Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

Is it tautological to call an action "wrongful discrimination?" Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term "discrimination" is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that "discrimination" usually conveys the action’s moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone (...) a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of "discriminatory" is a thing of the past. (shrink)

The French historian Auguste Bouché-Leclercq made major contributions to our knowledge of the Hellenistic period. A member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, he was also made an officer of the Légion d'Honneur. Bouché-Leclercq is also considered the first modern historian of astrology: he had developed a long-lasting interest in divination during his extensive researches on ancient Greek civilisation. This field had not been considered worthy of serious scholarly study until he published his Histoire de la divination (...) dans l'antiquité between 1879 and 1882. L'Astrologie grecque, first published in 1899, is another important work, still referred to today. Bouché-Leclercq looks back to the oriental roots of Greek astrology. He delves into the specific influence of the zodiac signs, and explains how the celestial sphere was divided in order to draw horoscopes. Other topics include astrology in Roman culture, as well as astrological medicine. (shrink)

According to the deductivist view of mathematics which became the rule during the nineteenth century, formal proofs working with symbolic formulas replaced the intuitive knowledge that used to be gained by the step-by-step construction of geometric fgures and diagrams. Twentieth century epistemological refection on symbolic formulas and formal proofs, however, took them to be diagrams respectively exhibiting formal relations and transformations. The claim was also made that, for such diagrams to be proofs, temporal displays of transformations—and of other speech acts—were (...) required. By returning to the signifcant elements of contemporary theories of mathematical proofs, we will here show how these proofs came to be a matter for semiotics and pragmatics as much as for formal logic. Once this is done, we will provide a few arguments against the standard objections to the ability of diagrams to present temporal order or perform speech acts. (shrink)

A la fin du XVIIIe siècle, Emmanuel Kant pouvait encore voir dans les mathématiques le modèle même des jugements synthétiques a priori, c'est-à-dire dotés d'un contenu intuitif propre quoique non dérivé de l'expérience sensible. Des géométries non-euclidiennes à la théorie des transfinis de Cantor, les mathématiques du XIXe siècle vont cependant faire triompher des systèmes mathématiques résolument déductifs et non plus intuitifs. Sur fond d'interrogations quant à la légitimité de ces développements récents, interrogations renforcées par la découverte de paradoxes, d'âpres (...) débats vont alors opposer différentes écoles quant aux méthodes de preuve acceptables ainsi que quant à ce qui constitue le fondement même du savoir mathématique. Logicisme, formalisme et intuitionnisme ; ce sont, à l'époque, pas moins de trois conceptions des mathématiques (et trois programmes pour les mathématiques) qui s'affrontent, conceptions auxquelles il faut ajouter le psychologisme, qui se nourrit de l'essor des sciences humaines et de leurs prétentions épistémologiques. En collant au plus près des textes des principaux protagonistes, l'ouvrage présente de manière tout à la fois synthétique et précise les différentes positions en présence, en soulignant autant que possible leurs divergences, mais en montrant aussi les variations et inflexions qui ont marqué leur développement durant la période 1870-1930. (shrink)

What is the connection between causation and responsibility? Is there a best way to theorize philosophically about causation? Which factors determine and influence what we judge to be the cause of something? Bringing together interdisciplinary research from experimental philosophy, traditional philosophy and psychology, this collection showcases the most recent developments and approaches to questions about causation. Chapters discuss the diverse theoretical ramifications of empirical findings in experimental philosophy of causation, providing a comprehensive survey of key issues such as the perception (...) and learning of causal relations, omission, normative considerations, mechanism, voluntariness and legal theories of causation. With novel contributions from both experts and rising stars, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation demonstrates the value of empirical work and opens new domains of inquiry at the cutting edge of the field. (shrink)

Mi meta en este trabajo es proponer un nuevo tipo de argumento en defensa del ideal deliberativo de reciprocidad de justificación —que fue inicialmente introducido por el liberalismo político de John Rawls—. Dicho argumento aspira a demostrar que, aun cuando aceptemos la hipótesis de que un grupo de ciudadanos dispone de una justificación pública apropiada para creer que determinada doctrina comprehensiva es verdadera o correcta, existen razones morales fundamentales para rechazar la pretensión de que el estado pueda estar justificado para (...) actuar sobre la base de esas creencias cuando las esencias constitucionales o cuestiones de justicia básica se encuentran en juego. (shrink)

What are the main features that influence our attribution of moral responsibility? It is widely accepted that there are various factors which strongly influence our moral judgments, such as the agent’s intentions, the consequences of the action, the causal involvement of the agent, and the agent’s freedom and ability to do otherwise. In this paper, we argue that this picture is incomplete: We argue that social roles are an additional key factor that is radically underestimated in the extant literature. We (...) will present an experiment to support this claim. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to investigate the ethical implications of emerging forms of control that have developed along with the use of ubiquitous information technology. Because it can be exerted at a distance, almost anytime and anywhere, IT-based control has become more subtle, indirect, and almost invisible, with many negative side effects. Yet the issues raised by this new form of control have rarely been interpreted, treated, and framed as ethical issues in business ethics literature. Thus, a more (...) comprehensive inquiry rooted in ethical concerns is necessary to improve understanding of this more subtle form of control, its ethical consequences, and the way ethical considerations can be taken into consideration and acted on by management. This article addresses this goal with a qualitative, exploratory case study of a telecommunications company, in which salespeople have been equipped with ubiquitous technology. The findings specify the characteristics and consequences of ubiquitous IT-based control, thereby inviting a rethinking of the ethical issues related to the privacy, autonomy, human dignity, and health of salespeople. In particular, this article highlights four ethical issues raised by the use of ubiquitous IT at work: the ambivalence of this use of ubiquitous IT at work, the subtlety of the control exerted by ubiquitous IT, the invasiveness of ubiquitous IT, and the self-reinforcement of ubiquitous IT-based control. Such issues are not often taken into account, suggesting that ethical considerations fail to enter into managerial decision making. This study directly raises questions about the intentions, responsibilities, and divisions across different categories of organizational members who participate in such control systems. It also provides useful insights into employees’ perceptions and offers guidance to managers who want to apply a professional code of ethics to the uses of ubiquitous IT. (shrink)

El presente artículo propone algunas objeciones contra la concepción deliberativa de la democracia desarrollada por Carlos Nino. El blanco central de las objeciones es la tesis del filósofo argentino según la cual el valor del debate democrático derivaría, fundamentalmente, de sus virtudes epistémicas, es decir, de su capacidad para elevar las probabilidades de que el sistema político tome las decisiones correctas. Se cuestiona el modo en que el autor presenta su propuesta como una forma de superar las deficiencias que presentarían (...) las concepciones de John Rawls y Jürgen Habermas en el campo de la epistemología moral. Se intentará demostrar que el modelo de deliberación defendido por Nino no resulta aplicable a un contexto de pluralismo razonable filosófico, religioso y moral como el que resulta característico de las democracias liberales contemporáneas. Por último, se ofrece el esbozo de una concepción alternativa, práctica y moral, no epistémica, del valor de los procedimientos democráticos y de la naturaleza de la legitimidad política. This paper posits some objections against the deliberative conception of democracy developed by Carlos Nino. According to Nino, the value of democratic deliberation lies, basically, in its epistemic virtues. Public deliberation increases the probability that the political system will arrive at the correct decisions. We shall argue that the Argentinean philosopher fails to prove that his proposal is a solution to purported weaknesses in John Rawls’ and Jürgen Habermas’ positions in the field of moral epistemology. We shall try to demonstrate that the conception of deliberation posited by nino cannot be applied successfully in the context of moral, philosophical or religious reasonable pluralism that characterizes liberal contemporary democracies. Finally, we offer an outline of an alternative conception -practical and moral, non epistemic- of the value of democratic procedures and about the nature of political legitimacy. (shrink)

La meta del presente artículo es probar que existen contextos de acción en los que tiene lugar una escisión entre el conocimiento moral de los sujetos y la justificación, también moral, de sus acciones. Para que ello ocurra, según sostendremos, deben darse al menos dos condiciones: el costo de actuar sobre la base de creencias falsas debe ser muy elevado para el bienestar de los afectados y la probabilidad de que tal resultado se produzca efectivamente, aunque baja, debe ser significativa (...) o no trivial. Sostendremos que la escisión entre conocimiento y justificación de la acción referida tiene importantes consecuencias para la estructura de la deliberación moral. This paper is aimed at proving that in certain contexts of action there may be a cleavage between the moral knowledge of an agent and the moral justification of her actions. I will argue that this is so when two conditions obtain: first, acting on the basis of false beliefs may end-up being very costly in terms of the welfare of those affected; and second, even if low, the probability of such negative upshots are significant or not trivial. I shall claim that this cleavage between knowledge and justification of actions has important consequences for the structure of moral deliberation. (shrink)

El debate entre liberalismo y perfeccionismo ha sido uno de los ejes centrales de la Filosofía política durante los últimos veinte años. Este libro aspira a analizar críticamente y, en última instancia, a ofrecer una defensa del núcleo conceptual de la posicíon liberal. A lo largo del trabajo, se examina y discute una amplia serie de argumentos propuestos por filósofos contemporáneos "Rawls, Larmore, Barry, Kymlicka, Nagel y Ackerman, entre otros" en defensa de la neutralidad estatal. A su vez, se desarrollan (...) dos líneas de argumentacíon en defensa de las posiciones liberales que pretenden superar las falencias analizadas a lo largo del libro. La meta del primer argumento es demostrar que quien acepte las ideas fundamentales de la cultura política de las democracias contemporáneas deberá aceptar también las ideas básicas del liberalismo. Su punto de partida es una formulacíon del ideal ético-político de igual respeto por las personas y una reinterpretacíon y ampliacíon de lo que Rawls ha denominado las "cargas del juicio". El segundo argumento toma como punto de partida una idea arraigada en la tradicíon de pensamiento liberal: la necesidad de reconocer la falibilidad humana y sus consecuencias políticas y morales. El argumento combina la apelacíon a una premisa falibilista con una distincíon entre razones para afirmar una creencia y razones para estar justificado a actuar a partir de ella en contextos en los que cometer un error acarrearía un daño grave a terceros. Sobre esta base, se señala una serie de ventajas de las políticas que satisfacen los requisitos de justificacíon neutrales frente a las políticas perfeccionistas. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that normative considerations play an important role in causal cognition. For instance, when an agent violates a moral rule and thereby produces a negative outcome, she will be judged to be much more of a cause of the outcome, compared to someone who performed the same action but did not violate a norm. While there is a substantial amount of evidence reporting these effects, it is still a matter of debate how this evidence is to (...) be interpreted. In this paper, we engage with the three most influential classes of explanations, namely, (a) the Norm‐Sensitive Cognitive Process View, (b) the Normative Concept View, and (c) the Pragmatics View. We will outline how these theories explain the empirical results and in what ways they differ. We conclude with a reflection on how well these strategies do overall and what questions they still leave unanswered. (shrink)

La meta del presente artículo es defender la tesis de que la aceptación de las ideas fundamentales del liberalismo político no conducen necesariamente a una concepción de la justicia global minimalista como la que desarrolló John Rawls en The Law of Peoples. Sostendré, contra lo que el filósofo explícitamente afirma, que las democracias liberales contemporáneas pueden apelar públicamente, en la esfera política global, a los ideales igualitarios y a una concepción robusta de los derechos humanos como justificación de ciertos aspectos (...) de su política exterior. Intentaré demostrar que ello no resulta incompatible con el requisito de asumir una posición de tolerancia y de respeto con las naciones que suscriben mayori-tariamente formas de vida y sistemas de creencias incompatibles con algunos de los valores liberales más significativos. The purpose of the following article is to sustain the view that accepting the basic notions of political liberalism does not necessarily lead to a minimalistic concept of global justice as that developed by John Rawls in The Law of Peoples. In opposition to his explicit opinion, I shall hold that -within the global political field- contemporary liberal democracies can publicly hold egalitarian ideals and a robust conception of human rights in order to justify some of the features of their foreign policy. I shall try to demonstrate that this is not incompatible with the required tolerance and respect toward nations that conspicuously embrace ways of life and belief systems incompatible with some of the most relevant liberal values. (shrink)

En A Letter Concerning Toleration John Locke argumenta en favor de la tolerancia religiosa afirmando que el Estado no puede mejorar la vida de las personas forzándolas a vivir de acuerdo con creencias que ellas no suscriben. Más recientemente, Ronald Dworkin y Will Kymlicka han desarrollado argumentos similares. En el caso del primero, contra ciertas políticas paternalistas; en el del segundo, en apoyo de la tesis liberal de la neutralidad estatal. Mi propósito en el presente artículo es analizar la plausibilidad (...) de dichos argumentos concebidos como una defensa de la tesis de la neutralidad estatal. Intentaré demostrar que ambas versiones del argumento fracasan. En la sección II, cuestionaré la capacidad de los argumentos para respaldar las conclusiones que aspiran establecer, sin objetar la plausibilidad de las premisas involucradas. En la sección III, desarrollaré tres objeciones contra la concepción del bienestar crítico que constituye el corazón de ambas versiones del argumento. In A Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke argues in favor of religious toleration positing that the state cannot make a person's life better by forcing that person to live according to beliefs he refuses. More recently, Ronald Dworkin and Will Kymlicka have developed similar arguments. In the first case, against some paternalistic policies; in the second, in support of the liberal ideal of state neutrality. My aim in the present paper is to analyze the plausibility of these arguments conceived as a defense of liberal neutrality. I will prove that both versions of the argument fail. In section II, I will object the argument's capability to support the conclusions it attempts to establish, without raising doubts about the reliability of its premises. In section III, I will submit three objections against the conception of critical well-being that constitutes the core of both versions of the argument. (shrink)

RESUMEN Los defensores del liberalismo político sostienen que el ejercicio del poder político es legítimo solo cuando es justificado por razones públicas que todos los ciudadanos pueden aceptar con independencia de la doctrina religiosa, filosófica o moral a la que se adhieren. Según John Rawls, satisfacer esa concepción de la legitimidad exige apelar, en la justificación pública de la acción del Estado, a "concepciones políticas de la justicia". Se busca elaborar un nuevo tipo de argumento a favor de la posición (...) de Rawls. ABSTRACT The supporters of political liberalism hold that the exercise of political power is legitimate only when it is justified by public reasons acceptable to all citizens, independently of the religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine they adhere to. In John Rawls' view, satisfying this conception of legitimacy makes it necessary to appeal to "political conceptions of justice" when attempting to publicly justify actions by the State. The article sets forth a new type of argument in favor of Rawls' position. RESUMO Os defensores do liberalismo político sustêm que o exercício do poder político é legítimo só quando é justificado por razões públicas que todos os cidadãos podem aceitar com independência da doutrina religiosa, filosófica ou moral à qual se aderem. Segundo John Rawls, satisfazer essa concepção da legitimidade exige apelar, na justificativa pública da ação do Estado, a "concepções políticas da justiça". Procura-se elaborar um novo tipo de argumento a favor da posição de Rawls. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

Moral philosophers draw an important distinction between two kinds of moral responsibility. An agent can be directly morally responsible, or they can be derivatively morally responsible. Direct moral responsibility, so many believe, presupposes that the agent could have behaved differently. However, in some situations, we hold agents responsible even though they could not have behaved differently, such as when they recklessly cause an accident or do not take adequate precautions to avoid harmful consequences. Moral philosophers typically argue that what we (...) ascribe in these cases is derivative moral responsibility. In this paper, I apply this conceptual distinction to the experimental debate about so-called folk-compatibilism. I argue that experimental philosophers have failed to consider this distinction when designing experiments and interpreting their results. I demonstrate that while compatibilism requires judgments of direct moral responsibility, participants in some of the most influential studies ascribed derivative moral responsibility. For this reason, these studies do not speak in favour of compatibilism at all. (shrink)

In Intuition et idéalités: Phénoménologie des objets mathématiques (2020), Dominique Pradelle questioned the nature of mathematical knowledge–the status of math.

The doxastic zoo contains many animals: belief, acceptance, belief in, belief that, certainty, conjecture, guess, conviction, denial, disbelief in, disbelief that, judgment, commitment, etc. It also contains belief’s “strange bedfellows”: credences, partial beliefs, tacit beliefs, subdoxastic states, creedal feelings, feelings of knowing, in-between believings, pathological beliefs, phobias, aliefs, delusions, biases, besires. How to order the zoo? I propose to distinguish doxastic attitudes from non-doxastic epistemic attitudes. The criterion is the existence of correctness conditions. Most bedfellows do not have such normative (...) conditions. So they should not be allowed in the Doxastic Club. (shrink)

Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell (...) out this difference by investigating laypeople’s conceptualisation of absences of actions in four experiments. In languages such as German, French, Italian, or Polish, people consider a friend’s not coming an omission. Any other person’s not coming, in contrast, is not considered an omission at all, but just a mere nothing. This use of the term omission differs from the usage in English, where ‘omission’ refers to all kinds of absences. In addition, ‘omission’ is not even an everyday term, but invented by philosophers for the sake of philosophical investigation. In other languages, ‘omission’ is part of an everyday vocabulary. Finally, I will discuss how this folk concept of omission could be made fruitful for philosophical questions. (shrink)

En mai 2007, une «table ronde» s’est tenue, au Collège International de Philosophie à Paris, autour de l’ouvrage de Pierre Magnard Pourquoi la religion?. Dans un texte récapitulatif, l’auteur du livre, spécialiste de la pensée de la Renaissance, montre les enjeux spéculatifs et pratiques de son approche de la religion, tout en exposant comment celle-ci se déploie dans la «marche» des hommes, en souci de leur humanisation. Si la religion – terme qu’il faut entendre ici au singulier – fait oeuvre (...) de reliaison, apportant sa contribution au fondement du lien social, n’est-ce pas en raison de sa vertu déliante: «seule la religion rassemble dûment, car elle seule est capable de délier»? Jean Leclercq donne une présentation des lignes de faîte de l’ouvrage, ce qui permet d’en prendre une première connaissance et de suivre les trois lectures, accompagnées de questionnements, que proposent ensuite, selon des perspectives différentes et complémentaires, Bernard Bourgeois, Thierry Gontier et Christian Trottmann. (shrink)

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, (...) whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted. (shrink)

Anger and disgust may have distinct roles in sexual morality; here, we tested hypotheses regarding the distinct foci, appraisals, and motivations of anger and disgust within the context of sexual offenses. We conducted four experiments in which we manipulated whether mutual consent (Studies 1–3) or desire (Study 4) was present or absent within a counter-normative sexual act. We found that anger is focused on the injustice of non-consensual sexual acts, and the transgressor of the injustice (Studies 1 and 3). Furthermore, (...) the sexual nature of the act was not critical for the elicitation of anger—as anger also responded to unjust acts of violence (Study 3). By contrast, we hypothesised and found that disgust is focused on whether or not a person voluntarily engaged in, desired or consented to a counter-normative sexual act (Studies 2–4). Appraisals of abnormality and degradation were the primary appraisals of disgust, and the sexual nature of the act was a critical elicitor of disgust (Study 3). A final study ruled out victimisation as the mechanism of the effect of consent on disgust and indicated that the consenter's sexual desire was the mechanism (Study 4). Our results reveal that anger and disgust have differential roles in consent-related sexual offenses due to the distinct appraisals and foci of these emotions. (shrink)

"I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time."—T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Pensees Intended to prove that religion is not contrary to reason, Pascal's Pensees rank among the liveliest and most eloquent defenses of Christianity. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) had intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. His untimely death prevented the work's completion, but the (...) fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Pensees remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. W. F. Trotter translation. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. (shrink)

Digitization and datafication of public space have a significant impact on how cities are developed, governed, perceived and used. As technological developments are based upon political decisions, which impact people’s everyday lives, and from which not everyone benefits or suffers equally, we argue that ‘the smart city’ should be part of continuous public debate; that it should be considered and treated as a social problem. Through nine focus groups, we invited respondents to explore and discuss instances and dilemmas of the (...) smart city. We investigated which interpretative repertoires they used to frame the smart city as a social and actionable problem. Following Blumer's and Gamson's theories on the social construction of problems and on collective action frames, we assessed respondents’ discursive interpretations and their subjective construction of their senses of injustice, agency and identity regarding this subject. We find that – in the context of the city of Rotterdam in The Netherlands – citizens do not experience and consider the smart city as a social and actionable problem. Although they do associate the technological development of smart cities with potential threats, this does not change or constrain their sense of ‘actionability’, nor their behaviour, as they consider themselves to be powerless individuals regarding what, in their eyes, is a complex, elusive and inevitable situation they are confronted with. Strikingly, rather than specifically and contextually reflecting on smart city issues, respondents tended to express their concerns in the more general context of digital and data technologies invading everyday life. (shrink)

The omission effect, first described by Spranca and colleagues, has since been extensively studied and repeatedly confirmed. All else being equal, most people judge it to be morally worse to actively bring about a negative event than to passively allow that event to happen. In this paper, we provide new experimental data that challenges previous studies of the omission effect both methodologically and philosophically. We argue that previous studies have failed to control for the equivalence of rules that are violated (...) by actions and omissions. Once equivalent norms are introduced, our results show that the omission effect is eliminated, even if the negative outcome of the behavior is foreseen and intended by the agent. We show that the omission effect does not constitute a basic, moral disposition but occurs exclusively in complex moral situations. Building on these empirical results, we cast doubt onto two influential explanations of the omission effect, the Causal Relevance Hypothesis and the Overgeneralization Hypothesis, and provide a novel explanation of the phenomenon. Furthermore, we discuss various ramifications of the interplay between our understanding of omissions and legal systems. (shrink)

Introduction La question de l’érôs est d’une extrême importance philosophique, et singulièrement dans le cadre de la pensée de M. Henry, mais elle est aussi d’une terrible et redoutable difficulté, parce qu’elle ne laisse pas indifférent et nous touche précisément sur le plan des affects, des concepts et du langage comme possibilité du dire, c’est-à-dire ces ressources que nous allons tenter de mobiliser pour évoquer un objet sensible et complexe, au regard duquel M. Henry pense, en plus et p...

Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to capture the folk concept of lying. Four hundred participants were presented with fourteen vignettes containing utterances that communicate conversational implicatures which the speaker believes to (...) be false. We further collected several potential proxy measures of lying, to get a better understanding of when a deceptive implicature is considered a case of lying. The results indicate that most implicatures (ten out of fourteen) were evaluated as lies and that lie ratings were closely tracked by the degree to which speakers were considered to have committed themselves to the truth of the content conveyed by their deceptive implicatures. (shrink)

Marx says of alienated labor that it does not "belong" to the worker, that it issues in a product that does not belong to her, and that it is unfulfilling, unfree, egoistically motivated, and inhuman. He seems to think, moreover, that the first of these features grounds all the others. All of these features seem quite independent, however: they can come apart; they share no obvious common cause or explanation; and if they often occur together this seems accidental. It is (...) not clear, then, how Marx's concept of alienated labor could possess the strong unity which he takes it to have. I defend a reinterpretation of the concept which explains this unity. The various features of alienated labor, I argue, all follow from a single, hitherto underappreciated feature of its formal motivational structure: the fact that such labor is motivated not by its product but by an incentive. (shrink)

Even though mathematics is deductive reasoning all along, it does not depend on logic. On the contrary, formal logic is mathematical. Despite what is often claimed, mathematics is not the science of quantity, but the science of necessary conclusions. It reasons from pure hypotheses, explores their possibilities in imagination and draws apodictic conclusions. Obtaining new theoretical results—as opposed to mere “corollaries” of previous results—asks for more than mere deduction of analytical consequences by analysis of the general concepts involved. It requires (...) representing these general concepts into singular diagrams and operating transformations on them in order to reveal necessary properties or relations which had not yet been perceived. By making these properties or relations the objects of new judgments, mathematics practices “abstraction” in a sense that does not reduce to the psychic operation of reserving one's attention to certain features of a percept at the expense of others. (shrink)

La figure de l'individu, qui a dominé la philosophie et les sciences sociales au cours des trois dernières décennies, semble à bout de souffle. Partout, singuliers et collectifs cherchent à dépasser la simple adaptation au monde fluide imposé par le capitalisme mondialisé et à redevenir les agents de leur propre vie. Au nord comme au sud, un immense désir de subjectivation est en train de gagner nos sociétés. Pourtant, la figure du sujet reste confuse. Longtemps identifiée à une entité naturelle, (...) hors de l'histoire, elle pâtit aujourd'hui également des représentations, tout aussi néfastes, qui concluent de l'historicité radicale du sujet à sa relativité éthique et politique, voire à son inexistence. Ce livre reprend, à la racine, la réflexion sur les relations entre sujet et histoire, en y réintroduisant une tradition oubliée, sinon refoulée par la philosophie : celle qui commence avec Humboldt, se poursuit chez Saussure, Benveniste et Meschonnic. En définissant le langage comme activité et comme mise en circulation de puissances poétiques, cette tradition fournit les bases d'une nouvelle anthropologie historique du sujet. (shrink)

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)