Mattia Gallotti

Ecole Normale Supérieure

Cultural cognition in the "we-mode"

2013-2014: Fall

Mattia Gallotti is a postdoctoral fellow in the philosophy of mind and society. He was educated in economics and philosophy at Bocconi University and the London School of Economics, before receiving his PhD at the University of Exeter. As a trained philosopher, Gallotti's work to date has sought to connect and unify a number of research domains under the general heading of sociality, with a focus on interdisciplinary questions concerning the foundations of the social mind. Throughout the years, his work was supported by generous funding from several institutions like the Royal Institute of Philosophy, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the École Normale Supérieure(ENS), which afforded him the opportunity to carry out interdisciplinary research in premiere centres for the study of human sociality across the mind and brain sciences.

According to many philosophers and scientists, sociality is explained by the capacity of individuals to 'share' the mental states of others. In recent published papers in philosophy and cognitive science journals, including Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Behavioural and Brain Sciences and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Gallotti offers a theory of shared intentionality which gives pride of place to one cognitive mechanism in particular, the so-called 'we-mode', for addressing issues of social cognition and agency. At the Italian Academy, he will articulate the we-mode approach to collective intentionality with an eye to its implications for the study of cultural cognition, notably the nature of cultural artifacts in social ontology.