The widespread use of online search engines to answer the general public’s needs for information has raised concerns about possible biases and the emerging of a ‘filter bubble’ in which users are isolated from attitude-discordant messages. Research is split between approaches that largely focus on the intrinsic limitations of search engines and approaches that investigate user search behavior. This work evaluates the findings and limitations of both approaches and advances a theoretical framework for empirical investigations of cognitive biases in online (...) search activities about health-related topics. We aim to investigate the interaction between the user and the search engine as a whole. Online search activity about health-related topics is considered as a hypothesis-testing process. Two questions emerge: whether the retrieved information provided by the search engines are fit to fulfill their role as evidence, and whether the use of this information by users is cognitively and epistemologically valid and unbiased. (shrink)

The book is devoted to the study of the sign-object relation in the semiotics of Charles Peirce. It puts this issue in the context of Peirce's philosophy of knowledge and of reality and individuates the final causality as the foundation of the semiotic relation, which gains its gnoseological reliableness from its underlying teleological tendencies.