Unlike in physics, the category of thought experiment is not very common in biology. At least there are no classic examples that are as important and as well-known as the most famous thought experiments in physics, such as Galileo’s, Maxwell’s or Einstein’s. The reasons for this are far from obvious; maybe it has to do with the fact that modern biology for the most part sees itself as a thoroughly empirical discipline that engages either in real natural history or in (...) experimenting on real organisms rather than fictive ones. While theoretical biology does exist and is recognized as part of biology, its role within biology appears to be more marginal than the role of theoretical physics within physics. It could be that this marginality of theory also affects thought experiments as sources of theoretical knowledge. Of course, none of this provides a sufficient reason for thinking that thought experiments are really unimportant in biology. It is quite possible that the common perception of this matter is wrong and that there are important theoretical considerations in biology, past or present, that deserve the title of thought experiment just as much as the standard examples from physics. Some such considerations may even be widely known and considered to be important, but were not recognized as thought experiments. In fact, as we shall see, there are reasons for thinking that what is arguably the single most important biological work ever, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, contains a number of thought experiments. There are also more recent examples both in evolutionary and non-evolutionary biology, as we will show. Part of the problem in identifying positive examples in the history of biology is the lack of agreement as to what exactly a thought experiment is. Even worse, there may not be more than a family resemblance that unifies this epistemic category. We take it that classical thought experiments show the following characteristics: They serve directly or indirectly in the non-empirical epistemic evaluation of theoretical propositions, explanations or hypotheses. Thought experiments somehow appeal to the imagination. They involve hypothetical scenarios, which may or may not be fictive. In other words, thought experiments suppose that certain states of affairs hold and then try to intuit what would happen in a world where these suppositions are true. We want to examine in the following sections if there are episodes in the history of biology that satisfy these criteria. As we will show, there are a few episodes that might satisfy all three of these criteria, and many more if the imagination criterion is dropped or understood in a lose sense. In any case, this criterion is somewhat vague in the first place, unless a specific account of the imagination is presupposed. There will also be issues as to what exactly “non-empirical” means. In general, for the sake of discussion we propose to understand the term “thought experiment” here in a broad rather than a narrow sense here. We would rather be guilty of having too wide a conception of thought experiment than of missing a whole range of really interesting examples. (shrink)

Une première période où les influences mêlées d’Alessandro Padoa et de Bertrand Russell s’exercent en France culmine avec les essais philosophiques de Jean Nicod. Une seconde période voit fleurir les travaux du mathématicien Jacques Herbrand ; avant de périr, il laisse son nom à un théorème fondamental. Suit une période de débats entre philosophes, mathématiciens et physiciens, stimulés en 1935 et 1937 par la tenue à Paris de deux congrès consacrés, totalement ou en partie, à la philosophie des sciences. Paulette (...) Février y esquisse une logique non classique où l’on postule l’existence de couples de propositions non composables pour ériger en principes les relations de Werner Heisenberg. Jean-Louis Destouches développe cette conception jusqu’à décrire comment édifier une théorie unifiante. La structuration des êtres mathématiques est l’objet d’études philosophiques d’Albert Lautman. Le rôle putatif de la notion de groupe en logique est interrogé. La notion de structure mathématique est l’objet de deux contributions : Marc Krasner généralise les conceptions d’Évariste Galois, attribuées à la logique et étendues à des langages infinitaires ; Nicolas Bourbaki, compte tenu de l’évolution des mathématiques, qualifie de structure ce que nous appelons aujourd’hui un modèle. (shrink)

In his posthumous book from 1914, "New foundations of logic, arithmetic and set theory", Julius Konig develops his philosophy of mathematics. In a previous contribution, we attracted attention on the positive part (his truth and falsehood predicates being excluded) of his "pure logic": his "isology" being assimilated to mutual implication, it constitutes a genuine formalization of positive intuitionistic logic. Konig's intention was to rebuild logic in such a way that the excluded third's principle could no longer be logical. However, his (...) treatment of truth and falsehood (boiling down to negation) is purely classical. We explain here this discrepancy by the choice of the alleged more primitive notions to which the questioned notions of truth and falsehood have been reduced. Finaly, it turns out that the disjunctive and conjunctive forms of the principles of the excluded third and of contradiction have effectively been excluded, but none of their implicative forms. (shrink)

In his posthumous book from 1914, “New foundations of logic, arithmetic andset theory”, Julius König develops his philosophy of mathematics. In a previous contribution, we attracted attention on the positive part of his “pure logic”: his “isology” being assimilated to mutual implication, it constitutes a genuine formalization of positive intuitionistic logic. König’s intention was to rebuild logic in such a way that the excluded third’s principle could no longer be logical. However, his treatment of truth and falsehood is purely classical. (...) We explain here this discrepancy by the choice of the alleged more primitive notions to which the questioned notions of truth and falsehood have been reduced. Finaly, it turns out that the disjunctive and conjunctive forms of the principles of the excluded third and of contradiction have effectively been excluded, but none of their implicative forms. (shrink)

Das obras de Newton da Costa, muitas pessoas na França conhecem apenas o renascimento da paraconsistência. Apresentamos algumas razões em defesa de investigações nessa parte da lógica. Acima de tudo, porém, relembramos uma das maiores contribuições de Newton da Costa: sua demonstração, em 1991, em colaboração com Doria, da indecidibilidade gödeliana do movimento na física matemátcia, um resultado que foi de certa forma previsto, por outras razões, por Duhem em 1906. DOI: 10.5007/1808-1711.2011v15n1p7.

The first step of the construction of Nézondet's models of finite arithmetics which are counter-models to Erdös–Woods conjecture is to add to the natural numbers the non-standard numbers generated by one of them, using addition, multiplication and divisions by a natural factor allowed in an ultrapower construction. After a review of some properties of such a structure, we show that the choice of the ultrafilter can be managed, using just the Chinese remainder's theorem, so that a model as desired is (...) obtained as early as at the first time. (shrink)

The first step of the construction of Nézondet's models of finite arithmetics which are counter-models to Erdös–Woods conjecture is to add to the natural numbers the non-standard numbers generated by one of them, using addition, multiplication and divisions by a natural factor allowed in an ultrapower construction. After a review of some properties of such a structure, we show that the choice of the ultrafilter can be managed, using just the Chinese remainder's theorem, so that a model as desired is (...) obtained as early as at the first time. (shrink)

From Newton da Costa’s works, many people in France know only the revival of paraconsistency. We give some reasons in defence of investigations in this part of logic. But above all we recall one of the major contributions of Newton da Costa: his proof, in 1991, in collaboration with Doria, of the gödelian undecidability of motion in mathematical physics, a result which was somewhat foreseen on other grounds by Duhem in 1906.

Comment expliquer que tant d'humains, en ce début de XXIe siècle, accordent encore foi aux discours des religions, que ce soit une religion chrétienne, musulmane ou juive? Possèdent-elles des vérités plus assurées que celles des sciences humaines ou maintiennent-elles leurs fidèles dans l'ignorance, de peur que ceux-ci ne quittent le bateau amiral des églises, des mosquées ou des synagogues? Que proposent-elles de si séduisant pour que l'on sente le besoin de suivre aveuglément leurs enseignements et que des croyants soient prêts (...) à mourir ou à occire pour elles? « Au moment où le créationnisme devient de plus en plus présent dans le cursus académique et où le programme Ethique et culture religieuse, enseigné à nos jeunes dans nos écoles, fait l'apologie du religieux et banalise la superstition, ce livre de Marcel Sylvestre a de quoi nous faire réfléchir sur l'importance à accorder à la raison. » Extrait de la préface de Louise Mailloux. (shrink)

This important collection of lectures and essays was regarded by Gabriel Marcel as the best introduction to his thought.

v. 1. Reflection & mystery -- v. 2. Faith & reality.

(2012). DEL-sequents for regression and epistemic planning. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 337-367. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2012.736703.

Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) deals with the representation and the study in a multi-agent setting of knowledge and belief change. It can express in a uniform way epistemic statements about: 1. what is true about an initial situation 2. what is true about an event occurring in this situation 3. what is true about the resulting situation after the event has occurred. We axiomatize within the DEL framework what we can infer about (iii) given (i) and (ii). Given three formulas (...) φ,φ' and φ" describing respectively (i), (ii) and (iii), we also show how to build a formula φ ? φ' which captures all the information which can be inferred about (iii) from φ and φ'. We show how our results extend to other modal logics than K. In our proofs and definitions, we resort to a large extent to the normal form formulas for modal logic originally introduced by Kit Fine. In a companion paper (Aucher, 2012), we axiomatize what we can infer about (ii) given (i) and (iii), and what we can infer about (i) given (ii) and (iii), and show how to build two formulas φ ? φ" and φ' ? φ" which capture respectively all the information which can be inferred about (ii) from φ and φ", and all the information which can be inferred about (i) from φ' and φ". (shrink)

One way social scientists explain phenomena is by building structural models. These models are explanatory insofar as they manage to perform a recursive decomposition on an initial multivariate probability distribution, which can be interpreted as a mechanism. Explanations in social sciences share important aspects that have been highlighted in the mechanisms literature. Notably, spelling out the functioning the mechanism gives it explanatory power. Thus social scientists should choose the variables to include in the model on the basis of their function (...) in the mechanism. This paper examines the notion of ‘function’ within structural modelling. We argue that ‘functions’ ought to be understood as the theoretical underpinnings of the causes, namely as the role that causes play in the functioning of the mechanism. (shrink)

Representing an epistemic situation involving several agents obviously depends on the modeling point of view one takes. We start by identifying the types of modeling points of view which are logically possible. We call the one traditionally followed by epistemic logic the perfect external approach, because there the modeler is assumed to be an omniscient and external observer of the epistemic situation. In the rest of the paper we focus on what we call the internal approach, where the modeler is (...) one of the agents involved in the situation. For this approach we propose and axiomatize a logical formalism based on epistemic logic. This leads us to formalize some intuitions about the internal approach and about its connections with the external ones. Finally, we show that our internal logic is decidable and PSPACE-complete. (shrink)

While Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is often seen to involve voluntary and deliberative approaches such as certification, governments have recently stepped into the picture through national legislation. France’s Law on Duty of Vigilance adopted in 2017 is a landmark case of such legislation. Years of voluntary CSR certification schemes led by Civil Society were replaced by a new philosophy of fighting for mandatory CSR controlled by a judge. We depict the change of mindset and the related change of roles inside (...) the coalition of Civil Society actors represents a Machiavellian Moment. The combination of collective civil society actors’ roles (namely nongovernmental organizations and labor unions) as Machiavellian _Virtue_ with disruptive events as Machiavellian _Fortuna_ made the law’s adoption possible. Based on this case study, we provide an analysis of civil society roles in the development of CSR-related legislation. (shrink)

The Grand Challenges literature brings under its umbrella a wide variety of disjointed phenomena but runs the risk of reinventing the wheel as well as overlooking incremental progress and past work. To avert this, scholars need to (dis)connect (dis)similar issues, build on past research on these issues, and create opportunities for generalizability through theoretical examinations.

After observing that the truth conditions of connectives of non–classical logics are generally defined in terms of formulas of first–order logic, we introduce ‘protologics’, a class of logics whose connectives are defined by arbitrary first–order formulas. Then, we introduce atomic and molecular logics, which are two subclasses of protologics that generalize our gaggle logics and which behave particularly well from a theoretical point of view. We also study and introduce a notion of equi-expressivity between two logics based on different classes (...) of models. We prove that, according to that notion, every pure predicate logic with \ variables and constants is as expressive as a predicate atomic logic, some sort of atomic logic. Then, we prove that the class of protologics is equally expressive as the class of molecular logics. That formally supports our claim that atomic and molecular logics are somehow ‘universal’. Finally, we identify a subclass of molecular logics that we call predicate molecular logics and which constitutes its representative core: every molecular logic is as expressive as a predicate molecular logic. (shrink)

This edition of Marcel's inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty-seven pages of new material available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity's foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on 'man on the way' that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope. Book jacket.

In update logic as studied by Baltag, Moss, Solecki and van Benthem, little attention is paid to the interpretation of an action by an agent, which is just assumed to depend on the situation. This is actually a complex issue that nevertheless complies to some logical dynamics. In this paper, we tackle this topic. We also deal with actions that change propositional facts of the situation. In parallel, we propose a formalism to accurately represent an agent's epistemic state based on (...) hyperreal numbers. In that respect, we use infinitesimals to express what would surprise the agents (and by how much) by contradicting their beliefs. We also use a subjective probability to model the notion of belief. It turns out that our probabilistic update mechanism satisfies the AGM postulates of belief revision. (shrink)

Guillaume Collett questions to what extent we can locate Deleuze within the Lacanian School during the late-1960s, prior to Guattari. In so doing, he offers a new, integrated reading of Deleuze's The Logic of Sense by understanding it as a 'psychoanalysis of sense', and gives a new interpretation of Deleuze's conception of philosophy itself. The Psychoanalysis of Sense shows that Deleuze was not merely aware of the debates animating the Lacanian School during the 1960s: he sought to contribute to (...) them. Emphasising his appropriation of the work of post-Lacanian Serge Leclaire, Collett explains how Deleuze constructed a more singular and immanent theory of the linguistic structure of the unconscious - granting the erogenous body a larger structuring role. (shrink)

Critical thinking is often taught with some emphasis on categories and operations of cognitive biases. The underlying thought is that knowledge of biases equips students to reduce them. The empirical evidence, however, doesn’t provide much support for this thought. We have previously argued that the emphasis on debiasing in critical thinking education is worth preserving, but in light of a more explicit and broader conception of debiasing. We now argue that this broader conception of debiasing strategies obliges critical thinking instructors (...) and curriculum designers to reflect on the teaching approaches that might facilitate the use of those strategies. We propose some teaching techniques to expand the scope of debiasing in the classroom—some untested, some only rarely and recently characterized as critical thinking strategies, rather than as pragmatic considerations in, e.g., design, engineering, marketing. These methods and others like them, we suggest, broaden the prospects for teaching a range of effective critical thinking techniques for debiasing. (shrink)

This paper takes as a starting point a recent development in privacy-debates: the emphasis on social and institutional environments in the definition and the defence of privacy. Recognizing the merits of this approach I supplement it in two respects. First, an analysis of the relation between privacy and autonomy teaches that in the digital age more than ever individual autonomy is threatened. The striking contrast between on the one hand offline vocabulary, where autonomy and individual decision making prevail, and on (...) the other online practices is a challenge that cannot be met in a social approach. Secondly, I elucidate the background of the social approach. Its importance is not exclusively related to the digital age. In public life we regularly face privacy-moments, when in a small distinguished social domain few people are commonly involved in common experiences. In the digital age the contextual integrity model of Helen Nissenbaum has become very influential. However this model has some problems. Nissenbaum refers to a variety of sources and uses several terms to explain the normativity in her model. The notion ‘context’ is not specific and faces the reproach of conservatism. We elaborate on the most promising suggestion: an elaboration on the notion ‘goods’ as it can be found in the works of Michael Walzer and Alisdair Macintyre. Developing criteria for defining a normative framework requires making explicit the substantive goods that are at stake in a context, and take them as the starting point for decisions about the flow of information. Doing so delivers stronger and more specific orientations that are indispensible in discussions about digital privacy. (shrink)

Due to its emphasis on experiential interests, animal ethics tends to focus on individuals as the sole unit of moral concern. Many issues in animal ethics can be fruitfully analysed in terms of obligations towards individual animals, but some problems require reflection about collective dimensions of animal life in ways that individualist approaches can’t offer. Criticism of the individualist focus in animal ethics is not new; it has been put forward in particular by environmental ethics approaches. However, the latter tend (...) to be so far removed from the concerns of animal ethicists that both groups talk at cross purposes. We think the gap between environmental and animal ethics could be bridged by on the one hand focusing more on the collective dimensions of our concerns with animals - after all, individuals are constituted by the collective of which they are a part - and on the other hand, by showing that moral status can also be attributed to groups in an indirect way, related to the moral status of their individual members. In our paper we explore various ways of conceptualising the moral relevance of collectiveness in animal life. We draw on insights from public health ethics, as this field of inquiry has also developed - at least partly—in response to individualist approaches in human bioethics, creating more room for recognizing the value of population health, interpersonal relations, solidarity, and ways in which a collective is constituted. (shrink)

Corporate codes of ethics, which have spread in the last decades, have shown a limited ability to foster ethical behaviors. For instance, they have been criticized for relying too much on formal compliance, rather than taking into account sufficiently agents and their moral development, or promoting self-reflexive behaviors. We aim here at showing that a code of ethics in fact has meaning and enables ethical progress when it is interpreted and appropriated with practical wisdom. We explore a model that represents (...) an uncommon organizational code of ethics: the monastic Rule of St. Benedict, written in the sixth century and still used today. Our empirical study—conducted in several monasteries living under this rule—shows that organization members interpret this rule, both hermeneutically and ethically, to adapt it to situations. They also appropriate this rule as a way of life and treat it as a dynamic framework that helps them to follow their purpose within their organization. This exceptional code actually offers an alternative model for practicing codes of ethics, in a virtue-ethical manner, beyond mere compliance with the text. The way in which reflexive and active agents practice the code, both individually and collectively, shapes their organizational experience and fosters their moral development. (shrink)

Résumé David Chalmers maintient que la réalité virtuelle est une véritable réalité. Une version de ce « réalisme virtuel » affirme que les entités virtuelles dépendent ontologiquement d'entités numériques réelles. Nous explorons ici cette suggestion, en proposant un nouveau modèle pour décrire la dépendance du virtuel à l’égard du numérique. En nous appuyant sur la théorie de la constitution de Lynne Rudder Baker, nous défendons que les objets virtuels sont constitués par des objets numériques, lorsque ceux-ci se trouvent dans certaines (...) circonstances favorables. Nous explorons les motivations et les implications de cette approche, que nous considérons comme une forme prometteuse de réalisme virtuel. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the distribution and the interpretation of the temporal suffix -kue in Mbyá, a Guaraní language that is closely related to Paraguayan Guaraní. This suffix is attested both inside noun phrases and inside clauses. Interestingly, its nominal uses give rise to inferences that are unattested in its clausal uses. These inferences were first identified in Paraguayan Guaraní by Tonhauser, who called them the existence property and the change of state property. Tonhauser further argued that these properties (...) are built into the lexical entry of the nominal temporal marker -kue. By contrast, I argue that -kue denotes a relative past tense both in its nominal and clausal uses, and that the existence and change of state properties are pragmatic inferences that arise from the interaction of the literal meaning of -kue with general constraints on the interpretation of noun phrases, notably constraints on the topicality of the time of evaluation of noun phrases. This allows me to maintain a uniform analysis of -kue across its nominal uses and its clausal uses. The analysis of -kue in Mbyá is relevant to a number of current debates on the expression of tense crosslinguistically. Firstly, the existence of relative tenses has sometimes been called into question. Klein notably argues that relative tenses are actually combinations of tense with the perfect aspect. Others have argued that there exist true relative tenses in certain languages. I argue that facts of Mbyá support the latter view. Secondly, Klein famously defined tenses as relations between topic times and the time of utterance. I argue, on the other hand, that relative tenses only denote relations between times, and that the topicality or non-topicality of their temporal arguments depends on their context of use, including their syntactic environment. Thirdly, this paper contributes to debates on the nature and reality of nominal tenses The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 2012), by arguing that tense in Mbyá is a genuinely nominal category, in the sense that temporal functional projections are part of the extended projection of the noun phrase. (shrink)

In epistemic logic, some axioms dealing with the notion of knowledge are rather convoluted and difficult to interpret intuitively, even though some of them, such as the axioms.2 and.3, are considered to be key axioms by some epistemic logicians. We show that they can be characterized in terms of understandable interaction axioms relating knowledge and belief or knowledge and conditional belief. In order to show it, we first sketch a theory dealing with the characterization of axioms in terms of interaction (...) axioms in modal logic. We then apply the main results and methods of this theory to obtain specific results related to epistemic and doxastic logics. (shrink)

This conference was devoted to the 80 years of the Copenhagen Interpretation, and to the question of the relevance of the Copenhagen interpretation for the present understanding of quantum mechanics. It is in this framework that fundamental questions raised by quantum mechanics, especially in information theory, were discussed throughout the conference. As has become customary in our series of conference in Växjö, we were glad to welcome a fruitful assembly of theoretical physicists, experimentalists, mathematicians and even philosophers interested in the (...) foundations of probability and physics. The nature of quantum fluctuations---in the form of Stochastic Electrodynamics or in other approaches to stochastic quantum mechanics---was also a central topic discussed during the conference, especially during debates. We should also mention talks on the completeness or incompleteness of quantum mechanics; on macroscopic quantum systems; on Bell's inequality, entanglement and experiments on quantum nonlocality (and locality); on Bohmian mechanics; on the connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity; on quantum probability; on quantum computing, quantum teleportation and quantum cryptography technologies; and more generally on the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics and on the philosophical problems raised by its interpretations. (shrink)