Avis de soutenance - doctorat - Matteo GANDOLINI

This dissertation investigates how to design new knowledge-based educational programs that can help young (3- to 6-year-old) children in overcoming food neophobia, which is a disposition to reject unfamiliar food even before tasting it (Dovey et al. 2008) and constitutes a major hindrance to the adoption of healthy and sustainable eating habits during the developmental phase in which food preferences first take shape. Recent studies have found a correlation between poorer performance in cognitive tasks tapping into conceptual food knowledge and higher scores on the Child Food Rejection Scale (Rioux et al. 2017) among preschool children (Rioux et al. 2018; Pickard et al. 2023; Foinant et al. 2022), thus suggesting that children's food concepts play an important role in determining their food behavior. Anyways, the educational potential of this connection is still unexplored. The General Introduction outlining the general aim of this work, some key terms and my methodological is followed by three research papers. The first one is a literature review which clarifies the notion of “conceptual food knowledge” in the light of extant experimental research on young children's food cognition. Conceptual food knowledge in this population can be unpacked into a more fine-grained typology encompassing three main subtypes of: taxonomic knowledge, which hinges on set-inclusion relations among food categories, relations knowledge, which involves contextual thematic and script relationships between food items and events, and value-laden knowledge, which encompasses evaluative and ad-hoc food knowledge. The review suggests that conceptual flexibility and knowledge about various conceptual relations are key factors to build a mature understanding of the food domain. The results of part one and recent philosophical literature (Borghini et al. 2021a, b) raise questions about how to conceive of the difference between neophobic children's and “mature” conceptualizations of the food domain. In Part Two I thus broaden my focus to an array of phenomena involving the trading of food concepts across different systems of knowledge and actors, most notably in communication. I introduce the notion of conceptual mismatch (defined as the state that obtains between two conceptual representations that with respect to the concepts they embed or the relationships between such concepts) to frame situations in which actors fall short of communicating felicitously and then proceed to characterize three different forms that conceptual mismatches can take in the food domain. Extensional mismatches occur when two conceptual representations refer to distinct categories, intensional mismatches encompass scenarios in which the modes of presentation of two different concepts map onto the same category, and ontological mismatches capture differences involving the conceptual relations that structure two food ontologies. Conceptual mismatches are a useful tool to analyze specific issues faced by neophobic children when they reason about the food domain. The last part of the dissertation exploits the results of the previous two to put forward recommendations about how to design new educational interventions that address the link between conceptual knowledge and (un)healthy eating dispositions. After pointing out the limitations of extant approaches to knowledge-based food education (KBFE), I single out three main recommendations to improve KBFE programs: to employ analogies and comparisons to deliver varied conceptual food knowledge, to provide knowledge that undermines possible misleading biases, and to train conceptual flexibility and executive functions. On top of advancing research on KBFE for preschool children, this dissertation is the first attempt at bringing philosophical and experimental research on food concepts. It provides insights to improve the protocols employed in empirical investigations and provides new tools for the philosophical study of food concepts.