Is thinking necessarily linguistic? Do we think with words, to use Bermudez’s (2003) phrase? Or does thinking occur in some other, yet to be determined, representational format? Or again do we think in various formats, switching from one to the other as tasks demand? In virtue perhaps of the ambiguous na- ture of first-person introspective data on the matter, philosophers have tradition- ally disagreed on this question, some thinking that thought had to be pictorial, other insisting that it could not (...) be but linguistic. When any problem divides a community of otherwise intelligent rational thinkers, one suspects some deep conceptual confusion is at play. Indeed, we believe that the conceptual cate- gories used to frame these and related questions are so hopelessly muddled that one could honestly answer “both simultaneously”, or “neither”, depending one what is meant by the alternatives. But let’s get our priorities straight. This paper first and foremost aims at defending what we believe to be a step in that direc- tion of the proper view of thinking, a view we call the spatial-motor view. In order to do so, however, we have found it essential to start by addressing the conceptual confusion just alluded to. Accordingly, the paper proceeds in two steps. First a conceptual step, in which we reconsider some of the traditional categories brought into play when thinking about thinking. Then an empirical step, in which we offer empirical evidence for one of the views conceptually isolated during the first part of the work. Future version of this collaborative work will include a speculative step in which we spin out an evolutionary and developmental scenario whose function it is justify the spatial-motor view by showing how it fits into current evolutionary and developmental theories. (shrink)

Research on folk epistemology usually takes place within one of two different paradigms. The first is centered on epistemic theories or, in other words, the way people think about knowledge. The second is centered on epistemic intuitions, that is, the way people intuitively distinguish knowledge from belief. In this paper, we argue that insufficient attention has been paid to the connection between the two paradigms, as well as to the mechanisms that underlie the use of both epistemic intuitions and theories. (...) We contend that research on folk epistemology must examine the use of both intuitions and theories in the pragmatic context of the game of giving and asking for reasons and, more generally, understand how these practices take place within the broader context of normative social cognition. (shrink)

The ultimatum game is a simple bargaining situation where the behavior of people frequently contradicts the optimal strategy according to classical game theory. Thus, according to many scholars, the commonly observed behavior should be considered irrational. We argue that this putative irrationality stems from a wrong conception of metanormativity (the study of norms about the establishment of norms). After discussing different metanormative conceptions, we defend a Quinean, naturalistic approach to the evaluation of norms. After reviewing empirical literature on the ultimatum (...) game, we argue that the common behavior in the ultimatum game is rational and justified. We therefore suggest that the norms of economic rationality should be amended. (shrink)

This article introduces and discusses from a philosophical point of view the nascent field of neuroeconomics, which is the study of neural mechanisms involved in decision-making and their economic significance. Following a survey of the ways in which decision-making is usually construed in philosophy, economics and psychology, I review many important findings in neuroeconomics to show that they suggest a revised picture of decision-making and ourselves as choosing agents. Finally, I outline a neuroeconomic account of irrationality.

Contra Jackendoff, we argue that within the parallel architecture framework, the generality of language does not require a rich conceptual structure. To show this, we put forward a delegation model of specialization. We find Jackendoff's alternative, the subdivision model, insufficiently supported. In particular, the computational consequences of his representational notion of modularity need to be clarified.

Alcohol intoxication is a major source of antisocial behavior in our society, strongly implicated in various forms of interpersonal aggression. Yet, moral philosophers have paid surprisingly little attention to the literature on alcohol and its effects. In part, this is because philosophers who have adopted a more empirically informed approach to moral psychology have gravitated toward moral sentimentalism, while the literature on alcohol intoxication fits very poorly with the sentimentalist account. Most contemporary research on the psychological effects of alcohol is (...) focused upon variants of the “disinhibition” theory, which suggests that alcohol does not provoke any specific affect, it merely weakens executive control. This research, we argue, lends support to a deontic moral psychology, which identifies our ability to suppress behavioral impulses as a central feature of moral agency. (shrink)

The theme for this volume is social cognition, construed from a psychological and collective point of view. From the psychological point of view, the question is to understand how the human mind processes social information; how it encodes, stores and uses it in the social context. From a collective point of view, the question is to understand how individual cognition is influenced (improved, increased or impaired) by social interactions, for instance in communicating and collaborating with intelligent agents. These two dimensions (...) of social cognition are obviously interdependent: the psychological dimension makes the collective dimension possible, which can in return modify the psychological dimension. The book is divided into four parts. The first part is about socio-cognitive skills. Among those, we count face recognition, imitation learning, embodied social interaction, cheater detection and psychological concept acquisition. The second part is about persons and memories: stereotypes, attraction judgements and impression formation are the subjects at hand. The third part is about understanding each other. A key part of that understanding is the motor system (whether or not we see it as a "mirror"), but community membership itself can also contribute to our understanding of others. The fourth and final part is about social cognition in societies. This section is unified by the common goal of understand how social cognition actually influences the structure of different societies, whether whole cultures, specific social networks, rural communities or even groups of caterpillars! (shrink)

Is thinking necessarily linguistic? Do we _think with words_, to use Bermudez’s (2003) phrase? Or does thinking occur in some other, yet to be determined, representational format? Or again do we think in various formats, switching from one to the other as tasks demand? In virtue perhaps of the ambiguous nature of first-person introspective data on the matter, philosophers have traditionally disagreed on this question, some thinking that thought had to be pictorial, other insisting that it could not be but (...) linguistic. When any problem divides a community of otherwise intelligent rational thinkers, one suspects some deep conceptual confusion is at play. Indeed, we believe that the conceptual categories used to frame these and related questions are so hopelessly muddled that one could honestly answer “both simultaneously”, or “neither”, depending one what is meant by the alternatives. But let’s get our priorities straight. This paper first and foremost aims at defending what we believe to be a step in that direction of the proper view of thinking, a view we call the spatial-motor view. In order to do so, however, we have found it essential to start by address the conceptual confusion just alluded to. Accordingly, the paper proceeds in two steps. First a conceptual step, in which we reconsider some of the traditional categories brought into play when thinking about thinking. Then an empirical step, in which we offer empirical evidence for one of the views conceptually isolated during the first part of the work. Future version of this collaborative work will include a speculative step in which we spin out an evolutionary and developmental scenario whose function it is justify the spatial-motor view by showing how it fits into current evolutionary and developmental theories. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century - a man who set ideas on fire. His defence of liberty and plurality was passionate and persuasive and inspired a generation. His ideas - especially his reasoned rejection of excessive certainty and political despotism - have become even more prescient and vital today.But who was the man behind such influential views? In Search of Isaiah Berlin tells the compelling story of a decades-long collaboration between Berlin and his (...) editor, Henry Hardy, who made it his vocation to bring Berlin's huge body of work into print. Hardy discovered that Berlin had written far more than people thought, much of it unpublished. As he describes his struggles with Berlin, who was almost on principle unwilling to have his work published, an intimate and revealing picture of the self-deprecating philosopher emerges. This is a unique portrait of a man who gave us a new way of thinking about the human predicament, and whose work had for most of his life remained largely out of view. (shrink)

Les recompositions familiales touchent l’ensemble des liens familiaux et des liens intergénérationnels. Or, si l’on observe, tant sur le plan juridique que dans les pratiques des familles conjugales, une acception plus complexe et plus riche de la parentalité, les grands-parents restent souvent méconnus. Comment construisent-ils leurs rapports à leurs « beaux-petits-enfants »? Nous avons examiné la littérature et interrogé des « belles-grands-mères » pour tenter d’y voir plus clair. Quelles représentations le champ social offre-t-il des beaux-grands-parents? Et quelles sont concrètement (...) les conditions et les étapes qui rendent possible une identité « beau-grand-parentale »? (shrink)

Mise en rapport de trois écrivains français qu'apparemment tout sépare mais dont les questions récurrentes - Dieu, le néant, le livre, l'histoire- se retrouvent en chacun d'eux.

Si la philosophie du droit a une très longue histoire, le bouleversement des conditions techniques, économiques, sociales et politiques nous impose aujourd'hui de renouveler en profondeur le traitement des questions qu'elle pose traditionnellement ainsi que les réponses qui y sont données. La définition de la justice, le partage des biens et des charges de la vie en société, les rôles respectifs de l'État, du marché et de la société civile, la mission des juges et l'application des lois, ou encore le (...) contenu et l'importance des droits de l'homme, doivent être réexaminés dans une perspective instruite par l'éclairage historique, mais résolument tournée vers les problèmes du présent et les choix qui engagent l'avenir. C'est dans une telle optique qu'a été conçu cet ouvrage. (shrink)

Predatory grooming is a form of abuse most familiar from high-profile cases of sexual misconduct, for example, the Nassar case at Michigan State. Predatory groomers target individuals in a systematic effort to lead them into relationships in which they are vulnerable to exploitation. This is an example of a broader form of epistemic misconduct that Leydon-Hardy describes as epistemic infringement, where this involves the contravention of social and epistemic norms in a way that undermines our epistemic agency. In this (...) chapter, Leydon-Hardy looks at the distinctive epistemic harm caused by epistemic infringement. She argues that this harm cannot be understood simply as the victim’s having a false belief, or even as her being alienated from her belief-forming mechanisms. A deeper understanding of the harm caused by infringement shows that it stems from damage to one’s epistemic agency, and indeed, to one’s personhood. (shrink)

This contribution presents the fundamentals of an amazement laboratory as a methodological means of transforming an object of disappointment into an object of desire for the researcher. First, the authors report on a Spinozist reading of their affects caused by their confrontation with a foreign material to the field of psychology, a docu-soap opera about school dropout entitled « Les persévérants » (Ferron & Baer, 2014). They consider astonishment as an affect to renew the interest of the researcher for his (...) research subject. Then they examine its conditions of emergence. Finally, the conditions for setting up an amazement laboratory are illustrated by examples drawn from the literature and the authors practices. (shrink)

Theories of knowledge as credit for true belief, or as cognitive achievement, have to face the following objection: in the famous Barn façades case, it seems that the truth of Barney's belief that he is in front of a barn is to be explained by the correct functioning of his cognitive capacities, although we are reluctant to say that he knows he is in front of a barn. Duncan Pritchard concludes from this that a safety clause, irreducible to the conditions (...) a true belief must satisfy in order to be credited to the believer, constitutes a necessary condition of knowledge. Because those who define knowledge as a cognitive achievement have not convincingly answered this objection, I intend, in the first section of this paper, to refute it by showing how practical and doxastic achievements differ. Then I defend the idea that we should also distinguish two kinds of environmental epistemic luck, and, correlatively, two kinds of safety, that are not equally incompatible with knowledge. Finally, I argue that this distinction is inevitably vague and I indicate some consequences of this vagueness for our knowledge‐intuitions. (shrink)

La présente étude rassemble les passages de l’Ab Vrbe condita de Tite-Live où un terme lié au rire est associé à un discours ou à une parole rapportée, afin de les confronter aux vues exprimées par Cicéron et Quintilien sur le rire en contexte rhétorique. Si tous les passages étudiés s’insèrent très bien dans la conception rhétorique du rire, l’historien latin s’appuie sur celle-ci pour offrir une répartition originale entre usages acceptables et formes abusives du rire qui participe à la (...) construction des portraits personnages et de l’œuvre. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to contribute to the elucidation of the nature of non-religious faith. I start by summarising several well-known arguments that belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for faith. I then try to identify the nature of the positive cognitive attitude towards p that is involved in having faith that p. After dismissing some candidates for the role, I explore the idea that faith and hope are similar attitudes. On this basis, I then advance a (...) new characterisation of faith. Finally, I turn to the question of the rationality of faith. I argue that faith is intrinsically irrational because it is an intrinsically incoherent propositional attitude, but that there is nonetheless a sense in which faith is neither intrinsically epistemically irrational nor intrinsically practically irrational. (shrink)

My main intention in this article is to settle the question whether having the ability to \ is, as Ryleans think, necessary for knowing how to \, and to determine the kind of role played by procedural knowledge in knowing how to \ and in acquiring and possessing the ability to \. I shall argue, in a seemingly anti-Rylean fashion, that when it comes to know-hows that are ordinarily categorised as physical skills, or—to be, for the moment, philosophically neutral—as enabling (...) one to possess such skills, it is necessary to have procedural knowledge of how to \ in order to possess those know-hows. However, I shall contend that this knowledge cannot be acquired without acquiring the kind of ability to \ in which having the skill to \ consists. And that having acquired the ability to \ is not only necessary but also sufficient for having acquired procedural knowledge of how to succeed in \-ing. (shrink)

Introduction: our environment is out of control -- The foundation: your environment shapes you -- Every hero is the product of a situation : understanding the proximity effect -- How your environment shapes you : the myth of willpower -- Use positive-stress environments to promote change -- Create enriched environments : the key of "forcing functions" to promote change -- More than good intentions : how to adapt to new and difficult environments -- Grow into your goals : outsource your (...) motivation to high pressure environments -- Optimal environments for rapid learning : shortcuts to success -- Rotate your environments : change it up based on the work you're doing -- Find unique collaborations : design your world through transformational relationships -- Never forget where you came from : remember the environment where you began -- Pse rejuvinating environments to promote recovery and growth -- Establish your value system : the clearer you get, the more successful you'll be -- Remove everything that conflicts with your values : how to make tough choices -- Change your defaults : outsource your behavior to your environment -- Create triggers to prevent self-sabotage : putting failure-planning to work -- Shock your routine : the power of regular sabbaticals -- Reset your body and brain every week: the power of a fast -- Designate a sacred space : create an environment to stay on course -- Conclusion: no matter where you are, you can change -- Acknowledgments -- Index -- About the author. (shrink)

The reception of René Girard’s work in France deserves book-length treatment to fully describe the heated debates, conflicting expectations, and controversy that it inspired before its lasting importance was eventually recognized. We must keep in mind that, although he lived in the US and became a citizen in 1956, he always kept his sights on his native land. He watched the transformations of French thought from the other side of the ocean; he forged his own writing strategies in response to (...) French thought; and it was within the context of French debates that he chose to formulate, through the conjoined hypotheses concerning mimetic desire, the scapegoat, and Judeo-Christian writing, the founding event of his... (shrink)

We are naturally inclined to judge that it is better to know that p than to merely truly believe that p. How to account for this intuition? In this paper, I examine Williamson, Goldman and Olsson, and Pritchard's answers, and agree with Pritchard that it cannot be consistently claimed that knowledge is epistemically superior to mere true belief, and that truth is the only finally valuable epistemic good. Contrary to Pritchard, I argue that the latter claim is deeply mistaken. I (...) do so by showing that mere true beliefs have no epistemic value at all. I sketch the consequences of this point concerning the epistemic value of knowledge, and answer some objections to the thesis that mere true beliefs do not possess epistemic value. (shrink)

When one tries to determine what the iconic dimension of thought consists in for Peirce and what its range is, one might have the impression that his remarks on this matter are inconsistent. For instance, on the one hand he writes the following: Remember it is by icons only that we really reason, and abstract statements are valueless in reasoning except so far as they aid us to construct diagrams. The sectaries of the opinion I am combating seem, on the (...) contrary, to suppose that reasoning is performed with abstract "judgments," and that an icon is of use only as enabling me to frame abstract statements as premisses. In an apparently similar fashion, Peirce argues that the predicate of a... (shrink)

Benoit Delbecq reflects upon the conditions under which his creative activity, as a pianist, a composer and an improviser, has to take place within the French context. Status of the copyrights, contribution of public funding, new modes of distribution, ambiguous irruptions of the show business mega-machine, fictions of freedom generated within the creative moment, polymorphous collective structures: this concrete work of knitting a new autonomous artistic network sheds light, beyond the microcosm of jazz, on the production of sociality in (...) today’s France. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce holds some views about science and inquiry whose exact significance and ratio essendi are notoriously hard to grasp. One of these is particularly intriguing, namely, his frequently inferring from the intuitive ideas that science consists “in diligent inquiry into truth for truth’s sake”, and that the greatest threat to science is to “block the way of inquiry”, the conclusions that “belief […] has no place in science” and that the “scientific man”, when inquiring, has only “provisional” opinions. (...) In this article, I examine the ground and validity of the infamous and, arguably, strongly counterintuitive thesis that “belief has... (shrink)

This article argues for the need to recover the concept of political myth in order to understand the crucial phenomena of our epoch. By drawing on Blumenberg’s philosophical reflections on myth, it proposes to understand political myth as the continual process of work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group can provide significance to their political conditions and experience. In order to show how this understanding of political myth can throw light on important aspects of (...) contemporary politics, the article analyses the work on one of the most conspicuous political myths of our time: the clash of civilizations. By reconstructing the mechanisms through which this myth works, the article shows how a paradigm that has been strongly criticized as too simplistic and scientifically inadequate could have turned into a successful political myth, i.e. into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

Considérée comme le seul pays « émergent » de son continent, l' Afrique du Sud est le produit d'une histoire tourmentée, sortie du système de l'apartheid pour devenir un État démocratique et multiracial au début des années 1990. Si la constitution prône une diversité culturelle et linguistique, reflet de sa population, l'Afrique du Sud s'intéresse plus à l'institution de la Francophonie, pour les avantages que son commerce et sa diplomatie en Afrique francophone peuvent en tirer, que pour l'usage de la (...) langue française surtout pratiquée par une communauté africaine francophone récemment implantée.South Africa is considered as the sole emerging country on its continent and has undergone a very difficult history. Following the end of the apartheid system, South Africa was transformed into a multiracial and democratic state in the nineties. The South African constitution now endorses linguistic and cultural diversity which mirrors its population. Francophony as an institution is of major interest for South Africa more to support its proactive trade and diplomacy in the Francophone area than to help develop the French language which is mainly spoken by a recently settled Francophone African community. (shrink)

For this special issue dedicated to Jonathan Glover, Peter Singer was asked to reflect on the influence that the book Causing Death and Saving Lives had on him, as well as the Glover seminar in Oxford that Peter Singer attended in the late 1960s. One of Peter Singer's recurring arguments is the criticism of the traditional distinction between acts and omissions. But Glover is no stranger to this questioning, even if the two thinkers do not seem to want to draw (...) exactly the same conclusions. What is at stake is this: what are we really responsible for and how demanding should our morality be? (shrink)

La médiation familiale existe en France depuis un peu moins de vingt ans et elle a obtenu, en 2002, une reconnaissance officielle sous la forme de la création d’un diplôme décerné par l’État. Cet article analyse le succès de la médiation et la place qu’elle occupe aujourd’hui dans la régulation des affaires privées. Pour ce faire, il considère différents niveaux de changement: l’évolution de la famille, celle de l’intervention sociale, ainsi que les stratégies développées par les médiateurs. En ce qui (...) concerne la famille et les ruptures d’union, la médiation familiale s’inscrit dans le droit fil des conceptions qui dominent actuellement. Elle se fait le promoteur de séparations négociées, permettant le maintien des relations entre l’enfant et le parent avec lequel il ne vit pas. S’agissant des transformations de l’action sociale, la médiation apparaît également comme l’expression d’un mouvement plus large : la diffusion d’une forme « douce » d’encadrement des comportements privés. En médiation, les parties sont conduites à écouter l’autre et à faire des concessions. Le dispositif lui-même est porteur d’une normativité forte. Le succès de la médiation ne s’explique cependant que si l’on prend en considération le troisième niveau, l’action des médiateurs : renforcement de la formation, obtention de soutiens sans faille dans la société civile et l’État, et détermination dans la volonté de créer une profession. L’auteur s’interroge sur les raisons qui sont à la base de cette détermination et évoque les questions qui se posent aujourd’hui aux médiateurs. (shrink)

La réception de la théologie politique de Johann Baptist Metz est un fait d’interprétation. Cette contribution présente tout d’abord la périodisation, apparue dans les années 1980, de l’oeuvre de Metz en trois phases: la période de la théologie transcendantale; la première phase de la théologie politique ainsi que sa deuxième phase. Décrire deux phases de la théologie politique délimitées par la formulation de la thèse centrale de l’oeuvre de Metz, selon laquelle la foi est mémoire de la souffrance de l’humanité, (...) permet de mettre en lumière la signification et les enjeux de la théologie politique. La deuxième partie de l’article s’intéresse à un aspect encore sujet à discussions de la réception de l’oeuvre de Metz: en réponse au refus postmoderne des grands récits, Metz et ses disciples présentent la théologie politique comme une théologie négative. Cependant, une telle réponse peut-elle être séparée d’autres affirmations déterminantes pour la théologie politique, en particulier celle selon laquelle le temps a une fin? (shrink)