El propósito del ensayo es ofrecer una reflexión sobre la profesión del investigador novel desde la experiencia del autor a la luz de las ideas y reflexiones ofrecidas por Pierre Bourdieu en su obra “El oficio de científico” con cuestiones actuales y retos a los que se enfrentan la comunidad científica en el ámbito de las ciencias de la educación. El texto se articula con relación a los temas que surgen de la lectura del libro de Bourdieu que se (...) irán nutriendo de los aportes de otros textos y artículos relacionados con la materia. Como señala Martel (2016), se pretende aportar un trozo de este espejo roto que es la profesión del investigador para reconstruirlo a modo de aviso para navegantes para los que vienen detrás desde la experiencia del investigador novel. (shrink)

A lot of attention has been devoted to the study of discoveries in high energy physics, but less on measurements aiming at improving an existing theory like the standard model of particle physics, getting more precise values for the parameters of the theory or establishing relationships between them. This paper provides a detailed and critical study of how measurements are performed in recent HEP experiments, taking examples from differential cross section measurements with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. This study (...) will be used to provide an elucidation of the concept of event used in HEP, in order to determine what constitutes an observation and what does not. It will highlight the essential place taken by theory-ladenness in order to produce observational facts, and will show how uncertainty and sensitivity estimates constitute an operational approach to robustness, inside the practice of science, avoiding potential circularity problem traditionally implied by theory-ladenness. This is in contrast to robustness analyses typically considered in the literature. A careful analysis of systematic uncertainty estimates and of statistical tests used to set empirical conclusions from the observations will however demonstrate that quantitative statements obtained from these statistical tests cannot be more than simple guiding arguments for the production of knowledge, but do not determine it. This indicates that the frontier between theory and observation is blurry and that the dichotomy theory-experiment should be revised. (shrink)

This article poses the question of the social and intellectual conditions for genuine social scientific internationalism, through an analysis of the worldwide spread of a new global vulgate resulting from the false and uncontrolled universalization of the folk concepts and preoccupations of American society and academe. The terms, themes and tropes of this new planetary doxa - `multiculturalism', `globalization', `liberals versus communitarians', `underclass', racial `minority' and identity, etc. - tend to project and impose on all societies American concerns and viewpoints, (...) thereby transfigured into tools of analysis and yardsticks of policy fit to naturalize the peculiar historical experience of one peculiar society, tacitly instituted as a model for humanity. The article suggests how the logic of the international circulation of ideas, the transformations of the academic field, the strategies of foundations and publishers, and of local collaborators in global conceptual `import-export' converge to foster a particularly powerful and pernicious form of cultural imperialism of which academics are at once perpetrators and victims. (shrink)

Carnap's ideal of explication has become a key concept in analytic philosophy and the basis of a method of analysis which may be considered as an alternative to various forms of naturalism, including Quine's conception of a naturalized epistemology. More recently, new light has been shed on this aspect of the classical Carnap-Quine debate by contemporary philosophers. Whereas Michael Friedman articulated a notion of relativized a priori which owes much to Carnap's internal/external distinction, André Carus attempted to restate Carnap's ideal (...) of explication in a way that bridges the gap between conceptual engineering and naturalism. On the other hand, Mark Wilson argued that concepts develop in unpredictable ways and cannot be planned in the way classical analytic philosophy has assumed from Frege and Russell onwards. This book consists of a series of defences as well as critiques of Carnap's programme, setting it in its historical context, discussing specific cases of explications, and enriching the on-going debate on conceptual engineering and naturalism in analytic philosophy.Carnap's ideal of explication has become a key concept in analytic philosophy and the basis of a method of analysis which may be considered as an alternative to various forms of naturalism, including Quine's conception of a naturalized epistemology. More recently, new light has been shed on this aspect of the classical Carnap-Quine debate by contemporary philosophers. Whereas Michael Friedman articulated a notion of relativized a priori which owes much to Carnap's internal/external distinction, André Carus attempted to restate Carnap's ideal of explication in a way that bridges the gap between conceptual engineering and naturalism. On the other hand, Mark Wilson argued that concepts develop in unpredictable ways and cannot be planned in the way classical analytic philosophy has assumed from Frege and Russell onwards. This book consists of a series of defences as well as critiques of Carnap's programme, setting it in its historical context, discussing specific cases of explications, and enriching the on-going debate on conceptual engineering and naturalism in analytic philosophy. (shrink)

As is often the case when scientific or engineering fields emerge, new concepts are forged or old ones are adapted. When this happens, various arguments rage over what ultimately turns out to be conceptual misunderstandings. At that critical time, there is a need for an explicit reflection on the meaning of the concepts that define the field. In this position paper, we aim to provide a reasoned framework in which to think about various issues in the field of distributed cognition. (...) We argue that both relevant concepts, distribution and cognition, must be understood as continuous. As it is used in the context of distributed cognition, the concept of distribution is essentially fuzzy, and we will link it to the notion of emergence of system-level properties. The concept of cognition must also be seen as fuzzy, but for a different reason: due to its origin as an anthropocentric concept, no one has a clear handle on its meaning in a distributed setting. As the proposed framework forms a space, we then explore its geography and visit famous landmarks. (shrink)

Before broaching our main subject, and exploring why, among all disorders of the mind, obsessive-compulsive disorders have a place apart, I would like to start from a dilemma that is well-known to historians interested in mental disorders. According to one approach, a mental illness X is considered as a bona fide or ‘genuine’ illness if, and only if, it originates from a disturbance of the brain. Its neurobiological form is in this case considered as invariant, whatever cultural veneer might give (...) it a different aspect in accord with historical and local settings. The assumption is that this veneer does not, properly speaking, have any deep grounding in reality... (shrink)

The involvement of developing countries in international clinical trials is necessary for the development of appropriate medicines for local populations. However, the absence of appropriate structures for ethical review represents a barrier for certain countries. Currently there is very little information available on existing structures dedicated to ethics in western and central Africa. This article briefly describes historical milestones in the development of networks dedicated to capacity building in ethical review in these regions and outlines the major conclusions of two (...) workshops on this issue, which were held in September and October 2002 in Libreville, Gabon, and Paris, France. The workshops were the culmination of collaboration between the African Malaria Network Trust (AMANET) and the Pan African Bioethics Initiative (PABIN). They produced an update on ethics organizations with regard to mission, function, activities, members, and contact people, in eight countries within the regions discussed. As a result of the commitment of mandated delegates, a further prominent outcome followed these workshops: the creation of national structures, where none existed before, dedicated to the ethical review of clinical trials. (shrink)

Frederick Griffith was an English bacteriologist at the Pathological Laboratory of the Ministry of Health in London who believed that progress in the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases would come only with more precise knowledge of the identity of the causative microorganisms. Over the years, Griffith developed and expanded a serological technique for identifying pathogenic microorganisms, which allowed the tracing of the sources of infectious disease outbreaks: slide agglutination. Yet Griffith is not remembered for his contributions to the biology (...) and epidemiology of infectious diseases so much as for discovering the phenomenon known as ‘transformation’. Griffith’s discovery, for many, was a pure case of serendipity whose biological relevance had also largely escaped him. In this paper, I argue that the key to understanding the significance of bacterial transformation – and the scientific legacy of Fred Griffith – rests not only on it initiating a cascade of events leading to molecular genetics but also on its implications for epidemiology based on the biology of host–parasite interactions. Looking at Griffith’s entire career, instead of focusing only on the transformation study, we can better appreciate the place of the latter within Griffith’s overall contributions. Presented in this way, Griffith’s experiment on bacterial transformation also ceases to appear as an anomaly, which in turn leads us to rethink some of the most prevalent historical conceptions about his work. (shrink)

We propose that the isomorphism generally observed between the representations composing our momentary phenomenal experience and the structure of the world is the end-product of a progressive organization that emerges thanks to elementary associative processes that take our conscious representations themselves as the stuff on which they operate, a thesis that we summarize in the concept of Self-Organizing Consciousness (SOC). Key Words: Associative learning; automatism; consciousness; development; implicit learning; incubation; language; mental representation; perception; phenomenal experience.

In this article, we develop tame topology over dp-minimal structures equipped with definable uniformities satisfying certain assumptions. Our assumptions are enough to ensure that definable sets are tame: there is a good notion of dimension on definable sets, definable functions are almost everywhere continuous, and definable sets are finite unions of graphs of definable continuous “multivalued functions.” This generalizes known statements about weakly o-minimal, C-minimal, and P-minimal theories.

The purpose of the paper is twofold. It first aims at clarifying and developing an important tension within enactivism concerning the relations between intentionality and content, once representationalism has been abandoned. In which sense(s) do enactivists (still) say that intentionality is contentful and not contentful? Secondly, it puts this tension in perspective with two paradigmatic ways of defining the relations between intentional states and their objects: Husserl’s theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations, and Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics.

The term “social cognition” can be construed in different ways. On the one hand, it can refer to the cognitive faculties involved in social activities, defined simply as situations where two or more individuals interact. On this view, social systems would consist of interactions between autonomous individuals; these interactions form higher-level autonomous domains not reducible to individual actions. A contrasting, alternative view is based on a much stronger theoretical definition of a truly social domain, which is always defined by a (...) set of structural norms; moreover, these social structures are not only a set of constraints, but actually constitute the possibility of enacting worlds that would just not exist without them. This view emphasises the heteronomy of individuals who abide by norms that are impersonal, culturally inherited and to a large extent independent of the individuals. Human beings are socialised through and through; consequently, all human cognition is social cognition. The article argues for this second position. Finally, it appears that fully blown autonomy actually requires heteronomy. It is the acceptance of the constraints of social structures that enables individuals to enter new realms of common meaningfulness. The emergence of social life marks a crucial step in the evolution of cognition; so that at some evolutionary point human cognition cannot but be social cognition. (shrink)

Many papers have been devoted to the semantic turn Carnap took in the late 1930s after Tarski had explained to him his method for defining truth and his work on the establishment of scientific semantics. Commentators have often argued that the major turn in Carnap’s approach to languages had already been taken in the Logical Syntax of Language, but they have usually assumed that Carnap was happy to subsequently follow Tarski and adopt Tarskian semantics. In this paper, it is argued (...) that this assumption needs to be qualified and that Carnap was actually far from following Tarski when he decided to complement his syntactic method with a semantic one. Carnap and Tarski had different goals, divergent programs, and dissenting views on truth and semantics. After exploring several possible methods for the explication of logical concepts such as L-truth and L-implication, Carnap opted for definitions based on concepts he had found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Waismann’s work on a logical interpretation of probability. Carnap’s reasons for taking a semantic turn are to be understood in the context of his principle of tolerance. He first hoped he could use Tarski’s technique to recover in the semantic setting the completeness result he had tried to establish in the Logical Syntax. His eventual adoption of non-Tarskian semantics can be accounted for by his program of a logical analysis of science—including empirical science—and his ambition to elaborate a unified logical framework for deductive, inductive, and modal logic, and for explicating analyticity. (shrink)

A fresh look at Aristotle's political theory with attention to the resonance of his thought for contemporary concerns.

T lymphocytes circulate continually throughout the peripheral lymphoid organs, where they scrutinize the surface of cells to detect the presence of nonself protein fragments. During the last years, many facets of T-cell function have been unravelled. After being bound by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules, peptides derived from nonself as well as from self proteins are delivered to the cell surface. A few copies of a nonself peptide “presented” at the cell surface in the context of an MHC molecule can (...) be detected by specific T cells, and suffice to trigger T-cell activation. This paper reviews the requirements imposed on T cells to fulfill this exquisite sensitivity. BioEssays 20:412–422, 1998.© 1998 John Wiley & Sons Inc. (shrink)

Duhem introduces and discusses Maxwell’s first theory, which is the theory of dielectric media constructed by analogy with the theory of the conduction of heat.

The mere fact that this question can be raised is in itself a small revolution. We were accustomed to wondering: “Does the Right have a monopoly on foreign policy?” or “Is the Left even capable of having one?” The Left has always been uncomfortable with international relations. Has it not been supposed by its very nature to be attached to themes of peace and to rhetorical transparency and is foreign policy not the domain, if not of war, at least of (...) the risk or the threat of war; if not the domain of lies, at least that of duplicity and guile; if not the domain of rejection of commitments, at least that of flexibility and unpredicability? (shrink)

Sleep has long been a topic of fascination for artists and scientists. Why do we sleep? What function does sleep serve? Why do we dream? What significance can we attach to our dreams? We spend so much of our lives sleeping, yet its precise function is unclear, in spite of our increasing understanding of the processes generating and maintaining sleep. We now know that sleep can be accompanied by periods of intense cerebral activity, yet only recently has experimental data started (...) to provide us with some insights into the type of processing taking place in the brain as we sleep. There is now strong evidence that sleep plays a crucial role in learning and in the consolidation of memories. Once the preserve of psychoanalysts, 'dreaming' is now a topic of increasing interest amongst scientists. With research into sleep growing, this volume is both timely and valuable in presenting a unique study of the relationship between sleep, learning, and memory. It brings together a team of international scientists researching sleep in both human and animal subjects. Aimed at researchers within the fields of neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology, this book will be an important first step in developing a full scientific understanding of the most intriguing state of consciousness. (shrink)

Just like atomic physics seventy years ago, when it was realized that chain reaction could lead to medical applications as well as to the creation of atomic weapons, the life sciences have entered a grey zone. “Advances in biotechnology […]” a 2003 CIA document stated, “have the potential to create a much more dangerous biological warfare threat […] Engineered biological agents could be much worse than any disease known to man”. As sociologists of science have noted, contemporary life sciences have (...) dual use potential as they can be used to foster beneficial applications, for instance in health care, or generate harm, either intentionally or not, and possibly on an unprecedented.. (shrink)

In response to Germain argument that evolution by natural selection has a limited explanatory power in cancer, Lean and Plutynski have recently argued that many adaptations in cancer only make sense at the tumor level, and that cancer progression mirrors the major evolutionary transitions. While we agree that selection could potentially act at various levels of organization in cancers, we argue that tumor-level selection is unlikely to actually play a relevant role in our understanding of the somatic evolution of human (...) cancers. (shrink)

Pierre Maquet1,2,6, Steven Laureys1,2, Philippe Peigneux1,2,3, Sonia Fuchs1, Christophe Petiau1, Christophe Phillips1,6, Joel Aerts1, Guy Del Fiore1, Christian Degueldre1, Thierry Meulemans3, André Luxen1, Georges Franck1,2, Martial Van Der Linden3, Carlyle Smith4 and Axel Cleeremans5.

Tout au long de sa vie et dès sa naissance, chaque personne doit attribuer du sens à tour ce qui l’entoure : objets, individus, paysages … Cette construction d’une signification corresponde à un décodage de l’environnement humaine et matériel qui repose notamment sur la mise en jeu du corps et sur ses manifestations motrices. À ce titre, les jeux et les sports représentent un domaine privilégié ou cette mobilisation des conduites motrices est au centre de la construction d’un sens et (...) de la décision du pratiquent. Ce décodage subjectif s’appuie sur les sonnées objectives de la logique interne de chaque activité ludosportive et des universaux correspondants. Inspiré par les avances de la linguistique et de la sémiologie, mais tout en soulignant ses mécanismes spécifiques, l’analyse sémiotrice explore les codages originaux des interactions ludosportives. Des sèmes particulaires, tels les gestèmes, praxèmes et els écosèmes sont identifiés. On note que les encodages et les décodages praxiques son plus ou moins rigoureux et ne possèdent jamais la double articulation qui caractérise toute langue. L’approfondissement de cette sémiotricité éclaire d’une nouveau jour les conduites de chaque acteur social, non seulement au cours des activités physiques mais aussi tout au long de sa vie. (shrink)

A ‘way out’ expresses a movement which looks completely different depending on whether one views it prospectively or retrospectively: in the first instance, it signifies ‘to emerge from’, which suggests a relationship of continuity; in the second it signifies ‘to breach a threshold’, a distancing, that is to say, a rupture. Which of these two meanings should we ascribe to the expression ‘Foucault’s way out of Hegel’ – that of a connection, which emerges when we look behind us, or that (...) of a disjunction, which appears when we look ahead? That of a line of descent, which obliges us to contend with a legacy, or that of rejection, thus a refusal to accept it? This is the very question that we want to confront. (shrink)

The Treatise on musical objects by Pierre Schaeffer is regarded as his most important work on music and its relationship with technology. Schaeffer refers to his earlier research in musique concrète and expands this to suggest a methodology of working with sounds resulting from the recording process. Drawing on acoustics, physics, and physiology, but also philosophy and the relationship between subject and object, Schaeffer's book summarizes his theoretical and practical work in music composition. North and Dack present an important (...) book in the history of ideas in Europe that will resonate far beyond electroacoustic music."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)