Archive Electronique - Institut Jean Nicod
Not a member yet
1997 research outputs found
Sort by
Shareability of Thought and Frege's Constraint: A Reply to Onofri
No full textInternational audienceOnofri (2018) proposes an individuation criterion for thoughts that purports to satisfy both shareability (the notion that different thinkers, or a single thinker at different times, can and generally do think type-identical thoughts) and Frege's constraint (according to which two thoughts are different if it is possible for a rational subject to endorse one while rejecting the other). I argue that his proposal fails to satisfy Frege's constraint. Then I propose a modification to Onofri's proposal to fix the problem
Populismo epistemico o della tirannia del buon senso
No full textInternational audienceEpistemic Populism, or the Tyranny of Common Sense Post-truth politics recruits epistemic populists in order to spread in our contemporary societies. I will present a brief phenomenology of the «epistemic populist» by describing some of their fundamental attitudes, such as naïve realism, methodological individualism, monism, nostalgy, arrogance, etc., to highlight some of the features that make them appeal to the virtues of common sense against the technocratic élites. Then I discuss what common sense means and how it relates to the Greek notion of koiné, as a set of beliefs that are commonly held by an entire population. The epistemic populist reacts against a technocratic management of power that doesn't respect this koiné. Technocracy is of course highly problematic in democracies as it has been discussed at length by many philosophers and there are reasons for the epistemic populist to oppose its power. Nonetheless, the quest for a «pure» non-mediated relation to knowledge and power is naïve and is easily manipulable especially in the era of social media. The paper analyses the mixture of empowerment and frustration that social media elicit in the epistemic populist by stressing the shift from an ideal struggle for recognition on social media to a struggle for reputation, that is, for a measurable visibility on the Web through digital features such as likes and retweets. I conclude by a note on what can be done on social media in order to diminish that competition for reputation, and make the design of conversations more suitable for a democratic exchange of opinions that doesn't exacerbate the clash between the people and the élites
The puzzle of ideography
No full textInternational audienceAbstract An ideography is a general-purpose code made of pictures that do not encode language, which can be used autonomously – not just as a mnemonic prop – to encode information on a broad range of topics. Why are viable ideographies so hard to find? I contend that self-sufficient graphic codes need to be narrowly specialized. Writing systems are only an apparent exception: at their core, they are notations of a spoken language. Even if they also encode non-linguistic information, they are useless to someone who lacks linguistic competence in the encoded language or a related one. The versatility of writing is thus vicarious: writing borrows it from spoken language. Why is it so difficult to build a fully generalist graphic code? The most widespread answer points to a learnability problem. We possess specialized cognitive resources for learning spoken language, but lack them for graphic codes. I argue in favor of a different account: what is difficult about graphic codes is not so much learning or teaching them as getting every user to learn and teach the same code. This standardization problem does not affect spoken or signed languages as much. Those are based on cheap and transient signals, allowing for easy online repairing of miscommunication, and require face-to-face interactions where the advantages of common ground are maximized. Graphic codes lack these advantages, which makes them smaller in size and more specialized
Stock Price Formation: Precepts from a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Model
No full textInternational audienc
Addressing joint action challenges in HRI: Insights from psychology and philosophy
No full textInternational audienceThe vast expansion of research in human-robot interactions (HRI) these last decades has been accompanied by the design of increasingly skilled robots for engaging in joint actions with humans. However, these advances have encountered significant challenges to ensure fluent interactions and sustain human motivation through the different steps of joint action. After exploring current literature on joint action in HRI, leading to a more precise definition of these challenges, the present article proposes some perspectives borrowed from psychology and philosophy showing the key role of communication in human interactions. From mutual recognition between individuals to the expression of commitment and social expectations, we argue that communicative cues can facilitate coordination, prediction, and motivation in the context of joint action. The description of several notions thus suggests that some communicative capacities can be implemented in the context of joint action for HRI, leading to an integrated perspective of robotic communication
On the properties of null subjects in sign languages: the case of French Sign Language (LSF)
No full textInternational audienceAbstract The typology of subject omission in simple declarative sentences ranges from languages that simply do not allow it like English and French to languages that allow it as long as a minimum degree of topicality is guaranteed like Chinese and Japanese. In between there are various languages in which subject omission is licensed, for example by rich agreement like in Italian and Spanish, or by a particular set of grammatical features like first and second person in Finnish, or tense like in Hebrew. In other languages subject omission is only limited to expletive sentences like in German. This rich typology observed in spoken languages is also attested across sign languages, with one important exception: there is no known sign language disallowing subject omission categorically. The goals of this paper are twofold: first, we apply syntactic and semantic tests to assess the boundaries of subject omission in French Sign Language and characterize it within the typology; second, we discuss in light of some particular aspects of grammars in the visual modality this apparent anomaly of sign languages
Imaginary worlds through the evolutionary lens: Ultimate functions, proximate mechanisms, cultural distribution
No full textInternational audienceWe received several commentaries both challenging and supporting our hypothesis. We thank the commentators for their thoughtful contributions, bringing together alternative hypotheses, complementary explanations, and appropriate corrections to our model. Here, we explain further our hypothesis, using more explicitly the framework of evolutionary social sciences. We first explain what we believe is the ultimate function of fiction in general (i.e., entertainment) and how this hypothesis differs from other evolutionary hypotheses put forward by several commentators. We then turn to the proximate features that make imaginary worlds entertaining and, therefore, culturally successful. We finally explore how these insights may explain the distribution of imaginary worlds across time, space, age, and social classes
Ten problems of ownership
No full textInternational audienceThe body is a material entity located in space and time in the same way as a rock, a tree or a bird. But do we perceive and experience our body like those other objects? Most philosophical interest for bodily awareness has come from its peculiarities. It is precisely because we assume that we are aware of our body differently from other objects that it raises many questions. But what makes it unique? The most intuitive answer is that it bears a special relation to the self, and to self-awareness. Yet, although introspectively familiar, it is hard to exactly pinpoint the nature of this specific relationship. Thanks to their privileged relation to our body, bodily experiences seem to afford awareness of our body as being our own, what has been called the sense of bodily ownership, for want of a better name. 1 In my book, Mind the body (2018), I explored what it takes to be aware of one's body as one's own but I had to face a number of issues, many of which are still unresolved, and since then, new ones have raised. The aim of this chapter is to offer a very brief outline of the main questions and puzzles that await those interested in bodily ownership. I have picked ten of them, to echo Michael Tye's famous Ten problems of consciousness, but there are many more, I am afraid, and each problem raises major issues that deserve much more than the space allocated here
How to Develop Reliable Instruments to Measure the Cultural Evolution of Preferences and Feelings in History?
No full textInternational audienceWhile we cannot directly measure the psychological preferences of individuals, and the moral, emotional, and cognitive tendencies of people from the past, we can use cultural artifacts as a window to the zeitgeist of societies in particular historical periods. At present, an increasing number of digitized texts spanning several centuries is available for a computerized analysis. In addition, developments form historical economics have enabled increasingly precise estimations of sociodemographic realities from the past. Crossing these datasets offer a powerful tool to test how the environment changes psychology and vice versa . However, designing the appropriate proxies of relevant psychological constructs is not trivial. The gold standard to measure psychological constructs in modern texts – Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) – has been validated by psychometric experimentation with modern participants. However, as a tool to investigate the psychology of the past, the LIWC is limited in two main aspects: (1) it does not cover the entire range of relevant psychological dimensions and (2) the meaning, spelling, and pragmatic use of certain words depend on the historical period from which the fiction work is sampled. These LIWC limitations make the design of custom tools inevitable. However, without psychometric validation, there is uncertainty regarding what exactly is being measured. To overcome these pitfalls, we suggest several internal and external validation procedures, to be conducted prior to diachronic analyses. First, the semantic adequacy of search terms in bags-of-words approaches should be verified by training semantic vector spaces with the historical text corpus using tools like word2vec. Second, we propose factor analyses to evaluate the internal consistency between distinct bag-of-words proxying the same underlying psychological construct. Third, these proxies can be externally validated using prior knowledge on the differences between genres or other literary dimensions. Finally, while LIWC is limited in the analysis of historical documents, it can be used as a sanity check for external validation of custom measures. This procedure allows a robust estimation of psychological constructs and how they change throughout history. Together with historical economics, it also increases our power in testing the relationship between environmental change and the expression of psychological traits from the past