It is shown that the expressive power of second-order propositional modal logic whose modalities are S4.2 or weaker is the same as that of second-order predicate logic.

"Konrad Talmont-Kaminski offers a very thoughtful and thought-provoking critique of the field and an alternative approach to magic, religion, and science that should spark some debate and further research Talmont-Kaminski has thrown down a challenge to the mainstream of anthropological thought about religion, and it is a challenge that we necessarily and gladly pick up." -- Anthropology Review Database "A philosophical naturalist's delight, this book - crisply written and carefully argued - weaves together insights about evolution, mind, and (...) society to explain how religions work and how secularisation threatens them." - Robert N. McCauley, Emory University Is religious belief a product of the mind? This book brings to light the multifaceted relationship between reason and religion. Religion as Magical Ideology examines the relationship between rationality and supernatural beliefs arguing that such beliefs are products of evolution, cognition and culture. The book does not offer a false rapprochement between reason and religion; instead, it explores their interrelationship as a series of complex adaptations between cognitive and cultural processes. Exploring the nature of the tension between religious traditions and reason, Religion as Magical Ideology develops a dual inheritance theory of religion - which combines the cognitive byproduct and prosocial adaptation accounts - and analyses the connection between the function of a belief and the degree of protection it gets from potential counter-evidence. With discussion ranging from individual cognitive mechanisms, general functional considerations, to the limits of evolutionary and cognitive processes, the book offers readers a systematic account of how cognition shapes religious beliefs and practices. (shrink)

Both science and religion are human endeavours that recruit and modify pre-existing human capacity to engage in epistemic vigilance. However, while science relies upon a focus on content vigilance, religion focusses on source vigilance. This difference is due, in turn, to the function of religious claims not being connected to their accuracy – unlike the function of scientific claims. Understanding this difference helps to understand many aspects of scientific and religious institutions.

Famously, Pascal described human beings as ‘thinking reeds’, weak in flesh but magnificent in mind. While it is a poetic image, it is also an ambivalent one and may suggest an inappropriately dualist view of human nature. It is important to realise that not only are we thinking reeds but that we are thinking because we are reeds. In fact – while being every bit the marvel that Pascal wondered at – rationality is reed-like itself, very much of a kind (...) with the rest of human nature. (shrink)

La nostalgie est cet état psychique qui se tient quelque part entre le deuil, la dépression et la mélancolie, avec lesquels on la confond souvent. Définie très tôt comme la maladie de l’exilé, la nostalgie est un pharmakon, à la fois baume et poison pour celui qui s’y adonne. À partir des écrits de Jean Améry, survivant de la Shoah, et de sa propre expérience auprès des survivants du génocide rwandais, l’auteur, psychanalyste, distingue ici deux positions face à la nostalgie (...) : la position nostalgique et l’évitement, toutes deux à l’origine d’états pathologiques qui peuvent conduire à la mélancolie, voire au suicide. (shrink)

This book explores the semantic and pragmatic mechanisms underlying grammaticalization. Regine Eckardt argues that language change frequently involves a structural reorganization at the phonological, morphological, and syntactic levels. Speakers not only master the structural aspect of such reanalyses, they also-as the author argues-keep a detailed mental record of what has happened to meaning. The author develops semantic reanalysis as the semantic correlate and tracks its effects in meaning change. Several case studies offer new insights in the architecture of conceptual thinking (...) that is part of the human language faculty. Professor Eckardt develops her approach in terms of formal semantic theory. She shows how neatly tailored analyses in truth-conditional compositional semantics can elucidate the structural mechanisms of meaning change. Her exposition is advanced in the context of several in-depth case studies containing data new to historical linguistics. This book will be of central interest to scholars and advanced students of historical and comparative linguistics and of formal semantics in departments of linguistics and philosophy. (shrink)

La mesure d'audience est au coeur de l'activité des médias dits de masse: elle sert de référence pour quantifier les auditoires et s'impose comme mode de consultation du public. Le présent numéro d'Hermès présente tout d'abord les systèmes de mesure d'audience des différents médias , mettant en évidence que l'audience est le résultat d'un ensemble de contraintes et d'un consensus toujours fragile entre les partenaires concernés. La deuxième partie, plus particulièrement centrée sur la télévision généraliste, analyse les effets de la (...) concurrence sur les programmes et les programmations. La partie suivante s'interroge sur la validité de l'audience comme moyen de connaissance des publics, et sur la possibilité de créer d'autres types de liens avec le téléspectateur. Enfin, la spécificité d'Internet par rapport aux médias traditionnels permet d'affirmer que la mesure d'audience n'y jouera sans doute jamais le rôle central, un nouveau mode de relation s'instaurant avec l'usager.Audience research is at the centre of mass media activity: it serves as a reference to quantify viewers and are considered to be THE way to survey audiences. This issue of Hermes first presents different audience rating systems used by the media , emphasizing the fact that the audience is the result of many constraints and of an invariably weak consensus between the partners concerned. The second part focuses more particularly on traditional TV channels, analyses the effects of competition on schedules and programming. The section that follows questions the validity of the audience as a means of getting to know viewers and also questions the possibility of creating other types of links with the viewer. Finally, the specificity of the Internet as opposed to more "traditional" media leads us to observe that audience rating might never play a central role in this media since a new type of relations is being created with users. (shrink)

L'évolution de la mesure d'audience TV est indissociable des principales étapes qui ont mené d'une télévision publique en situation de monopole à un système mixte public/privé. Les résultats du panel postal de l'ORTF, premier dispositif fiable et permanent , sont réservés aux seuls dirigeants des chaînes, afin d'éclairer une politique de programmes encore volontariste, tandis que le CESP mène une enquête parallèle à destination de la profession publicitaire. La montée de la compétition entre chaînes publiques s'accompagne de l'attention croissante accordée (...) à l'audience et, en 1982, la mise en place de l'audimétrie-foyer représente une véritable révolution, par la rapidité et la précision des résultats obtenus. Avec l'arrivée des chaînes commerciales et la concurrence entre diffuseurs qui en résulte, les publicitaires sont en mesure d'exiger leur participation au contrôle de l'outil géré par Médiamétrie et imposent l'audimétrie individuelle , qui permet un suivi par cible.The evolution of TV audience research is indissociably linked to the main stages of television’s own history which saw it progress from a single state-owned channel with no competition to a system where public and commercial channels co-exist. Results from the ORTF postal panel set up in 1969, the first reliable and permanent measuring device, are only given to channel executives to help shed some light on a programming policy which is still volontarist. The CESP also conducts a parallel survey used by advertisers. The rise in competition between public channels has gone hand-in-hand with the growing attention paid to audience ratings and the introduction, in 1982, of rating measurement meters represented a real revolution since results are accurate and rapidly obtained. The arrival of commercial channels and the resulting competition between broadcasters meant that advertisers were able to demand a say in the control of the “Médiamétrie” audience ratings system and imposed the introduction of the TV “people meter” which permits the calculation of target audiences. (shrink)

Reflecting current debates on ‘organizational virtues’ as going beyond the capitalocentrist bias of contemporary economies and to see diversity as ‘ethical responsibility,’ this article explores ‘ethical organizing’ at the intersection of alternative organizations and diversity. Our interest in a diversity-oriented analysis of alternative organizations stems from the assumption that those which question taken-for-granted notions of existing economies and follow alternative values of autonomy, solidarity, and responsibility might also be likely to challenge existing diversity relations and, thus, potentially open up new (...) avenues for ethical organizing. Discussing our findings in terms of Lewis and Simpson’s (in)visibility vortex, our study shows that even though organizations position themselves discursively as ‘alternative,’ this positioning is not related to diversity issues. We conclude that a shift is needed to fully constitute ethical organizing, namely the establishment of a strong connection between alternative organizations’ virtues with, e.g., the feminist, anti-racist, queer, and disability rights movements. (shrink)

La relation fraternelle est un domaine encore peu étudié et dont on n’épuise pas le sens et la fonction en la pensant comme n’étant qu’une projection sur les pairs d’une problématique qui se jouerait, en fait, avec les ascendants. La séduction fraternelle peut s’analyser à lueur de la problématique parents-enfants ou à celle de l’identification mentale, les deux axes pouvant, pour un même cas, se trouver intriqués de façon complexe. À partir de cas cliniques, nous montrons qu’il convient de différencier (...) ces deux axes pour mieux saisir le sens et la fonction de la séduction fraternelle dans la construction psychique du sujet, dans la naissance des conflits et dans leur résolution. La séduction fraternelle est à mi-chemin de la découverte de la différence des sexes et de la relation incestueuse, à mi-chemin des jeux sexuels infantiles et de la découverte de la sexualité génitale. En ce sens, elle constitue à la fois un miroir, un révélateur et un enjeu dans la construction du sujet en devenir. (shrink)

Religious beliefs, it has been noted, are often hard to disprove. While this would be a shortcoming for beliefs whose utility was connected to their accuracy, it is actually necessary in the case of beliefs whose function bears no connection to how accurate they are. In the case of religions and other ideologies that serve to promote prosocial behaviour this leads to the need to protect belief systems against potentially disruptive counterevidence while maintaining their relevance. Religions turn out to be (...) particularly adept at this because of the use they make of existing cognitive by-products to make them plausible without exposingthem overly to investigation. (shrink)

Tous les évènements traumatiques instaurent un rapport spécifique au temps. Parmi eux, le génocide constitue un paradigme de l’expérience extrême. Le génocide est un évènement qui échappe au temps commun et qui instaure une nouvelle temporalité, tant pour les victimes que pour les bourreaux. En analysant des témoignages oraux et écrits de rescapés de la Shoah et du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda, on constate que la temporalité instaurée par le génocide continue longtemps après la fin des massacres à se (...) réverbérer sur la vie des survivants dont les familles ont été décimées. (shrink)

In focusing on relations between data and vision and proposing to address big data in terms of currently dominant optical metaphors, the paper makes a case for an approach that allows for clearer distinctions between big data as ‘visions’, and data technologies. assessing notions and visions of panoptic data technologies, I outline three perspectives on the nexus between data and vision. Following Bruno Latour’s counter-image of “oligoptica”, I argue, more generally, in favour of a conceptual framework that understands big data (...) as a sociotechnical infrastructure, and discuss, drawing on more recent studies, in which ways this approach allows to address social and ethical implications of present data technologies and practices in a more differentiated way. (shrink)

Since the 19th century many philosophers have argued, that metaphysics will have no more function at all. But the concept of metaphysics has many aspects. It must not only be understood as a system, based on everlasting principles. In the following article it is used in the sense of a philosophical cosmology. The startingpoint are the sciences, which exclude by their method the observer in his subjectivity; their view of the world must remain incomplete. Philosophical cosmology therefore has the task (...) to complete the scientific interpretation of reality by other perspectives and to connect them with one another. The unity of reality as well as that of human experience forbids a side by side of different “Sprachspiele”. A philosophical cosmology therefore develops an interpretation of reality which embraces the scientific view of the world as well as the observer in his subjectivity and those relations, which are determined by it. Already Leibniz has tried to integrate both perspectives; in the 20th century, under new conditions, especially Whitehead has developed a philosopical cosmology. For a modern concept of metaphysics it is characteristic, that it is not a system, but a permanent process, in which all relevant experiences of man in a certain epoch are synthesized. (shrink)

While an ethical obligation to report findings of clinical research to trial participants is increasingly recognised, the academic debate is often vague about what kinds of data should be fed back and how such a process should be organised. In this article, we present a classification of different actors, processes and data involved in the feedback of research results pertaining to an individual. In a second step, we reflect on circumstances requiring further ethical consideration. In regard to a concrete research (...) setting—the one of clinico-genomic research—we discuss what kinds of difficulties have to be faced when returning individual research results to trial participants. In a last step, we elaborate on a stepwise model to trigger the individual feedback process. Hence, this paper gives guidance on how to feedback individual research results in a specific research setting and responds at the same time to new challenges in the debate on the duty to return individual research findings. (shrink)

This paper investigates the meaning of German selbst (≈ E N-self) in its intensifying use, and the relation of this selbst to the focus particle selbst (≈ E even). I propose that intensifying selbst denotes type-lifted variants of the identity function on the domain of individuals, and that the observed stress accents must be analysed in terms of by now well-established focus theories. This analysis covers the core range of data correctly, predicting obligatory stress on selbst, sortal restrictions, centrality effects, (...) and the distribution of examples that express some kind of surprise. Moreover, it allows for a treatment of the reanalysis of intensifying selbst into focus particle selbst that stipulates fewer historical accidents than previous accounts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The first part of this article relies on a number of well-known notions drawn directly from Bakhtin's work, while bringing to bear others inspired by the Bakhtinian perspective. The second part proposes a study dealing with the diverse kinds of verbal interactions rooted in Bakhtin's notion of responsive act. These include interdiscursivity, interlocution, and intralocution, elaborated by Jacques Brès among others, as well as moves and shifts, which we owe to Frédéric François. In the third part, this body of (...) notions is tested on a corpus of verbal interactions between young children and adults, and between two or more children. The study stresses the diversity and early use of these different kinds of dialogical relations in children's language practices. It also shows how a Bakhtinian approach can contribute to research on language acquisition. (shrink)