaneity, activity and objectivity can be fruitfully reformulated and translated into pragmatist terms. The key notion here is that of practices. It is only within the context of a practice that concepts can be successfully applied to experience. The intrinsic normativity of practices establishes different levels of objectivity. The paper defends a pluralistic view of reality, insisting on the irreducibility of common-sense objectivity to scientific objectivity. At the same time, it is maintained that common-sense practices have a primacy over scientific practices, and that scientific objects are constructed out of common-sense objects through a process of articulation of the potentialities of the latter.

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