Archive Electronique - Institut Jean Nicod
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1997 research outputs found
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From Chariclea and Theagen to Cui Yingying and Zhang Sheng: How romantic fictions inform us about the cultural evolution of pair-bonding in Eurasia
No full textIn Love and the Western World, Denis de Rougemont famously suggested that 'romantic love', the idea that love is key in human existence, emerged suddenly in 12th c. France. More recent scholarship in literary history suggests that the emergence of romantic love is general phenomenon in history. Similar increase in the importance of love can be detected in the Arab world, in India, in Persia, in China and in Japan. In this paper I discuss the idea that feelings depicted in narrative fictions correspond to the modern scientific characterization of romantic love, and thus may function as an indicator of a behavioral and psychological change in people's preferences for pair bonding. I also show that literary transmission chains (e.g., the Trojan War, from the Greek epic Iliad to the Hollywood film Troy) can help us study cultural shifts in the importance of love, as the increasing importance of love has greatly transformed the original stories, infusing them with romantic elements and sometimes radically changing the nature of the relationships between the original characters. Ironically, I suggest that this very phenomenon hinders the ability of modern readers to detect the absence of love in ancient fictions, as modern readers have first encountered the older stories through their modern, more romantic rewrites, whether in film, play, novel, or children's story form, and cannot help but project the modern version onto the older ones
Why Trust Raoult? How Social Indicators Inform the Reputations of Experts
No full textInternational audienceThe COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the considerable challenge of sourcing expertise and determining which experts to trust. Dissonant information fostered controversy in public discourse and encouraged an appeal to a wide range of social indicators of trustworthiness in order to decide whom to trust. We analyze public discourse on expertise by examining how social indicators inform the reputation of Dr. Didier Raoult, the French microbiologist who rose to international prominence as an early advocate for using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. To comprehend how these indicators came to inform his reputation, we outline Dr. Raoult’s rise to fame based on discourse about hydroxychloroquine. We then discuss why we trust in experts like scientist-practitioners. This is followed by an examination of how social indicators of trust like status, epistemic authority, influence and values have informed Dr. Raoult’s reputation. We conclude with recommendations for how to improve the selection and evaluation social indicators of trust and reputations. Our aim here, instead of making a claim about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine or Dr. Raoult’s reputation per se, is to outline through this case study how social indicators of trust inform reputation and the challenge they present to evaluating expertise
Joint contributions of metacognition and self-beliefs to uncertainty-guided checking behavior
No full textInternational audienceChecking behavior is a natural and adaptive strategy for resolving uncertainty in everyday situations. Here, we aimed at investigating the psychological drivers of checking and its regulation by uncertainty, in non-clinical participants and controlled experimental settings. We found that the sensitivity of participants’ explicit confidence judgments to actual performance (explicit metacognition) predicted the extent to which their checking strategy was regulated by uncertainty. Yet, a more implicit measure of metacognition (derived from asking participants to opt between trials) did not contribute to the regulation of checking behavior. Meanwhile, how participants scaled on questionnaires eliciting self-beliefs such as self-confidence and self-reported obsessive–compulsive symptoms also predicted participants’ uncertainty-guided checking tendencies. Altogether, these findings demonstrate that checking behavior is likely the outcome of a core explicit metacognitive process operating at the scale of single decisions, while remaining influenced by general self-beliefs. Our findings are thus consistent with two mechanisms (micro vs. macro) through which this otherwise adaptive behavior could go awry in certain psychiatric disorders such as obsessive–compulsive disorder
Timelines and Temporal Pointing in Chinese Sign Language
No full textInternational audienceWe argue that Chinese Sign Language (CSL) provides new insights into temporal anaphora, as well as new puzzles. Partee (1973) showed that temporal talk in English involves abstract anaphoric mechanisms akin to pronouns, although with a very different form. Schlenker (2013) argued that in American Sign Language (ASL), one and the same overt pronominal form, the pointing sign, can have individual and temporal uses, but his data involved the same loci across domains: no formal property distinguished temporal from individual anaphora. We replicate ASL temporal anaphora data in CSL, but we also display a new finding: CSL allows for locus establishment and anaphoric pointing on two specifically temporal timelines, a sagittal one (past is backwards) and a vertical one (past is up). Not only can temporal anaphora be overt in CSL; it can also be morphologically distinguished from nominal anaphora (various interesting restrictions on the timelines are also described)
Naturalizing Critical Thinking: Consequences for Education, Blueprint for Future Research in Cognitive Science
No full textInternational audienceNaturalizing critical thinking. Naturalizing critical thinking. Consequences for education, blueprint for future research Abstract. While very popular in public discourse about education, critical thinking education is still a work in progress. Two key conditions for successfully addressing critical thinking education are lacking: a) the availability of a clear, specific, and operational definition, and b) a deeper understanding of the natural cognitive bases of critical thinking. We therefore propose a theoretical framework for critical thinking education, grounded on a cognitive approach. Starting from a restrictive characterization of critical thinking-defined as the capacity of evaluating the epistemic quality of information, and of calibrating one's confidence in relationship to it-we identify specific mechanisms subserving critical thinking that are present in early human development. We refer to these mechanisms as the natural building blocks of critical thinking. On this naturalistic ground, effective educational strategies can be envisaged that both harness the natural building blocks of critical thinking and help overcome its shortcomings
Standards and quantification of coin iconography: possibilities and challenges
No full textInternational audienceThe use of digital technologies and big data in the humanities and social sciences provided many opportunities for cultural heritage management and research, enabling data sharing and interdisciplinary collaborations. These developments increased the need for standardized data formats. General and domain-specific standards for describing and classifying cultural data, based on linked data principles, are developed to support increasingly numerous digital collections. However, the existing standards do not fully address the particular challenges concerning the standardized descriptions of images. Here we focus on ancient coins, an official image-bearing medium. We present current approaches to coin iconography, including the application of statistical measures to infer patterns in the use of images for communication. We discuss the importance of consistent, standardized data for quantitative research, and propose a generalized approach, focused on basic concepts and limiting the level of detail for the sake of simplicity, interoperability, and compatibility with statistical methods, as a necessary first step towards creating reliable iconographic standards
Postface à l'édition critique (Université d'État d'Anacréon -4 859 GE)
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