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)

Philosopher, literary critic, translator (of Nietzsche and Benjamin), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading intellectual figures in France. This volume of six essays deals with the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, particularly the role of mimesis in a metaphysics of representation, and is introduced by Jacques Derrida.

In dynamic theories of presupposition, a trigger pp′ with presupposition p and at-issue component p′ comes with a requirement that p should be entailed by the local context of pp′. We argue that some co-speech gestures should be analyzed within a presuppositional framework, but with a twist: an expression p co-occurring with a co-speech gesture G with content g comes with the requirement that the local context of p should guarantee that p entails g; we call such assertion-dependent presuppositions ‘cosuppositions’. (...) We show that this analysis can be combined with earlier theories of local contexts to account for complex patterns of gesture projection in quantified and in attitudinal contexts, and we compare our account to two potential alternatives: one based on supervaluations, and one, due to Cornelia Ebert, that treats co-speech gestures as supplements. We argue that the latter is correct, but for ‘post-speech’ gestures, rather than for co-speech gestures. (shrink)

Memories, sensory experiences, expectations and intentions, as well thoughts, fears, and hopes: all share a fundamental trait, the fact that our conscious psychological states take place in time, and often are about time in some way or other. Temporality is an inescapable feature of the mind which has preoccupied philosophers (and psychologists) in diverse traditions such as Locke, Hume, Reid, Kant, Helmholtz, James, Husserl, Broad, and Bergson. The Temporal Mind: A Philosophical Introduction is the first book to offer a detailed (...) critical survey of recent work on the perception of time and the temporal features of the mind. Philippe Chuard introduces some of the central topics in contemporary discussions of the temporal mind and the perception of time: how psychological states occur in time and convey temporal information the stream of consciousness, duration, and how short conscious experiences may be the continuity and unity of conscious experience how sensory perception in particular can represent the timing of perceived events the debate between extensionalism, retentionalism, and the snapshot conception of temporal experiences temporal illusions (such as the flash-lag effect) and what they reveal about temporal representation temporality and the role of explanations in neuroscience. Including additional features such as suggested further readings sections and a glossary, The Temporal Mind is an ideal starting point for any student in philosophy of mind and perception, as well as for those in related fields such as psychology and cognitive science. (shrink)

This article examines what might constitute the first manifestation of consciousness in the life of an individual, focusing on the subjective starting state of newborns. It presents evidence showing that we are born with some minimal self-awareness, a kind of awareness that might even be present in foetuses depending on the criteria used. It investigates the mechanisms that might account for how self-awareness quickly evolves from being minimal and phenomenal in the context of sensation, perception, and action and discusses the (...) innate propensity of newborns to detect sameness in the experience of things that surround them. It identifies two putative mechanisms that would support an innate propensity to detect sameness: synesthesia and the vicariousness of experience. (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 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)

Predictive processing is an influential theoretical framework for understanding human and animal cognition. In the context of predictive processing, learning is often reduced to optimizing the parameters of a generative model with a predefined structure. This is known as Bayesian parameter learning. However, to provide a comprehensive account of learning, one must also explain how the brain learns the structure of its generative model. This second kind of learning is known as structure learning. Structure learning would involve true structural changes (...) in generative models. The purpose of the current paper is to describe the processes involved upstream of these structural changes. To do this, we first highlight the remarkable compatibility between predictive processing and the processing fluency theory. More precisely, we argue that predictive processing is able to account for all the main theoretical constructs associated with the notion of processing fluency (i.e., the fluency heuristic, naïve theory, the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis, absolute fluency, expected fluency, and relative fluency). We then use this predictive processing account of processing fluency to show how the brain could infer whether it needs a structural change for learning the causal regularities at play in the environment. Finally, we speculate on how this inference might indirectly trigger structural changes when necessary. (shrink)

Biological individuals are usually defined by evolutionists through a reference to natural selection. This article looks for a concept of individuality that would hold at the same time for organisms and for communities or ecosystems, the latter being unaffected by natural selection. In the wake of Simon’s notion of “quasi-independence,” I elaborate a concept of “weak individuality” defined by probabilistic connections between sub-entities, read off our knowledge of their interactions. This formal scheme of connections allows one to infer what are (...) the individuals in the domain addressed by the theory of the interactions. The article argues that if ecosystems do not have strong individuality, they still possess a weak individuality, ecological theories providing the values of the variables in the formula for individuality. (shrink)

We propose two alternatives to Xu’s axiomatization of Chellas’s STIT. The first one simplifies its presentation, and also provides an alternative axiomatization of the deliberative STIT. The second one starts from the idea that the historic necessity operator can be defined as an abbreviation of operators of agency, and can thus be eliminated from the logic of Chellas’s STIT. The second axiomatization also allows us to establish that the problem of deciding the satisfiability of a STIT formula without temporal operators (...) is NP-complete in the single-agent case, and is NEXPTIME-complete in the multiagent case, both for the deliberative and Chellas’s STIT. (shrink)

Temporally extended experiences, experiential holists have it, are not reducible to successions of their temporal parts because some whole experiences determine their parts (in some way). This paper suggests, first, that some forms of experiential holism are in fact consistent with the rival atomist view (that experiences are successions of their parts) and, second, that the main reasons advanced for experiential holism are compatible with atomism too. The paper then looks at how holistic determination of its parts by a whole (...) experience might take place in time, arguing that it is either inconsistent or undermines widespread assumptions regarding the mechanisms underlying experiences. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has repeatedly been described as an “essentially contested concept,” which means that its signification is subject to continuous struggle. We argue that the “CSR institution” (CSRI; i.e., the set of standards and rules regulating corporate conduct under the banner of CSR) is legitimized by narratives which “decontest” the underlying concept of CSR in a manner that safeguards the CSRI from calls for alternative institutional arrangements. Examining several such narratives from a structuralist perspective, we find them to (...) be permeated with six recurrent ambiguities that we show to be reflective of three deep-set taboos: the taboo of the noncongruency between corporate profit objectives and societal needs, the taboo of multinational firms’ continued contribution to the emergence of global socioenvironmental issues, and the taboo of the CSRI’s moderate results in solving these problems. We contend that the perpetuation of these taboos contributes to inhibiting substantial change in the way of doing business, and we sketch out possibilities for initiating a “recontestation” of CSR’s meaning. (shrink)

An introduction to semantics for the general reader. How things mean, from animal communication to music.

This article debunks Bruno Latour’s seemingly pro-scientific and well-intentioned posture. I briefly summarize Latour’s constructivist, relativist, hybridist, and mystic philosophy, insisting on his radicalization in his last two books. I show that Latour’s conception is akin to “pseudo-profound bullshit”, inasmuch as he tries to hide his mysticism behind the invocation of scientific facts. I then concentrate on Latour’s politicization of climate science, showing that it is: self-contradictory from an epistemological point of view, since it presupposes scientifically established facts while at (...) the same time undermining their objectivity; counterproductive, and even dangerous, from the political point of view, since it recommends a full politicization of climate science and ignores its harmful effects. I conclude by advocating a distinction between science and politics, and by showing that Latour’s philosophy fosters our current post-truth predicament. (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.

Book review of Cybernetics and the Origin of Information by Raymond Ruyer, Translated by Amélie Berger-Soraruff, Andrew Iliadis, Daniel W. Smith, and Ashley Woodward.

This anthology of essays presents a sample of studies from recent philosophy of medicine addressing issues which attempt to answer very general (interdependent) questions: (a) what is a disease and what is health? (b) How do we (causally) explain diseases? (c) And how do we distinguish diseases, id est define classes of diseases and recognize that an instance X of disease belongs to a given class B? (d) How do we assess and choose cure/ therapy? The book is divided into (...) three sections: classification, disease, and evidence. In general, attention is focused on statistics in medicine and epidemiology, issues in psychiatry, and connecting medicine with evolutionary biology and genetics. Many authors position the theories that they address within their historical contexts. The nature of health and disease will be addressed in several essays that also touch upon very general questions about the definition of medicine and its status. Several chapters scrutinize classification because of its centrality within philosophical problems raised by medicine and its core position in the philosophical questioning of psychiatry. Specificities of medical explanation have recently come under a new light, particularly because of the rise of statistical methods, and several chapters investigate these methods in specific contexts such as epidemiology or meta-analysis of random testing. Taken together this collection addresses the question of how we gather, use and assess evidence for various medical theories. The rich assortment of disciplines featured also includes epidemiology, parasitology, and public health, while technical aspects such as the application of game theory to medical research and the misuse of the DSM in forensic psychiatry are also given an airing. The book addresses more than the construction of medical knowledge, however, adding cogent appraisal of the processes of decision making in medicine and the protocols used to justify therapeutic choices. (shrink)

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.

I investigate the relationship between adaptation, as defined in evolutionary theory through natural selection, and the concept of emergence. I argue that there is an essential correlation between the former, and “emergence” defined in the field of algorithmic simulations. I first show that the computational concept of emergence (in terms of incompressible simulation) can be correlated with a causal criterion of emergence (in terms of the specificity of the explanation of global patterns). On this ground, I argue that emergence in (...) general involves some sort of selective processes. Finally, I show that a second criterion, concerning novel explanatory regularities following the emergence of a pattern, captures the robustness of emergence displayed by some cases of emergence (according to the first criterion). Emergent processes fulfilling both criteria are therefore exemplified in evolutionary biology by some so-called “innovations”, and mostly by the new units of fitness or new kinds of adaptations (like sexual reproduction, multicellular organisms, cells, societies) sometimes called “major transitions in evolution”, that recent research programs (Maynard-Smith and Szathmary 1995 ; Michod 1999 ) aims at explaining. (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)

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)

This book examines education and the aim of life through the ages; how the conception of progress is the primary driving force in the modern world; and how this limited understanding of progress has failed to satisfy the deepest aspirations of humanity, bringing modern civilisation to its present crisis and highlighting the limitations of today's education to meet this crisis. The author presents the free progress system at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education and explains how the views of (...) Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on integral education can prepare the children of today to consciously and luminously participate in the evolutionary destiny of the future. (shrink)

Quelles sont les capacités et valeurs qui peuvent animer des académiques en ces temps de changement où nous vivons?? À cette question, généralement non explicite dans leurs travaux, ont répondu quinze chercheuses et chercheurs de différentes spécialités. En revisitant leurs thèmes de recherche ou leur parcours sous cet angle, il se dessine une constellation où semblent émerger trois pôles?: critique, imagination, interdépendance.00Avec les contributions de : 00Philippe Baret, Tom Bauler, Philippe Bourdeau, Isabelle Ferreras, François Gemenne, Marie-Françoise Godart, Marine Lugen, (...) Delphine Misonne, Muriel Moser, François Ost, Benoît Timmermans, Christian Vandermotten, Didier Viviers et Arnaud Zacharie. (shrink)

We argue that Anselm’s ontological argument (or at least one reconstruction of it) is based on an empirical version of Berry’s paradox. It is invalid, but it takes some understanding of trivalence to see why this is so. Under our analysis, Anselm’s use of the notion of existence is not the heart of the matter; rather, trivalence is.

Sedufidelity—the contraction of seduction and fidelity—offers an interesting perspective for reflecting on the role of relationships and the ethics of care in highly technical healthcare settings. Understanding sedufidelity could help mitigate the observed social ruptures and promote a more humane approach to healthcare. However, challenges remain regarding its implementation, particularly in terms of building trust and loyalty towards management and healthcare policymakers. Furthermore, initiatives such as the ‘haie de déshonneur’ (‘hedge of dishonour’) can highlight the need and form of recognition (...) sought by caregivers, given their strong symbolism. However, other actions can also be considered to strengthen relationships and attention paid to caregivers, such as a prior consultation. (shrink)

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the division between nature and culture has been fundamental to Western thought. In this groundbreaking work, renowned anthropologist Philippe Descola seeks to break down this divide, arguing for a departure from the anthropocentric model and its rigid dualistic conception of nature and culture as distinct phenomena. In its stead, Descola proposes a radical new worldview, in which beings and objects, human and nonhuman, are understood through the complex relationships that they possess with (...) one another. The Ecology of Others presents a compelling challenge to anthropologists, ecologists, and environmental studies scholars to rethink the way we conceive of humans, objects, and the environment. Thought-provoking and engagingly written, it will be required reading for all those interested in moving beyond the moving beyond the confines of this fascinating debate." --Publisher's note. (shrink)

Taking precautions to prevent harm. Whether principe de précaution, Vorsorgeprinzip, føre-var prinsippet, or försiktighetsprincip, etc., the precautionary principle embodies the idea that public and private interests should act to prevent harm. Furthermore, the precautionary principle suggests that action should be taken to limit, regulate, or prevent potentially dangerous undertakings even in the absence of absolute scientific proof. Such measures also naturally entail taking economic costs into account. With the environmental disasters of the 1980s, the precautionary principle established itself as an (...) operational concept. On the eve of the 1997 Climate Summit in Kyoto, precaution, as the precautionary principle is often referred to, has now become a key legal principle in environmental law, in general, and in current international climate negotiations, in particular, attempts to understand why. It examines in turn the natural affinity between the precautionary principle and climate change, reviews a series of issues which the principle raises, and discusses avenues which it opens paper, climate change fulfills the theoretical requirements set for the application of the precautionary principle. It comes as no surprise that the actual application of the precautionary principle in the context of climate change raises high political stakes. As a result, climate change science, in particular, and science, in general, is under the fire of politically-motivated scientific skeptics. Thus, by way of the counter-measures which must be put into effect, the precautionary principle calls for a greater sense of responsibility on the part of scientists and the public at large. Specifically, from scientists, it demands perseverance in rigor, excellence in communication, and committment to education. However, even if special efforts are made to implement the precautionary principle in the context of climate change, the success of climate change mitigation will constitute no test of the validity, the usefulness, or the efficiency of the precautionary principle. Indeed, the degree to which climate change mitigation succeeds only provides a measure of our kind's ability to manage responsibly the global commons which we inherited from our ancestors and which our generation enjoys, the global commons which we will pass on to today's children and to generations to come. (shrink)

This note aims at critically assessing a little-noticed proposal made by Popper in the second edition of "Objective Knowledge" to the effect that verisimilitude of scientific theories should be made relative to the problems they deal with. Using a simple propositional calculus formalism, it is shown that the "relativized" definition fails for the very same reason why Popper's original concept of verisimilitude collapsed -- only if one of two theories is true can they be compared in terms of the suggested (...) definition of verisimilitude. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A spatial logic is a modal logic of which the models are the mathematical models of space. Successively considering the mathematical models of space that are the incidence geometry and the projective geometry, we will successively establish the language, the semantical basis, the axiomatical presentation, the proof of the decidability and the proof of the completeness of INC, the modal multilogic of incidence geometry, and PRO, the modal multilogic of projective geometry.

Here we will go beyond the variety of violence to show its unity, common points and continuities. For although there are multiple forms of violence, they are interrelated: they define a continuum from trivial to extreme violence. Violence against oneself, things, living things such as plants and animals, other nations, the other, one’s fellow human beings, therefore the violence of society against its members, which returns to self-violence. Another continuum is its spiral development, with violence generating violence and pushing it (...) to grow. Violence can also be learned, we progress ever further in violence: in gangs, in armies, in society... Everyone is capable of violence, sometimes to a good advantage as in self-defence. Here it resides in necessity, that of survival, but in general it is impunity that allows and encourages it. In closed, totalitarian, universes: family, work, hospital, army, state... The proximity and distance between the perpetrator and the victim defines yet another continuity. We will discuss the various elements that contribute to its development. And paradoxically, to see that violence also serves to avoid violence. In this way, evacuating it, refusing it, is in fact feeding it, which makes today’s violence, which is an evolution of previous violence and which prepares and defines tomorrow’s violence. (shrink)

L’objet de cet article est d’éclairer les rapports qu’entretiennent le droit naturel et l’économie dans la pensée de F. Bastiat. On montre que le statut de la raison humaine occupe une place centrale dans cette articulation. On met également en évidence les tensions entre le mécanisme de répartition des droits de propriété soumis à une procédure de concurrence et le respect de la loi naturelle. A cet égard, F. Bastiat définit la liberté comme la capacité à utiliser la raison.The aim (...) of this paper is to throw a new light on the close relations between natural rights and economics in F. Bastiat’s thought. We show that the human reason status holds a central place in this articulation. We also underscore the problematic compatibility between the natural rights allocation mechanism based on a competition process and the natural law. We explain how F. Bastiat comes to grips with this tension. He proposes to define the notion of liberty as the faculty of using human reason. (shrink)

The Powers of the Sacred is an opportunity for Hans Joas to return to the dynamogenic character of religion highlighted by William James and Émile Durkheim, in order to propose a reflection on the process of sacralisation of values. The present contribution enters into a pragmatist dialogue with Joas’s proposals, based on investigations carried out in an evangelical context. The aim is to show how certain spiritual practices encouraged on the horizon of collective celebrations participate in the creation of values (...) configured by religious entrepreneurs anxious to capture the religious energy of the faithful for the benefit of conservative political mobilizations. These empirical cases shed new light on the notion of the sacred proposed by Joas, and allow us to identify certain methodological knots, notably in the relationship between Joasian concepts and the notions through which social actors confer meaning on their individual or collective experiences. (shrink)

Dans cet essai l'auteur s'est donné pour tâche de dégager la " leçon de Fichte ". En effet, qu'a voulu dire Fichte, tant dans ses textes les plus philosophiques que dans ses discours et écrits à l'adresse de tous? A suivre Philippe Riviale, Fichte serait le frère savant de Gracchus Babeuf : selon lui, ils partagent le même désir de faire venir la vie en nous, de dénoncer l'imposture de la civilisation marchande et de la propriété, fondées sur le (...) déni du moi, tel qu'il est en son impulsion originaire. Le moi, loin d'être déjà constitué, s'élabore dans l'agir et le pâtir par quoi il se fait place dans le monde à venir, qui ne saurait être sans former un " nous " ensemble. Fichte, tout comme son frère en pensée, ne nous parle pas d'un monde hors de notre atteinte. Il ne pose pas l'esprit en marche, qui mènerait les hommes malheureux à un fabuleux destin. Par avance, il réfute Heidegger qui prétend nous donner à voir qu'il n'est rien d'autre que ce que nous sommes, en tant qu'existants ; que la pensée de la liberté est l'illusion suprême qui nous cache le devenir qui nous attend. A l'inverse, Fichte nous fait découvrir qui nous sommes, qui nous avons vocation à être si seulement nous acceptons de faire taire en nous le désir de servitude, la crainte des puissants, la croyance en un au-delà réparateur. C'est de la destination de l'homme qu'il s'agit. Mais Fichte ne fut compris ni de ses contemporains, ni des nôtres. A défaut d'être compris, il fut comparé à Hegel, à Schelling, renvoyé du côté des illuminés, des prémodernes. Cette tendance ne serait pas grave, s'il n'y avait là matière à recherche sur les complications de celui qui voulut annoncer sans répit, comme Babeuf le fit, qu'il n'y a pas de secret. Il est en nous d'aller là où nous conduit notre impulsion, au lieu de stagner misérablement dans des formes d'existence aliénée. Les hommes ne sont pas condamnés à errer sans avenir, nus, ignorants et traîtres à eux-mêmes. C'est de l'écoute de ce projet - fonder un vivre-ensemble par libre choix - que dépend la chance d'un éveil à l'autonomie et à l'humain. (shrink)

The pervasive use of computer simulations in the sciences brings novel epistemological issues discussed in the philosophy of science literature since about a decade. Evolutionary biology strongly relies on such simulations, and in relation to it there exists a research program (Artificial Life) that mainly studies simulations themselves. This paper addresses the specificity of computer simulations in evolutionary biology, in the context (described in Sect. 1) of a set of questions about their scope as explanations, the nature of validation processes (...) and the relation between simulations and true experiments or mathematical models. After making distinctions, especially between a weak use where simulations test hypotheses about the world, and a strong use where they allow one to explore sets of evolutionary dynamics not necessarily extant in our world, I argue in Sect. 2 that (weak) simulations are likely to represent in virtue of the fact that they instantiate specific features of causal processes that may be isomorphic to features of some causal processes in the world, though the latter are always intertwined with a myriad of different processes and hence unlikely to be directly manipulated and studied. I therefore argue that these simulations are merely able to provide candidate explanations for real patterns. Section 3 ends up by placing strong and weak simulations in Levins’ triangle, that conceives of simulations as devices trying to fulfil one or two among three incompatible epistemic values (precision, realism, genericity). (shrink)

This paper deals with the reference of quotations. Several positions can be discerned in the literature: 1. Quotations do not refer; 2. Quotations only refer to types or classes; 3. Quotations can refer to a variety of objects. Although I believe the third position to be the most sensible one, I show that it cannot be taken for granted and that arguments proving it to be correct are hard to come by.

L'éthique des affaires est un sujet en vogue depuis quelques années, marquées aussi par l'apparition de nouvelles méthodes de management. Sans doute existe-t-il un phénomène de mode en ce sens, mais la tendance vers une éthique des affaires et un nouveau management plus humain semble durable, comme tente de le démontrer cet ouvrage, qui se veut un manifeste pour une éthique des affaires et du management au XXIe siècle. La première partie examine les contours de l'éthique des affaires et du (...) management, à travers une étude du sens des mots utilisés (particulièrement une minutieuse analyse de l'éthique), une recherche de ses finalités (la dignité de l'homme, le bien commun) et de ses organes. La seconde partie porte sur les atours de l'éthique des affaires et du management. D'abord dans le microcosme, c'est-à-dire entre partenaires, en dépeignant successivement les outils juridiques (la bonne foi, la cause, la transparence, etc.), les sujets (avec notamment d'importantes considérations sur le management des entreprises dans la lumière de la dignité du salarié) et le moment (dont les pourparlers, conduisant à traiter de la corruption). Ensuite dans le macrocosme, en visant par là les rapports entre tous les intervenants du monde des affaires (non partenaires), que ce soit entre concurrents, envers les non-concurrents, ou enfin envers les pays en voie de développement (donnant lieu à une analyse et à une présentation de perspectives). Ce livre est un essai multidirectionnel, comportant des ouvertures dans des domaines les plus variés, aux vues personnelles bien qu'appuyées par d'innombrables travaux récents dans des disciplines diverses. S'il constitue une réflexion théorique sur un vaste secteur de l'activité humaine, il a aussi une visée pratique. Fondé sur des convictions, il s'achève par une note optimiste. Son auteur s'est efforcé à la plus grande clarté, tout en restant fidèle à la rigueur des juristes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper we introduce and investigate various classes of multimodal logics based on frames with relative accessibility relations. We discuss their applicability to representation and analysis of incomplete information. We provide axiom systems for these logics and we prove their completeness.