Two experiments were conducted to show that the IF … THEN … rules used in the different versions of Wason 's selection task are not psychologically—though they are logically—equivalent. Some of these rules are considered by the participants as strict logical conditionals, whereas others are interpreted as expressing a biconditional relationship. A deductive task was used jointly with the selection task to show that the original abstract rule is quite ambiguous in this respect, contrary to deontic rules: the typical “error” (...) made by most people may indeed be explained by the fact that they consider the abstract rule as a biconditional. Thus, there is no proper error or bias in the selection task as it is still argued, but a differential interpretation of the rule. The need for taking into account a pragmatic component in the process of reasoning is illustrated by the experiments. (shrink)

Previous chapter The notion of rhuthmos slowly reappeared in the second half of the 19th century through various and sometimes very complicated paths. In the 1850s and 1860s Baudelaire and Wagner explicitly belittled “rhythm” they asso­ciated with “meter” and “architecture” and preferred to cele­brate “har­mo­ny” and “melody” considered as more fit to grasp the “lyrical impulses of the soul.” In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music though, Nietzsche equally praised “rhythm” and “harmony” - Sur le concept (...) de rythme – Nouvel article. (shrink)

A response to a declaration in 'Le Monde', 'Luttons efficacement contre les théories du complot' by Gérald Bronner, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez, Karen Douglas, Nicolas Gauvrit, Anthony Lantian, and Pascal Wagner-Egger, published on June the 6th, 2016.

A reply to “Why ‘Healthy Conspiracy Theories’ Are (Oxy)morons” by Pascal Wagner-Egger, Gérald Bronner, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez and Nicolas Gauvrit.

A reply to Gérald Bronner, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez, Nicolas Gauvrit, Anthony Lantian, and Pascal Wagner-Egger's piece, '“They” Respond: Comments on Basham et al.’s “Social Science’s Conspiracy-Theory Panic: Now They Want to Cure Everyone”.

In this paper, I will examine the notion of an epistemic dilemma, its characterizations in the literature, and the different intuitions prompted by it. I will illustrate that the notion of an epistemic dilemma is expected to capture various phenomena that are not easily unified with one concept: while some aspects of these phenomena are more about the agent in a certain situation, other aspects seem to be more about the situation as such. As a consequence, incompatible intuitions emerge concerning (...) the transparency of epistemic dilemmas as well as regarding the role that doxastic suspension plays in resolving cases of epistemic dilemma. I suggest to distinguish between the mental state of agents who find themselves in an epistemic dilemma and the normative situation that gives rise to a dilemma. I will refer to the agent’s mental state as epistemic conflict and will reserve the term epistemic dilemma for evidential situations in which epistemic principles either recommend incompatible doxastic responses or render all options impermissible. The concept of epistemic conflict not only captures the mental state of agents who find themselves in a genuine epistemic dilemma but also applies to agents who face difficult epistemic choices that they cannot resolve without substantial cognitive (and often pragmatic) effort, for example, via doxastic suspension. (shrink)

What is truth? What value should we see in or attribute to it? The war over the meaning and utility of truth is at the center of contemporary philosophical debate, and its arguments have rocked the foundations of philosophical practice. In this book, the American pragmatist Richard Rorty and the French analytic philosopher Pascal Engel present their radically different perspectives on truth and its correspondence to reality. Rorty doubts that the notion of truth can be of any practical use (...) and points to the preconceptions that lie behind truth in both the intellectual and social spheres. Engel prefers a realist conception, defending the relevance and value of truth as a norm of belief and inquiry in both science and the public domain. Rorty finds more danger in using the notion of truth than in getting rid of it. Engel thinks it is important to hold on to the idea that truth is an accurate representation of reality. In Rorty's view, epistemology is an artificial construct meant to restore a function to philosophy usurped by the success of empirical science. Epistemology and ontology are false problems, and with their demise goes the Cartesian dualism of subject and object and the ancient problematic of appearance and reality. Conventional "philosophical problems," Rorty asserts, are just symptoms of the professionalism that has disfigured the discipline since the time of Kant. Engel, however, is by no means as complacent as Rorty in heralding the "end of truth," and he wages a fierce campaign against the "veriphobes" who deny its value. _What's the Use of Truth?_ is a rare opportunity to experience each side of this impassioned debate clearly and concisely. It is a subject that has profound implications not only for philosophical inquiry but also for the future study of all aspects of our culture. (shrink)

Divided into two parts this book examines the train of social theory from the 19th century, through to the `organization of modernity', in relation to ideas of social planning, and as contributors to the `rationalistic revolution' of the `golden age' of capitalism in the 1950s and 60s. Part two examines key concepts in the social sciences. It begins with some of the broadest concepts used by social scientists: choice, decision, action and institution and moves on to examine the `collectivist alternative': (...) the concepts of society, culture and polity, which are often dismissed as untenable by postmodernists today. This is a major contribution to contemporary social theory and provides a host of essential insights into the task of social science today. (shrink)

Pascal was a scientist and man of the world who came to be a passionately devout Christian. The fragments of his great defense of Christianity, left unfinished at his death in 1662, survive in the form of the Pensees. This series of brief, dramatic notes on his religious convictions are here translated into English. These thoughts expose Pascal's vision of the world and display powerful reasoning and a profound faith.

How might good work – skilled, autonomous work which affords workers opportunities for meaningful social cooperation in decent conditions – be made available to all? I evaluate five commonly advanced strategies: an unregulated labor market, egalitarian redistribution of resources, state regulation, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy. Each, I argue, has significant limitations. An unregulated labor market ignores workers' unduly weak bargaining power vis-à-vis employers. Egalitarian redistribution alone fails to solve this problem due to distinctive and endemic imperfections of labor markets. (...) Direct state regulation is insufficiently context-sensitive and insufficiently dynamic in the face of technological and other developments. Collective bargaining gives workers only indirect and sometimes costly influence over their working conditions. And workplace democracy leaves workers vulnerable to collective action problems induced by competition between firms. I argue, however, that these strategies can be complemented in a promising way by ‘syndicalist economic democracy’: direct worker participation in the government of the economy, largely specific to particular occupations or economic sectors but above the level of the individual workplace. (shrink)

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

David Chalmers has distinguished the “hard” and the “easy” problem of consciousness, arguing that progress on the “easy problem”—on pinpointing the physical/neural correlates of consciousness—will not necessarily involve progress on the hard problem—on explaining why consciousness, in the first place, emerges from physical processing. Chalmers, however, was hopeful that refined theorizing would eventually yield philosophical progress. In particular, he argued that panpsychism might be a candidate account to solve the hard problem. Here, I provide a concise stock-take on both the (...) empirical-neuroscientific and philosophical-conceptual progress on consciousness. It turns out that, whereas empirical progress is indisputable, philosophical progress is much less pronounced. While Chalmers was right, I argue, in distinguishing distinctive types of problems of consciousness, his prediction of progress on the hard problem was overly optimistic. Empirical progress and philosophical progress are essentially uncoupled; a more skeptical perspective on progress in philosophy in general is appropriate. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

In this paper, the relationship between the e-value of a complex hypothesis, H, and those of its constituent elementary hypotheses, Hj, j = 1… k, is analyzed, in the independent setup. The e-value of a hypothesis H, ev, is a Bayesian epistemic, credibility or truth value defined under the Full Bayesian Significance Testing mathematical apparatus. The questions addressed concern the important issue of how the truth value of H, and the truth function of the corresponding FBST structure M, relate to (...) the truth values of its elementary constituents, Hj, and to the truth functions of their corresponding FBST structures Mj, respectively. (shrink)

Une relecture de ce philosophe anglais (1676-1729), à la lumière de ce que disaient de et contre lui ses adversaires théologiens (Clarke, Berkeley), et surtout, de ce qu'il disait de lui-même. Pour ce libre-penseur, le concept de Dieu est vide de sens ou contradictoire, le dualisme créationniste une hypothèse intenable, et le christianisme un simple produit du besoin anthropologique de croire.

Le sceptique nous demande " Comment sais-tu que tu as deux mains? Peut-être rêves-tu, ou es-tu trompé par quelque Malin Génie? Peut-on même définir ce que c'est que la connaissance? Va savoir! " Lui rétorquer, comme le faisaient G.E. Moore et la tradition de la philosophie du sens commun : " Mais je sais bien que j'ai deux mains! " semble à la fois une pétition de principe et une bien mauvaise réponse. Le mieux, depuis que nous avons perdu le (...) souci de fonder nos croyance sur des raisons ultimes, serait, tout simplement, de ne pas se soucier des questions du sceptique. Ce que l'on sait dépend, nous dit-on, des circonstances, et toutes nos connaissances sont faillibles. N'y a-t-il pas plutôt des savoirs, dont l'histoire nous montre combien leurs modes de validations sont variés? Ce livre entend refuser ce type de réponse contextualiste et relativiste. Il propose de revenir à la réponse de sens commun de Moore, à partir des reformulations contemporaines des raisonnements sceptiques issues de la philosophie analytique de la connaissance. Personne ne peut nous envoyer savoir quelque chose que nous ne pourrions pas savoir. De fait, nous savons, mais notre savoir n'est pas transparent : nous n'avons pas besoin de savoir que nous savons. Pour parvenir à cette réponse, il faut replacer la notion de connaissance, plutôt que celle de croyance justifiée ou rationnelle, au centre de l'épistémologie, et reformuler des questions traditionnelles comme celles de la nature de la perception, du témoignage, et de la connaissance a priori. On peut aussi reprendre le vieux projet d'une enquête sur la nature de la connaissance en général. (shrink)

Science, engineering and technology are still male-dominated fields, and thus all over Europe much effort is expended on activities which, it is hoped, will lead to a sustainable gender balance. Scholarly work has frequently focused on the topic of how to motivate women to enter SET fields or to choose a corresponding education. In contrast to this one-sided approach, recent scholarly contributions have begun to emphasize the vital role of gendered structures and indirect exclusion mechanisms of technological institutions and their (...) professional self-understandings which discourage women from entering or staying in SET organizations. In particular, taken-for-granted knowledge as a mechanism for maintaining specific norms and values is considered a primary hindrance towards more inclusive and less oppressive organizational cultures. Since this taken-for-granted knowledge is often implicit, a primary goal of research can be said to make the invisible visible. Thus this article presents selected empirical results of a research project which makes use of an investigative tool called mind-scripting. Here the aim is to identify the main barriers, in terms of unquestioned taken-for granted knowledge, currently hindering an open and critical review of gendered structures and gender codes in the SET field, or in organizations in general, particularly with respect to professional norms. (shrink)

Taking his critique of totalitarianizing conceptions of community as a starting point, this text examines Jean-Luc Nancy's work of an ‘ontology of plural singular being’ for its political implications. It argues that while at first this ontology seems to advocate a negative or an anti-politics only, it can also be read as a ‘theory of communicative praxis’ that suggests a certain ethos – in the form of a certain use of symbols (which is expressed only inaptly by the word ‘style’) (...) that would render the ontological plurality of singulars perceptible and practically effective. Finally, some recent texts by Nancy even sidestep the ontology of being-with and face the question of what politics, faced with demands of justice, could be and what a democratic politics could provide. Both of these aspects in Nancy's work, however, still remain to be spelled out more politically. (shrink)

Marx says of alienated labor that it does not "belong" to the worker, that it issues in a product that does not belong to her, and that it is unfulfilling, unfree, egoistically motivated, and inhuman. He seems to think, moreover, that the first of these features grounds all the others. All of these features seem quite independent, however: they can come apart; they share no obvious common cause or explanation; and if they often occur together this seems accidental. It is (...) not clear, then, how Marx's concept of alienated labor could possess the strong unity which he takes it to have. I defend a reinterpretation of the concept which explains this unity. The various features of alienated labor, I argue, all follow from a single, hitherto underappreciated feature of its formal motivational structure: the fact that such labor is motivated not by its product but by an incentive. (shrink)

Intellectual historians have tended to focus on the most radical intellectuals of the counter-revolution such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, but the counter-revolution was an intellectually composite movement with many intellectual currents and ideas. In this article, I shed light on the composite character of the counter-revolution by focusing on one of its most moderate members, the comte de Montlosier. The article presents contextualised analysis of Montlosier’s conception of moderation, his theory of politics, his critique of fellow (...) counter-revolutionaries, and his ideas for a new aristocratic order build on public opinion and separation of powers. I argue that Montlosier’s moderate politics reflected a moderate enlightenment approach to politics, which was neither wholly rationalist nor wholly traditionalist. Rather, it was an attempt to find a middle ground between the two integrating a conservative view of history with a sociological approach to power and politics. I furthermore argue that even if Montlosier was unsuccessful in his endeavours to moderate the counter-revolution, he nonetheless provided a moderate response to it that would become integral to nineteenth-century conservative and liberal ideas. (shrink)

In the 1920s, Carnap and Schlick both made an important use of definitions in their main publications: Schlick, in his Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (1918, 2nd ed. 1925) and Carnap in Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928, mostly written by 1925). In this paper, we first provide an analysis of the kinds of definitions that are distinguished in these books and a few other papers, and we then propose a systematic comparison of Schlick’s and Carnap’s diverging conceptions of definitions in the 1920s, (...) relating them, in both cases, to their respective philosophical projects in the Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre and in Der logische Aufbau der Welt. (shrink)

Part I: Dimensions of time's enigma -- Is time real? -- Eleaticism, temporality, and time -- The makings of a temporal universe -- Pastness and futurity -- Synchronicity and synchronicity -- Temporal pace and measurement -- Presentness or the present -- Aristotle's real account of time -- Parmenidean time and the impossible now -- Cosmic motion and the speed of time -- Time as the motion of the cosmos -- Time as the cosmos itself -- Time as motion and all (...) change -- Temporal cognition and the return of the now -- Real temporality in an Aristotelian world -- Does Aristotle refute eleaticism? -- Bisection argument I -- Bisection argument II -- Bisection argument III -- Plotinus' vitalistic platonism and the real origins of time -- Temporality, eternality, and Plotinus' new metaphysic -- Plotinus' critique of Aristotelian motion -- Indefinite temporality and the measure of motion -- Plotinus' neoplatonic account of time. (shrink)

Lorsqu’elle nous reçoit à Conakry, en république de Guinée, ce 22 janvier 2002, Mme Kadidiatou Diallo prépare la commémoration de la « journée des pendus » au cours de laquelle, le 25 janvier 1971, de nombreuses personnes furent exécutées par pendaison à travers toute la Guinée, sur ordre du président de la République Ahmed Sékou Touré. Mme Diallo Telli a déjà accordé de nombreux entretiens à des journalistes qui l’ont interrogée sur son époux, Boubacar Diallo Telli, une des plus célèbres (...) per... (shrink)

Largement déterminée par la « scène primitive » de la Révolution française, notre conception de la citoyenneté est encore souvent associée à l’exercice des droits de suffrage et d’éligibilité. Le moment révolutionnaire, en abolissant les privilèges d’Ancien Régime et en promulguant la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, a, de fait, fondé une citoyenneté juridique définie par un ensemble de droits « naturels », civils et politiques. Or l’histoire des femmes et du genre, comme les...

Quels rapports, depuis les commencements, les philosophes ontils noués avec la science? Il ne s'agit pas ici de dresser l'inventaire des problèmes philosophiques que soulèvent les sciences ou la science, ni d'évaluer les réponses qui y furent apportées, mais, à l'inverse, de s'interroger sur les manières multiples dont les philosophes se sont représenté la science - état d'un sujet connaissant ou activité savante - système d'énoncés ou méthode de recherche, voire ensemble de disciplines constituées - et les problèmes afférents à (...) chacune de ces représentations. A l'exhaustivité historique, il a été préféré le questionnement philosophique. L'ouvrage se déploie à partir de quatre grandes problématiques : " La science "? (Platon ; Descartes, Newton ; Leibniz ; L'Encyclopédie ; Carnap) ; Critiques et limites de la science (empirisme et scepticisme anglais ; Kant ; Bergson, Brunschvicg ; Heidegger ; Wittgenstein) ; Science et naturalisme (Aristote ; Mach ; Bolzano ; Husserl ; Quine) Science, histoire et société (Comte ; Durkheim ; l'école de Francfort ; Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault ; logique de la science et révolutions scientifiques). (shrink)

Since its origin, bioethics has attracted the collaboration of few social scientists, and social scientific methods of gathering empirical data have remained unfamiliar to ethicists. Recently, however, the clouded relations between the empirical and normative perspectives on bioethics appear to be changing. Three reasons explain why there was no easy and consistent input of empirical evidence into bioethics. Firstly, interdisciplinary dialogue runs the risk of communication problems and divergent objectives. Secondly, the social sciences were absent partners since the beginning of (...) bioethics. Thirdly, the meta‐ethical distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ created a ‘natural’ border between the disciplines. Now, bioethics tends to accommodate more empirical research. Three hypotheses explain this emergence. Firstly, dissatisfaction with a foundationalist interpretation of applied ethics created a stimulus to incorporate empirical research in bioethics. Secondly, clinical ethicists became engaged in empirical research due to their strong integration in the medical setting. Thirdly, the rise of the evidence‐based paradigm had an influence on the practice of bioethics. However, a problematic relationship cannot simply and easily evolve into a perfect interaction. A new and positive climate for empirical approaches has arisen, but the original difficulties have not disappeared. (shrink)

En palabras del rector de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, coeditora de este libro, quien lea estas páginas podrá apreciar cómo Alberto Wagner de Reyna, alumno del filósofo alemán, nos aproxima a una renovada comprensión de los temas que cautivaron la reflexión de Heidegger, y nos invita a adentrarnos con él por esas "sendas del bosque" en las que el hombre que busca su autenticidad celebra la fiesta de la meditación serena.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

This article investigates the theory of an imperative mandate as presented in the radical French revolutionary Jean-François Varlet’s text Project for a Special and Imperative Mandate from 1792. This text is taken as, and shown to be, representative for a widespread understanding of radical democracy during the French Revolution in which deputies were not understood as ‘representatives’ but as ‘mandataries’ who were legally bound to follow the instructions of their commettants. As an essential part of this radical conception of democracy, (...) social movements were to be constantly mobilized and able to supervise the political system. This entails a shift in the balance of power from the state to the social movements, and as such it expresses a different conception of democracy than that of liberal democracy with its rule of law and state monopoly of violence. (shrink)

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s conception and critique of sovereignty has won him wide and well-deserved acclamation. In this article, however, it is argued that Agamben’s conception of sovereignty is somewhat misplaced, and, as a consequence, his positive political project of developing a ‘destituent power’ is highly deficient in terms of construing a popular and viable political alternative. The critique of Agamben is developed through a close reading of Aristotle’s Politics and his notion of kurion. It is argued that Agamben’s (...) flawed conception of sovereignty reemerges symptomatically in his extremely problematic reading of Aristotle’s Politics, and that a viable political alternative to both Agamben’s own project and the conception of politics that he criticizes can be developed through an alternative and closer reading of Aristotle. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the relation between ontology and practical philosophy in Cicero’s work and the role Hellenistic philosophy plays within the work of Giorgio Agamben. I discuss the relation between life and ontology, between philosophy as a guide to living and philosophy as the study of being. Unlike philosophers who treat Hellenistic philosophy as a form of therapy, I show how Agamben interprets Hellenistic philosophy as oppressive by turning the theory of being into an injunction of having-to-be. For (...) Agamben, every philosophy implies a certain form of life, and it is thus impossible to distinguish between ontology and living. The aim of philosophy, therefore, is not to be therapeutic but rather to develop an ontology that will allow for humanity to live without oppression. Through a detailed reading of Cicero’s concept of “nature,” I develop the reading and critique of Cicero suggested by Agamben.Cet article analyse la relation entre l’ontologie et la philosophie pratique dans l’oeuvre de Cicéron et le rôle joué par la philosophie hellénistique dans l’oeuvre de Giorgio Agamben. Il discute la relation entre la vie et l’ontologie, entre la philosophie comme guide de savoir-vivre et la philosophie comme étude de l’être. Contrairement aux philosophes qui traitent la philosophie hellénistique comme une forme de thérapie, je montre que Agamben interprète la philosophie hellénistique comme essentielle-ment oppressive en transformant la théorie de l'être en une injonction normative de devoir-être. Pour Agamben, toute philosophie implique une certaine forme de vie, rendant alors la distinction entre l’ontologie et la vie impossible. Ainsi, le but de la philosophie n'est pas d’être thérapeutique mais plutôt de développer une ontologie qui permettra à l’humanité de vivre sans oppression. Par une lecture du concept de la « nature » de Cicéron, je développe l’interprétation et la critique de Cicéron proposé par Agamben. (shrink)