Archive Electronique - Institut Jean Nicod
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1997 research outputs found
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The cultural evolution of love in literary history
No full textInternational audienceSince the late 19th century, cultural historians have noted that the importance of love has increased during the Medieval and Early Modern European period (a phenomenon that was once referred as the emergence of "courtly love"). However, more recent works have shown that a similar increase is also detectable in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Indian and Japanese cultures. Why such a convergent evolution in very different cultures? Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, we leverage literary history and build a database of ancient literary fictions for 19 geographical areas and 77 historical periods covering 3800 years, from the Middle Bronze age to the Early Modern period. We first confirm that romantic elements have increased in Eurasian literary fictions over the last millennium, and that similar increases also occurred earlier, in Ancient Greece, Rome and Classical India. We then explore the ecological determinants of this increase. Consistent with hypotheses from cultural history and behavioral ecology, we show that a higher level of economic development is strongly associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fictions (our proxy for the importance of love in a culture). To further test the causal role of economic development, we used a difference-indifference method that exploits exogenous regional variations in economic development resulting from the adoption of the heavy plough in medieval Europe. Finally, we used probabilistic generative models to reconstruct the latent evolution of love and to assess the respective role of cultural diffusion and economic development
As strong as an NPI in LSF, NGT and LIS
No full textInternational audienceNegative polarity items emerge from the interaction between some propertiesof the semantic module of human language and its lexicon. This leads tothe expectation that they should be equally common in spoken and sign language,contrary to what has been documented. We describe the sign UNTIL in French SignLanguage, Italian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands. We showthat under its punctual reading, UNTIL behaves as a strong negative polarity item,just like English until. We also discuss why more prototypical cases of polarityitems like any or ever are much harder to find in sign languag
Editorial Introduction: Substructural Logics and Metainferences
No full textInternational audienceThe concept of substructural logic was originally introduced in relation to limitations of Gentzen’s structural rules of Contraction, Weakening and Exchange. Recent years have witnessed the development of substructural logics also challenging the Tarskian properties of Reflexivity and Transitivity of logical consequence. In this introduction we explain this recent development and two aspects in which it leads to a reassessment of the bounds of classical logic. On the one hand, standard ways of defining the notion of logical consequence in classical logic naturally induce substructural logics when admitting more than two truth values; on the other hand, these substructural logics give rise to hierarchies of metainferences that can be used to approximate classical logic at different levels
Episodic remembering and affective metacognition
No full textInternational audienceThe aim of this article is to clarify, in the light of philosophical and psychological research on affective metacognition, the nature of the episodic feeling, which determines what it is like to remember or relive in one's mind an episode from one's own past. The hypothesis defended is that the episodic feeling is a metacognitive experience, which rests on mechanisms that monitor the source of the relevant information. Although there is presently no direct psychological evidence for the existence of the episodic feeling, studies on a specific kind of feelings of knowing, which are especially tied to episodic memory, can help cast light on the nature of the episodic feeling. Overall, the hypothesis that the episodic feeling is a metacognitive experience squares well with a general theory of metacognition. It leads to a two-tiered account of episodic remembering. On this account, the phenomenology characteristic of episodic remembering is extrinsic to the memory state itself. When we have a memory, it feels episodic only if it is properly monitored at the metacognitive level. However, an episodic memory can be attributed to a subject in the absence of an episodic feeling. The memory itself can be a mere unconscious mental condition, as in some cases of tip-of-the-tongue experiences, or its content can be transparent to the subject via a conscious imagining
Looming perception: seeing in a dynamic world
No full textInternational audienceTypically, just a few seconds before being hit, one experiences a relatively primitive sense of impending collision, something like “This is going to crash into me!”. Here I propose to explain the sense of impending collision in terms of amodal completion. Thanks to it, one can be visually aware of more than what one can actually see and I shall argue that this can be true not only for objects but also for dynamic events. But what mechanisms are involved in amodal completion? Do they qualify as perceptual or should we rather conceive them as being imaginative? Here I propose that there is a sense in which one can be said to have a perceptual sense of the future
Contexto y desacuerdo
No full textInternational audienceEste artículo hace balance del lugar que el argumento del desacuerdo sin falta ha ocupado en la filosofía del lenguaje en los últimos veinte años, en particular en el debate entre contextualismo y relativismo. En contra de lo que afirman los relativistas, el estudio ofrecido en la primera parte del artículo muestra que el fenómeno del desacuerdo no proporciona ninguna motivación sólida para adoptar un marco semántico novedoso. Sin embargo, el interés en los desacuerdos nos ha permitido entender mejor cómo funciona el lenguaje. La segunda parte del artículo se ocupa de explicar varios mecanismos semánticos, tanto en el nivel de las palabras, como en el de las oraciones e incluso en el del discurso completo, que pueden llevar a los participantes del discurso a estar en desacuerdo
Good and ought in argumentation: COVID-19 as a case study
No full textInternational audienceThe present paper concerns arguments whose conclusions take the form of a prescription such as you ought to do such-and-such, which have centered much public discussion and policy since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to tackle a hitherto under-explored characteristic of many such normative arguments, namely, the relationship between evaluative and deontic propositions, depending on whether they occur as premises or conclusions in such arguments. In order to investigate how willing people are to argue from what is good to what one ought to do, and the other way round, we conducted an Inferential Judgment Experiment. Participants were presented with arguments involving deontic and evaluative propositions, and had to judge whether they could infer the conclusion from the premise. The stimuli that we used are tightly related to the argumentation surrounding the pandemic, regarding the measures of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The results of the study show that there is a robust inferential connection between evaluatives and deontics, but at the same time, a significant asymmetry as well. We explore several theoretical approaches to the relationship between the deontic and the evaluative realm, and test their predictions against the results of our study
Métaphysique et philosophie de la connaissance
No full textInternational audienceEnseignement Sémiotique et ontologie Introduction Le cours 2018-2019 s’est inscrit dans le cadre (qui se poursuivra en 2019-2020) d’un examen des liens entre l’ontologie et la sémiotique. Il s’est agi de montrer comment, face à nombre d’impasses où nous ont menés, au xxe siècle, divers « tournants » (linguistique, cognitif, etc.), on peut aujourd’hui prendre au sérieux le projet d’une ontologie simultanément sémiotique et réaliste, en soulignant qu’une réflexion sur le langage, mais beaucoup ..
Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies
No full textInternational audienceNarrative fictions have surely become the single most widespread source of entertainment in the world. In their free time, humans read novels and comics, watch movies and TV series, and play video games: they consume stories that they know to be false. Such behaviors are expanding at lightning speed in modern societies. Yet, the question of the origin of fictions has been an evolutionary puzzle for decades: Are fictions biological adaptations, or the by-products of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for another purpose? The absence of any consensus in cognitive science has made it difficult to explain how narrative fictions evolve culturally. We argue that current conflicting hypotheses are partly wrong, and partly right: narrative fictions are by-products of the human mind, because they obviously co-opt some pre-existing cognitive preferences and mechanisms, such as our interest for social information, and our abilities to do mindreading and to imagine counterfactuals. But humans reap some fitness benefits from producing and consuming such appealing cultural items, making fictions adaptive . To reconcile these two views, we put forward the hypothesis that narrative fictions are best seen as entertainment technologies that is, as items crafted by some people for the proximate goal to grab the attention of other people, and with the ultimate goal to fulfill other evolutionary-relevant functions that become easier once other people’s attention is caught. This hypothesis explains why fictions are filled with exaggerated and entertaining stimuli, why they fit so well the changing preferences of the audience they target, and why producers constantly make their fictions more attractive as time goes by, in a cumulative manner
Alternatives and attention in language and reasoning: A reply to Mascarenhas & Picat 2019
No full textInternational audienceIn this paper, we employ an experimental paradigm using insights from the psychology of reasoning to investigate the question whether certain modals generate and draw attention to alternatives. The article extends and builds on the methodology and findings of Mascarenhas & Picat (2019). Based on experimental results, they argue that the English epistemic modal might raises alternatives. We apply the same methodology to the English modal allowed to to test different hypotheses regarding the involvement of alternatives in deontic modality. We find commonalities and differences between the two modals we tested. We discuss theoretical consequences for existing semantic analyses of these modals, and argue that reasoning tasks can serve as a diagnostic tool to discover which natural language expressions involve alternatives