The term “emotional practices” is gaining currency in the historical study of emotions. This essay discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of this concept. A definition of emotion informed by practice theory promises to bridge persistent dichotomies with which historians of emotion grapple, such as body and mind, structure and agency, as well as expression and experience. Practice theory emphasizes the importance of habituation and social context and is thus consistent with, and could enrich, psychological models of situated, distributed, and (...) embodied cognition and their approaches to the study of emotion.It is suggested here that practices not only generate emotions, but that emotions themselves can be viewed as a practical engagement with the world. Conceiving of emotions as practices means understanding them as emerging from bodily dispositions conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity. Emotion-as-practice is bound up with and dependent on “emotional practices,” defined here as practices involving the self , language, material artifacts, the environment, and other people. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, the essay emphasizes that the body is not a static, timeless, universal foundation that produces ahistorical emotional arousal, but is itself socially situated, adaptive, trained, plastic, and thus historical. Four kinds of emotional practices that make use of the capacities of a body trained by specific social settings and power relations are sketched out—mobilizing, naming, communicating, and regulating emotion—as are consequences for method in historical research. (shrink)

Does it follow from Wittgenstein's views about indeterminism that irregularities of nature could take place? Did he believe that chairs could simply disappear and reappear, that water could behave differently than it has, and that a man throwing a fair die might throw ones for a week? Or are these things only imaginable? Is his view simply that if we adopted an indeterministic point of view we would no longer look for causes, or would not always look for causes, because (...) we would no longer assume that there must be a cause of each event? (shrink)

I criticize the ‘Humean’ view of reasons for actions, the view that the reasons for an action can be stated in terms of desires and beliefs. I point out that this view must ignore concepts which are central to our understanding of human actions, namely, intention, motivation and associated concepts such as decision. One can then see just how inadequate the Humean view is.

Embodiment theories have proposed a reciprocal relationship between emotional state and bodily reactions. Besides large body postures, recent studies have found emotions to affect rather subtle bodily expressions, such as slumped or upright sitting posture. This study investigated back muscle activity as an indication of an effect of positive and negative emotions on the sitting position. The electromyography activity of six back muscles was recorded in 31 healthy subjects during exposure to positive and negative affective pictures. A resting period was (...) used as a control condition. Increased muscle activity patterns in the back were found during the exposure to negative emotional stimuli, which was mainly measured in the lumbar and thorax regions. The positive emotion condition caused no elevated activity. The findings show that negative emotions lead to increased differential muscle activity in the back and thus corroborate those of previous research that emotion affects subtle bodily expressions. (shrink)

1. IntroductionUn collègue niçois, Marcel Vuillaume, m'a dit souvent que la phonologie, en comparaison avec la sémantique à laquelle il s'intéresse, a cet avantage d'être ancrée dans le réel : elle peut s'appuyer sur la phonétique et donc décrire les catégories qui sont pertinentes pour elle de manière objective. La pauvre sémantique, elle, doit se servir, pour la description de ses observables, de son propre objet d'étude. En conséquence, la circularité la guette en permanence. Les phonologu...

Le présent article met en évidence deux fonctions distinctes du corpus : heuristique et validante. Chacun connaît la seconde : un corpus est utilisé afin de démontrer la plausibilité ou la véracité d'une hypothèse qui a une existence indépendante. A la différence de celle-ci, la première fonction montre, plutôt qu’elle ne démontre. Le linguiste ne cherche plus ici à convaincre ; il cherche à comprendre. Il part à la rencontre de l'inconnu avec un questionnement, mais sans solution, même hypothétique, pour (...) le puzzle dont il a identifié quelques pièces. La vertu du corpus ici est consubstantielle à son existence : le classement. Qui dit corpus dit en effet principe de classement. Le corpus heuristique a ceci de particulier qu'il est éphémère : sitôt ses services rendus, il sera transformé par le linguiste en corpus de validation (qui aura vocation à convaincre le monde). Ce changement d'objectif induit alors une organisation et une présentation très différentes de celles qui ont permis la découverte du fonctionnement linguistique en question. En remontant cette opération, le présent article essaie d'isoler les propriétés invariables des corpus heuristiques. Le propos est illustré par un cas particulier tiré de mon expérience personnelle, i.e. les alternances de longueur vocalique dans les itératifs tchèques. (shrink)

Nucleoli are the sites of ribosome biogenesis. Transcription of the ribosomal RNA genes as well as processing and initial packaging of their transcripts with ribosomal and non‐ribosomal proteins all occur within the nucleolus in an ordered manner and under defined topological conditions. Components of the nucleolus have been localized by immunocytochemistry and their functional aspects investigated by microinjection of antibodies directed against the enzyme responsible for rDNA transcription, RNA polymerase I. The role of nascent transcripts in postmitotic formation of nucleoli (...) will be discussed. (shrink)

In contemporary discussions of the concept of intention, the assumption is made that an intention results from a person's decision, or resolution, or plan, or the like. And the intention persists, generally, until the appropriate action is carried out. However, intentions cannot be said to have temporal duration, or beginnings, or endings. And it is not necessary for a person who is intending to do something to have made a decision to do it, or a resolution, or anything else. It (...) may be that a person acquires an intention because of the circumstances that he finds himself in. If one sees that a tricycle is in front of his car, he will move it. No decision is necessary, obviously, because running over it would be contrary to common sense. Or one may gradually come to realise that he is obliged to do something and thereupon acquires the intention to do it. By focusing on one kind of intention, the “desire‐belief” theories have failed to realise that intentions originate in various ways, and for various reasons. (shrink)

William Child has said that Wittgenstein is an anti-realist with respect to a person's dreams, recent thoughts that he has consciously entertained and other things. I discuss Wittgenstein's comments about these matters in order to show that they do not commit him to an anti-realist view or a realist view. He wished to discredit the idea that when a person reports his dream or his thoughts, or past intentions, the person is reading off the contents of his mind or memory. (...) Reporting what one dreamt or recently thought is not like reporting what one has just read. The language is different, and the criterion of truth is different. The anti-realist is able to explain why the reports of thoughts, for instance, are "guaranteed" to be true (PI II, 222) by stipulating that the character and existence of the past thought is constituted by an inclination to assert that one had that past thought so the assertion could not be false. This could not be Wittgenstein's view. What does "guarantee" the truth of such an assertion is the fact that the person himself is the principle authority on what he dreamt, thought, and intended, something which "stands fast" for us. I next consider Crispin Wright's account of Wittgenstein's ideas about intentions and point out that his assumption that person always makes a judgement as to whether his action conforms to his intention is clearly false. And he is wrong in attributing to Wittgenstein the idea that an intention does not have a determinate content prior to its author's judgement about whether the action conforms to the intention, an idea that is obscure. If this were accurate, it would be a mystery why we do anything, or, at least, why our actions ever conform to our intentions. (shrink)

This book examines the content of a complex perfectionism beyond absolute, abstract, negative and minimalist readings.It relates to issues in perfection, interpretation, virtue, narrative lives, flourishing, valuable activities, and environmentalism.

This theory regards intentions as mental states, e.g., attitudes, which, typically, have causal power. But we do not speak of our intentions as having such powers. Instead, we speak of a person's resolve, determination, or his anxiety, eagerness, and so forth, as the ‘powers’ that move us. Of course, one desires for various reasons to carry out his various intentions but that desire is not a component of the intentions. An intention is, roughly, the course of action that one has (...) adopted, so it has no such components. There are other characteristics of intentions which the mental state idea of intentions does not share. Intentions do not have the temporal characteristics that mental states have, or share the curious context dependency that intentions have. And since, according to the theory, mental states operate causally, it would not be possible for a person to commit himself to a course of action as we ordinarily do when we make a promise or sign an agreement or contract. (shrink)

If one thinks of intentions as entities of some sort, states or dispositions, for example, it should eventually strike him that there are peculiar difficulties with the idea. For example, he will have trouble counting his intentions. In a particular situation, we ask someone, ‘What are you going to do about that? And this?’ And his answer might be, ‘My intention is to pay that, and, as for this, my intention is to ignore it.’ But of course he may have (...) said, ‘My intention is to pay this and ignore that.’ For this reason and, as we will see, others, there is no such thing as a complete list of intentions that a person has. If someone told us, ‘I have just eight intentions at present’, we would think he was joking, even though he intends to do eight things—grade papers, meet a class at nine, and so on. And if we ask; ‘What are you going to do today?’, he may answer that he has a class at nine, office hours at two, and lunch already scheduled. But even though he has more to do today than yesterday, he would hardly tell us, ‘I am afraid I have more intentions today than I did yesterday.’. (shrink)

The input to phonological reasoning are alternations, that is, variations in the pronunciation of related words, such as in electri[k] ‐ electri[s]‐ity. But phonologists cannot agree what counts as a relevant alternation: the issue is highly contentious despite a research record of over 50 years. We believe that the experimental setup presented may contribute to this debate based on a kind of evidence that was not brought to bear to date. Our experiment was thus designed to distinguish between alternations where (...) phonological computation plays no role, and those where it has contributed to language production. The design manipulates two factors that to date have not been considered in experimental studies of language production: linguistic complexity and alternation specificity. The former is understood as extra processing demands issued by two types of linguistic activity, morphosyntactic and phonological. Our results show that reaction time latencies are longer when participants are burdened with both morphosyntactic and phonological tasks than when they carry out just a morphosyntactic task, and they are still shorter in absence of both types of demands. These results allowed us to address alternation specificity, that is, the fact that different alternations (within a language or across languages) may be driven by different production routines (an idea that is consensual among linguists but underdeveloped in the psycholinguistic literature). Our study shows that four different alternations in French produce alternation‐specific signatures in reaction time latencies. These findings may thus redound to the advantage of psycholinguistic studies by identifying two new factors, as well as produce results that speak to the linguistic quarrels. (shrink)