Riccardo Viale

Università di Milano-Bicocca

Visiting Senior Fellow

Cultural and cognitive aspects of tacit knowledge in technology transfer between academic and industrial laboratories

2008-2009: Spring

Riccardo Viale obtained a degree in medicine and psychiatry at the University of Turin with a thesis on "The Logical Models of Schizophrenic Thought." Afterwards, at Oxford, he developed interests in epistemology and cognitive science and in particular in the cognitive theory of science. He is now full professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of Milano-Bicocca and of cognitive economics at the Scuola Superiore della Pubblica Amministrazione di Roma. He is President of the Rosselli Foundation (Turin) and editor in chief of Mind & Society - Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences (Springer). 

He has been a faculty member and a visiting fellow at various universities, among them Bocconi (Milan); Oxford; Fribourg; Aix-en-Provence; Rice (Houston); California (Santa Barbara); and Federal (Rio de Janeiro). 

In the last twenty years his areas of interest and research have been: experimental epistemology (category based induction, probabilistic reasoning, vague predicates, causal reasoning, tacit knowledge, anthropological and developmental differences in cognition); philosophy of science (deductive reasoning and falsification, scientific methodological values and rationality, cognitive theory of science); methodology of social science (philosophy of mind of the social actor, cognitive foundation of social action, social rationality); social epistemology (truth and cognitive reliability, epistemological values in risk assessment, scientometrics and scientific governance); cognitive economics (biases in decision making, economic rationality and duality of mind, technological knowledge); research and innovation policy (technology transfer, university-industry relations, regional innovation systems, triple helix). 

He has published several books and many articles in various journals, among them: Mind & Language, Memory and Cognition, Foundation of Science, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Critical Sociology, Mind & Society, Industrial and Corporate Change, Science and Public Policy. 

His current research concerns the different cognitive styles between academic and industrial researchers and on how the diverse features of tacit knowledge shape the transfer of technology.