Introduction L’analyse des temporalités de l’action constitue une entrée pertinente pour aborder les rapports sociaux de domination. À sa manière, la revue Temporalités a perpétué cette tradition des sciences sociales qui observent les inégalités et les différenciations sociales, analysent leurs logiques, en insistant sur les relations étroites entre temporalités et pouvoir. Mais les articles de Temporalités, à l’exception d’un dossier sur les temps sexués de l’activité (Bess..

La pandémie de Covid-19 a créé dans le monde une situation inédite, moins par la nature du virus et des pathologies qu’il provoque que par les réactions que la pandémie a suscitées dans les systèmes de santé et auprès des pouvoirs publics. Ces changements induits par la crise et les manières d’y faire face, collectivement ou plus individuellement, ont mis en évidence l’enjeu central de la synchronisation sociale, ici largement mise à l’épreuve. Les nombreuses enquêtes en sciences sociales, la...

Parce que le temps est une question de pouvoir, la nuit en est également une. À notre collègue Marc Bessin En 2017, le numéro de _Conflits et Cultures _dirigé par le collectif CANDELA avait « pour ambition de démontrer la pertinence de ce champ de recherche [les sciences sociales du politique de la nuit] en constitution » (2017, p. 27). Six ans après, notre appel à articles plus spécifiquement sur les _Temporalités du nocturne_, a recueilli un très vif (...) intérêt, puisque nous avons reçu quarante-deux propositions d’articles, plus stimulantes les unes que les autres. Nous avons retenu celles qui nous semblaient traiter au mieux des dimensions temporelles de la nuit, qui, au-delà d’un contenant préalable à l'action, contrairement à l’espace, résulteraient aussi de l’activité, de pratiques (Bensa, 1997 ; Bessin, 1998). La nuit peut être envisagée comme un élément circonstanciel qui se borne par le lever et le coucher du soleil ; elle peut également indiquer « la noirceur en général, qu’elle soi... (shrink)

Le recueil Salut gnostique et métaphysique plotinienne contient cinq études portant sur les relations entre Plotin et différents courants gnostiques, plus particulièrement celui des séthiens platonisants. L’ouvrage est le résultat de rencontres et de discussions intervenues entre les auteurs, mais aussi de la volonté de poursuivre la réflexion entamée par Zeke Mazur sur ce sujet à la suite de son décès en 2016. Les articles de ce recueil cherchent à relier entre elles plusieurs idées de même nature que l’on découvre (...) entre plusieurs traités plotiniens et des textes appartenant au courant séthien platonisant, des thèmes communs, fruits sans doute d’échanges qui eurent lieu avant ou même pendant que Plotin enseignait à Rome. (shrink)

To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals' responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: (1) patterns of moral (...) judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation (within the limited range of our sample population) and (2) a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action. (shrink)

: To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals’ responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: patterns of moral (...) judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation and a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action. (shrink)

Ouija board sessions are illustrious examples of how subjective feelings of control – the Sense of Agency - can be manipulated in real life settings. We present findings from a field experiment at a paranormal conference, where Ouija enthusiasts were equipped with eye trackers while using the Ouija board. Our results show that participants have a significantly lower probability at visually predicting letters in a Ouija board session compared to a condition in which they are instructed to deliberately spell out (...) words with the Ouija board planchette. Our results also show that Ouija board believers report lower SoA compared to sceptic participants. These results support previous research which claim that low sense of agency is caused by a combination of retrospective inference and an inhibition of predictive processes. Our results show that users in Ouija board sessions become increasingly better at predicting letters as responses unfold over time, and that meaningful responses from the Ouija board can only be accounted for when considering interactions that goes on at the participant pair level. These results suggest that meaningful responses from the Ouija board may be an emergent property of interacting and predicting minds that increasingly impose structure on initially random events in Ouija sessions. (shrink)

The thesis we develop in this essay is that all humans are endowed with a moral faculty. The moral faculty enables us to produce moral judgments on the basis of the causes and consequences of actions. As an empirical research program, we follow the framework of modern linguistics.1 The spirit of the argument dates back at least to the economist Adam Smith (1759/1976) who argued for something akin to a moral grammar, and more recently, to the political philosopher John Rawls (...) (1971). The logic of the argument, however, comes from Noam Chomsky’s thinking on language specifically and the nature of knowledge more generally (Chomsky, 1986, 1988, 2000; Saporta, 1978). If the nature of moral knowledge is comparable in some way to the nature of linguistic knowledge, as defended recently by Harman (1977), Dwyer (1999, 2004), and Mikhail (2000; in press), then what should we expect to find when we look at the anatomy of our moral faculty? Is there a grammar, and if so, how can the moral grammarian uncover its structure? Are we aware of our moral grammar, its method of operation, and its moment-to-moment functioning in our judgments? Is there a universal moral grammar that allows each child to build a particular moral grammar? Once acquired, are different moral grammars mutually incomprehensible in the same way that a native Chinese speaker finds a native Italian speaker incomprehensible? How does the child acquire a particular moral grammar, especially if her experiences are impoverished relative to the moral judgments she makes? Are there certain forms of brain damage that disrupt moral competence but leave other forms of reasoning intact? And how did this machinery evolve, and for what particular adaptive function? We will have more to say about many of these questions later on, and Hauser (2006) develops others. However, in order to flesh out the key ideas and particular empirical research paths, let us turn to some of the central questions in the study of our language faculty.. (shrink)

What are the brain and cognitive systems that allow humans to play baseball, compute square roots, cook soufflés, or navigate the Tokyo subways? It may seem that studies of human infants and of non-human animals will tell us little about these abilities, because only educated, enculturated human adults engage in organized games, formal mathematics, gourmet cooking, or map-reading. In this chapter, we argue against this seemingly sensible conclusion. When human adults exhibit complex, uniquely human, culture-specific skills, they draw on a (...) set of psychological and neural mechanisms with two distinctive properties: they evolved before humanity and thus are shared with other animals, and they emerge early in human development and thus are common to infants, children, and adults. These core knowledge systems form the building blocks for uniquely human skills. Without them we wouldn’t be able to learn about different kinds of games, mathematics, cooking, or maps. To understand what is special about human intelligence, therefore, we must study both the core knowledge systems on which it rests and the mechanisms by which these systems are orchestrated to permit new kinds of concepts and cognitive processes. What is core knowledge? A wealth of research on non-human primates and on human infants suggests that a system of core knowledge is characterized by four properties (Hauser, 2000; Spelke, 2000). First, it is domain-specific: each system functions to represent particular kinds of entities such as conspecific agents, manipulable objects, places in the environmental layout, and numerosities. Second, it is task-specific: each system uses its representations to address specific questions about the world, such as “who is this?” [face recognition], “what does this do?” [categorization of artifacts], “where am I?” [spatial orientation], and “how many are here?” [enumeration]. Third, it is relatively encapsulated: each uses only a subset of the information delivered by an animal’s input systems and sends information only to a subset of the animal’s output systems. (shrink)

In this article we present a new approach to practical artificial intelligence (AI) ethics in heavy industry, which was developed in the context of an EU Horizons 2020 multi partner project. We begin with a review of the concept of Industry 4.0, discussing the limitations of the concept, and of iterative categorization of heavy industry generally, for a practical human centered ethical approach. We then proceed to an overview of actual and potential AI ethics approaches to heavy industry, suggesting that (...) current approaches with their emphasis on broad high-level principles are not well suited to AI ethics for industry. From there we outline our own approach in two sections. The first suggests tailoring ethics to the time and space situation of the shop floor level worker from the ground up, including giving specific and evolving ethical recommendations. The second describes the ethicist’s role as an ethical supervisor immersed in the development process and interpreting between industrial and technological (tech) development partners. In presenting our approach we draw heavily on our own experiences in applying the method in the Use Cases of our project, as examples of what can be done. (shrink)

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)

AI has become the poster child for a certain kind of thinking which holds that some technologies can become objective, independent and emergent entities which can evolve beyond the control of their creators. This thinking is not new however. It is a product of certain philosophical ideas such as materialism, a common-sense world of objective and independent objects, a correspondence theory of truth, and so forth, which are centered around the pre-eminence of science, epistemology, and logical reasoning, among others, as (...) the supremely valid modes of engaging experience. This paper aims to critically examine the synthesis of the development program for AI to be found in the writings of computer scientist John McCarthy (1927–2011). McCarthy has been called one of the founding fathers of AI. First, some of the main themes which recur in his writings from as early as the mid nineteen fifties in the Dartmouth proposal, up to his late writings, are considered. A discussion of the goals that such a program implies, follows, in terms of society’s relation with AI based technology and the nature and purpose of AI itself. These implications are arguably related to social control and are also moral. Ultimately, McCarthy’s idea that AI is and can be built upon a paradigm of reasoning and logic so as to simulate a perfectly rational abstraction of human thinking is shown to be motivated by his view that AI systems should be controlled, as servants. This understanding of human thinking is questionable, however, given current research on human irrationality, as well as on the argumentative role of reasoning. And yet, the process of development toward the unachievable goal of controllable, rational, logical AI systems, has handily come to serve as a blind for increasing techno-corporate control of society, with techno-corporate interests displacing blame for devaluations and harms caused by their push to develop the technology to AI systems which they can conveniently ‘lose control of.’. (shrink)

Computational models of semantic memory exploit information about co-occurrences of words in naturally occurring text to extract information about the meaning of the words that are present in the language. Such models implicitly specify a representation of temporal context. Depending on the model, words are said to have occurred in the same context if they are presented within a moving window, within the same sentence, or within the same document. The temporal context model (TCM), which specifies a particular definition of (...) temporal context, has proved useful in the study of episodic memory. The predictive temporal context model (pTCM) uses the same definition of temporal context to generate semantic memory representations. Taken together pTCM and TCM may prove to be part of a general model of declarative memory. (shrink)

Between 1900 and 1925, the American economy witnessed a remarkably successful effort to upgrade competition through associations. Unlike the prevailing interpretation of American industrialization, in which associations fell prey to antitrust and collective action problems, we find many associations that reinvented themselves from cartels to developmental associations. This transition marked two previously unrecognized varieties in economic institutions. In the first, associations joined markets and corporate hierarchies to create variety in American capitalism. In the second, associations used deliberation, cost accounting, and (...) benchmarking to enhance productivity and create varieties of collective governance. This article explains the origins of developmental associations, outlines their principles, traces their implementation in the commercial printing industry, and surveys their distribution and performance effects across 344 industries. Based on these findings, we revise conventional institutionalist assumptions about order and agency to make room for institutional diversity and actors’ capacities for reflexivity and learning. (shrink)

The unorthodox life and ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who defiantly claimed 'God is Dead', come alive in this documentary history. Here is a clear picture of the time in which the revolutionary philosopher lived as well as his famous love affairs, his theories of Superman, the Antichrist and nihilism. Nietzche's work had a major impact on the 20th century, including being manipulated and used by the Nazis to justify their cause during World War 2.

Since the late 1980s, the affinity between irony and postmodernity has been addressed in several studies that apply semiotic approaches to cultural postmodernity generally and to postmodern literature specifically. The following article contributes to the branch of semiotics of postmodern literature by proposing the notion of bi-paradigmatic irony as a special postmodern sign. Whereas mono-paradigmatic irony establishes its ironic contrast within the same paradigm, in bi-paradigmatic irony, said and meant meanings belong to two different paradigms. On the basis of two (...) semiotic paradigmatic perspectives and three semiotic paradigmatic ideologies , six types of bi-paradigmatic irony are possible. Two of the six types of postmodern irony are applied to theoretical-literary texts by Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes as well as to literary texts by the Austrian writers Christoph Ransmayr and Hans Carl Artmann. (shrink)

The article discusses three uses of the term »postmodern« by Rudolf Pannwitz, which first appeared in his 1917 book Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur. Whereas Wolfgang Welsch interpreted this concept as a new version of Nietzsche's ideal of the Übermensch, the article instead proposes to regard the »postmodern man« as an update of Nietzsche's letzter Mensch and therefore as a negative image of a threatening development towards superficiality and a lack of creativity, both of which prevent the overcoming of the (...) modern intellectual crisis based on nihilism and decadence. Although Pannwitz had no subsequent influence on postmodernity discourses, he had thus already sketched the concept of postmodernity-as-posthistoire. Furthermore, the article presents two additional and so far overlooked instances of »postmodern« in Pannwitz's work, namely from his 1921 autobiography Grundriss einer Geschichte meiner Kultur and from his 1951 article Der Nihilismus und die werdende Welt. The three examples arise from a relatively coherent array of cultural-philosophical concepts that delve into issues of modernity, classicism, romanticism, and naturalism. (shrink)

We present in this paper an abstract categorical logic based on an abstraction of quantifier. More precisely, the proposed logic is abstract because no structural constraints are imposed on models (semantics free). By contrast, formulas are inductively defined from an abstraction both of atomic formulas and of quantifiers. In this sense, the proposed approach differs from other works interested in formalizing the notion of abstract logic and of which the closest to our approach are the institutions, which in addition to (...) be semantics free do not also impose any syntactic contingencies on the structure of formulas. To define the semantical framework in which formulas will be interpreted, we propose to follow the idea from categorical logic which defines the semantical interpretation of formulas from context and as subobjects of an object of a given category. In the spirit of Lawvere’s hyperdoctrines, we use a more abstract notion which generalizes the notion of subobject, standard in category theory: Pitt’s prop-categories. Always in the spirit of categorical logic, we propose a sequent calculus of which we show correctness and completeness for all semantical frameworks defined over any prop-categories. We then study some conditions which allow us to get this completeness result for particular classes of prop-categories. (shrink)

Decoding the function and meaning of a foreign culture's sounds and gestures is a notoriously difficult problem. It is even more challenging when we think about the sounds and gestures of nonhuman animals. This essay provides a review of what is currently known about the informational content and function of primate vocalizations, emphasizing the problems underlying the construction of a primate “dictionary.” In contrast to the Oxford English Dictionary, this dictionary provides entries to emotional expressions as well as potentially referential (...) expressions. It therefore represents a guide to what animals do with their vocalizations, as well as how they are represented by signalers and perceivers. I begin by a discussion of the unit problem, of how an acoustic space is carved up into functionally significant components leading to a species‐specific repertoire or lexicon of sorts. This section shows how little we know about the units of organization within animal vocal repertoires, and how such lack of information constrains our ability to tackle the problem of syntactic structure. In Section III, I review research on the production and perception of vocal signals that appear to be functionally referential. This work shows that several nonhuman primates produce vocalizations that share some of the key properties of reference, but certainly not all; the components that are missing raises questions about their role as precursors to human words. In Section IV, I explore the social uses of vocalizations, assessing whether the signal contains sufficient information for listeners to judge a caller's credibility; ultimately, caller credibility determines how receivers select an appropriate response. Results show that individuals can use calls to assess whether someone is reliable or unreliable, and that such attributes are associated with individuals and particular contexts. I conclude by synthesizing the issues presented and then raise some directions for future conceptual and methodological progress. (shrink)

Dans divers textes autobiographiques, Paul Tillich (1886-1965) évoque laconiquement ses années de formation comme placées sous le signe d'une renaissance de l'idéalisme allemand. En quoi cette renaissance consiste-t-clic et quel est son impact sur l'oeuvre d'un des théologiens protestants les plus lus et les plus commentés de sa génération? C'est l'enquête que mène Marc Boss dans ce livre qui fera date. Il y montre comment Tillich combine les positions systématiques de Fichte et de Schelling en une " ellipse à (...) double foyer" pour accomplir l'une des intentions fondamentales du criticisme kantien : concevoir une philosophie de la religion qui ne ferait qu'un avec le système de la liberté. Cette enquête sur les sources de la pensée de Tillich est par conséquent aussi une contribution importante à l'interprétation de ces figures majeures de la philosophie que sont Fichte et Schelling. Elle met enfin en évidence un pan encore peu connu de la réception de la philosophie allemande classique dans les premières décennies du XXe siècle. (shrink)

In this paper, we present the methodology we used in the European Horizon 2020 AI-PROFICIENT project, to evaluate the implementation of the ethical component of the project. The project is a 3-year collaboration between a university partner and industrial and tech partners, which aims to research the integration of AI services in heavy industry work settings. An AI ethics approach developed for the project has involved embedded ethical analysis of work contexts and design solutions and the generation of specific and (...) evolving ethical recommendations for partners. We have performed an ongoing evaluation and monitoring of the implementation of recommendations. We describe the quantitative results of these implementations: overall, broken down by category, and broken down by category and responsible project partner (anonymized). In parallel, we discuss the results in light of our approach and offer insights for future research into the ground-level application of ethical recommendations for AI in heavy industry. (shrink)