While COVID-19 spreads aggressively and rapidly across the globe, many societies have also witnessed the spread of other viral phenomena like misinformation, conspiracy theories, and general mass suspicions about what is really going on. This study investigates how exposure to and trust in information sources, and anxiety and depression, are associated with conspiracy and misinformation beliefs in eight countries/regions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected in an online survey fielded from May 29, 2020 to June 12, 2020, resulting in (...) a multinational representative sample of 8,806 adult respondents. Results indicate that greater exposure to traditional media is associated with lower conspiracy and misinformation beliefs, while exposure to politicians and digital media and personal contacts are associated with greater conspiracy and misinformation beliefs. Exposure to health experts is associated with lower conspiracy beliefs only. Higher feelings of depression are also associated with greater conspiracy and misinformation beliefs. We also found relevant group- and country differences. We discuss the implications of these results. (shrink)

Researchers have studied marketing ethics from several perspectives. Few studies, however, have analyzed supervisory reactions to unethical behavior by salespeople. The results of this study using a 2 × 3 factorial design showed that the performance level of the salesperson and the consequences of the salesperson's actions influenced some types of discipline used by a sample of 246 sales managers. The findings both support and contradict prior research on how sales managers respond to unethical sales force behavior.

Societally salient issues, like migration, stimulate user engagement with political parties on social media. This user engagement, in turn, is associated with political behavior, such as voting. Nonetheless, few studies so far have investigated the interaction between these factors. We examine how anti-immigration attitudes are associated with user engagement with political parties on social media. In this study, user engagement is understood as following political parties on social media. Through online data that were collected in October 2019 among adults (N= (...) 1,000) in Belgium, we investigate how attitudes and user engagement are associated with voting behavior. Results suggest that attitudes towards migration are associated with user engagement with both left and right-wing parties on social media. Moreover, these attitudes and user engagement – and the interaction between the two – are related to voting behavior: being against (being in favor of) migration and following right-wing (left-wing) parties on social media is associated with a higher likelihood of voting for a right-wing (left-wing) party. (shrink)

John Rawls famously argued that the Difference Principle would be chosen by any rational agent in the original position. Derek Parfit and Philippe Van Parijs have claimed, contra Rawls, that it is not the Difference Principle which is implied by Rawls’ original position argument, but rather the more refined Lexical Difference Principle. In this paper, we study both principles in the context of social choice under ignorance. First, we present a general format for evaluating original position arguments in this context. (...) We argue that in this format, the Difference Principle can be specified in three conceptually distinct ways. We show that these three specifications give the same choice recommendations, and can be grounded in an original position argument in combination with the well-known maximin rule. Analogously, we argue that one can give at least four plausible specifications of the Lexical Difference Principle, which however turn out to give different recommendations in concrete choice scenarios. We prove that only one of these four specifications can be grounded in an original position argument. Moreover, this one specification seems the least appealing from the viewpoint of distributive justice. This insight points towards a general weakness of original position arguments. (shrink)

Diderot s’est passionné toute sa vie pour les questions musicales. C’est à travers elles que cet article traite du thème de la « perception des rapports » dans l’esthétique diderotienne. Le trait saillant des « Principes généraux d’acoustique » (1748) est le refus de distinguer un point de vue strictement scientifique et esthétiquement neutre, et un point de vue proprement esthétique. Dans les pas du Descartes de l’Abrégé de musique, et dans une discussion serrée avec le père André, Diderot soutient (...) une thèse que l’on pourrait qualifier d’empirico-malebranchienne. Si, sur le modèle de l’optique cartésienne, Diderot soutient que l’oreille perçoit les consonances et le beau musical selon une sorte de trigonométrie naturelle, il refuse de l’appuyer sur l’action directe d’une puissance supérieure à l’esprit, comme chez l’auteur de De la recherche de la vérité. La « perception des rapports » est au contraire fondée sur une conception empiriste du nombre : c’est dans l’expérience du dénombrement, et par le biais des sens, que nous connaissons le nombre. La conception des « corps harmoniques », développée dans la « Lettre à Mlle *** », permet d’associer la réalité des rapports des nombres, leur rationalité et le plaisir des corps – sans faire appel à une raison universelle sur le modèle malebranchien. (shrink)

Le présent volume reprend la plupart des interventions prononcées lors d’une journée d’étude organisée à l’Université de Strasbourg le 28 mars 2004, à l’occasion du 250e anniversaire de la publication du Neues Organon (Leipzig, 1764) de Johann Heinrich Lambert (Mulhouse, 1728-Berlin, 1777). Cette journée avait été organisée par le Centre de recherche en philosophie allemande et contemporaine (CREPHAC) de l’Université de Strasbourg. Quoi qu’il soit difficile dans le cas de cet auteur de tracer...

Les Essais réunis ici sont des interventions de Lambert à l’Académie des sciences de Berlin. Le Discours de réception envisage la question des secours mutuels que peuvent s’apporter les classes de l’Académie (et, à travers elles, les domaines du savoir qu’elles représentent). Les Observations sur quelques dimensions du monde intellectuel abordent, à travers la question du sublime, la manière dont quelques aspects du « monde physique » sont transférés aux dénominations dans le « monde intellectuel », c’est-à-dire celui de la (...) connaissance et de la volonté, en elle-même et dans ses représentations poétiques. Les deux Essais de taxéométrie ont pour objet de présenter une théorie de la mesure de l’ordre tel qu’il apparaît ; le deuxième essai étant tout particulièrement associé à la question du plaisir esthétique. Ces essais, publiés en français, sont brièvement présentés et annotés. (shrink)

This study investigated Belgian and Dutch parental opinions on confidentiality and consent regarding medical decisions about adolescents. Through an online survey, we presented six cases (three on confidentiality, and three on consent) to 1,382 Belgian and Dutch parents. We studied patterns in parental confidentiality and consent preferences across and between cases through binomial logistic regressions and latent class analysis. Participants often grant the right to consent for a treatment to the adolescent, but the majority diverges from the adolescent’s preferences regarding (...) confidentiality. More educated participants would rather not be informed about cases regarding a sexually transmitted disease or depression than lower educated participants. Further analysis shows that participants’ preferences correspond to authoritative (47%), permissive (30%) and authoritarian (17%) parenting styles. Belgian and Dutch parents are willing to grant some degree of autonomy, but they want to be informed about specific health issues. Parental views on confidentiality and granting consent appear to mirror existing parenting styles. (shrink)

BackgroundThe BelRAI Screener is a short-form assessment consolidating internationally validated interRAI items focusing on physical and psychological aspects of functioning and problems with activities of daily living. It was fully implemented in the Flemish home care setting as of June 2021. In a biopsychosocial model for developing a personalized and effective care plan social and contextual aspects are considered equally important to biomedical ones. Thus, a social supplement to the BelRAI Screener was collaboratively developed with stakeholders and tested to gather (...) additional information on the social context of community-dwelling adults with care needs.Objective and methodsTo examine the interrater reliability of the BelRAI Social Supplement in Flanders, Belgium, an observational study was conducted using a convenience sample. The method of simultaneous rating was used due to strict COVID-19 guidelines at the time and to minimize assessment burden. Fifty two community-dwelling adults requesting home care support were simultaneously assessed by two independent assessors during home visits. Interrater reliability was tested on all 80 items of the BelRAI Social Supplement using observed agreement, kappa coefficients, and intraclass correlation coefficients.ResultsThe kappa mean and median values for nominal items, show substantial agreement, while the kappa mean and median values for ordinal items were 0.81 and 0.90, which correspond to almost perfect agreement. Following the traditional cut-off points for the interpretation of the kappa statistic, reliability was almost perfect for 49% of all items, substantial for 33%, moderate for 8%, and poor for 10%. The majority of items with poor kappa value, showed a high observed agreement, reflecting homogeneity of the sample rather than poor agreement.ConclusionThe strength of kappa agreement for the items in this version of the BelRAI Social Supplement is generally substantial to almost perfect, with high proportions of observed agreement. COVID-19 restrictions had a large impact on the planning and execution of the home visits. A final optimization of the instrument and accompanying manual according to the findings will result in an improved version ready for nation-wide implementation. (shrink)

This collection of essays on the social history of disciplinary practices in education in North America, Northern Europe, and Colonial Bengal coverage upon an understanding that schools regulate the behavior of beliefs of students, teachers, and parents by enforcing certain disciplinary social norms.

We argue that two well-known examples (strawberry distribution and Konigsberg bridges) generally considered genuine cases of distinctively _mathematical_ explanation can also be understood as cases of distinctively _generic_ explanation. The latter answer resemblance questions (e.g., why did neither person A nor B manage to cross all bridges) by appealing to ‘generic task laws’ instead of mathematical necessity (as is done in distinctively mathematical explanations). We submit that distinctively generic explanations derive their explanatory force from their role in ontological unification. Additionally, (...) we argue that distinctively generic explanations are better seen as standardly mathematical instead of distinctively mathematical. Finally, we compare and contrast our proposal with the work of Christopher Pincock on abstract explanations in science and the views of Michael Strevens on abstract causal event explanations. (shrink)

Familial disclosure of genetic information is an important, long-standing ethical issue that still gives rise to much debate. In France, recent legislation has created an innovative and unprecedented procedure that allows healthcare professionals, under certain conditions, to disclose relevant information to relatives of a person carrying a deleterious genetic mutation. This article will analyse how HCPs in two medical genetics clinics have reacted to these new legal provisions and show how their reticence to inform the patients’ relatives on their behalf (...) leads them to use this option sparingly. (shrink)

Umberto Eco -- Stephen Jay Gould -- Jean-Claude Carrière -- Jean Delumeau.

Malebranche's conception of imagination is often thought to be entirely contained in Book II of La Recherche de la vérité, which aims at destroying the beliefs and false theories resulting from the untempered use of that faculty. And yet Malebranche shows, in Book VI of the same work, that imagination has an essential function in the construction of science, particularly when it comes to producing geometrical models for phenomena; and it is, from the point of view of cognition, a singular (...) cunning of reason which associates the presence of corporeal affects in the mind, and ideas, which enlighten it without touching it. This conception rests upon unacknowledged quotations from the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, which Malebranche must have had at hand while working on the Recherche. At stake is, for us, the precise understanding of the relation between mathematics and imagination, first in the Regulae and then in the Recherche, in the general context of the project of a universal science or mathesis universalis. (shrink)

Résumé L’esthétique de Mikel Dufrenne mérite mieux que l’oubli dans lequel elle est aujourd’hui tombée. C’est ce que révèle l’analyse de ses échanges avec Jean-François Lyotard, qui fut son thésard avant de devenir un interlocuteur privilégié de ses réflexions sur l’art et la politique. Avec l’opposition de Dufrenne à l’« esthétique libidinale » de Lyotard, on n’a pas affaire à la vaine réaction du maître contre un disciple devenu plus puissant que lui. Car si, avec Lyotard, Dufrenne se réjouit de (...) l’importance reconnue aux investissements du désir dans l’art, il en appelle contre lui à la vigilance, pour que des mouvements légitimes de subversion ne sombrent pas dans de violentes, inutiles et injustes perversions. (shrink)

Émile Meyerson (1859–1933) is an epistemologist, in the French meaning of the term: he himself introduced the word in French as a synonymous for “philo- sophy of science” in his major book of 1908 Identity and Reality. First educated as a chemist, Meyerson discovered philosophy while reading Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. However, he strongly rejected Comte’s positivism: metaphysics, he said, penetrates science and even common sense; men, whether they are scien- tists or not, are interested in finding a (...) cause behind the stream of phenomena. This anti-positivism is justified in so far as Meyerson used the same method and pursued the same goal as Comte: the philosopher must practice an “a posteriori analysis of the products of thought”, so as to determine the laws of human mind. Consequently, Meyerson’s work is not a mere philosophy of science, it is more than an “épistémolo- gie” in the French sense. Its ambition is to reach the intellectual basis of all thought. The philosopher can resort to the resources of metaphysics to reach the psychologi- cal foundations of humanity, when he reflects on the historical products of thought. He establishes the transcendent or metaphysical logic involved in the process of thought. Meyerson’s work consequently deserves the name its author eventually gave to it in his posthumous Essais: a “philosophy of intellect”. But is such a philoso- phy wide enough to embrace the meaning of all the products of human thought? It seems that Meyerson was embarrassed and limited by his very starting point, namely Comte’s system. I argue that scientific or common conceptions may need more than the anti-positivist claim of the preservation of one substance behind phenomena. Truth to tell, men generally tend to identify a large and rich configuration of causes or substances. Only such architectonics can give an idea of what people mean by invoking their “vision of the world”. (shrink)

L’algèbre fournit constamment à Condillac un exemple remarquable dans sa conception de la connaissance, en montrant comment les opérations de l’esprit s’orientent vers l’usage des signes, et, réciproquement, comment l’usage des signes permet un développement des opérations. La langue algébrique, « langue bien faite », est l’objet principal du dernier ouvrage que Condillac laisse inachevé, La langue des calculs, qui paraît réunir les résultats de la Logique à ceux de la Grammaire. Le propos de l’article est de montrer en contexte (...) comment Condillac définit l’algèbre et l’analyse et comment l’opération de traduction suppose une théorie de l’identité des propositions vraies (comparable à celle de Leibniz) et une théorie de l’analogie des différents dialectes utilisés en mathématiques. (shrink)

Leibniz lit, recopie et commente le fragment pascalien publié sous le titre « Connaissance générale de l’homme » au numéro 22 de l’édition de Port-Royal des Pensées au moment de l’élaboration de la doctrine des monades, de très longues années après avoir pris connaissance du livre. L’objet de cette étude est d’apprécier les conditions de réception par Leibniz d’une doctrine qui, à de multiples égards, s’oppose à la sienne, ainsi que certaines difficultés tournant autour des concepts d’infini et d’organisme. Les (...) remarques sur les « deux infinis » donnent des éléments de compréhension de l’articulation entre le plan phénoménal et continu d’une part et son fondement réel dans les unités ou monades de l’autre. En annexe, on donne une version revue des deux états du passage de Leibniz accompagné du texte pascalien publié en 1670.A great many years after first reading Pascal’s Thoughts, while elaborating his own doctrine of monads, Leibniz studied, wrote out and commented Pascal’s fragment published as number 22 in the Port-Royal edition of the Pensées under the title « Connaissance générale de l’homme ». The purpose of this study is first to examine how Leibniz reacted and related to a doctrine that opposed his in so many respects, and then to focus on some difficulties pertaining to the concept of the infinite and to that of organisms. Leibniz’s remarks on the « two infinites » provide elements that can help understand the way the phenomenal and continuous plane and its actual foundation in units or monads are articulated. A revised edition of the two versions of Leibniz’s commentary, along with the fragment by Pascal published in 1670, are supplied in an appendix. (shrink)

Un passage biffé d’une lettre à Antoine Arnauld du 14 janvier 1688 rappelle un projet ancien chez Leibniz, celui d’augmenter l’extension de la logique démonstrative. Il écrit : « votre Art de penser contient déjà de belles méditations, qu’on peut augmenter et pousser plus avant ». Le compliment est évidemment fort ambigu, et rappelle la fonction que Leibniz donne parfois à des auteurs appartenant grosso modo au même espace intellectuel que Descartes ou Pascal, c’est-à-dire celle d’avoir comme...

Michel Tournier had a Sartrean youth. But his radicalization of existentialism pushed him to return to a Cartesian cogito. He thus compromised the transparency of our relation to things that phenomenology intended to guarantee. In this respect, the consciousness without thickness put forward by his friend Gilles Deleuze seems more satisfactory. However, the latter was particularly interested in the movements of subjectivation, belatedly following the path that Tournier had opened before him.

Le problème abordé par cette étude concerne l’interprétation du statut de l’imagination dans les Méditations métaphysiques, dans son rapport avec l’intellection et la conception de l’espace, de ses objets et des propriétés mathématiques. Il s’agit en particulier de savoir comment l’imagination distincte paraît assurer la réalité de son objet lorsqu’il s’agit de l’espace en général et lorsqu’il s’agit des figures particulières.

La science française a d’abord réservé un mauvais accueil à la psychanalyse. La psychologie historique, objective, comparée s’est notamment insurgée contre la « fixité » de l’inconscient freudien. Mais il paraît difficile de soutenir des positions comparatistes en se fondant sur une complète variabilité du mental. A contrario, les épistémologues et les psychologues qui ont fait des tendances un invariant anthropologique sont parvenus à instaurer des comparaisons historiques pertinentes. L’étude du premier « retour à Freud » prôné par Lacan prouve (...) même que la reconnaissance de principes métapsychologiques, loin d’entraver la pratique du comparatisme, peut aider à la fonder. (shrink)

Depuis qu’a paru Le fromage et le vers, le cas du meunier Menocchio a donné lieu à de nombreuses exégèses. On cherche ici à le comprendre à la lumière d’un existentialisme de la connaissance, en partant du principe que son système d’idées est cohérent, et qu’il dérive de la situation qui est la sienne, dans ses dimensions indissolublement personnelles, sociales et « écologiques ». Pour appréhender le sens d’une telle expérience tout en restituant la portée d’une épistémologie élargie aux conditions (...) de toute existence, il paraît essentiel de s’appuyer sur les réflexions méthodologiques de Carlo Ginzburg aussi bien que sur des analyses d’ethnologie européenne qu’il lui est arrivé de mentionner. (shrink)

According to Thagard and Stewart :1–33, 2011), creativity results from the combination of neural representations, and combination results from convolution, an operation on vectors defined in the holographic reduced representation framework. They use these ideas to understand creativity as it occurs in many domains, and in particular in science. We argue that, because of its algebraic properties, convolution alone is ill-suited to the role proposed by Thagard and Stewart. The semantic pointer concept allows us to see how we can apply (...) the full range of HRR operations while keeping the modal representations so central to Thagard and Stewart’s theory. By adding another combination operation and using semantic pointers as the combinatorial basis, this modified version overcomes the limitations of the original theory and perhaps helps us explain aspects of creativity not covered by the original theory. While a priori reasons cast doubts on the use of HRR operations with modal representations :5039–5054, 1987) such as semantic pointers, recent models point in the other direction, allowing us to be optimistic about the success of the revised version. (shrink)