Intuitive credit attribution and the priority rule

International audienceWhen a good idea is discovered, who gets credit for it? This is an important question in science, the arts, law, and everyday life. We suggest that people have intuitions about credit ownership that depend on three factors: (i) whether the idea suggests the discoverer is competent; (ii) whether the discovery elicits gratitude toward the discoverer; (iii) who the first individual to come up with the idea is. We test these intuitions in three vignette experiments with UK participants, in the context of priority disputes in science. In Experiment 1, participants find a discoverer less competent and award less credit to them for a scientific idea if they perceive that the discoverer could have plagiarized another discoverer, but attributions of credit are also shown to differ from attributions of competence. In Experiment 2, participants are more grateful toward, and award more credit to a discoverer who makes their discovery public. In Experiment 3, participants are more biased toward the first discoverer in terms of credit attribution than in terms of competence attribution or feelings of gratitude. In conclusion, we suggest that intuitions of credit ownership help explain the popularity and endurance of the priority rule in science, by which all the credit of a discovery is supposed to go to the first discoverer

Modelling contrast and feature inventory: The nature of [web] in French Sign Language

International audienceSign language feature-based models use distinctive features to describe the phonological structure of signs. We use near-minimal pairs and phonological processes like productivity and neutralisation in French Sign Language to show that the feature [web], which refers to the webbing part of the fingers, should be (re)introduced in the list of phonologically active features. In discussing potential cases of [web] in other sign languages and the impact on the shape of phonological inventories, we first offer an account of [web] in terms of a location feature in line with most traditional feature-geometry models. We then offer some speculations on why a more uniform characterisation of [web] and the features in the same subclass in terms of the orientation type results in more economical models

Authority, Legitimacy and the Expert Layman Problem

International audienceExpertise is ubiquitous in contemporary societies. We are epistemically dependent on the knowledge of experts on many different issues. This poses several problems for democracy. Where do the authority and legitimacy of expertise come from? Experts are not elected: they are appointed by governments or recruited by media to give their opinion on important issues such as health, security and environment. Their opinion is preferred to that of the average citizen and is used by governments for prescribing policies that impact the whole society (see the restriction measures taken by most governments during Covid-19). In this chapter, I analyze the role of experts in democracy and the obstacles to their acceptance by the citizens, given that they violate two principles of democracy: neutrality, that is the idea that the State should not prefer a specific opinion on the others, and equality, that is, one person, one vote, independently of their cognitive capacities

Tolerance and degrees of truth

International audienceThis paper explores the relations between two logical approaches to vagueness: on the one hand the fuzzy approach defended by Smith (2008), and on the other the strict-tolerant approach defended by Cobreros, Egré, Ripley and van Rooij (2012). Although the former approach uses continuum many values and the latter implicitly four, we show that both approaches can be subsumed under a common three-valued framework. In particular, we defend the claim that Smith's continuum many values are not needed to solve what Smith calls `the jolt problem', and we show that they are not needed for his account of logical consequence either. Not only are three values enough to satisfy Smith's central desiderata, but they also allow us to internalize Smith's closeness principle in the form of a tolerance principle at the object-language. The reduction, we argue, matters for the justification of many-valuedness in an adequate theory of vague language

Measuring vagueness and subjectivity in texts: from symbolic to neural VAGO

International audienceWe present a hybrid approach to the automated measurement of vagueness and subjectivity in texts. We first introduce the expert system VAGO, we illustrate it on a small benchmark of fact vs. opinion sentences, and then test it on the larger French press corpus FreSaDa to confirm the higher prevalence of subjective markers in satirical vs. regular texts. We then build a neural clone of VAGO, based on a BERT-like architecture, trained on the symbolic VAGO scores obtained on FreSaDa. Using explainability tools (LIME), we show the interest of this neural version for the enrichment of the lexicons of the symbolic version, and for the production of versions in other languages

On the Optimality of Vagueness: "Around", "Between" and the Gricean Maxims

Why is ordinary language vague? We argue that in contexts in which a cooperative speaker is not perfectly informed about the world, the use of vague expressions can offer an optimal tradeoff between truthfulness (Gricean Quality) and informativeness (Gricean Quantity). Focusing on expressions of approximation such as "around", which are semantically vague, we show that they allow the speaker to convey indirect probabilistic information, in a way that can give the listener a more accurate representation of the information available to the speaker than any more precise expression would (intervals of the form "between"). That is, vague sentences can be more informative than their precise counterparts. We give a probabilistic treatment of the interpretation of "around", and offer a model for the interpretation and use of "around"statements within the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In our account, the shape of the speaker's distribution matters in ways not predicted by the Lexical Uncertainty model standardly used in the RSA framework for vague predicates. We use our approach to draw further lessons concerning the semantic flexibility of vague expressions and their irreducibility to more precise meanings

Exhaustivity and anti-exhaustivity in the RSA framework: Testing the effect of prior beliefs.

International audienceDuring communication, the interpretation of utterances is sensitive to a listener's probabilistic prior beliefs. In this paper, we focus on the influence of prior beliefs on so-called exhaustivity interpretations, whereby a sentence such as Mary came is understood to mean that only Mary came. Two theoretical origins for exhaustivity effects have been proposed in the previous literature. On the one hand are perspectives that view these inferences as the result of a purely pragmatic process (as in the classical Gricean view, and more recent Bayesian approaches); on the other hand are proposals that treat them as the result of an encapsulated semantic mechanism (Chierchia, Fox & Spector 2012). We gain traction on adjudicating between these two approaches with new theoretical and experimental evidence, focusing on the behavior of different models for exhaustivity effects, all of which fit under the Rational Speech Act modeling framework (RSA, Frank & Goodman, 2012). Some (but not all!) of these models include an encapsulated semantic mechanism. Theoretically, we demonstrate that many RSA models predict not only exhaustivity, but also anti-exhaustivity, whereby “Mary came” would convey that Mary and someone else came. We evaluate these models against data obtained in a new study which tested the effects of prior beliefs on both production and comprehension, improving on previous empirical work. We find that the models which have the best fit to human behavior include an encapsulated exhaustivity mechanism. We conclude that, on the one hand, in the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics, semantics plays a larger role than is often thought, but, on the other hand, the tradeoff between informativity and cost which characterizes all RSA models does play a central role for genuine pragmatic effects

Happy Thoughts: The Role of Communion in Accepting and Sharing (Mis)Beliefs

International audienceThe negativity bias favors the cultural diffusion of negative beliefs, yet many common (mis)beliefs-naturopathy works, there's a heaven-are positive. Why? People might share 'happy thoughts'-beliefs that might make others happy-to display their kindness. Five experiments conducted among Japanese and English-speaking participants (N = 2412) show that: (i) people higher on communion are more likely to believe and share happier beliefs, by contrast with people higher in competence and dominance; (ii) when they want to appear nice and kind, rather than competent and dominant, people avoid sharing sad beliefs, and instead prefer sharing happy beliefs; (iii) sharing happier beliefs instead of sad beliefs leads to being perceived as nicer and kinder; and (iv) sharing happy beliefs instead of sad beliefs leads to being perceived as less dominant. Happy beliefs could spread, despite a general negativity bias, because they allow their senders to signal kindness

New perspectives: An Introduction

International audienceIn this short Introduction to the present section, I will first briefly point out the reasons why the chapters collected here present original research in the context of the philosophy of the practice of mathematics, and open even newer perspectives. It is important to note that one crucial issue for future research will be to explore the connections within these chapters and with other chapters included in other sectionsin particular, but not exclusively, the sections on Proof, on "Experimental" mathematics, and on the Semiology of Mathematical Practice. Second, I will present a shortand not exhaustivesummary of the themes that are tackled in the chapters. There will be overlaps and common threads: These chapters are indeed the final product of several discussions and exchanges within the community of the philosophers of the mathematical practice, which is extending toward other regions of philosophy thus blurring standard boundaries

On Elicited Data in Sign Language

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