Being in a romantic relationship is characterized by a high degree of intimacy and affective involvement. Affective behavior indicates the emotional content in couple interactions and therefore promotes an understanding of the evolution of romantic relationships. When couples are also parents, their affective behavior reflects their romantic and coparental bonds. In this paper, we present an observation of parent couples’ affective behavior during a coparenting conflict discussion task to document whether and how much it improved during couple therapy. Two contrasting (...) cases of affective behavior change are included. Observational coding of affective behavior within pre- and post-intervention coparenting conflict discussion tasks was carried out to compute means and CIs for each partner in both cases. In addition, the partners’ coparental and romantic satisfaction were evaluated through validated self-report questionnaires in pre- and post-intervention assessments; this helped document whether the partners’ coparental and romantic satisfaction were dissimilar between the two cases. Finally, a clinical analysis of both cases was realized with the contribution of the therapists to investigate possible differences within therapy sessions. Statistical analyses revealed negative means of affective behavior for couple A in the pre-intervention assessment and positive means in the post-intervention assessment. Partners from couple B had negative means of affective behavior in the pre- and post-intervention assessments. Results concerning coparental and romantic satisfaction differed: Couple A’s coparental satisfaction slightly increased and the romantic satisfaction somewhat decreased, whereas couple B’s coparental satisfaction remained stable and the romantic satisfaction slightly increased between the pre- and post-intervention assessments. The clinical analysis revealed that the interactional quality of couple A slightly improved within therapy sessions and that both partners succeeded in working together as coparents, notwithstanding their romantic distress. Couple B conveyed coparental distress and exhibited poor interactional quality throughout therapy sessions (e.g., repeated criticism and contempt). This study contributes to enriching the more traditional empirical research methods in the field of couple psychotherapy, as it takes into account microlevel affective changes within parent couples’ interactions in addition to self-reported data. Furthermore, the analysis of therapy sessions supports the importance of working with affective behavior in couple therapy. (shrink)

We show in this paper that the AGM postulates are too weak to ensure the rational preservation of conditional beliefs during belief revision, thus permitting improper responses to sequences of observations. We remedy this weakness by proposing four additional postulates, which are sound relative to a qualitative version of probabilistic conditioning. Contrary to the AGM framework, the proposed postulates characterize belief revision as a process which may depend on elements of an epistemic state that are not necessarily captured by a (...) belief set. We also show that a simple modification to the AGM framework can allow belief revision to be a function of epistemic states. We establish a model-based representation theorem which characterizes the proposed postulates and constrains, in turn, the way in which entrenchment orderings may be transformed under iterated belief revision. (shrink)

Does metacognition--the capacity to self-evaluate one's cognitive performance--derive from a mindreading capacity, or does it rely on informational processes? Joëlle Proust draws on psychology and neuroscience to defend the second claim. She argues that metacognition need not involve metarepresentations, and is essentially related to mental agency.

Granting that various mental events might form the antecedents of an action, what is the mental event that is the proximate cause of action? The present article reconsiders the methodology for addressing this question: Intention and its varieties cannot be properly analyzed if one ignores the evolutionary constraints that have shaped action itself, such as the trade-off between efficient timing and resources available, for a given stake. On the present proposal, three types of action, impulsive, routine and strategic, are designed (...) to satisfy the trade-off above when achieving goals of each type. While actions of the first two types depend on non-conceptual appraisals of a given intensity and valence, strategic intentions have a propositional format and guide action within longer-term executive frameworks involving prospective memory. (shrink)

Recent work has shown that the input-output behavior of some common machine learning classifiers can be captured in symbolic form, allowing one to reason about the behavior of these classifiers using symbolic techniques. This includes explaining decisions, measuring robustness, and proving formal properties of machine learning classifiers by reasoning about the corresponding symbolic classifiers. In this work, we present a theory for unveiling the _reasons_ behind the decisions made by Boolean classifiers and study some of its theoretical and practical implications. (...) At the core of our theory is the notion of a _complete reason,_ which can be viewed as a necessary and sufficient condition for why a decision was made. We show how the complete reason can be used for computing notions such as sufficient reasons (also known as PI-explanations and abductive explanations), how it can be used for determining decision and classifier bias and how it can be used for evaluating counterfactual statements such as “a decision will stick even if...because....” We present a linear-time algorithm for computing the complete reasoning behind a decision, assuming the classifier is represented by a Boolean circuit of appropriate form. We then show how the computed complete reason can be used to answer many queries about a decision in linear or polynomial time. We finally conclude with a case study that illustrates the various notions and techniques we introduced. (shrink)

Perceiving an armchair prepares us to sit. Reading the first line in a text prepares us to read it. This article proposes that the affordance construct used to explain reactive potentiation of behavior similarly applies to reactive potentiation of cognitive actions. It defends furthermore that, in both cases, affordance-sensings do not only apply to selective (dis)engagement, but also to the revision and the termination of actions. In the first section, characteristics of environmental affordance-sensings such as directness, stability, action potentiation, valence, (...) and phenomenology are reexamined in light of contemporary cognitive science. In the second section, it is proposed that cognitive affordance-sensings can also be characterized along these dimensions. Called “metacognitive feelings” in the metacognitive literature, their function is to select, engage, revise and post-evaluate cognitive actions. A third section discusses alternative views, and responds to objections. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that the following Rule should be part of any characterization of science: Claims concerning specific disputed facts should be endorsed only if they are sufficiently supported by the application of validated methods of research or discovery, and moreover that acceptance of this Rule should lead one to reject religious belief. This paper argues, first, that the Rule, as stated, should not be accepted as it suffers from a number of problems. And second, that even if (...) the Rule were to be acceptable, it should not lead one to reject religious belief. (shrink)

Corporate crises call for effective communication to shelter or restore a company's reputation. The use of corporate social responsibility claims may provide an effective tool to counter the negative impact of a crisis, but knowledge about its effectiveness is scarce and lacking in studies that consider CSR communication during crises. To help fill this gap, this study investigates whether the length of company's involvement in CSR matters when it uses CSR claims in its crisis communication as a means to counter (...) negative publicity. The use of CSR claims in crisis communication is more effective for companies with a long CSR history than for those with a short CSR history, and consumer skepticism about claims lies at the heart of this phenomenon. (shrink)

What is at issue here is the founding of a philosophy for Lebanon, in its specific environment, that could be a viable departure into something new and worthwhile for the future, both academically and socially. Each founding is a question of origin, in whichever way we may conceive it, but never does a founding precede all origin, it is indeed made possible, as we shall see, through the work done on the question of origin. Hence, if we are to establish (...) a new philosophy, or more appropriately for a start, a locus – whatever meanings this word may carry – for philosophy here, we must direct our attention to the origin, in its multifarious aspects. But we also want something else: not simply a foundation, but one that will lead to a transformation of our intellectual and social environment, near and far, locally and regionally. There is thus an ethical dimension, one – to keep within the Greek original, ἦθος, as well as Dewey’s meaning – that will bring about new “habits” of thinking and behaviour to be gradually generalised through various media. We must then, as we go toward the origin and its different operations, keep in mind that we are seeking to transmute. (shrink)

L’éthique de Philodème de Gadara est aujourd’hui accessible, en langue anglaise, dans une présentation thématique qui met en perspective toutes les œuvres actuellement publiées de l’épicurien d’Herculanum, protégé du beau-père de César, Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, et ami de Virgile et d’Horace. Les trois cent cinquante pages du livre de Voula Tsouna, The Ethics of Philodemus, offrent en effet enfin au public la réorganisation et le commentaire, en un seul volume, de larges et très nombreux ex...

Dans le cadre des négociations commerciales internationales, les politiques en faveur de la diversité culturelle désignent un objectif qui consiste à limiter l'uniformisation censée résulter du fonctionnement du marché et du libre-échange. Depuis quelques années, le véritable débat ne porte plus sur l'objectif lui-même qui semble faire l'objet d'un consensus, mais sur les moyens d'y parvenir. Notre propos dans cet article est justement de revenir sur cet objectif en montrant sa complexité et son caractère multidimensionnel. Au-delà du discours incantatoire à (...) portée très générale sur ses bienfaits supposés, les décideurs publics doivent donc effectuer des arbitrages, classiquement en termes de coûts/bénéfices, de manière plus complexe entre les différentes dimensions de la diversité. Mener une politique en faveur de la diversité culturelle suppose donc de faire des choix parmi ces multiples aspects et d'assumer les coûts induits. (shrink)

Cet article se penche sur les rapports entre les politiques de réparation et la perception du temps après un crime de masse. Il cherche à démontrer que les mesures réparatrices prises parfois dans le but de rétablir la justice et le dialogue entre les groupes agissent sur la perception du temps. Elles sont dotées d’un pouvoir de reformulation qui vient modifier la mise en récit du passé, et donc sa perception. Elles contribuent notamment à faire le récit des responsabilités et (...) celui de la souffrance des victimes.Pour le montrer, l’article s’appuie sur un cas, celui des réparations ouest-allemandes destinées à Israël et à la Claims Conference entre 1945 et 1980. Cette période relativement longue permet d’observer un changement dans les modes de réparation : la RFA eut d’abord recours au droit civil, puis au droit pénal, et enfin aux symboles. Chacun de ces modes reformula à sa manière l’histoire des crimes et changea par conséquent la perception du passé qui ne cessa d’évoluer au fil du temps, en intégrant au fur et à mesure davantage le point de vue de la victime. (shrink)

A propos de 'Evolution et Rationalité' de Ronald de Sousa (2004).

What is a person, and how can a person come to know that she is a person identical to herself over time ? The article defends the view that the sense of being oneself in this sense consists in the ability to consciously affect oneself : in the memory of having affected oneself, joint to the consciousness of being able to affect oneself again. In other words, being a self requires a capacity for metacognition (control and monitoring of one's own (...) internal states). This view is compatible with the hypothesis that the self is a dynamic representation emerging out of a higher level control system, - valuation control - whose articulation with control of plans and perceptual/motor control is discussed in the context of normal and pertrubed agency. (shrink)

A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., thecapacity for reaching specific desirable mental statesthrough an appropriate monitoring of one's own mentalprocesses. The present paper aims to define mentalacts, and to defend their explanatory role againsttwo objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention thatpostulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress.The other is a different although related difficulty,here called the access puzzle: How can the mindalready know how to act in order to reach somepredefined result? A (...) crucial element in the solutionof these puzzles consists in making explicit thecontingency between mental acts and mentaloperations, parallel to the contingency betweenphysical acts and bodily movements. The paper finallydiscusses the kind of reflexivity at stake in mentalacts; it is shown that the capacity to refer tooneself is not a necessary condition of the successfulexecution of mental acts. (shrink)

Hence, this book's provocative claim: today's so-called logical empiricism owes much more to Kant's notion of science than to Hume's.

As part of their corporate social responsibility, many organizations practice cause-related marketing, in which organizations donate to a chosen cause with every consumer purchase. The extant literature has identified the importance of the fit between the organization and the nature of the cause in influencing corporate image, as well as the influence of a connection between the cause and consumer preferences on brand attitudes and brand choice. However, prior research has not addressed which cause composition most appeals to consumers or (...) the impact of cause choice on corporate image. A between-subjects field experiment in the Netherlands examines the influence of three core cause attributes—cause type, cause scope, and cause acuteness—on consumers’ perceptions of corporate image. Furthermore, this experiment examines the extent to which consumer identification with the cause mediates the influence of the cause attributes on corporate image. The findings indicate that identification with the cause leads to more positive evaluations of marketing campaigns for cause type and cause scope. Also, however, our results uncover a negative direct relationship between cause scope and corporate image. Cause acuteness is only marginally influential in corporate image perceptions. By proposing and testing a comprehensive model of the influence of cause attributes on corporate image in cause-related marketing, this article provides important implications and suggests avenues for further research. (shrink)

Building on a model of the biological, socio-psychological, and structural drivers of luxury consumption, this article explores when and why luxury consumers consider ethics in their luxury consumption practices, to identify differences in their ethical and ethical luxury consumption. The variables proposed to explain these differences derive from biological, socio-psychological, and structural drivers, namely, consumers’ (1) age, (2) ethicality, (3) human values, (4) motivations, and (5) assumptive world. A cluster analysis of a sample of 706 U.S. adult luxury consumers reveals (...) five segments of luxury consumers, each reflecting a specific persona, that engage in both ethical and ethical luxury consumption to varying extents. The five segments differ in the extent to which they exhibit features related to four discriminant functions (immorality, ego-orientation, and strain; altruistic-orientation; conservation, in control, and positivity; and youth and luxury savvy), which vary across the biological, socio-psychological, and structural drivers. The findings thus indicate which segments of luxury consumers are most relevant for luxury firms pursuing a long-term sustainability agenda and suggest practical actions to reach those goals. (shrink)

We address in this paper the problem of counting the models of a propositional theory under incremental changes to its literals. Specifcally, we show that if a propositional theory Δ is in a special form that we call smooth, deterministic, decomposable negation normal form, then for any consistent set of literals S, we can simultaneously count the models of Δ ∪ S and the models of every theory Δ ∪ T where T results from adding, removing or flipping a literal (...) in S. We present two results relating to the time and space complexity of compiling propositional theories into sd-DNNF. First, we show that if a conjunctive normal form has a bounded treewidth, then it can be compiled into an sd-DNNF in time and space which are linear in its size. Second, we show that sd-DNNF is a strictly more space efficient representation than Free Binary Decision Diagrams. Finally, we discuss some applications of the counting results to truth maintenance systems, belief revision, and model-based diagnosis. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is twofold. It first seeks to prove that the notion of facticity in Heidegger’s work saw a major change after Being and Time. While several studies did deal with facticity as it appeared before the magnus opus and show the influence it had on the latter’s development, hardly any have dealt with what happens to facticity after Sein und Zeit. This is mostly because facticity, as it imploded, took on different names which fall under the (...) heading of ground-attunements. Secondly, I will show the ambivalent character of this new facticity, where many essential notions, such as thrownness, truth, attunement and guilt, shifted meanings, sometimes almost imperceptibly or surreptitiously. I will show that this ambivalence comes from the fact that the shift in question allowed for an opening of facticity while at the same time bringing in restrictive limits, and thus a closing-off of certain essential issues. This has left several adumbrated questions, such as responsibility, in abeyance. (shrink)

Ce livre propose d'aller au plus intime de la pensée heideggerienne dans sa maturité, qui récapitule ses moments clefs au sein de la constellation des quatre : les dieux, les mortels, la terre et le ciel ; pour découvrir, comme vérité de la relation entre eux, la dimension divine, disposée, dispensée, plurivoque et déterminante dans l'avènement à partir de l'événement appropriant, l'Ereignis. Arriver à cet envoi destinal du divin comme essentiel à la pensée de Heidegger, n'a pu se faire, qu'en (...) prenant d'abord le chemin du dieu heideggerien, pour en dégager le sens et le dépasser vers son fondement puis ce qui a rendu ce dernier possible : ce sur quoi il repose, même dans un oubli, dont les textes ne donnent le sens que sous des moments précis, aboutissant, dans leur être-ensemble et les-uns-pour-les-autres, à l'installation d'un monde par l'Ereignis sous le signe du divin. Il a fallu donc dégager ce qu'est le dieu de ses sens accumulés - en passant par le Dieu créateur, au dieu qui sauvegarde puis au dieu Inconnu - pour retrouver ce qui le donne comme tel, et ensuite chercher la trace de ce don. Ce travail nous a permis de déceler, au fur des textes - non sans surprise et même quelque joie - les traces et les opérations du divin auprès de chacun des éléments de ce qui est devenu le Quadriparti. Une fois ce dégagement effectué avec le plus de précision possible, nous avons pu en identifier les modalités au sein du Geviert, sa manière de " s'installer ", toujours différente, et ses conséquences sur le monde et le destinal. Cela nous a permis enfin d'entreprendre un changement éclairant dans le sens de plusieurs topoi heideggeriens, à savoir l'histoire, l'art, la parole et le poème - éclairage qui donne à chacun son sens fondamental depuis l'expression divine. Ce travail se veut aussi, dans ses dernières pages, un questionnement renouvelé sur les problèmes fondamentaux du divin chez Heidegger, et demande donc de reprendre les textes dans une la perspective qu'il ouverte pour en développer toute la portée. (shrink)

D’un versant à l’autre des Alpes, les règles universitaires et éditoriales diffèrent beaucoup, et c’est une aubaine pour les chercheurs et les érudits. Voici Théon de Smyrne, élégamment propulsé sur le devant de la scène par un jeune chercheur de 27 ans, dans une traduction italienne actualisée, commentée au fil du texte à la mode antique, avec une volonté non dissimulée d’exhaustivité dans les références, les parallèles, les contrastes et les variantes, les interprétations divergentes. Les n...

Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States, killing approximately 480,000 people each year. This crushing health burden falls disproportionately, and recent CDC data shows that large disparities in adult cigarette smoking remain. One factor in these disparities is the use of flavors. Menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products are used at higher rates by vulnerable populations including youth and young adults, African Americans, women, Hispanics and Asian Americans. This is no accident; the (...) tobacco industry has long targeted these same groups. Given FDA's failure to act to ban flavored tobacco products, states and municipalities are considering taking matters into their own hands to protect their communities from these dangerous products. The authors will explore state and local authority to restrict the sales of these products and review the evidence base indicating that removing flavored tobacco products – and menthol combustible products in particular - from the market would significantly reduce the toll of illness and death caused by these products. (shrink)

Controlling one's mental agency encompasses two forms of metacognitive operations, self-probing and post-evaluating. Metacognition so defined might seem to fuel an internalist view of epistemic norms, where rational feelings are available to instruct a thinker of what she can do, and allow her to be responsible for her mental agency. Such a view, however, ignores the dynamics of the mind–world interactions that calibrate the epistemic sentiments as reliable indicators of epistemic norms. A 'brain in the lab' thought experiment suggests that (...) an internalist view of epistemic feelings is unable to account for the contrast between norm-tracking, educated sentiments, and illusory feelings. (shrink)

Against the prior view that primate communication is based only on signal decoding, comparative evidence suggests that primates are able, no less than humans, to intentionally perform or understand impulsive or habitual communicational actions with a structured evaluative nonconceptual content. These signals convey an affordance-sensing that immediately motivates conspecifics to act. Although humans have access to a strategic form of propositional communication adapted to teaching and persuasion, they share with nonhuman primates the capacity to communicate in impulsive or habitual ways. (...) They are also similarly able to monitor fluency, informativeness and relevance of messages or signals through nonconceptual cues. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Mental Agency as Sensitivity to Reasons Mental Agency as Voluntary Control Mental Agency, ‘Evaluative Control,’ and Metacognition References Further reading.

This book chapter aims at exploring how intentional a piece of behavior should be to count as an action, and how a minimal view on action, not requiring a richly intentional causation, may still qualify such a behavior as voluntary.

Peter Carruthers correctly claims that metacognition in humans may involve self-directed interpretations (i.e., may use the conceptual interpretative resources of mindreading). He fails to show, however, that metacognition cannot rely exclusively on subjective experience. Focusing on self-directed mindreading can only bypass evolutionary considerations and obscure important functional differences.

How should one attribute epistemic credit to an agent, and hence, knowledge, when cognitive processes include an extensive use of human or mechanical enhancers, informational tools, and devices which allow one to complement or modify one's own cognitive system? The concept of integration of a cognitive system has been used to address this question. For true belief to be creditable to a person's ability, it is claimed, the relevant informational processes must be or become part of the cognitive character of (...) the agent, as a result of a process of enculturation. We argue that this view does not capture the role of sensitivity to epistemic norms in forming true beliefs. An analysis of epistemic actions, basic and extended, is proposed as offering an appropriate framework for crediting an agent with knowledge. (shrink)

Given disagreement about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self‐knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and the scope of metacognition – the control of one’s cognition – is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self‐ascriptive view, has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one’s own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one’s mind. The main claims of this view are articulated, and (...) the difficulties that they raise are discussed. An alternative view of metacognition, the ‘self‐evaluative view’, is then examined. It is argued that this view provides an account of metacognition that is both empirically and conceptually more adequate than the self‐ascriptive model. Particular attention is given to the problem of transferring self‐evaluative judgments to the case of others. (shrink)

Pour celles et ceux qui prisent le grand large, la lecture de l’ouvrage de F. Thébaud, Une traversée du siècle. Marguerite Thibert, femme engagée et fonctionnaire internationale, s’impose. Dans cet ouvrage au long cours (près de 700 pages), l’auteure, spécialiste de l’histoire des femmes et du genre, nous convie en effet à partager un impressionnant périple temporel : celui d’une inconnue illustre, Marguerite Thibert (1886‑1982). Inconnue du grand public, Marguerite Thibert était déjà une per...

The project of understanding rationality in non-human animals faces a number of conceptual and methodological difficulties. The present chapter defends the view that it is counterproductive to rely on the human folk psychological idiom in animal cognition studies. Instead, it approaches the subject on the basis of dynamic- evolutionary considerations. Concepts from control theory can be used to frame the problem in the most general terms. The specific selective pressures exerted on agents endowed with information-processing capacities are analysed. It is (...) hypothesized that metacognition offers an evolutionary stable response to the various demands of the internal and external flows of information in a competitive environment. Metacognition provides a form of process-reflexivity that can, but does not have to be redeployed through metarepresentations. Finally the claim that rationality so conceived involves normativity is discussed. (shrink)