This book, "Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models", is a collection of papers that stems from the conference of the same name held at the Free University of Brussels in June 2006. Our main objective is to reconcile armchair theorising about the semantics-pragmatics interface with hypotheses about cognitive architecture. For that reason, the papers in the collection place some of the hottest questions in contemporary philosophy of language within the scope of a psychologically plausible theory of human communication. The collection is (...) articulated into three parts. The first concerns the cognitive counterparts of lexical meanings. The second explores the links between moods and forces. The third looks at the epistemological status of semantic theory from the point of view of human psychology. (shrink)

Over the last decade, research in semantics and pragmatics has started to increasingly incorporate new experimental methods from cognitive psychology. That this empirical stance on utterance interpretation has now reached maturity is revealed by two unmistakable symptoms: an increased reflection on the contextual methods used to elicit experimental data, and a continuous expansion of the linguistic phenomena and themes being investigated through these methods. The articles gathered in this volume testify to this very recent evolution of the field: a first (...) set of papers questions the interpretation or interpretability of data collected in non-naturalistic settings, while a second set reflects the extension of experimental methods to new topics. The volume offers an up-to-date overview of contemporary issues arising within the thriving field of Empirical Pragmatics. (shrink)

As of Volume 9 (1994/95) John Benjamins Publishing Company is the official publisher of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics, the annual publication of the Linguistic Society of Belgium. Each volume is topical and includes selected papers from the international meetings organised by the LSB.

This paper deals with the reference of quotations. Several positions can be discerned in the literature: 1. Quotations do not refer; 2. Quotations only refer to types or classes; 3. Quotations can refer to a variety of objects. Although I believe the third position to be the most sensible one, I show that it cannot be taken for granted and that arguments proving it to be correct are hard to come by.

We argue for an intimate relation between semantic externalism and semantic deference and propose a typology of speakers’ metasemantic views as revealed by their deferential attitudes. Building on this typology, we then offer a classification of metasemantic disagreements understood as verbal disputes between speakers who (consciously or unconsciously) hold divergent metasemantic views about the same word. In particular, we distinguish lower-order metasemantic disagreements between speakers who disagree on the exact source of meaning determination for a word yet agree on the (...) kind of deferential attitude this word is liable to, from higher-order metasemantic disagreements between speakers who do not even agree on the suitable kind of deferential attitude. We demonstrate the fruitfulness of our classification through the concrete implications it has for conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Human communication is multi-modal. It is an empirical fact that many of our acts of communication exploit a variety of means to make our communicative intentions recognisable. Scholars readily distinguish between verbal and non-verbal means of communication, and very often they deal with them separately. So it is that a great number of semanticists and pragmaticists give verbal communication preferential treatment. The non-verbal aspects of an act of communication are treated as if they were not underlain by communicative intentions. They (...) are “relegated” to mere aspects of the context. However, several schools of thoughts have a different take on the issue. Thus psychologists or semioticians of gesture have shown how intricately gestures and speech are related in utterances. And, in a different area of the theoretical landscape, so-called “Relevance Theorists” have made the same point. Thus, Robyn Carston writes that “the domain of pragmatics is a natural class of environmental phenomena, that of ostensive stimuli; verbal utterances are the central case, but not the only one, and they themselves are frequently accompanied by other ostensive gestures of the face, hands, voice etc, all of which have to be interpreted together if one is to correctly infer what is being communicated”. This position rests on the assumption that there is a single “pragmatic system” or module at work in the interpretation of “ostensive stimuli”. When it comes to interpreting verbal stimuli, the same mechanisms and resources are used as when it comes to processing non-verbal ones. If there is no distinct “linguistic pragmatic system”, then the scholar who studies communication should not favour the verbal at the expense of the non-verbal. In this paper, I want to make a contribution to the study of multi-modal messages by considering a type of utterances that mix the verbal with the non-verbal in such a way that a piece of non-linguistic communication seems to stand in for a linguistic constituent which remains unrealised. Here is a real-life example : I didn't see the [IMITATION OF FRIGHTENING GRUMPINESS] woman today; will she be back this week? The square-bracketed string in small capitals is meant to capture the facial expressions and gestures performed in the conversational setting. What is intriguing here is that this instance of ostensive mimicry does not come as a mere complement to some linguistic stimulus; it appears to take the place of that stimulus. I shall try to show that a linguistic analysis can indeed be offered for cases like – though, I believe, without succumbing to the pro-linguistic bias that Carston warns against. I will, however, argue against an ellipsis-based account : the structure of sentence does not contain an unrealised adjective phrase. Instead, I shall defend a ‘syntactic-recruitment' account. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to clarify the distinctions and the relationships among several phenomena, each of which has certain characteristics of what is generally called “deference”. We distinguish linguistic deference, which concerns the use of language and the meaning of the words we use, from epistemic deference, which concerns our reasons and evidence for making the claims we make. In our in-depth study of linguistic deference, we distinguish two subcategories: default deference, and deliberate deference. We also discuss the (...) phenomenon of im-perfect mastery, often associated with deference, and which we show to be independent both of linguistic deference and of epistemic deference. If our analysis is correct, then some recent debates on deference can be shown to result from a failure to appreciate all the distinctions that we draw here. (shrink)

We offer a new outlook on the vexed question of the reference of natural-kind terms. Since Kripke and Putnam, there is a widespread assumption that natural-kind terms function just like proper names: they designate their referents directly and they are rigid designators: their reference is unchanged even in worlds in which the referent lacks some or all the properties associated with it in the actual world, and which are useful to us in identifying that referent. There have, however, been heated (...) debates about what should be taken as a natural-kind term. Some challenge the very existence of a separate category of natural-kind terms ; some their being directly referential ; some raise the possibility that direct reference extends to terms beyond those usually assumed to fall under the category, e.g. to ‘polemical’ terms. When these debates turn on the question of what natural kinds are, they take on a strong epistemological or metaphysical dimension. We think the issues can be clarified within the limits of the philosophy of language: by looking into what ranges of general terms are perceived by speakers as rigid designators of natural kinds. The first step to take is to ground the various kinds of semantic externalism in distinct brands of semantic deference. This we define as speakers’ being disposed to use words in line with the norms of their linguistic community and as consenting to being corrected when it is manifest that their use and understanding of a word does not match common practice. When those dispositions are present, speakers defer semantically to something beyond themselves. Here, our focus is on spotting the words for which speakers would defer not to the current usage of the word in the linguistic community, nor to the current experts of the field to which the word pertains, but ultimately to the very nature of the referent of the term. When speakers’ deference conforms to that pattern, we argue, that is evidence that indexical externalism provides the right metasemantic account of how the meaning of the word is determined. In other words, one can say that the word is treated like a natural-kind term. But how can patterns of deference be measured? In an ongoing survey, participants are confronted with conditions that may prompt them to revise certain classificatory statements, e.g. An emu is a bird. Each condition makes salient one of the targets we have identified for deference: the community usage, the experts, the ‘world as it is’. In the condition that seeks to tap into the latter kind of deference, participants are presented with a scenario in which future scientific discoveries result in excluding from the extension of a term certain members currently thought to fall under that extension, e.g. discoveries that require excluding certain species now thought to be birds from the Aves class. The scenario is such that it is clear that the ‘discoveries’ bring us closer to the actual essence, if there is one, of birds. Our reasoning is that, if participants significantly modify their statements in the light of that scenario, they can be taken to ‘defer’ to the nature of the referent, thus vindicating indexical externalism. We test if words not normally assumed to be natural-kind terms – for instance summer, contract or rape – exhibit patterns of deference similar to those for bird. If so, then there’s a case for an extension of indexical externalism beyond the usual set of terms. What would be shown in this way is that speakers have something like realist intuitions with respect to words whose meaning is usually taken to be purely conventional or polemical. We are at the pre-test stage for the survey. We cannot yet report on our results. We should, however, have initial results by March, which, we believe, will enrich the observations made by previous empirical studies. References: Braisby, N., Franks, B. & Hampton, J. 1996. Essentialism, word use, and concepts. Cognition 59, 247-74./Genone, J. & Lombrozo, T. 2012. Concept possession, experimental semantics, and hybrid theories of reference. Philosophical Psychology 25, 717-742./Häggqvist, S. & Wikforss, Å. 2015. Experimental semantics: the case of natural kind terms, in J. Haukioja, Experimental Philosophy of Language, London, Bloomsbury./Jylkkä, J., Railo, H. & Haukioja, J. 2009. Psychological essentialism and semantic externalism: Evidence for externalism in lay speakers’ language use. Philosophical Psychology 22, 37-60./Mallon, R., Machery, E., Nichols, S. & Stich, S. 2009. Against arguments from reference, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79, 332-356./ Marconi, D. 1997. Language, Speech, and Communication. Lexical Competence. Cambridge : MIT Press./Moravcsik, J. 2016. Meaning, Creativity, and the Partial Inscrutability of the Human Mind, 2nd ed. Stanford: CSLI./Schroeter, L. & Schroeter, F. 2014. Normative concepts: a connectedness model, Philosophers’ Imprint 14, 1-26./ Wikforss, Å. 2010. Are natural kind terms special?, in H. Beebee and N. Sabbarton-Leary, The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds, New York, Routledge, 64-83. (shrink)

Are there “social kinds” the way there are “natural kinds”? Are social sciences likely to hit upon “essences” the way natural sciences do? Or are all social phenomena purely theoretical constructs? Questions about whether there are natural kinds, what exactly they are and which kinds of phenomena they cover have been the object of heated epistemological and metaphysical debates. We think the issues can be clarified within the limits of the philosophy of language: by looking into what ranges of general (...) terms are perceived by speakers as rigid designators of natural kinds. The first step to take is to ground the various kinds of semantic externalism in distinct brands of semantic deference. Our focus is on spotting the words for which speakers would defer not to the current usage of the word in the linguistic community, nor to the current experts of the field to which the word pertains, but ultimately to the very nature of the referent of the term. When speakers’ deference conforms to that pattern, we argue, that is evidence that indexical externalism provides the right metasemantic account of how the meaning of the word is determined; the word is treated like a natural-kind term. But how can patterns of deference be measured? In an ongoing survey, which shows a kinship with work by Braisby et al., Jylkkä et al., and Genone & Lombrozo, we confront participants with conditions that may prompt them to revise certain classificatory statements. Each condition makes salient one of the targets we have identified for deference: the community usage, the experts, the ‘world as it is’. In the condition that seeks to tap into the latter kind of deference, participants are presented with a scenario in which future scientific discoveries result in excluding from the extension of a term certain members currently thought to fall under that extension. Our reasoning is that, if participants significantly modify their statements in the light of that scenario, they can be taken to ‘defer’ to the nature of the referent, thus vindicating indexical externalism. We test if words not normally assumed to be natural-kind terms, including terms for social phenomena, exhibit patterns of deference similar to those for natural-kind terms. If so, speakers have something like realist intuitions with respect to words whose meaning is usually taken to be purely conventional or polemical, and there’s therefore a case for an extension of indexical externalism beyond its usual boundaries. Braisby, N., Franks, B. & Hampton, J. 1996. Essentialism, word use, and concepts. Cognition 59, 247-74./Genone, J. & Lombrozo, T. 2012. Concept possession, experimental semantics, and hybrid theories of reference. Philosophical Psychology 25, 717-742./Jylkkä, J., Railo, H. & Haukioja, J. 2009. Psychological essentialism and semantic externalism: Evidence for externalism in lay speakers’ language use. Philosophical Psychology 22, 37-60./Schwarz, S. 1983. Reply to Kornblith and Nelson. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 21, 475-481. (shrink)

Most writers working on simultaneous use and mention assume a distinction between mixed quotation and scare quoting. The consensus is that MQ affects truth-conditions. Hence, many writers regard MQ as a semantic phenomenon. There is no such consensus about ScQ. On the face of it, there is a clear difference between: Alice said that life “is difficult to understand”. Several ‘groupies' followed the band on their tour. The words quoted in are attributed to Alice, and would seem false if Alice (...) had not uttered them. No such intuition is available for. This induces Cappelen & Lepore, leading writers in the field, to regard as a blend of Direct and Indirect Discourse and to propose the following semantic analysis : there is an utterance u such that Alice said u and u samesays “Life is difficult to understand” and u sametokens “is difficult to understand”. As for, they regard the impact of the quotation in it as being entirely pragmatic. I show, however, that there is no principled distinction between MQ and ScQ. The main points are: speech attribution to Alice in is defeasible; there are cases of simultaneous use and mention without “say” which are semantically relevant ; there is apparent MQ with reporting verbs that pose a problem because they cannot govern Direct Speech reports. Hence, it is illegitimate to appeal to the sametokening predicate in logical form. These examples that ‘refuse' to fall neatly under MQ or ScQ seal the fate of Cappelen & Lepore's account. To conclude, I discuss Benbaji's fully semantic theory. Benbaji adopts Cappelen & Lepore's views on MQ. But he also proposes a semantic account of ScQ. One option for him is to give up the Cappelen & Lepore story and extend his views on ScQ to all instances of simultaneous use and mention. I show, however, that this too fails. Therefore, in the end, only a pragmatic account of simultaneous use and mention remains as a viable option. (shrink)

We sketch several variants of so-called “semantic externalism”, which we take to be prototypically embodied by Wittgenstein, Kripke and Burge respectively. Then, drawing inspiration from Putnam, we show how aspects of these different kinds of semantic externalism can be articulated with each other in the case of natural kind terms, and we suggest that this analysis could be extended to a larger set of words. When that is done, we turn to the core part of the paper, which consists in (...) a thorough discussion of the forms of “semantic deference” that can plausibly be associated with each brand of externalism. We suggest that the debates over the kinds of semantic externalism characteristic of different kinds of words can be clarified by investigating the kind of semantic deference they call for. (shrink)

This is the pdf of a talk we gave at the Linguistics & Epistemology conference at Aberdeen University, on May 13, 2007.

Response to two papers by Philippe De Brabanter in the symposium on *Truth-Conditional Pragmatics* (OUP 2010).

A l'instar de ses confrères des années 1250-1260 à l'Université de Paris, Siger de Brabant prit activement part à un mouvement de prise de conscience et de revendication intellectuelle, d'émancipation de la raison contre l'autorité du dogme et le dogmatisme en général, et joua un rôle essentiel dans l'émergence d'un nouveau style, d'une nouvelle morale, d'une nouvelle forme d'existence : en un mot, à la vie philosophique. Il proposa une nouvelle éthique, établie à partir de la lecture d'Aristote, mais une (...) lecture essentiellement rationaliste qui, aux yeux des autorités, s'écartait en tous points de la sagesse chrétienne - affirmant notamment que c'est en cette vie que l'on peut trouver le. bonheur, et non dans l'autre. Siger de Brabant contribua ainsi à une renaissance de la philosophie, qui commence par la Logique qui ordonne la pensée et le discours du philosophe, lui donne aussi son style, au sens littéraire du terme - ce dont le Traité de l'éternité du monde est une bonne illustration. (shrink)

La Universidad de París en la Europa de finales del siglo XIII fue centro de acaloradas discusiones acerca del alma del hombre. La cuestión del alma es el punto doctrinal central y se muestra decisivo porque en la resolución de este único punto puede verse el trasfondo antropológico y metafísico de toda una cosmovisión filosófica e incluso teológica del universo. Una de las más problemáticas cuestiones que se plantearon acerca del alma es el problema de la unidad del intelecto para (...) todos los hombres. Parecería contradictorio pensar que todos los hombres piensan con un único intelecto, pero a su vez suena absurdo afirmar que un principio espiritual, inmaterial, se una a un cuerpo por un tiempo determinado para luego separarse. Ambas posiciones surgen de la consideración de nuevos textos llegados a las manos de los pensadores parisinos a través de autores árabes: los textos del De anima de Aristóteles. (shrink)

Our intuitive assumption that only organisms are the real individuals in the natural world is at odds with developments in cell biology, ecology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and other fields. Although organisms have served for centuries as nature’s paradigmatic individuals, science suggests that organisms are only one of the many ways in which the natural world could be organized. When living beings work together—as in ant colonies, beehives, and bacteria-metazoan symbiosis—new collective individuals can emerge. In this book, leading scholars consider the (...) biological and philosophical implications of the emergence of these new collective individuals from associations of living beings. The topics they consider range from metaphysical issues to biological research on natural selection, sociobiology, and symbiosis. -/- The contributors investigate individuality and its relationship to evolution and the specific concept of organism; the tension between group evolution and individual adaptation; and the structure of collective individuals and the extent to which they can be defined by the same concept of individuality. These new perspectives on evolved individuality should trigger important revisions to both philosophical and biological conceptions of the individual. -/- Contributors: Frédéric Bouchard, Ellen Clarke, Jennifer Fewell, Andrew Gardner, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Charles J. Goodnight, Matt Haber, Andrew Hamilton, Philippe Huneman, Samir Okasha, Thomas Pradeu, Scott Turner, Minus van Baalen. (shrink)

The Ukrainian photographer Sergey Bratkov started his career in 1987 with his first solo shows in Kharkiv, Cheb, and Tel Aviv. He has since enjoyed international recognition from solo and group exhibitions in Europe an.

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum (...) disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

Both context relativists and circumstance-of-evaluation relativists agree that the traditional semantic interpretation of some sentence-types fails to deliver the adequate truth-conditions for the corresponding tokens. But while the context relativists argue that the truth-conditions of each token depend on its context of utterance—each token being thus associated with a distinct intension—circumstance-of-evaluation relativists preserve a unique intension for all the tokens by placing circumstances of evaluations under the influence of a certain ‘point of view’. The main difference between the two approaches (...) is that only the former can operate locally. It is shown that, for this reason, circumstance-of-evaluation relativism makes erroneous semantic predictions about (relative) gradable adjectives. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe massive influx of refugees into Europe in the past few years has given rise to different kinds of challenges among which is the challenge to successfully communicate with newly arrived immigrants. In this article, we will focus on the public service provision sector where quality of service is to a large extent determined by the capability of a service provider and his or her “client” to understand one another. The article centres on a study involving public organisations providing asylum (...) services or healthcare services in the multilingual and multicultural city of Brussels. Several interviews were conducted to gain insight into the communication problems such organisations face, as well as their communication requirements and solutions when providing services to people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. We will focus on the types of bridging functions commonly deployed by these organisations in multilingual service encounters and on the motivations for using them. In a... (shrink)

In opposition to a common assumption, this paper defends the idea that the auxiliary verb will has no other semantic contribution in contemporary English than a temporal shift towards the future with respect to the utterance time. Strong reasons for rejecting the idea that will quantifies over possible worlds are presented. Given the adoption of Lewis’s and Kratzer’s views on modality, the alleged ‘modal’ uses of will are accounted for by a pragmatic mechanism which restricts the domain of the covert (...) epistemic necessity operator scoping over the sentence. (shrink)

This paper attempts to identify general, cross-cultural cognitive factors that trigger the default commissive interpretation of assertions about one's future action. It is argued that the solution cannot be found at the level of the semantics of the English will, or any other future tense marker, but should be sought in the structure of rational intentions, as combined with the pragmatics of felicitous predictions and with parameters linked to the evolutionary advantage of cooperative behaviour. Some supporting evidence from language development (...) studies is briefly presented. (shrink)

In recent years, to protect the rights and welfare of human subjects, institutions in the USA have begun to set up programmes to monitor ongoing medical research. These programmes provide routine, onsite oversight, and thus go beyond existing oversight such as investigating suspected misconduct or reviewing paperwork provided by investigators. However, because of a lack of guidelines and evidence, institutions have had little guidance in setting up their programmes. To help institutions make the right choices, we used interviews and document (...) analysis to study how and why 11 US institutions have set up their monitoring programmes. Although these programmes varied considerably, we were able to distinguish two general types. ‘Compliance’ programmes on the one hand were part of the institutional review board office and set up to ensure compliance with regulations. Investigators’ participation was mandatory. Monitors focused on documentation. Investigators could be disciplined, and could be obliged to take corrective actions. ‘Quality-improvement’ programmes on the other hand were part of a separate office. Investigators requested to be monitored. Monitors focused more on actual research conduct. Investigators and other parties received feedback on how to improve the research process. Although both types of programmes have their drawbacks and advantages, we argue that if institutions want to set up monitoring programmes, quality improvement is the better choice: it can help foster an atmosphere of trust between investigators and the institutional review board, and can help raise the standards for the protection of human subjects. (shrink)

Le Conseiller d'Etat ou Recueil général de la politique moderne est l'un des grands traités politiques du XVIIe siècle. Son auteur, Philippe de Béthune, diplomate réputé et fin connaisseur de la vie publique, a écrit un livre étonnant de philosophie politique, de stratégie, d'économie et d'urbanisme. Œuvre d 'un homme de cour, habitué à côtoyer les princes, il est le produit de la réflexion et de l'expérience d'un personnage singulier, mais aussi d'une époque insolite de mutation entre deux mondes, (...) - celui de la Renaissance, des guerres de religion et des troubles de la Ligue, et celui de l'absolutisme monarchique et de l'État moderne, - marquée par une transformation profonde des valeurs politiques et morales. Personnalité peu commune, qui a voyagé à travers toute l'Europe, qui par deux fois a été ambassadeur à Rome et qui a bénéficié d'une longévité remarquable, Philippe de Béthune est le frère puîné de Sully Il naît sous Charles IX, commence sa carrière comme mignon, dans l'entourage de Joyeuse, l'archi-favori d'Henri III, sert Henri lV Louis XIII, Richelieu et termine sa vie sous le ministériat de Mazarin. Publié en 1633, avec l'accord du cardinal ministre, Le Conseiller d'Etat n 'a jamais été réédité depuis 1684. Cette nouvelle édition est précédée d'une longue introduction sur l'art politique de la première moitié du XVlle siècle et le paysage mental de l'époque. (shrink)

1. Fol au Christ universel. (F68-7177)--2. Vision cosmique el christique. (F68-7177).

This paper attempts to identify general, cross-cultural cognitive factors that trigger the default commissive interpretation of assertions about one's future action. It is argued that the solution cannot be found at the level of the semantics of the English will, or any other future tense marker, but should be sought in the structure of rational intentions, as combined with the pragmatics of felicitous predictions and with parameters linked to the evolutionary advantage of cooperative behaviour. Some supporting evidence from language development (...) studies is briefly presented. (shrink)

Pragmatic deficits of persons with autism spectrum disorders [ASDs] are often traced back to a dysfunction in Theory of Mind. However, the exact nature of the link between pragmatics and mindreading in autism is unclear. Pragmatic deficits in ASDs are not homogenous: in particular, while inter-subjective dimensions are affected, some other pragmatic capacities seem to be relatively preserved. Moreover, failure on classical false-belief tasks stems from executive problems that go beyond belief attribution; false-belief tasks require taking an alternative perspective on (...) the reality. While this capacity is functional in typically developing young children, it is impaired in ASDs. Typically developing children are capable of taking their interlocutor's perspective into account when communicating, whereas poor cognitive flexibility makes it difficult for persons with ASDs to grasp the inter-subjective character of communicative stimuli. This analysis predicts that those pragmatic processes that amount to merely taking into account salient contextual facts during utterance interpretation, without necessarily adopting the interlocutor's perspective, may be preserved in ASDs. (shrink)

This article discusses Sven Ove Hansson’s corpus model for the influence of values (in particular, non-epistemic ones) in the hypothesis acceptance/rejection phase of scientific inquiry. This corpus model is based on Hansson’s concepts of scientific corpus and science ‘in the large sense’. I first present Hansson’s corpus model of value influence with some introductory comments about its origins, a detailed presentation of the model with a new terminology, an analysis of its limits, and an appreciation of its handling of controversial (...) non-epistemic values. I conclude that it is a very good candidate for managing value influence, because contrary to other models in the literature it is fairly simple, it provides a universal and systematic procedure for dealing with values, and it syste- matically preserves the epistemic integrity of science. I then study some difficulties associated with the model’s central feature of taking the maximum level of evidence required by the applications of a claim in order for the latter to enter the scientific corpus: the difficulty to identify this maximum requirement; the non-optimality of this requirement with respect to other less demanding requirements; the potentially detrimental consequences of the preference for false negatives over false positives on which it relies; and the issue of whether there can nevertheless be requirements higher than this maximum. I show that these issues may potentially challenge the corpus model. Finally, I call for empirical work (in particular, an investigation of scientists’ and engineers’ own normative views) in order to better assess these issues. (shrink)

Umberto Eco -- Stephen Jay Gould -- Jean-Claude Carrière -- Jean Delumeau.