Several logical operators are defined as dual pairs, in different types of logics. Such dual pairs of operators also occur in other algebraic theories, such as mathematical morphology. Based on this observation, this paper proposes to define, at the abstract level of institutions, a pair of abstract dual and logical operators as morphological erosion and dilation. Standard quantifiers and modalities are then derived from these two abstract logical operators. These operators are studied both on sets of states and sets of (...) models. To cope with the lack of explicit set of states in institutions, the proposed abstract logical dual operators are defined in an extension of institutions, the stratified institutions, which take into account the notion of open sentences, whose satisfaction is parametrised by sets of states. A hint on the potential interest of the proposed framework for spatial reasoning is also provided. (shrink)

Social and environmental ratings provided by social rating agencies are multidimensional. The first goal of our paper is to identify a small number of independent and relevant socially responsible (SR) dimensions reflecting a firms’ coherent posture toward social issues. We put forward that these dimensions are not exactly the same as the ESG ones (Environment, Social, and Governance). Using the six sub-ratings provided by the Vigeo rating agency, we perform a principal component analysis and we highlight three main independent SR (...) dimensions related to (1) business stakeholders (employees, customers, and suppliers), (2) societal stakeholders (environment and society), and (3) financial stakeholders (stockholders and debt holders). The second objective of our paper is to explore the link between stock returns and these three SR dimensions. Our most notable finding is that for each SR dimension, investors ask for an additional risk premium when they accept to hold non-socially responsible stocks. The cost of equity is thus lower for SR firms. The average premium over the period 2003–2010 is larger for the components “business stakeholders” and “financial stakeholders” than for the component “societal stakeholders.” The premium for this last component has only existed since the end of 2008. Since that time, environment and community involvement have become important risk factors strongly considered by investors. For the three dimensions, investors notably penalize large non-social firms and reward small social firms. (shrink)

Three experiments were conducted in order to validate 56 musical excerpts that conveyed four intended emotions (happiness, sadness, threat and peacefulness). In Experiment 1, the musical clips were rated in terms of how clearly the intended emotion was portrayed, and for valence and arousal. In Experiment 2, a gating paradigm was used to evaluate the course for emotion recognition. In Experiment 3, a dissimilarity judgement task and multidimensional scaling analysis were used to probe emotional content with no emotional labels. The (...) results showed that emotions are easily recognised and discriminated on the basis of valence and arousal and with relative immediacy. Happy and sad excerpts were identified after the presentation of fewer than three musical events. With no labelling, emotion discrimination remained highly accurate and could be mapped on energetic and tense dimensions. The present study provides suitable musical material for research on emotions.Keywords. (shrink)

Previous research on religion and helping has left some questions unanswered. In the present study, participants expressed willingness to help groups of people in need, and this after having been religiously versus non-religiously stimulated. The activation of religious context increased the willingness to help, but only the homeless. Orthodox religious people tended to consider the targets responsible for their problem, an association partially mediated by the belief in a just world for other. Symbolic thinking was associated with willingness for helping, (...) an association partially mediated by the belief in ultimate justice. Results suggest a limited and conditional prosociality as a consequence of religion. (shrink)

We develop a model of ideals-based accountability which we have witnessed at work in several long-thriving family businesses. The owners and managers of these firms eschew individualism and materiality in the pursuit of ethical ideals such as supporting democracy and bettering the human condition. Although accountability is to these ideals, not for outcomes such as profitability or even reputation, IBA has resulted in outstanding reputations for some firms. We characterize IBA according to its missions, leadership, culture, and stakeholder relationships. We (...) also contrast it with traditional forms of accountability and differentiate IBA from related stakeholder, stewardship, and CSR perspectives. Finally, we examine its manifestations within five long-lived family enterprises, in the process generating propositions to advance the concept. (shrink)

Zipf famously stated that, if natural language lexicons are structured for efficient communication, the words that are used the most frequently should require the least effort. This observation explains the famous finding that the most frequent words in a language tend to be short. A related prediction is that, even within words of the same length, the most frequent word forms should be the ones that are easiest to produce and understand. Using orthographics as a proxy for phonetics, we test (...) this hypothesis using corpora of 96 languages from Wikipedia. We find that, across a variety of languages and language families and controlling for length, the most frequent forms in a language tend to be more orthographically well‐formed and have more orthographic neighbors than less frequent forms. We interpret this result as evidence that lexicons are structured by language usage pressures to facilitate efficient communication. (shrink)

In a thought-provoking paper, Schuklenk and Smalling argue that no right to conscientious objection should be granted to medical professionals. First, they hold that it is impossible to assess either the truth of conscience-based claims or the sincerity of the objectors. Second, even a fettered right to conscientious refusal inevitably has adverse effects on the rights of patients. We argue that the main problem with their position is that it is not derived from a broader reflection on the meaning and (...) implications of freedom of conscience and reasonable accommodation. We point out that they collapse two related but distinct questions, that is, the subjective conception of freedom of conscience and the sincerity test. We note that they do not successfully show that the standard norm according to which exemption claims should not impose undue hardship on others is unworkable. We suggest that the main reason why arguments such as no one is forced to be a medical professional are flawed is that public norms should not constrain citizens to choose between two of their basic rights unless it is necessary. In fine, Schuklenk and Smalling, who see conscience claims as arbitrary dislikes, sell freedom of conscience short and forego any attempts at balancing the competing rights involved. We maintain the authors neglect that most of legal reasoning is contextual and that the blanket restriction of healthcare professionals' freedom of conscience is disproportionate. (shrink)

La science classique s'est trouvée associée à un désenchantement du monde. C'est la leçon que Jacques Monod entendait tirer des progrès de la biologie : "L'ancienne alliance est rompue. L'homme sait enfin qu'il est seul dans l'immensité indifférente de l'Univers d'où il a émergé par hasard." Notre science n'est plus ce savoir classique, nous pouvons déchiffrer le récit d'une "nouvelle alliance". Loin de l'exclure du monde qu'elle décrit, la science retrouve comme un problème l'appartenance de l'homme à ce monde. Les (...) théories scientifiques ne peuvent plus supposer la possibilité d'un savoir omniscient : nous lisons, jusque dans leurs principes, les traces d'une activité d'exploration au sein d'une nature en évolution. (shrink)

The first question I wanted to ask you has to do with the manner in which you do philosophy, in the sense that the concepts that you create, develop and experiment with, always resist the temptation to tell others what to do. In fact, at the very beginning of your “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”, you begin with a question that I think resonates with this. You write: “How can we present a proposal intended not to say what is, or what ought (...) to be, but to provoke thought?” So what I wanted to ask you is, how would you characterize the importance of this challenge of creating concepts that provoke thought, rather than instruct others on how to think?Well, probably you never know why you do what you do as you do it.... (shrink)

Urban agriculture (UA) is spreading within the Global North, largely for food production, ranging from household individual gardens to community gardens that boost neighborhood regeneration. Additionally, UA is also being integrated into buildings, such as urban rooftop farming (URF). Some URF experiences succeed in North America both as private and community initiatives. To date, little attention has been paid to how stakeholders perceive UA and URF in the Mediterranean or to the role of food production in these initiatives. This study (...) examines the promotion and inclusion of new forms of UA through the practice of URF and contributes to the nascent literature on the stakeholder and public perceptions of UA. It seeks to understand how those perceptions shape the development of new urban agriculture practices and projects. Barcelona (Spain) was used as a Mediterranean case study where UA and URF projects are growing in popularity. Through semi-structured interviews with 25 core stakeholders, we show that UA is largely perceived as a social activity rather than a food production initiative, because the planning of urban gardens in Barcelona was traditionally done to achieve leisure and other social goals. However, several stakeholders highlighted the potential to increase urban fertility through URF by occupying currently unused spaces. As a result, the positive valuation of URF depends on the conceptualization of UA as a social or food production activity. In turn, such conceptualization shapes barriers and opportunities for the development of URF. While most UA-related stakeholders (e.g., food co-ops, NGOs) preferred soil-based UA, newer stakeholders (e.g., architects) highlighted the economic, social and environmental opportunities of local and efficient food production through innovative URF. (shrink)

In the philosophy of science, identity over time emerges as a central concern both as an ontological category in the interpretation of physical theories, and as an epistemological problem concerning the conditions of possibility of knowledge. In Reichenbach and subsequent writers on the problem of indistinguishable quantum particles we see the return of a contrast between Leibniz and Aquinas on the subject of individuation. The possibility of rejecting the principle of the identity of indiscernibles has certain logical difficulties, leading us (...) inexorably from ontology into epistemology. For the epistemological problem we attend to the differences that emerged between the (neo-)Kantian and logical empiricist traditions, also saliently displayed in Reichenbach's writings. After examining the contrast between Kant's and Leibniz's conceptions of empirical knowledge, specifically with respect to the irreducibility of spatiotemporal determinations, we explore an application of a neo-Kantian view to the same problem of indistinguishable quantum particles. (shrink)

BackgroundInnovations in technology have contributed to rapid changes in the way that modern biomedical research is carried out. Researchers are increasingly required to endorse adaptive and flexible approaches to accommodate these innovations and comply with ethical, legal and regulatory requirements. This paper explores how Dynamic Consent may provide solutions to address challenges encountered when researchers invite individuals to participate in research and follow them up over time in a continuously changing environment.MethodsAn interdisciplinary workshop jointly organised by the University of Oxford (...) and the COST Action CHIP ME gathered clinicians, researchers, ethicists, lawyers, research participants and patient representatives to discuss experiences of using Dynamic Consent, and how such use may facilitate the conduct of specific research tasks. The data collected during the workshop were analysed using a content analysis approach.ResultsDynamic Consent can provide practical, sustainable and future-proof solutions to challenges related to participant recruitment, the attainment of informed consent, participant retention and consent management, and may bring economic efficiencies.ConclusionsDynamic Consent offers opportunities for ongoing communication between researchers and research participants that can positively impact research. Dynamic Consent supports inter-sector, cross-border approaches and large scale data-sharing. Whilst it is relatively easy to set up and maintain, its implementation will require that researchers re-consider their relationship with research participants and adopt new procedures. (shrink)

The essential precondition of implementing interventionist techniques of causal reasoning is that particular variables are identified as so-called intervention variables. While the pertinent literature standardly brackets the question how this can be accomplished in concrete contexts of causal discovery, the first part of this paper shows that the interventionist nature of variables cannot, in principle, be established based only on an interventionist notion of causation. The second part then demonstrates that standard observational methods that draw on Bayesian networks identify intervention (...) variables only if they also answer the questions that can be answered by interventionist techniques—which are thus rendered dispensable. The paper concludes by suggesting a way of identifying intervention variables that allows for exploiting the whole inferential potential of interventionist techniques. (shrink)

The effect of contextual information on the resolution of ambiguity was investigated in a group of individuals awaiting dental treatment and a group of control individuals. Participants heard threat/neutral, neutral/neutral and positive/neutral homophones while being simultaneously presented with a context word that was consistent with one of the two meanings of the homophone. Participants then made a lexical decision task on a target word that was one of the two alternate spellings of the homophone. We found that the dental group (...) was more sensitive to context for all types of homophones, and there was no evidence for mood congruency. It also appeared that there might have been an element of mood regulation in the dental group, as they were slower to respond to the emotional targets overall. Our results show that sensitivity to context in state anxiety is a robust phenomenon and one that generalises to naturally occurring anxious moods. (shrink)

The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus is famous for having turned botany into a systematic discipline, through his classification systems—most notably the sexual system—and his nomenclature. Throughout his life, Linnaeus experimented with various paper technologies designed to display information synoptically. The list took pride of place among these and is also the common element of more complex representations he produced, such as genera descriptions and his “natural system.” Taking clues from the anthropology of writing, this essay seeks to demonstrate that lists (...) can be considered as genuine research technologies. They possess a potential to generate research problems of their own but also pose limitations to inquiries that can be overcome only by the use of new media. (shrink)

A radically new philosophy of experience and speculation, based on a reading of Whitehead's Process and Reality. Can experience be thought systematically without transforming the richness of the world as it is lived into reductive philosophical generalities? Can the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with a method of systematic cosmological speculation? Didier Debaise's reading of Whitehead shows clearly what a philosophy that makes this possible looks like, how it works and what is at stake. He focuses in on Whitehead's (...) attempt to construct a metaphysical system of everything in the universe that exists whilst simultaneously claiming that it can account for every element of our experience: everything enjoyed and perceived, willed or thought. (shrink)

Les écritures du quotidien sont aujourd’hui bien souvent affaire de femmes ; celles-ci recueillent, sauvent et agencent l’éphémère patrimoine mémoriel qui, sans le secours de quelque sœur, tante ou vieille cousine, serait voué à l’oubli. Véritables « machines à écrire familiales », selon la formule chère à Bernard Lahire, les femmes notent, archivent et mettent en forme les traces d’un passé ordinaire qui prend tout son sens à la faveur de leurs commentaires et gardent la famille en vie. Avan...

De longues années après sa création, l’État d’Israël a bénéficié d’une réputation flatteuse : des images récurrentes de femmes labourant la terre, pavant des routes, effectuant des travaux de maçonnerie ou montant la garde dans les colonies agricoles créées par les pionniers juifs à partir des années 1880 ont laissé croire à l’émergence d’une société où hommes et femmes vivraient en parfaite égalité. Pourtant, lettres, journaux intimes, mémoires, récits de toutes sortes laissés par des femmes restées anonymes ou au contraire (...) devenues célèbres viennent renverser cette image idyllique ; la Palestine juive n’y apparaît nullement comme un havre d’harmonie entre hommes et femmes. Bien plus, le pays supposé du lait et du miel est une terre hostile, où la vie est difficile pour tous et que beaucoup quittent, par l’émigration ou le suicide… À travers ces textes, l’imagerie qui entoure l’expérience sioniste en Palestine se trouve profondément ébranlée. Et c’est une nouvelle histoire qui peut s’écrire…. (shrink)

Différents textes de Margaret Fuller et Elizabeth Cady Stanton, deux féministes américaines parfois oubliées de l’historiographie au profit notamment de Susan B. Anthony (dont le nom reste associé à l’amendement qui a accordé, aux États-Unis, le droit de vote aux femmes) ont récemment fait l’objet de traductions en français et d’une édition critique éclairante. Si la lecture parallèle de leurs textes fait apparaître des traits communs entre les deux militantes, parcours et convictions présent...