Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Cet article synthétise les acquis et développements issus de projets de recherche menés depuis 2013 à propos de l’analyse d’un type particulier de données CMC (Computer-mediated communication) : les tweets politiques. Après une caractérisation de ce genre de discours, et des problématiques soulevées, l’article développe les enjeux de l’exploration des corpus de ce genre ; l’appréhension et la constitution de ces données sociales en corpus ; la production de résultats scientifiques, et la mise en place de différents types d’exploration de (...) corpus. Les méthodes de constitution de corpus, la standardisation et la mise au format TEI, l’utilisation d’outils d’analyse des données textuelles, et le développement de plateformes, sont ainsi présentés, comme différents points d’une même recherche qui vise à caractériser et comprendre une pratique sociale avec une méthode scientifique et une portée citoyenne. L’exploration de corpus peut ainsi passer par des nouvelles productions de ressources, outils, interfaces, dont l’interactivité, l’hypertextualité, et l’ouverture, garantissent la validité des corpus, et la possibilité d’y accéder de manière contextuelle, et outillée. (shrink)

Après la diffusion en intégralité, le samedi 28 septembre 2019, du discours d’Eric Zemmour à la « Convention de la droite », une large polémique est relayée, dans les médias et sur les réseaux sociaux, sur l’opportunité d’une telle diffusion. Le premier ministre Edouard Philippe a qualifié ces propos de « nauséabonds et profondément contraires à l’idée que nous nous faisons de la France et de la République ». Entre accusations et justifications, beaucoup reconnaissent que ce discours a posé des (...) problèmes. Les thèmes habituels du polémiste y sont abordés, avec de nombreux cas de propos pouvant relever de la discrimination, notamment envers les femmes. Pour mener cette étude, cet article présente une analyse textométrique de ce discours, dont les conclusions questionnent plus particulièrement les propos tenus vis-à-vis des femmes, notamment dans trois chapitres spécifiques de son ouvrage, Le suicide français. Au-delà, l’article interroge la légitimité d’Eric Zemmour, en mettant en valeur le « savoir » et l’« érudition » qu’il matérialise dans ses prises de parole, et la manière dont il parvient à auto-légitimer ses propos – ce qui lui confère une certaine "autorité" dans les médias. (shrink)

Ce recueil d’articles fait suite à une journée d’étude organisée à Tours en janvier 2008 et qui avait pour objectif de décrire comment le discours, appréhendé à travers des études de corpus, devient un lieu majeur de l’analyse linguistique et un observatoire de certains faits langagiers susceptibles d’être théorisés comme phénomènes sociaux. Les cadres théoriques sollicités sont variés, mais relèvent tous peu ou prou à la fois du courant énonciativiste francophone et de l’école française de l...

Ce recueil d’articles fait suite à une journée d’étude organisée à Tours en janvier 2008 et qui avait pour objectif de décrire comment le discours, appréhendé à travers des études de corpus, devient un lieu majeur de l’analyse linguistique et un observatoire de certains faits langagiers susceptibles d’être théorisés comme phénomènes sociaux. Les cadres théoriques sollicités sont variés, mais relèvent tous peu ou prou à la fois du courant énonciativiste francophone et de l’école française de l..

Moral philosophers agree that welfare matters. But they disagree about what it is, or how much it matters. In this vital new work, Wayne Sumner presents an original theory of welfare, investigating its nature and discussing its importance. He considers and rejects all notable theories of welfare, both objective and subjective, including hedonism and theories founded on desire or preference. His own theory connects welfare closely with happiness or life satisfaction. Reacting against the value pluralism that currently dominates moral philosophy, (...) he advances welfare as the only basic ethical value. He concludes by discussing the implications of this thesis for ethical and political theory. Written in clear, non-technical language, and including a definitive survey of other work in this area, Sumner's book is essential reading for moral philosophers, political theorists, and welfare economists. (shrink)

What does it mean for someone to have a moral right to something? What kinds of creatures can have rights, and which rights can they have? While rights are indispensable to our moral and political thinking, they are also mysterious and controversial; as long as these controversies remain unsolved, rights will remain vulnerable to skepticism. Here, Sumner constructs both a coherent concept of a moral right and a workable substantive theory of rights to provide the moral foundation necessary to dispel (...) such doubts. (shrink)

US Supreme Court rulings concerning sanctions for juvenile offenders have drawn on the science of brain development and concluded that adolescents are inherently less mature than adults in ways that render them less culpable. This conclusion departs from arguments made in cases involving the mature minor doctrine, in which teenagers have been portrayed as comparable to adults in their capacity to make medical decisions. I attempt to reconcile these apparently incompatible views of adolescents’ decision-making competence. Adolescents are indeed less mature (...) than adults when making decisions under conditions that are characterized by emotional arousal and peer pressure, but adolescents aged 15 and older are just as mature as adults when emotional arousal is minimized and when they are not under the influence of peers, conditions that typically characterize medical decision-making. The mature minor doctrine, as applied to individuals 15 and older, is thus consistent with recent research on adolescent development. (shrink)

My purpose in what follows is not so much to defend the basic principle of utilitarianism as to indicate the form of it which seems most promising as a basic moral and political position. I shall take the principle of utility as offering a criterion for two different sorts of evaluation: first, the merits of acts of government, social policies, and social institutions, and secondly, the ultimate moral evaluation of the actions of individuals. I do not take it as implying (...) that the individual should live his life on the basis of constant evaluations of this sort. For there are different levels of decision making each with its appropriate criteria. For example, we each inevitably make many of our decisions from the point of view of our own personal self-fulfilment and this cannot regularly take a directly utilitarian form, nor should the utilitarian want it to do so. His claim is at most that we should sometimes review our life from the point of view of a kind of impersonal moral truth of a universalistic utilitarian character. (shrink)

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 seems (...) even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In _The Neighbor_, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, _The Neighbor_ will prove to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. (shrink)

To better understand the multiple individual factors that contribute to college cheating, we undertook a multivariate analysis of a national sample of 2,503 college students. Our findings indicated that demographic characteristics, character qualities, college experience, and student perceptions and attitudes are all significantly associated with academic cheating.

This volume brings together a collection of essays on the history and philosophy of probability and statistics by one of the eminent scholars in these subjects. Written over the last fifteen years, they fall into three broad categories. The first deals with the use of symmetry arguments in inductive probability, in particular, their use in deriving rules of succession. The second group deals with four outstanding individuals who made lasting contributions to probability and statistics in very different ways: Frank Ramsey, (...) R. A. Fisher, Alan Turing, and Abraham de Moivre. The last group of essays deals with the problem of 'predicting the unpredictable' - making predictions when the range of possible outcomes is unknown in advance. The essays weave together the history and philosophy of these subjects and document the fascination that they have exercised for more than three centuries. (shrink)

L. Nandi Theunissen offers an original and provocative account of the value of humanity. Human beings have value just as anything of value has value: because we are capable of being of value to someone--in the first place, to ourselves. And this explains the key forms of ethical responsiveness that we owe to one another.

The paper argues against Sosa’s claim that sensitivity cannot be differentially supported over safety as the right requirement for knowledge. Its main contention is that, although all sensitive beliefs that should be counted as knowledge are also safe, some insensitive true beliefs that shouldn’t be counted as knowledge are nevertheless safe.

The federal government is funding a sea change in health care by investing in interventions targeting social determinants of health, which are significant contributors to illness and health inequity. This funding power has encouraged states, professional and accreditation organizations, health care entities, and providers to focus heavily on social determinants. We examine how this shift in focus affects clinical practice in the fields of oncology and emergency medicine, and highlight potential areas of reform.

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) integrated model of production and comprehension includes no explicit role for nonlinguistic cognitive processes. Yet, how domain-general cognitive functions contribute to language processing has become clearer with well-specified theories and supporting data. We therefore believe that their account can benefit by incorporating functions like working memory and cognitive control into a unified model of language processing.

Various aspects of the concepts of privacy and confidentiality are discussed in relation to health care information in primary health care settings. In addition, findings are presented from patient and nurse practitioner focus groups held to elicit concerns that these two groups have in relation to privacy and confidentiality in their respective primary care settings. The focus groups were held prior to the implementation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act in the USA. Implications for advanced practice registered nurses (...) in primary care practices are provided. (shrink)

While central to the Christian religion, the act of faith has been notoriously difficult to define. This essay is an attempt to illuminate, with the aid of insights from cognitive science and process philosophy, what it means for a Christian to have faith, specifically in God. In doing so, the apriori and aposteriori aspects of faith are explored, along with its connections to science and empirical evidence, revelation, knowledge, doubt, morality, and additional Christian beliefs.

This article describes a representation-based framework of distributed cognition. This framework considers distributed cognition as a cognitive system whose structures and processes are distributed between internal and external representations, across a group of individuals, and across space and time. The major issue for distributed research, under this framework, are the distribution, transformation, and propagation of information across the components of the distributed cognitive system and how they affect the performance of the system as a whole. To demonstrate the value of (...) this representation-based approach, the framework was used to describe and explain an important, challenging, and controversial issue — the concept of affordance. (shrink)

L. Stasyuk «Projection of Humanistic and Reformational reception in Protestant Ortodoxy». There is performed a philosophical and theological reflection of the process in which main subjects of Renaissance and Reformation changes adhere to the principle of getting back to sources such as appeal, thorough rethinking, borrowing of the antique heritage within which a foundation of the Humanism philosophy is laid, as well as to the Holy Scriptures and to the teachings of spiritual and religious leaders of Christianity. There is made (...) a comparative analysis of the attitude to the antique philosophical and medieval scholastic achievements and to the philosophy as a way of thinking generally by representatives of Humanism and Protestant Orthodoxy which typify the spiritual paradigm of European history. (shrink)

The contributors to the volume discuss various approaches to bioethical thinking and the political and institutional contexts of bioethics, addressing underlying concerns about the purposes of its practice.

When medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was legalized in Canada in June 2016, the question of allowing decisionally capable persons to make advance requests in anticipation of later incapacity was reserved for further consideration during the mandatory parliamentary review originally scheduled to begin in June 2020 (but since delayed by COVID-19). In its current form the legislation does not permit such requests, since it stipulates that at the time at which the procedure is to be administered the patient must give (...) “express consent” to receiving it. Since express consent presupposes decisional capacity, this requirement rules out administering MAiD to a patient who has lost capacity. Amendments to the legislation passed by Parliament in March 2021 open the door slightly by allowing advance requests by patients after they have been approved for MAiD, if they fear losing capacity before the procedure can be administered. But this provision would apply only to patients whose natural death was deemed to be “reasonably foreseeable”, and would continue to exclude (a) requests made after diagnosis of a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” but in advance of approval for MAiD, and (b) requests made before such a diagnosis. My aim in this paper is twofold: to explore the ethical and legal issues concerning advance requests for MAiD, and to argue for expanding provision for such requests to include both of these further scenarios. (shrink)

In the postscript to The Varieties of Religious Experience William James distinguishes two types of belief in the supernatural, conceived as an essential component in religion, crass or piecemeal supernaturalism, on the one hand, and refined supernaturalism on the other.

The relationship between Bentham's ‘enunciative principle’ and his ‘censorial principle’ is famously problematic. The problem's solution is that each person has an overwhelming interest in living in a community in which they, like others, are liable to punishment for behaviour condemned by the censorial principle either by the institutions of the state or by the tribunal of public opinion. The senses in which Bentham did and did not think everyone selfish are examined, and a less problematic form of psychological hedonism (...) than Bentham's is proposed. (shrink)

Hate speech, understood broadly, is any form of expression intended to arouse hatred or contempt toward members of a particular social group. When university administrators have reason to believe that a planned speaking event on campus may feature hate speech (at least in the eyes of some), how should they respond? In this paper I address this question as it arises for Canadian universities. I argue that, where the regulation of campus speech is concerned, the right course of action for (...) university administrators is nearly always to do absolutely nothing. They will have reason to become actively involved only in order to ensure that a speaking event proceeds safely, or when it threatens to disrupt the functioning of the university, or when it is itself threatened with disruption by protesting groups. In those instances the justification for intervention will be to protect and facilitate speech, not to shut it down. (shrink)

The man in the street to-day is aware that recent developments in the physical sciences have necessitated a fundamental revision of the concepts of physics; he finds that Einstein is no less upsetting to his ideas than was Copernicus to those of his own time or than Darwin was to Bishop Wilberforce. The plain man who has “ philosophical leanings ” is aware that questions previously regarded as metaphysical—and about which philosophers have written much that is unintelligible—are now recognized as (...) falling within the scope of physics. Every reader of this Journal is aware that the criticism to which the main concepts of physics—space, time, matter—have been subjected is so fundamental that it is no longer possible to say that there are material bodies in space, which have events happening to them at a given time. We must substitute the conception of a fourfold continuum within which space, time and matter are inextricably involved. Finally, we are told that this new way of regarding the classical trinity suggests the consequence that we know nothing about the “ inner nature ” of the terms with which we deal, we can make no assertions as to the ultimate nature of that to which they may refer. In this respect the prevailing temper of the present-day scientist is to be contrasted with the cocksureness of most nineteenth-century physicists l who, even if they did not go so far as to say “ we know what matter is,” at least suggested that only the metaphysician had, or could have, any doubts as to its nature and reality^. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Rights and Goals Rules, Rights, and Utility Rights and Liberty.