Digital corpora play an important, if not defining, role in digital history and may be considered as one of the most obvious differences to traditional history. Corpora are essential for the use of computational methods and thus for the construction of computational historical models. But beyond their technical necessity and their practical advantages, their epistemological impact is significant. While the traditional pre-digital corpus is often more of a potentiality, a mere “intellectual object,” the objective of computational processing requires the corpus (...) to be made explicit and thus turns it into a “material object.” Far from being naturally given, corpora are constructed as models of a historical phenomenon and therefore have all the properties of models. Moreover, following Gaston Bachelard, I would argue that corpora actually construct the phenomenon they are supposed to represent; they should therefore be considered as phenomenotechnical devices. (shrink)

This article aims at presenting a specific aim of late antique biographical discourse: presenting to the reader an ideal, but nonetheless practical, way of life to put into practice. Gregory of Nyssa and Marinus’s biographical texts, The Life of Moses and The Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus on the one hand, and Proclus or concerning happiness on the other, provide a good example of this more or less explicit aim. Furthermore, these two texts are particularly interesting to determine the reason why (...) late antique authors from the 4th and the 5th century CE used biographical discourse to present an ideal way of life and how this specific aim was achieved. By giving a concrete or practical example of the good life, biographical discourse can indeed be seen as a particularly adequate type of discourse to present and exhort the reader to imitate a particular way of life. By providing a practical exemple of the good life, biographical discourse facilitates the imitation of such a life, more than a theoretical discourse would do. (shrink)

This article aims at presenting a specific aim of late antique biographical discourse: presenting to the reader an ideal, but nonetheless practical, way of life to put into practice. Gregory of Nyssa and Marinus’s biographical texts, The Life of Moses and The Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus on the one hand, and Proclus or concerning happiness on the other, provide a good example of this more or less explicit aim. Furthermore, these two texts are particularly interesting to determine the reason why (...) late antique authors from the 4th and the 5th century CE used biographical discourse to present an ideal way of life and how this specific aim was achieved. By giving a concrete or practical example of the good life, biographical discourse can indeed be seen as a particularly adequate type of discourse to present and exhort the reader to imitate a particular way of life. By providing a practical exemple of the good life, biographical discourse facilitates the imitation of such a life, more than a theoretical discourse would do. (shrink)

‘Regime shift’ has emerged as a key concept in the environmental sciences. The concept has roots in complexity science and its ecological applications, and is increasingly applied to intertwined social and ecological phenomena. Yet what exactly is a regime shift? We explore this question at three nested levels. First, we propose a broad, contingent, multi-perspective epistemological basis for the concept, seeking to build bridges between its complexity theory origins and critiques from science studies, political ecology, and environmental history. Second, we (...) define the concept in a way that is consistent with this epistemology, building on previous work on speed, scale, stickiness, and interrelationships, but also emphasising human perceptions and rhetorical uses of the notion. Third, we propose a novel typology of the ways in which the regime shift concept is used in analysing social–environmental phenomena in geography and beyond. These uses are categorised along two axes. On the one side, we distinguish between description of past or present changes and normative prescriptions for the future. On the other side, we distinguish between whether the focus is on material shifts (social and ecological) or conceptual shifts (discourses and ideas). We illustrate the typology with reference to social–environmental changes in landscapes around the world that are dominated by plantations or the widespread naturalisation of Australian Acacia species. We conclude that the regime shift concept is a boundary object with value as both an analytical and communicative tool in addressing social–environmental challenges. (shrink)

In digital history, uncertainty is generally regarded as an unavoidable evil. One generally aims to reduce—and ideally resolve—uncertainty in data as much as possible. However, information systems are not designed to handle the absence of information; we discuss how both SQL’s seemingly simple Null marker and the TEI Guideline’s elaborate facilities for recording “certainty” fail to address the challenges posed by uncertainty. Neither is big data and a “digital historical positivism” a satisfactory answer: the causal models that underpin historical narratives (...) do not simply emerge from a collection of facts. Here, it is necessary to distinguish between two types of uncertainty: historical uncertainty, which concerns the facts of the past, and historiographical uncertainty, which concerns the causal models constructed by historians. The latter results from different interpretations of the causal relations between the facts; given our limited knowledge of the past, it is ultimately irreducible. But it is also this uncertainty that allows us to construct the narratives we need for sense-making. We argue that in this sense uncertainty may be regarded as an unavoidable good and that we should aim to design computational frameworks that treat it as an asset rather than an obstacle. (shrink)

We provide a game theoretical proof of the fact that if f is a function from a zero-dimensional Polish space to NN that has a point of continuity when restricted to any non-empty compact subset, then f is of Baire class 1. We use this property of the restrictions to compact sets to give a generalisation of Baire’s grand theorem for functions of any Baire class.

The Bayesian perspective is based on conditioning related to reported evidence that is considered to be certain. What is called ‘Radical Probabilism’ replaces such an extreme view by introducing uncertainty on the reported evidence. How can such equivocal evidence be used in further inferences about a main hypothesis? The theoretical ground is introduced with the aim of offering to the readership an explanation for the generalization of the Bayes’ Theorem. This extension—that considers uncertainty related to the reporting of evidence—also has (...) an impact on the assessment of the value of evidence through the Bayes’ factor. A generalization for such a logical measure of the evidence is also presented and justified. (shrink)

The analysis of inferential interactions plays an important role in the description of the line of reasoning for a forensic evaluator in a case involving the cross-transfer of evidence. It is possible the two items of evidence may mean more to an evaluator when considered jointly than they do if considered separately. An approach to the evaluation of evidence, with particular attention to the factors that need to be considered, is described for a case involving the cross-transfer of evidence. A (...) formula is given which may be used to define the possible interactions between the evidence transferred in each direction and hence ease the interpretation of such evidence. Numerical examples are given from a classical fibre evidence scenario. (shrink)

While the ICD-DSM paradigm has been a major advance in clinical psychiatry, its usefulness for biological psychiatry is debated. By defining consensus-based disorders rather than empirically driven phenotypes, consensus classifications were not an implementation of the biomedical paradigm. In the field of endogenous psychoses, the Wernicke-Kleist-Leonhard (WKL) pathway has optimized the descriptions of 35 major phenotypes using common medical heuristics on lifelong diachronic observations. Regarding their construct validity, WKL phenotypes have good reliability and predictive and face validity. WKL phenotypes come (...) with remarkable evidence for differential validity on age of onset, familiality, pregnancy complications, precipitating factors, and treatment response. Most impressive is the replicated separation of high- and low-familiality phenotypes. Created in the purest tradition of the biomedical paradigm, the WKL phenotypes deserve to be contrasted as credible alternatives with other approaches currently under discussion.. (shrink)

This article is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Contexts of Religious Tolerance: New Perspectives from Early Modern Britain and Beyond’, which contains essays on the contributions to the debates on tolerance by non-canonical philosophers and theologians, mainly from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland and England. Among the studied authors are the Aberdeen Doctors, Samuel Rutherford, James Dundas, John Finch, George Keith, John Simson, Archibald Campbell, Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull and John Witherspoon. The introduction draws attention to several methodological points (...) connected to the decision to look at the debates on tolerance through the prism of rarely studied authors. It then presents the essays, which offer novel perspectives by analysing and contextualising political, religious and moral treatments of tolerance. These are tied especially to debates on the articles of faith and on their status, on confessions of faith and their role in the quest for orthodoxy, on liberty of conscience, and on the relation between church and state. (shrink)

For more than 10 years, forensic science has been at best, criticized for its lack of scientific foundations and at worst, presented as an oxymoron. An exclusive focus on standard operating procedures and quality management could cause forensic science to fall short of addressing the epistemological issue initiated by judges. This is particularly so in rapidly changing times, including digital transformation of society and decentralization of forensic services. As a consequence, the present understanding of forensic science by both scientists and (...) its stakeholders is questioned. It is argued that that forensic science fundamental principles and, more broadly, forensic science philosophy are pivotal to the reliable application of science to address security and justice questions. (shrink)

Covers and bindings are collapsing in the digital textual world. To begin with, the following paper argues that this is not a genuinely new situation, since all cultural Western history attests to written texts as never having been autonomous from oral discourses and versioning steps. Thenceforth – after analyzing the relationship between paper and body, relying notably on Derrida – this article will claim that we have the right and indeed, an obligation, to "capture" new covers and bindings. During the (...) 17th century, in the lawless parts of the ocean, buccaneers realized that the right to depart was the condition for the capacity to be bound. Therefore, let us dare to depart from ancient bindings and create new boundaries. (shrink)

By examining the case of the French translation of the expression "digital humanities" (DH), this article argues that cultural diversity and multilingualism could be fostered in digital culture. If other languages have been invited and forced to welcome this English phrase, its translations have to be studied since they could potentially have strong epistemological backwash-effects on it. Through an historical etymological inquiry, it can be demonstrated that the use of the outmoded French word humanités is the most significant element in (...) the two French expressions humanités numériques or humanités digitales. This single word opens up a specific space for humanist approaches within the open-ended digital approaches. On this base, the encounter between Humanities and hard sciences can be reconsidered, as it happens already in two examples of new DH masters in French-speaking countries. To my late mother, who read so many books aloud to me, building my cultural memory of the forgotten meanings of words By examining the case of the French translation of the expression "digital humanities" (DH), this article argues that cultural diversity and multilingualism could be fostered in digital culture. At first glance, the international success of this expression seems to contradict this statement: isn't it a clear example of English language domination over other Western and non-Western languages? Used in written form for Lost in translation? The odyssey of 'digital humanities' in French 27 Studia UBB Digitalia Volume 62, No. 1, 2017 the first time in 2004 (Kirschenbaum 56), tirelessly discussed in DH conferences and works, "DH" has quickly been used in professorship titles, in undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, or to qualify centers, laboratories, and research projects (Clivaz "Common Era" 41). If other languages have been invited and forced to welcome this expression, its translations have to be studied since they could potentially have strong epistemological backwash-effects on it. French is an example worth examining: it can be demonstrated that the use of the outmoded French word humanités is the most significant element in the two French expressions humanités numériques or humanités digitales. This single word opens up a specific space for humanist approaches within the open-ended digital approaches. The introduction below aims to present the specific impact of a study of the phrase "digital humanities" and its translations within the general problematic of the phrase's definition. The second part of this article summarizes the main progressions and arguments in the discussions surrounding humanités numériques (humanities computing) and humanités digitales (digital humanities) in the French-speaking sphere. The third section examines the historical epistemology of humanités while the final section considers the resulting confrontation between the humanities and the 'hard' sciences: this underlines their potential synergy and the proper role of the humanities. (shrink)

Forensic science has been at the crossroads for over a decade. While this situation is a fertile ground for discussion, security problem solving and the sound administration of justice cannot be put on hold until solutions pleasing everyone emerge. In all practical reality, forensic science will continue to be applied because it is simply the most reliable way to reconstruct the past through the exploitation of relics of criminal activities and by logical treatment of the collected information. In this paper, (...) it is argued that instead of exclusively focusing on error management and processes, we should also question the very ontological nature of forensic science. Not only should the dominant conception of forensic sciences as a patchwork of disciplines assisting the criminal justice system be challenged, but forensic science’s own fundamental principles should also be better enunciated and promoted so they can be more broadly accepted and understood. Such changes invite operations, education and research to become more collective and interdisciplinary. This is necessary to fully exploit the investigative, epidemiological, court and social functions of forensic science. We ought to ask the question: will forensic science reach the end of the crossroads soon? (shrink)

Scientific mindfulness is a holistic, cross-disciplinary, contextual, and reflexive approach to research, teaching, and practice using multiple perspectives with the intent to contribute to the betterment of society. With scientific mindfulness, Jonsen et al. introduced an evidence-based approach that reflects a pro-active mindset, combining a pro-social attitude, stakeholder involvement, and intellectual curiosity with the purpose of generating practically relevant knowledge and evidence that are both valid and reliable. Scientific mindfulness is a general approach, but can also be concretely applied in (...) the planning and execution of projects. (shrink)

Out of several years of research experience in the field of religion in prison, this article proposes some reflexions reflections on how to take into account both a superdiverse situation and power issues in public total institutions. It proposes to use the notion of ‘gray zone,’ which refers to both the fluidity of current religious practices in contrast to a clear-cut distinction between secularity and religion, and to an ambiguous positioning of actors in the complex field of institutional power relations. (...) In a first step, the author discusses briefly the structural locations of religion in European public total institutions and the ways these have been studied. In a second step, the focus goes on those locations and uses of religion which are informal and which open up what the author calls a ‘gray zone.’ The concluding remarks highlight the complex power issues and relations at work in the realm of such a gray zone. (shrink)

The stability versus novelty relationship remains a conundrum in organization studies, partly owing to conventional views of time and temporality. In this article, we address organization as a stability-novelty intertwinement through the lens of organizational events. The advantage of an events-based approach is that stability and novelty are expressed as parts of the same acts, and not different acts, which tends to be the assumption among mainstream theories of organization change. The events-based approach developed for this paper shows how the (...) organization may be defined as a structure of past and anticipated events, defined and redefined on an ongoing basis. From a case study of the development of a competency management tool in a bank, we show how the intertwinement between stability and novelty is articulated through events throughout the project and how every event is both an act of stability and an act of change. (shrink)

Emerging technological innovations have transformed some science fiction ideas into reality, promising radical changes in human nature. New philosophical and intellectual movements such as 'transhumanism' and 'posthumanism' try to foretell and even direct the future of our existence while dealing with new and complex ethical, social, political issues and dilemmas.

The use of the Bayes factor (BF) or likelihood ratio as a metric to assess the probative value of forensic traces is largely supported by operational standards and recommendations in different forensic disciplines. However, the progress towards more widespread consensus about foundational principles is still fragile as it raises new problems about which views differ. It is not uncommon e.g. to encounter scientists who feel the need to compute the probability distribution of a given expression of evidential value (i.e. a (...) BF), or to place intervals or significance probabilities on such a quantity. The article here presents arguments to show that such views involve a misconception of principles and abuse of language. The conclusion of the discussion is that, in a given case at hand, forensic scientists ought to offer to a court of justice a given single value for the BF, rather than an expression based on a distribution over a range of values. (shrink)

The historical pole of this research distinguishes differing historical and cultural contexts in which the scholar al-Bïrûnî evolved. Between the years 973 and 1017, he lived in Khwarezm (Kät and JürjänTya), Ray, and Jürjän. He also dwelt in Kabul and Ghazna, both situated on a passage between Persia and India, and travelled to some parts of early medieval India between the years 1017 and 1030. Evidence pointing to him having made actual direct observations beyond the abode of Islam remains scanty. (...) According to his writings, only five locales emerge as having been visited by him, all situated in today's Afghanistan and Pakistan. When al-BTrunl visited these places, he encountered the society of the Indian Shähis, who followed a form of Brahmanism. Al-Bïrûnï's knowledge of Sanskrit was the result of a long process that lasted at least 30 years (1000-1030). In order to reach the level of Sanskrit that enabled him to translate several works from Sanskrit into Arabic, he needed to work with literate people well-versed in Sanskrit, who may also have had some comprehension of Arabic, and/or Persian. The textual pole of this dissertation examines the question of the relationship between al- Bïrûnï's Arabic Kitab Sank and Kitäb Pätangal - two works related to Sämkhya-Yoga - and their possible Sanskrit sources. A philological survey based on these Arabic translations and on Sämkhya-Yoga Sanskrit literature highlights that al-Bïrûnï's translations, both, are related to the classical phase in the development of these two Indian philosophical systems. Despite the early spread of Yoga and Sämkhya ideas through Sanskrit literature, it seems that between the early 11th and 16th centuries they lost vitality amongst Indian scholars. Therefore, al-Bïrûnï's translation of works related to these specific Indian philosophies in the early 11th century CE deserves attention. The second pole of this study also demonstrates that al-BTrünl's hermeneutics played an important part in his transmission of these two Indian schools of thought, as he highly transformed his source in both form and substance. This dissertation considers the question of the relationship between al-Bïrûnï's Arabic translations and their possible Sanskrit sources from the viewpoint of Translation Studies; which makes it possible to point out potential candidates for being al-Bïrûnï's original Sanskrit sources with some confidence. Overall, the Kitäb Sank and the Kitäb Pätangal represent original works of Sämkhya and Yoga, as viewed and transmitted by a Perso-Muslim scholar, rather than pure translations of Sanskrit work. (shrink)

In this article, I address epistemological questions regarding the status of linguistic rules and the pervasive--though seldom discussed--tension that arises between theory-driven object perception by linguists on the one hand, and ordinary speakers' possible intuitive knowledge on the other hand. Several issues will be discussed using examples from French verb morphology, based on the 6500 verbs from Le Petit Robert dictionary (2013).

The debate about Free Will has been in the human mind for centuries, but has become even more intense with the recent scientific findings adding new lights on the problem. This interdisciplinary explosion of interest for the topic has brought many insightful knowledge, but also a great deal of epistemological problems. We think that those epistemological problems are deeply related to the very definition of Free Will and how this definition interacts with the interpretations of experimental results. We will thus (...) outline a few of these problems and then propose a definition of Free Will which takes into account those epistemological pitfalls. (shrink)

While the US jurisprudence of the 1993 Daubert requires judges to question not only the methodology behind, but also the principles governing, a body of knowledge to qualify it as scientific, can forensic science, based on Locard's and Kirk's Principles, pretend to this higher status in the courtroom? Moving away from the disputable American legal debate, this historical and philosophical study will screen the relevance of the different logical epistemologies to recognize the scientific status of forensic science. As a consequence, (...) the authors are supporting a call for its recognition as a science of its own, defined as the science of identifying and associating traces for investigative and security purposes, based o its fundamental principles and the case assesment and interpretation process that follows with its specific and relevant mode of inference. (shrink)

Game theory describes and analyzes strategic interaction. It is usually distinguished between static games, which are strategic situations in which the players choose only once as well as simultaneously, and dynamic games, which are strategic situations involving sequential choices. In addition, dynamic games can be further classified according to perfect and imperfect information. Indeed, a dynamic game is said to exhibit perfect information, whenever at any point of the game every player has full informational access to all choices that have (...) been conducted so far. However, in the case of imperfect information some players are not fully informed about some choices. Game-theoretic analysis proceeds in two steps. Firstly, games are modelled by so-called form structures which extract and formalize the significant parts of the underlying strategic interaction. The basic and most commonly used models of games are the normal form, which rather sparsely describes a game merely in terms of the players' strategy sets and utilities, and the extensive form, which models a game in a more detailed way as a tree. In fact, it is standard to formalize static games with the normal form and dynamic games with the extensive form. Secondly, solution concepts are developed to solve models of games in the sense of identifying the choices that should be taken by rational players. Indeed, the ultimate objective of the classical approach to game theory, which is of normative character, is the development of a solution concept that is capable of identifying a unique choice for every player in an arbitrary game. However, given the large variety of games, it is not at all certain whether it is possible to device a solution concept with such universal capability. Alternatively, interactive epistemology provides an epistemic approach to game theory of descriptive character. This rather recent discipline analyzes the relation between knowledge, belief and choice of game-playing agents in an epistemic framework. The description of the players' choices in a given game relative to various epistemic assumptions constitutes the fundamental problem addressed by an epistemic approach to game theory. In a general sense, the objective of interactive epistemology consists in characterizing existing game-theoretic solution concepts in terms of epistemic assumptions as well as in proposing novel solution concepts by studying the game-theoretic implications of refined or new epistemic hypotheses. Intuitively, an epistemic model of a game can be interpreted as representing the reasoning of the players. Indeed, before making a decision in a game, the players reason about the game and their respective opponents, given their knowledge and beliefs. Precisely these epistemic mental states on which players base their decisions are explicitly expressible in an epistemic framework. In this PhD thesis, we consider an epistemic approach to game theory from a foundational point of view. In Chapter 1, basic game-theoretic notions as well as Aumann's epistemic framework for games are expounded and illustrated. Also, Aumann's sufficient conditions for backward induction are presented and his conceptual views discussed. In Chapter 2, Aumann's interactive epistemology is conceptually analyzed. In Chapter 3, which is based on joint work with Conrad Heilmann, a three-stage account for dynamic games is introduced and a type-based epistemic model is extended with a notion of agent connectedness. Then, sufficient conditions for backward induction are derived. In Chapter 4, which is based on joint work with Jérémie Cabessa, a topological approach to interactive epistemology is initiated. In particular, the epistemic-topological operator limit knowledge is defined and some implications for games considered. In Chapter 5, which is based on joint work with Jérémie Cabessa and Andrés Perea, Aumann's impossibility theorem on agreeing to disagree is revisited and weakened in the sense that possible contexts are provided in which agents can indeed agree to disagree. (shrink)