Human music and language are two systems of communication and expression that, while historically considered to overlap, have become increasingly divergent in their approach and study. Music and language almost certainly co-evolved and emerged from the same semiotic field, and this relationship as well as co-origin are actively researched and debated. For the sake of evaluating the semiotic content of zoomusicology, we investigate music from a ‘bottom-up’ biosemiotic functionalist account considering iconic, indexical, and symbolic forms of meaning not in a (...) hierarchy but according to their effects on agents. Such an approach avoids overintellectualizing the representational aspects of music, and instead inverts, as it were, the traditional hierarchy of semiotic categories to produce illocutionary effects. Understanding aesthetics and action not as a priori separate but rather fundamentally co-arising elements of the same events. The focus of musicality again returns to interpretation and how semiosis precipitates expression. (shrink)

Peterson et al. (2023) identify important ethical issues that are relevant to psychedelic therapy and research in various clinical populations and contexts. This is certainly the case in palliative...

Current theories suggest that the brain is the sole source of mental illness. However, affective disorders, and major depressive disorder (MDD) in particular, may be better conceptualized as brain-body disorders that involve peripheral systems as well. This perspective emphasizes the embodied, multifaceted physiology of well-being, and suggests that afferent signals from the body may contribute to cognitive and emotional states. In this review, we focus on evidence from preclinical and clinical studies suggesting that afferent thermosensory signals contribute to well-being and (...) depression. Although thermoregulatory systems have traditionally been conceptualized as serving primarily homeostatic functions, increasing evidence suggests neural pathways responsible for regulating body temperature may be linked more closely with emotional states than previously recognized, an affective warmth hypothesis. Human studies indicate that increasing physical warmth activates brain circuits associated with cognitive and affective functions, promotes interpersonal warmth and prosocial behavior, and has antidepressant effects. Consistent with these effects, preclinical studies in rodents demonstrate that physical warmth activates brain serotonergic neurons implicated in antidepressant-like effects. Together, these studies suggest that (1) thermosensory pathways interact with brain systems that control affective function, (2) these pathways are dysregulated in affective disorders, and (3) activating warm thermosensory pathways promotes a sense of well-being and has therapeutic potential in the treatment of affective disorders. (shrink)

Designer Biology: The Ethics of Intensively Engineering Biological and Ecological Systems consists of thirteen chapters that address the ethical issues raised by technological intervention and design across a broad range of biological and ecological systems. Among the technologies addressed are geoengineering, human enhancement, sex selection, genetic modification, and synthetic biology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology by John BehrMatthew Z. ValeJohn the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology by John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), xv + 388 pp.Father Behr's book defies summary. Its ambitions span several fields—patristics, contemporary biblical scholarship, speculative systematics, phenomenology—and Behr has controversial proposals in each. The book is not (expressly) a work of systematic (...) theology, but its speculative élan and its ambition to give a normative account of Christian theology's beating heart is unmistakable. If a vice of the book is vagueness on questions of burning Christological, protological, and eschatological interest, among its virtues is the verve and vividness with which it provokes such questions to begin with. Behr has written, not a book on John, but a Johannine manifesto on theology. [End Page 989]The book is a "symposium" in three parts, each inviting a different kind of reader of John's gospel. The first is predominantly "historical" (the early Fathers of the Johannine school, reconstructed by modern scholarship), the second predominantly "exegetical" (contemporary biblical studies), and the third "philosophical," with a single guest in Michel Henry. The book's heart is an argument about what "incarnation" means. When it comes to the Incarnation, we labor, Behr says, under what Quentin Skinner calls a "mythology of doctrine," the hermeneutical fallacy of projecting onto a tradition's classical writers positions and whole doctrinal categories developed only later (6–8). The mythology of doctrine Behr opposes is, in fact, a mythological notion of the Incarnation as "an episode in the biography of the Word" (a phrase from Rowan Williams), the episode when a "pre-incarnate Word" is born as Jesus (3, and throughout). To break the ice on this mythology, part 1 reconstructs an original milieu for John's Gospel—a school of John the Evangelist, centered upon an original Pascha celebration—in which "becoming flesh," "Word," and "human being" mean something other than the dogmatic meanings we project back onto them. This Johannine school is not the Johannine "community" posited by historical-critical studies, but the school of John's "hearers" that J. B. Lightfoot traced from Polycarp of Smyrna, Ignatius of Antioch, Papias of Hierapolis, and Melito of Sardis down to Irenaeus (30–31). Behr's reconstruction makes the following proposals. Our evangelist is John the Elder, the beloved disciple, not the Synoptics' son of Zebedee. This John was plausibly an eyewitness to the crucifixion—alone among the evangelists. He authored both the Gospel and the Apocalypse bearing his name, according to near unanimous second-century tradition (76). The Apocalypse was possibly written before the Gospel, perhaps before the Temple's destruction. John the Elder originated the yearly Pascha celebration, and it remained peculiar to his school until the second half of the second century. This feast originally celebrated the crucifixion, burial, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost as the single event of the Passion, just as in John's Gospel Jesus's ascension (12:32), glorification (13:31–2), and "handing down the Spirit" (19:30) are identified with the crucifixion. Only later was the Passion's simple white light refracted into the liturgical cycle's rainbow of distinct feasts (91–92, 243).This reconstruction is explicitly speculative. Its purpose is to enliven our imaginations about what the evangelist's vision may possibly be. If the mythological picture of the Incarnation is easily recognized as false, our theological traditions still have not entirely exorcised it from their standard narration. Behr proposes a Johannine narration untroubled by this [End Page 990] mythology. The Incarnation is not a novelty occurring for God at some moment. No previously fleshless divine agent undergoes change to become flesh at some time. The Incarnation must instead be understood "apocalyptically," as the eternal mystery of Jesus Christ being revealed for us in time (256-57). The Incarnation is Jesus's eternal identity as the Word being revealed and wrought in time and pro nobis by the Passion (24, 29, 257, 130). John's Gospel should be read, in John Ashton's words, as "an apocalypse—in reverse, upside down, inside out" (4, 99... (shrink)

This article reviews David Strauss's recent book,The Living Constitution. The thesis of Strauss's book is that constitutional law is a kind of common law, based largely on judicial precedent and commonsense judgments about what works and what is fair. In defending this claim, Strauss argues that central constitutional prohibitions of discrimination and protections of free speech have a common-law basis and that the originalist should consequently reject them. The review disputes this contention. It examines Strauss's account of the common law (...) and argues that it cannot support our First Amendment protections of subversive advocacy, as Strauss says it does. The review then offers an alternative account of the common law based on the “classical” common-law theory associated with Coke and Hale. The latter account does support our protections of subversive advocacy but is much less appealing to those distrustful of ambitious and large-scale judicial action. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of expressivism in metaethics tend to run together two quite different antidescriptivist views, and only one of them is subject to the objection about compositional semantics pressed most recently by Schroeder (following Dreier, Unwinn, Hale, Geach and others). Here I distinguish the two versions of expressivism and then go on to suggest that those sympathetic to the second sort of expressivism might improve their account of normative vocabulary and the way it figures in reasoning by making what (...) may seem like a somewhat surprising comparison between normative vocabulary and logical vocabulary. I argue that this comparison brings into view the initial steps towards a third antidescriptivist view in metaethics, which we may see as a pragmatist improvement on the second version of expressivism. (shrink)

In the wake of colonial fragmentation and genocide, Indigenous ‘Khoisan resurgence’ movements in South Africa have mobilised subversive forms of authenticity, including heteroglossic and inventive translanguaging from fragments of Khoekhoegowab. In our analysis of video ethnographic texts produced in collaboration with the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council (GKC) in Hankey, the birthplace of Sarah Baartman, we explore how memory, language politics, and environmental activism are interwoven in acts of linguistic citizenship that constitute the ‘rememorying’ of a history that has remained persistently obscured. (...) We argue that rememorying advances a politics of reminding which counters the Rainbow Nation’s institutionalised politics of forgetting, as well as anthropological accounts that consider Indigenous activist invocations of history as merely ‘therapeutic’. Through an engagement with the memory activism of the GKC, we identify how reconstructing word-histories, reliving historical traumas, retelling histories of sites of memory, seeing oneself mirrored in one’s ancestors, and the nexus of land, memory, and time form the basis for shared meaning-making, bringing impetus, focus, and intergenerational continuity to struggles for environmental and land justice. (shrink)

Gerald Postema presents the collected writings on legal, political, and moral theory of a key thinker of the 17th century, Sir Matthew Hale. Hale develops a unique and sophisticated account of the nature and foundations of common law, with extended reflections on natural law, moral and legal reasoning, and the legal limits of political authority.

This paper discusses sovereignty and examines in detail Hobbes’s debates with the two leading legal theorists of his day, Coke and Hale, both Lord Chief Justices of the King’s Bench. I argue that Hobbes came to change his mind somewhat about the desirability of divided sovereignty by the time, near the end of his life, that he wrote the Dialogue . But I also argue that Hobbes should have developed more than a very thin conception of the rule of (...) law. Hobbes should have been more open to the ideas that the jurists of his day were developing, especially the idea that the judiciary should have independent status. (shrink)

Recent debates within the autism advocacy community have raised difficult questions about who can credibly act as a representative of a particular population and what responsibilities that...

The correspondence theory of truth is often thought to be supported by the intuition that if a proposition (sentence, belief) is true, then something makes it true. I argue that this appearance is illusory and is sustained only by a conflation of two distinct notions of truthmaking, existential and non-existential. Once the conflation is exposed, I maintain, deflationism is seen to be adequate for accommodating truthmaking intuitions.

Standard accounts of the senses attempt to answer the question how and why we count five senses ; none of the standard accounts is satisfactory. Any adequate account of the senses must explain the significance of the senses, that is, why distinguishing different senses matters. I provide such an explanation, and then use it as the basis for providing an account of the senses and answering the counting question.

This book follows postwar Germany's leading philosopher and social thinker, Jürgen Habermas, through four decades of political and constitutional struggle over the shape of liberal democracy in Germany. Habermas's most influential theories - of the public sphere, communicative action, and modernity - were decisively shaped by major West German political events: the failure to de-Nazify the judiciary, the rise of a powerful Constitutional Court, student rebellions in the late 1960s, the changing fortunes of the Social Democratic Party, NATO's decision to (...) station nuclear weapons, and the unexpected collapse of East Germany. In turn, Habermas's writings on state, law, and constitution played a critical role in reorienting German political thought and culture to a progressive liberal-democratic model. Matthew Specter uniquely illuminates the interrelationship between the thinker and his culture. (shrink)

This paper discusses some serious difficulties for what we shall call the standard account of various kinds of relative necessity, according to which any given kind of relative necessity may be defined by a strict conditional - necessarily, if C then p - where C is a suitable constant proposition, such as a conjunction of physical laws. We argue, with the help of Humberstone, that the standard account has several unpalatable consequences. We argue that Humberstone’s alternative account has certain disadvantages, (...) and offer another - considerably simpler - solution. (shrink)

Getting Emotional -- Constructing Discourse -- Telling and Remembering -- Inviting Emotional Tellings -- Eliciting Feelings -- (re)formulating Emotionality -- Managing Emotionality and Distress -- Being Negative -- Reflecting Back, Moving Forward.

Television medical dramas frequently depict the practice of medicine and bioethical issues in a strikingly realistic but sometimes inaccurate fashion. Because these shows depict medicine so vividly and are so relevant to the career interests of medical and nursing students, they may affect these students' beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions regarding the practice of medicine and bioethical issues. We conducted a web-based survey of medical and nursing students to determine the medical drama viewing habits and impressions of bioethical issues depicted in (...) them. More than 80% of medical and nursing students watch television medical dramas. Students with more clinical experience tended to have impressions that were more negative than those of students without clinical experience. Furthermore, viewing of television medical dramas is a social event and many students discuss the bioethical issues they observe with friends and family. Television medical dramas may stimulate students to think about and discuss bioethical issues. (shrink)

Matthew Tones examines the early ontological development of the tragic disposition in Nietzsche's analysis of the pre-Platonic Greeks and its influence on Nietzsche's quest to discover a future nobility. This book fuses the popular reading of Nietzsche as a naturalist with noble creative impulses to reveal further complexities in his mature work.

We may define words or concepts, and we may also, as Aristotle and others have thought, define the things for which words stand and of which concepts are concepts. Definitions of words or concepts may be explicit or implicit, and may seek to report preexisting synonymies, as Quine put it, but they may instead be wholly or partly stipulative. Definition by abstraction, of which Hume’s principle is a much discussed example, seek to define a term-forming operator, such as the number (...) operator, by fixing the truth-conditions of identity-statements featuring terms formed by means of that operator. Such definitions are a species of implicit definition. They are typically at least partly stipulative. Definitions of things, or real definitions, are, by contrast, typically conceived as true or false statements about the nature or essence of their definienda, and so not stipulative. There thus appears to be an obvious and head-on clash between taking Hume’s principle as an implicit and at least partly stipultative definition of the number operator and taking it as a real definition, stating the nature or essence of cardinal numbers. This paper argues that this apparent tension can be resolved, and that resolving it sheds light on part of the epistemology or essence and necessity, showing how some of our knowledge of essence and necessity can be a priori. (shrink)

It has been argued that nonreductive physicalism’s problems with mental causation disappear if we abandon the intuitive but naïve production-based conception of causation in favor of one based on counterfactual dependence and difference-making. In recent years, this response has been thoroughly developed and defended by James Woodward, who contends that Kim’s causal exclusion argument, widely thought to be the most serious threat to nonreductive mental causation, cannot even be given a coherent formulation within Woodward’s preferred interventionist framework. But Woodward has, (...) even more recently, defended a pair of necessary conditions on mental causation and higher-order causation more generally, and it is here that the interventionist framework proves less friendly to nonreductive mental causation. Functionalism is arguably the most important species of nonreductive physicalism concerning specifically mental properties, but, as I argue, functional properties fail both of Woodward’s tests of causal relevance, one of them in two different ways. The problem, moreover, seems unique to functionalism, for other types of higher-order properties appear to pass Woodward’s tests. If functionalism faces defeat even in such friendly territory, its problems with mental causation are not an artifact of naïve metaphysics. They run deep. (shrink)

How come quantum theory has anything to do with mind? Is your theory refutable? What is the point of all the technical detail? Do you suggest that the operation of the brain involves large scale quantum coherence? Isn't large scale quantum coherence necessary to solve the problem of the unity of consciousness? How does a many-minds interpretation survive Occam's razor? What, briefly, is your current philosophical position? What is your understanding of the relationship between mind and brain for split-brain patients? (...) Do you believe that the mind can survive the death of the brain? No journal reference is given for several of the recent papers on your home page. Where will these papers be printed? How are the “source” and “pdf” versions of the papers on your home page produced and viewed? Why does the page with your photograph behave oddly in some browsers? Where can I find an elementary introduction to the interpretation of quantum theory? Doesn't decoherence theory solve all the problems of the interpretation of quantum theory? How do the ambiguities of decoherence affect the many-worlds interpretation? Could you expand on your answers to the two previous questions? Why isn't the conventional interpretation of quantum theory adequate? What about the Bohm interpretation? What about consistent histories? Does the present many-minds interpretation solve all the problems? (shrink)

Bob Hale; XII*—Grundlagen §64, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 97, Issue 1, 1 June 1997, Pages 243–262, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9264.00015.

Confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States increased exponentially, quickly leading to a pandemic in 2020, which created a serious public-health emergency. During the period in which the COVID-1...

What is a self? What does it mean to have selfhood? What is the relationship between selfhood and identity? These are puzzling questions that philosophers, psychologists, social scientists, and many other researchers often grapple with. -/- Self and Identity is a book that explores and brings together relevant ideas on selfhood and identity, while also helping to clarify some important and long standing scientific and philosophical debates. It will enable readers to understand the difference between selves in humans and other (...) animals, and the different selves that we come to possess from when we are born to when we become old. It also explains how and why the self might break down due to mental illness, thereby providing insight into how we might treat illnesses such as dementia and depression, both of which are conditions that fundamentally affect our selfhood. -/- Taking an important step towards clarifying our understanding of human selfhood and applying it to mental illness, this book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students exploring philosophical questions of selfhood, as well as those examining the connection to clinical disorders. (shrink)

Cappelen and Dever challenge the widely accepted idea that some key aspect of intentional action is essentially indexical. They argue that the classical arguments for this coming from Perry are in fact arguments for a different phenomenon: the opacity of explanatory contexts. I agree with Cappelen and Dever that what Perry says about the ineliminability of indexical terms from explanations of intentional action fails to amount to an argument for this indexicality being essential. But this should not lead us to (...) be sceptics. In this paper, I present a different argument for the essential indexicality of intentional actions. The key premise of this argument is that intentions themselves are essentially indexical. I provide evidence for this premise and defend it against potential criticism. I also show how the essential indexicality of intentions can be used to vindicate Perry's original claims about the essential indexicality of certain beliefs and desires. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Instinct of Nature: Natural Law, Synderesis, and the Moral SenseRobert A. Greene“Instinct is a great matter.”—Sir John FalstaffThis essay traces the evolution of the meaning of the expression instinctus naturae in the discussion of the natural law from Justinian’s Digest through its association with synderesis to Francis Hutcheson’s theory of the moral sense. The introduction of instinctus naturae into Ulpian’s definition of the natural law by Isidore of Seville (...) in the seventh century posed a problem of definition for medieval commentators. Some said that it meant a universal and providential natura naturans; some defined it as the urge to self and species preservation in animals, degenerating in man into sensual and shameful impulses; some advanced the humanistic and paradoxical notion that it referred to a unique exercise of human reason in coming to know the natural law. The contemporaneous revival in the twelfth century of St. Jerome’s puzzling new term “synderesis,” and its gradual definition as the immediate apprehension of the first practical moral principles of the natural law, brought the two terms into proximity and loose association.A half-century later St. Bonaventure made explicit what had remained latent in the thinking of Thomas Aquinas by relocating synderesis in the affective rather than the intellectual part of man’s nature. Accordingly the moral discoveries of synderesis came to be spoken of as not only non-discursive but instinctive in nature—apprehensions for which no reason could be given, apprehensions somehow rooted in affective human experience. During the bilingual early modern period an increasingly secularized, internalized, and reified instinctus [End Page 173] naturae, together with its abbreviated vernacular cognate, “instinct,” came to serve as a substitute and synonym for the obsolescent synderesis. Edward Herbert’s attention to instinctus naturae in his De Veritate (1624), Sir Matthew Hale’s speculations about the place of rational instinct in the natural law, and Francis Hutcheson’s theory of a moral sense all exemplify this semantic legacy.The first entry in Justinian’s Digest has had a disproportionate influence on later speculation about the natural law. It begins a chapter that gives pride of place to general definitions of justice, law, jus naturale and jus gentium, and it is drawn from the writings of the Roman jurisconsult Domitius Ulpianus (d. 223), whose work constitutes forty percent of the Digest. Ulpian defines the natural law, with insistent repetition, as that which nature has taught to, or is common to, all animals:Jus naturale is that which nature has taught to all animals; for it is not a law specific to mankind but is common to all animals—land animals, sea animals, and the birds as well. Out of this comes the union of man and woman [male and female] which we call marriage, and the procreation of children, and their rearing. So we can see that the other animals, wild beasts included, are rightly understood to be acquainted with this law. Jus gentium, the law of the nations, is that which all human peoples observe. That it is not coextensive with natural law can be grasped easily, since this latter is common to all animals whereas jus gentium is common only to human beings among themselves. 1Justinian’s compilers gave Ulpian’s definition striking prominence at the beginning of the Digest and then in the same short chapter quoted the incompatible and more traditional definitions of his contemporaries Gaius and Paulus. They confined the operation of the natural law to mankind and spoke of reason as its source. 2 The compilers had been charged to eliminate just such conflicts; yet here at the very outset they set a conundrum that perplexed commentators [End Page 174] and invited explanation from Isidore of Seville to Hugo Grotius. Their selection of quotations suggests that as lawyers they regarded such general definitions as “for legal purposes no more than ornament to discussion.” 3 For those of a more speculative bent, however, the dilemmas could not have been more fundamental. How was the natural law to be defined in relation to those appetitive and self-preservative urges that man seemed to share with animals? Or did the term law apply only... (shrink)

An early objection to Simon Blackburn’s first attempts to breathe new life into expressivism—by solving the Frege-Geach problem—was that whilst viewing compound sentences featuring moral components as expressive of attitudes towards combinations of attitudes might enable one to make out that a thinker who, to take the usual example, asserts the premisses but will not accept the conclusion of a moral modus ponens is at fault because they are involved in a “clash of attitudes”, this does no justice to the (...) data of the problem, since the failing here is logical, not just moral or more generally practical. Blackburn claims to have an effective answer to this objection—a way to see how, as he now puts it, expressivism can after all “deliver the mighty ‘musts’ of logic”. I remain unconvinced. (shrink)

Ideal theory has been extensively contested on the grounds that it is ideology: namely, that it performs the distorting social role of reifying and enforcing unjust features of the status quo. Indeed, a growing number of philosophers adopt a nonideal methodology—which dispenses with ideal theory—because of this ideology critique. I argue, however, that such philosophers are confused about the ultimate dialectical upshot of this critique even if it succeeds. I do so by constructing a parallel—equally plausible—ideology critique of nonideal methodology; (...) specifically, I argue that capitalist and managerial social attitudes have commodified people’s conception of justice and induced suspicion of ideal theory, which is not construed as having direct practical value. Consequently, nonideal methodology performs the distorting role of reifying and enforcing the hegemonies of capitalism and managerialism. Ideal theory and nonideal methodology are, therefore, in symmetrically bad positions. (shrink)

There are three broad ethical issues related to handling public health emergencies. They are the three R's - rationing, restrictions and responsibilities. Recently, a severe shortage of annual influenza vaccine in the US, combined with the threat of pandemic flu, has provided an opportunity for policy makers to think about rationing in very concrete terms. Some lessons from annual flu vaccination likely will apply to pandemic vaccine distribution, but many preparatory decisions must be based on very rough estimates. What ethical (...) principles should guide rationing decisions, what data should inform these decisions, how to revise decisions as new data emerge, and how to implement rationing decisions on the ground are all important considerations. In addition, ethicists might be able to help policy makers think through the importance of international cooperation in surmounting global rationing dilemmas and to accept the inevitable responsibilities of government in making and implementing rationing decisions. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between disability and quality of life and some of its implications for bioethics and healthcare. It focuses on the neglected perfectionist approach that ties well-being to the flourishing of human nature, which provides the strongest support for the common view of disability as a harm. After critiquing the traditional Aristotelian version of perfectionism, which excludes the disabled from flourishing by prioritizing rationalistic goods, I defend a new version that prioritizes the social capacities of human nature (...) and the goods of personal relationship. This relationship-centered perfectionism is able to accommodate and explain disabled thriving. I also show how these issues have important implications for specific bioethical debates and clinical practices, using a cluster of issues related to Down syndrome as timely illustrations. My goal is to sketch a perfectionist theory that gives a more plausible account of the relationship between disability and well-being, and that provides better practical guidance in cases involving judgments about the quality of disabled lives. (shrink)

Au cours des deux dernières décennies, les études sur Stanley Milgram ont connu une véritable renaissance interdisciplinaire, qui a conduit à modifier profondément le débat sur ces expériences de psychologie sociale parmi les plus controversées du xxe siècle. L’intérêt considérable pour les conditions expérimentales de ses travaux constitue une nouvelle perspective, qui a des implications pour la philosophie de la psychologie sociale. L’ontologie sociale (ou ontologie historique), de différents styles, peut mettre en lumière les caractéristiques contingentes de l’« obéissance à (...) l’autorité» et d’autres expériences classiques de la psychologie sociale nord-américaine. Dans ce numéro de Philosophia Scientiæ consacré à Milgram, ma contribution consiste à montrer comment une approche empirique de l’interaction sociale peut aider à éclairer – « à partir de la base» -– les relations de pouvoir dans le laboratoire de Milgram, ainsi que les résistances à la poursuite de l’expérience. Tout d’abord, je présente le pouvoir comme une caractéristique multidimensionnelle de la sociabilité humaine, en soulignant son aspect performatif. Dans le laboratoire, les sujets jouant le rôle des Enseignants sont contraints à exercer leur pouvoir de différentes façons très contrastées, soit en exerçant ce pouvoir sur l’Apprenant (en se conformant à la volonté de l’expérimentateur), soit contre l’expérimentateur (c’est-à-dire en lui résistant). Deuxièmement, je propose que, comme la moralité, le pouvoir au sens performatif peut être compris à l’aide de la distinction entre premier-plan et arrière-plan (dans le vocabulaire Gestaltiste, la distinction figure/fond), les deux aspects du phénomène étant empiriquement fondés, et orientés vers les pratiques concrètes des agents en interaction. Troisièmement, je précise la notion de pouvoir performatif, en relation avec la pratique de ceux qui, parmi les sujets en position d’Enseignants, s’opposent à la continuation de l’expérience. En conclusion, l’article illustre la valeur de l’analyse éthnométhodologique conversationnelle, en tant que style d’ontologie sociale adapté tant à l’étude des relations de pouvoirs, à celle des prétentions à la connaissance en psychologie sociale, qu’à la reconstruction des présupposés de la psychologie sociale nord-américaine classique. (shrink)