Alberto Cevolini

I motori di ricerca hanno trasformato il nostro modo di esplorare la realtà per ottenere in modo selettivo informazioni. La sociologia ha tuttavia trascurato di chiedersi a quali condizioni ciò sia stato possibile. Poiché i motori di ricerca operano come sistemi di indicizzazione, essi andrebbero inclusi negli studi sulla memoria culturale. Questo libro intende dare un contributo a una questione ancora poco indagata da questi studi, ovvero quale sia il rapporto fra evoluzione e memoria sociale. Se l’evoluzione favorisce le funzioni e la funzione della memoria è quella di dimenticare, allora una ricerca di tipo socio-evolutivo dovrebbe spiegare non solo come avviene questo favoreggiamento, ma anche che cosa lo favorisca. Nel tentativo di dare una risposta a queste due domande si chiarisce infine che il vero problema della memoria culturale non è il passato, bensì il futuro.

Knowledge management and production is performed today by means
of search engines. This implies the use of machines as external memories. For sure, computer is the most successful device. However, it is neither the first nor the only one. The use of secondary memories (card indices, libraries, archives) is an essential feature of modern age. The present book is the first critical edition of the manuscript in which Thomas Harrison sketched an extraordinary invention: the Ark of Studies (ca.1640). The Ark of Studies is the first  filing cabinet based on alphabetically arranged removable entries that has been designed for scholarly purposes in the 17th Century. Concerning its structure and function, this filing cabinet may be regarded as the most relevant scholarly machine in the modern age before the invention of the Web. The introductory essay tries to explain how it was possible that a high improbable deviation –that is, to entrust memorable knowledge to a machine rather than to consciousness, out of which it could be retrieved only by means of a combinatory art– became normal.

The construction of sociological theories can be investigated either from the perspective
of the sociology of science or from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge. In the former case, the main concerns are the differentiation of a common conceptual language and the construction of a theory provided with self-referential closure. Both technical-theoretical conditions aim to cope with the complexity of the external world by means of meaning. In the latter case, the claim that every scientific theory is constructed as a theoretical system can be traced back to the epistemological reflections of the 18th century. Since this claim also applies to sociology as a theory of society, the construction of a theory of society and its socio-cultural evolution makes sociology itself a subject of sociological study. Social systems theory fulfils the basic condition that all modern scientific theories must be constructed as theoretical systems and, as a theory of social systems, can co-describe itself while describing society.

Over the last thirty years, much historical research has focused on the early modern practice of note-taking and the compilation of commonplace-books. Actors' choices of headings, however, is a still poorly investigated theme, especially given the fact that such choices were crucial for the organisation of access to information when knowledge was stored in external repositories. In this article, I analyse how early modern scholars addressed this technical problem and tried to tackle it. By means of mostly seventeenth-century sources I show that scholars formulated both theoretical and practical rules to create working indexing systems as tools to discriminate between remembering and forgetting. My hypothesis is that the novelty in the choice of subject headings for early modern commonplace-books and filing cabinets lay in the fact that subject headings became a choice. This paved the way to an epochmaking transition from universal topics to a universal index upon all authors.

While insurance was originally devised as a safety net that steps in to compensate for financial losses after an accident
has occurred, the information generated by sensors and digital devices now offers insurance companies the opportunity
to transform their business by considering prevention. We discuss a new form of risk analytics based on big data
and algorithmic prediction in the insurance sector to determine whether accidents could indeed be prevented before
they occur, as some now claim is possible. We will use the example of motor insurance where risk analytics is more
advanced. Finally, we draw conclusions about insurance’s new preventive role and the effect it may have on the
policyholders’ behavior.

Questo articolo costituisce la versione ampliata della
conferenza tenuta al convegno "Conoscenza e libertà
nell’epoca dei Big Data (Seconda parte: Big Data:
libertà, profezia o predestinazione?)" organizzato dall’Istituto
Filosofico di Studi Tomistici e svoltosi presso
la Camera di Commercio di Modena il 10 ottobre 2020.
Colgo l’occasione per ringraziare il Prof. Claudio Testi
per l’invito e i partecipanti al convegno per le domande
con cui hanno animato il dibattito.

Bibliotheken und Archive werden in funktional-soziologischer Sicht als sekundäre Gedächtnissysteme betrachtet, deren Hauptfunktion nicht im Erinnern, sondern im Vergessen besteht. Durch Indexierungs- und Katalogisierungsmethoden wird der Zugriff auf Information organisiert. Dies geschieht stets in hochselektiver Weise, damit der bzw. die Leser*in keine Zeit verschwendet und seine bzw. ihre Aufmerksamkeit nicht durch das Nachschlagen von Überflüssigem oder Nichtzutreffendem vergeudet wird. Bereits in der frühen Moderne werden daher Indexierungssysteme erstellt, die wie eine heutige Suchmaschine funktionieren. Die spätere Automatisierung der sekundären Gedächtnisse ersetzt die semantische Indexierung durch eine statistische Datenverarbeitung. Dies führt zu neuartigen Problemen, nicht zuletzt zu einem zugespitzten Selektionsbedarf in einer Gesellschaft, die offenbar nichts mehr vergessen kann.

The use of algorithmic prediction in insurance is regarded as the beginning of a new era, because it promises to personalise insurance policies and premiums on the basis of individual behaviour and level of risk. The core idea is that the price of the policy would no longer refer to the calculated uncertainty of a pool of policyholders, with the consequence that everyone would have to pay only for her real exposure to risk. For insurance, however, uncertainty is not only a problem-shared uncertainty is a resource. The availability of individual risk information could undermine the principle of risk-pooling and risk-spreading on which insurance is based. The article examines this disruptive change first by exploring the possible consequences of the use of predictive algorithms to set insurance premiums. Will it endanger the principle of mutualisation of risks, producing new forms of discrimination and exclusion from coverage? In a second step, we analyse how the relationship between the insurer and the policyholder changes when the customer knows that the company has voluminous, and continuously updated, data about her real behaviour.

Der in Mailand geborene Prof. Dr. Alberto Cevolini lehrt zurzeit als Gastprofessor im Bereich Allgemeine Soziologie, Soziologische Theorie an der Universität Bielefeld. Das Thema, das Prof. Cevolini für das Symposium ausgewählt hatte, mag für einiges Erstaunen gesorgt haben. Ist es doch nicht „Allgemeingut“, dass Tönnies zu den Wissenschaftlern zählt, die sich auch mit dem Versicherungswesen auseinandergesetzt haben. Und doch erschien 1917 (DSN 496) in der „Zeitschrift für die gesamte Versicherungs-Wissenschaft“, Bd. 17) der Tönnies Text „Das Versicherungswesen in soziologischer Betrachtung“. Dabei ist das Versicherungswesen durchaus geeignet, z.B. Versicherung und Solidarität zu thematisieren. Zwar ist der Solidaritätsbegriff nicht klar konturiert und findet bei Juristen, Ökonomen, Soziologen und Ethikern keine einheitliche Verwendung. Er liegt jedoch als sozialpolitische Wertentscheidung in der Europäischen Union zugrunde (Art. 2 S. 2 EUV) und bedeutet regelmäßig Rücksichtnahme, das „Füreinander-Einstehen“.

Despite the fact that insurance is a ubiquitous core institution of modern society, a sociological theory of insurance does not yet exist. This article aims at suggesting some hypotheses which can help filling the gap. Insurance has been pertinently defined as "the archetype of modernist governance of the future". Consequently, a sociological research on insurance institution should answer three preliminary questions: First, when we talk about the future, what are we actually talking about? Second, how is it possible to govern the future in the present? Finally, what is the modernity of this modernist governance of the future, and why does insurance represent its archetype? Moving from a comparison between prudence and providence, it is suggested that insurance turns uncertainty into possibilities. In this way, the decision-maker who takes out insurance can plan for the planningness of the future-that is, whatever happens, he relies on an open future. This article suggests, eventually, that the theory of evolution is conceptually well equipped to explain why an institution that at the beginning (that is, in the late Middle Ages) was regarded as a form of deviation has become normal over time.

In the last twenty years, indexing systems have undergone a profound transformation that has been dubbed social tagging or folksonomy. The aim of this article is not to furnish instructions about the best way to tag library resources. Instead, the aim here is to consider the activity of tagging from a more abstract standpoint; that is, from the viewpoint of social memory. As a first priority, therefore, this article deals with the function performed by tagging: how social access to information is organized. After a brief discussion of social memory, three core issues are taken into consideration: first, the function performed by tagging; second, the feedback cycle which is triggered by the interplay of users and the machine; third, the way that tags do not inform us about the contents of library resources, but about what users think the contents of library resources are. The last question to be tackled by this article is whether any correlation with the evolution of social memory can be discerned in the procedures of tagging and, if so, what the evolutionary advantage of the activity of social tagging consists of.

Fake news entered quite impetuously in our daily lives, causing much concern. However, scientific research on this social issue is still rather lacking. This article offers a contribution to research starting from a strictly sociological approach. First of all, it is shown that the phenomenon of fake news is an old and new phenomenon at the same time, even if to understand this phenomenon we do not need a new concept of fake news but a new media theory. The issue of fake news is then detached from two very commonly held misunderstandings: that in order to defend oneself from this type of news it is necessary to distinguish the true from the false, and that the news can be manipulated. The core distinction should be, however, that between information and non-information rather than that between information and misinformation. Even misinformation is informative-not so much on what is reported, as on recipients' reactions to misinformation. The main hypothesis is that fake news exploit this information to "stage dissent" in the mass media system. Fake news are therefore interpreted as events which trigger a second-order observation starting from a second reality, that produced by the mass media, which does not oblige consensus.

Thanks to a grant of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, the Bielefeld University has started a project of fifteen years length (2015–2030) which includes the critical edition of Niklas Luhmann’s extant works and manuscripts and the digitalization of his famous card index. Such valuable enterprise has re-aroused interest for what is regarded by many scholars as a Gral, a marvellous instrument which ensured the German sociologist a huge creativity and an incredible scientific production. The feeling is that looking inside the filing cabinet is like looking inside the mind of a genius at work. This article suggests a different point of view which deals with the Enlightenment project of the sociologist of Bielefeld. The main hypothesis is that in the use of a card index as surprises generator there is nothing particularly surprising if one takes into consideration the evolution of knowledge management in early modern Europe. Rather, the question should be how it is possible to explain the evolutionary improbability of the social use of ‘machines’ as secondary memories for knowledge management and production. This article provides some suggestions for research and tries to display where Luhmann’s card index comes from.

This article deals with the interplay of complexity and knowledge management by means of machines which were intentionally designed to be used as external memories in early modern Europe. The main hypothesis is that the invention of printing press affects the cognitive habits of learned men. Consequently, scholars discard the old mnemotechniques and get used to interact with external memories – card indexes, archives, and calculating machines – whose advantage is that they can save cognitive energies to be used in Information processing.

This article deals with the social meaning of insurance contracts in the late medieval and modern society. Starting from the empirical analysis of one of the early marine insurance contracts which were stipulated in the second half of the 14 th century, the hypothesis is suggested that the premium rate coincides with the estimated average frequency of sea accidents. By means of a proto-probability calculus, rate was used by the early insurers for trading risks. Therefore the main thesis arises that insurance premium is a way of giving a certain price to the uncertainty of the future and that it indeed represents the cost of such observation. A comparison with the original function of money in primitive societies based on reciprocity is finally developed in order to explain how time construction is contingent on social structures.

Social sciences are experiencing an anticipatory turn. A core issue of this turn are the so-called 'weak signals'. In order to speak of this type of signals, we must use the distinction between weak and strong. The question may be raised, who handles this distinction? That is, who is the ob-server? It seems that only two answers are possible: the observer is either outside or inside, i.e., either he is a world-observer, or he is a extra-world-observer. In the latter case, the problem of weak signals disappears; after the fact, everybody is able to say BI told you!^. In the former case, the system has to face the dilemma of warning signals. As social systems cannot observe themselves from the outside, the issue of weak signals should be explained as the outcome of a self-referential dynamics that finally leads to the paradox of knowing the unknown. In fact, the difference between weak and strong refers not to the future as such (to what is signalized), but to the observing system itself. The main hypothesis of this contribution is that a signal is weak for a lack of redundancy that hinders the system to combine a reference to an environmental event with a concomitant reference to a systemic cog-nitive map. By means of a system theory of sign, it should be possible to see the difference between weak and strong as an unfolding device for temporal paradoxes arising in social systems , and to support the hypothesis that, since in social systems cognitive maps are contingent on time, signals can be only weak, never strong.

The article deals with the hypothesis that Aristotle lacks a concept of risk since in metaphysics it is not possible to conceived of behavior as decision. And there is not a concept for decision since there is not a suitable understanding of time. Only when time is no longer conceived of in spatial but in temporal sense, it is possible to observe actions as decisions, and therefore to perceive the riskyness of what has been decided.
L’articolo indaga l’ipotesi che in Aristotele manchi un concetto di rischio poiché nel linguaggio della metafisica non è concepibile qualcosa come una decisione; e manca un concetto di decisione poiché non esiste una concezione adeguata della temporalità. Soltanto quando si passa da una concezione spazializzata a una concezione temporalizzata del tempo diventa possibile osservare l’agire come decisione e con essa percepire anche il rischio di ciò che ogni volta viene deciso.

The traditional business model of insurance is going through a disruptive change. InsurTech and predictive analytics are raising high expectations because they can offer personalized policy premiums adapted to the individual level of risk. Whereas the personalization of premium setting represents an opportunity, however, it could also become a threat because it can question the principle of risk pooling and spreading on which the whole insurance mechanism is based. This international interdisciplinary workshop involve actuaries, practitioners and sociologists, and address the possible socio-economic, ethical and political consequences of algorithmic techniques in the field of insurance.