Depuis qu'elles existent, les sciences dites exactes se prétendent différentes des autres savoirs. Comment comprendre cette prétention? Faut-il, à la manière des épistémologues anglo-saxons ou de Karl Popper, tenter d'identifier les critères qui la justifient? Peut-on, suivant le modèle nouveau des études sociales des sciences, y voir une simple croyance? Ce livre propose un dépassement fructueux de l'opposition, apparemment irréconciliable, entre ces deux approches des sciences. Et si la tension entre objectivité scientifique et croyance était justement constitutive des sciences, enjeu (...) des pratiques inventées et réinventées par les scientifiques? Réussir à parler des sciences avec humour, sans en faire un objet de vénération, ni de dénonciation, en restant au plus proche de la passion des scientifiques, tel est ici le pari d'Isabelle Stengers. Mais ce livre ne se limite pas à un discours sur les sciences. Il s'agit bien plutôt de prolonger l'histoire de leur invention. Comment comprendre les liens multiples entre la science et les pouvoirs qui la mobilisent aujourd'hui? Comment concevoir les rapports entre science, expertise et démocratie? La nouveauté de L'invention des sciences modernes est de faire de ces différents problèmes intellectuels, pratiques et politiques les enjeux du processus par où pourrait s'inventer et se renouveler l'identité même des sciences. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead has never gone out of print, but for a time he was decidedly out of fashion in the English-speaking world. In a splendid work that serves as both introduction and erudite commentary, Isabelle Stengersâe"one of todayâe(tm)s leading philosophers of scienceâe"goes straight to the beating heart of Whiteheadâe(tm)s thought. The product of thirty yearsâe(tm) engagement with the mathematician-philosopherâe(tm)s entire canon, this volume establishes Whitehead as a daring thinker on par with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. (...) Reading the texts in broadly chronological order while highlighting major works, Stengers deftly unpacks Whiteheadâe(tm)s often complicated language, explaining the seismic shifts in his thinking and showing how he called into question all that philosophers had considered settled after Descartes and Kant. She demonstrates that the implications of Whiteheadâe(tm)s philosophical theories and specialized knowledge of the various sciences come yoked with his innovative, revisionist take on God. Whiteheadâe(tm)s God exists within a specific epistemological realm created by a radically complex and often highly mathematical language. âeoeTo think with Whitehead today,âe Stengers writes, âeoemeans to sign on in advance to an adventure that will leave none of the terms we normally use as they were.âe. (shrink)

This memorial to Latour is not an appraisal of his fifty-year research career but the report of a traveling companion with a story to share about the apparent lack of continuity, the sudden, unapologetic, unprincipled changes of position, with which he surprised or scandalized his colleagues and readers. In the first place, was he a sociologist, an anthropologist, a philosopher? Though he did not make lasting commitments of that kind, he did make deeper ones that did not change—above all, never (...) to explain anything in terms of something more general and, thus, never to accept the position of judge. To follow Latour's problematic changes—sometimes referred to as his “versatility”—demands that we follow the changes of the very terms of the problems that his basic commitment bound him to confront. From the 1980s, when his work dealt with technoscientific progress, to the years of his growing concern with political ecology, and finally to his recognition of the oncoming climate chaos, dizzying leaps were entailed by his resistance to the temptation of judging. Involved in, but never the cause of, various of his leaps, Stengers describes her friend as responding, perforce, to changing times, rather than as behaving like a theorist thinking mainly of his image, reputation, and career. (shrink)

Making reason and revelation agree, notably by defining the former’s subordination to the latter, was one of the main concerns of European Medieval scholasticism; and from the tension between the weight of scriptural authority and the aspiration to the independence of rational inquiry finally emerged in Europe a philosophical field free of any allegiance to a revealed discourse – or at least pretending to be so – and castigating the old “scholastic method”. In India, by way of contrast, the philosophical (...) field has remained essentially scholastic inasmuch as most philosophical systems never ceased to acknowledge scripture (āgama) as a means of valid knowledge, and even often asserted its supremacy over reason and experience. Yet, just as European scholasticism cannot be reduced to the image of it that has prevailed since Descartes, the relationship between scriptural authority and rational enquiry in India is much more complex than might appear at first sight. It is first and foremost in order to defend their respective scriptures that various Indian religious currents chose to engage in philosophical debates; but this apologetic intention paradoxically led their champions to set aside scriptural authority. The paper points out this strange process of philosophical emancipation, born of apologetic concerns and nourished by them; and by comparing two apparently diametrically opposed definitions of the relationship between reason and revelation – that of the Buddhist Dharmakīrti, and that of the Śaiva nondualist Utpaladeva –, it aims at showing that although the Indian philosophical field never acquired the autonomy (real or proclaimed) that has characterized Western philosophy from the 17th century onwards, it grew in a constant creative tension between the acceptance and rejection of scriptural authority. (shrink)

The article is built in twelve remarks posing and arguing the “choice of not to”: not to enter the systematics of Joas’ essay and Joas’ thought about what he conceives as “the powers of the sacred”. The discussion is based on the introduction to the book and the preface to its French translation, remaining in a multidisciplinary references field, external to the Joasian systematics. It is not about the terms of the debate, nor about the debate concerning the Weber’s concept (...) of disenchantment and its reception. On the contrary, all along the threshold pages of Joas’ essay, the argument consolidates its discussing exteriority, without seeking or claiming to invalidate Joas’ thesis. The choice of not to, as a way of thinking attempted here, is closer to the Taubesian “discordant accord” figure, than that of the Weberian “elective attraction”, which, moreover, Joas takes over in his own way. What is at stake is not to subscribe to the anachronistic invalidation of a modern self-understanding that was effective, which indeed does not solve the question of thinking how it is outdated today. It is also not to subscribe to think the extreme effective plurality of the religions on the bases of two unifying notions, the political and the (in fact too particular) notion of “sacred”. (shrink)

En ce XXe siècle, où la physique s'est identifiée à la science révolutionnaire par excellence, l'œuvre passionnée d'Ilya Prigogine constitue une singulière anomalie. Anormale parce qu'elle prend le parti du monde des phénomènes physiques contre le pouvoir de la théorie, jugé abusif ; mais anormale aussi par sa longue obstination à une époque où la rapidité fait foi. Le combat avait commencé au début des années soixante, sur un mode mineur : Prigogine demandait à ses collègues de reconnaître qu' " (...) il y a certainement une signification physique profonde dans l'équation de Boltzman ". Thèse apparemment bien légitime : l'équation de Boltzmann permet de décrire avec succès le comportement de non-équilibre des gaz dilués. Mais thèse iconoclaste : car, depuis que la croissance de l'entropie a été renvoyée aux seules probabilités, le comportement de non-équilibre n'est plus sensé autoriser la moindre " signification profonde ". Raconter l'histoire de ce combat, comme le fait Isabelle Stengers dans ce livre, revient à interroger les lois fondamentales sous l'angle du lien entre théorie, valeur et obligation. En effet, sans ce lien, ni la position de Prigogine ni celle des physiciens contre qui il va chercher des arguments toujours plus puissants ne sont intelligibles. L'auteur montre que ce lien permet d' " inventer " des problèmes : Il y a Prigogine qui oppose ainsi des lois nouvelles, les " lois du chaos ", au déterminisme absolu des lois fondamentales de la physique. La physique est habitée par la passion de la loi, mais la manière dont cette passion est ici réinventée pourrait ouvrir de nouvelles voies, vitales pour une " écologie des pratiques ". Serait-il possible que le physicien ne se présente plus comme celui par qui s'opère la fascinante découverte des lois de la nature? Serait-il possible de célébrer avec lui l'extraordinaire aventure que constitue l'invention d'un objet capable de dicter la manière dont il doit être décrit? (shrink)

La vie a-t-elle émergé de la matière? Et dans ce cas, comprendre le vivant signifie-t-il le réduire à un ensemble particulier d'interactions physico-chimiques? Et comprendre l'expérience psychique, est-ce la réduire à l'activité de populations neuronales enchevêtrées? Le premier visage proposé par la question de l'émergence de la vie est celui de l'affrontement entre les conquérants de la réduction et les défenseurs de la différence qualitative entre le tout et ses parties. Visage polémique, affichant l'arrogance et les prétentions qui dominent l'écologie (...) des pratiques scientifiques. Avec le thème de l'auto-organisation, l'émergence propose aujourd'hui d'autres visages, plus avenants, car ils annoncent un intérêt nouveau, orienté vers l'exploitation des propriétés en vérité très singulières que l'apparition et l'évolution des vivants pourraient avoir requis de la matière. Une approche pacifique de la question de l'émergence est-elle désormais possible? Ou s'agit-il là d'une opération de pacification, menée à l'encontre de belligérants naïfs par des tiers qui en savent plus? Les différents visages de l'émergence expriment les différents types de liens qui existent ou pourraient s'inventer entre pratiques scientifiques, entre constructeurs de modèles et praticiens de terrain. Mais les protagonistes de la question de l'émergence, qu'ils entendent la réduire, à la manière des sociobiologistes, ou en célébrer la complexité innovante, ne peuvent s'empêcher de rêver, de spéculer sur la possibilité d'une approche enfin scientifique qui permettrait de nous comprendre nous-mêmes et de comprendre les enjeux de nos histoires. Isabelle Stengers prend ici le risque d'accepter que cette composante spéculative est irrépressible. Mais l'enjeu est alors de reconnaître les situations où la spéculation change de nature, parce que les pratiques scientifiques s'y adressent à ces questions posées par d'autres, et qu'elles obligent à une rencontre avec d'autres pratiques humaines, modernes et non-modernes. (shrink)

As intergenerational interactions increase due to an ageing population, the study of emotion-related responses to the elderly is increasingly relevant. Previous research found mixed results regarding affective mimicry – a measure related to liking and affiliation. In the current study, we investigated emotional mimicry to younger and older actors following an encounter with a younger and older player in a Cyberball game. In a complete exclusion condition, in which both younger and older players excluded the participant, we expected emotional mimicry (...) to be stronger for younger vs. older actors. In a partial inclusion condition, in which the younger player excluded while the older player included the participant, we predicted that the difference in player behaviour would lead to a difference in liking. This increased liking of the older interaction partner should reduce the difference in emotional mimicry towards the two different age groups. Results revealed more mimicry for older actors following partial inclusion especially for negative emotions, suggesting inclusive behaviour by an older person in an interaction as a possible means to increase mimicry and affiliation to the elderly. (shrink)

Pourquoi les sciences modernes n'avancent-elles que sur le mode guerrier - guerre du scientifique contre ses concurrents, guerre du savant contre le " charlatan ", guerre du " nouveau " contre l' " ancien "? Pourquoi ces sciences sont-elles présentes parmi nous sous le jour le plus faux : triomphe d'un savoir enfin objectif, neutre et désintéressé, produit par une démarche méthodique, humble et sereine? Et pourquoi, lorsque les scientifiques osent dire leurs rêves et leurs ambitions, est-ce si souvent la (...) spéculation arrogante, le mépris et la polémique qui trouvent à s'exprimer? Les savoirs modernes sont aujourd'hui habités par une obsession de la différenciation. Et cette obsession de la différence à rappeler, de l'opposition à maintenir, entre objectivité scientifique et savoirs subjectifs, les voue à exister sur le mode de la guerre généralisée, guerre défensive ou offensive de chacun contre les autres, guerre de tous contre ce qu'ils s'accordent à disqualifier en tant que simple opinion. Est-il possible de civiliser les savoirs modernes, d'inventer entre eux et avec nous un régime de coexistence pacifique? Est-ce possible, sans leur demander de renoncer aux rêves et aux passions qui les font exister, sans exiger qu'ils se soumettent, au nom de cette paix à établir, à un quelconque tribunal distribuant les droits et les devoirs de chacun? C'est pour construire une réponse à cette question qu'Isabelle Stengers tente ici une démarche tout à la fois de diagnostic et de pronostic. Car il s'agit tout aussi bien de comprendre les valeurs que font exister les sciences, que de risquer un pari sur un avenir possible où ces valeurs seraient activement dissociées du pouvoir de disqualifier. Le projet d'une mise en culture des sciences n'a rien à voir, alors, avec un quelconque supplément d'âme, ou une meilleure diffusion des connaissances scientifiques. Pour Isabelle Stengers, il passe par la construction de ce qu'exigerait une véritable écologie des pratiques, modernes et non modernes. (shrink)

L'homme et l'univers ne font-ils qu'un? L'antique sagesse chinoise détient-elle une clé précieuse pour habiter le monde? Comment concilier l'absolu et la réalité du monde? Le taoïsme est depuis plus de deux mille ans la principale religion chinoise. Fondée par le sage Lao zi (Lao - Tseu), elle repose sur la dialectique universelle des principes féminin et masculin et de la non -existence et de l'existence (yin et yang). Le succès en Occident d'ouvrages taoïstes, comme le Yi-King ou le Tao-Te-King, (...) révèle un intérêt croissant pour cette philosophie chinoise globale à caractère cosmique. Allant aux sources mêmes de cette pensée, la rendant accessible, mettant à la disposition du lecteur quelques-uns de ses textes majeurs, l'auteur a écrit un ouvrage qui constitue la meilleure introduction publiée en France jusqu'à ce jour. (shrink)

Au début de ce siècle, les atomes ont enfin conquis droit de cité à l'intérieur de la physique. Leur foule désordonnée, les évènements multiples dont ils sont les acteurs, renvoient aux apparences les lois classiques de la physique. Le monde s'est peuplé et le peuple des atomes semble rebelle à la loi. Et pourtant, quelques années plus tard, ce peuple rebelle est devenu silencieux. La loi règne à nouveau, et elle descend en ligne directe de la plus étonnante des créations (...) de la physique mathématique, la mécanique quantique. Moment de triomphe ou moment de désarroi? Car tout se passe comme si, soudain, les physiciens avaient perdu l'accès à ce qu'ils appelaient réalité, comme si tout savoir portant sur cette réalité devait être reconnu comme irrémédiablement factice. La loi règne, certes, mais dans le silence, une coupure infranchissable venant, semble-t-il séparer le langage que nous devons utiliser pour décrire la réalité et la vérité indicible de cette réalité. Le réel est voilé. La tragédie de la mécanique quantique a fait l'objet de mille et une controverses qui semblent témoigner que la physique, ici, est confrontée à des questions proprement philosophiques : la réalité est-elle connaissable? Voire, " existe-t-elle-en soi "? Mais une autre hypothèse peut être proposée, qui permettrait de transformer en comédie non dénuée d'humour l'ironie tragique d'un rêve dont l'accomplissement final entraîne la destruction. Car les questions d'apparence philosophique et le renoncement ascétique auxquels la mécanique quantique semble appeler les physiciens traduisent peut être d'abord et avant tout les moyens que ceux-ci ont utilisés pour faire faire le monde événementiel et tumultueux dont ils avaient gagné l'accès, pour transmuter en harmonie mathématique le bruit des atomes. (shrink)

Biobanks correspond to different situations: research and technological development, medical diagnosis or therapeutic activities. Their status is not clearly defined. We aimed to investigate human biobanking in Europe, particularly in relation to organisational, economic and ethical issues in various national contexts. Data from a survey in six EU countries were collected as part of a European Research Project examining human and non-human biobanking. A total of 147 institutions concerned with biobanking of human samples and data were investigated by questionnaires and (...) interviews. Most institutions surveyed belong to the public or private non-profit-making sectors, which have a key role in biobanking. This activity is increasing in all countries because few samples are discarded and genetic research is proliferating. Collections vary in size, many being small and only a few very large. Their purpose is often research, or research and healthcare, mostly in the context of disease studies. A specific budget is very rarely allocated to biobanking and costs are not often evaluated. Samples are usually provided free of charge and gifts and exchanges are the common rule. Good practice guidelines are generally followed and quality controls are performed but quality procedures are not always clearly explained. Associated data are usually computerised. Biobankers generally favour centralisation of data rather than of samples. Legal and ethical harmonisation within Europe is considered likely to facilitate international collaboration. We propose a series of recommendations and suggestions arising from the EUROGENBANK project. (shrink)

La 4e de couverture indique : "Si la philosophie la plus contemporaine s'articule autour de la critique de la représentation et dénonce dans la métaphysique classique la volonté d'unir en un seul concept (celui de "représenter") la multiplicité des dimensions de la pensée, elle tend parfois à négliger le fait que cette assomption de la représentation fut souvent accompagnée de sa remise en question. L'idéalisme allemand est l'un des moments de la crise de la représentation, l'une des figures les plus (...) radicales de sa critique. C'est, sur la base d'une étude de la philosophie de Fichte, ce que cet ouvrage vise à démontrer. En effet, Fichte substitue à la pensée comme représentation (Kant), la pensée comme acte, à la notion de connaissance, celle de savoir, à la notion de figuration, celle de réflexion. Ce modèle de la réflexion a ceci de spécifique que le problème, qui préside à son élaboration n'est pas, comme dans la philosophie classique de la subjectivité, de savoir comment le sujet peut revenir sur lui-même, mais comment le philosophe peut dire ce qu'il dit sans se contredire en le disant. Cette question du statut du discours du philosophe et la nécessité, pour lui, de dégager, dans tout ce qu'il dit, la forme et l'instance de son dire explique les thèmes les plus marquants de la doctrine de la science (acte, savoir et infini), la structure - totalement inédite - de son argumentation et en garantit la cohérence ; cohérence tant entre les différentes versions de la doctrine de la science qu'entre cette doctrine et les disciplines particulières (éthique, droit, religion). Dépasser la dimension traditionnellement spéculaire de la pensée et, pour ce faire, passer de la connaissance au savoir, de la validité objective à la vérité réflexive, de l'objectivation qui limite à la raison qui infinitise, tel est donc le sens de cette philosophie qu'il devient loisible de comparer aux figures les plus actuelles de la critique de la représentation.". (shrink)

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, an important conceptual battleground for democratic theorists ought to be, it would seem, the capitalist firm. We are now painfully aware that the typical model of government in so-called investor-owned companies remains profoundly oligarchic, hierarchical, and unequal. Renewing with the literature of the 1970s and 1980s on workplace democracy, a few political theorists have started to advocate democratic reforms of the workplace by relying on an analogy between firm and state. To (...) the extent that a firm is an organization comparable to the state, it too ought to be ruled along democratic lines. Our paper tests the robustness of the analogy between firm and state by considering six major objections to it: the objection from a difference in ends, the objection from shareholders’ property rights, the objection from worker’s consent, the objection from workers’ exit opportunities, the objection from workers’ expertise, and the objection from the fragility of firms. We find all of these objections wanting. While the paper does not ambition to settle the issue of workplace democracy at once, our goal is to pave the way for a more in-depth study of the ways in which firms and states can be compared and the possible implications this may have for our understanding of the nature of managerial authority and the governance of firms. (shrink)

Joseph Priestley, the eighteenth-century scientist who discovered oxygen, was one of the most remarkable thinkers of his time. This collection of essays by a team of experts covers the full range of his work in the fields of education, politics, philosophy, and theology, and firmly re-establishes him as a major intellectual figure.

The paper provides a new critical perspective on the propensity interpretation of fitness, by investigating its relationship to the propensity interpretation of probability. Two main conclusions are drawn. First, the claim that fitness is a propensity cannot be understood properly: fitness is not a propensity in the sense prescribed by the propensity interpretation of probability. Second, this interpretation of probability is inessential for explanations proposed by the PIF in evolutionary biology. Consequently, interpreting the probabilistic dimension of fitness in terms of (...) propensities is neither a strong motivation in favor of this interpretation, nor a possible target for substantial criticism. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive presentation of the Pratyabhij philosophy (elaborated in the 10th and 11th centuries by Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta) by showing how its main concepts arose from the confrontation of aiva religious dogmas ...

Based on an extensive review of the literature and field surveys, the paper proposes a conceptualization and operationalization of corporate citizenship meaningful in two countries: the United States and France. A survey of 210 American and 120 French managers provides support for the proposed definition of corporate citizenship as a construct including the four correlated factors of economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary citizenship. The managerial implications of the research and directions for future research are discussed.

Recent years have seen a notable increase in the production of scientific expertise by large multidisciplinary groups. The issue we address is how reports may be written by such groups in spite of their size and of formidable obstacles: complexity of subject matter, uncertainty, and scientific disagreement. Our focus is on the International Panel on Climate Change, unquestionably the best-known case of such collective scientific expertise. What we show is that the organization of work within the IPCC aims to make (...) it possible to produce documents that are indeed expert reports. To do so, we first put forward the epistemic norms that apply to expert reports in general, that is, the properties that reports should have in order to be useful and to help decision-making. Section 2 claims that these properties are: intelligibility, relevance and accuracy. Based on this analysis, section 3 points to the difficulties of having IPCC reports indeed satisfying these norms. We then show how the organization of work within the IPCC aims at and to a large extent secures intelligibility, relevance and accuracy, with the result that IPCC reports can be relied on for decision-making. Section 4 focuses on the fundamentals of IPCC’s work organization--that is, division of labour within the IPCC--while section 5 investigates three frameworks that were introduced over the course of the functioning of the IPCC: the reviewing procedure of IPCC reports, the language that IPCC authors use to express uncertainty and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. Concluding remarks are offered in section 6. (shrink)

Concerned with the interplay between science, society, and power, Isabelle Stengers offers a unique perspective on the power of scientific theories to modify society, and vice versa. 9 diagrams.

This paper demonstrates how argumentation schemes can be used in decision support systems that help clinicians in making treatment decisions. The work builds on the use of computational argumentation, a rigorous approach to reasoning with complex data that places strong emphasis on being able to justify and explain the decisions that are recommended. The main contribution of the paper is to present a novel set of specialised argumentation schemes that can be used in the context of a clinical decision support (...) system to assist in reasoning about what treatments to offer. These schemes provide a mechanism for capturing clinical reasoning in such a way that it can be handled by the formal reasoning mechanisms of formal argumentation. The paper describes how the integration between argumentation schemes and formal argumentation may be carried out, sketches how this is achieved by an implementation that we have created and illustrates the overall process on a small set of case studies. (shrink)

"Isabelle Stengers presents us with a new way of understanding a remarkably diverse range of sciences and their relation to a material and living world. Playing with a position both inside the practices that constitute and transform science and outside the sciences as their mode of conceptualization, Stengers explores the limits, constraints, and inventions that fuse modern science and contemporary society." Elizabeth Grosz --.

This study brings together the analysis of a magazine for children published in a mass-circulation newspaper in a poor industrialized country. Based on a comprehensive survey of articles popularizing science, technology and health topics printed in Notícias Miudinho between 1924 and 1933, this paper intends to show how this publication tuned in with the on-going Portuguese political and educational agenda, while highlighting the idiosyncrasies of the networks involved in the publication of the magazine. In addition, and based on the analysis (...) of the magazine’s mail section, this paper questions historiographic claims about the reduced impact of the Republican education programme. At the same time, this essay intends to contribute to the discussion on the historicity of ‘popular science’ while putting in evidence the importance of understanding the particularities of the actors and networks involved locally to grasp the full extent to which science culturally permeates, mirrors and models society worldwide. (shrink)

Shavelson et al. (2023) identify an important problem in their Target article: a significant number of terminally ill patients with impaired motor function are wrongfully excluded from receiving ai...

The multifaceted nature of empathy requires a comprehensive conceptualization of core and related emotional and mindreading processes. Here I argue that new paradigms are needed that allow for a more ecologically valid and parametric assessment of empathy subprocesses and their neuronal correlates. Towards that goal, cognitive neuroscience studies should make use of audiovisual stimuli that more closely approximate real-life settings and include online social interaction paradigms.

Although the mapping between form and meaning is often regarded as arbitrary, there are in fact well-known constraints on words which are the result of functional pressures associated with language use and its acquisition. In particular, languages have been shown to encode meaning distinctions in their sound properties, which may be important for language learning. Here, we investigate the relationship between semantic distance and phonological distance in the large-scale structure of the lexicon. We show evidence in 100 languages from a (...) diverse array of language families that more semantically similar word pairs are also more phonologically similar. This suggests that there is an important statistical trend for lexicons to have semantically similar words be phonologically similar as well, possibly for functional reasons associated with language learning. (shrink)

Originally published in French in seven volumes, Cosmopolitics investigates the role and authority of the sciences in modern societies and challenges their claims to objectivity, rationality, and truth. Cosmopolitics II includes the first English-language translations of the last four books: Quantum Mechanics: The End of the Dream, In the Name of the Arrow of Time: Prigogine’s Challenge, Life and Artifice: The Faces of Emergence, and The Curse of Tolerance. Arguing for an “ecology of practices” in the sciences, Isabelle Stengers (...) explores the discordant landscape of knowledge derived from modern science, seeking intellectual consistency among contradictory, confrontational, and mutually exclusive philosophical ambitions and approaches. For Stengers, science is a constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and highly contingent system that does not simply discover preexisting truths but, through specific practices and processes, helps shape them.Stengers concludes this philosophical inquiry with a forceful critique of tolerance; it is a fundamentally condescending attitude, she contends, that prevents those worldviews that challenge dominant explanatory systems from being taken seriously. Instead of tolerance, she proposes a “cosmopolitics” that rejects politics as a universal category and allows modern scientific practices to peacefully coexist with other forms of knowledge. (shrink)

So far, the conceptualization and measurement of parental burnout have been deduced from those of job burnout. As a result, it is unclear whether current measures of parental burnout constitute the best representation of the parental burnout construct/syndrome: the possibility cannot be excluded that some dimensions ought to be added, which would change the structure and definition of parental burnout. In this study, the conceptualization and measurement of parental burnout were approached using an inductive method, in which the parental burnout (...) phenomenon was (re)constructed based solely on the testimonies of burned-out parents. Items extracted from their testimonies were presented to a sample of French-speaking and English-speaking parents (N = 901) and submitted to factor analyses. An identifiable parental burnout syndrome including four dimensions was found (exhaustion in one’s parental role, contrast with previous parental self, feelings of being fed up with one’s parental role and emotional distancing from one’s children). The resulting instrument, the Parental Burnout Assessment (PBA) presents good validity. Factorial invariance across gender and languages was also found. Finally, the results of this study replicate previous findings that psychological traits of the parents, parenting factors and family functioning account for more variance in parental burnout than sociodemographic factors. (shrink)

Investigating the causes of unethical behaviors in academia, such as scientific misconduct, has become a highly important research subject. The current performance measurement practices (e.g., equating research performance with the number of publications in top-tier journals) are frequently referred to as being responsible for scientists’ unethical behaviors. We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders of the higher education system (e.g., professors and policy makers; N = 43) to analyze the influence of performance measurement on scientists’ behavior. We followed a (...) three-step coding procedure and found (1) that the participants described a variety of positive behavioral consequences (e.g., higher productivity) but mainly negative behavioral consequences (e.g., questionable publishing practices) of current performance measurement practices in academia; (2) that scientists’ behavior can be described as gaming performance measurement (i.e., achieving performance goals by reducing performance quality and focusing on those tasks that are measured); and (3) that gaming performance measurement shares the same characteristics as deviant workplace behavior (i.e., a voluntary violation of organizational norms that harms the university). We discuss that gaming performance measurement has not been considered as a type of deviant workplace behavior in the previous literature. Furthermore, we draw from research on deviant workplace behavior and goal setting to discuss psychological processes that may underlie gaming performance measurement. Our results indicate the importance of connecting literature on deviant workplace behavior and goal setting to advance our understanding of gaming performance measurement. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the role of several consumers’ cognitive and psychographic traits in their perceptions of retailers’ deceptive practices and the different effects on perceived deception associated with online vis-à-vis in-store shopping. Building on theoretical models of persuasion in consumer behavior, we hypothesize that the antecedents of perceived deception in traditional settings are the same as those on the Internet, while the intensity of the impact of these antecedents differs between the online and the offline environment. Results suggest (...) that the effects of individual’s cognitive traits and risk aversion on perceived deception are more relevant when consumers shop online than when they purchase from traditional stores. Conversely, psychographic traits play a more important role in explaining perceived deception in the traditional shopping context as compared to the online channel. Several theoretical and managerial implications are derived from these findings. (shrink)