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)

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.

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)

En partant de l’étonnement qu’a suscité l’apparition d’animaux sauvages dans les villes désertées par leurs habitants confinés, cet article met en exergue ce que la vie sauvage nous apprend de la vie urbaine, de ses insuffisances, de ses aberrations, des sacrifices qu’elle impose et des contraintes qu’elle exerce sur les vivants en général. Comment faire de la ville une nouvelle arche de Noé? Telle est la question qui se pose.

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)

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)

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)

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)

This contribution aims to examine the dynamics that have emerged from a collaborative research-training approach having relied on collective interviews, in order to shed light on the growing phenomenon of the professional integration of foreign-trained teachers in Quebec schools which seems problematic in various aspects. A conversation analysis was used to identify how the expertises of a research culture and professional cultures come together to serve a knowledge co-production process that seems relevant by the two communities concerned. Three dynamics have (...) been identified : the development of a comprehensive posture, the production of new adjusted interpretations, and the affirmation of its actor’s competency. Their highlighting leads us to reflect on collaborative design and animation strategies that served the co-production of knowledge process. (shrink)

Although providing aid in conflict is implicitly political, involving humanitarian actors and aid in conflict resolution initiatives, as Weiss advocates, risks diluting the primary responsibility of humanitarian aid to alleviate suffering.

In mathematics education, students' difficulties with negative numbers are well known. To explain these difficulties, researchers traditionally refer to obstacles raised by the concept of NEGATIVE NUMBERS itself throughout its historical evolution. In order to improve our understanding, I propose to take into consideration another point of view, based on Vygotsky's principles, which define a strong relationship between signs such as language or symbols and cognitive development. I show how it is of great interest to consider students' difficulties with negatives (...) in the light of the use of symbols, in particular the minus sign. I describe the results of an empirical study about students' strategies in solving arithmetical equations with negatives. My analysis shows that the problems raised by the presence of negatives in the equations are attributable to students' very restricted and often inadequate use of the minus sign, which prevents them from finding a negative solution or making sense of it. (shrink)

Experience of agency in patients with schizophrenia involves an interesting dissociation; these patients demonstrate that one can have a thought or perform an action consciously without being conscious of thinking or acting as the motivated agent, author of that thought or of that action. This chapter examines several interesting accounts of this dissociation, and aims at showing how they can be generalized to thought insertion phenomena. It is argued that control theory allows such a generalization; three different comparators need to (...) be distinguished: the sense of subjectivity relies on a comparator in which motivation and emotion play a structuring role. The sense of agency emerges in a system that delivers a rough categorization of self-generated – versus other- generated – actions and mental activities. A third system specializes in the social evaluation of the effects of an action, intention or other thought process, given certain goals in self or in 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...

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)

We investigated the association between cognitive control and individual differences in cortisol response to stress in participants with generalised anxiety disorder and in never-disordered c...

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

This chapter examines whether, and in what sense, one can speak of agentive mental events. An adequate characterization of mental acts should respond to three main worries. First, mental acts cannot have pre-specified goal contents. For example, one cannot prespecify the content of a judgment or of a deliberation. Second, mental acts seem to depend crucially on receptive attitudes. Third, it does not seem that intentions play any role in mental actions. Given these three constraints, mental and bodily actions appear (...) to have a significantly different structure. A careful analysis of the role of normative requirements, distinguishing them from instrumental reasons, allows the distinction between mental and bodily forms of action to be clarified. Two kinds of motives must be present for a mental act to develop. The first kind is instrumental: a mental act is performed because of some basic informational need, such as the need to "remember the name of that play". The second kind is normative: given the specific type of mental action performed, there is a specific epistemic norm relevant to that act. These two motives actually correspond to different phases of a single mental act. The first motivates the mental act, i.e. makes salient the corresponding goal. The second offers an evaluation of the feasibility of the act, on the basis of its constitutive normative requirement. Conceived in this way, a characterization of mental acts avoids the three difficulties mentioned above. The possibility of pre-specifying the outcome of epistemic mental acts is blocked by the fact that such acts are constituted by strict normative requirements. That mental acts include receptive features is shown to be a necessary architectural constraint for mental agents to be sensitive to epistemic requirements. Finally, the phenomenology of intending is shown to be absent in most mental acts; the motivational structure of mental acts is, rather, associated with error- signals and self-directed doubtings. Mental acts need to be recognized as a natural kind of action meant to normatively control and enhance cognitive efficiency according to current processing needs. (shrink)

Résumé Née en 1959, l’ autrice retrace depuis sa naissance 20 ans d’ histoire du prolétariat, de l’ engagement communiste, de l’ empreinte catholique, de l’ immigration en Europe et en Afrique du Nord, de la France des taudis et des banlieues. Ce parcours marqué par le féminisme et la lutte contre le patriarcat, l’ ascension et l’ intégration sociales, s’ inscrit dans les débats intellectuels de l’ époque sur le colonialisme, le racisme, le fascisme, le capitalisme, notamment portés par (...) Boris Vian, Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir, dont elle revendique la filiation. (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.

_Border-crossing in Education_ comprises a series of case studies covering a variety of cultural areas, in order to reveal the density of connections and exchanges that inform educational practices, policies, and systems. It attaches particular importance to individual and collective actors that govern these flows – initiating, promoting, or reconfiguring transfers of policy models. The contributors explore various aspects of the circulatory mechanisms that have been deployed in the field of education during the modern and contemporary period. Varying the observation (...) scales, from local to international, they demonstrate the multilateral character of the circulatory dynamics observed. The implementation of rich and varied approaches to these complex processes offers a perspective that complements and renews our knowledge of the genesis and evolution of educational policies and systems, most notably highlighting their foreign inspirations. However, these studies do not merely evoke borrowings and hybridization, as if national borders proved porous or non-existent. Instead they show that the phenomena of resistance, reinterpretation, and rejection are also an integral part of transnational mechanisms of exchanges. The book thus demonstrates the relevance of a historical approach in addressing these transnational mechanisms in the field of education and childhood policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Paedagogica Historica. _. (shrink)

With rapidly spreading extractive practices on a global scale, the amount of residue generated raises the question of waste management and economic externalities. Are humans, and most crucially the Earth, equipped to welcome such an exponentially increasing quantity of restants? Artworks, as inexhaustible in their readings, are congenial to this idea of irreducible remains. In this paper, I argue Derrida’s treatment of remains might provide a waste-based approach to ecocriticism which, in turns, can be leveraged to articulate an insightful reading (...) of some artworks in times of extractive overconsumption and environmental destabilisation. Lee Bae’s Issu du feu (2000) and House of Moon (2014), Emerson Pontes’s Mil Quase Mortos: Boiúna, and Rochelle Goldberg’s Cannibal Actif (2018) are three contemporary artworks that directly challenge those externalities by explicitly engaging with remains ranging from charcoal, human-made waste and oil. Through a formal analysis of these artworks and a close reading of Derrida’s Feu la cendre, ‘Biodegradables Seven Diary Fragments,’ and the seminars Manger l’autre and Rhétorique du cannibalisme, it appears that eco-deconstruction is perhaps above all a matter of engaging with the structure of remains. (shrink)

Les économistes s'accordent à montrer que la diversité est un bienfait que le marché parvient difficilement à produire mais sont peu diserts sur les modalités de défense de cette diversité. Nous montrons que la diversité culturelle ne peut être atteinte par des politiques purement nationales. La Francophonie a un rôle politique de premier plan à jouer afin de défendre des identités culturelles qui dépassent les frontières des Etats-nationsEconomists tend to agree that any beneficial effects of diversity are not produced by (...) the market to any great extent but nevertheless they are less forthcoming on how that diversity could be defended. Here we show that cultural diversity cannot be achieved through purely national politics. The international organisation of "La Francophony" has a political role to play in defending cultural identities that go beyond national borders. (shrink)

A number of practical aspects as well as ethical and political considerations have contributed to the advent of open-source applications in pioneering software, and subsequently to an extension of the openness principle to culture and research fields. This article explores the genealogy of open-source scientific publishing, emphasising the other variable of economic market dysfunction to show that although this has been an important factor in the development of open access, the problem has by no means been entirely resolved by this (...) new form of science dissemination. (shrink)

Paru pour la première fois en 1933, dans une revue lituanienne disparue durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, l’article de Levinas que l’on va lire a été republié récemment par Andrius Valevicius, professeur à l’Université de Sherbrooke.

Newborn screening for genetic diseases has developed rapidly in Western countries. These biopolitics raise the question of birth as a sociological “knot” insofar as it is the threshold between the child and the fetus. The question therefore addressed in this text, based on a field study of newborn screening for cystic fibrosis in France, is that of the link between the quest for good health and the elimination of poor health. Do they reinforce each other or, on the contrary, are (...) they contradictory? I analyze the positions of both mothers of screened children and clinicians regarding the following three points: prenatal diagnosis to preclude sets of sick siblings, identification of heterozygous individuals, and generalized prenatal screening. This study shows how increasingly attentive patient care and an increasingly demanding approach to prenatal diagnosis reinforce one another. It also analyzes the role of taking action early on and evaluating the lives of sick or disabled people in this process. In conclusion, I engage a more general discussion about what I suggest calling a “quality life.”. (shrink)