Quelle est la place du scepticisme dans l'œuvre d'un philosophe des Lumières comme Denis Diderot? Cet ouvrage vise à mettre en évidence les caractéristiques de la réception des instances sceptiques dans les œuvres de Diderot. L'analyse prend en considération l'ensemble du corpus diderotien, y compris sa contribution à l'Encyclopédie. L'objectif est aussi de montrer que la méthode sceptique de Diderot, qui consiste en l'usage de certaines argumentations, mais aussi en un ensemble de choix stylistiques, permet de mieux interpréter certaines spécificités (...) de sa pensée philosophique et de son matérialisme. Une meilleure compréhension du rôle du scepticisme dans la pensée de Diderot vise à apporter une contribution aux études sur ce qu'on définit comme le scepticisme des Lumières, en montrant qu'il serait plus exact de parler de scepticismes au pluriel, en raison des différences qui subsistent parmi les philosophes. Pour cette raison, ce livre propose des confrontations entre Diderot et ses sources sceptiques, mais aussi avec d'autres philosophes de son époque comme Montesquieu, Voltaire, D'Alembert et Hume"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

A substantial body of experimental evidence has demonstrated that labels have an impact on infant categorization processes. Yet little is known regarding the nature of the mechanisms by which this effect is achieved. We distinguish between two competing accounts: supervised name‐based categorization and unsupervised feature‐based categorization. We describe a neurocomputational model of infant visual categorization, based on self‐organizing maps, that implements the unsupervised feature‐based approach. The model successfully reproduces experiments demonstrating the impact of labeling on infant visual categorization reported in (...) Plunkett, Hu, and Cohen (2008). It mimics infant behavior in both the familiarization and testing phases of the procedure, using a training regime that involves only single presentations of each stimulus and using just 24 participant networks per experiment. The model predicts that the observed behavior in infants is due to a transient form of learning that might lead to the emergence of hierarchically organized categorical structure and that the impact of labels on categorization is influenced by the perceived similarity and the sequence in which the objects are presented. The results suggest that early in development, say before 12 months old, labels need not act as invitations to form categories nor highlight the commonalities between objects, but they may play a more mundane but nevertheless powerful role as additional features that are processed in the same fashion as other features that characterize objects and object categories. (shrink)

Regulatory schema has shifted from government to governance-based systems. One particular form that has emerged at the international level is the multi-stakeholder voluntary code of conduct (MSVC). We argue that such codes are not only simply mechanisms by which various stakeholders attempt to govern the action of the corporation but also systems by which each stakeholder attempts to gain or retain some legitimacy goal. Each stakeholder is motivated by strategic legitimacy goal to join the code, and once a member, is (...) also required to assist in maintaining the institutional legitimacy of the code, resulting in “networked legitimacy.” We begin our analysis of these systems by first exploring the growth and structure of such MSVCs, and then building an analytical framework using strategic and institutional legitimacy as they apply to such MSVCs. We contribute to the codes of conduct literature by developing the construct of networked legitimacy from strategic and institutional legitimacy. We then apply our framework to the United Nations Global Compact, one of the predominant MSVCs today. In doing so, we: (1) demonstrate how different stakeholders are pursuing different types of legitimacy through their participation in the code, (2) examine the specific opportunities and risks in terms of what we have called “networked legitimacy” posed by the institutional design of actual MSVCs, and (3) create an argument for three pillars supporting the legitimacy of MSVCs. (shrink)

Riassunto: Reificazione presenta notevoli discontinuità rispetto alle precedenti e alle successive trattazioni honnethiane e costituisce un tentativo audace di fondare una teoria sociale normativa su strutture ontologiche e antropologiche. Per salvare la pregnanza di questa prova, cercheremo di conciliare gli aspetti più contraddittori dell’opera, mostrando l’unitarietà di fondo dell’intero percorso honnethiano. Innanzitutto, occorre mettere a fuoco lo statuto del riconoscimento, preso di per se stesso, al fine di comprendere l’unità che si gioca alle spalle delle diverse versioni elaborate da Honneth. (...) Poi, ci concentreremo sul riferimento alla psicoanalisi e alla psicologia evolutiva, cercando di mettere in relazione i concetti di simbiosi e di imitazione neonatale. In terzo luogo, intendiamo illuminare la duplice dimensione del paradigma honnethiano del riconoscimento: da un lato, esso viene caratterizzato normativamente; dall’altro, ha una pretesa più propriamente ontologica e antropogenetica. Infine, occorre ridefinire l’orizzonte sorgivo del conflitto. Parole chiave: Axel Honneth; Riconoscimento; Intersoggettività; Antropogenesi; Teoria Critica Honneth’s Paradigm of Recognition: Interaction, Anthropogenesis, and Normativity: Reification demonstrates a number of discontinuities with Honneth’s earlier and later works and constitutes a bold attempt to ground a social normative theory on ontological and anthropological grounds. In order to respect the importance of this effort, I try to reconcile some of the more incompatible aspects of this work by pointing to the deep unity of the Honnethian path as a whole. First, I focus on the status of recognition itself, in order to reveal the unity of thought behind the different versions proposed by Honneth. Then, I concentrate on his references to psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology, in an attempt to bring together the ideas of symbiosis and neonatal imitation. Third, I highlight the dual nature of the Honnethian recognition paradigm: on the one hand, it can be characterized as normative; on the other, it makes a truly ontological and anthropogenic claim. Finally, I redefine the source of the conflict between this and Honneth’s other work. Keywords: Axel Honneth; Recognition; Intersubjectivity; Anthropogenesis; Critical Theory. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive analysis of the idea of libertas and its conflicting uses in the political struggles of the late Roman Republic. By reconstructing Roman political thinking about liberty against the background of Classical and Hellenistic thought, it excavates two distinct intellectual traditions on the means allowing for the preservation and the loss of libertas. Considering the interplay of these traditions in the political debates of the first century BC, Dr Arena offers a significant reinterpretation of the political struggles (...) of the time as well as a radical reappraisal of the role played by the idea of liberty in the practice of politics. She argues that, as a result of its uses in rhetorical debates, libertas underwent a form of conceptual change at the end of the Republic and came to legitimise a new course of politics, which led progressively to the transformation of the whole political system. (shrink)

Ontologies represent the standard way to model the knowledge about specific domains. This holds also for the legal domain where several ontologies have been put forward to model specific kinds of legal knowledge. Both for standard users and for law scholars, it is often difficult to have an overall view on the existing alternatives, their main features and their interlinking with the other ontologies. To answer this need, in this paper, we address an analysis of the state-of-the-art in legal ontologies (...) and we characterise them along with some distinctive features. This paper aims to guide generic users and law experts in selecting the legal ontology that better fits their needs and in understanding its specificity so that proper extensions to the selected model could be investigated. (shrink)

Several theories propose that one of the core functions of inner speech (IS) is to support subjects in the completion of cognitively effortful tasks, especially those involving executive functions (EF). In this paper we focus on two populations who notoriously encounter difficulties in performing EF tasks, namely, people diagnosed with schizophrenia who experience auditory verbal hallucinations (Sz-AVH) and people within the Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). We focus on these two populations because they represent two different ways in which IS can (...) fail to help in EF tasks, which can be illustrative for other mental conditions. First, we review the main components of EF (Section 1). Then we explain the functions that IS is taken to perform in the domain of EF (Section 2) and review the evidence concerning problems about EF in the two populations of our study: Sz-AVH (Section 3) and ASC (Section 4). After this we further detail our account about what a properly functioning IS can do for both populations and how different IS profiles may impact EF performance: in the case of Sz-AVH, the uncontrolled and intrusive character of IS negatively affects EF performance, whereas in ASC, EF is not sufficiently supported by IS, given the tendency in this population to present a diminished use of IS (Section 5). We finally briefly discuss Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Developmental Language Disorders (DLD). (shrink)

With every new recursive relation R on a recursive model , we consider the images of R under all isomorphisms from to other recursive models. We call the set of Turing degrees of these images the degree spectrum of R on , and say that R is intrinsically r.e. if all the images are r.e. C. Ash and A. Nerode introduce an extra decidability condition on , expressed in terms of R. Assuming this decidability condition, they prove that R is (...) intrinsically r.e. if and only if a natural recursive-syntactic condition is satisfied. We show that, while a recursive non-intrinsically r.e. relation may have a two element degree spectrum, a non-intrinsically r.e. relation which satisfies the Ash–Nerode decidability condition has an infinite degree spectrum. We also study several related decidability conditions and their effects on the degree spectra, including some conditions which are sufficient to obtain every r.e. degree in a spectrum. (shrink)

We study the complexity of infinite chains and antichains in computable partial orderings. We show that there is a computable partial ordering which has an infinite chain but none that is ${\Sigma _{1}^{1}}$ or ${\Pi _{1}^{1}}$ , and also obtain the analogous result for antichains. On the other hand, we show that every computable partial ordering which has an infinite chain must have an infinite chain that is the difference of two ${\Pi _{1}^{1}}$ sets. Our main result is that there (...) is a computably axiomatizable theory K of partial orderings such that K has a computable model with arbitrarily long finite chains but no computable model with an infinite chain. We also prove the corresponding result for antichains. Finally, we prove that if a computable partial ordering ${\mathcal{A}}$ has the feature that for every ${\mathcal{B} \cong \mathcal{A}}$ , there is an infinite chain or antichain that is ${\Delta _{2}^{0}}$ relative to ${\mathcal{B}}$ , then we have uniform dichotomy: either for all copies ${\mathcal{B}}$ of ${\mathcal{A}}$ , there is an infinite chain that is ${\Delta _{2}^{0}}$ relative to ${\mathcal{B}}$ , or for all copies ${\mathcal{B}}$ of ${\mathcal{A}}$ , there is an infinite antichain that is ${\Delta _{2}^{0}}$ relative to ${\mathcal{B}}$. (shrink)

The contemporary State power is concentrated in the hands of the legislative, executive and judicial powers, which is traditionally referred to as the principle of the division of State power. The separation of State power and the attribution of the function of the interpretation and application of statutory law to courts were like “letting the genie out of the bottle”. Having started with a mechanical application of the statutory law, the courts, armed with various doctrines on interpretation of law, have (...) in the meantime started creating rules themselves and turned into rivals to the legislator. In addition to having started making the law, the courts have also begun exerting control over both the legislative (constitutional justice) and the executive (administrative justice) powers. The acknowledgement of the fact that by interpreting and applying the law, the court is simultaneously making it, gives rise to a host of questions, e.g.: if the court is the guardian of law, who is the guardian of the court? How to separate the interpretation of law from its creation? If the court acts as a lawmaker, then maybe in future, the court will turn into a sole lawmaker?, etc. (shrink)

In recent literature there is unanimous agreement about children's pragmatic competence in drawing scalar implicatures about some , if the task is made easy enough. However, children accept infelicitous some sentences more often than adults do. In general their acceptance is assumed to be synonymous with a logical interpretation of some as a quantifier. But in our view an overlap with some as a determiner in under-informative sentences cannot be ruled out, given the ambiguity of the experimental instructions and the (...) attitude of trust by children in adults. Our study investigated this hypothesis with different experimental manipulations. We found that when the experimenter's intentions are clear (Experiment 1, all / some order effect; Experiments 2 and 4, conditions 2 and 3), under-informative sentences are usually rejected; otherwise (Experiment 1, some / all order effect; Experiments 3 and 4, control condition) they are accepted. However, analysis of verbal protocols indicated that pragmatically infelicitous sentences are accepted, with some interpreted mostly as a determiner, irrespective of the function of some as a quantifier. Acceptance is not in itself synonymous with a logical interpretation of some as a quantifier. (shrink)

In spatial sequence synaesthesia ordinal stimuli are perceived as arranged in peripersonal space. Using fMRI, we examined the neural bases of SSS and colour synaesthesia for spoken words in a late-blind synaesthete, JF. He reported days of the week and months of the year as both coloured and spatially ordered in peripersonal space; parts of the days and festivities of the year were spatially ordered but uncoloured. Words that denote time-units and triggered no concurrents were used in a control condition. (...) Both conditions inducing SSS activated the occipito-parietal, infero-frontal and insular cortex. The colour area hOC4v was engaged when the synaesthetic experience included colour. These results confirm the continued recruitment of visual colour cortex in this late-blind synaesthetes. Synaesthesia also involved activation in inferior frontal cortex, which may be related to spatial memory and detection, and in the insula, which might contribute to audiovisual integration related to the processing of inducers and concurrents. (shrink)

In his Democratic justice and the social contract, Weale presents a distinctive contingent practice-dependent model of ‘democratic justice’ that relies heavily on a condition of just social and political relations among equals. Several issues arise from this account. Under which conditions might such just social and political relations be realised? What ideal of equality is required for ‘democratic justice’? What are its implications for the political ideal of citizenship? This paper focuses on these questions as a way to critically reconsider (...) Weale’s model. After presenting Weale’s procedural constructivism, I distinguish his model from an institutional practicedependent model, one salient example of which is Rawls’s political constructivism. This distinction allows for a formulation of the social and political equality required for justice in each case. The contingent model assumes that an equality of ‘status’ will generate just social practices, yet it fails to recognise that an equality of ‘role’ is also important to ensure citizens’ compliance. The paper ultimately seeks to show that the contingent model is insufficient to ensure that just social practices will become stable. (shrink)

We examine whether a taxpayer’s decision to choose a taxpayer-favorable characterization of income is associated with contextual and individual dimensions of that decision. Using a 2 × 2 factorial experimental design, we manipulate the prevailing social norm on whether there is a general belief that a specific form of income should be characterized as a capital gain or as ordinary income, and the group affiliation on whether the individual is making a tax characterization decision as a sole proprietor or as (...) a member of a group practice. Moreover, we measure participants’ fairness perception of characterizing the income as capital gains versus ordinary. We study the decisions of 180 graduate business and accounting students from two US business schools to explore these dimensions using a tax-ambiguous income situation. Results indicate that both contextual and individual dimensions impact taxpayer decisions. Specifically, the social norm and fairness perception of characterizing income as capital gains affects the likelihood of choosing such a characterization. Being a sole proprietor or a member of a group practice does not have any significant main effect. However, relative to all other conditions, taxpayers are most likely to characterize income as capital gains when both the social norms are for capital gains characterization and when the taxpayer is a member of a group practice. Results remain largely robust to a variety of alternative explanations. We conclude the paper with a discussion of our findings and their implications for tax policy, enforcement, and research. (shrink)

Despite several criticisms surrounding the DSM classification in psychiatry, a significant bulk of research on mental conditions still operates according to two core assumptions: a) homogeneity, that is the idea that mental conditions are sufficiently homogeneous to justify generalization; b) additive comorbidity, that is the idea that the coexistence of multiple conditions in the same individual can be interpreted as additive. In this paper we take autism research as a case study to show that, despite a plethora of criticism, psychiatric (...) research often continues to operate in accordance with this model. Then we argue that such a model runs into problems once facts about comorbidity are taken into account. Finally, we offer some suggestions on how to tackle the challenge raised by comorbidity and its impact on heterogeneity. To do so, we explore transdiagnostic stratification accounts and network models to show that combining these approaches can move us in the right direction. (shrink)

In this paper we (Laura Giordano, Nicola Olivetti and myself) propose a conditional logic to represent iterated belief revision systems. We propose a set of postulates for belief revision which are a small variant of Darwiche and Pearl's ones.The resulting conditional logic has a standard semantics in terms of selection function models, and provides a natural representation of epistemic states. A Representation Theorem establishes a correspondence between iterated belief revision systems and conditional models. Our Representation Theorem does not entail Gärdenfors' (...) Triviality Result. (shrink)

The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers. By Jack Tannous. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 647. $39.95, £34.

The purpose of this article is to identify how modern Russia can build good relationships between multiple Russian religions and the state. At present there are many obstacles standing in the way of achieving this goal. The article includes a great many statistics, and discusses political, social, and religious views of the issue.The working Russian Constitution provides major legal provisions for democratic relationships between religions and the state. The law “On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations” (1997) clarified constitutional provisions. (...) It should not forgotten that Russia is a secular state claiming to respect all religions. No doubt the supremacy of Orthodoxy in Russia after 1721 and the extreme atheism that arose in the Soviet Union after 1917 influenced people’s minds greatly. While the countries in Western Europe were moving from religiosity to secularism, Russia was developing the other way around. But while respecting all religions, Russia should not forget to be mindful of extremism. Religious associations themselves are likewise uneasy about the danger presented by certain mystic, neo-pagan, and destructive sects. The author argues that the best compromise between religions and the modern Russian state canonly be achieved on the basis of equality and freedom. (shrink)

Bortolotti argues that we cannot distinguish delusions from other irrational beliefs in virtue of their epistemic features alone. Although her arguments are convincing, her analysis leaves an important question unanswered: What makes delusions pathological? In this paper I set out to answer this question by arguing that the pathological character of delusions arises from an executive dysfunction in a subject’s ability to detect relevance in the environment. I further suggest that this dysfunction derives from an underlying emotional imbalance—one that leads (...) delusional subjects to regard some contextual elements as deeply puzzling or highly significant. (shrink)

The paper addresses the problem of imaginative resistance in science, that is, why and under what circumstances imagination sometimes resists certain scenarios. In the first part, the paper presents and discusses two accounts concerning the problem and relevant for the main thesis of this study. The first position is that of Gendler (Journal of Philosophy 97:55–81, 2000), (Gendler, in: Nichols (ed) The Architecture of the Imagination: New essays on pretence, possibility and fiction, Oxford University Press, New York, 2006a), (Gendler & (...) Liao, in: Gibson, Carroll (eds) The routledge companion to philosophy of literature, Routledge, New York, 2016), according to which imaginative resistance mainly concerns evaluative scenarios, presenting deviant moral attitudes. The second account examined is that of Kim et al. (in: Cova, Réhault (eds) Advances in experimental philosophy of aesthetics, Bloomsbury, London, 2018), who insisted on the link between imaginative resistance on the one hand and counterfactual and counterdescriptive scenarios on the other. In the light of both theories, this paper discusses the importance of addressing the problem of imaginative resistance in the scientific enterprise in the light of some mechanisms of embodied simulation, based on the activity of mirror neurons and investigated within the framework of the Embodied Simulation Theory. (shrink)

Computable model theory, also called effective or recursive model theory, studies algorithmic properties of mathematical structures, their relations, and isomorphisms. These properties can be described syntactically or semantically. One of the major tasks of computable model theory is to obtain, whenever possible, computability-theoretic versions of various classical model-theoretic notions and results. For example, in the 1950's, Fröhlich and Shepherdson realized that the concept of a computable function can make van der Waerden's intuitive notion of an explicit field precise. This led (...) to the notion of a computable structure. In 1960, Rabin proved that every computable field has a computable algebraic closure. However, not every classical result “effectivizes”. Unlike Vaught's theorem that no complete theory has exactly two nonisomorphic countable models, Millar's and Kudaibergenov's result establishes that there is a complete decidable theory that has exactly two nonisomorphic countable models with computable elementary diagrams. In the 1970's, Metakides and Nerode [58], [59] and Remmel [71], [72], [73] used more advanced methods of computability theory to investigate algorithmic properties of fields, vector spaces, and other mathematical structures. (shrink)

Der Beitrag greift das komplexe Kuhnsche Konzept des „Exemplars“ anhand einiger Schlüsselpassagen aus dem Postscript-1969 und The Essential Tension auf. Der Begriff „Exemplar“ bezieht sich auf die tiefere philosophische Bedeutung des wissenschaftlichen Paradigmas: Der „normale“ Wissenschaftler kann unter Bezugnahme auf das Paradigma seine oder ihre Forschung durchführen, indem er Ähnlichkeitsurteile zwischen verschiedenen Problemen fällt. Solche Urteile beruhen auf einer Wahrnehmungsfähigkeit, die jeder expliziten Regel vorausgeht und die sowohl als erlernt als auch als primitiv definiert wird. In diesem Beitrag soll dieser (...) doppelte Aspekt der Ähnlichkeitswahrnehmung aus der Sicht der verkörperten Simulationstheorie analysiert werden. Das Kuhnsche Konzept des Exemplars kann durch die Berücksichtigung des Wertes der Verkörperung geklärt und vertieft werden. Die Mechanismen einer „gebildeten“ Wahrnehmung können in den automatischen Mechanismen der Wahrnehmungsspiegelung identifiziert werden, auf denen die verkörperte Kognition beruht. (shrink)

A model is computable if its domain is a computable set and its relations and functions are uniformly computable. Let be a computable model and let R be an extra relation on the domain of . That is, R is not named in the language of . We define to be the set of Turing degrees of the images f under all isomorphisms f from to computable models. We investigate conditions on and R which are sufficient and necessary for to (...) contain every Turing degree. These conditions imply that if every Turing degree 0″ can be realized in via an isomorphism of the same Turing degree as its image of R, then contains every Turing degree. We also discuss an example of and R whose coincides with the Turing degrees which are 0′. (shrink)

We construct a recursive model , a recursive subset R of its domain, and a Turing degree x 0 satisfying the following condition. The nonrecursive images of R under all isomorphisms from to other recursive models are of Turing degree x and cannot be recursively enumerable.