"Et toutes ces belles idées sur la liberté, elles sont appliquées quelque part? - Ensemble, non. Mais par petits bouts, oui. Enfin, je crois. - Hé bien, tu n'as qu'à aller voir." C'est ainsi que je fus arraché à la torpeur de ma bibliothèque. Depuis lors, je voyage à travers le monde avec une ambition simple : étudier les thèmes de philosophie politique qui me sont chers là où ils sont mis en oeuvre. Faire apparaître derrière les concepts des histoires, (...) des visages. Pour comprendre la tolérance religieuse, j'ai parcouru le Kerala, en Inde, où les grands monothéismes coexistent depuis la nuit des temps. Pour me faire une opinion sur le libre-échange, j'ai suivi dans son quotidien le directeur de l'Organisation mondiale du commerce. Pour tester la libéralisation des drogues, j'ai côtoyé les entrepreneurs de la marijuana au Colorado. Pour mieux saisir les enjeux du revenu universel, j'ai enquêté dans les villages brésiliens où il est expérimenté. Pour apprécier la réalité du micro-crédit, j'ai sillonné les bidonvilles de Lima. Et pour m'assurer des vertus de la liberté, j'ai rencontré ceux qui en sont privés, dans les "prisons ouvertes" finlandaises. Chemin faisant, j'ai perdu certains préjugés, découvert de nouvelles idées, croisé des auteurs insoupçonnés. Et j'ai acquis une conviction : les problèmes posés par la liberté se résolvent par... davantage de liberté. G.K. (shrink)

Un révolutionnaire sommeille en chaque Français, prêt hier comme aujourd'hui à briser les rentes et les privilèges. Dans le même temps, un expert l'observe et le dirige, planifiant autoritairement la société. Et un geek lui tape sur l'épaule, l'entraînant dans le monde inconnu des nouvelles technologies qui fourmille de promesses et de menaces. Ces trois influences parfois contradictoires nous font tourner la tête. Gaspard Koenig propose donc de les interpréter à la lumière d'une nouvelle philosophie politique, fondée sur l'autonomie (...) individuelle. Car ce dont la France a besoin, ce n'est pas d'un énième diagnostic économique, mais de principes solides dont on pourra déduire des réformes radicales. Revenons au modèle révolutionnaire, ce «jacobinisme libéral» incarné par le député du tiers état Isaac Le Chapelier. Rejetons la tentation planiste, léguée par le régime de Vichy et responsable encore aujourd'hui de tant d'injustice et d'exclusion. Apprenons à maîtriser l'utopie numérique, en imaginant un nouvel humanisme qui réponde aux défis de la Silicon Valley et un Etat 2.0 qui nous redonne le contrôle de notre destin numérique. Pays des libertés, la France meurt de servitude volontaire. Terminons, enfin, notre Révolution! Et chacun deviendra son propre maître. (shrink)

Qui aurait pu imaginer, il y a dix ans à peine, que le quotidien Le Monde titre un article « La garde des Sceaux... », que la presse parlant d ’ une femme ministre dise désormais « la ministre », que dans le Journal officiel le nom des femmes auxquelles la Légion d ’ honneur est attribuée ( aujourd ’ hui un peu..

Psychologists have emphasized children's acquisition of information through firsthand observation. However, many beliefs are acquired from others' testimony. In two experiments, most 4yearolds displayed sceptical trust in testimony. Having heard informants' accurate or inaccurate testimony, they anticipated that informants would continue to display such differential accuracy and they trusted the hitherto reliable informant. Yet they ignored the testimony of the reliable informant if it conflicted with what they themselves had seen. By contrast, threeyearolds were less selective in trusting a reliable (...) informant. Thus, young children check testimony against their own experience and increasingly recognise that some informants are more trustworthy than others. (shrink)

The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1–11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions12–14, produce an abnor- mally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of (...) judgements on moral dilemmas that pit compelling considerations of aggregate welfare against highly emotionally aversive behaviours (for example, having to sacrifice one person’s life to save a number of other lives)7,8. In contrast, the VMPC patients’ judgements were normal in other classes of moral dilemmas. These findings indicate that, for a selective set of moral dilemmas, the VMPC is critical for normal judgements of right and wrong. The findings support a necessary role for emotion in the generation of those judgements. (shrink)

In an 1894 manuscript addendum to the seminal "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", which he had written in 1877, Charles Peirce stated that "there are many people who detect the authorship of my unsigned screeds; and I doubt not that one of the marks of my style by which they do so is my inordinate reluctance to repeat a word". However, if Peirce refrained from repeating words in one and the same sentence, he surely did not refrain from repeating (...) words throughout all his writings, as this brief report will show. Here, we present the results of a lexicometric analysis performed on the vocabulary present in the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, as they were edited and published by... (shrink)

Can there be a global demos? The current debate about this topic is divided between two opposing camps: the “pessimist” or “impossibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is either conceptually or empirically impossible, and the “optimist” or “possibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is conceptually as well as empirically possible and an embryonic version of it already exists. However, the two camps agree neither on a common working definition of a (...) global demos, nor on the relevant empirical facts, so it is difficult to reconcile their conflicting outlooks. We seek to move the debate beyond this stalemate. We argue that existing conceptions of a demos are ill-suited for capturing what kind of a global demos is needed to facilitate good global governance, and we propose a new conception of a demos that is better suited for this purpose. We suggest that some of the most prominent conceptions of a demos have focused too much on who the members of a demos are and too little on what functional characteristics the demos must have in order to perform its role in facilitating governance within the relevant domain. Our new proposal shifts the emphasis from the first, “compositional” question to the second, “performative” one, and provides a more “agency-based” account of a global demos. The key criterion that a collection of individuals must meet in order to qualify as a demos is that it is not merely demarcated by an appropriate membership criterion, but that it can be organized, democratically, so as to function as a state-like agent. Compared to the existing, predominantly “compositional” approaches to thinking about the demos, this agency-based approach puts us into a much better position to assess the empirical prospects for the emergence of a global demos that can facilitate good global governance. (shrink)

A basic assumption in current western medicine is that good healthcare involves informed choices. Indeed, making informed choices is not only viewed as “good practice” but a right to which each individual is entitled, a perspective only recently developed in the medical field.Moreover, in the case of ethical decisions, much of the discussion on the role of the family is cast within the autonomy paradigm of contemporary bioethics; that is, family members provide emotional support but do not make decisions for (...) the competent adult patient. The family Is uniformly viewed as an Important proxy decision maker for incompetent patients; but most bioethicists would eschew any decision-making role for the family of mentally competent adult patients. Underlying the discussion of autonomy is the basic assumption in western medicine that good healthcare Involves choices by Informed individuals. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article I propose to interpret Austin's conception of perlocution in light of Peirce's philosophy of signs, through the lens of his notions of thirdness and speculative rhetoric in particular. I suggest that the traditional notion of speech genre, examined within the context of Peirce's semiotic framework, can make sense of the regularities and predictability that are characteristic of a large part of our discursive practices. More specifically, I argue that crystallized “habits of interpretation,” correlated to purposeful speech genres (...) instantiated in given circumstances of enunciation, could be construed as predetermining the range of future interpretive conduct. In that perspective, this process of determination could be thus conceived as relatively predictable, at least for communication situations activating well-defined speech genres. In the end, I suggest that Peirce's conception of rhetoric draws attention to the necessarily constrained interpretive habits of our discursive life, yielding an original perspective on the notion of perlocution. (shrink)

This article focuses on discursive regularities that can generally be observed in text corpora produced in similar communication situations (medical interviews, political debates, teaching classes, etc.). One type of such regularities is related to the so-called ‘discourse genres’, considered as a set of tacit instructions broadly constraining the forms of utterances in a given discursive practice. Those regularities highlight the relatively regulated, non-random nature of most of our discursive practices and epitomize the necessary constrained creativity of meaning making in discourse. (...) In this perspective, we suggest that the concepts of Thirdness and Habit, as theorized by Charles S. Peirce, can be fruitful in describing the role and importance of such regularities in our sociodiscursive life. More specifically, we believe that discourse regularities are ideal case studies if one wishes to investigate instances of predictability in semiotic (discursive) processes. Overall, we suggest that their study can be one of many research orientations through which a prediction-based scientific conception of semiotics could be applied. (shrink)

Biological kin share up to half of their genetic material, including predisposition to disease. Thus, variants of clinical significance identified in each individual’s genome can implicate an exponential number of relatives at potential risk. This has renewed the dilemma over family access to research participant’s genetic results, since prevailing US practices treat these as private, controlled by the individual. These individual-based ethics contrast with the family-based ethics – in which genetic information, privacy, and autonomy are considered to be familial – (...) endorsed in UK genomic medicine and by participants in a multi-method study of US research participants presented here. The dilemma reflects a conflict between US legal and ethical frameworks that privilege “the individual” and exclude “the family” versus actual human genetics that are simultaneously individual and familial. Can human genetics succeed in challenging bioethics’ hegemonic individualism to recognize and place the family at the center of the room where bioethics happens? (shrink)

The hypothesis that the particular linear tracks appearing in the measurement of a spherically-emitting radioactive source in a cloud chamber are determined by the positions of atoms or molecules inside the chamber is further explored in the framework of a recently established one-dimensional model. In this model, meshes of localized spins 1/2 play the role of the cloud-chamber atoms and the spherical wave is replaced by a linear superposition of two wave packets moving from the origin to the left and (...) to the right, evolving deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation. We first revisit these results using a time-dependent approach, where the wave packets impinge on a symmetric two-sided detector. We discuss the evolution of the wave function in the configuration space and stress the interest of a non-symmetric detector in a quantum-measurement perspective. Next we use a time-independent approach to study the scattering of a plane wave on a single-sided detector. Preliminary results are obtained, analytically for the single-spin case and numerically for up to 8 spins. They show that the spin-excitation probabilities are sometimes very sensitive to the parameters of the model, which corroborates the idea that the measurement result could be determined by the atom positions. The possible origin of decoherence and entropy increase in future models is finally discussed. (shrink)

As we look to the future in a world with porous borders and boundaries transgressed by technologies, an inevitable question is:Can there be a single, global bioethics? Intimately intertwined with this question is a second one: How might a global bioethics account for profound - and constantly transforming - sources of cultural difference? Can a uniform, global bioethics be relevant cross-culturally? These are not simple questions, rather, a multi-dimensional answer is required. It is important to distinguish between two meanings of (...) bioethics: the academic discipline of bioethics as opposed to bioethics as a set of practices governing clinical care and scientific research. There is growing evidence to support the notion of a shared global understanding of bioethics as a field of inquiry focused on the moral dimensions of science and biomedicine. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Charles S. Peirce’s grammar of representation and its relevance for a logical conception of scientific inquiry. Closely relying on Peirce’s writings, one of his important trichotomies of signs will be discussed in particular: that distinguishing between substitutive signs, or “semes”, informational signs, or “phemes”, and persuasive signs, or “delomes”. According to Peirce, these three categories of signs result from an extension of the traditional division between “terms”, “propositions”, and “arguments” to all signs, understood as the foundational (...) elements with and on which the scientific mind operates. It is shown that such an extended view of logic, conceived as a “semiotic”, or general doctrine of signs, is consistent with Peirce’s metaphysical views on truth and reality. Logic-as-semiotic, and its three corresponding branches of stecheotic, critic, and methodeutic, is thus conceived as a requisite normative trivium for the practice of scientific inquiry, whose purpose is to represent reality truthfully. In the end, we aim to remind that Peirce’s semiotic epistemology must necessarily be contextualized within the frame of his comprehensive philosophy of the scientific “settlement of opinion”. (shrink)

Harold Hotelling’s articles in mathematical economics from the 1930s are classics. Some are keystones of entire sub-disciplines of economic theory such as location economics [Hotelling...

Le livre refermé on ne peut s’empêcher de ressentir une sorte d’accablement. Car l’histoire est terrible. Cette « étrange défaite » que Christine Bard constate, reprenant le titre du livre écrit par Marc Bloch dans la clandestinité, est celle de notre société et d’abord la nôtre, celle des féministes. Défaite des féministes qui se sont dépensées dans cet entre-deux-guerres et n’ont remporté que de maigres succès dans leur lutte pour l’égalité civile et civique. Défaite de l’histoire aussi, si...

Le livre refermé on ne peut s’empêcher de ressentir une sorte d’accablement. Car l’histoire est terrible. Cette « étrange défaite » que Christine Bard constate, reprenant le titre du livre écrit par Marc Bloch dans la clandestinité, est celle de notre société et d’abord la nôtre, celle des féministes. Défaite des féministes qui se sont dépensées dans cet entre-deux-guerres et n’ont remporté que de maigres succès dans leur lutte pour l’égalité civile et civique. Défaite de l’histoire aussi, si...

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 551-565.

This essay attempts an overview of Peirce’s pragmaticist doctrine of the truth of propositions. Relying on his writings, I try to characterize his conception of the real and discuss the ways in which his peculiar scholastic metaphysics, opposing that of nominalists, is a central tenet of the pragmaticist view of truth which he strived to develop. Peirce conceived indeed real possibilities and real necessities to be just as real as actualities, those realities corresponding in nature to qualities (“firsts”), laws (“thirds”), (...) and existents (“seconds”), respectively. More specifically, I detail the peculiar mode of being of each kind of real elements and show that all three categories must be recognized at once in true propositions. This led Peirce to conclude that if propositions are general signs indeed and, as such, along with terms and arguments, are necessarily dependent on mind, it does not in the least preclude those propositions to be about, nor true of, a real world – a position which actually constitutes a necessary prerequisite for any meaningful conception of scientific inquiry. I believe that a focus on such interrelations between Peirce’s categorial account of the real and Peirce’s pragmaticist conception of truth constitutes an ideal testament to the systematic nature of his thought, which is an aspect often deflated in unspecialized literatures. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Frank Ramsey's essay on subjective probability (1926) as a consistent way to articulate logic, rationality and knowledge. The first part of the essay builds an axiomatic theory of subjective probability based on ‘formal logic’, defining rationality as choice-consistency. The second part seems to open up different horizons: the evaluation of degrees of belief by ‘human logic’. Because of the interest Keynes (1931) had taken in ‘human logic’, it was considered to be a possible alternative to the formal (...) logic underlying the neoclassical theory of individual behaviour. The analysis of Ramsey's method in the entire paper, the relation between logic and rationality it constructs and the conception of uncertainty it reveals, lead me to note on the contrary that Ramsey's human logic was a complementary logic rather than an alternative to formal logic. Defining a standard to evaluate beliefs formation according to a frequentist criterion, it completes a normative representation of rationality which supports an original theory of knowledge that appears more in line with further developments of neoclassical methodology than with Keynesian economics. (shrink)

As we look to the future in a world with porous borders and boundaries transgressed by technologies, an inevitable question is:Can there be a single, global bioethics? Intimately intertwined with this question is a second one: How might a global bioethics account for profound - and constantly transforming - sources of cultural difference? Can a uniform, global bioethics be relevant cross-culturally? These are not simple questions, rather, a multi-dimensional answer is required. It is important to distinguish between two meanings of (...) bioethics: the academic discipline of bioethics as opposed to bioethics as a set of practices governing clinical care and scientific research. There is growing evidence to support the notion of a shared global understanding of bioethics as a field of inquiry focused on the moral dimensions of science and biomedicine. (shrink)

Cosmopolitics, the concept of a world politics based on shared democratic values, is in an increasingly fragile state.

What is the nature of children's trust in testimony? Is it based primarily on evidential correlations between statements and facts, as stated by Hume, or does it derive from an interest in the trustworthiness of particular speakers? In this essay, we explore these questions in an effort to understand the developmental course and cognitive bases of children's extensive reliance on testimony. Recent work shows that, from an early age, children monitor the reliability of particular informants, differentiate between those who make (...) true and false claims and keep that differential accuracy in mind when evaluating new information from these people. We argue that this selective trust is likely to involve the mentalistic appraisal of speakers rather than surface generalizations of their behavior. Finally, we review the significance of children's deference to adult authority on issues of naming and categorization. In addition to challenging a purely inductive account of trust, these and other findings reflect a potentially rich set of tools brought by children to the task of learning from people's testimony. (shrink)

Cultural difference has been largely ignored within bioethics, particularly within the end-of-life discourses and practices that have developed over the past two decades in the U.S. healthcare system. Yet how should culturebe taken into account?

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

The current research applied a mid-level evolutionary theory that has been successfully employed across numerous animal species—life history theory—in an attempt to understand the Dark Triad personality trait cluster (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism). In Study 1 (N = 246), a measure of life history strategy was correlated with psychopathy, but unexpectedly with neither Machiavellianism nor narcissism. Study 2 (N = 321) replicated this overall pattern of results using longer, traditional measures of the Dark Triad traits and alternative, future-discounting indicators of (...) life history strategy (a smaller-sooner, larger-later monetary dilemma and self-reported risk-taking behaviors). Additional findings suggested two sources of shared variance across the Dark Triad traits: confidence in predicting future outcomes and openness to short-term mating. (shrink)

Paul Appelbaum and colleagues propose four models of informed consent to research that deploys whole genome sequencing and may generate incidental findings. They base their analysis on empirical data that suggests that research participants want to be offered incidental findings and on a normative consensus that researchers incur a duty to offer them. Their models will contribute to the heated policy debate about return of incidental findings. But in my view, they do not ask the foundational question, In the context (...) of genome sequencing, how much work can consent be asked to do? (shrink)

Within the growing developmental literature on children's testimonial learning, the emphasis placed on children's evaluations of testimonial evidence has shielded from view some of the more collaborative dimensions of testimonial learning. Drawing on recent philosophical work on testimony and interpersonal trust, we argue for an alternative way of conceptualizing the social nature of testimonial learning. On this alternative, some testimonial learning is the result of a jointly collaborative epistemic activity, an activity that aims at the epistemic goal of true belief, (...) but that does so by means of an irreducibly social process. (shrink)

We support Jaswal & Akhtar's interrogation of social motivational accounts of autism and discuss two sources of bias that contribute to how others construe autistic people's communications: an experience-based bias that limits our ability to discern the speaker's action as communicative and a prejudice against the credibility of certain speakers that limits a listener's willingness to believe their testimony.

Das vorliegende Handbuch bietet eine umfassende Darstellung von Leben, Werk und Wirkung Georg Simmels. Neben Simmels Herkunft aus den Zusammenhängen einer Völkerpsychologie und früher europäisch-ethnologischer Interessen geht es darum, nächst dem ungleich bekannteren Soziologen v. a. den Philosophen Simmel herauszustellen. Komplementär zu einer Darstellung des Lebens Simmels sowie der Wirkung seines Schaffens werden seine Werke nicht nur inhaltlich dargestellt, sondern auch ihre Kontexte einbezogen und behandelt. Der Versuch, Simmels Denken in seiner ganzen Breite und Vielfalt abzubilden, führt dazu, die in (...) der Forschung klassische Einteilung in drei Phasen von Simmels Werk sowie die Ausdifferenzierung in einen eher philosophisch und eher soziologisch orientierten Denker zu Gunsten einer genaueren Gruppierung der Werkphasen aufzuweichen bzw. mitunter ganz aufzugeben. Ziel ist es, weitere thematische Differenzierungen zu ermöglichen und Kontinuitäten und Zäsuren des Simmelschen Denkens möglichst umfangreich nachzuzeichnen. (shrink)

Cet essai se penche sur un aspect méconnu de l’œuvre d’El Lissitzky : ses relations avec le cinéma. Il propose une analyse détaillée des deux salles d’exposition conçues entièrement par El Lissitzky, les Demonstrationsräume [Salles de démonstration] construites respectivement à Dresde (1926) et Hanovre (1927), fondée sur ses écrits théoriques du milieu des années 1920, ainsi que sur les notions de « cinéma élargi » et de « cinéma par d’autres moyens ». En soulignant l’importance de la matérialité du dispositif (...) cinématographique, cet essai décrit ces salles d’exposition modernistes comme des lieux d’expérimentation radicale visant à renégocier les relations entre les différents médias artistiques. (shrink)