R Paul

This short paper will discuss the background to the special issue through a consideration of the basic knowledge representation issues in AI. We will briefly introduce the symbolic and sub-symbolic representations which are traditionally associated with AI, before noting the socially constructed views of knowledge with which they are at odds and the techniques for knowledge elicitation which they use. This forms the context against which this special issues sits, highlighting the broad view of knowledge elicitation and representation and the issues that they raise which we feel are important to debate in the discipline. By gathering this set of papers together, we hope to encourage researchers to see the value in differing approaches and to encourage a more synthetic view of the discipline, where contributions and insights from different perspectives may be of use

In this essay, Domenico Jervolino summarizes twenty years of Ricoeur’s reading of Patočka’s work, up to the Neapolitan conference of 1997. Nowhere is Ricoeur closer to Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology. Both thinkers belong, together with authors like Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, to a third phase of the phenomenological movement, marked by the search for a new approach to the relation between human beings and world, beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In the search for this approach, Patočka strongly underlines the relation between body, temporality and sociality. Central to this new encounter of Patočka and Ricoeur is the discovery of an idea of inter-human community based on a a-subjective conception of existence.

Digital platforms and application software have changed how people work in a range of industries. Empirical studies of the gig economy have raised concerns about new systems of algorithmic management exercised over workers and how these alter the structural conditions of their work. Drawing on the republican literature, we offer a theoretical account of algorithmic domination and a framework for understanding how it can be applied to ride hail and food delivery services in the on-demand economy. We argue that certain algorithms can facilitate new relationships of domination by sustaining a socio-technical system in which the owners and managers of a company dominate workers. This analysis has implications for the growing use of algorithms throughout the gig economy and broader labor market.

When individuals learn from what others tell them, the information is subject to transmission error that does not arise in learning from direct experience. Yet evidence shows that humans consistently prefer this apparently more unreliable source of information. We examine the effect this preference has in cases where the information concerns a judgment on others’ behaviour and is used to establish cooperation in a society. We present a spatial model confirming that cooperation can be sustained by gossip containing a high degree of uncertainty. Accuracy alone does not predict the value of information in evolutionary terms; relevance, the impact of information on behavioural outcomes, must also be considered. We then show that once relevance is incorporated as a criterion, second-hand information can no longer be discounted on the basis of its poor fidelity alone. Finally we show that the relative importance of accuracy and relevance depends on factors of life history and demography.

We publish here the letters between Gadamer and Ricoeur, as they are found in the Archives of the two philosophers (Gadamer-Archiv in Marbach and Fonds Ricoeur in Paris). Starting from February 1964 and ending on October 2000, the thirty-five letters reproduced here cannot give a complete picture of their much richer correspondence and relations, because it seems that neither Ricoeur, nor Gadamer kept all the letters they received from one another. But altogether, they document their common concerns, their mutual respect, even their intellectual solidarity and finally the particular context that brought them to write to one another, i.e. Ricoeur’s intention to publish a translation of Gadamer’s book, Truth and Method, in a new series he edited for the Seuil Publisher. This publishing and translation project will mark their entire correspondence.

Le milieu universitaire, précisément le monde des enseignants-chercheurs, se trouve dans la nécessité absolue de s’approprier les nouvelles technologies de l’information ; en même temps, il est l’héritier d’habitudes épistémologiques séculaires. Cet article pose la question des pratiques présentes et émergentes dans les processus de documentation scientifique. Il s’agit d’une part de constater les éventuelles carences dénoncées par les chercheurs en matière d’accès à l’information, d’autre part de faire émerger tout un système de représentations sociales participant d’une culture informationnelle spécifique influençant nécessairement les pratiques. Sur la base d’une analyse qualitative, nous mettons en évidence la nécessité, pour les chercheurs, quelle que soit leur discipline, de maintenir une relation « papier » avec les supports d’information. Cette relation traditionnelle permet de mieux appréhender l’innovation technique et de faire face aux potentialités offertes par les nouvelles sources d’accès à l’information. En outre, nous montrons que la définition même du métier de chercheur et son comportement face au traitement de l’information dépend de sa culture disciplinaire, selon qu’il appartient aux sciences humaines et sociales ou aux « sciences dures ».The university environment, where scholars and professors work, is faced with an imperative need to appropriate the new information technologies, but it has also inherited the epistemological habits of centuries. This article raises the question of current and emerging practices in the scientific documentation process. It seeks on the one hand to observe the failings exposed by researchers regarding access to information, and on the other hand to draw out the contours of a whole system of social representations relating to a specific information culture that necessarily influences practice. Based on a qualitative analysis, we show the need for researchers in any discipline to maintain « print » relationships with information media. This traditional relationship helps to gain a better grasp of technical innovation and to cope with the potential of new ways of accessing information. We also show that the very definition of the research profession, as well as researchers’ attitudes to information processing, depend on their disciplinary culture and whether they belong to the humanities and social sciences or to the « hard sciences »

Collective rituals have long puzzled anthropologists, yet little is known about how rituals affect participants. Our study investigated the effects of nine naturally occurring rituals on prosociality. We operationalized prosociality as (1) attitudes about fellow ritual participants and (2) decisions in a public goods game. The nine rituals varied in levels of synchrony and levels of sacred attribution. We found that rituals with synchronous body movements were more likely to enhance prosocial attitudes. We also found that rituals judged to be sacred were associated with the largest contributions in the public goods game. Path analysis favored a model in which sacred values mediate the effects of synchronous movements on prosocial behaviors. Our analysis offers the first quantitative evidence for the long-standing anthropological conjecture that rituals orchestrate body motions and sacred values to support prosociality. Our analysis, moreover, adds precision to this old conjecture with evidence of a specific mechanism: ritual synchrony increases perceptions of oneness with others, which increases sacred values to intensify prosocial behaviors

Local seed systems remain the fundamental source of seeds for many crops in developing countries. Climate resilience for small holder farmers continues to depend largely on locally available seeds of traditional crop varieties. High rainfall events can have as significant an impact on crop production as increased temperatures and drought. This article analyzes the dynamics of maize diversity over 3 years in a farming community of Yucatán state, Mexico, where elevated levels of precipitation forced farmers in 2012 to reduce maize diversity in their plots. We study how farmers maintained their agroecosystem resilience through seed networks, examining the drivers influencing maize diversity and seed provisioning in the year preceding and following the 2012 climatic disturbance. We found that, under these challenging circumstances, farmers focused their efforts on their most reliable landraces, disregarding hybrids. We show that farmers were able to recover and restore the diversity usually cultivated in the community in the year following the critical climate event. The maize dynamic assessed in this study demonstrates the importance of community level conservation of crop diversity. Understanding farmer management strategies of agrobiodiversity, especially during a challenging climatic period, is necessary to promote a more tailored response to climate change in traditional farming systems.

Following important work by Pizarro, Uhlmann and Salovey (2003) on moral judgments of uncontrolled/impulsive versus controlled/ deliberate action, we focus on the related issue of the moral evaluation of emotion-motivated versus principle-driven behavior. We examine: (a) the potential lesser blameworthiness of antisocial acts perceived as driven by emotion as opposed to principle; (b) how factors governing the moral evaluation of antisocial acts might extend to the evaluation of prosocial acts; and (c) how overriding a moral emotion in favor of a moral principle affects moral attributions.

In this article, we provide a comprehensive analysis and a normative assessment of rationing through inconvenience as a form of rationing. By “rationing through inconvenience” in the health sphere, we refer to a nonfinancial burden that is either intended to cause or has the effect of causing patients or clinicians to choose an option for health-related consumption that is preferred by the health system for its fairness, efficiency, or other distributive desiderata beyond assisting the immediate patient. We argue that under certain conditions, rationing through inconvenience may turn out to serve as a legitimate and, compared to direct rationing, even a preferable tool for rationing; we propose a research agenda to identify more precisely when that might be the case and when, alternatively, rationing through inconvenience remains ethically undesirable. After defining and illustrating rationing through inconvenience, we turn to its moral advantages and disadvantages over other rationing methods. We take it as a starting assumption that rationing, understood as scarce-resource prioritization, is inevitable and, in a society that has goals beyond optimizing health care for individual patients—such as improving societal health care, education, or overall welfare—prudent and fair.