Objetivou-se discutir a comunicação silenciosa entre mãe e bebê, a partir do pensamento de Winnicott. Fez-se uma pesquisa qualitativa, baseada no método clínico e referencial psicanalítico, por meio do estudo de caso de uma criança, com 8 anos de idade e dificuldades no desenvolvimento da fala, sem ..

Este artigo discute as implicações do segundo dualismo pulsional freudiano para a economia narcísica e o conceito de trauma, fenômenos que despontam no corpo teórico da segunda tópica psíquica. Discute-se o modelo econômico da dor física e sua retomada em Além do princípio do prazer, como um marco renovado para a teoria do trauma e sua relação com a fixação em formas de sofrimento psíquico e de adoecimento. Conclui-se que um desenvolvimento teórico sobre a dor e sua relação com o (...) masoquismo erógeno e moral são contribuições para elucidar o retorno de formações narcísicas sobre o Eu. (shrink)

Desde o início da teorização freudiana, inibição, defesa e censura são processos que devem incidir sobre as pulsões. O primitivo pulsional precisa ser reprimido ou transformado. Este artigo problematiza a relação entre as pulsões sexuais e a defesa psíquica, ao longo do período pré-psicanalítico e da primeira tópica freudiana. Situamos o conflito entre sexualidade e repressão, apontado por Freud como característico das psiconeuroses, enquanto que nas neuroses atuais a angústia está relacionada a um registro quantitativo e não exatamente a um (...) conflito psíquico. Nesse caso, revela-se desencontros entre um sexual corpóreo e sua representação psíquica. Pretende-se, neste trabalho, evidenciar o caráter negativo das pulsões e pôr em relevo a natureza do antagonismo que se opõe às pulsões sexuais. A formulação das pulsões de autoconservação como aquilo que deve se contrapor às pulsões sexuais não esclarece completamente porque é imperativo que algo aconteça face às vivências pulsionais fundantes do aparelho. A satisfação em estado bruto acarreta prejuízos, tanto do ponto de vista psíquico quanto social; logo, a repressão das pulsões sexuais é condição necessária para a existência individual e coletiva. Evidencia-se assim algo específico do humano, afinal, se toda a natureza funciona afirmando o instinto, a espécie humana somente se desenvolve a partir de sua negação. A partir de tais construções teóricas, questiona-se se a psicanálise ainda permanece demasiadamente tributária de uma concepção de natureza revestida de pressupostos morais, sustentando a noção de que tenha que ser continuamente negada, afastada, coagida e domesticada, em prol de construções sociais bastante questionáveis, porém acatadas como necessárias. (shrink)

The article presents the results of an investigation about Africa should be one of the political, economic and social priorities for Europe because of its strategic location, its high birth rate and its natural wealth, but the reality we are faced with is very different. Spain as the border of North Africa and due to its position as the southern border of the European Union is not only a destination country for significant non-EU migratory flows, but also a country of (...) transit of emigrants to other European Community States, being one of the great challenges that you have to face. Our country, through its cooperation policies by both the Head of State and the government, have had and have the primary objective of strengthening its diplomatic, political and business presence and contributing to its economic transformation and political development. (shrink)

O Transtorno do Espectro Autista (TEA) é caracterizado pela presença de déficits persistentes na comunicação e interação social, além de padrões restritos e repetitivos de comportamentos, interesses e atividades. Como forma de viabilizar a inclusão das crianças autistas no ambiente escolar, a orientação dos professores que atuam com este público é de suma importância. O objetivo do estudo é apresentar a experiência de orientação feita para os professores que lecionam para alunos autistas, acompanhados pelo Núcleo de Atenção ao TEA, da (...) cidade de Monte Alto-SP, no período de junho de 2022 a junho de 2023. Trata-se de um estudo descritivo, do tipo relato de experiência, embasado na ciência ABA (Análise do Comportamento Aplicada) e relacionado às vivências com os professores em orientações, realizadas mensalmente. Como resultado, observou-se a dificuldade dos docentes em acolher estes alunos, direcionar atividades, lidar com comportamentos disruptivos e no manejo das atividades de vida diária. Discute-se a importância de uma ferramenta de apoio para proporcionar aos docentes maior respaldo teórico à prática com alunos autistas, para contribuir na inclusão, aprendizagem e socialização no ambiente escolar. Esta experiência ampliou as vivências sobre a perspectiva do professor na inclusão escolar de crianças com TEA, lançando luz sobre a necessidade de formação teórica e instrumentalização dos docentes, considerando as particularidades de neurodesenvolvimento e comportamento desta população e contribuindo para a maior eficácia da assistência educacional inclusiva. (shrink)

É recente a evocação do termo de “fake news” em comunicações científicas da comunidade acadêmica brasileira inscrita na grande área de Ciências Sociais Aplicadas. Este artigo objetiva identificar a presença do conceito “fake news” em artigos científicos no domínio da grande área das Ciências Sociais Aplicadas por meio de levantamento na Base de Dados em Ciência da Informação. Metodologicamente, a pesquisa é exploratória com abordagem quantitativa e qualitativa, em que a perspectiva cientométrica foi utilizada para representação dos resultados. Apresenta discussões (...) que reforçam o entendimento do papel da comunicação científica para a consolidação de conceitos que visam refletir demandas presentes na sociedade. Considera positivo o aspecto exploratório das discussões para estudos que podem oferecer contribuições no campo dos estudos métricos, da Biblioteconomia e da Ciência da Informação, no intuito de entender a práxis de elaboração conceitual presente em uma comunidade científica circunscrita. (shrink)

El artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación sobre la violencia política en Perú y su actual incidencia en la crisis de legitimidad de las instituciones políticas democráticas. La metodología empleada supone la revisión documental y el tratamiento de otras fuentes sobre las múltiples maneras como el conflicto armado debilitó la credibilidad en los mecanismos y estamentos democráticos. Se presentan elementos concluyentes sobre la continuidad, durante y después del conflicto, de la desigualdad, la frustración en la búsqueda de la verdad (...) y justicia ante la violación de los derechos humanos como causas de la crisis e inestabilidad política en Perú. El artículo permitirá concluir con la grave crisis de gobernabilidad que atraviesa el país, que se traduce en prácticas corruptas que paralizan su desarrollo económico, marcando el paso de una crisis económica a una crisis política: un puente que une los años 1992 a 2018 y que deja como saldo una pérdida generalizada de confianza en la clase política y en las instituciones del poder público en Perú. (shrink)

O presenta artigo se constitui em um estudo interpretativo a respeito dos efeitos da inserção maciça de tecnologias conectadas à rede mundial de computadores, em nossa cultura. Celebradas a ponto de se alastrarem como objeto de desejo por toda a parte, essas tecnologias, sobretudo as mídias móveis, têm se tornado ubíquas e não há um único segmento da sociedade que não tenha sido tocado por essa inserção. A educação formal em nosso país, por meio de políticas públicas como o Programa (...) Nacional de Tecnologia Educacional – Proinfo, procurou introduzir nas escolas da rede recursos para agregar qualidade ao nosso ensino básico, sabidamente precário. Entretanto a iniciativa se depara com resistências de toda a sorte, tanto por parte de gestores quanto de professores. Esse artigo pondera sobre essas resistências procurando ultrapassas questões, tais como falta de capacitação dos gestores, incidência de problemas técnicos ou mera falta interesse nas tecnologias. Busca pistas dessa oposição silenciosa a partir das alterações promovidas pela “virtualidade” na relação simbólica do sujeito com o meio, incidindo na esfera de sua identidade. (shrink)

From March to September 2020, researchers working at a biomedical scientific campus in Spain faced two lockdowns and various mobility restrictions that affected their social and professional lifestyles. The working group “Women in Science,” which acts as an independent observatory of scientific gender inequalities on campus launched an online survey to assess the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on scientific activity, domestic and caregiving tasks, and psychological status. The survey revealed differences in scientific performance by gender: while male researchers participated in (...) a larger number of scientific activities for career development, female researchers performed more invisible scientific tasks, including peer review or outreach activities. Mental impact was greater in researchers caring for children or dependents, and this was aggravated for women. Results spot a disproportionate impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on female scientific career development, and urges for equity measures to mitigate the consequences of an increase in the gender gap in biomedical sciences for current and future pandemics. (shrink)

O presente trabalho busca investigar a formação propagada pelos cursos de Direito do Estado de Alagoas, objetivando avaliar se atendem aos postulados da Educação em Direitos Humanos. Partindo-se do pressuposto de que ainda preponderam o dogmatismo e o olhar legalista na formação dos futuros bacharéis, deixando em segundo plano a formação humanística, adotou-se como opção teórico-metodológica a abordagem de natureza qualitativa, com ênfase na revisão de literatura e na análise dos 18 currículos dos cursos de Direito ofertados em Alagoas. Para (...) a análise dos dados utilizou-se a Análise de Conteúdo de Bardin, elegendo como categorias a presença da disciplina “Direitos Humanos” nos currículos dos cursos de Direito e a proporção de disciplinas de Formação Humanística em relação às técnico-jurídicas. A fim de compreender como a educação em direitos humanos pode influenciar a formação do estudante de Direito, foram analisados os resultados do Enade nos anos de 2006, 2009, 2012 e 2015, nas questões que abordaram, de forma direta ou indireta, os direitos humanos. O referencial teórico pauta-se por autores como: Tardif, Apple, Giroux, Tomaz Tadeu, Barbosa, dentre outros. Palavras-chave: Educação em Direitos Humanos. Cursos Jurídicos. Currículos. Enade. Alagoas. (shrink)

This powerful book tells the story of one teacher's odyssey to understand the inner world of immigrant children, and to create a learning environment that is responsive to these students' feelings and their needs. Featuring the voices and artwork of many immigrant children, this text portrays the immigrant experience of uprooting, culture shock, and adjustment to a new world, and then describes cultural, academic, and psychological interventions that facilitate learning as immigrant students make the transition to a new language and (...) culture. Particularly relevant for courses dealing with multicultural and bilingual education, foundations of education, and literacy curriculum and instruction, this text is essential reading for _all_ teachers who will -- or currently do -- work in today's school environment. (shrink)

Lewis (1968) claims that his language of Counterpart Theory (CT) interprets modal discourse and he adverts to a translation scheme from the language of Quantifed Modal Logic (QML) to CT. However, everybody now agrees that his original translation scheme does not always work, since it does not always preserve the ‘intuitive’ meaning of the translated QML-formulas. Lewis discusses this problem with regard to the Necessitist Thesis, and I will extend his discourse to the analysis of the Converse Barcan Formula. Everyone (...) also agrees that there are CT-formulas that can express the QMLcontent that gets lost through the translation. The problem is how we arrive to them. In this paper, I propose new translation rules from QML to CT, based on a suggestion by Kaplan. However, I will claim that we cannot have ‘the’ translation scheme from QML to CT. The reason being that de re modal language is ambiguous. Accordingly, there are diferent sorts of QML, depending on how we resolve such ambiguity. Therefore, depending on what sort of QML we intend to translate into CT, we need to use the corresponding translation scheme. This suggests that all the translation problems might just disappear if we do what Lewis did not: begin with a fully worked out QML that tells us how to understand de re modal discourse. (shrink)

This article addresses several issues raised by Nichols, Gintis, and Skyrms and Zollman in their comments on my book, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms . In particular, I explore the relation between social and personal norms, what an adequate game-theoretic representation of norms should be, and what models of norms emergence should tell us about the formation of normative expectations.

Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them. In Figurative Language and Thought, internationally recognized experts in the (...) field of figurative language, Albert Katz, Mark Turner, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Cristina Cacciari, provide a coherent and focused debate on the subject. The book's authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, including: What can figures of speech tell us about the structure of the conceptual system? If and how should we distinguish the literal from the nonliteral in our theories of language and thought? Are we primarily figurative thinkers and consequently figurative language users or the other way around? Why do we prefer to speak metaphorically in everyday conversation, when literal options may be available for use? Is metaphor the only vehicle through which we can understand abstract concepts? What role do cultural and social factors play in our comprehension of figurative language? These and related questions are raised and argued in an integrative look at the role of nonliteral language in cognition. This volume, a part of Counterpoints series, will be thought-provoking reading for a wide range of cognitive psychologists, linguists, and philosophers. (shrink)

Il s'agit de montrer l'équivocité de la notion de substance quand on la prend à la fois chez Descartes et chez Leibniz, et de comparer à propos de ce problème les positions des deux philosophes. La question est abordée sous l'angle du rapport entre les modifications de rôle et de sens de la notion de substance telle qu'elles apparaissent chez les deux représentants des tendances constitutives de l'epistême classique. La confrontation sert à préciser, d'une part, les déterminations ontologiques du maintien (...) de cette notion dans les problématiques respectives de Descartes et de Leibniz; d'autre part, elle vise à alimenter d'une pièce supplémentaire le débat sur la différence entre les enjeux du rationalisme cartésien et celui leibnizien.We will first examine the manner in which Descartes and Leibniz each defines the notion of substance; then the meaning that each of these authors attributes to this notion; finally, we shall analyze the relations between substances in their respective systems. This comparison should serve to throw light on the ontological determinations of this notion as it appears in the respective systems of Descartes and Leibniz as well as to differenciate between the rationalism of each to them. (shrink)

In Democracy Reloaded, Cristina Flesher Fominaya tells the story of: Spain's Indignados or 15-M, one of the most influential social movements of recent times. In the wake of the global financial crisis and harsh austerity policies, 15-M movement activists occupied public squares across the country, mobilized millions of Spanish citizens, gave rise to new hybrid parties such as Podemos, and inspired pro-democracy movements around the world.

Savant aux intérêts multiples--historiques, scientifiques et religieux, connu et estimé dans l'Europe du XVIIIe siècle, bien qu'ayant très peu publié de son vivant, Firmin Abauzit reste à beaucoup d'égards un mystère. Comment ce réfugié huguenot, arrivé à Genève encore enfant après la révocation de l'édit de Nantes, a-t-il pu bénéficier d'une réputation flatteuse dans la ville d'accueil alors que ses opinions hétérodoxes sur la trinité ou la christologie ou les prophéties bibliques étaient notoires? Au-delà des étiquettes faciles, quelle était la (...) nature exacte de son hétérodoxie? Comment sa légendaire 'modestie', qui lui a fait refuser honneurs et charges publiques, se concilie-t-elle avec le fait de laisser copier et circuler abondamment en Europe ses manuscrits? Quel rapport existe-t-il entre une telle circulation et son refus obstiné d'autoriser la publication de ses travaux? Comment interpréter, dans son cas, la tension entre réputation et publication? À ces questions, souvent escamotées ou abordées dans une visée hagiographique, le volume répond par une réflexion large qui croise l'histoire des religions, de la littérature, de la philosophie et du fait religieux. Une approche qui intègre des aspects peu ou pas du tout étudiés de la vaste production de l'auteur, tels que le rapport entre idolâtrie et religion, ou sa lecture de textes déistes anglais, ou encore ses écrits de controverse confessionnelle, mais qui reprend aussi, en les renouvelant, des thèmes plus classiques, comme la célèbre note de Rousseau sur Abauzit philosophe ou les éditions concurrentes qui ont été publiées peu après la mort du savant"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This paper aims to study the role of the social robot Probo in providing assistance to a therapist for robot assisted therapy (RAT) with autistic children. Children with autism have difficulties with social interaction and several studies indicate that they show preference toward interaction with objects, such as computers and robots, rather than with humans. In 1991, Carol Gray developed Social Stories, an intervention tool aimed to increase children's social skills. Social stories are short scenarios written or tailored for autistic (...) individuals to help them understand and behave appropriately in social situations. This study shows that, in specific situations, the social performance of autistic children improves when using the robot Probo, as a medium for social story telling, than when a human reader tells the stories. The robot tells Social Stories to teach ASD children how to react in situations like saying “hello“, saying “thank you“ and “sharing toys“. The robot has the capability of expressing emotions and attention via its facial expressions and its gaze. The paper discusses the use of Probo as an added-value therapeutic tool for social story telling and presents the first experimental results. Keywords: social robot; ASD children; social story; robot assisted therapy. (shrink)

This paper aims to study the role of the social robot Probo in providing assistance to a therapist for robot assisted therapy with autistic children. Children with autism have difficulties with social interaction and several studies indicate that they show preference toward interaction with objects, such as computers and robots, rather than with humans. In 1991, Carol Gray developed Social Stories, an intervention tool aimed to increase children’s social skills. Social stories are short scenarios written or tailored for autistic individuals (...) to help them understand and behave appropriately in social situations. This study shows that, in specific situations, the social performance of autistic children improves when using the robot Probo, as a medium for social story telling, than when a human reader tells the stories. The robot tells Social Stories to teach ASD children how to react in situations like saying “hello”, saying “thank you” and “sharing toys”. The robot has the capability of expressing emotions and attention via its facial expressions and its gaze. The paper discusses the use of Probo as an added-value therapeutic tool for social story telling and presents the first experimental results. Keywords: social robot; ASD children; social story; robot assisted therapy. (shrink)

This paper aims to study the role of the social robot Probo in providing assistance to a therapist for robot assisted therapy with autistic children. Children with autism have difficulties with social interaction and several studies indicate that they show preference toward interaction with objects, such as computers and robots, rather than with humans. In 1991, Carol Gray developed Social Stories, an intervention tool aimed to increase children’s social skills. Social stories are short scenarios written or tailored for autistic individuals (...) to help them understand and behave appropriately in social situations. This study shows that, in specific situations, the social performance of autistic children improves when using the robot Probo, as a medium for social story telling, than when a human reader tells the stories. The robot tells Social Stories to teach ASD children how to react in situations like saying “hello”, saying “thank you” and “sharing toys”. The robot has the capability of expressing emotions and attention via its facial expressions and its gaze. The paper discusses the use of Probo as an added-value therapeutic tool for social story telling and presents the first experimental results. Keywords: social robot; ASD children; social story; robot assisted therapy. (shrink)

Tim Wardle’s 2018 documentary film Three Identical Strangers is an exploration of identity, family, and loss. It’s also about nature versus nurture and the boundaries of ethically permissible research, particularly research involving children. The film tells the story of identical triplets who were separated soon after birth in 1961. A different family adopted each boy, without being told that their son had two identical brothers. The adoption agency responsible for finding the families was collaborating with a group of researchers working (...) on a study about … something. Three Identical Strangers details the boys’ fight to obtain information about the study and for closure. But while the film may have received rave reviews, it left us feeling uneasy. We came away with two sets of questions, one having to do with the story that the film documents and the second with the ethics of filmmaking itself. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to promote an analysis of the intercultural experience carried out through the exchange of letters with children from the city of Ninomiya, Kanagawa Province – Japan, with children from the Municipal Education Network of the Veranópolis, Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil. The exchanges take place annually through the Post and Telegraph service in Brazil and Japan, between students from the 3rd to 9th years of this network. Japanese children write to Veranians and vice (...) versa. They tell facts about their routine, their city, peculiar aspects of their daily lives, including photos and geographic and cultural characteristics specific to each local space. This experience invites us to expand our gaze on the importance of thematizing, in the educational process, sociocultural aspects of different peoples, social groups, customs and ways of being and living together. We challenge ourselves to reflect on how this practice of exchanging letters, between children from two very different countries, both socially and culturally, manages to raise awareness about issues related to interculturality as a field of debate about identity processes that constitute an environment. Furthermore, it allows us to analyze issues related to the ease of writing and the symbology used to describe aspects related to the daily life of each child, as well as the subjectivity in each message in the exchange of letters. The reciprocity in exchanges, the care with the details present in each report, the richness that makes up the writing and how everyday life presents itself with similarities and differences in the life of each student, whether here or in Japan, are essential components in the construction of this analysis. Keywords: Local history. Interculturality. Education. Global citizenship. (shrink)

Health systems in Africa have been widely studied in the social sciences. Several aspects have been addressed in particular: the provision of and access to care, working conditions, the human resources crisis, and patient–provider relations, for example. In this respect, the idea of an “attitude problem,” with health-care providers offering different services for different patients, has been suggested. Recently, researchers have studied the impact of global health initiatives on local health systems, mainly in the fight against HIV/aids. Others have explored (...) why some health issues have attracted more attention than others. Despite this wealth of studies, one point remains insufficiently addressed: the materiality of care and its impact on interactions within hospital settings. In this article, I consider the heuristic value of the uses of a maternity ward in a resource-limited country to understand health workers’ so-called attitude problem, specifically, the tension characteristic of patient–provider interactions. I suggest that this tension is related to a continuous process of translation and anticipation to adapt the maternity ward’s space to everyday activities. Drawing on Akrich’s description of technical objects, and Lussault’s pragmatics of space, I attempt to show that in this context, care is also an art of tinkering with unpredictable bodies in unstable hospitals’ spaces. (shrink)

This study looks at the interactions between health workers, physical space, surgical tools, and the “patient-body” in an operating theater. My aim is to explore the approaches of Katz, Rawlings, and Collins and to show that when rituals, restrictive entrance procedures, and clothing requirements are not in place, when rules are not observed for reasons that this article addresses, the boundary between the operating theater and its surroundings blurs. It becomes a trivialized space. Data were collected in the regional hospital (...) of one major town of the Extrême Nord of Cameroon. I describe a context of crisis and a lack of equipment and personnel that narrow the boundaries of the operating room but do not erase them. Restrictive entrance procedures, clothing requirements, rituals, and rules that are supposed to separate the operating theater from its surroundings, as Katz has shown, are not observed. Instead, the theater is connected to its surroundings through an “intriguing combination of practices” consistent with the analyses of Rawling and Collins. Thus, the operating theater is not a closed and limited area inside the hospital that can be completely isolated from its surroundings. There is continuity between the interior and the exterior. (shrink)

Dès l'Antiquité, puis ensuite à l’âge classique, se développe toute une littérature qui aborde des questions relatives à la politique au travers de récits de fiction, satires ou utopies. Le récit est alors utilisé comme un moyen d’éviter la censure dans l’analyse critique du régime en place ou du discours dominant ; comme une façon de mettre en scène des expériences philosophiques sur des sociétés imaginaires, ou encore comme une manière détournée d’éveiller l’intelligence politique du lecteur.

Après avoir questionné l'application de la notion d'audience à Internet, l'article se livre à une analyse critique des dispositifs de mesures et d'études d'audience qui reposent sur un agencement d'outils informatiques, statistiques et marketing. Les mesures de trafic et les enquêtes en ligne ne sont pas tant conçues pour la connaissance des publics que comme outils stratégiques pour la conception de site, la publicité et le commerce électronique. Outre les enjeux déontologiques soulevés par l'exploitation des traces laissées par les internautes, (...) ces dispositifs produisent des modèles de quantification des utilisations qui ne permettent pas de saisir l'usage social du média.After questioning whether the concept of "audience" is applicable to the Internet, this article provides a critical analysis of Internet audience studies based on a combination of computing tools, statistics, and marketing. It analyzes the different methodologies used to measure audiences , as well as online surveys. These devices are mainly used as strategic tools for advertising and electronic commerce. While Internet audience studies raise ethical issues about the protection of users’ privacy, they merely build empirical models that do not allow us to grasp the social uses of Internet. (shrink)

This book articulates a participatory conception of deliberative democracy that takes the democratic ideal of self-government seriously. It aims to improve citizens' democratic control and vindicate the value of citizens' participation against conceptions that threaten to undermine it. The book critically analyzes deep pluralist, epistocratic, and lottocratic conceptions of democracy. Their defenders propose various institutional ''shortcuts'' to help solve problems of democratic governance such as overcoming disagreements, citizens' political ignorance, or poor-quality deliberation. However, all these shortcut proposals require citizens to (...) blindly defer to actors over whose decisions they cannot exercise control. Implementing such proposals would therefore undermine democracy. Moreover, it seems naive to assume that a community can reach better outcomes 'faster' if it bypasses the beliefs and attitudes of its citizens. Unfortunately, there are no 'shortcuts' to make a community better than its members. The only road to better outcomes is the long, participatory road that is taken when citizens forge a collective will by changing one another's hearts and minds. However difficult the process of justifying political decisions to one another may be, skipping it cannot get us any closer to the democratic ideal. Starting from this conviction, the book defends a conception of democracy ''without shortcuts''. This conception sheds new light on long-standing debates about the proper scope of public reason, the role of religion in politics, and the democratic legitimacy of judicial review. It also proposes new ways to unleash the democratic potential of institutional innovations such as deliberative minipublics. (shrink)

In The Grammar of Society, first published in 2006, Cristina Bicchieri examines social norms, such as fairness, cooperation, and reciprocity, in an effort to understand their nature and dynamics, the expectations that they generate, and how they evolve and change. Drawing on several intellectual traditions and methods, including those of social psychology, experimental economics and evolutionary game theory, Bicchieri provides an integrated account of how social norms emerge, why and when we follow them, and the situations where we are (...) most likely to focus on relevant norms. Examining the existence and survival of inefficient norms, she demonstrates how norms evolve in ways that depend upon the psychological dispositions of the individual and how such dispositions may impair social efficiency. By contrast, she also shows how certain psychological propensities may naturally lead individuals to evolve fairness norms that closely resemble those we follow in most modern societies. (shrink)

In Norms in the Wild, distinguished philosopher Cristina Bicchieri argues that when it comes to human behavior, social scientists place too much stress on rational deliberation. In fact, she says, many choices occur without much deliberation at all. Two people passing in a corridor automatically negotiate their shared space; cars at an intersection obey traffic signals; we choose clothing based on our instincts for what is considered appropriate. Bicchieri's theory of social norms accounts for these automatic components of coordination, (...) where individuals react automatically to cues that focus their attention on what the norm is in that situation. Social norms thus act as rules for making choices in a social world where people expect others -- often unconsciously -- to follow the same rule. Some norms enable seamless social co-operation, while others are less beneficial to human flourishing.Bicchieri is famous for her interdisciplinary work on game theory and most recently her work on social norms, and Norms in the Wild represents her latest challenge to many of the fundamental assumptions of the social sciences. Bicchieri's work has broad implications not only for understanding human behavior, but for changing it for better outcomes. People have a strongly conditioned preference for following social norms, but that also means that manipulating their expectations can cause major behavioral changes. Bicchieri has been working recently with UNICEF and other NGO's to explore the applicability of her views to issues of human rights around the world. Is it possible to change social expectations around forced marriage, genital mutilations, and public health practices like vaccinations and sanitation? If so, how? What tools might we use? This short book explores how social norms work, and how changing them - changing preferences, beliefs, and especially social expectations - can potentially improve lives all around the world. It will appeal to an unusually broad range of readers including philosophers, psychologists and others in behavioral sciences, and anyone involved in public policy or at NGOs. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In memory of Professor Louise Marcil, from the University of Montreal, who died prematurely in April 1995, this special issue of Dialogue is dedicated to Equality. In addition to presenting the various contributions, the Introduction traces the main strands of Louise Marcil’s work on equality. The impressive corpus of her writings on the subject is characterized throughout by sensitivity to the historical and conceptual complexity of egalitarian theories and policies and by a depth of scholarship, the richness of which (...) defies classification into traditional philosophical schools. Moreover, far from being merely abstract scholarship, this work was clearly intended to strengthen actual egalitarian social projects, to which Louise Marcil was passionately committed. The contributions to this special issue of Dialogue have been selected in large part to reflect the diversity and scholarly standards of Louise Marcil’s approach to equality as well as its engaged spirit. (shrink)

Cet article présente un service de consultation conjugale situé en Suisse romande, non médicalisé, dont l’orientation psychodynamique et le travail auprès des couples n’est pas sans rappeler la pratique française des conseillers conjugaux-thérapeutes de couple « ancien modèle ». Si l’appellation de consultation conjugale a été retenue, malgré ses inconvénients, c’est qu’elle permet de toucher un très large public, en particulier de nombreuses personnes insuffisamment individuées pour qui l’appartenance au « Nous-couple » est constitutive. Par rapport aux objectifs de travail, (...) l’auteure explore deux voies, illustrées par deux vignettes cliniques : l’une vise à recouvrir une problématique sous-jacente en rétablissant un équilibre antérieur, l’autre à découvrir l’arrangement défensif du couple en introduisant une dynamique de changement. (shrink)