The starting point of this conversation with philosopher Mathieu Triclot is the issue of the causal contribution of video game playing in school shootings. Triclot explains the limitations of current psychological approaches regarding video game violence. He further develops on the peculiar features of the video game medium and how they relate to the problem of violence. Triclot eventually shows that, although players may relate to virtual violence in very different ways, violence in video games is not merely a (...) subjective phenomenon. He highlights that some “regimes of experience,” which got stable in the video game culture, cultivate a toxic relation to violence. (shrink)

Although neuroscience is currently gaining wide acceptance in organization science and management studies, some important questions remain unanswered and may hinder the development of so-called organizational neuroscience. Specifically, it appears that the usefulness and the applications of neuroscience methods to organization science are still unclear. Hence, the paper addresses this by examining the role of psychophysiology in investigating implicit emotional experience in organizational behaviors and by discussing how concepts from affective sciences and psychophysiological methods could provide a more complete picture (...) of emotion in organization. Finally, we discuss some important points that should be carefully considered before using psychophysiological measurements in organization science. (shrink)

In this paper, elementary but hitherto overlooked connections are established between Wittgenstein's remarks on mathematics, written during his transitional period, and free-variable finitism. After giving a brief description of theTractatus Logico-Philosophicus on quantifiers and generality, I present in the first section Wittgenstein's rejection of quantification theory and his account of general arithmetical propositions, to use modern jargon, as claims (as opposed to statements). As in Skolem's primitive recursive arithmetic and Goodstein's equational calculus, Wittgenstein represented generality by the use of free (...) variables. This has the effect that negation of unbounded universal and existential propositions cannot be expressed. This is claimed in the second section to be the basis for Wittgenstein's criticism of the universal validity of the law of excluded middle. In the last section, there is a brief discussion of Wittgenstein's remarks on real numbers. These show a preference, in line with finitism, for a recursive version of the continuum. (shrink)

A Polish space is not always homeomorphic to a computably presented Polish space. In this article, we examine degrees of non-computability of presenting homeomorphic copies of compact Polish spaces. We show that there exists a $\mathbf {0}'$ -computable low $_3$ compact Polish space which is not homeomorphic to a computable one, and that, for any natural number $n\geq 2$, there exists a Polish space $X_n$ such that exactly the high $_{n}$ -degrees are required to present the homeomorphism type of $X_n$. (...) Along the way we investigate the computable aspects of Čech homology groups. We also show that no compact Polish space has a least presentation with respect to Turing reducibility. (shrink)

Longtemps objet de prédilection des hitoriens de l'économie européenne, la croissance médiévale n'est plus au centre de leurs préoccupations. En la replaçant dans une perspective de long terme, du XIe au XVe siècle, et en s'interrogeant sur ce qui en elle relève proprement des processus de développement ou des dynamiques conjoncturelles, il est possible de replacer au centre du débat historique un moment essentiel de construction de l'économie-monde européenne. L'article insiste en particulier sur l'importance des processus sociaux de promotion des (...) activités productives et des groupes de travailleurs: ils ont rendu possible une intensification du travail, rémunérée par un ensemble complexe de mécanismes de redistribution des richesses qui sont l'une de créations originales des sociétés médiévales. (shrink)

What may we learn about the life of human beings with Evolutionary Biology? In order to answer this question, without taking a distrustful stance, I think that Daniel Dennett’s evolutionary cognitivism and Foucault s archaeological approach are not unreconciliable but complementary traditions. Indeed, Derrnett’s originality, thanks to his interpretation of the Baldwin Effect and his thesis of Self as a Narrative Center of Gravity, manages to present the human being’s world as the living fulfilment of a set of historical products, (...) without giving up the properly creative dimension of the individual . In this way, devices of domination and processes of « subjectivisation » belong to the broader transfornzative process of the evolution of life on Earth. In return, Dennett s philosophy, rightfully careful when it comes to political questions, should be complemented by a critical analysis. (shrink)

The dating of Islamic traditions has so far remained dependent on internal analyses of the hadith corpus. However, a comparison between this corpus and documentary sources appears possible. Invocations engraved on rocks during the first three centuries of Islam can be compared with those attributed to the earliest authorities of Islam. The new method I propose, based on an analysis of lexical convergences between inscriptions and hadith, allows to approach the time when traditions were first put into circulation and to (...) study the process whereby invocatory formulas were incorporated into the sunna and attributed to various authorities. In this way, it becomes possible to identify a historically plausible lexical nucleus in prophetic hadith and to understand how, by means of transmitters that I call “hubs,” ancient non-prophetic traditions became prophetic. (shrink)

Many engineering ethics classes and textbooks introduce theories such as utilitarianism and Kantianism (and most others draw from these theories without mentioning them explicitly). Yet using ethical theories to teach engineering ethics is not devoid of difficulty. First, their status is unclear (should one pick a single theory or use them all? does it make a difference?) Also, textbooks generally assume or fallaciously ‘prove’ that egoism (or even simply accounting for one’s interests) is wrong. Further, the drawbacks of ethical theories (...) are underestimated and the theories are also otherwise misrepresented to make them more suitable for engineering ethics as the authors construe it, viz. the ‘moral reasoning’ process. Stating in what various theories disagree would allow the students to frame the problem more productively in terms of motive–consequence or society–individual dichotomies rather than in terms of Kant–utilitarian. (shrink)

A leading idea of cultural evolutionary theory is that for human cultures to undergo evolutionary change, cultural transmission must generally serve as a high-fidelity copying process. In analogy to genetic inheritance, the high fidelity of human cultural transmission would act as a safeguard against the transformation and loss of cultural information, thus ensuring both the stability and longevity of cultural traditions. Cultural fidelity would also serve as the key difference-maker between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, explaining why only (...) us humans, with our uniquely high-fidelity transmission capabilities, are capable of evolving and sustaining complex traditions. But what does it mean for cultural transmission to be more or less faithful? This article has two objectives. The first is to clarify the meaning and uses of the concept of cultural fidelity and to evaluate their explanatory import. I argue that cultural evolutionists use several fidelity concepts (episodic, propensity, and generalized fidelity), concepts that I will define and clarify. The second objective is to challenge the explanatory significance of a general notion of fidelity (generalized fidelity) as being both explanatorily meaningful and operationalizable. I conclude that if fidelity is to serve as an explanation of the key differences between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, then the concept will have to be redesigned and rely on different assumptions. 1Introduction 2Generalized Fidelity 2.1The need for an explanatory concept of fidelity 2.2Three conditions for a general notion of cultural fidelity 3Episodic Fidelity 3.1Measuring episodic fidelity 3.2The relevance problem 3.3Explanatory pluralism 3.4The incommensurability of fidelity metrics 4Propensity Fidelity 5Fidelity as an Explanatory Concept 5.1Explaining cultural stability 5.2Explaining human distinctiveness 6Conclusion. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper considers the question of whether it is possible to be mistaken about the content of our first-order intentional states. For proponents of the rational agency model of self-knowledge, such failures might seem very difficult to explain. On this model, the authority of self-knowledge is not based on inference from evidence, but rather originates in our capacity, as rational agents, to shape our beliefs and other intentional states. To believe that one believes that p, on this view, constitutes (...) one's belief that p and so self-knowledge involves a constitutive relation between first- and second-order beliefs. If this is true, it is hard to see how those second-order beliefs could ever be false.I develop two counter-examples which show that despite the constitutive relation between first- and second-order beliefs in standard cases of self-knowledge, it is possible to be mistaken, and even self-deceived, about the content of one's own beliefs. These counter-examples do not show that the rational agency model is mistaken—rather, they show that the possibility of estrangement from one's own mental life means that, even within the rational agency model, it is possible to have false second-order beliefs about the content of one's first-order beliefs. The authority of self-knowledge does not entail that to believe that one believes that p suffices to make it the case that one believes that p. (shrink)

Le transhumanisme a inspiré beaucoup de livres. Pour et contre. Il fallait Mathieu Terence pour en dévoiler l'imposture. Pour en dénoncer l'aberration. Pour démonter ce mythe ultime de la religion du progrès. Avec humour et gravité. Avec style et prophétisme. Sources, théories, moyens financiers, relais médiatiques, réseaux d'influence : voici, tel qu'en lui-même, le mirage high-tech et mortifère de l'idéologie libérale mondialisée. Car, sous cette fausse promesse de puissance et d'immortalité, se cache la disparition du corps, du visage, de (...) la parole et de tout ce qui confère sa véritable infinité à la finitude humaine. Cet intégrisme, jusque-là, ne disait pas son nom. C'est chose faite. Mieux qu'un pamphlet, un bréviaire de résistance."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Prominent ethical and policy issues such as affirmative action and female enrollment in science and engineering revolve around the idea that diversity is good. However, a precise definition is seldom provided. I show that diversity may be construed as a factual description, a craving for symmetry, an intrinsic good, an instrumental good, a symptom, or a side effect. These acceptions differ vastly in their nature and properties. Some are deeply mistaken and some others cannot lead to concrete policies. It is (...) thus necessary to clarify what one means by ‘diversity.’ It may be a neutral description of a given state; but this is insufficient to act. The idea that there should be the same representation in a specific context as in the overall population is both puzzling and arbitrary. Diversity as intrinsic good is a mere opinion, which cannot be concretely applied; moreover, the most commonly invoked forms of diversity are not intrinsically good. On the other hand, diversity as instrumental good can be evaluated empirically and can give rise to policies, but these may be very weak. Finally, symptoms and side effects are not actually about diversity. I consider the example of female enrollment in science and engineering, interpreting the various arguments found in the literature in light of this polysemy. (shrink)

Since cheating is obviously wrong, arguments against it need only be mentioned in passing. But the argument of unfair advantage absurdly takes education to be essentially a race of all against all; moreover, it ignores that many cases of unfair advantages are widely accepted. On the other hand, the fact that cheating can hamper learning does not mean that punishing cheating will necessarily favour learning, so that this argument does not obviously justify sanctioning cheaters.

Bringing Pierre Bourdieu to Science and Technology Studies Content Type Journal Article Pages 263-273 DOI 10.1007/s11024-011-9174-2 Authors Mathieu Albert, Wilson Centre and Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, 200 Elizabeth Street , Eaton-South 1-581, Toronto, ON M5G 2C4, Canada Daniel Lee Kleinman, Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 348 Agricultural Hall 1450 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA Journal Minerva Online ISSN 1573-1871 Print ISSN 0026-4695 Journal Volume Volume 49 Journal Issue Volume 49, (...) Number 3. (shrink)

Nous tenterons ici d’élucider le sens de la référence quelque peu surprenante de H. G. Gadamer à la doctrine médiévale des transcendantaux à la fin de Vérité et méthode. Le concept d’appartenance signifie pour Gadamer l’insertion de la connaissance dans l’être. Nous soutenons que la thèse fondamentale de Gadamer, l’être susceptible d’être compris est langage, ne signifie pas que l’être soit «soumis» au langage, mais suggère plutôt une certaine intelligibilité de l’être auquel l’homme participe par le biais de la connaissance. (...) Ceci nous reconduit à deux doctrines clés issues de la philosophie médiévale en ce qui concerne le problème de la vérité, soit les transcendantaux et la définition classique de la vérité comme adaequatio rei et intellectus. (shrink)

High-fidelity cultural transmission, rather than brute intelligence, is the secret of our species’ success, or so many cultural evolutionists claim. It has been selected because it ensures the spread, stability and longevity of beneficial cultural traditions, and it supports cumulative cultural change. To play these roles, however, fidelity must be a causally-efficient property of cultural transmission. This is where the grain problem comes in and challenges the explanatory potency of fidelity. Assessing the degree of fidelity of any episode or mechanism (...) of cultural transmission always depends upon an investigator’s choice of grain of description at which cultural traditions are being studied. The fidelity of cultural transmission then appears to be relative to the granularity at which one approaches cultural variation, and since there is a multiplicity of grains of description by which the same tradition can be studied, there results a multiplicity of measures of fidelity for a same event or mechanism of cultural transmission. If this is correct, because fidelity is always relative to the grain of description dictated by the local and specific research interests of the investigator, then there seems to be no fact of the matter as to whether cultural transmission is faithful or not, independently from a researcher’s framework of analysis. The aims of this paper are to offer a conceptual clarification of the grain problem in cultural evolution, to assess its causes, to unpack its epistemological implications, and to examine its reach and consequences for a science of cultural evolution. (shrink)

We present the inconsistency-adaptive deontic logic DP r , a nonmonotonic logic for dealing with conflicts between normative statements. On the one hand, this logic does not lead to explosion in view of normative conflicts such as O A ∧ O ∼A, O A ∧ P ∼A or even O A ∧ ∼O A. On the other hand, DP r still verifies all intuitively reliable inferences valid in Standard Deontic Logic (SDL). DP r interprets a given premise set ‘as normally (...) as possible’ with respect to SDL. Whereas some SDL-rules are verified unconditionally by DP r , others are verified conditionally. The latter are applicable unless they rely on formulas that turn out to behave inconsistently in view of the premises. This dynamic process is mirrored by the proof theory of DP r. (shrink)

La réception de John Rawls et des théories de la justice Souvent présenté comme un des plus grands théoriciens politiques du XXe siècle, John Rawls est aujourd'hui un philosophe consacré en France, communément perçu comme le porte-parole d'un " libéralisme égalitaire ", alliant défense de la démocratie, du marché et de la justice sociale. La réception de John Rawls et des théories de la justice Souvent présenté comme un des plus grands théoriciens politiques du XXe siècle, John Rawls est aujourd'hui (...) un philosophe consacré en France, communément perçu comme le porte-parole d'un " libéralisme égalitaire ", alliant défense de la démocratie, du marché et de la justice sociale. Rien ne laissait pourtant présager l'entrée dans le canon académique et dans le débat politique d'une oeuvre longtemps ignorée des philosophes et intellectuels français. Cette consécration tardive constitue le terme d'une histoire qui court du début des années 1970 aux années 2000, durant laquelle les lectures les plus diverses de Rawls se sont affrontées. Porté par une écriture dynamique et accessible, l'ouvrage de Mathieu Hauchecorne rend compte de la réception française de ce qu'on a communément appelé les " théories de la justice ". Il retrace les circulations de Rawls mais aussi d'auteurs comme Robert Nozick, Michael Walzer ou Amartya Sen entre les Etats-Unis et la France ; entre économie, philosophie, sociologie, droit et science politique ; et entre champ intellectuel et champ politique. Une histoire inséparable de reconfigurations plus globales, comme la domination accrue de l'anglais sur les échanges intellectuels transnationaux, l'affirmation d'une gauche non-marxiste en France, et les débats relatifs aux politiques de redistribution. Une contribution majeure à une sociologie de la pensée politique contemporaine. (shrink)

La base de données orales de français de Suisse romande (OFROM) contient des transcriptions d’enregistrements auxquels ont participé des locuteurs nés et vivant en Suisse. Elle a été créée par des linguistes soucieux de documenter les usages oraux du français en Suisse romande, et de combler ainsi le retard dans la description des usages oraux de la langue parlée dans cette partie de la francophonie, notamment sur le plan du lexique, de la syntaxe et de la phonologie. La base de (...) données OFROM a été mise en ligne en décembre 2012 ; elle est encore jeune et d’ampleur modeste (65 heures de parole pour près de 410 000 mots transcrits, au moment où nous écrivons), mais il est prévu de l’enrichir et de la diversifier régulièrement au cours des années à venir. La première partie de cet article présente les principes fondamentaux qui ont guidé la constitution de la base (choix des locuteurs, des supports et conventions de transcription, annotations, etc.). La seconde partie contient les résultats obtenus à l’issue d’études en cours ou de sondages prospectifs, portant sur la variation lexicale et la variation syntaxique. Ils permettront d’illustrer quelques-unes des potentialités qu’offrent la base et son moteur de recherche. (shrink)

In this article we assess the general claim that Durkheimian sociology has reactionary, fascist, or totalitarian affinities, and the specific claim that Marcel Déat’s Durkheimian background was a significant factor in his becoming a Nazi sympathizer. We do so by comparing the different trajectories of the interwar generation of young Durkheimians and find that only one, i.e. Déat, can be said to have become fascist. Indeed, what characterizes this generation of Durkheimians is the variety of the ways in which they (...) responded to the crises of the interwar years, both politically and scientifically. Nonetheless, most remained on the political left, and during the war many younger members of the Durkheimian group either fled the country or were involved in the French Resistance. As the only personal link between the Durkheimian group and fascism, Déat’s career is of particular interest. Instead of Déat’s being an orthodox Durkheimian, his successive engagements embody the intellectual fragmentation and heterodoxy characteristic of the interwar generation. We outline Déat’s career by foregrounding the conjunctural and dispositional factors that we believe point toward a more plausible explanation of Déat’s transformation than does an internalist history-of-ideas approach according to which his political evolution can be explained by reference to an underlying intellectual continuity. Déat’s fascism is better explained by the repeated frustration of his political and intellectual ambitions that ultimately led to a fateful accommodation with Nazi power than by any tendency inherent to Durkheimian sociology. (shrink)

La philosophie de l’histoire d’Auguste Comte, méconnue aujourd’hui, mérite un nouvel examen. L’idée de progrès social qui lui sert de fil conducteur s’éclaire lorsqu’on la compare à la hiérarchie animale telle qu’elle est conçue notamment par Lamarck et Blainville. De ce point de vue, on s’aperçoit que les critiques déjà formulées par Cuvier envers une telle hiérarchie préfigurent celles qu’on peut adresser à la conception comtienne de l’histoire, qui semble postuler une corrélation trop rigide entre les différents aspects sociaux. Mais (...) ne peut-on pas alors interpréter les idées de progrès social et de hiérarchie animale comme des principes régulateurs et non des faits observables? (shrink)

Plagiarism is a crime against academy. It deceives readers, hurts plagiarized authors, and gets the plagiarist undeserved benefits. However, even though these arguments do show that copying other people’s intellectual contribution is wrong, they do not apply to the copying of words. Copying a few sentences that contain no original idea (e.g. in the introduction) is of marginal importance compared to stealing the ideas of others. The two must be clearly distinguished, and the ‘plagiarism’ label should not be used for (...) deeds which are very different in nature and importance. (shrink)

The past two decades have seen growing calls for the “tobacco endgame.” Its advocates are united by their commitment to two ideas. First, tobacco‐related harms represent a catastrophic health emergency, and second, current tobacco‐control approaches are an inadequate response to the scale of that emergency. To endgame advocates, tobacco policy should have more ambitious goals than merely “controlling” tobacco. Instead, it should aim to bring about a smoke‐free world. While a range of different policies are included under the umbrella of (...) the “tobacco endgame,” the most radical proposal is for a complete ban on tobacco. Its advocates argue that in addition to improving global public health, an effective ban on tobacco would also promote overall autonomy and would have important egalitarian benefits. This article critically examines these arguments for a tobacco ban. I argue that they rely on idealizing assumptions about the likely effects of a ban. Because an effective ban would require robust enforcement to control the illegal market in tobacco, it would be more likely to undermine autonomy and equality than it would be to promote them. By relying on idealizing assumptions and ignoring the likely consequences of a tobacco ban, advocates of a ban obscure, rather than clarify, both the policy debate and the ethical stakes. I conclude by considering the ways that idealizing assumptions should—and should not—play a role in debates about ethical issues in public policy. (shrink)

According to Clifford Geertz, the purpose of anthropology is not to explain culture but to explicate it. That should cause us to rethink our relationship with machine learning. It is, we contend, perfectly possible that machine learning algorithms, which are unable to explain, and could even be unexplainable themselves, can still be of critical use in a process of explication. Thus, we report on an experiment with anthropological AI. From a dataset of 175K Facebook comments, we trained a neural network (...) to predict the emoji reaction associated with a comment and asked a group of human players to compete against the machine. We show that a) the machine can reach the same accuracy as the players, b) it fails in roughly the same ways as the players, and c) easily predictable emoji reactions tend to reflect unambiguous situations where interpretation is easy. We therefore repurpose the failures of the neural network to point us to deeper and more ambiguous situations where interpretation is hard and explication becomes both necessary and interesting. We use this experiment as a point of departure for discussing how experiences from anthropology, and in particular the tension between formalist ethnoscience and interpretive thick description, might contribute to debates about explainable AI. (shrink)

An essay on whether or not we today are the 'heirs' of the materialist Enlightenment.

Martha Nussbaum has proposed an influential interpretation of the stoic theory of the passions, which will be challenged in this article. According to Nussbaum, the Stoics view the passions as judgments, rather than as intentional states caused by previous judgments. It will be argued that Nussbaum does not distinguish the passion, which is in fact an impulse of thehegemonikon, and the judgment that causes it. Such a distinction, however, is crucial to the Stoics, as it allows them to present the (...) passion as an intentional movement having evaluative, kinetic and affective properties, while at the same time analysing the judgment that causes it. It will also be argued that Nussbaum fails to mention the existence of a first quasi-impulse, prior to the passion, which Chrysippus, Cicero and Seneca took into account in their therapy of the passions. (shrink)

I offer a discussion of the criminological sociology of Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936). While Tönnies is generally well known for his theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, his elaborate contributions to the sociological study of crime have been almost entirely neglected in the history of sociology. Situated within Tönnies’ general theoretical perspective, I present the central themes of Tönnies’ study of crime and discuss its conceptual and methodological characteristics as a distinct approach in criminological sociology. I additionally center on the importance of (...) Tönnies’ criminological work for the reception and status of his sociological theory. I argue that the neglect of Tönnies’ crime studies has led to overlooking Tönnies’ aspiration to integrate sociological theory and empirical inquiry, which has contributed to misconstrue his unique conception of social order. (shrink)

This article examines a collection of singular artifacts, originating in the 1960s and 1970s, which I call "cybertrance" devices. These devices are based on the reappropriation of instruments from the academic world in order to place users in modified states of consciousness, far from the ordinary mode of wakefulness. All of these inventions draw on the heritage of American cybernetics, and re-articulate the man-machine concept central to it: passing from neo-mechanistic theory to experimentations with coupling and prostheses, and from rational (...) analysis to countercultural mysticism.If these cybertrance devices literally dismantle the man-machine, using technology to disorder the senses, in no way do they seek to... (shrink)