Contemporary experimental research has emphasised the role of centrally generated signals arising from premotor areas in voluntary muscular force perception. It is therefore generally accepted that judgements of force are based on a central sense, known as the sense of effort, rather than on a sense of intra-muscular tension. Interestingly, the concept of effort is also present in the classical philosophy: to the French philosopher Maine de Biran [Maine de Biran . Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée , Vrin, (...) Paris ], the sense of effort is the fundamental component of self-experience, the landmark of the exercise of the will. In the present review, after a presentation of the nature and neurophysiological bases of effort sensation, we will examine its possible involvement in the neurocognitive process of agency. We will further focus on delusions of alien control in schizophrenic patients. Experimental data suggest that these patients have an abnormal awareness of effort caused by cerebral anomalies in the frontal and parietal lobes. (shrink)

Mental Spaces is the classic introduction to the study of mental spaces and conceptual projection, as revealed through the structure and use of language. It examines in detail the dynamic construction of connected domains as discourse unfolds. The discovery of mental space organization has modified our conception of language and thought: powerful and uniform accounts of superficially disparate phenomena have become available in the areas of reference, presupposition projection, counterfactual and analogical reasoning, metaphor and metonymy, and time and aspect in (...) discourse. The present work lays the foundation for this research. It uncovers simple and general principles that lie behind the awesome complexity of everyday logic. (shrink)

Conceptual integration—“blending”—is a general cognitive operation on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling, conceptual categorization, and framing. It serves a variety of cognitive purposes. It is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It yields products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual structure and grammar, and it often performs new work on its previously entrenched products as inputs. Blending is easy to detect in spectacular cases but it is for the most part a routine, workaday process that (...) escapes detection except on technical analysis. It is not reserved for special purposes, and is not costly.In blending, structure from input mental spaces is projected to a separate, “blended” mental space. The projection is selective. Through completion and elaboration, the blend develops structure not provided by the inputs. Inferences, arguments, and ideas developed in the blend can have effect in cognition, leading us to modify the initial inputs and to change our view of the corresponding situations.Blending operates according to a set of uniform structural and dynamic principles. It additionally observes a set of optimality principles. (shrink)

Understanding the role of simulation in conceptualization has become a priority for cognitive science. Barsalou makes a valuable contribution in that direction. The present commentary points to theoretical issues that need to be refined and elaborated in order to account for key aspects of meaning construction, such as negation, counterfactuals, quantification or analogy. Backstage cognition, with its elaborate bindings, blendings, and mappings, is more complex than Barsalou's discussion might suggest. Language does not directly carry meaning, but rather serves, along with (...) countless other situational elements, as a powerful instrument for prompting its construction. (shrink)

Meaning construction through language requires advanced mental operations also necessary for other higher-order, specifically human behaviors. Biological evolution slowly improved conceptual mapping capacities until human beings reached the level of double-scope blending, perhaps 50 to 80 thousand years ago, at which point language, along with other higher-order human behaviors, became possible. Languages are optimized to be driven by the principles and powers of double-scope blending.

L’objectif de l’article est de proposer une théorie de l’engagement psychologique dans le langage. C’est-à-dire de présenter une vue systématique de l’implication de la psyché des sujets parlants dans leur accomplissement d’actes de langage ou encore de ce à quoi ils sont assujettis sur le plan psychologique quand ils parlent. Cette théorie a la forme d’une série de thèses chacune relative à un trait spécifique de la performance langagière. Prenant appui sur la philosophie du langage de John Searle et Daniel (...) Vanderveken, elle est élaborée à partir d’une notion originale d’engagement à avoir des états mentaux.The aim of this article is to propose a theory of the psychological commitment in the language. In other words, it is to present a systematic view of how the mental states of the speakers are present in their performance of speech acts, of what are the psychological states to the possession of which the speakers are committed when they speak. This theory is based on several thesis, each of which is about a specific aspect of the performance of speech acts. It is proposed in the perspective of the philosophy of language of John Searle and Daniel Vanderveken on the basis of an original concept of commitment to have mental states. (shrink)

The flames of Alexandria continue to rage. After twenty centuries, they still dazzle us, as though the Mouseion were the only massacred library. One would believe that Julius Caesar, Theophilus of Antioch and Omar (the three pyromaniacs, the pagan, the Christian and the Moslem) had had no predecessors or imitators. But the race of incendiaries is as numerous as the waves of the sea. It is monotonous, it is indestructible, it is equal to that of the ants. It was born (...) at the same time as the first Babylonian tablets. In 1988, it continues its work. All over the world and in all times, the incendiaries were there with their torches. They burned parchments, wood or clay tablets, leather manuscripts, papyrus or folios. The same warriors who profaned temples set fire to incunabula. The same ones who slaughtered the Aztecs threw their firebrands into the collection of codices. What is it, this unleashed fury of prince and priest, judge and soldier against these small monuments of clay or paper, against these sepulchres in which the dead say that they have lived and loved, suffered and hoped? (shrink)

This study looks at the way in which students give meaning to the examples that are presented to them during educational presentations. Our research objectives are (1) to identify the properties of examples, (2) to observe their impacts for students and (3) to establish connections between their properties and their impacts. Start from 15 individual interviews with university students, we were able to identify twelve specific properties, six distinct ranges of impacts. More over, several connections can be woven between their (...) properties and their effects. To conclude, this study stresses the value and even the necessity, of taking into account the impact of language in pedagogical presentations and to continue research into this specific language practice in order to improve teaching practices. (shrink)

Given a 4-tuple of Boolean variables (a, b, c, d), logical proportions are modeled by a pair of equivalences relating similarity indicators ( \({a \wedge b}\) and \({\overline{a} \wedge \overline{b}}\) ), or dissimilarity indicators ( \({a \wedge \overline{b}}\) and \({\overline{a} \wedge b}\) ) pertaining to the pair (a, b), to the ones associated with the pair (c, d). There are 120 semantically distinct logical proportions. One of them models the analogical proportion which corresponds to a statement of the form “a (...) is to b as c is to d”. The paper inventories the whole set of logical proportions by dividing it into five subfamilies according to what they express, and then identifies the proportions that satisfy noticeable properties such as full identity (the pair of equivalences defining the proportion hold as true for the 4-tuple (a, a, a, a)), symmetry (if the proportion holds for (a, b, c, d), it also holds for (c, d, a, b)), or code independency (if the proportion holds for (a, b, c, d), it also holds for their negations \({{(\overline{a},\overline{b}, \overline{c}, \overline{d})}}\) ). It appears that only four proportions (including analogical proportion) are homogeneous in the sense that they use only one type of indicator (either similarity or dissimilarity) in their definition. Due to their specific patterns, they have a particular cognitive appeal, and as such are studied in greater details. Finally, the paper provides a discussion of the other existing works on analogical proportions. (shrink)

Widespread preservation of fossilized biomolecules in many fossil animals has recently been reported in six studies, based on Raman microspectroscopy. Here, we show that the putative Raman signatures of organic compounds in these fossils are actually instrumental artefacts resulting from intense background luminescence. Raman spectroscopy is based on the detection of photons scattered inelastically by matter upon its interaction with a laser beam. For many natural materials, this interaction also generates a luminescence signal that is often orders of magnitude more (...) intense than the light produced by Raman scattering. Such luminescence, coupled with the transmission properties of the spectrometer, induced quasi‐periodic ripples in the measured spectra that have been incorrectly interpreted as Raman signatures of organic molecules. Although several analytical strategies have been developed to overcome this common issue, Raman microspectroscopy as used in the studies questioned here cannot be used to identify fossil biomolecules. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNegative emotion influences cognitive control, and more specifically conflict adaptation. However, discrepant results have often been reported in the literature. In this study, we broke down negative emotion into integral and incidental components using a modern motivation-based framework, and assessed whether the former could change conflict adaptation. In the first experiment, we manipulated the duration of the inter-trial-interval to assess the actual time-scale of this effect. Integral negative emotion was induced by using loss-related feedback contingent on task performance, and measured (...) at the subjective and physiological levels. Results showed that conflict-driven adaptive control was enhanced when integral negative emotion was elicited, compared to a control condition without changes in defensive motivation. Importantly, this effect was only found when a short, as opposed to long ITI was used, suggesting that it had a short time scale. In the second experiment, we controlled for effe... (shrink)

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

Product differentiation has emerged as a central dynamic in contemporary agrofood systems. Departure from the mode of standardization emblematic of agrofood modernization raises questions about future technical trajectories and the ways in which learning will be sustained. This article examines two innovation trajectories: the rapid coupling of biotechnologies and information technologies to yield products differentiated by constituent components—a model based on a cognitive logic of decomposition/ recomposition—and the proliferation of product networks that mobilize distinctive, localized resources to create complete identities—a (...) model based on a cognitive logic of identity. The article analyzes the information structures—institutional mechanisms that support information exchange and learning—in each of these opposed development paradigms. We find that knowledge creation under each of the logics occurs through mechanisms not recognized within the respective paradigms. On this basis, we derive institutional hybridity as a fundamental resource in systems of innovation. (shrink)

In this supplement to a work co-authored with André Cresson, David Hume, sa vie, son œuvre, left untranslated until now, Deleuze lays the groundwork for what he will later develop as an “ethics without morality.” Contrary to morality, ethics engenders its general rule for action out of the immanence that grants it the power to affect and to be affected, that is, to increase or decrease its capacity to compose new empowering relations between beings, and between beings and the world. (...) The power to act is synonymous with the capacity to imaginatively create relations, in order to exist. In this way, the imagination reveals its ontological significance. Here we discern Deleuze’s Humean impulse encountering a fundamental Nietzscheanism. The translator’s introduction attempts to make explicit his specific philosophical motive, at this point only formative but, eventually, foundational for his later thought. (shrink)

A historical and systematic introduction to what the medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote about the Trinity. By focusing on the thought of one of the greatest defenders of the doctrine of the Trinity, Gilles Emery OP elucidates the classical Christian understanding of God.

A lone fish swims haphazardly in any direction, but. if we get enough fish of the same species together so that neighboring individual fish may exchange signals, they adopt a common direction. Here we have a phenomenon of cooperation: many individuals find themselves in strong interaction with each other, and overall behavior is noticeably affected.

The Conversation that Descartes had with Burman on April 16, 1648 sheds light on the meaning of the phrase ens reale, which was common in modern scholastic treatises but unusual under his pen, and thus on the Cartesian concept of realitas. Ens verum et reale, such is the object of mathematics: no less real than that of physics, even if it does not exist out of the mind and requires imagination. As for the object of metaphysics, if it is no (...) less real than that of physics and mathematics, it is both existent and unimaginable. The answers given by Descartes that are examined here are significant samples which in addition show the need to re-edit the Conversation in the light of Clauberg's Opera. (shrink)

Les Theoremata d'esse et essentia (ca 1278-1285), qui, en depit d'une edition critique deja ancienne (Hocedez, 1930), n'avaient pas encore ete traduits integralement en francais a ce jour, apparaissent comme l'uvre majeure pour bien saisir la genese doctrinale et conceptuelle de la theorie de la distinction reelle. Peu de temps avant les Questions disputees sur l'etre et l'essence (1286-1287), qui sont au cur du debat entre Gilles de Rome (ca 1245-1316), partisan d'une distinction reelle entre l'etre et l'essence, et (...) Henri de Gand (ca 1217-1293), promoteur d'une theorie de la distinction " intentionnelle ", les Theoremes apparaissent comme un essai de synthese, dans lequel le maitre augustin donne un expose d'ensemble des arguments qui le conduisent a faire de l'etre une res (" chose " au sens de " realite ") a part entiere. Dans ces conditions, les disciples de Thomas d'Aquin (ca 1224-1274) n'ont pas manque de voir, en Gilles, l'un des partisans d'une these qu'ils revendiquaient comme un heritage de l'Aquinate. Les Theoremes revelent cependant une pensee incontestablement personnelle, et manifestent le caractere resolument original de Gilles de Rome, metaphysicien incontournable du XIIIe siecle finissant. (shrink)