Several arguments are considered which purport to demonstrate the impossibility of theory-neutral observation. The most important of these infers the continuity of observation with theory from the presumed continuity of perception with cognition, a doctrine widely espoused in recent cognitive psychology. An alternative psychological account of the relation between cognition and perception is proposed and its epistemological consequences for the observation/theory distinction are then explored.

La fin du marxisme en tant qu'"horizon de notre temps" a ouvert une période souvent appelée "post-moderne". Elle couvre approximativement les années 1970 à 2000 et se caractérise par la déconstruction. On observe ensuite un attrait renouvelé de la synthèse, pour diverses raisons : l'expérience totalitaire n'est plus aussi centrale, pour les nouvelles générations ; la multiplication des approches et la déconstruction généralisée a aussi fait perdre le sens global de notre époque, débouchant sur ce que certains auteurs appellent le (...) parcellitarisme ; l'émergence des anciens pays en développement sur la scène internationale apporte un regard neuf et partiellement extérieur à l'Occident, mettant en lumière ce que cette zone culturelle a de particulier et mettant à mal l'universalisme revendiqué. Cet ouvrage entend contribuer à l'effort et tenter un bilan synthétique et dialectique de la question de l'émancipation, à l'époque de la mondialisation et de la crise écologique. Il procède en trois étapes : un bilan du libéralisme, dans sa critique du conservatisme (thèse) ; un bilan des marxismes et post-marxismes, dans leur critique du libéralisme (antithèse) ; et une troisième partie de synthèse, se situant dans le prolongement théorique d'un ouvrage précédent sur l'écologisme, où l'auteur propose de réarticuler des concepts tels qu'autorité, religion, politique, science, culture et sacré, afin d'éclairer d'un jour nouveau la question de l'émancipation. La conclusion rejoint Gramsci et d'autres pour qui l'émancipation réside dans le fait d'agir en vérité. Cette affirmation apparemment simple se fonde sur un concept cosmologique de vérité élaboré principalement sur la base des travaux de Laclau, Sartre et de Whitehead. Il ouvre des pistes pour penser l'articulation de l'un et du multiple, dans une perspective résolument non relativiste."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

La 4e de couverture indique : " Que signifie le « retour du confucianisme » dans une Chine redevenue puissance mondiale? Alors que les études existantes privilégient les discours idéologiques et les débats intellectuels, ce livre prend pour la première fois comme point de départ l’émergence, dans les années 2000, d’un « confucianisme populaire » qui se distingue des initiatives officielles. À partir d’enquêtes de terrain menées sur près d’une décennie, il étudie le développement de nouvelles pratiques – réappropriation des (...) textes classiques, culture du corps, création d’un néoritualisme... –, dans des contextes aussi variés que les écoles et les universités, les temples et les mouvements religieux, les entreprises et les administrations. En les analysant dans la perspective plus vaste d’une remise en cause en Chine des grands récits modernisateurs ayant dominé le xxe siècle, Le Sage et le peuple jette une lumière nouvelle sur l’articulation du politique et du religieux dans la Chine contemporaine. À travers l’observation des cultes d’État mis en place sur le continent et à Taïwan, c’est aussi la question du destin contemporain de la tradition cosmologique chinoise qui se trouve posée. ". (shrink)

Accelerating Expansion explores some of the philosophical implications of modern cosmology, focused on the significance that the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe has for our understanding of time, geometry, and physics. The appearance of the cosmological constant in the equations of general relativity allows one to model universes in which space has an inherent tendency towards expansion. This constant, introduced by Einstein but subsequently abandoned by him, returned to centre stage with the discovery of the accelerating expansion. (...) This pedagogically-oriented essay begins with a study of the most basic and elegant relativistic world that involves a positive cosmological constant, de Sitter spacetime. It then turns to the relatives of de Sitter spacetime that dominate modern relativistic cosmology. Some of the topics considered include: the nature of time and simultaneity in de Sitter worlds; the sense in which de Sitter spacetime is a powerful dynamical attractor; the limited extent to which observation can give us information about the topology of space in a world undergoing accelerated expansion; and cosmologists' favourite sceptical worry about the reliability of evidence and the possibility of knowledge, the problem of Boltzmann brains. (shrink)

Depuis 1917, la cosmologie est scientifique. Cette date marque la publication par Albert Einstein du premier modèle cosmologique – le modèle d’Einstein – fondé sur sa théorie de la relativité générale, énoncée un an plus tôt. Depuis lors, de nombreux modèles ont été proposés pour décrire notre Univers, soit dans le cadre de cette même théorie, soit dans le cadre de théories encore à l’essai, qui tentent de la dépasser et de la compléter. Parmi eux, les modèles de big bang (...) (qui forment en fait une famille) sont les plus simples. Fondés sur des théories physiques éprouvées (notamment la relativité générale), confirmés par de nombreuses observations, ils sont en fait les seuls acceptables aujourd’hui. (shrink)

Intuitively, the knowledge of one’s own intentional actions is different from the knowledge of actions of other sorts, including those of other people and unintentional actions of one's own. But how are we to understand this phenomenon? Does it pertain to all actions, under every description under which they are known? If so, then how is this possible? If not, then how should we think about cases that are exceptions to this principle? This paper is a critical survey of recent (...) attempts to answer these questions. I consider views under three headings: "special source" views, which hold that the knowledge of one's intentional actions has a non-perceptual source; "special domain" views, which hold that some but not all aspects of one's intentional actions are known in a special way; and "special character" views, which hold that the knowledge of intentional actions is special not because of where it comes from, but because of some other respect in which it is different in kind from the knowledge of other things. (shrink)

Raphaël Van Daele L’expression chinoise ziran 自然 s’entend aussi bien à propos de la « nature », cette région de l’être dont l’émergence et les processus ne relèvent pas de la volonté ou de l’action humaine, qu’à propos d’un certain type d’agir humain. Le geste expert de l’artiste est l’exemple privilégié d’un tel agir. Loin de nuire à la cohérence de cette notion, le fait que celle-ci soit mobilisée dans le discours théorique sur l’art autant que dans le discours sur (...) la nature témoigne d’un lien organique qui, dans la pensée chinoise, unit différents domaines de la réflexion. Le présent article propose d’esquisser une lecture philosophique de la notion de ziran. Pour ce faire, nous explorerons le rôle joué par ziran dans l’oeuvre esthétique de Cai Yong 蔡邕 (133-192) et dans la pensée de Guo Xiang 郭象 († 312). (shrink)

Contents \t\t\t\t\t \tTRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION \t\t1 \t \tNOTE ON THE TRANSLATION \t\t39 \t OBSERVATIONS ON THE FEELING OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME \t\t\t\t\t \tSECTION ONE: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Distinct Objects of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime \t\t45 \tSECTION TWO: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime.

_Anthropic Bias_ explores how to reason when you suspect that your evidence is biased by "observation selection effects"--that is, evidence that has been filtered by the precondition that there be some suitably positioned observer to "have" the evidence. This conundrum--sometimes alluded to as "the anthropic principle," "self-locating belief," or "indexical information"--turns out to be a surprisingly perplexing and intellectually stimulating challenge, one abounding with important implications for many areas in science and philosophy. There are the philosophical thought experiments and paradoxes: (...) the Doomsday Argument; Sleeping Beauty; the Presumptuous Philosopher; Adam & Eve; the Absent-Minded Driver; the Shooting Room. And there are the applications in contemporary science: cosmology ; evolutionary theory ; the problem of time's arrow ; quantum physics ; game-theory problems with imperfect recall ; even traffic analysis. _Anthropic Bias_ argues that the same principles are at work across all these domains. And it offers a synthesis: a mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects that attempts to meet scientific needs while steering clear of philosophical paradox. (shrink)

Au cours du dernier siècle, l'investigation empirique a été bouleversée par le développement de nouveaux instruments et par la possibilité de traiter numériquement les données. Cet ouvrage entreprend d'adapter la notion classique d'observation scientifique à ces nouvelles pratiques.

On discute dans cette note le rôle joué par la constante cosmologique dans le modèle cosmologique standard et quelques scénarios alternatifs proposés dans la cosmologie moderne depuis la découverte de l’accélération de l’expansion cosmique.

On discute dans cette note le rôle joué par la constante cosmologique dans le modèle cosmologique standard et quelques scénarios alternatifs proposés dans la cosmologie moderne depuis la découverte de l’accélération de l’expansion cosmique.

In recent decades historians of science have argued that observation became something of a way of life in the early modern period. This article expands this analysis by shifting focus from observational practices within natural and experimental philosophy to a number of discourses and practices of self-examination and self-observation in eighteenth-century Germany. While the initial aim of these was therapeutic rather than scientific, therapeutic connotations were partly replaced by epistemic virtues and techniques adopted from natural and experimental philosophy toward the (...) end of the century. The article further argues that the subordination of self-observation to scientific modes of procedure reflected the increasingly radical interest in human subjectivity and, by extension, the emergence of a modern civic and individual self. (shrink)

L’auteur rappelle que le théorème de Bernoulli est distinct de la loi des grands nombres ; et que l’équivalence pratique des probabilités a priori et des fréquences empiriques est un fait a posteriori considérable. — La répartition globale des espèces de l'événement dans des proportions rationnelles a une роrtéе cosmologique. — Importance gnoséologique de la réussite d’inductions basées sur une spéculation architectonique et idéalement instaurative.

The motivating question of this paper is: ‘How are our beliefs in the theorems of mathematics justified?’ This is distinguished from the question ‘How are our mathematical beliefs reliably true?’ We examine an influential answer, outlined by Russell, championed by Gödel, and developed by those searching for new axioms to settle undecidables, that our mathematical beliefs are justified by ‘intuitions’, as our scientific beliefs are justified by observations. On this view, axioms are analogous to laws of nature. They are (...) postulated to best systematize the data to be explained. We argue that there is a decisive difference between the cases. There is agreement on the data to be systematized in the scientific case that has no analog in the mathematical one. There is virtual consensus over observations, but conspicuous dispute over intuitions. In this respect, mathematics more closely resembles stereotypical philosophy. We conclude by distinguishing two ideas that have long been associated -- realism (the idea that there is an independent reality) and objectivity (the idea that in a disagreement, only one of us can be right). We argue that, while realism is true of mathematics and philosophy, these domains fail to be objective. One upshot of the discussion is that even questions of fundamental physics may fail to be objective in roughly the sense that the question, ‘Is the Parallel Postulate is true?’, understood as one of pure mathematics, fails to be. Another is a kind of pragmatism. Factual questions in mathematics, modality, logic, and evaluative areas go proxy for non-factual practical ones. -/- . (shrink)

This book develops an explanation for the roles of observation and theory in scientific endeavor that occupies the middle ground between empiricism and rationalism, and captures the strengths of both approaches. Brown argues that philosophical theories have the same epistemological status as scientific theories and constructs an epistemological theory that provides an account of the role that theory and instruments play in scientific observation. His theory of perception yields a new analysis of objectivity that combines the traditional view of observation (...) as the foundation of scientific objectivity with the contemporary recognition that observation is theory-dependent. (shrink)

Several arguments are considered which purport to demonstrate the impossibility of theory-neutral observation. The most important of these infers the continuity of observation with theory from the presumed continuity of perception with cognition, a doctrine widely espoused in recent cognitive psychology. An alternative psychological account of the relation between cognition and perception is proposed and its epistemological consequences for the observation/theory distinction are then explored.

First published in 1749, Hartley's great work was abridged by Priestley in 1775 and reissued as a whole by Joseph Johnson in 1791. To Priestley, who founded his Unitarianism on the Observations, it seemed that Hartley was the greatest of human beings with the single exception of Jesus. Coleridge adopted his associationist theology in the mid 1790s, naming his eldest son David Hartley Coleridge, and passing on to Wordsworth the theory of mind that underlies 'Tintern Abbey', the early Prelude (...) and the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. An indispensable book. (shrink)

Knill, Kersten, & Mamassian (Chapter 6) provide an interesting discussion of how the Bayesian formulation can be used to help investigate human vision. In their view, computational theories can be based on an ideal observer that uses Bayesian inference to make optimal use of available information. Four factors are important here: the image information used, the output structures estimated, the priors assumed (i.e., knowledge about the structure of the world), and the likelihood function used (i.e., knowledge about the projection of (...) the world onto the sensors). Knill & Kersten argue that such a framework not only helps analyze a perceptual task, but can also help investigators to define it. Two examples are provided (the interpretation of surface contour and the perception of moving shadows) to show how this approach can be used in practice. As the authors admit, most (if not all) perceptual processes are ill-suited to a "strong" Bayesian approach based on a single consistent model of the world. Instead, they argue for a "weak" variant that assumes Bayesian inference to be carried out in modules of more limited scope. But how weak is "weak"? Are such approaches suitable for only a few relatively low-level tasks, or can they be applied more generally? Could a weak Bayesian approach, for example, explain how we would recognize the return of Elvis Presley? The formal modelling of human perception To help get a fix on things, it is useful to examine the fate of an earlier attempt to formalize human perception: the application of information theory. It was once hoped that this theory—a close cousin of the Bayesian formulation—would provide a way to uncover information-handling laws that were largely independent of physical implementation. In this approach, the human nervous system was assumed to have.. (shrink)

Are those judgments that we make on the basis of our memories immune to error through misidentification? In this paper, I discuss a phenomenon which seems to suggest that they are not; the phenomenon of observer memory. I argue that observer memories fail to show that memory judgments are not IEM. However, the discussion of observer memories will reveal an interesting fact about the perspectivity of memory; a fact that puts us on the right path towards explaining why memory judgments (...) are indeed IEM. The main tenet in the account of IEM to be proposed is that this aspect of memory is grounded, on the one hand, on the intentionality of perception and, on the other hand, on the relation between the intentionality of perception and that of memory. (shrink)

_Anthropic Bias_ explores how to reason when you suspect that your evidence is biased by "observation selection effects"--that is, evidence that has been filtered by the precondition that there be some suitably positioned observer to "have" the evidence. This conundrum--sometimes alluded to as "the anthropic principle," "self-locating belief," or "indexical information"--turns out to be a surprisingly perplexing and intellectually stimulating challenge, one abounding with important implications for many areas in science and philosophy. There are the philosophical thought experiments and paradoxes: (...) the Doomsday Argument; Sleeping Beauty; the Presumptuous Philosopher; Adam & Eve; the Absent-Minded Driver; the Shooting Room. And there are the applications in contemporary science: cosmology ; evolutionary theory ; the problem of time's arrow ; quantum physics ; game-theory problems with imperfect recall ; even traffic analysis. _Anthropic Bias_ argues that the same principles are at work across all these domains. And it offers a synthesis: a mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects that attempts to meet scientific needs while steering clear of philosophical paradox. (shrink)

L'ouvrage nous offre un exposé minutieux de la Poétique de Gaston Bachelard, qui nous mène à un dialogue imaginaire où María Noel Lapoujade exprime ses propres points de vue dérivés de sa Philosophie de l'imagination, des images et des imaginaires et donne ainsi les fondements de sa notion originale d'Homo imaginans. La lecture de cet ouvrage original et fondé nous conduit à un scénario peuplé de résonances inédites de la pensée de Bachelard.

Mediated by a hermeneutic/semiotic reading of symbols, searching out and finding some similitudes between mythical constructions concerning the genesisof the world and scientific hypotheses can be considered fruitful from at least two viewpoints, since: (a) it allows the validation of a truth which is difficult to prove through other means, that early humans had intuitive-cognitive resources much more profound than appearances seem to allow; (b) it enables the utilization of some of the suggestions offered by the mythic language in the (...) scientific language context. Using such correspondences, the author proposes the integrative model of a structurally named "Cluster Universe" or the functionally named "Pulsatory expansion", able to solve some major difficulties of the cosmological thinking. (shrink)

This paper argues that new light may be shed on mathematical reasoning in its non-pathological forms by careful observation of its pathologies. The first section explores the application to mathematics of recent work on fallacy theory, specifically the concept of an ‘argumentation scheme’: a characteristic pattern under which many similar inferential steps may be subsumed. Fallacies may then be understood as argumentation schemes used inappropriately. The next section demonstrates how some specific mathematical fallacies may be characterized in terms of argumentation (...) schemes. The third section considers the phenomenon of correct answers which result from incorrect methods. This turns out to pose some deep questions concerning the nature of mathematical knowledge. In particular, it is argued that a satisfactory epistemology for mathematical practice must address the role of luck. (shrink)

Using examples of observations of primates in the wild, I will focus in this chapter on the ways in which some of the main feminist critiques are applicable to the observation of non-human animals. In particular, I will focus on the relationship between primatology and various conceptions of human nature and on the fact that primatology has often been described as a “feminist science.” I argue that in primatology there is an openness to a diversity of approaches and to (...) feminist values that has made it possible for researchers to understand primates in new, more complex ways. Finally, I include a brief discussion of an avenue of future research that will show that even the feminist perspectives explored in this chapter are situated within a specific western background and that it is important to remember that this feminist perspective is just one among many different perspectives. To illustrate variations in the roles that feminist critiques can play in animal observation, I will use examples from my own personal experience of Latinx identity while conducting research in Gombe National Park (Tanzania, Africa). (shrink)

The question of observability of sign changes under 2pi rotations is considered. It is shown that in certain circumstances there are observable consequences of such sign changes in classical physics. A macroscopic experiment is proposed which could in principle detect the 4pi periodicity of rotations.

This book makes a compelling case for the significance of the long, surprising, and epistemologically significant history of scientific observation, a history ...

Following a long-standing philosophical tradition, impartiality is a distinctive and determining feature of moral judgments, especially in matters of distributive justice. This broad ethical tradition was revived in welfare economics by Vickrey, and above all, Harsanyi, under the form of the so-called Impartial Observer Theorem. The paper offers an analytical reconstruction of this argument and a step-wise philosophical critique of its premisses. It eventually provides a new formal version of the theorem based on subjective probability.

Le démiurge de Platon et l'atome primitif de Lemaître sont deux intuitions inédites, artifices théoriques d'astronomie anti-observationnelle. La genèse de ces artifices remonte à la thématisation présocratique de l'unité cosmique. Platon institutionnalise les Formes intelligibles et platonise les présocratiques. Lemaître, contemporain d'Einstein, est tributaire d'une unité cosmique marquée par la gravitation relativiste, qui disqualifie le système classique ayant, en son temps, déclassé les substances et le mouvement aristotéliciens. La théorisation montre comment Platon fait du démiurge le concept axial de son (...) astronomie géométrique. L'univers est conforme aux normes mathématiques. La perspective dynamique de Lemaître émerge contre le modèle stationnaire d'Einstein/De Sitter, aristotélicien en son fond. Au bout, deux configurations apparaissent : sphérique et homogène, l'univers de Platon repose sur le triangle. L'« âme du monde » en assure la dynamique. D'interprétation quantique, la singularité cosmique de Lemaître développe le modèle d'un univers issu de l'explosion (big bang) d'un atome primitif : l'isotope du neutron. (shrink)