L'hypothèse que l'on proposera ici est que le dispositif du «médecin de la civilisation» monté par Deleuze en 1962 dans sa lecture de Nietzsche, loin de pouvoir être généralisé comme tel (comme si la suite de l'oeuvre n'en était que l'application différée ou même la continuation par d'autres moyens), n'y est effectivement agissant qu'à force de décaler l'énonciation deleuzienne par rapport à l'instance de la philosophie clinique qu'il définit. Et que pour cette raison, la figure du philosophe médecin de la (...) civilisation permet d'autant mieux de problématiser certaines difficultés que rencontre la tâche d'une symptomatologie des modes collectifs d'existence. À prendre cette tâche au sérieux, j'avancerai enfin que le déplacement du dispositif nietzschéen de part et d'autre de la rencontre avec Guattari et de L'Anti-OEdipe, trouve un point de résolution, ou en tout cas de cohérence et d'équilibre, dans la détermination d'une pratique analytique sui generis, celle-là même que Guattari nommera «schizo-analyse», et plus spécifiquement dans le concept d'agencement qui, de L'Anti-OEdipe à Mille plateaux, en supportera de plus en plus clairement les coordonnées propres. (shrink)

This text addresses some difficulties encountered reading Deleuze and Guattari “in situation”, in order to suggest a “symptomal reading” of their historico-conceptual moment. It first reexamines the distinction between a “history of revolutions” and “revolutionary-becoming”, in order to explain the meaning of the latter in connection with the Deleuzian concept of event and in the context of the historical sequence which demanded this new concept. The concept of event involves a foreclosed reference to the problem of the revolutionary situation in (...) Marxism; it acknowledges the theoretical difficulties of elaborating a materialist notion of revolutionary situation, but also the political impasses which, in the post-war decades, had brought about a crisis in the representation of the revolutionary subject which Marxism believed it could guarantee. In the light of this double crisis, theoretical and political, the article concludes with an examination of the contemporary reflections of Althusser and Guattari concerning the connection between revolutionary circumstances and political subjectivation. (shrink)

Part One. Archi-violence: presupposition of the state -- Historical materialism and schizoanalysis of the form-state -- Capture: for a concept of primitive accumulation of state power -- Part Two. Exo-violence: hypothesis of the war machine -- Nomadology: hypothesis of the war machine -- The formula and the hypothesis: state appropriation and genealogy of war power -- Part Three. Endo-violence: the capitalist axiomatic -- The axiomatic of capital: states and accumulation on a global scale -- Becoming minorities: becoming revolutionary -- Conclusion. (...) Micropolitics did not take place. (shrink)

Este artículo retoma la cuestión del espacio en Gilles Deleuze. Examinamos al respecto tres motivos: un concepto original de cartografía, una teoría de las geografías afectivas, y un análisis de los vectores «territorializantes» y «desterritorializantes» que determinan las transformaciones de las identidades colectivas. A través de estos tres momentos, la espacialidad deviene en los trabajos de Gilles Deleuze la piedra angular de una renovación de la vocación crítica de la filosofía. Dejando de ser un objeto de reflexión entre otros, la (...) espacialidad se vuelve un esquema de pensamiento, una manera de plantear problemas y de construir conceptos, donde ya no se trata de construir una filosofía de la geografía, sino una «geofilosofía». (shrink)

Souvent abordée par sa « micropolitique du désir », l’œuvre commune de Deleuze et Guattari est rarement sollicitée lorsqu’on s’interroge sur les problèmes classiques ou contemporains de la pensée politique : la forme-État, la souveraineté, le rapport de la violence et du droit, la guerre, le paradigme de la Nation et les recombinaisons qu’il a entraînées entre les idées de peuple, de citoyenneté et de minorité. En suivant la trajectoire conduisant du premier tome de Capitalisme et schizophrénie (1972) au second (...) (1980), ce sont pourtant tous ces problèmes qui se trouvent réélaborés, au fil d’une conjoncture de transition historique marquée par la fin des guerres de décolonisation, la transformation du capitalisme mondial, les recompositions aussi profondes qu’incertaines des forces de résistance collective. Encore faut-il, pour mesurer les prises de la pensée guattaro-deleuzienne sur les bouleversements de son temps, la confronter à ce qui fut son interlocuteur principal, le marxisme, à son champ épistémique (le matérialisme historique), à son programme critique (la critique de l’économie politique) et à sa grammaire politique (la lutte des classes). De ces pourparlers, trois hypothèses nouvelles se dégagent : celle d’un « Urstaat », incarnant un excès de la violence souveraine sur l’appareil d’État et sur ses investissements politiques ; celle d’une puissance de « machine de guerre », que les États ne peuvent jamais s’approprier que partiellement, et à laquelle ils peuvent eux-mêmes se subordonner ; celle d’un excès du « destructivisme » de l’accumulation capitaliste sur son organisation productive. Dans ce triple excès, la pensée politique de Deleuze et Guattari trahit le spectre de l’entre-deux-guerres qui la hante, mais qui la fait aussi communiquer avec les penseurs actuels de l’impolitique. S’y donnent à lire non seulement une nouvelle théorie politique, mais aussi un tableau de la pluralité des voies d’ascension à l’extrême-violence susceptibles de détruire la politique même et auxquelles les luttes contemporaines ne peuvent s’épargner de faire face. (shrink)

Crisis and student struggles : the dialectics of politicisation and questions of method The article considers the current revival of large-scale mobilisations within the student population in Europe. It advances the hypothesis that these waves of mobilisation reactivate a process of politicisation reflecting a much longer-term temporality which provides them with their foundation and which casts light on the problems and the ambivalence inherent in the phenomenon. The article thus outlines a framework for the analysis of this process that is (...) based on the following dialectic : a) the structural integration of the university institution of advanced capitalism within a process of reproduction of the prevailing socio-economic and socio-ideological relations ; b) the conjunctures of struggle which have invested the university as institution. The article goes on to focus on two factors contributing to the intensification of this antagonism : a dialectics of politicisation and depoliticisation of the practices of knowledge in relations within the institution ; an « intrusion » of the international conjuncture within the sphere of student mobilisation. This latter factor catalyses the process of de-identification with the framework of the national State and confers a particular importance, precisely because of the fragility and the ambiguity of the phenomenon, to the European dimension of the current struggles. (shrink)

La question des minorités touche au cœur de la pensée politique de Deleuze, c’est-à-dire au lieu où la catégorie même du « politique » y devient à tous égards problématique : du point de vue du sens que cette catégorie prend dans son œuvre en mouvement, du point de vue des implications politiques effectives que cette œuvre recèlerait (sous formes d’instruments..

Cet article interroge les conditions du renversement actuel des principes libéraux et anti-discriminatoires de la laïcité en leur application répressive : un « méta-laïcisme », au sens où l’on a pu parler d’un métaracisme, avec lequel il a partie liée. Plutôt que dans les instrumentalisations tactiques hétéroclites faites du discours de la laïcité – qui sont une dimension du problème plutôt que son explication –, on interroge ce renversement à partir des conditions historico-politiques d’une constitution matérielle laïque, du développement inégal (...) qui marque sa synthèse historique, et des effets résultants de la crise de son hégémonie. L’issue qui s’en dessine n’est pas seulement hypothétique, mais doublement hyperbolique, appelant un surcroît de luttes émancipatrices égalitaires, mais sur fond d’un non moins nécessaire surcroît de libéralisme politique pour accepter de reconnaître dans les cultures de l’Islam les ressources de forces idéologiques ayant droit de cité dans le champ des affrontements idéologico-politiques. (shrink)

This text provides an analysis of the Deleuzian theory of minorities. Its hypothesis is that this theory produces a double effect of interpellation: upon a materialistic reading of the philosophy of Deleuze, and upon the theoretical and political heritage of Marxism. Concerning the first aspect, the thesis of an actual multiplication of ‘becomings-minoritarian’ reopening ‘the question of the becoming-revolutionary of people, at every level, in every place’, has to be referred to the Deleuzo-Guattarian analysis of the conjuncture – namely, to (...) a diagnosis of the global capitalist system's dynamisms and the contradictions they produce in the social, juridical and political institutions of national States. Concerning the second aspect, I confront the adversities faced by minorities with the schema of the classes struggle, and I examine certain links (of continuation and integration, but also differentiation) between the processes of ‘proletarianisation’ and ‘becoming-minoritarian’, that is to say, between two ways of problematising the collective subject of a revolutionary politics of emancipation. Finally I assert that the concept of ‘becoming-minoritarian’ makes of the possibility of an unprecedented internationalism the way to a renewal of the two concepts between which the horizon of modern political thought extends, and around which the tradition of political liberalism and thinkers of a revolutionary politics have never ceased to confront one another: autonomy and universality. (shrink)

Par sa conceptualisation des normes, Michel Foucault renouvelle profondément la philosophie théorique et pratique de la culture, par rapport aux principaux postulats qui la commandent depuis le XVIIIe siècle. On a pu montrer qu’il ouvrait celle-ci sur une pensée de la production immanente des normes. Il s’agit ici de mettre cette hypothèse à l’épreuve d’une compréhension vitaliste de la positivité des normes, qui assigne celle-ci à une puissance créatrice de nouvelles possibilités d’existence, de nouvelles allures de vie. Comment articuler la (...) perspective d’un processus immanent de production à celle de la création et de la nouveauté ? On s’oriente alors vers un naturalisme vitaliste, capable de conférer aux « possibilités d’existence » leur teneur ontologique, leur effectivité pratique, et leur primat axiologique et épistémologique. C’est dans ce contexte que l’on tente d’évaluer chez Gilles Deleuze un certain nombre de déplacements terminologiques et conceptuels par rapport à Foucault : du possible au potentiel, de la stratégie au problématique, de la généalogie à la géologie, de l’histoire aux devenirs. (shrink)

The problematical point is the relations between the State and war with respect to the notion of « machine of war ». Based on this concept, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari intend : to analyse the way state machines « capture » social forces in order to produce and reproduce their own strength of administration, control and repression in the immanent social praxis ; to connect this « heterogenesis » of State power with a genealogy of war ; to reform (...) marxist concepts of State power, State apparatus, primitive accumulation and State capitalism in the light of the leading role of the economy of war in the development of capitalism. (shrink)

Les théories féministes de la reproduction ont été soumises à trois types d’objections : elles seraient soit fonctionnalistes, soit économicistes, ou biologisantes. Ces objections reposent sur un contresens concernant les notions marxistes de production et reproduction ainsi que sur une conception réifiée de la nature des sociétés capitalistes. De plus, ces objections ne sont pas capables de proposer une alternative convaincante et débouchent sur des impasses comme celles qui sont propres aux théories des systèmes double ou triple. Au contraire, le (...) concept de reproduction sociale permet de sortir de ces impasses en même temps qu’il rend possible une conception non-réductionniste du mode de production capitaliste dans laquelle le capital n’est pas conçu comme le sujet d’un processus strictement « économique ». (shrink)

Dans cet entretien, Henry Bernstein revient sur la fondation des études agraires critiques et les principaux concepts qu’il a développés pour une étude marxiste de la sociologie rurale. Il montre comment l’opposition entre léninisme et populisme se rejoue dans l’épistémologie de la structure de classe de la paysannerie.

In this paper, we use an experimental design to compare the performance of elicitation rules for subjective beliefs. Contrary to previous works in which elicited beliefs are compared to an objective benchmark, we consider a purely subjective belief framework. The performance of different elicitation rules is assessed according to the accuracy of stated beliefs in predicting success. We measure this accuracy using two main factors: calibration and discrimination. For each of them, we propose two statistical indexes and we compare the (...) rules’ performances for each measurement. The matching probability method provides more accurate beliefs in terms of discrimination, while the quadratic scoring rule reduces overconfidence and the free rule, a simple rule with no incentives, which succeeds in eliciting accurate beliefs. Nevertheless, the matching probability appears to be the best mechanism for eliciting beliefs due to its performances in terms of calibration and discrimination, but also its ability to elicit consistent beliefs across measures and across tasks, as well as its empirical and theoretical properties. (shrink)

This conference was devoted to the 80 years of the Copenhagen Interpretation, and to the question of the relevance of the Copenhagen interpretation for the present understanding of quantum mechanics. It is in this framework that fundamental questions raised by quantum mechanics, especially in information theory, were discussed throughout the conference. As has become customary in our series of conference in Växjö, we were glad to welcome a fruitful assembly of theoretical physicists, experimentalists, mathematicians and even philosophers interested in the (...) foundations of probability and physics. The nature of quantum fluctuations---in the form of Stochastic Electrodynamics or in other approaches to stochastic quantum mechanics---was also a central topic discussed during the conference, especially during debates. We should also mention talks on the completeness or incompleteness of quantum mechanics; on macroscopic quantum systems; on Bell's inequality, entanglement and experiments on quantum nonlocality (and locality); on Bohmian mechanics; on the connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity; on quantum probability; on quantum computing, quantum teleportation and quantum cryptography technologies; and more generally on the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics and on the philosophical problems raised by its interpretations. (shrink)

This Växjö conference was devoted to the reconsideration of quantum foundations. Due to increasing research in quantum information theory, especially on quantum computing and cryptography, many questions regarding the foundations of quantum mechanics, which have long been considered to be exclusively of philosophical interest, nowadays play an important role in theoretical and experimental quantum physics.

Corporate codes of ethics, which have spread in the last decades, have shown a limited ability to foster ethical behaviors. For instance, they have been criticized for relying too much on formal compliance, rather than taking into account sufficiently agents and their moral development, or promoting self-reflexive behaviors. We aim here at showing that a code of ethics in fact has meaning and enables ethical progress when it is interpreted and appropriated with practical wisdom. We explore a model that represents (...) an uncommon organizational code of ethics: the monastic Rule of St. Benedict, written in the sixth century and still used today. Our empirical study—conducted in several monasteries living under this rule—shows that organization members interpret this rule, both hermeneutically and ethically, to adapt it to situations. They also appropriate this rule as a way of life and treat it as a dynamic framework that helps them to follow their purpose within their organization. This exceptional code actually offers an alternative model for practicing codes of ethics, in a virtue-ethical manner, beyond mere compliance with the text. The way in which reflexive and active agents practice the code, both individually and collectively, shapes their organizational experience and fosters their moral development. (shrink)

Although Wilhelm Dilthey and Franz Brentano apparently were pursuing roughly the same objective—to offer a description of our mental functions and of their relations to objects—and both called their respective research programs ‘descriptive psychology’, they seem to have used the term to refer to two different methods of psychological research. In this article, I compare analyses of these differences. Against the reading of Orth but also against a possible application of recent relativist accounts of the epistemology of peer disagreement to (...) this case, I argue that their apparent shared objective is not enough to support an understanding of their views as two alternatives within a given historical or scientific context, or as a mutual peer disagreement. I show that the impression of a shared objective can be explained away as stemming from the influence of their teacher Adolf Trendelenburg, and I stress that the case of introspection strongly suggests that an account in terms of peer disagreement is not plausible. Finally, I conclude that the opposition between two traditions, Austrian philosophy and historicism, might be better suited to account for the dispute and its apparent common historical context. (shrink)

Conventional economic theory assumes that agents should be consistent across decisions. However, it is often observed that experimental subjects fail to report consistent preferences. So far, these inconsistencies are almost always examined singly. We thus wonder whether the more inconsistent individuals in one task are also more inconsistent in other tasks. We propose an experiment in which subjects are asked to report their preferences over risky bets so as to obtain, for each subject, three measures of inconsistencies: classical preference reversals, (...) framing effects and preference instability. In line with previous experimental findings, subjects are largely inconsistent according to each of these three measures and there are considerable individual differences. The main result is that we find no correlation among these three measures of inconsistency. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the distribution and the interpretation of the temporal suffix -kue in Mbyá, a Guaraní language that is closely related to Paraguayan Guaraní. This suffix is attested both inside noun phrases and inside clauses. Interestingly, its nominal uses give rise to inferences that are unattested in its clausal uses. These inferences were first identified in Paraguayan Guaraní by Tonhauser, who called them the existence property and the change of state property. Tonhauser further argued that these properties (...) are built into the lexical entry of the nominal temporal marker -kue. By contrast, I argue that -kue denotes a relative past tense both in its nominal and clausal uses, and that the existence and change of state properties are pragmatic inferences that arise from the interaction of the literal meaning of -kue with general constraints on the interpretation of noun phrases, notably constraints on the topicality of the time of evaluation of noun phrases. This allows me to maintain a uniform analysis of -kue across its nominal uses and its clausal uses. The analysis of -kue in Mbyá is relevant to a number of current debates on the expression of tense crosslinguistically. Firstly, the existence of relative tenses has sometimes been called into question. Klein notably argues that relative tenses are actually combinations of tense with the perfect aspect. Others have argued that there exist true relative tenses in certain languages. I argue that facts of Mbyá support the latter view. Secondly, Klein famously defined tenses as relations between topic times and the time of utterance. I argue, on the other hand, that relative tenses only denote relations between times, and that the topicality or non-topicality of their temporal arguments depends on their context of use, including their syntactic environment. Thirdly, this paper contributes to debates on the nature and reality of nominal tenses The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 2012), by arguing that tense in Mbyá is a genuinely nominal category, in the sense that temporal functional projections are part of the extended projection of the noun phrase. (shrink)

The confrontations of stakeholder visions about agriculture and food production has become a focal point in the public sphere, coinciding with a diversification of agrifood models. This study analyzes the debates stemming from the coexistence of these models, particularly during the initial term of neoliberal-centrist Emmanuel Macron’s presidency in France. Employing collective monitoring from 2017 to 2021, a corpus of 958 online news and blog articles was compiled. Using a computational analysis, we reveal the framings and controversies emerging from this (...) media discourse. The macro-structuring of discourse on model coexistence revolves around scientific, economic and political framings. Coexistence is a complex of debates based on specific frames associated with specific arenas and actor configurations: growth of organic agriculture, transformations of agrifood systems, sciences of production and impacts, livestock and meat diet controversies, agroecological innovations, CAP reform criticism, discourse of peasant agriculture and State-Profession _co-gestion_. Employing global sentiment analysis and focusing on salient controversies, namely EGAlim law, pesticide regulations, and agribashing, we show the shift from conciliation to a hardening of debates. Finally, we discuss the causes and consequences of this trend. The political will to support the transition of agriculture remains influenced by the _co-gestion_ system, an inherited configuration of decision-makers instrumental in the agricultural modernization. As a consequence, significant agricultural challenges, particularly highlighted in the scientific macro-frame, persist unresolved. This lock-in of the agrifood system is based on defensive strategies that challenge the democratic debate about food and agricultural practices. (shrink)

Resumo O artigo descreve o poema “An die Melancholie” como um momento crucial e essencial da evolução da filosofia de Nietzsche, aquele de uma primeira intuição da noção de “vontade de potência”. O filósofo se afasta da longa tradição alemã dos hinos à melancolia, ao mesmo tempo em que subverteu os poemas filosóficos - os darwinistas em particular - de sua época, para superar seu pessimismo schopenhaueriano.The article aims at describing the poem “An die Melancholie” as an essential and crucial (...) moment within the development of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which refers to the first intuition of the notion of “Will to Power”. The philosopher deviates from the long German tradition of odes to melancholy, whilst subverting the philosophical poems of his own time - specially the Darwinian ones -, in order to overcome his Schopenhauerian pessimism. (shrink)

ObjectivesFrom a self-determination theory perspective, the purpose of this cross sectional study was to better understand how to motivate hospitalized older adults’ behaviors and test an integrative model of the role of causality orientations and a supportive/controlled environment on basic need satisfaction, motivation for health oriented physical activity, positive and negative affective states, depressive symptoms, apathy, and boredom.MethodsOlder adults in French hospital units completed self-report questionnaires and socio-demographic data were also collected.ResultsPartial least squares path modeling results showed that participants’ autonomy (...) orientation positively associated with the perception of a supportive environment was related to need satisfaction, autonomous motivation for health-oriented physical activity, and high scores on positive affective states. Conversely, participants’ impersonal orientation positively associated with the perception of a controlled environment was related to undermining need satisfaction, controlled motivation for health-oriented physical activity, and amotivation, and high scores on both negative affective states, and boredom.ConclusionThe present results indicate that taking into account personality factors in hospital units can be useful and health professionals should take an interest both in the patients’ causality orientations and the supportive nature of the environment in order to understand better how to motivate patients’ behaviors. The present study points to the need to focus on all motivational dynamics which allow patients’ need satisfaction. (shrink)

Le film n’est pas seulement un récit, c’est aussi un discours sur le monde. Or, trop souvent, la puissance de ce discours est surestimée et les publics caricaturés, en contradiction avec notre pratique ordinaire d’une discussion, non seulement après, mais avec les films. La tradition rhétorique et argumentative, retravaillée aujourd’hui dans une perspective pragmatique, envisage formes et contextes conjointement et permet de comprendre les liens entre le film, son discours et le spectateur. Entre formes et espace public, les analyses de (...) films, reportages et séries proposées dans cet ouvrage montrent ainsi que la démarche rhétorique permet de restituer, à côté de leur capacité mimétique, la capacité délibérative des images et des sons, fondement d’un dialogue entre le film et le spectateur. (shrink)

(2012). DEL-sequents for regression and epistemic planning. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 337-367. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2012.736703.

One way social scientists explain phenomena is by building structural models. These models are explanatory insofar as they manage to perform a recursive decomposition on an initial multivariate probability distribution, which can be interpreted as a mechanism. Explanations in social sciences share important aspects that have been highlighted in the mechanisms literature. Notably, spelling out the functioning the mechanism gives it explanatory power. Thus social scientists should choose the variables to include in the model on the basis of their function (...) in the mechanism. This paper examines the notion of ‘function’ within structural modelling. We argue that ‘functions’ ought to be understood as the theoretical underpinnings of the causes, namely as the role that causes play in the functioning of the mechanism. (shrink)

L’auteur montre que le principe de précaution est souvent confondu avec d’autres (notamment principes de prévention ou de préparation). Sa formulation en droit français est restrictive et, même dans cette acception, son application par le législateur ou la jurisprudence est rare. Alors que le principe de précaution exige des évaluations des risques rigoureuses et continues, il est à tort invoqué pour justifier ou critiquer des décisions publiques qui n’en relèvent pas.

Cet article propose de réfléchir sur la nature des images animées, à partir sur trois thèses de Kendall Walton. Le philosophe américain, bien connu dans le monde analytique pour un livre sur les arts représentationnels, Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), discute très régulièrement de films, mais aucune de ses recherches n’a à proprement parler versé dans la philosophie du cinéma. C’est pourquoi, cet article se demande à quoi ressemblerait une philosophie waltonienne du cinéma. Pour ce faire, je présente et discute trois (...) propositions tirées des travaux de Walton : (1) les œuvres de fiction ne sont pas définies comme des contre-vérités, (2) les dépictions nous donnent à imaginer autant qu’à percevoir ce qu’elles représentent, (3) les photographies nous placent dans une relation épistémique objective avec leurs sujets. De là, j’élabore une interprétation waltonienne de la distinction entre l’image fictive et l’image documentaire. (shrink)

Dans cet article, il est question des fondements du récit cinématographique. Contre une thèse endossée par des théoriciens du cinéma français (Metz, Oudart) aussi bien que des philosophes américains (Levinson, Chatman), je défends qu’il n’existe pas de narrateur cinématographique implicite. Pour ce faire, je montre que l’argument a priori, d’après lequel la notion même de récit cinématographique implique qu’il y ait dans tout film, même implicitement, un narrateur, est erroné. En me reposant sur Gaut, j’avance que le postulat d’un narrateur (...) implicite conduit à une conception absurde de l’expérience du spectateur. Je conclus qu’il convient d’abandonner ce platonisme à l’égard du récit cinématographique, pour lui préférer, suivant une remarque de Bordwell, un nominalisme. (shrink)

Unlike in physics, the category of thought experiment is not very common in biology. At least there are no classic examples that are as important and as well-known as the most famous thought experiments in physics, such as Galileo’s, Maxwell’s or Einstein’s. The reasons for this are far from obvious; maybe it has to do with the fact that modern biology for the most part sees itself as a thoroughly empirical discipline that engages either in real natural history or in (...) experimenting on real organisms rather than fictive ones. While theoretical biology does exist and is recognized as part of biology, its role within biology appears to be more marginal than the role of theoretical physics within physics. It could be that this marginality of theory also affects thought experiments as sources of theoretical knowledge. Of course, none of this provides a sufficient reason for thinking that thought experiments are really unimportant in biology. It is quite possible that the common perception of this matter is wrong and that there are important theoretical considerations in biology, past or present, that deserve the title of thought experiment just as much as the standard examples from physics. Some such considerations may even be widely known and considered to be important, but were not recognized as thought experiments. In fact, as we shall see, there are reasons for thinking that what is arguably the single most important biological work ever, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, contains a number of thought experiments. There are also more recent examples both in evolutionary and non-evolutionary biology, as we will show. Part of the problem in identifying positive examples in the history of biology is the lack of agreement as to what exactly a thought experiment is. Even worse, there may not be more than a family resemblance that unifies this epistemic category. We take it that classical thought experiments show the following characteristics: They serve directly or indirectly in the non-empirical epistemic evaluation of theoretical propositions, explanations or hypotheses. Thought experiments somehow appeal to the imagination. They involve hypothetical scenarios, which may or may not be fictive. In other words, thought experiments suppose that certain states of affairs hold and then try to intuit what would happen in a world where these suppositions are true. We want to examine in the following sections if there are episodes in the history of biology that satisfy these criteria. As we will show, there are a few episodes that might satisfy all three of these criteria, and many more if the imagination criterion is dropped or understood in a lose sense. In any case, this criterion is somewhat vague in the first place, unless a specific account of the imagination is presupposed. There will also be issues as to what exactly “non-empirical” means. In general, for the sake of discussion we propose to understand the term “thought experiment” here in a broad rather than a narrow sense here. We would rather be guilty of having too wide a conception of thought experiment than of missing a whole range of really interesting examples. (shrink)

Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) deals with the representation and the study in a multi-agent setting of knowledge and belief change. It can express in a uniform way epistemic statements about: 1. what is true about an initial situation 2. what is true about an event occurring in this situation 3. what is true about the resulting situation after the event has occurred. We axiomatize within the DEL framework what we can infer about (iii) given (i) and (ii). Given three formulas (...) φ,φ' and φ" describing respectively (i), (ii) and (iii), we also show how to build a formula φ ? φ' which captures all the information which can be inferred about (iii) from φ and φ'. We show how our results extend to other modal logics than K. In our proofs and definitions, we resort to a large extent to the normal form formulas for modal logic originally introduced by Kit Fine. In a companion paper (Aucher, 2012), we axiomatize what we can infer about (ii) given (i) and (iii), and what we can infer about (i) given (ii) and (iii), and show how to build two formulas φ ? φ" and φ' ? φ" which capture respectively all the information which can be inferred about (ii) from φ and φ", and all the information which can be inferred about (i) from φ' and φ". (shrink)

Representing an epistemic situation involving several agents obviously depends on the modeling point of view one takes. We start by identifying the types of modeling points of view which are logically possible. We call the one traditionally followed by epistemic logic the perfect external approach, because there the modeler is assumed to be an omniscient and external observer of the epistemic situation. In the rest of the paper we focus on what we call the internal approach, where the modeler is (...) one of the agents involved in the situation. For this approach we propose and axiomatize a logical formalism based on epistemic logic. This leads us to formalize some intuitions about the internal approach and about its connections with the external ones. Finally, we show that our internal logic is decidable and PSPACE-complete. (shrink)

This paper introduces the category of b-frames as a new tool in the study of complete lattices. B-frames can be seen as a generalization of posets, which play an important role in the representation theory of Heyting algebras, but also in the study of complete Boolean algebras in forcing. This paper combines ideas from the two traditions in order to generalize some techniques and results to the wider context of complete lattices. In particular, we lift a representation theorem of Allwein (...) and MacCaull to a duality between complete lattices and b-frames, and we derive alternative characterizations of several classes of complete lattices from this duality. This framework is then used to obtain new results in the theory of complete Heyting algebras and the semantics of intuitionistic propositional logic. (shrink)

After observing that the truth conditions of connectives of non–classical logics are generally defined in terms of formulas of first–order logic, we introduce ‘protologics’, a class of logics whose connectives are defined by arbitrary first–order formulas. Then, we introduce atomic and molecular logics, which are two subclasses of protologics that generalize our gaggle logics and which behave particularly well from a theoretical point of view. We also study and introduce a notion of equi-expressivity between two logics based on different classes (...) of models. We prove that, according to that notion, every pure predicate logic with \ variables and constants is as expressive as a predicate atomic logic, some sort of atomic logic. Then, we prove that the class of protologics is equally expressive as the class of molecular logics. That formally supports our claim that atomic and molecular logics are somehow ‘universal’. Finally, we identify a subclass of molecular logics that we call predicate molecular logics and which constitutes its representative core: every molecular logic is as expressive as a predicate molecular logic. (shrink)