Individuals, organisations, populations: at what level(s) should we collect, analyse and interpret data? How can we envision the articulation between these different levels if we choose more than one? These questions arise in all research, but sometimes in an almost unconscious or mechanical way. This introduction outlines a number of milestones that will enable to place these questions in their historical context, to specify what we are talking about when we refer to these micro-meso-macro levels, and to put forward some (...) of the main issues at stake in the articulation between these levels. (shrink)

In 1975, Michel Foucault made his first trip to the University of California, Berkeley campus, where he met members of the French and philosophy departments. Although only fragments of these public interventions have survived, it seems that Foucault’s visit aroused great interest, not only among professors who had organized this first series of lectures, but also among students. This caused great displeasure to Foucault himself, who was unaccustomed to such demonstrations of overflowing enthusiasm on the benches of his lecture halls. (...) The following anecdote, recounted by biographer James Miller, exemplifies the way academic audiences responded to his presence. Invited to lecture at Berkeley yet another time on October 20, 1980, Foucault faced a horde of students who rushed to either Zellerbach Hall, one of the largest halls on campus, or Wheeler Auditorium, where the lecture was broadcast live. When he started, some of them had been waiting for an hour already. Police forces were called in to bring back order and an overwhelmed Foucault asked Hubert Dreyfus, the professor in charge of introducing him, to make an announcement to dissuade students from staying. Dreyfus then stood up and warned the audience of the technicality of Foucault’s approach: “Michel Foucault says this is a very technical lecture, and difficult, and, I think, he wants to imply, boring; and he suggests that it would be better for everyone to leave now” (Miller 327). Dreyfus’s words hardly had the desired effect: on the contrary, the promise of esoteric and obscure remarks from the French thinker only strengthened his appeal at Berkeley, where he ended up lecturing on numerous occasions between 1981 and 1983. Such fervor begs the question of whether there has been a singular affinity between Foucault’s work and the United States. American historian Michel Behrent recently argued that enthusiasm for Foucault may have been higher across the Atlantic due to a different understanding of his thought: while there was “a French Foucault, fond of surrealism, obsessed with death, madness, and transgression, fascinated by Sade, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot,” there came to be a “mostly American” Foucault, “who offers us a toolbox to free ourselves from disciplinary and normalizing powers.” For Behrent, “this second Foucault seems, in the long run, to have prevailed over the first” as there is a trend toward “becoming American” in his work, or “at least its reception.” Behrent goes on to hypothesize that “Americans may be the ones who have not only appreciated his thought the most, but have understood it the best,” thus claiming a very particular, quasi-exceptional adherence to Foucauldian concepts among US academics (81). (shrink)

How can we understand prehistoric lithic objects? What meaning should we give them and what view should we adopt to claim access to their significance? How can we reduce and clarify our biases? This article is a proposal to introduce Peircian semiotics to review lithic objects. For a long time, these were apprehended as types, sometimes within evolutionary lineages; however, in this research, knapped stone objects will be perceived through a semio-pragmatic grid and reviewed as signs. The proposed approach is (...) a new way of accessing the fields of technical phenomena of prehistoric communities. This new perception aims at a quest for objectivity, by clarifying the affective, analytical and interpretative a priori as an answer to the sometimes very personal view of the prehistorian on lithic objects. Charles Sanders Peirce’s logical theory of signs or semiotics is contextualized within an ‘artisanal’ reading of prehistoric tools as initiated by Éric Boëda and further developed by Michel Lepot. Through this phaneroscopic/phenomenological vision, the technical object, now a sign-object, is placed in action (semiosis) within a system of signs. This new trajectory is positioned both as a methodological tool and as an innovative milestone in the construction of a more logical episteme in Prehistory, taking lithics both as signs of past human activity and of archaeological representations. (shrink)

This article enriches reflections on the circulation of the concept of gender in the Global South by looking at the transformations of Tanzanian research on gender in education between the 1970s and the early 1990s. A close reading of the texts shows how the concept of gender has been used in this field of study since 1990; it considers variations depending on authors and their positioning. Comparing this with the writings of the 1970s and 1980s, when no one used the (...) concept, reveals how it contributed to epistemological change. The article also reflects on the respective role of local factors and international influences (via donor agencies and global epistemologies) in the epistemological evolutions of the field. It highlights that researchers, even in a time of growing international dependency, managed to keep intellectual autonomy. (shrink)

This chapter takes a closer look at the doctrine of common notions and universal consent developed by Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–51) in his Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, a work based on lectures delivered at Cambridge in 1645–46, but only published posthumously in 1652. I study Culverwell’s doctrine of common notions and universal consent from the perspective of his critical discussion of two contemporary works, namely Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637) and Robert Greville’s The Nature of (...) Truth (1640). I argue that, contrary to Wallis who was indeed an Aristotelian who rejected innate ideas entirely, Culverwell adopted a characteristically stoic position, according to which common notions do not directly derive from sense experience, but are innate dispositions common to all which become present to the mind only under the impact of the senses. (shrink)

In this chapter, I explore this complex and somewhat neglected tradition of the early modern common notion. I focus on three thinkers, two of them innatist in some sense, one of them not; all (mostly) products of the English context; all arguably part of the background for Locke’s critique of common notions and innate ideas in the first book of the Essay; and all related to each other in various and complicated ways. They are: Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1582–1648), Kenelm (...) Digby (1603–1665), and Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–1651). I show how they deployed three different theories of common notions that we can describe, respectively, as gnoseological, rhetorical, and allegorical. (shrink)

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a major source of fear and misunderstanding and has become a public health priority. But biomedical research on AD has been marked by disappointment and fierce debate in recent decades. This three-part thesis mobilises different methods to study the controversies, explore their consequences, and propose solutions. The first part is an empirical study that questions the dominance of the amyloid hypothesis through a bibliometric analysis of citation practices and an international survey of researchers promoted by the (...) Alzheimer’s Association. The second part uses a conceptual approach to consider research beyond the amyloid hypothesis and we propose a holistic model to maximise the quality and quantity of information useful to research and patients. The third part explores the ethics of the non-existence of validated treatments and the existence of non-validated treatments with the aim of protecting people's autonomy from non-validated treatments, moralistic attitudes towards prevention, and a fragile economic model underpinning drug development. We argue that the biological and societal complexity of this disease defies reductionism and monopoly, and that the population as a whole, all potentially affected by the many problems AD poses for welfare and justice, should become agents of change to influence the direction of future research and policy. (shrink)

May the theory of radical interpretation developed by Donald Davidson on the basis of Quine's arguments for the indeterminacy of translation help fix the meaning of the logical constants? In particular, may the theory exclude ways of conferring meaning on the constants which, although developed within the Davidsonian framework, would lead to unexpected results? Could an interpreter fix the meaning of the constants in a non classical way, although still in accordance with the guiding principles of the interpretative strategy? Or, (...) on the contrary, does the theory incorporate constraints on interpretation which are stronger than those imposed by the possibility of non classical, or deviant logics? I examine the particular case of negation within the framework of the natural deduction system developed by Gentzen and Prawitz, and conclude that Davidson's theory, understood as an empirical theory of truth, leaves the problem of knowing which meaning should be assigned to the constant for negation without a satisfactory solution. Although interpetation has to be carried out according to the principle of charity, disagreements may come up regarding which meaning should be assigned to "not" in a properly regimented natural language. (shrink)

Danielle Macbeth's purpose in Macbeth 2005 is threefold. Her monograph proposes "to provide a logical justification for all aspects of Frege's peculiar notation, to motivate and explain the developments in Frege's views over the course of his intellectual life, and to explicate his most developed, critically reflective conception of his Begriffschrift, his formula language of pure thought". I shall focus here on a few selected aspects of the first and third points and leave on the side the discussion of the (...) historical development of Frege's views on logic, semantics and mathematics. The book's underlying claim is that although Frege's logical language, "can of course be read as a language of quantificational logic, [it] can also be read very differently", so much so, as a matter of fact, that although Frege's logic is usually thought of as a "notational variant of standard quantificational logic", it is nevertheless "unknown to us". This naturally prompts three questions : "What is Frege's logic?", "What is quantificational logic?", and given the way we understand formal languages for first and higher order predicate logic, most notably the notions of argument 2 place, of scope and of binding : "How come Frege's logic says nothing about such notions, or something so different from what we say?". (shrink)

The objective of the paper is the methodological presentation of the basic principles towards a critical interdisciplinary approach for studying the history of monuments restoration, valid for different cultures. The proposed integrated framework offers the possibility to study and document monuments restoration in various spatial levels e.g. global, continental, international, national, regional, and local. The conceptual and methodological aspects are based on the following fundamental pillars a) the development of science and technology, including relevant history of education, b) the evolution (...) of the restoration philosophy, c) the incorporation of the above in restoration projects at a lower level, d) the infiltration of the above in restoration interventions at the lowest level. The author expects that the above successive and/or parallel levels of scientific branches can contribute effectively to the analysis, synthesis and comparative assessment of the aspects and criteria that influenced monuments restoration timeline. The challenge for the researcher of the monuments restoration history is the adjustment of the whole process to his own –under research- level in such a way as to take advantage of all theinterdisciplinary inputs creating, thus, inventive links and stimulating new information and knowledge. The above are briefly tested in the case study of Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece. Such an inductive approach will enable all disciplines to devote their finest efforts towards understanding, documenting and studying monuments restoration history and, thus, support effectively a sustainable future for the world’s cultural heritagel audience. (shrink)

Extreme events are an expression of natural climate variability. Since anthropogenic emissions affect global climate, it is natural to wonder whether recent observed extreme events are a manifestation of anthropogenic climate change. This thesis aims at contributing to the understanding of the influence of anthopogenic climate change on observed extreme events, while assessing whether and how this scientific information - and more generally, the science of extreme event attribution - could be useful for society. I propose statistical tools to achieve (...) the former, while relying on qualitative interviews for the latter.The statistical part focuses on European heatwaves. I quantify the role played by the atmospheric circulation in the intensity of four recent heatwaves. This analysis is based on flow analogues, which identify days with a similar circulation pattern than the event of interest. I then disentangle the influence of climate change on the dynamical and non-dynamical processes leading to heatwaves. I calculate trends in the occurrence of circulation patterns leading to high temperatures and trends in temperature for a fixed circulation pattern, applied to the 2003 Western Europe and 2010 Russia heatwaves. I find that the significance of the results depend on the event of interest, highlighting the value of calculating trends for very specific types of circulation.The epistemological part evaluates the potential social uses of extreme event attribution. I assess how it could inform international climate negotiations, more specifically loss and damage, in response to a number of claims from scientists going in this direction. I find that the only potential role EEA could play to boost the loss and damage agenda would be to raise awareness for policy makers, aside from the negotiation process itself. I also evaluate how the different motivations stated by EEA scientists in interviews fare compared to the existing evidence on social use of this type of scientific information. I show that the social relevance of EEA results is ambiguous, and that there is a lack of empirical data to better understand how different non-scientific stakeholders react and appropriate EEA information. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the analysis of management tools for sustainable agricultural systems based on natural resources management from the perspective of a more relevant designing process. This management is faced with uncertainty linked to the lack of knowledge about the ecological effects of agricultural practices. New management modes, which involve longer term forecasts and, especially, adaptive management that is adjusting decisions in the course of action, lead us to question the nature of the management (...) tools. We analyszed the Pastoral Value tool used to assess the potential of forage resources in livestock farms in France with management science concepts to better understand the relationships between the nature of the tool and practices. Our findings show how the concepts and paradigms building the chosen tool, strongly shapes practices and how it can be adapted by technicians to their situation within the context of the French Central Pyrenees, emphasizing the role of experiential knowledge. (shrink)

A widely debated issue in philosophy of logic concerns the possibility of an inferentialist account of classical logic. Many proposals to show that classical logic satisfies the requirements of inferentialist semantics (such as harmony) demand to modify the ordinary natural deduction rules. In this paper, we try to explain why the ordinary natural deduction rules for classical logic are not harmonious and therefore not directly justifiable within an inferentialist framework. We show however that an indirect justification of classical logic, passing (...) through negative translation, can be acceptable from an inferentialist point of view. (shrink)