>PRESENTATION:
Full Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at Florence University. Former president of the International Quantum Structure Association, of the Italian Society of Logic and Philosophy of Science and of the Centro Fiorentino di Storia e Filosofia del la Scienza. Author of numerous publications of Logic and of Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, including the book (cohauthored with R. Giuntini and R. Greechie) Reasoning in Quantum Theory (Kluwer, 2004). Currently her interest is focused on the Logic of Quantum Computation.

Human perception and thinking seem to be essentially synthetic. We never perceive an ob ject by scanning it point by point; we instead form right away a Gestalt, a global idea of it. Gestalt-thinking processes cannot be adequately represented in the framework of classical semantics, which is basically compositional and analytical: the meaning of a whole is determined by the meanings of its parts, and not vice versa. Quantum computational semantics provides a mathematical formalism for an abstract theory of meanings where the following conditions are satisfied: 1) global meanings (which may correspond to a Gestalt) are intrinsically vague, because they leave semantically undecided many relevant properties of the objects under investigation; 2) any global meaning determines some partial meanings , which are gen- erally more vague than the global one; 3) meanings (Gestalten) can be generally represented as superpositions of other meanings, possibly associated to probability-values; 4) like Gestalten, meanings are dealt with as intrinsically dynamic objects.