Nucléaire, clonage, OGM, sang contaminé : sans cesse invoqué en matiére d'environnement, de santé, d'alimentation, le principe de précaution est l'objet de multiples controverses. De quoi s'agit-il? Trop de précaution ne risque-t-il pas de bloquer des avancées scientifiques ou techniques cruciales pour l'avenir? Une clarification était nécessaire. Car l'important aujourd'hui est de donner à ce principe un contenu positif, c'est-à -dire une définition assortie d'un mode d'emploi qui puisse être compris de tous et servir à tous. Philippe Kourilsky (...) est directeur général de l'Institut Pasteur, professeur au Collége de France et membre de l'Académie des sciences. Il est notamment l'auteur des Artisans de l'hérédité et de La Science en partage. (shrink)

Kaplan claims in Demonstratives that no operator may manipulate the context of evaluation of natural language indexicals. We show that this is not so. In fact, attitude reports always manipulate a context parameter (or, rather, a context variable). This is shown by (i) the existence of De Se readings of attitude reports in English (which Kaplan has no account for), and (ii) the existence of a variety of indexicals across languages whose point of evaluation can be shifted, but only in (...) attitude reports. We develop an alternative account within an extensional framework with overt quantification over times, worlds and contexts. Various typological facts are discussed, esp. the distinction between English, Amharic and Ewe pronouns, and that between English and Russian tenses. (shrink)

Potts (2005, 2007) has argued that expressives such as honky must be analyzed using an entirely new dimension of meaning. We explore a more conservative theory in which expressives are presuppositional expressions [Macià 2002] that are indexical and attitudinal (and sometimes shiftable): they predicate something of the mental state of the agent of the context (and this need not always be the agent of the actual context). Following Stalnaker’s recent work on informative presuppositions (2002), we argue that the presuppositions triggered (...) by expressives are automatically satisfied (= ’self-fulfilling’), hence the impression that they are not standard presupposition triggers. (shrink)

Innovating new experiences is an innovation strategy that increases product differentiation and the perceived value of offers for future autonomous cars. Young Chinese customers are a relevant target group of lead users to co-create those experiences. We address the co-creation of memorable and engaging experiences with targeted potential users and the building of the meaning of experiential imaginary that results from innovations (based on digital media) echoing the need for sensory atmospherics while strolling in the city. We aim at understanding (...) how customers can co-create meaningful experiences. We analyze the narrative structures of the experiential imaginaries, considering the narratives as a major component of ambiance experiences and imaginary. With an empirical approach that associates projective techniques to semiotic analysis of the corresponding narratives, we describe the structural system of the experiential imaginary of young Chinese customers when imagining driving in the city in tomorrow’s cars. Semiotics offers a novel contribution to innovation marketing and idea generation of experiential innovations. This theoretical stance valorizes the outside-in paradigm of future lead-users as co-creators of innovative experiences, whose imaginary narratives are raw materials for creativity. This approach is an alternative to brainstorming and its limits for creating disruptive innovations. (shrink)

A full understanding of emotions and emotion characteristics can only be reached when their dynamic nature is taken into account. As such, a primary objective of the present study is to describe and account for variability in temporal profiles of experienced emotional intensity. Participants were asked to make detailed drawings of intensity profiles of recently experienced episodes of anger, sadness, joy and affection. Functional data analysis revealed three features that together accounted for 84% of the total variability: (i) steepness at (...) onset; (ii) skewness; and (iii) the number of peaks. Emotions differed with regard to the first two features, with the rise at onset being steeper for sadness and joy and affection being the most negatively skewed emotion under study. Individual differences regarding each of the three features were found, however, they did not strongly generalise across emotions. (shrink)

Following a long-standing philosophical tradition, impartiality is a distinctive and determining feature of moral judgments, especially in matters of distributive justice. This broad ethical tradition was revived in welfare economics by Vickrey, and above all, Harsanyi, under the form of the so-called Impartial Observer Theorem. The paper offers an analytical reconstruction of this argument and a step-wise philosophical critique of its premisses. It eventually provides a new formal version of the theorem based on subjective probability.

We define and study the notion of an indexed frame. This is a bi-dimensional structure consisting of a Cartesian product equipped with relations which only relate pairs if they coincide in one of their components. We show that these structures are quite ubiquitous in modal logic, showing up in the literature as products of Kripke frames, subset spaces, or temporal frames for STIT logics. We show that indexed frames are completely characterised by their ‘orthogonal’ relations, and we provide their sound (...) and complete logic. Using these ‘orthogonality’ results, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for an arbitrary Kripke frame to be isomorphic to certain well-known bi-dimensional structures. (shrink)

Following a previous elaboration of the concept of weak individuality and some examples of its instances in ecology and biology, the article focuses on general features of the concept, arguing that in any ontological field individuals are understood on the basis of our knowledge of interactions, through the application of these general formulas for extracting individuals from interactions. Then, the specificities of the individuality in the sense of this weak concept are examined in ecology; I conclude by addressing the differences (...) between ecosystems and organisms as they appear in the viewpoint of such concept. (shrink)

In several sign languages, plurals can be realized with unpunctuated or punctuated repetitions of a noun, with different semantic implications; similar repetition-based plurals have been described in some homesigns and silent gestures. Unpunctuated repetitions often get approximate ‘at least’ readings while punctuated repetitions typically correspond to ‘exactly’ readings. The prevalence of these mechanisms could be thought to be a case in which Universal Grammar does not just specify the abstract properties of grammatical elements, but also their phonological realization, at least (...) in the visual modality. We explore an alternative in which punctuated and unpunctuated repetitions arise from general properties of iconic representations. On an empirical level, we argue that in ASL, punctuated and unpunctuated repetitions are unlikely to be an exclusively grammatical mechanism, as they can be found with purely iconic representations. On a theoretical level, we argue for a modular account with three components. First, repetition-based plurals can create a simplified pictorial representation. Second, unpunctuated repetitions give rise to pictorial vagueness, resolved by way of quantification over precisifications. Third, a pragmatic process involving strategic reasoning maps these vague representations onto a set of candidate linguistic meanings, including some ‘at least’ plural readings that are best expressed by unpunctuated repetitions. (shrink)

The relations between rationality and optimization have been widely discussed in the wake of Herbert Simon's work, with the common conclusion that the rationality concept does not imply the optimization principle. The paper is partly concerned with adding evidence for this view, but its main, more challenging objective is to question the converse implication from optimization to rationality, which is accepted even by bounded rationality theorists. We discuss three topics in succession: (1) rationally defensible cyclical choices, (2) the revealed preference (...) theory of optimization, and (3) the infinite regress of optimization. We conclude that (1) and (2) provide evidence only for the weak thesis that rationality does not imply optimization. But (3) is seen to deliver a significant argument for the strong thesis that optimization does not imply rationality. (shrink)

Long before his last book, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, was published in early 1971, Richard M. Titmuss , a professor of social administration at the London School of Economics, had been a major figure in the debates over the welfare state. The Gift Relationship was the culmination of an eventful relationship with the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank that advocated the extension of rational pricing to social services. By arguing that the British system (...) of blood procurement and distribution, based on free giving within the National Health Service, was more efficient than the partly commercialized American system, Titmuss intended to signal the dangers of the increasing commercialization of society. What made for the impact of his book, however, was not merely its argument that transfusion‐transmitted infections were much more common with paid than with voluntary donors, but also its reflections on what it is that holds a society together. And here Titmuss argued that a “socialist” social policy, by encouraging the sense of community, played a central role. The eclecticism of Titmuss’s work, together with its strong ethical and political flavor, makes it a rich and original account of the “social” at a time when heated debates over social policy, both in Britain and in the United States, raised the question of the division of labor among the social sciences. (shrink)

In the ordinary modal language, KD is the modal logic determined by the class of all serial frames. In this paper, we demonstrate that KD is nullary.

The problem of unification in a normal modal logic $L$ can be defined as follows: given a formula $\varphi$, determine whether there exists a substitution $\sigma$ such that $\sigma $ is in $L$. In this paper, we prove that for several non-symmetric non-transitive modal logics, there exists unifiable formulas that possess no minimal complete set of unifiers.

Kripke’s theory of truth succeeded in providing a trivalent semantics for a language that contains its own truth predicate and means of self-reference; but it did so by radically restricting the expressive power of the logic. In Kripke’s analysis, the Liar (e.g. This very sentence is not true) receives the indeterminate truth value; but the logic cannot express the fact that the Liar is something other than true: in order to do so, a weak negation not* would be needed, but (...) it would also make the logic inconsistent (because the ‘Super Liar’ This very sentence is not* true could not be assigned any truth value). Taking a hint from the quantificational form of the problematic sentences (… is something other than true), we define a hierarchy of negations which each quantifies over a domain of truth values, assimilated to ordinals. The resulting logic has as many negations and truth values as there are ordinals. Unlike Kripke’s logic, it enjoys a form of expressive completeness. And although the logic is not monotonic, we show that under broad conditions we can construct a variety of fixed points; one of them emulates Kripke’s ‘least fixed point’, while another one assigns a different truth value to each Super Liar. (shrink)

The article discusses Friedman's classic claim that economics can be based on irrealistic assumptions. It exploits Samuelson's distinction between two "F-twists" (that is, "it is an advantage for an economic theory to use irrealistic assumptions" vs "the more irrealistic the assumptions, the better the economic theory"), as well as Nagel's distinction between three philosophy-of-science construals of the basic claim. On examination, only one of Nagel's construals seems promising enough. It involves the neo-positivistic distinction between theoretical and non-theoretical ("observable") terms; so (...) Friedman would in some sense argue for the major role of theoretical terms in economics. The paper uses a model-theoretic apparatus to refine the selected construal and check whether it can be made to support the claim. This inquiry leads to essentially negative results for both F-twists, and the final conclusion is that they are left unsupported. (shrink)

There are two main approaches to the problem of donkey anaphora (e.g. If John owns a donkey , he beats it ). Proponents of dynamic approaches take the pronoun to be a logical variable, but they revise the semantics of quantifiers so as to allow them to bind variables that are not within their syntactic scope. Older dynamic approaches took this measure to apply solely to existential quantifiers; recent dynamic approaches have extended it to all quantifiers. By contrast, proponents of (...) E-type analyses take the pronoun to have the semantics of a definite description (with it ≈ the donkey, or the donkey that John owns ). While competing accounts make very different claims about the patterns of coindexation that are found in the syntax, these are not morphologically realized in spoken languages. But they are in sign language, namely through locus assignment and pointing. We make two main claims on the basis of ASL and LSF data. First, sign language data favor dynamic over E-type theories: in those cases in which the two approaches make conflicting predictions about possible patterns of coindexation, dynamic analyses are at an advantage. Second, among dynamic theories, sign language data favor recent ones because the very same formal mechanism is used irrespective of the indefinite or non-indefinite nature of the antecedent. Going beyond this debate, we argue that dynamic theories should allow pronouns to be bound across negative expressions, as long as the pronoun is presupposed to have a non-empty denotation. Finally, an appendix displays and explains subtle differences between overt sign language pronouns and all other pronouns in examples involving ‘disjunctive antecedents’, and suggests that counterparts of sign language loci might be found in spoken language. (shrink)

The comprehension of living organisms in all their complexity poses a major challenge to the biological sciences. Recently, systems biology has been proposed as a new candidate in the development of such a comprehension. The main objective of this paper is to address what systems biology is and how it is practised. To this end, the basic tools of a systems biological approach are explored and illustrated. In addition, it is questioned whether systems biology ‘revolutionizes’ molecular biology and ‘transcends’ its (...) assumed reductionism. The strength of this claim appears to depend on how molecular and systems biology are characterised and on how reductionism is interpreted. Doing credit to molecular biology and to methodological reductionism, it is argued that the distinction between molecular and systems biology is gradual rather than sharp. As such, the classical challenge in biology to manage, interpret and integrate biological data into functional wholes is further intensified by systems biology’s use of modelling and bioinformatics, and by its scale enlargement. (shrink)

Because of the extent and evidence of political participation of intellectuals in France of the thirties, the latter may be considered as full actors of the political life and debates of these years. The historical circumstances are however not sufficient to explain the political role they then assumed. More precisely, the article is intended to show that in order to explain the peculiarity of the phenomenon, one must necessarily turn to the cultural data, i.e. the set of values and representations (...) that found the social recognition of intellectuals in France and that account for the believe according to which those who, because of their intellectual activity, arenotorious, have an authorized opinion on political matters. In this perspective, one may conclude that the commitment of intellectuals in France of the thirties may not be reduced to a political fact. It also constitutes a cultural fact, resulting from the combination of a value crisis and the system of political attitudes attached, in this country, to the status of intellectuals. (shrink)

Deux inscriptions découvertes à une centaine de mètres de la Synagogue font connaître des oί εν Δήλω Ίσραηλΐται οί άπαρχόμενοι είς ιερόν άγιον Άργαριζείν. Il s'agit de Samaritains comme l'indiquent la déclaration d'appartenance au Garizim et le nom d'Israëlites. Ces inscriptions ont la double utilité de révéler une nouvelle communauté étrangère à Délos et d'enrichir le dossier, encore très maigre, de la diaspora samaritaine. La date des inscriptions, fondée sur la seule paléographie, reste imprécise : la plus ancienne doit remonter (...) à la première moitié du IIe siècle ; la plus récente peut être postérieure à la destruction Temple du Garizim en 129 av. J.-C. Les « Israélites de Délos » possédaient leur local propre à 100 m au Nord de la Synagogue, nouveau qui invite à reconsidérer l'implantation hébraïque à Délos. (shrink)

Since its origin in the early 20th century, the modern synthesis theory of evolution has grown to represent the orthodox view on the process of organic evolution. It is a powerful and successful theory. Its defining features include the prominence it accords to genes in the explanation of development and inheritance, and the role of natural selection as the cause of adaptation. Since the advent of the 21st century, however, the modern synthesis has been subject to repeated and sustained challenges. (...) In the last two decades, evolutionary biology has witnessed unprecedented growth in the understanding of those processes that underwrite the development of organisms and the inheritance of characters. The empirical advances usher in challenges to the conceptual foundations of evolutionary theory. Many current commentators charge that the new biology of the 21st century calls for a revision, extension, or wholesale rejection of the modern synthesis theory of evolution. Defenders of the modern synthesis maintain that the theory can accommodate the exciting new advances in biology, without forfeiting its central precepts. The original essays collected in this volume—by evolutionary biologists, philosophers of science, and historians of biology—survey and assess the various challenges to the modern synthesis arising from the new biology of the 21st century. Taken together, the essays cover a spectrum of views, from those that contend that the modern synthesis can rise to the challenges of the new biology, with little or no revision required, to those that call for the abandonment of the modern synthesis. (shrink)

This book addresses several key issues in the biological study of death with the intent of capturing their genealogy, the assumptions and presuppositions they make, and the way that they open specific new research avenues. The book is divided into two sections: the first considers physiology and the second evolutionary biology. Huneman explains that biologists in the late 1950s put forth a research framework that evolutionarily accounts for death in terms of either an effect of the weakness of natural selection (...) or a by-product of natural selection for early reproduction. He illustrates how the biology of death is a central field and that studying it provides insight into the way that the epistemic structure of this knowledge has been constituted, persists until now, and may conflict with some traditional philosophical ideas. (shrink)

Farabi et l'école d'Alexandrie, est la première étude consacrée à l'ensemble des thèmes de l'œuvre de celui qui fut l'un des plus grands philosophes arabes.

Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgements -- PART I: WHAT HAPPENED? -- Inheriting from Seattle -- What Are We Dealing With? -- Daring to be Pragmatic -- Infernal Alternatives -- Minions -- PART II: LEARNING TO PROTECT ONESELF -- Do You Believe in Sorcery? -- Leaving Safe Ground -- Marx Again... -- To Believe in Progress No Longer? -- Learning Fright -- PART III: HOW TO GET A HOLD? -- Thanks to Seattle? -- The Trajectory of an Apprenticeship -- Fostering (...) New Connections -- Sorry, but we have to -- Reactivating History -- PART IV: NEEDING PEOPLE TO THINK -- A Cry -- Interstices -- Ecosophy -- Political Creation -- Empowerment -- Reclaim -- Above All, Not to Conclude -- Index. (shrink)

Van Heijenoort's main contribution to history and philosophy of modern logic was his distinction between two basic views of logic, first, the absolutist, or universalist, view of the founding fathers, Frege, Peano, and Russell, which dominated the first, classical period of history of modern logic, and, second, the relativist, or model-theoretic, view, inherited from Boole, Schröder, and Löwenheim, which has dominated the second, contemporary period of that history. In my paper, I present the man Jean van Heijenoort (Sect. 1); then (...) I describe his way of arguing for the second view (Sect. 2); and finally I come down in favor of the first view (Sect. 3). There, I specify the version of universalism for which I am prepared to argue (Sect. 3, introduction). Choosing ZFC to play the part of universal, logical (in a nowadays forgotten sense) system, I show, through an example, how the usual model theory can be naturally given its proper place, from the universalist point of view, in the logical framework of ZFC; I outline another, not rival but complementary, semantics for admissible extensions of ZFC in the very same logical framework; I propose a way to get universalism out of the predicaments in which universalists themselves believed it to be (Sect. 3.1). Thus, if universalists of the classical period did not, in fact, construct these semantics, it was not that their universalism forbade them, in principle, to do so. The historical defeat of universalism was not technical in character. Neither was it philosophical. Indeed, it was hardly more than the victory of technicism over the very possibility of a philosophical dispute (Sect. 3.2). (shrink)

Ecology in principle is tied to evolution, since communities and ecosystems result from evolution and ecological conditions determine fitness values. Yet the two disciplines of evolution and ecology were not unified in the twentieth-century. The architects of the Modern Synthesis, and especially Julian Huxley, constantly pushed for such integration, but the major ideas of the Synthesis—namely, the privileged role of selection and the key role of gene frequencies in evolution—did not directly or immediately translate into ecological science. In this paper (...) I consider five stages through which the Synthesis was integrated into ecology and distinguish between various ways in which a possible integration was gained. I start with Elton’s animal ecology, then consider successively Ford’s ecological genetics in the 1940s, the major textbook Principles of animal ecology edited by Allee et al., and the debates over the role of competition in population regulation in the 1950s, ending with Hutchinson’s niche concept and McArthur and Wilson’s Principles of Island Biogeography viewed as a formal transposition of Modern Synthesis explanatory schemes. I will emphasize the key role of founders of the Synthesis at each stage of this very nonlinear history. (shrink)

À la pensée de l'infini, il nous vient une idée de Dieu; c'est une élaboration de notre entendement fini, imparfait. Nous avons appris, par ceux qui nous ont précédés, combien profonde et difficile est cette idée. Toute notre civilisation s'est édifiée sur le fondement que nous nommons judéo-chrétien, mais hellène aussi, quoiqu'en ce temps qui est nôtre nous en sommes venus à rejeter cette expérience. D'ailleurs, le triomphe de la civilisation marchande a recouvert d'un manteau d'oubli une longue accoutumance, au (...) point qu'une pensée de l'absolue désespérance a gagné nos esprits, résolus à oublier le divin. C'est précisément ce que nous ne pouvons, parce qu'il est en nous une obligation d'éprouver, en dépit de notre imperfection et à cause d'elle, ce qui nous appelle vers l'infini, présent en l'âme et notre boussole en ce monde. Le présent écrit n'est pas un traité; tout au plus une patiente exploration."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)