Sandro Sozzo
DIUM
Camminavamo, io e Einstein, quando a un tratto egli si fermò. “Veramente è convinto – mi chiese – che la luna esista solo quando la si guarda?”
A. Pais
Sandro Sozzo
Logica e filosofia della scienza (M-FIL/02)
- Associate professor
- Tel.: 0432 556558
- Email: sandro.sozzo@uniud.it
- Office: Casa Solari, second floor, room L2-01
- Teachings: Philosophical Logic and Mathematics; Philosophy of Science
Sandro Sozzo
Logica e filosofia della scienza (M-FIL/02)
- Associate professor
- Tel.: 0432 556558
- Email: sandro.sozzo@uniud.it
- Office: Casa Solari, second floor, room L2-01
- Teachings: Philosophical Logic and Mathematics; Philosophy of Science
Camminavamo, io e Einstein, quando a un tratto egli si fermò. “Veramente è convinto – mi chiese – che la luna esista solo quando la si guarda?”
A. Pais
Born in 1978, I received a Master’s Degree in Physics in 2002 and a PhD in Physics in 2006 at the University of Salento. After a period of training as a postdoctoral researcher at the “Free University of Brussels” (VUB), I took up positions as a “lecturer” in 2013 and as an “associate professor” in 2015 at the “University of Leicester” (UK). Since 2022 I have been an associate professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the “University of Udine”, and I have the scientific qualification as full professor in the sector "Logic, History and Philosophy of Science".
My research interests mainly concern the logico-epistemological foundations of natural and cognitive sciences. I contributed to the elaboration of a new approach to the foundations of scientific theories that uses a methodology that is typical of analytical philosophy. This approach has, in particular, been applied to physical theories, through an accurate analysis of the language and of the constituent elements of these theories and their mathematical and interpretative structure. The analysis allowed to reach interesting conclusions regarding the crucial themes of realism, causality, indeterminism and the interpretation of probability in classical and quantum theories. The approach was later extended to cognitive sciences. In particular, a new theoretical perspective has been developed for the representation of concepts, which is internationally recognized and explains in a unitary way the origin of numerous "cognitive fallacies" and "deviations from rationality" in probabilistic judgments and decisions in the presence of uncertainty. This perspective has also had significant applications in computer science, in relation to information retrieval and natural language processing.
I am the author of a hundred of articles on the foundations and philosophy of science (2004-2022), I am co-author of the book "The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: Historical Analysis and Open Questions" (World Scientific, 2006), I have organized 5 international conferences, and I have been invited to give lectures in the United Kingdom (“University of Oxford”), the United States, Canada, the European Union, New Zealand and China. In 2014 I founded and currently direct the "Centre for Quantum Social and Cognitive Science" (CQSCS) research centre, which aims to develop an interdisciplinary research program for the epistemological foundations of natural and cognitive sciences. As part of the activities of the centre, I acted as principal investigator in the international consortium "Quantum Information Access and Retrieval Theory" (QUARTZ), which received funding for a "Marie Curie Innovative Training Network". In different periods, I have taken on positions as director for teaching, research and internationalization. Member since 2015 of the "Higher Education Academy" (HEA), I won awards for the quality of teaching in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022. Since 2012 I have been elected secretary of the "International Quantum Structures Association" (IQSA) based in the United States, and "managing editor" of the Springer Nature magazine "Foundations of Science".
Publications
Towards a Quantum World Wide Web
Theoretical Computer Science 752 (2018) 116–131 (con D. Aerts, J. Arguëlles, L. Beltran, L. Beltran, I. Distrito, M. Sassoli de Bianchi, T. Veloz)
Quantum Structures in Cognitive and Social Science
Lausanne 2016 (a cura di D. Aerts, J. Broekaert, L. Gabora, S. Sozzo)
New Fundamental Evidence of Non-Classical Structure in the Combination of Natural Concepts
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 374 (2015) 20150095 (con D. Aerts, T. Veloz)
Concepts and Their Dynamics: A Quantum-theoretic Modeling of Human Thought
Topics in Cognitive Science 5 (2013) 737–772 (con D. Aerts, L. Gabora)
Recovering Quantum Logic within an Extended Classical Framework
Erkenntnis 78 (2013) 399–419 (con C. Garola)
Modeling Human Decision-making: An Overview of the Brussels Quantum Approach
Foundations of Science 26 (2021) 27–54 (con D. Aerts, M. Sassoli de Bianchi, T. Veloz)
Explaining versus Describing Human Decisions. Hilbert Space Structures in Decision Theory
Soft Computing 24 (2020) 10219–10229
Quantum Entanglement in Physical and Cognitive Systems: A Conceptual Analysis and a General Representation
European Physical Journal Plus 134 (2019) 493 (con D. Aerts, J. Argüelles, L. Beltran, S. Geriente, M. Sassoli de Bianchi, T. Veloz)
Quantum Structure in Cognition and the Foundations of Human Reasoning
International Journal of Theoretical Physics 54 (2015) 4557–5469 (con D. Aerts, T. Veloz)
Conjunction and Negation of Natural Concepts: A Quantum-theoretic Modeling
Journal of Mathematical Psychology 66 (2015) 83–102
Quantum Structure and Human Thought
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2013) 274–276 (con D. Aerts, J. Broekaert, L. Gabora)
Extended Representations of Observables and States for a Noncontextual Reinterpretation of QM
Journal of Physics A 45 (2012) 075303 (con C. Garola)
Generalized Observables, Bell's Inequalities and Mixtures in the ESR Model for QM
Foundations of Physics 41 (2011) 424–449 (con C. Garola)
The ESR Model: A Proposal for a Noncontextual and Local Hilbert Space Extension of QM
Europhysics Letters 86 (2009) 20009 (con C. Garola)
A Semantic Approach to the Completeness Problem in Quantum Mechanics
Foundations of Physics 34 (2004) 1249–1266 (con C. Garola)