Pour passer du domaine intrapsychique de l’identification à celui psychosocial de l’identité, il est nécessaire de se référer aux groupes d’appartenance dans l’espace transitionnel desquels s’effectuent la métabolisation de la réalité psychique et du monde extérieur, la différenciation du Moi et du non-Moi, du narcissisme et de l’investissement d’objets. Le groupe constitue ainsi le chaînon manquant pour saisir à la fois les rapports du singulier au collectif et leur imbrication réciproque et permet de rendre compte de l’histoire transgénérationnelle. Selon (...) les travaux de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok, le concept de fantôme postule que certaines personnes héritent de la substance psychique de secrets de leurs ancêtres. Les exemples cliniques de transmission cachée conduisent au postulat d’un lien entre la structure psychique du sujet endocryptique et de celle du groupe d’appartenance primaire. (shrink)

C’est dans le cadre du soutien à la parentalité auprès de familles qui « bénéficient » d’une mesure éducative et/ou de placement que nous avons été amenés à mettre en place un dispositif de prise en charge un peu particulier pour ce qui concerne essentiellement les familles monoparentales. Ce dispositif s’attache à prendre en compte les besoins tant de la mère que des enfants et a nécessité de travailler à partir de cadres séparés mais intégrés dans une dynamique d’ensemble. C’est (...) à partir de deux cadres d’élaboration que la symptomatologie familiale pourra être appréhendée : les entretiens individuels avec la mère suivi du cadre des entretiens familiaux à visée thérapeutique qui réunit mère et enfants. L’emploi du génogramme classique au sein du premier dispositif associé à l’emploi du génogramme libre dans le second cadre (qui met plus particulièrement en relief ce qui pour chaque participant fait famille ou empêche de faire famille) vont conjointement permettre de donner un éclairage sur ce qui va se donner à voir de la transmission transgénérationnelle et qui se présente sous la forme de points qui insistent et qui résistent, points traumatiques qui font symptôme. Points traumatiques qui se signalent par des blancs, des absences de représentation, des ratures qui sont autant de marques d’oubli ou de volonté d’oublier, d’effacer ce qui reste en souffrance, en mal d’être dit ou représenté. Au travers de ce dispositif, il est possible d’appréhender le symptôme dans sa structure composite et qui participe de l’individuel et du collectif. Charge aux thérapeutes de travailler à l’intégration des événements traumatiques, au « remaillage familial », pour que ce qui s’apparente à la fatalité ou à la prédétermination en tant que répétition transgénérationnelle à l’œuvre, ouvre de possibles vrais choix de vie. (shrink)

Les grossesses précoces sur l’île de La Réunion sont quatre fois plus nombreuses qu’en France métropolitaine. L’article reprend ici une étude ethnopsychanalytique sur six familles qui s’intéresse à l’impact de ces maternités sur le fonctionnement psychique des enfants issus de ces grossesses. Il s’avère que transgénérationnellement la relation mère-enfant est fusionnelle, consécutivement à une angoisse d’abandon et à un fort besoin affectif maternel. De fait, l’enfant développe un sentiment d’insécurité psychique, présente des symptômes dépressifs et anxieux. Il apparaît également que (...) mère et enfant possèdent un faux self ou tout du moins un défaut de spontanéité, une immaturité affective, se manifestant chez ces derniers par un repli sur soi ou inversement des tendances mégalomaniaques. L’article s’interroge sur la spécificité réunionnaise, l’héritage historique, le contexte culturel, pouvant expliquer l’ampleur ici de ce phénomène. (shrink)

Le texte décrit l’intérêt et les limites de la thérapie familiale psychanalytique dans la mise au travail de liens de couple souffrants et particulièrement infectés par des éléments de la transmission transgénérationnelle. Le cadre de la thérapie familiale permet la restauration d’une sécurité de base autorisant la régression, dont la présence réelle des enfants est un puissant activateur. L’auteur, thérapeute familiale psychanalytique, illustre différentes problématiques de couple, à travers des vignettes cliniques, en pointant les limites du travail possible (...) dans ce dispositif : vigilance dans les interventions qui doivent rester groupales-familiales et protection des enfants contre des débordements à caractère exhibitionniste, sexuel ou pervers. À ces conditions, le couple parental, suffisamment dégagé des scories d’un transgénérationnel encombrant, peut éventuellement s’engager en parallèle ou ultérieurement dans un authentique travail de couple. (shrink)

Les approches pour lutter contre le fléau des maladies chroniques qui augmentent dans le monde entier se révèlent infructueuses et très coûteuses. Il est maintenant possible de corriger les chiffres alarmants et d’envisager une prévention efficace en adoptant le nouveau paradigme des Origines du Développement de la Santé et des Maladies (DOHaD), à condition d’intervenir très tôt en agissant sur le risque et non lorsque la maladie est déjà apparue. Ce concept est largement reconnu grâce à des études épidémiologiques et (...) des études animales. Les influences des facteurs environnementaux – nutrition, stress, psycho-affectifs, toxiques, bactériens et physiques – sur les processus épigénétiques représentent une révolution. En effet, les DMR modifications épigénétiques conservent la mémoire des impacts de facteurs environnementaux auxquels un individu est soumis tout au long de sa vie. Une période cruciale est le développement précoce, pré et postnatal, les 1000 jours ; cruciale parce que l’épigénome est particulièrement sensible aux effets de l’environnement, et aussi parce que l’individu construit son capital santé pour répondre plus ou moins bien aux aléas de la vie. En outre, l’existence de mécanismes non génétiques et non culturels capables de transférer la mémoire des expériences/expositions à des facteurs environnementaux parentaux et qui conditionnent la réactivité des générations suivantes à différents environnements au cours de leur vie suscite un intérêt grandissant. L’idée selon laquelle des marques épigénétiques non effacées lors des phases de reprogrammation est actuellement très en vogue, voire considérée à tort comme acquise malgré la rareté des exemples probants. Cependant, des questions fondamentales subsistent quant à la nature, aux rôles et à l’impact des marques et des mécanismes épigénétiques, des ARN non codants ou d’autres mécanismes et à leur persistance au cours des générations. Un modèle intégrant ces différents systèmes, leurs interactions avec l’environnement et les fenêtres de développement de la sensibilité selon le sexe du parent et de l’enfant reste à construire. Sur la base de la malléabilité des mécanismes épigénétiques sous-jacents, la réversibilité des marques environnementales ouvre de nouvelles perspectives. Cependant, comment les facteurs conférant une susceptibilité accrue ou une résilience vis-à-vis du développement des maladies agissent et influencent les mécanismes épigénétiques reste à élucider. Si la mémoire des expériences/expositions à des facteurs environnementaux est effectivement transmissible, le principal défi pour l’individu, et surtout pour les pouvoirs publics, est d’être en mesure d’éviter ceux qui posent des risques pour la descendance. Ces données peuvent déplacer le curseur des responsabilités en matière de soins de santé, de la sphère privée à la sphère socio-géographico-politique. (shrink)

Dans le cadre de la psychopathologie des inadaptations qui concerne les familles déshéritées plus connues sous le vocable de familles « cas sociaux », l’auteur s’interroge sur le lien pouvant exister entre l’instabilité motrice et affective dont souffre la grande majorité des enfants qui « bénéficient » d’une mesure d’aide éducative ou de placement et l’errance qui traverse la vie de leurs mères : errance géographique, errance amoureuse et errance dans le langage. Ce qui caractérise ces familles est une très (...) grande précarité, tant matérielle que psychique, qui prédispose à la répétition de ruptures, sociales, professionnelles ou familiales. Cette répétition agie des ruptures – au fil des générations et dans une même génération – peut être appréhendée sous l’angle d’une impossible séparation au sens d’une impossible mise en lien. Nous touchons là ce qui dans l’errance renvoie à une psychopathologie de l’absence ; le sujet se trouvant précisément pris au piège de la logique utopique. (shrink)

Résumé À travers le cas clinique d’une adolescente obèse, l’article postule que le corps « obèse » peut être l’espace d’expression de la conflictualité inter et transgénérationnelle. Le symptôme de l’obésité viendrait alors préserver l’homéostasie familiale. Cet écrit met le projecteur sur la dimension contenante de ce corps « encombrant », signifiant formel d’une enveloppe psychique porteuse de traces douloureuses appartenant au mémorial familial. Il expose ainsi une explication au phénomène de résistance à l’amaigrissement rencontré parfois dans la clinique (...) de l’obésité. (shrink)

Résumé À travers le cas clinique d’une adolescente obèse, l’article postule que le corps « obèse » peut être l’espace d’expression de la conflictualité inter et transgénérationnelle. Le symptôme de l’obésité viendrait alors préserver l’homéostasie familiale. Cet écrit met le projecteur sur la dimension contenante de ce corps « encombrant », signifiant formel d’une enveloppe psychique porteuse de traces douloureuses appartenant au mémorial familial. Il expose ainsi une explication au phénomène de résistance à l’amaigrissement rencontré parfois dans la clinique (...) de l’obésité. (shrink)

Transmission of justification across inference is a valuable and indeed ubiquitous epistemic phenomenon in everyday life and science. It is thanks to the phenomenon of epistemic transmission that inferential reasoning is a means for substantiating predictions of future events and, more generally, for expanding the sphere of our justified beliefs or reinforcing the justification of beliefs that we already entertain. However, transmission of justification is not without exceptions. As a few epistemologists have come to realise, more or (...) less trivial forms of circularity can prevent justification from transmitting from p to q even if one has justification for p and one is aware of the inferential link from p to q. In interesting cases this happens because one can acquire justification for p only if one has independent justification for q. In this case the justification for q cannot depend on the justification for p and the inferential link from p to q, as genuine transmission would require. The phenomenon of transmission failure seems to shed light on philosophical puzzles, such as Moore's proof of a material world and McKinsey's paradox, and it plays a central role in various philosophical debates. For this reason it is being granted continued and increasing attention. (shrink)

The Neo-Moorean Deduction (I have a hand, so I am not a brain-in-a-vat) and the Zebra Deduction (the creature is a zebra, so isn’t a cleverly disguised mule) are notorious. Crispin Wright, Martin Davies, Fred Dretske, and Brian McLaughlin, among others, argue that these deductions are instances of transmission failure. That is, they argue that these deductions cannot transmit justification to their conclusions. I contend, however, that the notoriety of these deductions is undeserved. My strategy is to clarify, attack, (...) defend, and apply. I clarify what transmission and transmission failure really are, thereby exposing two questionable but quotidian assumptions. I attack existing views of transmission failure, especially those of Crispin Wright. I defend a permissive view of transmission failure, one which holds that deductions of a certain kind fail to transmit only because of premise circularity. Finally, I apply this account to the Neo-Moorean and Zebra Deductions and show that, given my permissive view, these deductions transmit in an intuitively acceptable way—at least if either a certain type of circularity is benign or a certain view of perceptual justification is false. (shrink)

The pitfalls of the Wadding edition of John Duns Scotus illustrate a general feature of the study of medieval philosophy: the gap that separates the authentic words of the medieval thinker one wishes to study from the Latin words one sees on the pages of a printed edition — and further still from the English words one sees in a translation. The aim of this essay is to make clear both the nature and the size of that gap, not in (...) order to dismay prospective students of medieval philosophy, but in order to explain the hazards in such a way that students can equip themselves properly to meet them. I will begin by discussing in a general way the channels of transmission by which medieval philosophy has made its way down to us. I then turn to three specific cases by which I illustrate some of those general points as they apply to texts of different sorts and from different periods. Along the way I draw attention to the kinds of errors that are liable to be introduced at the various stages of transmission between a medieval lecturer’s spoken words and the text of a modern critical edition, and I outline the tools and techniques that the careful historian of medieval philosophy will use in order to minimize such errors, especially where no critical edition is available. In the second half of the essay I turn to problems of translation. I provide an example that shows how a reader can sometimes detect errors in a translation even without checking the Latin text, and another to illustrate how translations sometimes reflect controversial views about how a text is to be interpreted. I then conclude with a look at the translation of particular terms, discussing a number of standard translations that are apt to be misleading, and giving some idea of the range of translation of certain key terms. (shrink)

I set out the standard view about alleged examples of failure of transmission of warrant, respond to two cases for the view, and argue that the view is false. The first argument for the view neglects the distinction between believing a proposition on the basis of a justification and merely having a justification to believe a proposition. The second argument for the view neglects the position that one's justification for believing a conclusion can be one's premise for the conclusion, (...) rather than simply one's justification for the premise. Finally, the view is false since it is inconsistent with the closure of knowledge as closure is properly understood. (shrink)

Marie-Therese d'Alverny devoted a large part of her research to discovering and describing manuscripts of scientific texts, especially those translated from Arabic. This volume contains those of d'Alverny's studies devoted to the Latin transmission of the works of other Greek and Arabic authors (Aristotle, Galen, Priscianus Lydus, al-Kindi, Albumasar, Algazel and Averroes), the authors responsible for this transmission (Scotus Eriugena, Raymond of Marseilles, Petrus Hispanus, Henri Bate of Malines and Pietro d'Abano), and some of the themes of the (...) transmitted texts (astrology and the planetary system of Herclides), as well as three articles summarizing the whole transmission process. (shrink)

This paper explains how the notion of justification transmission can be used to ground a notion of knowledge transmission. It then explains how transmission theories can characterise schoolteacher cases, which have prominently been presented as counterexamples to transmission theories.

This encyclopedia entry provides an introduction to the literature on transmission failure.

This article provides a discussion of the principle of transmission of evidential support across entailment from the perspective of belief revision theory in the AGM tradition. After outlining and briefly defending a small number of basic principles of belief change, which include a number of belief contraction analogues of the Darwiche-Pearl postulates for iterated revision, a proposal is then made concerning the connection between evidential beliefs and belief change policies in rational agents. This proposal is found to be suffcient (...) to establish the truth of a much-discussed intuition regarding transmission failure. (shrink)

According to fitting-attitudes accounts of value, the valuable is what there is sufficient reason to value. Such accounts face the famous wrong kind of reason problem. For example, if an evil demon threatens to kill you unless you value him, it may appear that you have sufficient reason to value the demon, although he is not valuable. One solution to this problem is to deny that the demon’s threat is a reason to value him. It is instead a reason to (...) want to value the demon, and to bring it about that you value him. However, many proponents of the wrong kind of reason problem find this solution unmotivated. This paper thus offers a new argument for this solution. The argument turns on the ‘transmission’ of reasons – the familiar fact that there is often reason for one action or attitude because there is reason for another. I observe that putative reasons of the wrong kind transmit in a very different way to other reasons. I then argue that this difference is best explained by the hypothesis that putative reasons of the wrong kind are not reasons for the attitude in question, but are instead reasons to want and bring about that attitude. (shrink)

Cet article, adossé à un cas clinique, propose une réflexion sur la dimension traumatique à l’adolescence en analysant la problématique de l’intrus persécuteur et la problématique transgénérationnelle. L’adolescent manifeste une dynamique de survie psychique par des symptômes somatiques, des conduites phobosociales et une hypersensibilité narcissique. La différenciation et la séparation-individuation d’avec l’objet interne intruseur sont également apparues dans le travail psychique engagé dans les entretiens familiaux.

Deontological internalism is the family of views where justification is a positive deontological appraisal of someone's epistemic agency: S is justified, that is, when S is blameless, praiseworthy, or responsible in believing that p. Brian Weatherson discusses very briefly how a plausible principle of ampliative transmission reveals a worry for versions of deontological internalism formulated in terms of epistemic blame. Weatherson denies, however, that similar principles reveal similar worries for other versions. I disagree. In this article, I argue that (...) plausible principles of ampliative transmission reveal a worry for deontological internalism in general. (shrink)

Biologists rely heavily on the language of information, coding, and transmission that is commonplace in the field of information theory developed by Claude Shannon, but there is open debate about whether such language is anything more than facile metaphor. Philosophers of biology have argued that when biologists talk about information in genes and in evolution, they are not talking about the sort of information that Shannon’s theory addresses. First, philosophers have suggested that Shannon’s theory is only useful for developing (...) a shallow notion of correlation, the so-called causal sense of information. Second, they typically argue that in genetics and evolutionary biology, information language is used in a semantic sense, whereas semantics are deliberately omitted from Shannon’s theory. Neither critique is well-founded. Here we propose an alternative to the causal and semantic senses of information: a transmission sense of information, in which an object X conveys information if the function of X is to reduce, by virtue of its sequence properties, uncertainty on the part of an agent who observes X. The transmission sense not only captures much of what biologists intend when they talk about information in genes, but also brings Shannon’s theory back to the fore. By taking the viewpoint of a communications engineer and focusing on the decision problem of how information is to be packaged for transport, this approach resolves several problems that have plagued the information concept in biology, and highlights a number of important features of the way that information is encoded, stored, and transmitted as genetic sequence. (shrink)

Cumulative cultural knowledge [CCK], the knowledge we acquire via social learning and has been refined by previous generations, is of central importance to our species’ flourishing. Considering its importance, we should expect that our best epistemological theories can account for how this happens. Perhaps surprisingly, CCK and how we acquire it via cultural learning has only received little attention from social epistemologists. Here, I focus on how we should epistemically evaluate how agents acquire CCK. After sampling some reasons why extant (...) theories cannot account for CCK, I suggest that things aren’t as bleak as they might look. I explain how agents deserve epistemic credit for how CCK is transmitted in cultural learning by promoting a central need of their social group: The efficient and safe transmission of CCK. A good initial fit exists between this observation and Greco’s knowledge-economy framework. Ultimately, however, Greco’s account doesn’t straightforwardly account for CCK because of its strict focus on testimony. I point out two issues in the framework due to this focus. The resulting view advocates giving epistemic credit to agents when they act to promote their communities’ epistemic needs in the right way and highlights the various ways in which agents come to do this. (shrink)

Abstract: Pluralistic ignorance is a nasty informational phenomenon widely studied in social psychology and theoretical economics. It revolves around conditions under which it is "legitimate" for everyone to remain ignorant. In formal epistemology there is enough machinery to model and resolve situations in which pluralistic ignorance may arise. Here is a simple first stab at recovering from pluralistic ignorance by means of knowledge transmissibility.

Transmission arguments against closure of knowledge base the case against closure on the premise that a necessary condition for knowledge is not closed. Warfield argues that this kind of argument is fallacious whereas Brueckner, Murphy and Yan try to rescue it. According to them, the transmission argument is no longer fallacious once an implicit assumption is made explicit. I defend Warfield’s objection by arguing that the various proposals for the unstated assumption either do not avoid the fallacy or (...) turn the central premise of the transmission argument, namely that a necessary condition is not closed, into a redundant and superfluous premise. I conclude that Warfield’s advice is still to be heeded: Arguments against closure must not rely essentially on the premise that a necessary condition for knowledge is not closed. (shrink)

Almost everyone believes that testimony can transmit knowledge from speaker to hearer. What some philosophers mean by this is ordinary and pedestrian-- they mean only that, in at least some cases, a speaker S knows that p, S testifies that p to a hearer H, and H comes to know that p as a result of believing S's testimony. There is disagreement about how this occurs, but that it does occur is sufficient for the transmission of knowledge in the (...) intended sense. On this understanding of transmission, the natural questions are these: (1) What conditions, in addition to speaker knowledge and speaker testimony, are sufficient for the hearer to gain testimonial knowledge?; and (2) Is speaker knowledge always necessary for testimonial knowledge? That is: Is all testimonial knowledge transmitted knowledge? (shrink)

It is argued that a shared agency account of large-scale knowledge transmission provides a viable way forward for understanding a variety of phenomena, including the transmission of knowledge via diverse technologies such as Wikipedia, Google Search, and Siri. In fact, the lessons learned arguably apply more generally than this. If the arguments of the paper are sound, much of what is said here will apply to large-scale knowledge generation as well, including knowledge generation via large-scale technologies. Finally, the (...) paper considers generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Med-PaLM, and asks whether these can be understood as either transmitting knowledge or generating it. Several models are considered for each of these possibilities. (shrink)

In my 1991 paper, AAnti-Individualism and Privileged Access,@ I argued that externalism in the philosophy of mind is incompatible with the thesis that we have privileged , nonempirical access to the contents of our own thoughts.¹ One of the most interesting responses to my argument has been that of Martin Davies (1998, 2000, and Chapter _ above) and Crispin Wright (2000 and Chapter _ above), who describe several types of cases to show that warrant for a premise does not always (...) transmit to a known deductive consequence of that premise, and who contend that this fact under-mines my argument for incompatibilism. I will try to show here that the Davies/Wright point about transmission of warrant does not adversely affect my argument. (shrink)

In this paper I draw attention to a peculiar epistemic feature exhibited by certain deductively valid inferences. Certain deductively valid inferences are unable to enhance the reliability of one's belief that the conclusion is true—in a sense that will be fully explained. As I shall show, this feature is demonstrably present in certain philosophically significant inferences—such as GE Moore's notorious 'proof' of the existence of the external world. I suggest that this peculiar epistemic feature might be correlated with the much (...) discussed phenomenon that Crispin Wright and Martin Davies have called 'transmission failure'—the apparent failure, on the part of some deductively valid inferences to transmit one's justification for believing the premises. (shrink)

Culture, defined as shared behavior or information within a community acquired through some form of social learning from conspecifics, is now suggested to act as a second inheritance system. Cultural processes are important in a wide variety of vertebrate species. Birdsong provides a classic example of cultural processes: cultural transmission, where changes in a shared song are learned from surrounding conspecifics, and cultural evolution, where the patterns of songs change through time. This form of cultural transmission of information (...) has features that are different in speed and form from genetic transmission. More recently, culture, vocal traditions and an extreme form of song evolution has been documented in cetaceans. Humpback whale song ‘revolutions’, where the single population-wide shared song type is rapidly replaced by a new, novel song type introduced from a neighbouring population, represents an extraordinary example of ocean basin-wide cultural transmission rivalled in its geographic extent only by humans. In this review, we examine the cultural evolutions and revolutions present in some birdsong and whale song, respectively. By taking a comparative approach to these cultural processes, we review the existing evidence to understand the similarities and differences for their patterns of expression and the underlying drivers, including anthropogenic influences, which may shape them. Finally, we encourage future studies to explore the role of innovation vs. production errors in song evolution, the fitness information present in song, and how human-induced changes in population sizes, trajectories and migratory connections facilitating cultural transmission may be driving song revolutions. (shrink)

The ideas (i) that skill is a form of knowledge and (ii) that it can be taught are commonplace in both ancient philosophy and everyday life. I argue that contemporary epistemology lacks the resources to adequately accommodate them. Intellectualist and anti-intellectualist accounts of knowledge how struggle to represent the transmission of skill via teaching and learning (§II), in part because each adopts a fundamentally individualistic approach to the acquisition of skill that focuses on individual practice and experience; consequently, learning (...) from an expert’s teaching is rendered at best peripheral (§III). An account of the transmission of skill that focuses on guided practice is shown to be immanent in an anti-individualist account of skill (§IV) that takes seriously the Aristotelian ideas that skills are rational capacities and second natures by developing the thought that doing, teaching, and practising are three moments of an a priori unity: the life-cycle of a skill (§V). (shrink)

Cancer is an evolutionary and ecological process in which complex interactions between tumour cells and their environment share many similarities with organismal evolution. Tumour cells with highest adaptive potential have a selective advantage over less fit cells. Naturally occurring transmissible cancers provide an ideal model system for investigating the evolutionary arms race between cancer cells and their surrounding micro‐environment and macro‐environment. However, the evolutionary landscapes in which contagious cancers reside have not been subjected to comprehensive investigation. Here, we provide a (...) multifocal analysis of transmissible tumour progression and discuss the selection forces that shape it. We demonstrate that transmissible cancers adapt to both their micro‐environment and macro‐environment, and evolutionary theories applied to organisms are also relevant to these unique diseases. The three naturally occurring transmissible cancers, canine transmissible venereal tumour (CTVT) and Tasmanian devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) and the recently discovered clam leukaemia, exhibit different evolutionary phases: (i) CTVT, the oldest naturally occurring cell line is remarkably stable; (ii) DFTD exhibits the signs of stepwise cancer evolution; and (iii) clam leukaemia shows genetic instability. While all three contagious cancers carry the signature of ongoing and fairly recent adaptations to selective forces, CTVT appears to have reached an evolutionary stalemate with its host, while DFTD and the clam leukaemia appear to be still at a more dynamic phase of their evolution. Parallel investigation of contagious cancer genomes and transcriptomes and of their micro‐environment and macro‐environment could shed light on the selective forces shaping tumour development at different time points: during the progressive phase and at the endpoint. A greater understanding of transmissible cancers from an evolutionary ecology perspective will provide novel avenues for the prevention and treatment of both contagious and non‐communicable cancers. (shrink)

Social transmission is at the core of cultural evolutionary theory. It occurs when a demonstrator uses mental representations to produce some public displays which in turn allow a learner to acquire similar mental representations. Although cultural evolutionists do not dispute this view of social transmission, they typically abstract away from the multistep nature of the process when they speak of cultural variants at large, thereby referring both to variation and evolutionary change in mental representations as well as in (...) their corresponding public displays. This conflation suggests that differentiating each step of the transmission process is redundant. In this paper, I examine different forms of interplay between the multistep nature of social transmission and the metric spaces used by cultural evolutionists to measure cultural variation and to model cultural change. I offer a conceptual analysis of what assumptions seem to be at work when cultural evolutionists conflate the complex causal sequence of social transmission as a single space of variation in which populations evolve. To this aim, I use the framework of variation spaces, a formal framework commonly used in evolutionary biology, and I develop two theoretical concepts, ‘technique’ and ‘technical space’, for addressing cases where the complexity of social transmission defies the handy assumption of a single variation space for cultural change. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that Boghossian's explanation of how we can acquire a priori knowledge of logical principles through implicit definitions commits a transmission of warrant-failure. To this end, I will briefly outline Boghossian's account, followed by an explanation of what a transmission of warrant-failure consists in. I will also show that this charge is independent of the worry of rule-circularity which has been raised concerning the justification of logical principles and of which Boghossian is fully (...) aware. My argument comes in two steps: firstly, I will argue for the insufficiency of Boghossian's template which is meant to explain how a subject can acquire a warrant for logical principles. I will show however that this insufficiency of his template can be remedied by adopting what I call the Disquotational Step. Secondly, I will argue that incorporating this further step makes his template subject to a transmission of warrant-failure, assuming that certain rather basic and individually motivated principles hold. Thus, Boghossian's account faces a dilemma: either he adopts the Disquotational Step and subjects his account to the charge of a transmission of warrant-failure, or he drops this additional step leaving the account confronted with explaining the gap that has previously been highlighted. I will then suggest various rejoinders that Boghossian might adopt but none of which - I will argue - can resolve the dilemma. Lastly, I will raise and briefly discuss the question whether this worry generalizes to other accounts, such as Hale and Wright's that aim to explain our knowledge of logic and/or mathematics in virtue of implicit definitions. (shrink)

Sanford Goldberg argues for Content Externalism by drawing our attention to the extent to which an individual’s concepts depend on the concepts of others. More specifically, he focuses on cases that involve knowledge transmission between experts and non-experts to make his point. In this paper, I argue that the content internalist cannot only plausibly respond to his argument but that Content Internalism offers a more plausible account of intentional content with regard to knowledge transmission than does Content Externalism.

The articles collected in this volume have their origin in an international workshop dedicated to “Experience and Knowledge Structures in Arabic and Latin Sciences.” Specialists from Great Britain, France, Denmark, Spain, Morocco, the United States, and Germany gathered in Berlin in 1996 in the context of an interdisciplinary research project on the history of mechanical thinking at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. The workshop initiated a process of discussion focused on problems of the intercultural transmission (...) and transformation of knowledge. The present double issue is an outcome of this ongoing discussion. (shrink)

The new disciplines of experimental psychology and physical chemistry which emerged in late-nineteenth-century Germany were transmitted rapidly to North America, where they flourished. At the time, American higher education was growing fast and undergoing important organizational changes. It was then especially receptive to such European ideas as these new growth points in German science. However, although there were important similarities in the transmission of the two sciences, experimental psychology was changed far more than physical chemistry by the transfer. Physical (...) chemistry was able to fit into a flourishing pattern of German-inspired chemistry in higher education. Psychology was more dependent on its intellectual and social context, and the American context was quite different from that of Germany. (shrink)

According to a natural view of instrumental normativity, if you ought to do φ, and doing ψ is a necessary means for you to do φ, then you ought to do ψ. In “Instrumental Normativity: In Defense of the Transmission Principle,” Benjamin Kiesewetter defends this principle against certain actualist-inspired counterexamples. In this article I argue that Kiesewetter’s defense of the transmission principle fails. His arguments rely on certain principles—Joint Satisfiability and Reason Transmission—which we should not accept in (...) the unqualified forms needed to establish his conclusion. (shrink)

Singing is central in African life and among the many reasons provided is that traditionally it is believed that people who can sing have a very special connection with the spiritual world. Songs are celebratory and could convey the message of joy and happiness in context of freedom, culture, love, gospel, etc. and could convey joy and happiness that is unique and beautiful. However, the songs can equally be dangerous. Music has the potential and possibility to carry messages of oppression, (...) suppression, exclusion, abuse, rape, crime, xenophobia, among others. In this article, the author uses the hymn in Hosanna Hymn Book titled ‘Jehova Modimo wa Iseraele/Jehovah God of Israel’ to argue that what seems to be innocent and neutral carried the message (by and through education) and acceptance of colonisation. The transmission and reception thereof become dangerous for the unsuspecting colonised. The article deals with the history of colonialism relating to ‘Christian’ literature or hymns that carry with them a systematic theology aimed at oppressing others. The author does a minimum exegesis to express the worldview and language and content of the Hymn.Contribution: This study contributes to an ongoing liberation discourse and Hymn 11 is used as an example of oppressive language and negative transmission (through education). (shrink)

Transmissible cancers are elusive and understudied parasitic life forms caused by malignant clonal cells (nine lineages are known so far). They emerge by completing sequential steps that include breaking cell cooperation, evade anti‐cancer defences and shedding cells to infect new hosts. Transmissible cancers impair host fitness, and their importance as selective force is likely largely underestimated. It is, therefore, crucial to determine how common they might be in the wild. Here, we draw a parallel between the steps required for a (...) transmissible cancer to emerge and the steps required for an intelligent civilisation to emerge in the Milky Way using a modified Drake equation. Using numerical analyses, we estimate the potential number of extant marine and bivalve species in which transmissible cancers might exist. Our results suggest that transmissible cancers are more common than expected, and that new lineages can be found by screening a large number of species. (shrink)

Our knowledge of the world comes from various sources. But it is sometimes said that testimony, unlike other sources, transmits knowledge from one person to another. In this book, Stephen Wright investigates what the transmission of knowledge involves and the role that it should play in our theorising about testimony as a source of knowledge. He argues that the transmission of knowledge should be understood in terms of the more fundamental concept of the transmission of epistemic grounds, (...) and that the claim that testimony transmits knowledge is not only defensible in its own right, but indispensable to an adequate theory of testimony. This makes testimony unlike other epistemic sources. (shrink)

Crispin Wright’s discussion of the notion of ‘transmission-failure’ promises to have important philosophical ramifications, both in epistemology and beyond. This paper offers a precise, formal characterisation of the concept within a Bayesian framework. The interpretation given avoids the serious shortcomings of a recent alternative proposal due to Samir Okasha.

The application of phylogenetic methods to cultural variation raises questions about how cultural adaption works and how it is coupled to cultural transmission. Cultural group selection is of particular interest in this context because it depends on the same kinds of mechanisms that lead to tree-like patterns of cultural variation. Here, we review ideas about cultural group selection relevant to cultural phylogenetics. We discuss why group selection among multiple equilibria is not subject to the usual criticisms directed at group (...) selection, why multiple equilibria are a common phenomena, and why selection among multiple equilibria is not likely to be an important force in genetic evolution. We also discuss three forms of group competition and the processes that cause populations to shift from one equilibrium to another and create a mutation-like process at the group level. (shrink)

There are two dominant approaches towards understanding medieval Muslim philosophy: Greek ancestry approach and religiopolitical context approach. In the Greek ancestry approach, medieval Muslim philosophy is interpreted in terms of its relation to classical Greek philosophy, particularly to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. The religiopolitical context approach, however, views a thorough understanding of the religious and political situation of that time as the key to the proper understanding of medieval Muslim philosophy. Notwithstanding the immense significance of the two approaches (...) for understanding medieval Muslim philosophy, the question on the reason behind medieval Muslim philosophers’ preference for Plato’s Republic over Aristotle’s Politics in political philosophy is not accurately answered. This preference is usually attributed either to the availability or unavailability of the text or to the suitability or unsuitability of the text for Islamic theological views. However, this article shows that neither the availability or unavailability of text nor its suitability or unsuitability for Islamic religious and theological views can appropriately explain medieval Muslim philosophers’ preference for Plato’s Republic over Aristotle’s Politics in their political thought. This article proposes that the key to understand this preference lies in understanding the transmission of Greek philosophy to medieval Muslim philosophers. Contribution: This study highlights the significance of the thorough understanding of the transmission of Greek philosophy to medieval Muslim world as one of the important approaches towards proper understanding of medieval Muslim philosophy, particularly medieval Muslim political philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper intergenerational dimensions of reproductive behavior are studied within the context of the experience of a mid-sized Spanish town just before and during the demographic transition. Different indicators of reproduction are used in bivariate and multivariate approaches. Fertility shows a small, often statistically significant intergenerational dimension, with stronger effects working through women and their mothers than those stemming from the families of their husbands. These effects are materialized mainly through duration-related fertility variables, are singularly absent for variables such (...) as age at first birth or birth intervals, and are much stronger in the case of firstborn daughters than with later siblings. There is a substantial increase in the strength of intergenerational effects during the course of the demographic transition, most visible in age at last birth and duration of reproduction (between women and their mothers), as well as in the effects working through the families of their husbands. These results underscore the on-going importance of biological dimensions of reproduction as well as the way attitudes toward reproduction are taught within the family. The changes identified in this study suggest that the transmission of values and attitudes became more important for reproductive outcomes during this period of demographic modernization. (shrink)

According to the Transmission View of Testimony : TVT: If a speaker testifies to a hearer that p, and if the hearer is justified in believing that p on the basis of that speaker's testimony, then the hearer's belief is justified by whatever justification the speaker has for believing that p. The aim of this paper is to develop and defend a novel objection to the TVT.

Jennifer Lackey’s case “Creationist Teacher,” in which students acquire knowledge of evolutionary theory from a teacher who does not herself believe the theory, has been discussed widely as a counterexample to so-called transmission theories of testimonial knowledge and justification. The case purports to show that a speaker need not herself have knowledge or justification in order to enable listeners to acquire knowledge or justification from her assertion. The original case has been criticized on the ground that it does not (...) really refute the transmission theory, because there is still somebody in a chain of testifiers—the person from whom the creationist teacher acquired what she testifies—who knows the truth of the testified statements. In this paper, we provide a kind of pattern for generating counterexample cases, one that avoids objections discussed by Peter Graham and others in relation to such cases. (shrink)

Even if our justified beliefs are closed under known entailment, there may still be instances of transmission failure. Transmission failure occurs when P entails Q, but a subject cannot acquire a justified belief that Q by deducing it from P. Paradigm cases of transmission failure involve inferences from mundane beliefs (e.g., that the wall in front of you is red) to the denials of skeptical hypotheses relative to those beliefs (e.g., that the wall in front of you (...) is not white and lit by red lights). According to the Bayesian explanation, transmission failure occurs when (i) the subject’s belief that P is based on E, and (ii) P(Q|E) P(Q). No modifications of the Bayesian explanation are capable of accommodating such cases, so the explanation must be rejected as inadequate. Alternative explanations employing simple subjunctive conditionals are fully capable of capturing all of the paradigm cases, as well as those missed by the Bayesian explanation. (shrink)

This paper presents the hypothesis that linguistic capacity evolved through the action of natural selection as an instrument which increased the efficiency of the cultural transmission system of early hominids. We suggest that during the early stages of hominization, hominid social learning, based on indirect social learning mechanisms and true imitation, came to constitute cumulative cultural transmission based on true imitation and the approval or disapproval of the learned behaviour of offspring. A key factor for this transformation was (...) the development of a conceptual capacity for categorizing learned behaviour in value terms - positive or negative, good or bad. We believe that some hominids developed this capacity for categorizing behaviour, and such an ability allowed them to approve or disapprove of their offsprings- learned behaviour. With such an ability, hominids were favoured, as they could transmit to their offspring all their behavioural experience about what can and cannot be done. This capacity triggered a cultural transmission system similar to the human one, though pre-linguistic. We suggest that the adaptive advantage provided by this new system of social learning generated a selection pressure in favour of the development of a linguistic capacity allowing children to better understand the new kind of evaluative information received from parents. (shrink)

Transmission views of testimony hold that a speaker's knowledge or justification can become the audience's knowledge or justification. We argue that transmission views are incompatible with the hypothesis that one's epistemic state, together with one's practical circumstances, determines what actions are rationally permissible for an agent. We argue that there are cases where, if the speaker's epistemic state were transmitted to the audience, then the audience would be warranted in acting in particular ways. Yet, the audience in these (...) cases is not so warranted, as their strength of justification does not come close to the speaker's. (shrink)