Dans ce classique de la sociologie de la connaissance, Durkheim et Mauss ne s'attaquent à rien de moins qu'au projet de réécrire la table kantienne des catégories : la maîtrise des jugements logiques qu'ils rendent possibles ne sont pas le fruit des seules forces de l'individu, mais ont une origine sociale. Cette hypothèse, ils la testent sur les concepts de genres et d'espèces, et plus généralement sur l'activité scientifique de classes. Ils entendent ainsi établir qu'en Amérique du Nord et chez (...) les Aborigènes d'Australie, tout autant que dans le système divinatoire chinois, stratification sociale et genres naturels primitifs se font écho ; on ne saurait classer les choses sans appartenir à des sociétés structurées. On comprend le profit à tirer de ce constat pour mieux appréhender les activités scientifiques modernes. (shrink)

This paper concerns the formal semantic analysis of imperative sentences. It is argued that such an analysis cannot be deferred to the semantics of propositions, under any of the three commonly adopted strategies: the performative analysis, the sentence radical approach to propositions, and the (nondeclarative) mood-as-operator approach. Whereas the first two are conceptually problematic, the third faces empirical problems: various complex imperatives should be analysed in terms of semantic operators over simple imperatives. One particularly striking case is the Dutch pluperfect (...) imperative. It is argued that this construction should be analysed as a genuine counterfactual imperative. On the constructive side, in the last part of the paper a formal semantic analysis of imperatives is presented, in the framework of Update Semantics. On this analysis, imperatives are sui generis semantic entities, on a par with propositions. The analysis also includes an account of the counterfactual imperatives. (shrink)

This seems to me to be a metaphysically significant feature of CEM. If CEM is correct — if all its theorems are true, then metaphysicians have a choice to make in how we understand the mereological nature of the world. We may think of the mereological relation either as a relation of part to whole, or as a relation of overlap; for if we give a metaphysical theory about one, we thereby give a metaphysical theory about the other. We may (...) choose which we think of as more metaphysically fundamental, for the they are interdefinable. However, if CEM is not correct, then perhaps we do not have this choice. Perhaps part-whole cannot be defined in terms of overlap; in which case we must choose part-whole as the metaphysical fundamental mereological relation (if any relation is). (shrink)

Relational primitives can facilitate rapid inductive generalization beyond individual mental-state reasoning. Computational models of social cognition should incorporate social relationships as core primitives, enabling richer explanations for how minimal social observations lead to flexible, efficient, and culturally adaptive social predictions.

We propose a reconstruction of the constellation of problems and philosophical positions on the nature and number of the primitives of logic in four authors of the nineteenth century logical scene: Peano, Padoa, Frege and Peirce. We argue that the proposed reconstruction forces us to recognize that it is in at least four different senses that a notation can be said to be simpler than another, and we trace the origins of these four senses in the writings of these (...) authors. We conclude that Frege, and even more so Peirce, developed new notations not to make drawing logical conclusions easier but in order to answer the needs of logical analysis. (shrink)

From ancient times, human history has been dotted with numerous instances of conflict and cooperation. Why do humans conflict or cooperate? With the invention of sciencea\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$^a$$\end{document}, the focus of modern science shifts from observing natural and social phenomena to constructing theories to explain the observed phenomena. Game theory is one such theory, rooted in mathematics, to explain conflict and cooperation. According to Morgenstern (1968), the modern origins of game theory date back (...) to Leibnitz, who emphasized the need to model conflict situations in 1710. In 1712, Waldegrave formulated an initial version of the minimax strategy. In 1881, Edgeworth showed the congruence between game theory and economics. One of the early and an important result is the minimax theorem by von Neumann (1928). The publication of “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” by von Neumann and Morgenstern in 1944b\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$^b$$\end{document} provided a logical foundation of game theory and its application in economic and social sciences. Nash (1950) introduces the concept of Nash equilibriumNash equilibrium that forms the cornerstone of applications of game theory in multiple disciplines, from economics to biology. (shrink)

The tripartite relationship model is unlikely to reflect how relationships are represented in the mind, given considerable difficulty in wresting clear conceptual distinctions from it. Instead, it offers a descriptive framework for organizing findings. Here, we present examples of conceptual difficulties of the model and elaborate on the functional importance of third-party inference based on our agent-based modeling work.

1. Outline of the Project. This paper is intended to be a progress report on a project in philosophy of science. The immediate stimulus of this report is the eightieth birthday of E. A. Singer, Jr., who was the inspiration of the project, and, needless to say, though responsible for the whole is not responsible for the misconceptions in the specific parts.

This article describes the conceptual framework within which knowledge about Africa was legitimized in eighteenth-century French philosophy. The article traces a shift or rupture in this conceptual framework which, at the end of the eighteenth century, led to the emergence of new conditions for knowledge legitimation that altered Europe's perception of Africa. The article examines these two conceptual frameworks within the context of a discussion of the social theory of the time, which categorized Africans first as savages, and then, with (...) the advent of our modern "style of reasoning," as primitives. The argument used to demonstrate this change in categorizations is historical. The greater part of the article analyzes in detail the principal social theory of Enlightenment philosophy, the stadial theory of society, with the aim of demonstrating how it determined what could be affirmed about Africa. The shift in the perception of Africans from savages to primitives involved an epistemological change in how societies were grasped. The article provides a greater understanding of the constitution of Africa as a cognitive construct, which is not only of theoretical concern; this construct shaped Europe's intervention in Africa, and continues to influence what we believe Africa is and should become. (shrink)

This chapter unifies the disciplinary studies of the last two definiens of noémon system (NoS), namely, communication and understanding. Its first section succinctly reviews the literature on the nature of communication and defines human communication in terms of the process of mutual human understanding. The latter is in turn defined in terms of a system of human primitives. The second section discusses the process of human understanding and in particular the end result of it, namely, a system of human (...) primitives. We conclude that the processes of human communication and understanding constitute qualitative invariances of historic H. sapiens psychology. The last section extends our definitions for any NoS, discusses the limits of communication among NoSs, and compares well known regularities and qualitative invariances of psychology and AI. © Petros A. M. Gelepithis 2024. (shrink)

Is the experience of the primitives fundamentally different from ours, or is there only a difference of degree? What is striking at first is that this experience presents two aspects. On the one hand, the primitives understand and think as we do; they distinguish objects and their relationships by localizing them in the space and time of the exterior world, by separating them from the subjective “I”, in short by objectifying them in a rational manner. This is the (...) “natural” aspect of primitive experience. (shrink)

This Book Contains Nine Cases In Theoretic Primitives From National And International Experts. The Book Presents Intellectual Panorama Of Highest Metaphysical And Scientific Nature To The Scholarly World.

The search for simplifying principles in motor control motivates the target article. One method that the CNS uses to simplify the task of controlling a limb's mechanical properties is absent from the article. Evidence from multi-joint, force-field measurements and from kinematics that points to the existence of multi-joint primitives as control variables is discussed.

Current models of speech motor control rely on either trajectory-based control (DIVA, GEPPETO, ACT) or a dynamical systems approach based on feedback control (Task Dynamics, FACTS). While both approaches have provided insights into the speech motor system, it is difficult to connect these findings across models given the distinct theoretical and computational bases of the two approaches. We propose a new extension of the most widely used dynamical systems approach, Task Dynamics, that incorporates many of the strengths of trajectory-based approaches, (...) providing a way to bridge the theoretical divide between what have been two separate approaches to understanding speech motor control. The Task Dynamics (TD) model posits that speech gestures are governed by point attractor dynamics consistent with a critically damped harmonic oscillator. Kinematic trajectories associated with such gestures should therefore be consistent with a second-order dynamical system, possibly modified by blending with temporally overlapping gestures or altering oscillator parameters. This account of observed kinematics is powerful and theoretically appealing, but may be insufficient to account for deviations from predicted kinematics—i.e., changes produced in response to some external perturbations to the jaw, changes in control during acquisition and development, or effects of word/syllable frequency. Optimization, such as would be needed to minimize articulatory effort, is also incompatible with the current TD model, though the idea that the speech production systems economizes effort has a long history and, importantly, also plays a critical role in current theories of domain-general human motor control. To address these issues, we use Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) to expand a dynamical systems framework for speech motor control to allow modification of kinematic trajectories by incorporating a simple, learnable forcing term into existing point attractor dynamics. We show that integration of DMPs with task-based point-attractor dynamics enhances the potential explanatory power of TD in a number of critical ways, including the ability to account for external forces in planning and optimizing both kinematic and dynamic movement costs. At the same time, this approach preserves the successes of Task Dynamics in handling multi-gesture planning and coordination. (shrink)

Natural forms, often characterized by irregularity and roughness, have a unique complexity that exhibit self-similarity across different spatial scales or levels of magnification. Our visual system is remarkably efficient in the processing of natural scenes and tuned to the multi-scale, fractal-like properties they possess. The fractal-like scaling characteristics are ubiquitous in many physical and biological domains, with recent research also highlighting their importance in aesthetic perception, particularly in the visual and, to some extent, auditory modalities. Given the multitude of fractal-like (...) scaling manifestations, we explore potential commonalities in the way they might affect aesthetic preference within and across different physical and sensory domains. We use a range of visual and tactile stimuli to explore the equivalence of fractal-scaling effects on aesthetic preferences within and across visual and tactile modalities. Our results suggest that, despite some superficial differences, the underlying dimensional structure mediating the preference across the two domains is remarkably similar. The qualitative nature of this dimensional structure as well as suggestions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to summarize a particular approach of doing metaphysics through physics - the primitive ontology approach. The idea is that any fundamental physical theory has a well-defined architecture, to the foundation of which there is the primitive ontology, which represents matter. According to the framework provided by this approach when applied to quantum mechanics, the wave function is not suitable to represent matter. Rather, the wave function has a nomological character, given that its role in (...) the theory is to implement the law of evolution for the primitive ontology. (shrink)

Primitive ontology is a recently much discussed approach to the ontology of quantum theory according to which the theory is ultimately about entities in 3-dimensional space and their temporal evolution. This paper critically discusses the primitive ontologies that have been suggested within the Bohmian approach to quantum field theory in the light of the existence of unitarily inequivalent representations. These primitive ontologies rely either on a Fock space representation or a wave functional representation, which are strictly speaking unambiguously available only (...) for free systems in flat spacetime. As a consequence, it is argued that they do not constitute fundamental ontologies for quantum field theory, in contrast to the case of the Bohmian approach to quantum mechanics. (shrink)

We don't yet have adequate theories of what the human mind is representing when it represents a social group. Worse still, many people think we do. This mistaken belief is a consequence of the state of play: Until now, researchers have relied on their own intuitions to link up the concept social group on the one hand and the results of particular studies or models on the other. While necessary, this reliance on intuition has been purchased at a considerable cost. (...) When looked at soberly, existing theories of social groups are either (i) literal, but not remotely adequate (such as models built atop economic games), or (ii) simply metaphorical (typically a subsumption or containment metaphor). Intuition is filling in the gaps of an explicit theory. This paper presents a computational theory of what, literally, a group representation is in the context of conflict: It is the assignment of agents to specific roles within a small number of triadic interaction types. This “mental definition” of a group paves the way for a computational theory of social groups – in that it provides a theory of what exactly the information-processing problem of representing and reasoning about a group is. For psychologists, this paper offers a different way to conceptualize and study groups, and suggests that a non-tautological definition of a social group is possible. For cognitive scientists, this paper provides a computational benchmark against which natural and artificial intelligences can be held. (shrink)

Several metaphysical debates have typically been modeled as oppositions between a relationist approach and a substantivalist approach. Such debates include the Bundle Theory and the Substratum Theory about ordinary material objects, the Bundle (Humean) Theory and the Substance (Cartesian) Theory of the Self, and Relationism and Substantivalism about time. In all three debates, the substantivalist side typically insists that in order to provide a good treatment of the subject-matter of the theory (time, Self, material objects), it is necessary to postulate (...) the existence of a certain kind of substance, while the other side, the relationist one, characteristically feels that this is an unnecessary expense and that one can get the job done in an ontologically cheaper way just with inter-related properties or events. In this paper I shall defend the view that there is much less of a disagreement between relational ontologies and substantival ontologies than it is usually thought. I believe that, when carefully examined, the two sides of the debate are not that different from each other, in all three cases of pairs of views mentioned above. As we will see, both the relational side and the substantival side work in the same way, suffer from and answer the same objections, and are structurally extremely similar. It will be an important question – one that I shall discuss in detail, and that is indeed the main point of interest for me in this paper – whether this means that the two sides of the debate are somehow 'equivalent' or not, and what 'equivalent' could mean. (shrink)

One reason to posit governing laws is to explain the uniformity of nature. Explanatory power can be purchased by accepting new primitives, and scientists invoke laws in their explanations without providing any supporting metaphysics. For these reasons, one might suspect that we can treat laws as wholly unanalyzable primitives. (John Carroll’s *Laws of Nature* (1994) and Tim Maudlin’s *The Metaphysics Within Physics* (2007) offer recent defenses of primitivism about laws.) Whatever defects primitive laws might have, explanatory weakness should (...) not be one of them. However, in this essay I’ll argue that wholly primitive laws cannot explain the uniformity of nature. The basic argument is based on the following idea: though a primitive law that P makes P likely, the primitive status of the law provides no reason to think that P must describe (or otherwise give rise to) a natural regularity. After identifying the problem for primitive laws, I consider an extension of the objection to all theories of governing laws and suggest that it may be avoided by a version of the Dretske/Tooley/Armstrong theory according to which laws are relations between universals. (shrink)

In this paper I present the common structure of quantum theories with a primitive ontology, and discuss in what sense the classical world emerges from quantum theories as understood in this framework. In addition, I argue that the primitive ontology approach is better at answering this question than the rival wave function ontology approach or any other approach in which the classical world is nonreductively ‘emergent:’ even if the classical limit within this framework needs to be fully developed, the difficulties (...) are technical rather than conceptual, while this is not true for the alternatives. (shrink)

The paper explains in what sense the GRW matter density theory is a primitive ontology theory of quantum mechanics and why, thus conceived, the standard objections against the GRW formalism do not apply to GRWm. We consider the different options for conceiving the quantum state in GRWm and argue that dispositionalism is the most attractive one.

Metaphysical theories heavily rely on the use of primitives to which they typically appeal. I will start by examining and evaluating some traditional well-known theories and I will discuss the role of primitives in metaphysical theories in general. I will then turn to a discussion of claims of between theories that, I think, depend on equivalences of primitives, and I will explore the nature of primitives. I will then claim that almost all explanatory power of metaphysical (...) theories comes from their primitives, and so I will turn to scrutinize the notion of "power" and "explanatory". (shrink)

The chapter argues from an ethology-inspired internalist perspective that ‘colour’ is not a homogeneous and autonomous attribute, but rather plays different roles in different conceptual forms underlying perception. It discusses empirical and theoretical evidence that indicates that core assumptions underlying orthodox conceptions are grossly inadequate. The assumptions pertain to the idea that colour is a kind of autonomous and unitary attribute. It is regarded as unitary or homogeneous by assuming that its core properties do not depend on the type of (...) ‘perceptual object’ to which it pertains and that‘colour per se’ constitutes a natural attribute in the functional architecture of the perceptual system. It is regarded as autonomous by assuming that it can be studied in isolation of other perceptual attributes. More generally, the chapter argues on the bases of corresponding empirical and theoretical evidence that perception cannot be understood as the ‘recovery’ of physical world structure from sensory structure by input-based computational processes. Rather, the sensory input serves as a kind of sign for biologically relevant aspects of the external world that activates biologically given conceptual forms with their internal parameters. Although the sensory input is a causally necessary requirement for the activation of conceptual forms, the perceptual computations triggered are under the control of an internal programme based on a set of conceptual forms. (shrink)

Eternalists believe that there is no ontological difference between the past, present and future. Thus, a challenge arises: in virtue of what does time have a direction? Some eternalists, Oaklander and Tegtmeier ) argue that the direction of time is primitive. A natural response to positing primitive directionality is the suspicion that said posit is too mysterious to do any explanatory work. The aim of this paper is to relieve primitive directionality of some of its mystery by offering a novel (...) way to understand the phenomenon in terms of the recently popularised notion of grounding. (shrink)

For a long time it was believed that it was impossible to be realist about quantum mechanics. It took quite a while for the researchers in the foundations of physics, beginning with John Stuart Bell [Bell 1987], to convince others that such an alleged impossibility had no foundation. Nowadays there are several quantum theories that can be interpreted realistically, among which Bohmian mechanics, the GRW theory, and the many-worlds theory. The debate, though, is far from being over: in what respect (...) should we be realist regarding these theories? Two diff erent proposals have been made: on the one hand, there are those who insist on a direct ontological interpretation of the wave function as representing physical bodies, and on the other hand there are those who claim that quantum mechanics is not really about the wave function. In this paper we will present and discuss one proposal of the latter kind that focuses on the notion of primitive ontology. (shrink)

Primitive ontology is a program which seeks to make explicit the ontological commitments of physical theories in terms of a distribution of matter in ordinary space-time. This program targets wave-function realism, which interprets the high-dimensional configuration space on which wave-functions are defined as our fundamental physical space. Wave-function realism allegedly fails to account for a correspondence between the ontology it postulates and the ‘manifest image’ of the world in which experimental tests of the theory are performed, and therefore the wave-function (...) must be completed with an additional structure which describes what fundamentally exists in ordinary space-time: the ‘primitive ontology’. However primitive ontologies face some difficulties, in particular concerning the ontological status of the wave-function. In this paper, I defend a realist interpretation of the wave-function as describing objects in ordinary space-time, which does not require supplementing the theory with additional structure. The main difference between this proposal and other primitive ontology proposals is that the fundamental constituents of reality are not conceived of as localised objects, but as primitive relations. This interpretation purports to share the advantages of both wave-function realism and primitive ontologies without facing the same difficulties. I argue that the need for an additional structure stems from a commitment to the locality of the fundamental constituents of reality, and that such commitment is unnecessary for recovering the manifest image of the world. (shrink)

Joshua Gert presents an original account of color properties, and of our perception of them. He employs a general philosophical strategy - neo-pragmatism - which challenges an assumption made by virtually all other theories of color: he argues that colors are primitive properties of objects, irreducible to physical or dispositional properties.

A major disagreement between different views about the foundations of quantum mechanics concerns whether for a theory to be intelligible as a fundamental physical theory it must involve a ‘primitive ontology’ (PO), i.e. variables describing the distribution of matter in four-dimensional space–time. In this article, we illustrate the value of having a PO. We do so by focusing on the role that the PO plays for extracting predictions from a given theory and discuss valid and invalid derivations of predictions. To (...) this end, we investigate a number of examples based on toy models built from the elements of familiar interpretations of quantum theory. (shrink)

In this paper, we contribute to the further development of non-deterministic semantics for propositional modality within the 8-valued framework. As our point of departure, we take MnD, a very weak modal logic where modal operators are inter-definable and uninterpreted. We study its extensions with respect to $\Box,\Diamond,\vee,\wedge,\rightarrow $ by means of simple refinements. We provide axiomatisations for all extensions obtained through these refinements. This systematic approach enables the exploration of a wide range of non-deterministic modal logics and hones our understanding (...) of non-deterministic semantics for modality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There is an important debate in the philosophy of mind that has roots in the phenomenological tradition, namely: what are the primitive forms of consciousness, that is, what are the fundamental ingredients or aspects of consciousness. This paper wants to contribute to partially answering this general question by providing an answer to a required sub-question within this question: is emotional phenomenology fundamental? I will answer in the affirmative and will offer an argument focused on contemplative emotions elicited by fiction. (...) Another type of contemplative emotions, namely, esthetic emotions, have been invoked in the literature but I will argue that the phenomenology of emotions elicited by fiction, given their continuity and sameness in kind with the phenomenology of garden variety emotions, are more dialectically efficient vis-à-vis the debate on the irreducibility of emotional phenomenology. (shrink)