In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 81-98 [Access article in PDF] Leonor de Cáceres and the Mexican Inquisition Margaret Mott Introduction: The Family and the Times The Carvajál family, well-known to historians of colonial Mexico, achieved its enduring status largely through the records of the Mexican Holy Office. 1 The governor, Luis de Carvajál, after becoming embroiled in a boundary dispute with the Viceroy of New Spain, (...) was denounced as a Judaizer in 1589. He was eventually cleared of the crime of Judaizing, of performing Jewish rituals while pretending to be Catholic, but was sent to prison for one year for having concealed his Judaizing relatives from the authorities. He died while serving out his prison sentence. Many of the rest of his family, whom he brought over from Spain as part of the privileges of his office, were condemned as judaizantes pertinaz, persistent Judaizers. In the auto de fe of 8 December 1596 the governor's sister Francisca Núñez de Carvajál and four of her adult children were, in the language of the Holy Office, "relaxed to the secular arm for burning." Francisca's daughter, Mariana, was spared the stake in 1596 because she was deemed to have lost her senses. Once she regained them, she, too, was condemned as a persistent Judaizer and died in the auto de fe of 25 March 1601.From all accounts the Carvajál family was used by the Holy Office as a warning to the crypto-Jewish community of New Spain. Even Stephen Greenleaf, known for his balanced accounts on the Mexican Inquisition, 2 describes the persecution [End Page 81] of the Carvajáls as a "Counter Reformation tact," concluding that "the Holy Office wanted to use the Carvajáls as an example to the Jewish community of Mexico." 3 Yet more was at issue here than just a display of the naked power. The questions the inquisitors posed and the rhetoric they used suggest something beyond flexing a coercive muscle in front of the crypto-Jewish population of colonial Mexico.Not all members of the Carvajál family perished in the flames of so-called Counter Reformation intolerance. One of Francisca's sons, a Dominican monk, was able to maintain his commitment to his order even after being convicted of concealing his heretic relatives from the authorities. A son-in-law, Antonio Diaz de Cáceres, was reconciled after paying what biographer Martin A. Cohen considered an "unusually light" penalty, a public abjure de vehementia and a fine of a thousand Castilian ducats. Cohen explains this unusual pardon in terms of political intrigue. "Because he was a man of esteem and had served the king on several occasions," wrote Cohen, Antonio was spared the lash. 4 Yet political favors were not the only consideration. Francisca's granddaughter (and Antonio's daughter) Leonor de Cáceres, who was nine at the time of the first auto de fe, was reconciled along with her father in the auto de fe of 1601. Although she was fourteen at the time of her trial, much of the evidence concerns events that took place in her childhood, before the age of reason. Rather than a "Counter Reformation tact," her trial reflects some of the Catholic reforms of the sixteenth century, a time in Spanish political and social thought when natural law arguments for education and evangelization were on the ascendant.The term Counter Reformation implies an entrenched position against any efforts of reform. "Counter Reformation," writes historian John O'Malley, "expressed the quintessence of Catholicism, which was reaction and repression." 5 Counter Reformation underscores intolerance and obscures the radical reforms of the times (for which reason O'Malley offers the more neutral term, Early Modern Catholicism). In actuality sixteenth-century Catholicism was a time of both unification and universality, of shoring up the papacy and experimenting with evangelical techniques. Balanced against the heightened authority of the Vatican were the educational experiments of the Jesuits. 6 Alongside the racist arguments in support of the encomendero system was a very... (shrink)

Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents’ psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness is also sensitive to the moral value of agents’ lives. Five studies systematically investigate and explain the impact of morality on ordinary assessments of happiness. Study 1 demonstrates that moral judgments influence assessments of happiness not only (...) for untrained participants, but also for academic researchers and even in those who study happiness specifically. Studies 2 and 3 then respectively ask whether this effect may be explained by general motivational biases or beliefs in a just world. In both cases, we find evidence against these explanations. Study 4 shows that the impact of moral judgments cannot be explained by changes in the perception of descriptive psychological states. Finally, Study 5 compares the impact of moral and non-moral value, and provides evidence that unlike non-moral value, moral value is part of the criteria that govern the ordinary concept of happiness. Taken together, these studies provide a specific explanation of how and why the ordinary concept of happiness deviates from the definition used by researchers studying happiness. (shrink)

Previous studies suggest that ancient threats capture attention because human beings possess an inborn module shaped by evolution and dedicated to their detection. An alternative account proposes that a key feature predicting whether a stimulus will capture attention is its relevance rather than its ontology. Within this framework, the present research deals with the attentional capture by threats commonly encountered in our urban environment. In two experiments, we investigate the attentional capture by modern threats. In Experiment 1, participants responded to (...) a target preceded by a cue, which was a weapon or a non-threatening stimulus. We found a larger cuing effect with weapons as compared with non-threatening cues. In Experiment 2, modern and ancient threats were pitted against one another as cues to determine which ones preferentially capture attention. Crucially, participants were faster to detect a target preceded by a modern as opposed to an ancient threat, providing initial evidence for a superiority of modern threat. Overall, the present findings appear more consistent with a relevance-based explanation rather than an evolutionary-based explanation of threat detection. (shrink)

A scholarly synthesis of biblical studies and Christian social ethics, designed to provide a biblical argument for intentional institutional change on behalf of social justice.

Much writing on scientific biography focuses on the legitimacy and utility of this genre. In contrast, this essay discusses a variety of genre conventions and imperatives which continue to exert a powerful influence on the selection of biographical subjects, and to control the plot and structure of the ensuing biographies. These imperatives include the following: the plot templates of the Bildungsroman (the realistic novel of individual self-development), the life trajectories of Weberian ideal types, and the functional elements and personae of (...) the folkloric tale of the "hero's quest." The essay discusses the nature and application of these genre conventions in some detail, with the conclusion that biography, however useful, exerts a powerfully distorting influence on the image of how most science gets done. (shrink)

. Given the importance of the issue of scientific objectivity in our democratic societies and the significant development of citizen science, it is crucial to investigate how citizen science may either undermine or foster scientific objectivity. This paper identifies a variety of epistemic risks and benefits that participation of lay citizens in scientific inquiries may bring. It also discusses concrete actions and pending issues that should be addressed in order to foster objectivity in citizen science programs.

How paying attention to the tracks of animals can change our way of relating to the world around us.

This paper focuses on the conception and use of machine-learning algorithms for marketing. In the last years, specialized service providers as well as in-house data scientists have been increasingly using machine learning to predict consumer behavior for large companies. Predictive marketing thus revives the old dream of one-to-one, perfectly adjusted selling techniques, now at an unprecedented scale. How do predictive marketing devices change the way corporations know and model their customers? Drawing from STS and the sociology of quantification, I propose (...) to study the original ambivalence that characterizes the promise of a mass personalization, i.e. algorithmic processes in which the precise adjustment of prediction to unique individuals involves the computation of massive datasets. By studying algorithms in practice, I show how the active embedding of local preexisting consumer knowledge and punctual de-personalization mechanisms are keys to the epistemic and organizational success of predictive marketing. This paper argues for the study of algorithms in their contexts and suggests new perspectives on algorithmic objectivity. (shrink)

Les concepts de paradigme et de thématisation, par lesquels Jean Cavaillès décrit dans l’ouvrage posthume Sur la Logique et la théorie de la science la dynamique de l’activité mathématique, trouvent dans la théorie des catégories à la fois une illustration et une formalisation, et dans la dialectique hégélienne un précédent. Dans un premier temps, nous examinerons cette hypothèse, non sans définir le concept de thématisation et les quelques notions élémentaires de théorie des catégories qui nous serviront par la suite. Ensuite, (...) en supposant hégélienne la notion de « dialectique » employée par Cavaillès, nous vérifierons si le concept de « thématisation » peut prétendre décrire le processus dialectique de la logique hégélienne, interprétation dont nous trouverons l’esquisse chez William Lawvere. Enfin, nous mettrons à l’épreuve cette interprétation en analysant la dialectique hégélienne de l’être et du néant dans la Science de la logique et les Leçons sur l’histoire de la philosophie. Nous verrons ainsi comment la dialectique hégélienne peut tout à la fois décrire la pratique mathématique et s’y voir représenter. (shrink)

The question of the division of cognitive labor has given rise to various models characterizing the way scientists should distribute their efforts. These models often consider the scientific community as a self-governed sphere constituted by rational agents making choices on the basis of fixed rules. Such models have recently been criticized for not taking into account the real mechanisms of science funding. Hence, the question of the utility of the DCL models in guiding science policy remains an open one. In (...) this paper, we show that two unconsidered dimensions would have to be taken into account. First, DCL studies miss the existence of distinct levels of epistemic objectives organizing the research process. Indeed, the scientific field is structured as a system of hierarchical, interconnected practices which are defined both by their inherent purposes and by various superposed external functions. Second, I criticize the absence of ontological considerations, since the epistemological significance of pluralism is highly dependent on the nature of the object under study. Because of these missing dimensions, current DCL models might have a limited usefulness to identify good practices of research governance. (shrink)

The building of a global model of carcinogenesis is one of modern biology’s greatest challenges. The traditional somatic mutation theory is now supplemented by a new approach, called the Tissue Organization Field Theory. According to TOFT, the original source of cancer is loss of tissue organization rather than genetic mutations. In this paper, we study the argumentative strategy used by the advocates of TOFT to impose their view. In particular, we criticize their claim of incompatibility used to justify the necessity (...) to definitively reject SMT. First, we note that since it is difficult to build a non-ambiguous experimental demonstration of the superiority of TOFT, its partisans add epistemological and metaphysical arguments to the debate. This argumentative strategy allows them to defend the necessity of a paradigm shift, with TOFT superseding SMT. To do so, they introduce a notion of incompatibility, which they actually use as the Kuhnian notion of incommensurability. To justify this so-called incompatibility between the two theories of cancer, they move the debate to a metaphysical ground by assimilating the controversy to a fundamental opposition between reductionism and organicism. We show here that this argumentative strategy is specious, because it does not demonstrate clearly that TOFT is an organicist theory. Since it shares with SMT its vocabulary, its ontology and its methodology, it appears that a claim of incompatibility based on this metaphysical plan is not fully justified in the present state of the debate. We conclude that it is more cogent to argue that the two theories are compatible, both biologically and metaphysically. We propose to consider that TOFT and SMT describe two distinct and compatible causal pathways to carcinogenesis. This view is coherent with the existence of integrative approaches, and suggests that they have a higher epistemic value than the two theories taken separately. (shrink)

The revolt against expertise is a novel aspect of a larger and longer-standing discontent with the power of managerial elites within modern democracies. In the United States, scientific expertise is contested adversarially on the model of a public trial. In broadcast media, expert disagreement proceeds via staged debates with opposing sides (generally representing extremes of more complex debates) arguing scientific questions bearing on public policy. By the mid-20th century many observers agreed that this broadcast format had transformed the active ‘public’ (...) – the target audience of these debates – into a passive ‘mass society’ that could listen to or view them, but had few or no means, outside of electoral politics, to engage with them. Two recent developments have challenged the traditional approach to public debates of scientific expertise, and challenged that expertise itself. The first is the rapid privatization of science since about 1980, changing public perception of scientists from disinterested servants of truth to spokespersons for government or economic interests. The second (since about 2007) is the combination of the universality of smartphones and direct access to internet discussion platforms not controlled by managerial elites, which have transformed the mute ‘mass’ into a highly vocal assortment of selforganizing publics (like those imagined in classical democratic theory) demanding to be heard directly on scientific questions. The matter of who now is a scientific expert, for whom, and under what circumstances, is a pressing question for historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science. (shrink)

The question of the division of cognitive labor has given rise to various models characterizing the way scientists should distribute their efforts. These models often consider the scientific community as a self-governed sphere constituted by rational agents making choices on the basis of fixed rules. Such models have recently been criticized for not taking into account the real mechanisms of science funding. Hence, the question of the utility of the DCL models in guiding science policy remains an open one. In (...) this paper, we show that two unconsidered dimensions would have to be taken into account. First, DCL studies miss the existence of distinct levels of epistemic objectives organizing the research process. Indeed, the scientific field is structured as a system of hierarchical, interconnected practices which are defined both by their inherent purposes and by various superposed external functions. Second, I criticize the absence of ontological considerations, since the epistemological significance of pluralism is highly dependent on the nature of the object under study. Because of these missing dimensions, current DCL models might have a limited usefulness to identify good practices of research governance. (shrink)

Hybride et émergent, artéfactuel et culturel sans cesser d’être naturel, le monde humain tel que l’entend Joseph Margolis est aussi, en cela même, dans ses différentes dimensions, un monde fragile, instable et en perpétuelle reconstruction. Les enquêtes scientifiques et philosophiques ne peuvent en effet s’affranchir d’une condition d’impermanence où le flux l’emporte sur la fixité, ni s’émanciper d’un horizon de discours symbiotique ancré dans le langage ordinaire. Métisses et solidaires d’un monde médian conversationnel, les langues humaines répondent également, dans leur (...) indétermination même, aux exigences de formes de vie partagées et changeantes. Les personnes humaines enfin, enculturées et enlangagées, restent inscrites dans un monde Intentionnel et historique, qu’elles s’incorporent et transforment. (shrink)

Les concepts de paradigme et de thématisation, par lesquels Jean Cavaillès décrit dans l’ouvrage posthume Sur la Logique et la théorie de la science la dynamique de l’activité mathématique, trouvent dans la théorie des catégories à la fois une illustration et une formalisation, et dans la dialectique hégélienne un précédent. Dans un premier temps, nous examinerons cette hypothèse, non sans définir le concept de thématisation et les quelques notions élémentaires de théorie des catégories qui nous serviront par la suite. Ensuite, (...) en supposant hégélienne la notion de « dialectique » employée par Cavaillès, nous vérifierons si le concept de « thématisation » peut prétendre décrire le processus dialectique de la logique hégélienne, interprétation dont nous trouverons l’esquisse chez William Lawvere. Enfin, nous mettrons à l’épreuve cette interprétation en analysant la dialectique hégélienne de l’être et du néant dans la Science de la logique et les Leçons sur l’histoire de la philosophie. Nous verrons ainsi comment la dialectique hégélienne peut tout à la fois décrire la pratique mathématique et s’y voir représenter. (shrink)

Philosophy Beyond Spacetime assesses the state of play in the philosophy of quantum gravity. Research in this field aims at a unified theory in which quantum matter is related dynamically to relativistic spacetime. This volume highlights the conceptual questions involved, showing how physics and metaphysics can illuminate each other.