The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the conference Mapping Parameters of Meaning, an event organized by the GReG (Groupe de Rèflexion sur les Grammaires) linguistics research group in the Language Department of the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre on November 19-20, 2010. The book addresses the description of meaning construction processes, and the necessity for new linguistic interface-tools to analyze it in its dynamic and multi-dimensional aspect. Syntax, grammar, prosody, discourse organization, subjective and situational filters (...) are not considered as autonomous systems; on the contrary, they are shown to systematically converge in the process of meaning construction and interpretation. The notion of context is discussed throughout the volume, a major concern being to try and define the precise nature of the link between variable contextual parameters and stable linguistic systems. The book will be of value to anyone interested in the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics in the gradual construction and interpretation of meaning in natural languages, including researchers, students and scholars of formal linguistics, cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of collective epistemic vices, which we call the “group identification account”. The group identification account attributes collective epistemic vices to the groups that are constituted by “group identification”, which is a primitive and non-doxastic self-understanding as a group member (Turner, 1982; Brewer, 1991; Brewer & Gardner, 1996; Pacherie, 2013; Salice & Miyazono, 2020). The distinctive feature of the group identification account is that it enables us to attribute epistemic vices not (...) just to established social groups (e.g. committees, research teams, juries) but also to loose social groups (e.g. loosely connected people in an echo chamber) when they are constituted by group identification. The group identification account is contrasted with Fricker’s (2010, 2020) influential account, the “joint commitment account”, which focuses on established social groups, and has difficulty in making sense of collective epistemic vices of loose social groups. The group identification account is motivated by the fact that collective epistemic vices can be useful to diagnose not only the epistemic performance of established groups but also that of loose groups in real-life cases, such as echo chamber (Nguyen, 2020), implicit bias (Holroyd, 2020), group polarization (Broncano-Berrocal & Carter, 2021), etc. (shrink)

Groups can be epistemically vicious just like individuals. And just like individuals, groups sometimes want to do something about their vices. They want to change. However, intentionally combating one’s own vices seems impossible without detecting those vices first. Self-knowledge seems to provide a first step towards changing one’s own epistemic vices. I argue that groups can acquire self-knowledge about their epistemic vices and I propose an account of such collective self-knowledge. I suggest that collective self-knowledge of vices is partially based (...) on evidence that a group can generate by performing internal promptings. Whereas these promptings are done mentally in individual self-knowledge, these promptings are done by interactions of group members in the collective case. The group can then acquire inferential self-knowledge of their vices based on the evidence generated by the interactions within the group. Groups thereby bring themselves into a position from which they can combat and change those vices intentionally. (shrink)

Gabriele Taylor presents a philosophical investigation of the "ordinary" vices traditionally seen as "death to the soul": sloth, envy, avarice, pride, anger, lust, and gluttony. In the course of a richly detailed discussion of individual and interrelated vices, which complements recent work by moral philosophers on virtue, she shows why these "deadly sins" are correctly so named and grouped together.

On the basis of psychological research, a group of philosophers known as 'situationists' argue that the evidence belies the existence of broad and stable (or 'global') character traits. They argue that this condemns as psychologically unrealistic those traditions in moral theory in which global virtues are upheld as ideals. After a survey of the debate to date, this article argues that the thesis of situationism is ill-supported by the available evidence. Situationists overlook the explanatory potential of a large class (...) of global character traits, namely, vices that do not involve other-directed malevolence, such as laziness, cowardice, and selfishness. A detailed discussion of the relevant empirical studies bearing on moral psychology shows that the behavioral patterns observed in these studies are consistent with the widespread possession of such non-malicious vices. This means, contrary to the situationist thesis, that the empirical record is fully compatible with the common existence of global character traits. (shrink)

Tosi and Warmke discuss cases where the speaker intends for the audience to take their expressions as evidence of good moral character. However, another possibility exists that similarly exploits the social communicative architecture. A contribution to public moral discourse may also attempt to strut by demonstrating evidence of bad moral character, by purposely failing to meet the evaluative standards of its audience—or, paradigmatically for my purposes, a particular section of its actual or notional audience. I call this kind of communication (...) vice signaling. On their face, virtue signaling and vice signaling may seem to be opposites, since the labels imply that they are signaling opposite things. But certain cases of vice signaling are in fact also cases of virtue signaling. These are the cases where someone flaunts the standards of an out-group in order to demonstrate solidarity, seriousness, or some other virtue to their in-group. In this paper I attempt to describe these cases and point out the moral risks and opportunities they present. (shrink)

In this chapter, after a review of some existent empirical and philosophical literature that suggests that human beings are essentially incapable of changing their mind in response to counter-evidence, I argue that motivation makes a significant difference to individuals’ ability rationally to evaluate information. I rely on empirical work on group deliberation to argue that the motivation to learn from others, as opposed to the desire to win arguments, promotes good quality group deliberation. Finally I provide an overview (...) of some epistemic virtues and vices crucial to the politico-epistemic activities of arguing, debating, and listening to a contrary point of view. (shrink)

A body of work in ethics and epistemology has advanced a collectivist view of virtues. Collectivism holds that some social groups can be subjects in themselves which can possess attributes such as agency or responsibility. Collectivism about virtues holds that virtues are among those attributes. By focusing on two different accounts, I argue that the collectivist virtue project has limited prospects. On one such interpretation of institutional virtues, virtue-like features of the social collective are explained by particular group-oriented features (...) of individual role-bearers that are elicited by institutional structures or goals. On another account of groups as moral agents unbound by formal institutional constraints, to the extent that group characteristics meet the collectivist requirement, they fail to stand up as virtues in the substantive sense of a character trait. These two positions’ respective drawbacks and insights support a non-collectivist conclusion: Where there is a substantive virtue of some social group, it consists only in certain group-specific attitudes and motives of individuals qua members of that group. I end by outlining some risks in adopting collectivism about virtues as an explanatory or normative doctrine, and suggesting that we can abandon it without embracing an equally undesirable individualism in virtue theory. (shrink)

Introduction Groups and solidarity are, separately, widely debated concepts in contemporary social philosophy, yet their interplay remains largely unexplored and undertheorized. In fact, when it comes to investigating one of these concepts, more often than not the other is at best vaguely mentioned as a background assumption, and vice versa. To be fair, this poor attention to the connections between groups and solidarity is not to be addressed to social philosophers only, for it is easily rec...

This book addresses a prominent group of virtues and vices as portrayed in popular films to further our understanding of these moral character traits. The discussions emphasize the interplay between the philosophical conception of the virtues and vices and the cinematic representations of character. Joseph H. Kupfer explores how fictional characters possessing certain moral strengths and weaknesses concretize our abstract understanding of them. Because the actions that flow from these traits occur in cinematic contexts mirroring real world conditions, the (...) narrative portrayals of these moral characteristics can further our appreciation of their import. Humility, integrity, and perseverance, for example, are depicted in Chariots of Fire, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and Billy Elliot, while the vices of envy, arrogance and vanity are captured in Amadeus, Whiplash, and Young Adult. This interdisciplinary work in philosophy and film criticism will be of great interest to scholars and students of film studies, philosophy of film, ethics, aesthetics, and popular culture. (shrink)

Group polarization—roughly, the tendency of groups to incline towards more extreme positions than initially held by their individual members— has been rigorously studied by social psychol- ogists, though in a way that has overlooked important philosophical questions about this phenomenon which remain unexplored. Two such salient questions are metaphysical and epistemological, respectively. From a metaphysical point of view, can group polarization, understood as an epistemic feature of a group, be reduced to epistemic features of its individual members? (...) Relatedly, from an epistemological point of view, is group polarization best understood as a kind of cognitive bias or rather in terms of intellectual vice? This book taxonomizes this possibility space by comparing four models which combine potential answers to the metaphysical and epistemological questions. The models we consider are: group polarization as a collective bias, a summation of individual epistemic vices; a summation of individual biases; and a collective epistemic vice. We defend a collective vice model of group polarization over the competing alternatives. (shrink)

In Deadly Vices, Gabriele Taylor provides a secular analysis of vices which in Christian theology were thought to bring death to the soul: sloth, envy, avarice, pride, anger, lust, and gluttony. She argues that these vices are appropriately singled out and grouped together in that ‘they are destructive of the self and prevent its flourishing’. Using a related approach, I offer a secular analysis of gluttony and cowardice, examining their roles in common failures to empathise with animals. I argue that (...) these vices constitute serious moral failings, for they enable continuing complicity in animal abuse and undermine integrity. While Taylor aims to show that ‘deadly vices’ are destructive of the self, I argue that they are ultimately deadly to other animals. I offer practical suggestions for overcoming them by cultivating agentic courage and better empathy with animals. (shrink)

Can implicit biases be properly thought of as epistemic vices? I start by sketching the contours of implicit biases (1), and then turn to the recent claim, from Cassam, that implicit biases are epistemic vices (2). However, I argue that concerns about the stability of implicit biases and their role in producing behavior make for difficulties in establishing that implicit biases of individuals are epistemic vices (3). I then consider a recently developed model which prompts us to consider implicit biases (...) as properties of groups (4). This raises the question of whether implicit biases might constitute collective epistemic vice. I suggest that there is a way to make sense of this claim, but it requires rethinking how we conceptualise collective epistemic vice (5). These re-conceptualisations can be independently motivated. I close by marshalling some considerations in favour of using the terminology of vice to capture these defects of collective epistemic practice (6). (shrink)

The Mismeasure of the Self is dedicated to vices that blight many lives. They are the vices of superiority, characteristic of those who feel entitled, superior and who have an inflated opinion of themselves, and those of inferiority, typical of those who are riddled with self-doubt and feel inferior. Arrogance, narcissism, haughtiness, and vanity are among the first group. Self-abasement, fatalism, servility, and timidity exemplify the second. This book shows these traits to be to vices of self-evaluation and describes (...) their pervasive harmful effects in some detail. Even though the influence of these traits extends to any aspect of life, the focus of this book is their damaging impact on the life of the intellect. Tanesini develops and defends a view of these vices that puts vicious motivations at their core. The analyses developed in this work build on empirical research in attitude psychology and on philosophical theories in virtue ethics and epistemology. The book concludes with a positive proposal for weakening vice and promoting virtue. (shrink)

Vice crimes, crimes prohibited in part because they are viewed as morally corrupting, engage legal theorists because they reveal importantly contrasting views between liberals and virtue-centered theorists on the very limits of legitimate state action. Yet advocates and opponents alike focus on the role law can play in suppressing personal vice; the role of law is seen as suppressing licentiousness, sloth, greed etc. The most powerful advocates of the position that the law must nurture good character often draw (...) on Aristotelian theories of virtue to ground the connection between law and virtue. While Aristotle believed that law and character were linked, it is ironic to note that he did not argue for the position evidenced in our vice laws that law was likely to succeed in instilling virtue. Indeed, Aristotle thought the project of using law to instill private virtue was nearly certain to fail. Aristotle’s deep concern was not for the way law protected private virtue within each person but the way law had to protect civic virtue between citizens. This article argues that even from its foundations, the project of vice crimes as moral instruction is misconceived. The use of law for overly instrumental or narrow reasons opens law and legal institutions to abuse and factionalism. Lawyers, judges and others specially connected to law must first and foremost aim at addressing “legal vices,” vices internal to the institutions of law. Particularly, increasing factionalism and instrumentalism which disconnects law from the pursuit of the common good threatens our civic bonds. Most importantly, where civic bonds are disrupted, citizens have no reason to remain law abiding. The striking lesson, captured both in ancient philosophy and modern history, is that when legal vices grow unchecked and factions use the law to pursue narrow interests, ultimately law abidingness is corrupted and interest groups harm themselves as much as others. (shrink)

This chapter argues for three related points. First, answerability is the key to intellectual autonomy. However, in order to enjoy that status that befits an intellectually autonomous subject, other epistemic subjects must also recognize that one is answerable for one’s believing. Second, systemic conditions of social oppression impede recognition since they promote situations in which members of oppressed groups are disabled in their attempts to make themselves answerable for their believing. Third, these oppressive conditions foster the development of the epistemic (...) vices of hyper-autonomy in privileged individuals and of heteronomy in those who are subordinated. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors argue for two main claims: first, that the epistemic results of group deliberation can be superior to those of individual inquiry; and, second, that successful deliberative groups depend on individuals exhibiting deliberative virtues. The development of these group-deliberative virtues, the authors argue, is important not only for epistemic purposes but political purposes, as democracies require the virtuous deliberation of their citizens. Deliberative virtues contribute to the deliberative synergy of the group, not only (...) in terms of improving the quality of the group's present decisions, but also improving the background conditions for continued group deliberation. The authors sketch a preliminary schedule of these group-deliberative virtues modelled on Aristotle's conception of virtue as the mean between two extreme vices. The virtues discussed in this article include deliberative wit, friendliness, empathy, charity, temperance, courage, sincerity, and humility. (shrink)

Qu’est-ce que la circulation mondialisée des biens et des personnes fait à la musique? Deux choses apparemment contradictoires : l’uniformisation des styles et des moyens se conjugue avec leur renouvellement constant, les effets de contagion planétaire avec la multiplication des réappropriations locales. Autrement dit ce qui uniformise peut être aussi ce qui singularise. Ce paradoxe nous conduit à dérouler quelques fils, à suivre de proche en proche des « objets » circulants – un appareil numérique, un style musical, un groupe (...) de pratiques – de manière à saisir les modalités concrètes de leur circulation. Pour que ça circule, il faut que ça se connecte, ce qui ne va pas sans heurts, disputes, larsens, frottements, qui tous affectent voire transforment l’« objet » circulant. Point de circulation sans frictions et boucles de rétroaction et sans une multitude d’agents qui font que ça passe : nous croisons en cheminant des musiciens noise, mais aussi des benders, des shifters, des makers, des repairers. Ces figures de l’interconnexion globale sont également celles qui se glissent dans ses failles et amplifient ses différences. (shrink)

History teems with instances of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Some wrongs are perpetrated by individuals; most ghastly evils were committed by groups or nations. Other horrific evils were established and sustained by legal systems and supported by cultural mores. This demands explanation. I describe and evaluate four common explanations of evil before discussing more mundane and psychologically informed explanations of wrong-doing. Examining these latter forms helps isolate an additional factor which, if acknowledged, empowers us to diagnose, cope with, and prevent (...) many ordinary and serious moral wrongs. In so doing, I do not assert that the explanations of first call are never appropriate. I claim only that their role is smaller than many of us reflexively suppose, and that the role of the later feature I identify is more significant, in part, because it supports and amplifies the more mundane and psychologically informed factors prompting wrong-doing. (shrink)

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive shortcomings, limitations and biases play a positive functional role in yielding various forms of collective cognitive success. When this idea is transposed to the epistemological domain, mandevillian intelligence emerges as the idea that individual forms of intellectual vice may, on occasion, support the epistemic performance of some form of multi-agent ensemble, such as a socio-epistemic system, a collective doxastic agent, or an epistemic group agent. As (...) a specific form of collective intelligence, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to a number of debates in social epistemology, especially those that seek to understand how group (or collective) knowledge arises from the interactions between a collection of individual epistemic agents. Beyond this, however, mandevillian intelligence raises issues that are relevant to the research agendas of both virtue epistemology and applied epistemology. From a virtue epistemological perspective, mandevillian intelligence encourages us to adopt a relativistic conception of intellectual vice/virtue, enabling us to see how individual forms of intellectual vice may (sometimes) be relevant to collective forms of intellectual virtue. In addition, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to the nascent sub-discipline of applied epistemology. In particular, mandevillian intelligence forces us see the potential epistemic value of (e.g., technological) interventions that create, maintain or promote individual forms of intellectual vice. (shrink)

The theory of pragmatic encroachment states that the risks associated with being wrong, or the practical stakes, can make a difference to whether one’s evidence is good enough to justify belief. While still far from the orthodox view, it has garnered enough popularity that it is worth exploring the implications when we apply the theory of pragmatic encroachment to group epistemology, specifically to the justificatory status of the beliefs of group agents. When we do, I claim, we discover (...) two novel cases of divergence; cases where a group epistemic agent is justified in believing but none of the members are, and vice versa. Using Jennifer Lackey’s influential Group Epistemic Agent Account as a foil, in particular Lackey’s arguments against previous proposed cases of divergence, the present paper defends the following argument, which I call Pragmatic Encroachment Divergence (PED): (i) Practical stakes make a difference to what an agent (group or individual) is justified in believing. (ii) The practical stakes of a group agent can come apart from the practical stakes of the (operative) members. (iii) Therefore, it is possible for the justified beliefs of a group to diverge from the justified beliefs of its members. (shrink)

In this book Daly attempts to forge a new ethical approach to issues of social structures, an area of thought deficient in traditional Catholic ethics. Daly argues that the concept of the structures of virtue and vice provide the best ethical lens with which to scrutinize the effects of social structures on personal character and the well-being of the community. His argument relies on two premises: First, he considers the nexus between structures and individual moral agency - arguing that (...) Catholic ethics has failed to account for these realities adequately. The second premise concerns virtue theory, once again emphasizing the importance of accounting for the individual when approaching societal ethics. With the establishment of these premises, Daly furthers the book's ultimate goal: the development of ethical concepts capable of scrutinizing social structures regarding how they shape personal moral character, as well as how they causally impact the well-being of people and groups. Drawing on the works of Thomas Aquinas as well as social theories such as critical realism, Daly fills a lacuna in Catholic ethics that addresses the structure-agency problem that has plagued this field of study. (shrink)

In the article I argue that intellectual arrogance can be an individual, collective and even corporate vice. I show that arrogance is in all these cases underpinned by defensive positive evaluations of epistemic features of the evaluator in the service of buttressing its illegitimate social dominance. Individual arrogance as superbia or as hubris stems from attitudes biased by the motive of self-enhancement. Collective arrogance is underpinned by positive defensive attitudes to a one’s social identity that seeks to maintain its (...) unwarranted social dominance. Finally, corporations are arrogant when their attitudes are the aggregation of the arrogant dispositions of its managers or when these corporations have inherited structures and policies that are defensive of its illegitimately dominant social status. (shrink)

In the film and play Twelve Angry Men, Juror 8 confronts the prejudices and poor reasoning of his fellow jurors, exhibiting an unwavering capacity not just to formulate and challenge arguments, but to be open-minded, stay calm, tolerate uncertainty, and negotiate in the face of considerable group pressures. In a perceptive and detailed portrayal of a group deliberation a ‘wheel of virtue’ is presented by the characters of Twelve Angry Men that allows for critical thinking virtues and vices (...) to be analysed in context. This article makes the case for the film being an exceptional teaching resource, and, drawing primarily on the ideas of Martha Nussbaum concerning contextualised detail, emotional engagement, and aesthetic distance, its educational value being intimately related to its being a work of fiction. (shrink)

Cet article vise à enrichir l’approche désagrégative proposée par Cécile Laborde dans Liberalism’s Religion [HUP, 2017] à l’aide de certaines intuitions rawlsiennes provenant de notre ouvrage La nation pluraliste [PUM, 2018]. En partant de la notion d’« accommodement raisonnable » telle que comprise dans le contexte légal du Québec et du Canada, nous parvenons à une interprétation des fondements normatifs de la distinction entre droits fondamentaux et accommodements qui repose sur la raison publique. La perspective que nous défendons permet ultimement (...) d’admettre des droits fondamentaux à la fois pour les personnes et pour les groupes. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a dynamic epistemic framework to capture the knowledge evolution in multi-agent systems where agents are not able to observe. We formalize multi-agent conformant planning with group knowledge, and reduce planning problems to model checking problems. We prove that multi-agent conformant planning with group knowledge is Pspace -complete on the size of dynamic epistemic models. We also consider the alternative Kripke semantics, and show that for each Kripke model with perfect recall and no miracles, (...) there is an equivalent dynamic epistemic model and vice versa. (shrink)

This article considers different ways in which keywords and concepts have been, and might be, explored. It summarizes the methodological discussions of a project to analyse 'commonwealth' in the period 1450-1800. 'Commonwealth' was a part of a conceptual field of terms to do with the public good and thus serves as a case study for wider problems of approaching such keywords through a collaboration across disciplines and reflects the importance of recent attempts to provide social and literary contexts for political (...) discourse. Early modern states and their authority are now recognized to be as much socially and culturally as politically constructed, thus widening not only the essential 'context' which students of political discourse must take into account, but also requiring social historians to engage with the language of politics, the metaphors, images and genres of which scholars of literature and art likewise can illuminate. This social and cultural turn to political discourse helps the recovery of the language of vice and virtue which was so intrinsic to the deployment of keywords and concepts. The German conceptual history school is also relevant and useful in requiring us to think about how concepts were constituted and change over time, though its chronological focus needs to be extended to embrace more fully the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Finally, the article offers some pointers about how technology might be utilized to maximize the necessary collaborations that have been outlined. (shrink)

On a longtemps pensé le XVIIIe siècle à travers l'affrontement exclusif de deux mouvements : les Philosophes exaltant la raison critique et leurs adversaires représentants des anti-Lumières. Cet ouvrage vise à étudier les marges de ce noyau dur, objet privilégié de la tradition historiographique. Le mot marges est pris dans toutes les acceptions du terme : limites, seuils, zones grises, incertaines et problématiques. Il désigne les courants de pensée les plus divers qui se situent à la frontière des mouvements philosophiques, (...) sans basculer pour autant dans l'antiphilosophie ou les anti-Lumières. Il montre d'abord comment les Lumières elles-mêmes pensent les limites extrêmes de la validité de leur démarche, puis examine des courants intellectuels, à l'origine divergents ou opposés, qui se rencontrent ou coexistent, dans un état de tension et d'instabilité. Dans les trente années précédant la Révolution, on a souvent recours au vocabulaire philosophique, alors qu'on adopte des positions vaguement ou ouvertement antiphilosophiques. Fruit d'un colloque international tenu à l'Université de Tours en 2001, cet ouvrage nous rappelle que l'histoire culturelle de la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle est faite de contradictions et de chevauchements, parfois paradoxaux. (shrink)

L’interprétation d’un acte de violence de masse est toujours délicate puisqu’elle confère un certain statut au groupe visé. Ce statut peut devenir un facteur important dans la décision de la communauté internationale de reconnaître ou non l’indépendance d’un groupe et de son territoire. Cet article examine le cas de la reconnaissance du Kosovo par la communauté internationale, en février 2008, et soutient que cette reconnaissance a été rendue possible par l’utilisation d’arguments basés sur le statut collectif de victime de nettoyage (...) ethnique détenu par la population albanaise du Kosovo. L’article comble le fossé entre, d’un côté, la théorie de la sécession comme réparation, et de l’autre, les travaux sur la violence de masse contre les groupes ethnonationaux. L’analyse montre que la pratique de la reconnaissance étatique a été réorientée vers un critère restrictif lié au type de violence subie par le groupe réclamant l’indépendance. Dans cette optique, le territoire devient une forme tangible de compensation pour les injustices subies, ce qui tranche par rapport à la pratique antérieure de la reconnaissance étatique dans l’ex-Yougoslavie et ailleurs.The interpretation of an act of mass violence is always a contentious issue since it confers a certain status to the targeted group. This status may become an important factor in the international community’s decision to recognize or not the independence of a group and its territory. This article examines the case of Kosovo’s February 2008 recognition by the international community and argues that this recognition was made possible by the summoning of arguments based on Kosovo Albanians’ collective status as victims of ethnic cleansing. The article bridges the gap between on the one hand the Remedial Right theory of secession, and on the other hand, works on mass violence against ethnonational groups. The article shows that the practice of state recognition was reoriented towards a restrictive criterion linked to the type of violence sustained by the group claiming independence. Under this interpretation, territory becomes a tangible form of compensation for suffered injustices, which contrasts with earlier practice of state recognition in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. (shrink)

Hostile epistemology is the study of how environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in those vulnerabilities arise from the basic character of our epistemic lives. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources, perpetually forced to reasoning a rush. I focus on two sources of unavoidable vulnerability. First, we need to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to manage our limited time and attention. But hostile forces can always game the gap between the heuristic and the ideal. (...) Second, we need to trust others, and trust makes us vulnerable. In particular, we need to trust experts whose expertise lies beyond our individual ability to vet. So we must rely on various imperfect signals and proxies, like institutional affiliation, to manage our trust. We are forced to use these imperfect and exploitable forms of reasoning, in order to cope with a cognitively overwhelming world. I present the hostile epistemology framework as a counterbalance to vice epistemology, which tends to locate responsibility for bad beliefs in the character of the believer. I draw two conclusions from my analysis. First: suppose we accept that that only communities and institutions can know about the world. This deeply social approach doesn’t solve the problem of expert identification. The individual still faces a problem: given their incomplete understanding, how should the individual pick which group to trust? Second: we might have hoped to get some kind of static picture of the right principles of reasoning — but hostile epistemology presents a different picture. We have to use risky heuristics and shortcuts, which hostile forces can game and exploit. We can respond by shifting to a different set of heuristics, but this simply shifts the location of our vulnerabilities. These new heuristics are also exploitable. There is no end to this, only a constant struggle to adapt. Limited beings in a hostile epistemic environment are locked in an unending epistemic arms race. (shrink)

On vise à saisir les dynamiques de petits groupes sociaux et de réseaux personnels, de leur formation initiale à leur délitement. Pour cela, depuis 2011, je mène des enquêtes ethnographiques dans trois résidences universitaires en France, aux États-Unis et au Canada. J’effectue ainsi une analyse sur deux niveaux : celui de plusieurs groupes suivis conjointement sur chacun de ces terrains, et celui des relations et des réseaux qui émergent et évoluent. J’articule la représentation graphique des réseaux personnels à des données (...) qualitatives sur ces groupes et ces réseaux. La représentation des liens et des réseaux permet de compléter l’étude des relations affinitaires et de leurs degrés d’intensité. Elle donne aussi à voir l’évolution des réseaux personnels au cours de l’année universitaire. Les descriptions ethnographiques, quant à elles, révèlent la réflexivité des acteurs sur leurs réseaux personnels, et sur leurs évolutions. Cette analyse permet dès lors d’identifier quatre étapes dans le processus de formation et transformation de petits groupes sociaux. Ces quatre temporalités se retrouvent dans l’ensemble des groupes suivis conjointement, malgré la pluralité de leurs compositions. Nous pouvons alors nous demander si dans tout groupe social de ce type se retrouveraient ces quatre temps. En ce sens, cette recherche contribue à compléter les travaux sur les réseaux personnels et les temporalités de leurs évolutions, en apportant une démarche ethnographique et microsociologique. (shrink)

The Special Focus on invitation policy at universities contains a target article by Romy Jaster and Geert Keil, five commentaries, and a response. The question under discussion is what disqualifies a person from being invited to speak at a university. On liberal, Millian approaches, the epistemic benefits of free speech preclude no-platforming policies. More restrictive approaches demand the exclusion of speakers who are considered racist or otherwise hostile against marginalized groups. Jaster and Keil take a virtue-based approach to invitation policy: (...) A person is ineligible as a speaker if she exhibits specific intellectual vices that are detrimental to the pursuit of truth, the university’s raison d’être. The five critics raise various concerns. Birgit Recki deems the virtue-based approach too restrictive: It is prone to exclude some speakers who make intellectually stimulating contributions. Eva von Redecker and Daniel Loick deem the criterion too permissive: It allows for contributions that should have no place on campus. Dieter Schönecker and Maria-Sibylla Lotter object that the approach is silent on all recent actual cases of ‘cancelling’ at universities. In their response, Jaster and Keil address these concerns and clarify their position. (shrink)

Cet article vise à décrire la possibilité de travailler en institution de manière groupale avec une famille d’accueil et un enfant placé au long cours. En s’appuyant sur le suivi thérapeutique d’une enfant et de son assistante familiale, l’auteur privilégie l’aspect clinique. Les concepts présentés traitent de l’affiliation en tant que potentiel recours à la résolution d’un trauma sur les origines. Le cadre thérapeutique correspond au néo-groupe, sa contenance et l’émergence progressive de souvenirs, travaillés par des médiations. Les chaînes associatives (...) groupales sont fonction du transfert et du contretransfert au sein d’une structure médico-sociale. L’article passe en revue différentes temporalités thérapeutiques jusqu’à l’étape d’un assouplissement de certains mécanismes de défense. Le réel des faits est cependant toujours resté hors champ. (shrink)

Cet article vise à développer de quelles manières et pour quelles raisons le franglais, en règle générale décrié, est utilisé dans les tabloïdes français qui ont également mauvaise presse. Via un corpus constitué de gros titres, titres, et extraits d’articles provenant des magazines en ligne de presse à scandale français Closer, Gala, Grazia, Paris Match, Public, Purepeople, et Voici, nous débutons notre analyse par une première partie consacrée aux spécificités du franglais appliquées à la presse à sensation française, à savoir (...) l’aspect codé et ciblé de ce lexique ainsi que la notion de « quantité ». Puis, dans une seconde partie, nous traitons des principales raisons justifiant l’utilisation du franglais dans ce type de presse en abordant les notions clés d’ « économie du langage » et d’ « identité de groupe ». (shrink)

How should we understand the arrogance of groups that do not seem to exhibit group agency? Specifically, how should we understand the putative epistemic arrogance ascribed to men and privileged or powerful groups in cases raised in the extant philosophical literature? Groups like these differ from others that are usually the subject of work on collective vice and virtue insofar as they seem to lack essential features of group agency; they are sub-agential groups. In this article, I (...) ask whether extant summative or anti-summative accounts of collective epistemic vice offer a basis for understanding the structure of the epistemic arrogance of men and the privileged. I argue that a summative formulation and two prominent anti-summative positions fail to adequately account for the structure of group arrogance in such cases. This leaves us lacking an understanding of how sub-agential group arrogance works. To address this, I defend a collectivist account of group arrogance that takes social norms as the determinative basis of group arrogance. (shrink)

For Kant and for feminists, self-respect is a morally central and morally powerful concern. In this paper I focus on some questions about the relation of self-respect to two other stances toward the self, humility and arrogance. Just as arrogance is usually treated as a serious vice, so humility is widely regarded as an important virtue. Indeed, it is supposed to be the virtue that opposes arrogance, keeping it in check or preventing it from developing in the first place. (...) I’ve argued elsewhere that, on Kant’s account, arrogance is a vice of disrespect for other people and for oneself. Humility is not, however, unproblematic from a Kantian perspective, and he is more concerned to identify bad forms of it than to praise it as a virtue or recommend it as a cure for arrogance. Feminist ethics draws our attention to the ways in which character traits, attitudes, beliefs, and stances take on differential moral valences in contexts of oppression, and what might be a virtue for members of dominant groups can be vices for members of subordinate groups. How, then, are we to understand and assess humility? The upshot of Kantian and feminist analyses is two-fold: First, humility is not the virtue opposing arrogance; rather, self-respect is. Second, humility is at best an ancillary, instrumental, contextual virtue and the servant of self-respect; but at worst, it is as serious a vice as arrogance, indeed, an aspect of it. (shrink)

This paper compares two well-known arguments in the units of selection literature, one due to , the other due to . Both arguments concern the legitimacy of averaging fitness values across contexts and making inferences about the level of selection on that basis. The first three sections of the paper shows that the two arguments are incompatible if taken at face value, their apparent similarity notwithstanding. If we accept Sober and Lewontin's criterion for when averaging genic fitnesses across diploid genotypes (...) is illegitmate, we cannot accept Sober and Wilson's criterion for when averaging individual fitnesses across groups is illegitimate, and vice versa. The final section suggests a possible way of reconciling the two arguments, by invoking an ambiguity in the concept of genic selection. (shrink)

In order to figure out why quantum physics needs the complex Hilbert space, many attempts have been made to distinguish the C*-algebras and von Neumann algebras in more general classes of abstractly defined Jordan algebras . One particularly important distinguishing property was identified by Alfsen and Shultz and is the existence of a dynamical correspondence. It reproduces the dual role of the selfadjoint operators as observables and generators of dynamical groups in quantum mechanics. In the paper, this concept is extended (...) to another class of nonassociative algebras, arising from recent studies of the quantum logics with a conditional probability calculus and particularly of those that rule out third-order interference. The conditional probability calculus is a mathematical model of the Lüders–von Neumann quantum measurement process, and third-order interference is a property of the conditional probabilities which was discovered by Sorkin and which is ruled out by quantum mechanics. It is shown then that the postulates that a dynamical correspondence exists and that the square of any algebra element is positive still characterize, in the class considered, those algebras that emerge from the selfadjoint parts of C*-algebras equipped with the Jordan product. Within this class, the two postulates thus result in ordinary quantum mechanics using the complex Hilbert space or, vice versa, a genuine generalization of quantum theory must omit at least one of them. (shrink)

Homosexual activist groups have targeted the Catholic Church and the American military as institutions especially in need of transformation. Associations of healthcare professionals are also under assault from homosexual activists. It is, nevertheless, appropriate for the Church and the military to defend themselves against this assault, to affirm that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian ethics and military service, and to help homosexuals free themselves from the vice of homosexuality. Arguments that homosexual reorientation therapy is unethical are unsound. Such therapy (...) is consistent with the Christian virtue of charity. (shrink)

Cet article vise à développer de quelles manières et pour quelles raisons le franglais, en règle générale décrié, est utilisé dans les tabloïdes français qui ont également mauvaise presse. Via un corpus constitué de gros titres, titres, et extraits d’articles provenant des magazines en ligne de presse à scandale français _Closer_, _Gala_, _Grazia_, _Paris Match_, _Public_, _Purepeople_, et _Voici_, nous débutons notre analyse par une première partie consacrée aux spécificités du franglais appliquées à la presse à sensation française, à savoir (...) l’aspect codé et ciblé de ce lexique ainsi que la notion de « quantité ». Puis, dans une seconde partie, nous traitons des principales raisons justifiant l’utilisation du franglais dans ce type de presse en abordant les notions clés d’ « économie du langage » et d’ « identité de groupe ». (shrink)

Conventional wisdom suggests that promoting self-determination for peoples and protecting the human rights of individuals are competing priorities. By this is meant that securing individuals in their human rights requires limits on the rights of their peoples, and vice versa. In contrast, the Draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the Draft Declaration) treats the two as not only mutually supporting but mutually necessary. In the Draft Declaration, the right of peoples to self-determination is more than a (...) principle that constrains states in their behavior towards other states and territories “outre-mer”; it also constrains states within their domestic realm. This view of self-determination reflects the experience of many indigenous groups, for whom refusal to respect the integrity of their group and failure to respect the integrity of their persons have gone hand in hand. In this chapter, I argue that the Draft Declaration’s treatment of self-determination is right: self-determination is a human right and this human right is the same right that underpins the rights of states. Treating an interest of peoples like self-determination as a constitutive element of human dignity raises practical worries about the stability of the international system, and philosophical worries about potential conflicts between individuals and peoples. But it also casts state sovereignty itself in a different light. This new light has interesting consequences both for international law and for philosophical debates about minorities within minorities. In particular, it allows one to think about questions about internal minorities as ultimately questions about legitimacy and representation. (shrink)

The word “intolerance” bears almost exclusively negative connotations. It is treated invariably, almost ideologically as a vice. What would it mean to reconceive of intolerance as a virtue—or, at the very least, a positive affect? In this essay, I analyze two complementary archives of positive intolerance: the records of the Prisons Information Group (the GIP) and the writings of one of its members: Michel Foucault. For the GIP, intolerance—as a militant refusal of intolerable material and political conditions—is essential (...) to the prison activist effort. Relatedly, for Foucault, scholarship—as the creative and/or critical act of naming and changing public awareness of intolerable conditions—can be a mode of political intolerance against an oppressive state. When paired together, these two archives trouble the easy severance of theory and practice, suggesting both that prison resistance efforts involve intellectual assessments of the intolerable and that engaged scholarship often doubles as intolerant activism. Both archives, moreover, agree that such intolerant activism is always rooted in personal investments and local struggles. This analysis allows me to suggest that, if the struggle against forces of marginalization and exploitation mobilizes resistant intolerance as a political and intellectual strategy, then intolerance may very well be commendable. It might, in fact, be virtuous. (shrink)

Originally titled “Institutional, Group, and Individual Virtue,” this was my paper for an Invited Symposium on "Intersections between Social, Feminist, and Virtue Epistemologies," APA Pacific Division Meeting, April 2011, San Diego. -/- Abstract: This paper examines recent research on individual, social, and institutional virtues and vices; the aim is to explore and make proposals concerning their inter-relationships, as well as to highlight central questions for future research with the study of each. More specifically, the paper will focus on how (...) these studies can be approached in a systematic way such that it contributes to greater convergence between virtue theory, feminist epistemology, and social epistemology. To this end the paper develops a model of responsibility qua diachronic (longitudinal) assessment of the inquiry-directed agential habits (motivations, activities, and strategies), while explaining the place of this model within a broader, 15-point proposed “Responsibilist” research program. (shrink)

The objective of Working Group 4 of the COST Action NET4Age-Friendly is to examine existing policies, advocacy, and funding opportunities and to build up relations with policy makers and funding organisations. Also, to synthesize and improve existing knowledge and models to develop from effective business and evaluation models, as well as to guarantee quality and education, proper dissemination and ensure the future of the Action. The Working Group further aims to enable capacity building to improve interdisciplinary participation, to (...) promote knowledge exchange and to foster a cross-European interdisciplinary research capacity, to improve cooperation and co-creation with cross-sectors stakeholders and to introduce and educate students SHAFE implementation and sustainability. To enable the achievement of the objectives of Working Group 4, the Leader of the Working Group, the Chair and Vice-Chair, in close cooperation with the Science Communication Coordinator, developed a template to map the current state of SHAFE policies, funding opportunities and networking in the COST member countries of the Action. On invitation, the Working Group lead received contributions from 37 countries, in a total of 85 Action members. The contributions provide an overview of the diversity of SHAFE policies and opportunities in Europe and beyond. These were not edited or revised and are a result of the main areas of expertise and knowledge of the contributors; thus, gaps in areas or content are possible and these shall be further explored in the following works and reports of this WG. But this preliminary mapping is of huge importance to proceed with the WG activities. In the following chapters, an introduction on the need of SHAFE policies is presented, followed by a summary of the main approaches to be pursued for the next period of work. The deliverable finishes with the opportunities of capacity building, networking and funding that will be relevant to undertake within the frame of Working Group 4 and the total COST Action. The total of country contributions is presented in the annex of this deliverable. (shrink)

This paper identifies and elucidates a hitherto unnamed epistemic vice: epistemic insouciance. Epistemic insouciance consists in a casual lack of concern about whether one’s beliefs have any basis in reality or are adequately supported by the best available evidence. The primary intellectual product of epistemic insouciance is bullshit in Harry Frankfurt’s sense. This paper clarifies the notion of epistemic insouciance and argues that epistemic insouciance is both an epistemic posture and an epistemic vice. Epistemic postures are attitudes towards (...) epistemic objects such as knowledge, evidence or inquiry. Epistemic vices are defined as character traits, attitudes or thinking styles that systematically obstruct the gaining, keeping or sharing of knowledge. Epistemic insouciance is not just a posture but an affective posture. Such postures are distinguished from epistemic stances, which are policies that one can adopt or reject. Epistemic malevolence, as Jason Baehr describes it, is an example of an epistemically vicious epistemic stance that issues in active attempts to undermine the knowledge possessed by a specified group of individuals. An example of epistemic malevolence in action is the so-called ‘tobacco strategy’. I argue that epistemic malevolence undermines knowledge by instilling doubts about respectable sources of evidence. (shrink)

I motivate three claims: Firstly, attentional traits can be cognitive virtues and vices. Secondly, groups and collectives can possess attentional virtues and vices. Thirdly, attention has epistemic, moral, social, and political importance. An epistemology of attention is needed to better understand our social-epistemic landscape, including media, social media, search engines, political polarisation, and the aims of protest. I apply attentional normativity to undermine recent arguments for moral encroachment and to illuminate a distinctive epistemic value of occupying particular social positions. A (...) recurring theme is that disproportionate attention can distort, mislead, and misrepresent even when all the relevant claims are true and well supported by evidence. In the informational cacophony of the internet age, epistemology must foreground the cognitive virtues of attunement. (shrink)

This paper identifies and elucidates a hitherto unnamed epistemic vice: epistemic insouciance. Epistemic insouciance consists in a casual lack of concern about whether one’s beliefs have any basis in reality or are adequately supported by the best available evidence. The primary intellectual product of epistemic insouciance is bullshit in Frankfurt’s sense. This paper clarifies the notion of epistemic insouciance and argues that epistemic insouciance is both an epistemic posture and an epistemic vice. Epistemic postures are attitudes towards epistemic (...) objects such as knowledge, evidence, or inquiry. Epistemic vices are defined as character traits, attitudes, or thinking styles that systematically obstruct the gaining, keeping or sharing of knowledge. Epistemic insouciance is not just a posture but an affective posture. Such postures are distinguished from epistemic stances, which are policies that one can adopt or reject. Epistemic malevolence is an example of an epistemically vicious epistemic stance that issues in active attempts to undermine the knowledge possessed by a specified group of individuals. An example of epistemic malevolence in action is the so-called ‘tobacco strategy.’ I argue that epistemic malevolence undermines knowledge by instilling doubts about respectable sources of evidence. (shrink)

Cet article vise à clarifier la position de Marx relativement au libéralisme politique au moment où, en 1843, il se consacre, dans le Manuscrit de Kreuznach, à la critique d’une grande partie de la section « État » des Principes de Hegel. Récusant comme archaïque la critique hégélienne du libéralisme politique, Marx reconnaît à ce dernier le mérite d’avoir séparé la société civile et l’État, mais, ce faisant, Marx entérine aussi la représentation de la société civile que propose le libéralisme. (...) Il se contente d’opposer à l’abstraction libérale de la représentation politique une autre abstraction : celle de la société civile, abstraitement assimilée au « peuple », là où Hegel avait su au contraire en reconnaître l’articulation en groupes sociaux différenciés. (shrink)

" Reflexivity" is defined as the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their contexts and vice versa. In addition to this sociological interest, it allows us to hold idle or trivial internal conversations. Focussing fully on this phenomenon, this book discusses the three main questions associated with this subject in detail. Where does the ability to be "reflexive" comes from? What part do our internal reflexive deliberations play in (...) designing the courses of action we take: subordinate to habitual action or not? Is "reflexivity" a homogeneous practice for all people and invariant over history? In addressing these questions, contributors engage critically with the most relevant studies by luminaries such as G.H Mead, C.S. Pierce, Habermas, Luhmann, Beck, Giddens and Bourdieu. Most contributors are leading Pragmatists or Critical Realists, associated with the "Reflexivity Forum" an informal, international and inter-disciplinary group. This combination of reference to influential writers of the past, and the best of modern theory has produced a fascinating book that is essential reading for all students with a serious interest in social theory or critical realism. (shrink)

The fact that each of us has significantly greater confidence in the claims of co-partisans – those belonging to groups with which we identify – explains, in large part, why so many people believe a significant amount of the misinformation they encounter. It's natural to assume that such misinformed partisan beliefs typically involve a rational failure of some kind, and philosophers and psychologists have defended various accounts of the nature of the rational failure purportedly involved. I argue that none of (...) the standard diagnoses of the irrationality of misinformed partisan beliefs is convincing, but I also argue that we ought to reject attempts to characterize these beliefs as rational or consistent with epistemic virtue. Accordingly, I defend an alternative diagnosis of the relevant epistemic error. Specifically, I maintain that such beliefs typically result when an individual evaluating testimony assigns more weight to co-partisanship than he ought to under the circumstances, and consequently believes the testimony of co-partisans when better alternatives are available. (shrink)