Castelfranchi
Cristiano started collaborating with the Institute of Psychology of the
National Research Council (IPCNR, now ISTC-CNR) during the final years
of his undergraduate degree, and he became a permanent researcher there
in 1971. In those early years his interests were divided between two
main topics: the pragmatics and semantics of natural
language (with D. Parisi), with an emphasis on generative linguistics
and how explicit representations of mental states (goals and beliefs)
determine language understanding, and the analysis and prevention of
mental disease with non-constrictive methods (with F. Basaglia and
R. Misiti), which was instrumental to the legal reform of the national
psychiatric system in Italy in 1978.His theoretical approach was focused since the onset on defining an
operational notion of goal, partially inspired by progresses in
cybernetics and control theory, in sharp contrast with the more vague
and affective notion of “motivation”, traditionally employed in
cognitive and social psychology at that time. Defining goals as
anticipatory representations of world-states capable of guiding the
agent’s behavior proved extremely helpful in understanding language,
and it became soon clear to him that this notion was equally crucial in
understanding social phenomena in general, as well as in elucidating the
cognitive structure of complex emotions.
No comments:
Post a Comment