Cet article plaide pour une révolution marginale en éthique appliquée, suivant la révolution marginale qui a marqué le début de l’économie néoclassique. L’éthique est situationnelle en ce sens qu’elle concerne les incréments de valeurs. Nous ne choisissons pas entre toute la liberté ou toute l’égalité du monde. Nous choisissons plutôt entre des incréments, par exemple, de liberté ou d’égalité. Cet article introduit donc les bases d’une théorie de l’éthique marginale : (1) nous devrions préférer les échelles cardinales aux échelles ordinales, (...) (2) les valeurs devraient être évaluées à travers leur taux marginal de substitution, (3) nous devrions rejeter l’idée de valeur absolue ou intrinsèque, (4) quelque chose est juste dans la mesure où le dernier desideratum réalisable qui lui est attaché à la marge est satisfait. L’objectif de cette approche est de nous permettre de mieux classer les desiderata, conceptualisées à la marge, et d’introduire dans le domaine de l’éthique certaines notions issues de la théorie économique moderne. JEL Codes : B13, A12, A13. (shrink)

L’article se penche sur l’opposition bi‑l‑majāz vs. bi‑l‑ḥaqīqa qu’on rencontre dans plus d’un traite d’al‑Kindī. Il s’agit de determiner si l’usage qu’en fait al‑Kindī se situe sur le plan lexical, voire semantique, a savoir l’opposition ‛sens propre’ vs. ‛sens figure’ ou devrait plutot se lire sur le plan ontologique, ḥaqīqa s’appliquant alors a tout ce qui est propre a Dieu et majāz a ce qui est cree par lui et donc en derive. S’appuyant sur les conclusions de Wolfhart Heinrichs (...) au sujet de la genese de la dichotomie ḥaqīqa ‑ majāz, l’auteure montre que l’usage qu’al‑Kindī en fait releve de l’ordre ontologique, ce en quoi il s’accorde avec les milieux mu‛tazilites contemporains du philosophe. Cette interpretation est relayee par un temoin plus tardif, a savoir le theologien et philosophe andalou Baḥya Ibn Paqūda dont le traite al‑Hidāya ilā farā’iḍ al‑qulūb fait d’importants emprunts a la Philosophie Premiere d’al‑Kindī. (shrink)

Faut-il définir la religion et tenter de faire de cette notion un concept ? Est-ce possible, est-ce profitable ? Historiens des religions, éthnologues et sociologues, philosophes et théologiens, entre autres, en débattent depuis un siècle au moins. Mais ce débat s’est radicalisé depuis trois décennies. Les essais de définition se sont multipliés, d’autres sciences humaines prennent part désormais à cet effort lexical, notamment les juristes, tandis que certains spécialistes dénoncent le caractère ethnocentrique et idéologique de cette notion, allant jusqu’à (...) proposer de bannir son usage. A l’occasion de la publication du livre de Régis Debray intitulé Les Communions humaines , l’auteur présente les principaux protagonistes de cette discussion et les répartit en trois catégories, selon qu’ils tentent de définir le terme, en usent sans chercher à le définir ou proposent de l’abandonner en lui trouvant un remplaçant. Les enjeux de ce débat, qui font l’objet d’une mise au point finale, paraissent être avant tout d’ordre épistémologique, socio-culturel et interreligieux. (shrink)

Lexical Semantics is about the meaning of words. Although obviously a central concern of linguistics, the semantic behaviour of words has been unduly neglected in the current literature, which has tended to emphasize sentential semantics and its relation to formal systems of logic. In this textbook D. A. Cruse establishes in a principled and disciplined way the descriptive and generalizable facts about lexical relations that any formal theory of semantics will have to encompass. Among the topics covered in (...) depth are idiomaticity, lexical ambiguity, synonymy, hierarchical relations such as hyponymy and meronymy, and various types of oppositeness. Syntagmatic relations are also treated in some detail. The discussions are richly illustrated by examples drawn almost entirely from English. Although a familiarity with traditional grammar is assumed, readers with no technical linguistic background will find the exposition always accessible. All readers with an interest in semantics will find in this original text not only essential background but a stimulating new perspective on the field. (shrink)

L'ordre matériel du savoir Comment les savants travaillent | XVIe-XXIe siècles L'article, le graphique, la fiche, le poster, le cahier de laboratoire sont quelques-uns des nombreux outils du travail scientifique étudiés dans cet ouvrage qui offre une histoire matérielle de la culture savante entre le XVIe et le XXIe siècle. Il rend manifeste, de la médecine à l'archéologie, de la géographie à la chirurgie, ce que l'on ne voit pas ou plus dans les résultats : la masse imposante de (...) l'outillage à disposition, sa grande diversité, son accroissement constant. S'y ajoutent les ressources des savants eux-mêmes, celles de leurs sens éduqués ou amplifiés par de multiples instruments. Les configurations fascinantes que ces outils et leur emploi créent entre écrit, image, parole, regard et geste révèlent le caractère composite, multimédia et multisensoriel, de l'ordre raisonné du savoir. Explorer la science dans sa matérialité éclaire d'un jour nouveau des pans entiers de l'histoire intellectuelle. Les outils de travail ne sont pas de simples à-côtés des idées. Ils participent étroitement à la connaissance, entre objectivité scientifique et éléments empruntés à l'expérience des sens. Un essai d'anthropologie des savoirs qui porte un regard original sur l'ordinaire de la science. (shrink)

In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called commonsense metaphysics. This includes a number of areas that figure in virtually every domain of discourse, such as granularity, (...) scales, time, space, material, physical objects, shape, causality, functionality, and force. Our effort has been to construct core theories of each of these areas, and then to define, or at least characterize, a large number of lexical items in terms provided by the core theories. In this paper we discuss our methodological principles and describe the key ideas in the various domains we are investigating. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of “conceptual pacts,” or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measured the effect of this manipulation on epistemic and practical trust. Our results showed that participants were more likely to trust a coordinated partner (...) than an uncoordinated one, but only when the latter broke previously established conceptual pacts. (shrink)

Luthra, Peraza-Santiago, Beeson, Saltzman, Crinnion, and Magnuson (2021) present data from the lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation paradigm that they claim provides conclusive evidence in favor of top-down processing in speech perception. We argue here that this evidence does not support that conclusion. The findings are open to alternative explanations, and we give data in support of one of them (that there is an acoustic confound in the materials). Lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation thus remains elusive, while prior data from (...) the paradigm instead challenge the idea that there is top-down processing in online speech recognition. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses—is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of (...) words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine‐grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure. (shrink)

Lexical innovations (e.g., zero-derivations coined on the fly by a speaker) seem to bear semantic content. Yet, such expressions cannot bear semantic content as a function of the conventions of meaning in force in the language, since they are not part of its lexicon. This is in tension with the commonplace view that the semantic content of lexical expressions is constituted by linguistic conventions. The conventionalist has two immediate ways out of the tension. The first is to preserve (...) the conventionalist assumption and deny that lexical innovations bear semantic content. The second is to dynamicize the conventionalist assumption, that is, argue that presentations of unattested expressions trigger an augmentation of the standing semantic resources of the language and instantiate content as a result of this underlying update. Building on a comparison with the production of novel onomatopoeic words, iconic pseudowords and pro-speech gestures, the paper argues that the issue is best addressed by suspending the conventionalist assumption, and describes the metasemantic implications of the claim. (shrink)

A moral requirement R1 is said to be lexically prior to a moral requirement R2 just in case we are morally obliged to uphold R1 at the expense of R2 – no matter how many times R2 must be violated thereby. While lexical priority is a feature of many ethical theories, and arguably a part of common sense morality, attempts to model it within the framework of decision theory have led to a series of problems – a fact which (...) is sometimes spun as a ‘decision theoretic critique’ of lexical priority. In this paper, I develop an enriched decision theoretic framework that is capable of modelling lexical priority while avoiding all extant problems. This will involve introducing several new ingredients into the standard decision theoretic framework, including multidimensional utilities, de minimis risks, and the means to represent two different conceptions of risk. (shrink)

The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical (...) meaning, such as polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word. (shrink)

The motivations of health service users and health care professionals to engage in participative practices differ. Health service users want to improve the patient experience by reducing epistemic injustices and increasing well-being, from a social justice perspective. Six motivations underlying participation co-exist (utilitarian, methodological, democratic, consumerist, epistemic, and emancipatory). However, the compatibility of these motivations is not obvious. Moreover, democracy in health care has become protean and tensions are appearing between representative democracy and participatory democracy, of the indirect type. Combining (...) the epistemic profiles of users with the different motivations and reasons for action, and viewing them through the prism of complementarity could alleviate these tensions. (shrink)

Le libéralisme et la liberté des médias sont-ils intrinsèquement liés, comme les deux faces d’une même pièce ? À première vue, ils semblent des corollaires puisqu’ils dérivent tous les deux du principe de liberté. Les mé­dias auraient donc d’autant plus d’espace que le libéralisme serait soli­de­ment implanté politiquement et économiquement. Inversement, un rejet du libéralisme politique irait de pair avec un rejet de la liberté des médias. Cette simplicité est cependant trompeuse. Les médias ne forment pas un ensemble homogène ; (...) il y a médias et médias. Il en va de même pour l’autre terme de l’équation : le libéralisme, même dans ses formes les plus classiques, fonde d’une manière plus éclectique qu’on le croit les libertés. (shrink)

We question the assumption of serial attention shifts and the assumption that saccade programs are initiated or canceled only after stage one of word identification. Evidence: (1) Fixation durations prior to skipped words are not consistently higher compared to those prior to nonskipped words. (2) Attentional modulation of microsaccade rate might occur after early visual processing. Saccades are probably triggered by attentional selection.

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as a new paradigm for gaining insights into the mechanisms by which children may accomplish these feats. Unfortunately, many of these models assume a computational complexity and linguistic knowledge (...) likely to be beyond the abilities of developing young children. This article shows that, using simple statistical procedures, significant correlations exist between the beginnings and endings of a word and its lexical category in English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. Therefore, phonetic information can contribute to individuating higher level structural properties of these languages. This article also presents a simple 2‐layer connectionist model that, once trained with an initial small sample of words labeled for lexical category, can infer the lexical category of a large proportion of novel words using only word‐edge phonological information, namely the first and last phoneme of a word. The results suggest that simple procedures combined with phonetic information perceptually available to children provide solid scaffolding for emerging lexical categories in language development. (shrink)