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13Review - Medical Nihilism, Jacob Stegenga, OUP, 2018Lato Sensu: Revue de la Société de Philosophie des Sciences 6 (1): 16-19. 2019.
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13Zeynep P amuk, Politics and expertise : how to use science in a democratic society, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2021Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 117 (1): 142-144. 2023.
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15Joint Improvisation, Minimalism and Pluralism about Joint actionJournal of Social Ontology 7 (1): 97-118. 2021.This paper introduces freely improvised joint actions, a class of joint actions characterized by highly unspecific goals and the unavailability of shared plans. For example, walking together just for the sake of walking together with no specific destination or path in mind provides an ordinary example of FIJAs, along with examples in the arts, e.g., collective free improvisation in music, improv theater, or contact improvisation in dance. We argue that classic philosophical accounts of joint act…Read more
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25Unexplained cooperationEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3): 1-21. 2021.Social evolution theory provides a wide array of successful evolutionary explanations for cooperative traits. However and surprisingly, a number of cases of unexplained cooperative behaviour remain. Shouldn’t they cast doubt on the relevance of the theory, or even disconfirm it? This depends on whether the theory is akin to a research programme such as adaptationism, or closer to a theory – a set of compatible, confirmable hypotheses. In order to find out, we focus on the two main tenets of soci…Read more
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31Joint Improvisation, Minimalism and Pluralism about Joint actionJournal of Social Ontology 7 (1): 97-118. 2021.This paper introduces freely improvised joint actions, a class of joint actions characterized by highly unspecific goals and the unavailability of shared plans. For example, walking together just for the sake of walking together with no specific destination or path in mind provides an ordinary example of FIJAs, along with examples in the arts, e.g., collective free improvisation in music, improv theater, or contact improvisation in dance. We argue that classic philosophical accounts of joint act…Read more
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Joint Action: Why So Minimal?In Anika Fiebich (ed.), Minimal Cooperation and Shared Agency. 2020.The repeated attempts to characterise joint action have displayed a common trend towards minimalism – whether they focus on minimal situations, minimal characterisations, cognitively minimal agents or minimal cognitive mechanisms. This trend also appears to lead to pluralism: the idea that joint action may receive multiple, equally valid characterisations. In this paper, I argue for a pluralist stance regarding joint action, although one stemming from maximalism. Starting from the description of…Read more
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Explaining Prosocial Behavior: Team Reasoning or Social Influence?In Michiru Nagatsu & Attila Ruzzene (eds.), Contemporary Philosophy and Social Science: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. 2019.
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248Virtues and vices in scientific practiceSynthese 194 (5). 2017.The role intellectual virtues play in scientific inquiry has raised significant discussions in the recent literature. A number of authors have recently explored the link between virtue epistemology and philosophy of science with the aim to show whether epistemic virtues can contribute to the resolution of the problem of theory choice. This paper analyses how intellectual virtues can be beneficial for successful resolution of theory choice. We explore the role of virtues as well as vices in scien…Read more
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Coopération et altruismeIn Thierry Hoquet & Francesca Merlin (eds.), Précis de Philosophie de la Biologie. 2014.
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Constraints on Joint ActionIn Mattia Gallotti & John Michael (eds.), Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition. 2014.There exist many competing philosophical definitions of joint action and no clear criteria to decide between them; so far the search for definitions has by and large been a semantical enterprise rather than an empirical one. This chapter describes and assesses several constraints that could help converge towards a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for joint action. The tightness constraint favours definitions that fit joint actions in which the links between agents are as relaxed as pos…Read more
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16Trolls, bans and reverts: simulating WikipediaSynthese 198 (1): 451-470. 2018.The surprisingly high reliability of Wikipedia has often been seen as a beneficial effect of the aggregation of diverse contributors, or as an instance of the wisdom of crowds phenomenon; additional factors such as elite contributors, Wikipedia’s policy or its administration have also been mentioned. We adjudicate between such explanations by modelling and simulating the evolution of a Wikipedia entry. The main threat to Wikipedia’s reliability, namely the presence of epistemically disruptive ag…Read more
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16Social evolution and the individual-as-maximising-agent analogyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 79 101225. 2020.
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783Deception: a functional accountPhilosophical Studies 175 (3): 579-600. 2018.Deception has recently received a significant amount of attention. One of main reasons is that it lies at the intersection of various areas of research, such as the evolution of cooperation, animal communication, ethics or epistemology. This essay focuses on the biological approach to deception and argues that standard definitions put forward by most biologists and philosophers are inadequate. We provide a functional account of deception which solves the problems of extant accounts in virtue of …Read more
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28Knowledge transfer without knowledge? The case of agentive metaphors in biologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 72 49-58. 2018.
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12Sens commun et connaissance communeLes Etudes Philosophiques 123 (4): 555-578. 2017.Les concepts de sens commun et de connaissance commune, bien qu’intuitivement proches, divergent selon leurs analyses philosophiques traditionnelles. Le sens commun est polysémique et possède une dimension sociologique, tandis que la connaissance commune est un état épistémique collectif qui a reçu des définitions formelles. Cet article montre que ces divergences ne sont qu’apparentes en révélant plusieurs points de convergence significatifs entre les deux concepts. En particulier, le sens commu…Read more
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Agir EnsembleVrin. 2017.Marcher ensemble, porter une table à plusieurs, participer à une manifestation, et même discuter, sont autant d’exemples de coopération humaine – d’action conjointe. Par opposition, les mouvements d’une foule dans la rue, la course simultanée d’individus vers un abri lorsque l’orage se déclare ne sont que des actions collectives. Mais comment distinguer les unes des autres? Quand pouvons-nous dire que des personnes ont vraiment agi ensemble? Et comment expliquer qu’ils coopèrent même lorsque le …Read more
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353Social norms and game theory: harmony or discord?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (3): 551-587. 2013.Recent years have witnessed an increased number of game-theoretic approaches to social norms, which apparently share some common vocabulary and methods. We describe three major approaches of this kind (due to Binmore, Bicchieri and Gintis), before comparing them systematically on five crucial themes: generality of the solution, preference transformation, punishment, epistemic conditions and type of explanation. This allows us to show that these theories are, by and large, less compatible than th…Read more
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35Robustness in evolutionary explanations: a positive accountBiology and Philosophy 32 (1): 73-96. 2017.Robustness analysis is widespread in science, but philosophers have struggled to justify its confirmatory power. We provide a positive account of robustness by analysing some explicit and implicit uses of within and across-model robustness in evolutionary theory. We argue that appeals to robustness are usually difficult to justify because they aim to increase the likeliness that a phenomenon obtains. However, we show that robust results are necessary for explanations of phenomena with specific p…Read more
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16The formal Darwinism project: editors' introductionBiology and Philosophy 29 (2): 153-154. 2014.
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70Group adaptation, formal darwinism and contextual analysisJournal of Evolutionary Biology 25 (6). 2012.We consider the question: under what circumstances can the concept of adaptation be applied to groups, rather than individuals? Gardner and Grafen (2009, J. Evol. Biol.22: 659–671) develop a novel approach to this question, building on Grafen's ‘formal Darwinism’ project, which defines adaptation in terms of links between evolutionary dynamics and optimization. They conclude that only clonal groups, and to a lesser extent groups in which reproductive competition is repressed, can be considered a…Read more
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67The Fragility of Common KnowledgeErkenntnis 82 (3): 451-472. 2017.Ordinary common knowledge is formally expressed by strong probabilistic common belief. How strong exactly? The question can be answered by drawing from the similar equivalence, recently explored, between plain and probabilistic individual beliefs. I argue that such a move entails that common knowledge displays a double fragility: as a description of a collective state and as a phenomenon, because it can respectively disappear as group size increases, or more worryingly as the epistemic context c…Read more
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21Comment on Raimo Tuomela. Joint Action: How Rational? How Irreducible?Analyse & Kritik 33 (1): 87-92. 2011.In his 'Cooperation as joint action', Tuomela presents a we-mode account of cooperation, which he argues has several advantages over an individual account. This commentary examines to what extent this is true. In particular, I assess three related characteristics of we-mode joint action: its possible rationality, its greater efficiency, and its alleged irreducibility to purely individual properties, which are recurring points of the article.
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86The epistemic core of weak joint actionPhilosophical Psychology (1): 1-24. 2013.Over the last three decades, joint action has received various definitions, which for all their differences share many features. However, they cannot fit some perplexing cases of weak joint action, such as demonstrations, where agents rely on distinct epistemic sources, and as a result, have no first-hand knowledge about each other. I argue that one major reason why the definition of such collective actions is akin to the classical ones is that it crucially relies on the concept of common knowle…Read more
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48Shared adaptiveness is not group adaptationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (5): 499-500. 2013.Climate stresses and monetary resources seem to lead to different collective adaptations. However, the reference to adaptation and to ambiguous collective dimensions appears premature; populations may entertain nothing more than shared adaptiveness. At this point, the intricacy of the underlying evolutionary processes (cultural selection, fitness-utility decoupling) very much obscures any diagnosis based on correlations
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92Review of Brian Skyrms, Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (11). 2010.
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Parallels between joint action and biological individualityIn Thomas Pradeu & Alexandre Guay (eds.), Individuals Across The Sciences, Oxford University Press. 2015.There exist many definitions of human joint action, or of what makes a group similar to an individual. However, they do not agree and are not directly reducible to each other. This multiplicity is due to a lack of constraints on them. I argue that they should at least meet an efficiency constraint: any account of joint action has to justify how it reliably leads agents to cooperation. One avenue consists in exploring the analogy between definitions of joint action and of biological individuality…Read more
Areas of Interest
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