We show that Bayesian ex post aggregation is unstable with respect to refinements. Suppose a group of Bayesians use ex post aggregation. Since it is a joint problem, each agent’s problem is captured by the same model, but probabilities and utilities may vary. If they analyze the same situation in more detail, their refined analysis should preserve their preferences among acts. However, ex post aggregation could bring about a preference reversal on the group level. Ex post aggregation thus depends on (...) how much information is used and may keep oscillating (‘‘flipping’’) as one keeps adding more information. (shrink)

Le point le plus crucial, à propos de la réalité des objets physiques, consiste sans doute à éclaircir la signification du terme « réel ». Je ne m’y risquerai pas ici. En tentant de ne pas sortir de mon rôle de physicien, j’adopterai plutôt une définition particulière et limitée du terme, qui correspond peu ou prou à ce que Arthur Fine qualifie d’« attitude ontologique naturelle ». L’« humble raisonnement » J’introduirai ici...

Jeffrey conditioning allows updating in Bayesian style when the evidence is uncertain. A weighted average, essentially, over classically updating on the alternatives. Unlike classical Bayesian conditioning, this allows learning to be unlearned.

Anne-Lise Rey | : L’article montre qu’après la « révolution scientifique » opérée par l’introduction des idées de Newton en France, Émilie du Châtelet a construit un dispositif épistémique inventif qui lui permet d’articuler principes métaphysiques et experimental philosophy. Je cherche à exposer que, s’il y a bien une relative invisibilité du travail philosophique d’Émilie du Châtelet dans l’historiographie des Lumières, cela tient à la fois au statut de femme savante à cette époque, mais aussi à la situation philosophique d’Émilie (...) du Châtelet, qui ne peut se réduire à aucune filiation et qui élabore une philosophie naturelle originale. | : This paper shows that after the “Scientific Revolution” stemming from the introduction of Newton’s ideas in France, Émilie du Châtelet developed an innovative epistemic framework that allowed her to reconcile metaphysical principles with experimental philosophy. The author aims to show that the relative invisibility of Émilie du Châtelet’s philosophical work within the historiography of the enlightenment is due both to her status as a learned woman at that time and to the philosophical position of Émilie du Châtelet, which cannot be reduced to a single philosophical affiliation and which allows her to develop an original account of natural philosophy. (shrink)

PIERRE REY. — Connaître personnellement un auteur, c’est un peu superposer une voix à une parole... Après son décès, les médias ont commenté votre relation avec Claude Nougaro. Pourriez-vous nous en dire un mot ?DOMINIQUE BAUDIS. — Le lien entre Claude et moi, c’est évidemment Toulouse. Pour l’anecdote, je l’ai connu au moment..

Résumé La révolution einsteinienne – construction des théories de la relativité – repose sur la disparition du temps, au profit de l’espace-temps isotrope. Je la compare à la révolution newtonienne, vue comme une disparition de la verticale au profit de l’espace isotrope. J’analyse l’existence et la pertinence de notions à caractère temporel dans les théories relativistes ; en particulier temps et durées propres, et causalité.

Je pensais, sans doute naïvement, que tous les physiciens contemporains croyaient en l’existence du temps. Après avoir lu cet ouvrage, je commence à en douter. Non seulement parce qu’à plusieurs reprises l’auteur affirme, d’une façon ou d’une autre, que « le message de l’impossibilité relativiste du temps n’est pas encore passé, même chez certains physiciens », , mais aussi parce que la manière très rigoureuse, tout en étant compréhensible pour u..

Consider a group of people whose preferences satisfy the axioms of one of the current versions of utility theory, such as von Neumann-Morgenstern (1944), Savage (1954), or Bolker-Jeffrey (1965). There are political and economic contexts in which it is of interest to find ways of aggregating these individual preferences into a group preference ranking. The question then arises of whether methods of aggregation exist in which the group’s preferences also satisfy the axioms of the chosen utility theory, and in which (...) at the same time the aggregation process satisfies certain plausible conditions (e.g., the Pareto conditions below). (shrink)

It seems natural to think of an unwilling addict as having a pattern of preferences that she does not endorse—preferences that, in some sense, she does not ‘identify’ with. Following Frankfurt (1971), Jeffrey (1974) proposed a way of modeling those features of an agent’s preferences by appealing to preferences among preferences.Th„e addict’s preferences are preferences she does not prefer to have. I argue that this modeling suggestion will not do, for it follows from plausible assumptions that a minimally rational agent (...) must prefer those first-order preferences she actually has. I close by considering two different but related ways to think about the initial phenomenon. (shrink)

In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways (...) to bring about the former, but only by presupposing the very expressive powers Carey is claiming they explain. Analogies must be understood, and bootstrapping involves confirmation of hypotheses already expressible; otherwise they can't select among an infinitude of hypotheses compatible with the finite data the child has encountered, a fact rendered vivid by Goodman's ‘grue’ paradox and Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument. The problems have special application to minds, since there is no reason to expect a child's concepts to be ‘projectible’ or to correspond to mind-independent natural kinds. I conclude with an ecumenical view that concepts are reasonably regarded as both innate and often learned, and that what is learned can in fact increase what really concerns Carey, the functioning psychological expressive power of the child, even if it leaves untouched what concerns Fodor, the semantic expressive power. Less ecumenically: maybe Fodor (2008) miscast the debate, and the real issue that bothers people concerns not nativism, but an issue on which Carey and Fodor surprisingly agree, his conceptual Atomism, or the view that all mono-morphemic concepts are primitive and unanalyzable. The issue deserves further discussion independently of Mad-doggery. (shrink)

A survey of innateness in cognitive science, focusing on (1) what innateness might be, and (2) whether concepts might be innate.

One would have thought that Fodor's justly famous computational views about the mind and his covariation approaches to content owed a lot to the twentieth century that he now reviles. On the other hand, a number of lines he pursues in the target article make one wonder whether he hasn’t perhaps changed his mind about those famous views. Specifically, I argue that his own theory of content is open to the very same objections he raises against ‘sorting’ theories, and that (...) the supposed circularity in implicit definitions of logical particles can easily be avoided by the very functional/computational definitions that he fathered decades ago. Fodor's rejection here of sorting and implicit definition does make one worry that he is now opting for what seems the only atomistic alternative that would seem to be left, the first‐person meaning mysticism of the very Cartesian sort he now claims to favor, but from which I would have thought twentieth century role and discrimination views were a welcome relief. Despite all these worries, however, I concede that one could probably do worse than assume for the nonce that meaning is atomic, or, anyway, unanalyzed, and get on with investigating the mind on that basis—but keeping the options open. (shrink)

Extracting the regularities of our environment is one of our core cognitive abilities. To study the fine-grained dynamics of the extraction of embedded regularities, a method combining the advantages of the artificial language paradigm and the serial response time task was used with a group of Guinea baboons in a new automatic experimental device. After a series of random trials, monkeys were exposed to language-like patterns. We found that the extraction of embedded patterns positioned at the end of larger patterns (...) was faster than the extraction of initial embedded patterns. This result suggests that there is a learning advantage for the final element of a sequence that benefits from the contextual information provided by previous elements. (shrink)

The article gives a graphical interpretation of the concept of risk vulnerability. It shows that in a specific context of binary lotteries the assumption of risk vulnerability adds to prudence what the assumption of decreasing absolute risk aversion adds to risk aversion. We end the presentation showing that results can be extended to the concept of multiplicative risk vulnerability.

In 1720, Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande wrote Physicis elementa mathematica, experimentis confirmata. Sive introductio ad philosophiam Newtonianam. Although he was undoubtedly one of the most important popularizers of Newtonian physics, experimental methodology and epistemology in the 1720s, his empirical claim somehow backfired: in applying tenets of Newtonian methodology, he was ultimately led to validate the Leibnizian principle of the conservation of living forces, contrary to the Newtonians. This conclusion invited a great deal of anger, particularly from Samuel Clarke who, in (...) a volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from 1729, accused ’s Gravesande of having written the book with the aim of “darkening Newton’s philosophy”. In a reply, which ’s Gravesande published as a supplement to his Essay upon a New Theory of the Collision of Bodies, he developed a hybrid methodology that relied upon both experimentation and reason. In my paper, I shall thoroughly analyse this interesting combination. (shrink)

The object of this article is to lay bare the consensualist presuppositions implicit within contemporary analyses of the controversies of the Classical Age by proposing an alternative model: agonistic pluralism. The convergence between this political reading of the controversies and an epistemological reading is reinforced by a discussion of Hasok Chang's work, which develops a model of epistemic pluralism that breaks away from studies in the history of science undertaken following the Kuhnian model of scientific revolutions. This makes it possible (...) to question the theoretical convergence of two anti-hegemonic claims: one political, the other epistemological. I aim to put this new model of analysis to the test by applying it to a well known, oft-analysed dispute, that which erupted between Dortous de Mairan and Emilie du Châtelet following the publication of the Institutions de Physique. (shrink)

This book offers productive new readings of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy and of other facets of his thought.

Theories of organization and management have offered several concepts and models which indicate that organizational values are an important factor for running organizations successfully. A still unexplained question concerns the creation of balanced organizational values, which can support the achievement of several different and even conflicting goals of modern organizations. To explore balanced organizational values in contemporary business practice, we tested different models of organizational values on a sample of Fortune 100 companies. Research results demonstrate that none of the proportions/ratios (...) of balance proposed by the main models of organizational values from existing literature possesses/presents the ideal balance that is currently pursued in the business field. As a conclusion, a new model of balanced organizational values is proposed. (shrink)

Coincidiendo con los cincuenta años del inicio del Concilio Vaticano II y con los veinte años de la promulgación del Catecismo de la Iglesia Católica, su Santidad el Papa Benedicto XVI, a través de la Carta Apostólica Porta Fidei, ha declarado un Año de la Fe que abarcaría desde el 11 de Octubre del presente año 2012 hasta el 24 de Noviembre del próximo año 2013. Se desea, en este tiempo, redescubrir el don de la fe, y para ello como (...) hará el propio Pontífice– no se encontrará mejor apoyo que la doctrina de San Agustín de Hipona. Les invito, pues, a atravesar “la puerta de la fe” (Hch. 14,27), que permitirá adentrarnos en la Iglesia para vivir en comunión con Dios, de la mano del “Doctor más universal y el genio más vigoroso que ha poseído la Iglesia”. (shrink)

RésuméCet article examine le duel à l’époque moderne entendu à la fois comme la forme suprême de la querelle, son aboutissement naturel sous certaines conditions, alors qu’il est lui-même objet de controverses vives. Le duel, qui repose sur des lois, réglemente le dissensus en même temps qu’il le porte à son paroxysme. Il peut servir de révélateur de la place du dissensus dans la société, de la façon dont les rapports sociaux prennent acte du désaccord entre les individus et réglementent (...) les façons de le résoudre. Cet article examine la forme du duel comme fin des querelles. Il se porte ensuite sur les controverses autour des duels. Il examine enfin la place du duel dans la littérature, sa fonction poétique et dramatique, afin de souligner les façons dont le texte littéraire participe de cette réflexion sur le duel. (shrink)

El autor analiza el significado de la idea jurídica de igualdad en el constitucionalismo democrático de nuestros días en su triple dimensión de valor superior del ordenamiento jurídico, principio jurídico y derecho fundamental. En este contexto, la idea de igualdad serviría para determinar, razonable y no arbitrariamente qué grado de desigualdad jurídica de trato entre dos o más personas es tolerable, es decir, la igualdad sería el criterio que mediría el grado de desigualdad jurídicamente admisible. A partir de ahí, el (...) autor disecciona esta idea de igualdad mediante las distinciones entre igualdad en el contenido y en la aplicación de la ley, igualdad real e igualdad formal, igualdad y prohibición de la discriminación. Finaliza el trabajo con un análisis del derecho fundamental a no ser discriminado que incluiría, por un lado, la igualdad de trato y las prohibiciones de discriminación tanto directas como indirectas y, por otro lado, la igualdad de oportunidades y la licitud y exigencia de medidas de acción positiva. (shrink)

Para comprender íntegramente los diálogos redactados por San Agustín en la villa de Casicíaco, se hace necesario e imprescindibleentender previamente cómo se relacionan con las obras filosóficas que -ya anteriormente- había escrito Marco Tulio Cicerón. Así, podemos apreciar que el Contra Academicos agustiniano constituye una clara respuesta al Academica ciceroniano, o también el De beata vita al De finibus y Tusculanae disputationes. Asimismo, su De ordine lo será a la trilogía de obras que el Arpinate elabora sobre la providencia: De (...) natura deorum, De divinatione y De fato. Por otra parte, numerosos autores también señalan sus Soliloquios como un “nuevo diálogo de Casicíaco”, en donde el maestro de Hipona y la razón establecen una “edificante y sólida conversación”. Sin embargo, no está pensado para constituir una respuesta a ningún escrito ciceroniano en concreto. (shrink)