Network Analysis is considered as a new method that challenges Latent Variable models in inferring psychological attributes. With Network Analysis, psychological attributes are derived from a complex system of components without the need to call on any latent variables. But the ontological status of psychological attributes is not adequately defined with Network Analysis, because a psychological attribute is both a complex system and a property emerging from this complex system. The aim of this article is to reappraise the legitimacy of (...) latent variable models by engaging in an ontological and epistemological discussion on psychological attributes. Psychological attributes relate to the mental equilibrium of individuals embedded in their social interactions, as robust attractors within complex dynamic processes with emergent properties, distinct from physical entities located in precise areas of the brain. Latent variables thus possess legitimacy, because the emergent properties can be conceptualized and analyzed on the sole basis of their manifestations, without exploring the upstream complex system. However, in opposition with the usual Latent Variable models, this article is in favor of the integration of a dynamic system of manifestations. Latent Variables models and Network Analysis thus appear as complementary approaches. New approaches combining Latent Network Models and Network Residuals are certainly a promising new way to infer psychological attributes, placing psychological attributes in an inter-subjective dynamic approach. Pragmatism-realism appears as the epistemological framework required if we are to use latent variables as representations of psychological attributes. (shrink)

For Ockham and Wittgenstein the analysis of knowledge is based on language. Both authors uphold the conception of the world from a logical-philosophical dimension configured by the close thought-language relationship. This construct is developed on the basis of the following three aspects: first, concepts are signs of things; second, propositions describe “state of affairs”; and third, knowledge in terms of “habits” is expressed in propositions structured in terms of the “uses” of language. These propositions are established by the thought considered (...) as “activity” and “operation of signs”. By analyzing certain a priori propositions, we recognize the very boundaries of the thought-language relationship, wherein the existential problems of mankind are revealed, whether out of the human tendency of explaining the world as a whole or out of the human attitude in the face of it. (shrink)

Les grands paradigmes des sciences humaines ont été constitués, au fil de l’histoire, par l’éviction progressive de la dimension affective des objets et méthodes scientifiques. Après un long désintérêt, pour partie dû à la préoccupation de l’objectivation des phénomènes retenus par l’analyse sociologique, mais aussi à l’hypostase du social, qui a trouvé notamment chez Durkheim un accomplissement encore plus accentué que dans la plupart des conceptions holistes, la question des émotions est l’...

The imaginary has been inseparable, since prehistoric times, from technical artefacs, their forms, functions and uses. Gilbert Durand’s typologies can help to understand better the different technologies, their success, their effects, etc. Can we not go further by looking in the imaginary for one of the keys to technological innovation today which would allow an anthropological renovation of theoretical tools?

Un essai qui prend l'époque à revers pour répondre à la question de la faillite de la communauté.

Though traditional accounts of moral development focus on the development of rational and deliberate thinking, recent work in developmental affective neuroscience suggests that moral cognition is tightly related to affective and emotional processing. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies show age-related changes in response to empathy-eliciting stimuli, with a gradual shift from the monitoring of somatovisceral responses in young children mediated by the amygdala, insula and medial aspect of the orbitofrontal cortex, to the executive control and evaluation of emotion processing implemented (...) by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in older participants. These data indicate that the development of moral reasoning involves the increasing integration of empathic emotion-related somatovisceral responses with more complex social-reasoning abilities. (shrink)

The practice of justifying scientific explanations generates argumentative patterns in which several types of arguments may play a role. This paper is aimed at identifying these patterns on the basis of an exploration of the institutional conventions regarding the nature, the shape and the quality of scientific explanations as reflected in the writings of influential philosophers of science. First, a basic pattern for justifying scientific explanations is described. Then, two types of extensions of this pattern are presented. These extensions are (...) derived from philosophical accounts of requirements for the quality of explanations and the choice of the best explanation from a number of candidate explanations respectively. The description of the second extension will make clear how pragmatic argumentation plays a role in argumentative patterns within the scientific domain. (shrink)

This study shows how institutional work contributes to institutional resilience in extreme operating environments. The authors draw from a longitudinal analysis of the operations of Desjardins International Development, a French Canadian nongovernmental organization that, both before and after the major earthquake of 2010, supported the implementation of cooperative banking in Haiti. Building on a unique access to DID’s internal documents as well as on 49 interviews with DID employees, the authors highlight the ways in which political, technical, and cultural forms (...) of institutional work triggered the emergence of social capital, which in turn supported the rise of new forms of institutional work that enabled institutional resilience. The results show how organizational activities focused on shaping institutions may have unintended effects that enable institutional resilience in EOEs, and demonstrate how the accumulation of institutional work by an organization contributes to the enhancement of its social capital. (shrink)

This book revisits the theory of the sources of international law from the perspective of formalism.

Le projet de Jean Piaget ne se réduit pas à son œuvre épistémologique. Il prend sa source, dès l'adolescence, dans une volonté de réconcilier la science et la foi. C'est de cette source-là, morale et humaniste, que lui vient son intérêt pour l'éducation. Sa pensée éducative se fonde sur la ferme conviction que la morale est une logique de l'action comme la logique est une morale de la pensée. Il s'ensuit qu'éducation morale et éducation intellectuelle doivent être menées de (...) front, et donc, qu'il faut éduquer la personne entière. Mais l'éducation est ambiguë par essence, selon qu'elle enferme l'enfant dans son égocentrisme intellectuel et la morale conventionnelle ou, au contraire, qu'elle stimule, par une pédagogie appropriée, sa marche vers une plus grande rationalité et une éthique personnelle. Dans de nombreux textes, Piaget explique comment l'école peut aider l'élève, citoyen de demain, à construire sa liberté intérieure, liberté de jugement autant que liberté de conscience. Humaniser l'humanité par l'éducation grâce à l'école, tel est le sens de son engagement - pendant trois décennies - à la tête du Bureau international d'éducation et à l'Unesco. (shrink)

The phenomenological origins of the concept of givenness -- Remarks on the origins of Gegebenheit in Heidegger's thought -- Substitution and solicitude: how Levinas re-reads Heidegger -- Sketch of a phenomenological concept of sacrifice.

This essay takes, as its starting point, Andreas Malm’s effort, in How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, to legitimize and normalize property destruction in the context of the climate movement. The sabotage of energy infrastructures, I counter, cannot make sense, for it poses a threat to coherence, removing without replacing the material and discursive conditions that grant the climate movement its meaning and purpose within late capitalism and late liberalism. Recent protests entailing (...) the defacement of paintings share with ecocriticism an investment in an essentially liberal, pedagogical and moral covenant, one that urges witnesses to undergo an individual process of reflection in order to acquire or affirm values and priorities friendlier to the environment. Sabotage, by contrast, violates this covenant; blowing up a pipeline may be said to have met its goals by reducing and slowing the supply of oil, regardless of what the public learned from sabotage’s mediatization. Drawing on psychoanalytic accounts of aesthetic education, I argue that sabotage introduces absurdity into a category—action—that the climate movement otherwise insists is self-identical. Sabotage does this by subtracting the world wherein putatively future-bound actions, including having and raising a child, mean what they do. I test out this claim in a reading of Nell Zink’s novel The Wallcreeper and Benedikt Erlingsson’s film Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð), two absurdist comedies that formally amplify the semiotic crisis induced by sabotage and, in so doing, enable us to confront the necessary dislocation of politics from sense. (shrink)

Wenn man behauptet, Wolff sei Rationalist, will man im allgemeinen zum Ausdruck bringen, daß er nur auf die apriorische Deduktion baut. Freilich räumt er der Vernunft einen Vorrang in der Konstitution des Wissens ein. Aber er betont, daß die Vernunft nur tätig werden könne, wenn sie sich auf die Daten der Erfahrung stütze, und er fügt hinzu, die Erfahrungsdaten bildeten sowohl den Ausgangspunkt für die rationale Erklärung als auch das Mittel für die Bestätigung der Folgerung. Unter diesem Gesichtspunkt ist folglich (...) Wolffs Rationalismus ein eingeschränkter. Wenn man jedoch in Betracht zieht, daß Wolff die Vernunft beim Erwerb der intellektuellen Erkenntnis fast ausschließlich eine Rolle spielen läßt, kann man im Gegensatz zum Vorhergehenden die These vertreten, er sei sehr rationalistisch eingestellt. Denn der Gegenstand dieser Erkenntnis wird fast vollständig konstituiert durch Gattungsund Artbegriffe, zu welchen man nur mit Hilfe des Denkens gelangen kann. (shrink)

In this paper I answer some concerns of the commentators on my article 'On the birth and growth of concepts'. I explain that my theory of concept formation in infancy emphasizes spatial information over bodily information but still allows the body to influence conceptual thought. I suggest that bodily feelings may be represented differently from spatial information. I do not claim that spatial image-schemas account for all conceptual thought, but I show why they are sufficient for the relatively limited conceptual (...) life of preverbal infants, making an innate propositional language of thought unnecessary. Finally, I discuss why uninterpreted percepts cannot be concepts, and clarify the mechanism of Perceptual Meaning Analysis. (shrink)

Transhuman, or trans-human, is the concept of an intermediary form between human and posthuman. In other words, a transhuman is a being that resembles a human in most respects but who has powers and abilities beyond those of standard humans. These abilities might include improved intelligence, awareness, strength, or durability. Transhumans sometimes appear in science-fiction as cyborgs or genetically-enhanced humans. This book will look into the question "Can machines think?" followed by "Can humans extend their lifespan and keep up with (...) machines?" In other words, do we (humans) have to modify ourselves to be bionic humans, to co-exist and make the most of machines in future? (shrink)

Kant describes a conflict among the different theories of knowledge. A productive conflict whose emergence is the origin of a renewal: it awakens the spirit and it leads it to think critically. Philosophy becomes critique, Kant says, when it is not focused on the doctrines and on their demands, but on the relationship between general rules (the “sense”) that coordinates all the faculties – and their particular expression, that is to say the specific cases. Similarly operates the judge, that, in (...) court, has to invent (ausdenken) the rule capable of corresponding to the single case: a judge that, in order to decide (jus dicere) and utter the decision, tries to compensate the absence of adequate legal rules and often decides without the adapt general rule. The problem of the différend does not concern, thus, anthropology. It concerns language. Exemplary cases provide analoga of the sensitive data and are devices that allow the dialectic between different systems of value by connecting their core meaning, the proper names involved and what Kant defines the Darstellung. Nevertheless, against this background, a change of paradigm becomes necessary – a change that entails the break with hegelian philosophy of law and with a thought built on mediation, that is to say with the kantian Zusammenstimmung. It is not possible, nor desirable, to substitute the battle field with the court and to subordinate the individual interests to the general logic of argumentation, because the synthesis of the different voices might imply totalitarianism and the end of the différend might correspond to the beginning of terror. (shrink)

Critical theory and critical thinking emphasize the power of self-reflection and educative analysis where students in higher education become motivated to change their present societal reality by being strategic and action orientated. Central to these theories is the enlistment of strategies that utilize educational vehicles infused with critical thinking to engage students in the process of intensive evaluation of the theory, values, knowledge and skiIls of their respective fields with the often transformative impact upon a student’s worldviews. This article reviews (...) the theoretical and historical tenets of ctitical theory and its interdependence and reinforcing relationship with critical thinking. An illustration is offered that represents the cyclical and often transformative relationship between critical theory and critical thinking. Along with a definition of critical thinking there is a discussion of the difference between critical thinking and other forms of thinking. Last, at the core of the article will be suggestions for designing trans disciplinary teaching methods based upon Freire’s critical consciousness with an emphasis upon an instructor’s self-evaluative, liberating stance towards education. Strategies will be introduced that engage students in the act of intensive critical thinking becomes transformative. (shrink)

Liang Qichao's Discourse on the New Citizen was serialized in 1902 in the New Citizen Journal. In "On Public Morality",1 one of his most widely studied articles, Liang inserts a brief interlinear comment explicating what it is that has contributed to the Chinese people's lack of a "new morality." Printed in a size one-third smaller than the rest of the text, the passage conveys a view that seems marginal to arguments Liang makes in the article as well as the scholarly (...) interpretations it has received:2 … recent scholar officials who support reform … call for everything new except new morality. This is because they cannot dispose of their academic slavishness... (shrink)

In this paper, we look for the relevance of chaos in the well-known Hicks-Samuelson's oscillator model investigating the endogenous fluctuations of the national income between two limits: full employment income and under-employment income. We compute the Lyapunov exponent, via Monte- Carlo simulations, to detect chaos in the evolution of the income between both limits. In the case of positive Lyapunov exponent and large values of the parameter (i.e. marginal propensity to consume and technical coefficient for capital), the evolution of income (...) is seen to be chaotic. The model also may contain a quasi-periodic attractor that can be chaotic or not. (shrink)

This article focuses on the relationship between emotions and passions, on the one hand, and values, needs and rights, on the other. This relationship is indeed central to the social dimension of international politics. In this perspective, the article examines how emotions and passions can be at the same time effects and causes of the extent to which actors feel that their needs and rights are fulfilled or not. In the process, the article also explores the negative and positive features (...) of emotions and passions, and their impact on the nature and dynamics of change in international affairs. Beyond this general approach to emotions and passions in connection with the social dimension of international politics and the questions of values, needs, and rights of actors and change, it concludes with the idea that there is also a contextual dimension to the generic argument developed in the article. This will have to be factored in for future research on case studies. (shrink)