Mikael Cozic

La logique est un compagnon naturel de la philosophie. Qu'est-ce qu'un raisonnement correct? Qu'est-ce qu'une preuve? Peut-on definir le concept de verite? Que faire face aux paradoxes? Ces questions sont debattues par les philosophes depuis l'Antiquite; et la logique moderne, usant de langages formels, developpe une analyse rigoureuse de ces concepts les plus fondamentaux. Les onze textes classiques reunis ici proposent un retour reflexif sur cette discipline et sur la signification philosophique de ses achevements. Ils s'adressent a quiconque souhaite prendre la mesure des enjeux conceptuels de la logique, et a tous les etudiants desireux de completer leur apprentissage de la discipline par une reflexion epistemologique sur ses fondements.

Le Précis de philosophie des sciences vise à présenter, de manière pédagogique, l'état actuel des grandes questions et des grands domaines de la philosophie des sciences. C'est un ouvrage de niveau "intermédiaire", entre les ouvrages d'initiation et les ouvrages de recherche. Il peut être utilisé comme manuel pour des cours de philosophie des sciences au niveau Master, ainsi que dans le cadre de la préparation aux nouvelles épreuves d'épistémologie des CAPES scientifiques. Il a notamment pour vocation de servir de support de cours pour des enseignements en épistémologie et philosophie des sciences de niveau L3, M1 et M2.

Philosophy of science studies the methods, theories, and concepts used by scientists. It mainly developed as a field in its own right during the twentieth century and is now a diversified and lively research area. This book surveys the current state of the discipline by focusing on central themes like confirmation of scientific hypotheses, scientific explanation, causality, the relationship between science and metaphysics, scientific change, the relationship between philosophy of science and science studies, the role of theories and models, unity of science. These themes define general philosophy of science. The book also presents sub-disciplines in the philosophy of science dealing with the main sciences: logic, mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, cognitive science, linguistics, social sciences, and economics. While it is common to address the specific philosophical problems raised by physics and biology in such a book, the place assigned to the philosophy of special sciences is much more unusual. Most authors collaborate on a regular basis in their research or teaching and share a common vision of philosophy of science and its place within philosophy and academia in general. The chapters have been written in close accordance with the three editors, thus achieving strong unity of style and tone.

Nudge is a concept of policy intervention that originates in Thaler and Sunstein's (2008) popular eponymous book. Following their own hints, we distinguish three properties of nudge interventions: they redirect individual choices by only slightly altering choice conditions (here nudge 1), they use rationality failures instrumentally (here nudge 2), and they alleviate the unfavourable effects of these failures (here nudge 3). We explore each property in semantic detail and show that no entailment relation holds between them. This calls into question the theoretical unity of nudge, as intended by Thaler and Sunstein and most followers. We eventually recommend pursuing each property separately, both in policy research and at the foundational level. We particularly emphasize the need of reconsidering the respective roles of decision theory and behavioural economics to delineate nudge 2 correctly. The paper differs from most of the literature in focusing on the definitional rather than the normative problems of nudge.

Jeffrey conditioning tells an agent how to update her priors so as to grant a given probability to a particular event. Weighted averaging tells an agent how to update her priors on the basis of testimonial evidence, by changing to a weighted arithmetic mean of her priors and another agent’s priors. We show that, in their respective settings, these two seemingly so different updating rules are axiomatized by essentially the same invariance condition. As a by-product, this sheds new light on the question how weighted averaging should be extended to deal with cases when the other agent reveals only parts of her probability distribution. The combination of weighted averaging and Jeffrey conditioning is a comprehensive updating rule to deal with such cases, which is again axiomatized by invariance under embedding. We conclude that, even though one may dislike Jeffrey conditioning or weighted averaging, the two make a natural pair when a policy for partial testimonial evidence is needed.

One of the most impressive changes in economics and decision sciences is the emergence and fast growth of so-called “behavioral” economics and neuroeconomics. These fields raise several methodological issues, some of them being currently intensively discussed. Amongst those issues, the following is prominent : what is the epistemic relevance of non-behavioral or “cognitive” data, i.e. data which bear on cognitive processes and states involved in decision making ? F. Gul and W. Pesendorfer (2005/2008) have vigorously criticized the idea that these data could be relevant for economics and decision sciences. Their criticisms became the focal point of a very active methodological literature. In this paper, we reconstruct and discuss Gul and Pesendorfer’s views and arguments. Although we are not convinced by some of them, we believe the authors hint a genuine issue : the “missing links” issue.

Adams’ thesis is generally agreed to be linguistically compelling for simple conditionals with factual antecedent and consequent. We propose a derivation of Adams’ thesis from the Lewis- Kratzer analysis of if-clauses as domain restrictors, applied to probability operators. We argue that Lewis’s triviality result may be seen as a result of inexpressibility of the kind familiar in generalized quantifier theory. Some implications of the Lewis- Kratzer analysis are presented concerning the assignment of probabilities to compounds of conditionals.

Since the ground-breaking contributions of M. Dummett (Dummett 1978), it is widely recognized that anti-realist principles have a critical impact on the choice of logic. Dummett argued that classical logic does not satisfy the requirements of such principles but that intuitionistic logic does. Some philosophers have adopted a more radical stance and argued for a more important departure from classical logic on the basis of similar intuitions. In particular, J. Dubucs and M. Marion (?) and (Dubucs 2002) have recently argued that a proper understanding of anti-realism should lead us to the so-called substructural logics (see (Restall 2000)) and especially linear logic. The aim of this paper is to scrutinize this proposal. We will raise two kinds of issues for the radical anti-realist. First, we will stress the fact that it is hard to live without structural rules. Second, we will argue that, from an anti- realist perspective, there is currently no satisfactory justi cation to the shift to substructural logics

Contemporary decision theory places crucial emphasis on a family of mathematical results called representation theorems, which relate criteria for evaluating the available options to axioms pertaining to the decision-maker’s preferences. Various claims have been made concerning the reasons for the importance of these results. The goal of this article is to assess their semantic role: representation theorems are purported to provide definitions of the decision-theoretic concepts involved in the evaluation criteria. In particular, this claim shall be examined from the perspective of philosophical theories of the meaning of theoretical terms