Recent semantic research has made increasing use of a principle, Maximize Presupposition, which requires that under certain circumstances the strongest possible presupposition be marked. This principle is generally taken to be irreducible to standard Gricean reasoning because the forms that are in competition have the same assertive content. We suggest, however, that Maximize Presupposition might be reducible to the theory of scalar implicatures. (i)First, we consider a special case: the speaker utters a sentence with a presupposition p which is not (...) initially taken for granted by the addressee, but the latter takes the speaker to be an authority on the matter. Signaling the presupposition provides new information to the addressee; but it also follows from the logic of presupposition qua common belief that the presupposition is thereby satisfied (Stalnaker, Ling Philos 25(5–6):701–721, 2002). (ii) Second, we generalize this solution to other cases. We assume that even when p is common belief, there is a very small chance that the addressee might forget it (‘Fallibility’); in such cases, marking a presupposition will turn out to generate new information by re-establishing part of the original context. We also adopt from Raj Singh (Nat Lang Semantics 19(2):149–168, 2011) the hypothesis that presupposition maximization is computed relative to local contexts—and we assume that these too are subject to Fallibility; this accounts for cases in which the information that justifies the presupposition is linguistically provided. (iii) Finally, we suggest that our assumptions have benefits in the domain of implicatures: they make it possible to reinterpret Magri’s ‘blind’ (i.e. context-insensitive) implicatures as context-sensitive implicatures which just happen to be misleading. (shrink)

: In the 1980s, the analysis of presupposition projection contributed to a ‘dynamic turn’ in semantics: the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions was replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials. We argue that this move was misguided, and we offer an alternative in which presupposition projection follows from the combination of a fully classical semantics and a new pragmatic principle, which we call Be Articulate. This principle requires that a meaning pp’ conceptualized as involving (...) a pre-condition p should be articulated as … … rather than as … pp’ …, unless the full conjunction is ruled out because the first or the second conjunct is semantically idle. In particular, … … is infelicitous - and hence … pp’ … is acceptable - if one can determine as soon as p and is uttered that no matter how the sentence ends these words could be eliminated without affecting its contextual meaning. An equivalence theorem guarantees that this condition suffices to derive Heim’s results in almost all cases. Extensions of the condition lead to several new predictions, in particular concerning some ‘symmetric readings’, as well as presupposition projection in quantified structures, which displays a complex interaction between the nature of the trigger and the monotonicity of the quantifier. (shrink)

Epistemic logics are essential to the design of logical systems that capture elements of reasoning about knowledge. In this paper, we study the computability of unifiability and the unification types in several epistemic logics.

Les concepts évoluent dans un processus de filiation. La créativité ne peut survenir que dans la reconnaissance d’une dépendance relative aux générations antérieures. La richesse des réflexions en psychanalyse et notamment celles portant sur la relation pulsion/objet et sur le traumatisme permet d’alimenter des questions chez les psychanalystes s’intéressant aux couples et aux familles. L’analyse de groupe, et d’un autre point de vue l’approche systémique, ont influencé nos domaines théoriques. Des concepts plus spécifiques tels que les alliances inconscientes, le transgénérationnel, (...) l’incestuel nous permettent d’adosser notre pratique. Il est souhaitable et probable que l’étude des couples et des familles donne naissance à d’autres avancées conceptuelles. (shrink)

À Jean-Luc Nancy, un maître qui m’a donné la chiquenaude initiale et dont la salutation m’a introduit à la pensée. Une des clés pour la lecture de cet ouvrage se trouve à la page 23. Nous y lisons qu’il ne s’agit pas de thématiser l’adoration, c’est-à-dire aussi bien d’en faire la théorie, d’en construire un concept ou d’en proposer une analyse méthodique. Même si l’analyse méthodique n’est pas absente, loin s’en faut, du livre de Jean-Luc Nancy! Mais cette analyse ne (...) fait que frayer un chem... (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous nous efforçons de circonscrire le champ de problèmes à partir duquel Bataille et Queneau peuvent être situés l’un par rapport à l’autre, mais aussi l’un et l’autre par rapport à Kojève et à sa lecture de Hegel dans les années 1930. Ce champ problématique apparaît polarisé par les thématiques du Désir et de l’Histoire. À partir de là, nous montrons comment les spéculations philosophiques et littéraires de Bataille sur l’expérience-limite le conduisent à dédialectiser et, finalement, à (...) détéléologiser le Désir et à substituer à la perspective kojévienne d’une Sagesse post-historique le thème d’un érotisme transgressif. De son côté, Queneau offre une contestation plus nuancée du kojévisme dans le contexte de fictions littéraires où la conception kojévienne de l’Histoire se trouve ironisée, et finalement relativisée. (shrink)

This research investigates 3- and 5-year-olds' relative fairness in distributing small collections of even or odd numbers of more or less desirable candies, either with an adult experimenter or between two dolls. The authors compare more than 200 children from around the world, growing up in seven highly contrasted cultural and economic contexts, from rich and poor urban areas, to small-scale traditional and rural communities. Across cultures, young children tend to optimize their own gain, not showing many signs of self-sacrifice (...) or generosity. Already by 3 years of age, self-optimizing in distributive justice is based on perspective taking and rudiments of mind reading. By 5 years, overall, children tend to show more fairness in sharing. What varies across cultures is the magnitude of young children's self-interest. More fairness (less self-interest) in distributive justice is evident by children growing up in small-scale urban and traditional societies thought to promote more collective values. (shrink)

This article situates Xiong Shili’s 熊十力 classic work New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness within the central dilemma of post-May Fourth China surrounding the concerns with so-called modern universalism and Chinese particularism. I look at the way the text portrays its author as situated both within particular traditions and outside of them in order to show how the figure of the author is presented as a site wherein Chinese/Asian particularism and universalism can be fused. My central aim, in doing (...) so, is to argue that within the text’s discourse on the positioning of its author resides an implicit argument for the universality of Chinese or Asian philosophy—as interpreted and subsumed by the text—and against the hegemonic intentions of Western philosophy. Yet I also suggest that the text reiterates a conception of universality and an intention to monopolize the universal which are characteristic of hegemonic discourses. (shrink)

This paper focuses on contemporary Chinese theories of public moral justification and engages in the mainly descriptive project of introducing how, according to at least some contemporary Chinese theorists, we ought to decide which moral order shall figure as the common normative framework for our undertakings so that it can be considered to be publicly justified to all. Giving a closer reading of four Chinese theorists, it will become apparent that these accounts display an internal dynamic that shall allow us (...) to relate them so as to draw the rough outlines of a possible coherent account of public moral justification. In the centre of this account will figure a standpoint that may be coined as a “first-person plural standpoint”. (shrink)

Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. 164 pp.

Do instances of extreme self-sacrifice represent a valid paradigm to capture what makes typical individuals fuse with others? Probably not, because they can be viewed as aberrant phenomena. To understand the origins and mechanisms of human social fusion, one should first look at the development of babies and young children. Typical development represents the best alternative to Whitehouse's extreme model of social fusion.

Conceptualist accounts of the representational content of perceptual experiences have it that a subject _S_ can experience no object, property, relation, etc., unless _S_ "i# possesses and "ii# exercises concepts for such object, property, or relation. Perceptual experiences, on such a view, represent the world in a way that is conceptual.

Musical performance requires the ability to master a complex integration of highly specialized motor, cognitive and perceptual skills developed over years of practice. It often means also being able to deal with a large amount of pressure within dynamic environments. Consequently, many musicians suffer from health-related problems and have a large number of physical and psychological complaints. Research has shown that making music can present challenges for musicians’ wellbeing. Therefore, our research aims to evaluate and analyze the wellbeing of two (...) distinct groups of respondents, college music students compared with amateur musicians in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, this second group serving as our comparison group. This article presents the results of a sample of 126 musicians (mean age ± SD = 22.4 ± 4.5 years, 71 male). The wellbeing was assessed through the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF questionnaire evaluating two general measures, Quality of Life and General health, and four specific dimensions, Physical health, Psychological health, Social relationships and Environment. The respondents’ Quality of Life was high on each measure: median scores were higher than 4 for the first two measures and higher than 70 for the four specific dimensions. Among the dimensions, respondents had the highest mean score for Social relationships and Physical health (74.0 and 73.8, respectively) and, finally, on Psychological health (70.3). Our overview of musicians’ wellbeing in Western Switzerland underlines the importance of helping musicians to be aware of their health in order to take care of themselves. This research offers an important insight into musicians’ health and point out the importance of involving different actors (teachers, administrators or support staff) to promote their wellbeing and empower musicians. (shrink)

A full understanding of emotions and emotion characteristics can only be reached when their dynamic nature is taken into account. As such, a primary objective of the present study is to describe and account for variability in temporal profiles of experienced emotional intensity. Participants were asked to make detailed drawings of intensity profiles of recently experienced episodes of anger, sadness, joy and affection. Functional data analysis revealed three features that together accounted for 84% of the total variability: (i) steepness at (...) onset; (ii) skewness; and (iii) the number of peaks. Emotions differed with regard to the first two features, with the rise at onset being steeper for sadness and joy and affection being the most negatively skewed emotion under study. Individual differences regarding each of the three features were found, however, they did not strongly generalise across emotions. (shrink)

Philippe Roy-Lysencourt | : Dans cet article, Philippe Roy-Lysencourt présente les rapports personnels entre Pie X et son Secrétaire d’État, le cardinal Rafael Merry del Val. Il considère tout d’abord la période qui va de la première rencontre entre les deux hommes jusqu’à la nomination de Merry del Val comme Secrétaire d’État ; il examine ensuite les relations de travail et les relations personnelles entre les deux hommes, avant de relater leur dernière rencontre, au chevet de Pie X, (...) qui illustre d’une façon particulière la profondeur de leur amitié. À partir de sources inédites, Philippe Roy-Lysencourt montre que les relations entre les deux hommes étaient fondées sur une estime, un respect et une admiration réciproques, qu’elles étaient caractérisées par une grande confiance mutuelle et que, finalement, les rapports entre les deux hommes étaient si étroits que l’histoire et l’historien ne peuvent dissocier les noms de Pie X et du cardinal Merry del Val. | : In this article, Philippe Roy-Lysencourt presents the personal relationships between Pius X and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val. He first takes into consideration the period that goes from the first encounter between the two men until Merry del Val’s appointment as Secretary of State ; he then examines the working and personal relations between the two men, before discussing their last encounter, at Pius X’s bedside, which illustrates in a particular way the depth of their friendship. Working from unpublished sources, Philippe Roy-Lysencourt shows that the relationship between the two men was based on a reciprocal esteem, respect and admiration, that it was characterized by great mutual trust, and that finally this relationship was so close that history and the historian cannot dissociate the names of Pius X and Cardinal Merry del Val. (shrink)

I challenge the usual approach of defining emergence in terms of properties of wholes “emerging” upon properties of parts. This approach indeed fails to meet the requirement of nontriviality, since it renders a bunch of ordinary properties emergent; however, by defining emergence as the incompressibility of a simulation process, we have an objective meaning of emergence because the difference between the processes satisfying the incompressibility criterion and the other processes does not depend on our cognitive abilities. Finally, this definition fulfills (...) the nontriviality and the scientific‐adequacy requirements better than the combinatorial approach, emergence here being a predicate of processes rather than of properties. †To contact the author, please write to: Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS/Université Paris I Sorbonne), 13 rue du Four 75006, Paris; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This book addresses several key issues in the biological study of death with the intent of capturing their genealogy, the assumptions and presuppositions they make, and the way that they open specific new research avenues. The book is divided into two sections: the first considers physiology and the second evolutionary biology. Huneman explains that biologists in the late 1950s put forth a research framework that evolutionarily accounts for death in terms of either an effect of the weakness of natural selection (...) or a by-product of natural selection for early reproduction. He illustrates how the biology of death is a central field and that studying it provides insight into the way that the epistemic structure of this knowledge has been constituted, persists until now, and may conflict with some traditional philosophical ideas. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give new kinds of modal logics suitable for reasoning about regions in discrete spaces. We call them dynamic logics of the region-based theory of discrete spaces. These modal logics are linguistic restrictions of propositional dynamic logic with the global diamond E. Their formulas are equivalent to Boolean combinations of modal formulas like E(A ∧ ⟨α⟩ B) where A and B are Boolean terms and α is a relational term. Examining what we can say (...) about dynamic models when we use formulas to describe them, we successively address the axiomatization/completeness issue and the decidability/complexity issue of our dynamic logics of the region-based theory of discrete spaces. (shrink)

Fallibilists about looks deny that the relation of looking the same as is non-transitive. Regarding familiar examples of coloured patches suggesting that such a relation is non-transitive, they argue that, in fact, indiscriminable adjacent patches may well look different, despite their perceptual indiscriminability: it’s just that we cannot notice the relevant differences in the chromatic appearances of such patches. In this paper, I present an argument that fallibilism about looks requires commitment to an empirically false consequence. To succeed in deflecting (...) putative cases of non-transitivity, fallibilists would have to claim that there can’t be any perceptual limitations of any kind on human chromatic discrimination. But there are good reasons to think such limitations exist. (shrink)

‘Statisticalists’ argue that the individual interactions of organisms taken together constitute natural selection. On this view, natural selection is an aggregated effect of interactions rather than some added cause acting on populations. The statisticalists’ view entails that natural selection and drift are indistinguishable aggregated effects of interactions, so that it becomes impossible to make a difference between them. The present paper attempts to make sense of the difference between selection and drift, given the main insights of statisticalism; basically, it will (...) disentangle the various kinds of indistinguishability between selection and drift that happen within biology, by examining the epistemological and metaphysical nature of the distinction between selection and drift. It will be based on a ‘difference-making account’ of selection. The first section will explicate the inscrutability of selection and drift, its various types in the statisticalist writings, and its implications. The second section specifies concepts of natural selection and drift in the difference making account of selection I am using, and shows that one can derive from this the statistical signatures of selection and drift. On this basis I focus on one sort of indistinguishability issue about selection and drift, which I call epistemic opacity, and explain why it mostly affects small populations. The last section explains why epistemic opacity does not raise an genuine epistemic problem for evolutionary biology. (shrink)

I investigate the relationship between adaptation, as defined in evolutionary theory through natural selection, and the concept of emergence. I argue that there is an essential correlation between the former, and “emergence” defined in the field of algorithmic simulations. I first show that the computational concept of emergence (in terms of incompressible simulation) can be correlated with a causal criterion of emergence (in terms of the specificity of the explanation of global patterns). On this ground, I argue that emergence in (...) general involves some sort of selective processes. Finally, I show that a second criterion, concerning novel explanatory regularities following the emergence of a pattern, captures the robustness of emergence displayed by some cases of emergence (according to the first criterion). Emergent processes fulfilling both criteria are therefore exemplified in evolutionary biology by some so-called “innovations”, and mostly by the new units of fitness or new kinds of adaptations (like sexual reproduction, multicellular organisms, cells, societies) sometimes called “major transitions in evolution”, that recent research programs (Maynard-Smith and Szathmary 1995 ; Michod 1999 ) aims at explaining. (shrink)

The problem of generation has been, for Kant scholars, a kind of test of Kant's successive concepts of finality. Although he deplores the absence of a naturalistic account of purposiveness (and hence of reproduction) in his pre-critical writings, in the First Critique he nevertheless presents a "reductionist" view of finality in the Transcendental Dialectic's Appendices. This finality can be used only as a language, extended to the whole of nature, but which must be filled with mechanistic explanations. Therefore, in 1781, (...) mechanism and teleology are synonymous languages. Despite the differences between its two authors, the Wolffian embryology, exposed in the Theorie der Generation (1764), and debated by Blumenbach's dissertation on Bildungstrieb, enabled Kant to resolve the philosophical problem of natural generation, and subsequently to determine what is proper to the explanation of living processes. Thus, in the Third Critique he could give another account of purposiveness, restricted to the organism, and more realistic than his former one; this philosophical reappraisal of purposiveness in embryology required the new concept of "simply reflexive judgement", and the correlated notion of "regulative principle". Thus framed, this naturalized teleology provided some answers to the Kantian problem of order and contingency after the end of classical (Leibnizian) metaphysics. (shrink)

Van Heijenoort's main contribution to history and philosophy of modern logic was his distinction between two basic views of logic, first, the absolutist, or universalist, view of the founding fathers, Frege, Peano, and Russell, which dominated the first, classical period of history of modern logic, and, second, the relativist, or model-theoretic, view, inherited from Boole, Schröder, and Löwenheim, which has dominated the second, contemporary period of that history. In my paper, I present the man Jean van Heijenoort (Sect. 1); then (...) I describe his way of arguing for the second view (Sect. 2); and finally I come down in favor of the first view (Sect. 3). There, I specify the version of universalism for which I am prepared to argue (Sect. 3, introduction). Choosing ZFC to play the part of universal, logical (in a nowadays forgotten sense) system, I show, through an example, how the usual model theory can be naturally given its proper place, from the universalist point of view, in the logical framework of ZFC; I outline another, not rival but complementary, semantics for admissible extensions of ZFC in the very same logical framework; I propose a way to get universalism out of the predicaments in which universalists themselves believed it to be (Sect. 3.1). Thus, if universalists of the classical period did not, in fact, construct these semantics, it was not that their universalism forbade them, in principle, to do so. The historical defeat of universalism was not technical in character. Neither was it philosophical. Indeed, it was hardly more than the victory of technicism over the very possibility of a philosophical dispute (Sect. 3.2). (shrink)