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Base de données des enseignements et séminaires de l'EHESS

L’esprit, soutiennent les externalistes en philosophie de l’esprit et en épistémologie, ne se limite pas aux confins de la peau et du cerveau, mais s’étend dans les artefacts où nous stockons nos contenus mémoriels et notre savoir, voire aux institutions et au social tout entier. Quelle est la portée de cette extension des connaissances ? On examinera principalement les thèses d’esprit étendu en philosophie de l’esprit, en épistémologie et en épistémologie sociale, et leurs limites.

Ce séminaire est accessible sur la plateforme d'enseignement de l'Environnement numérique de travail de l'EHESS :

7 mars : Externalisme et internalisme en épistémologie

14 mars : Le témoignage et la connaissance sociale étendue

21 mars : Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern, professeur invité à l'EHESS), « Socially Extended Knowledge »

A fairly common view in current work in collective epistemology is that groups can have knowledge that not a single one of its members possesses. More precisely, it is argued that a group, G, can know that p even when not a single member of G knows that p. Recently, an even more radical conception of socially extended knowledge has been defended by Alexander Bird, according to which knowledge can be possessed, not only by structured groups with a unified goal—like the crew of a ship—but also by large and unstructured collective entities with diverse aims. He calls this phenomenon “social knowing” or “social knowledge,” paradigmatic instances of which are “North Korea knows how to build an atomic bomb,” or “The growth of scientific knowledge has been exponential since the scientific revolution.” In such cases, a collective entity is said to know that p despite the fact that not a single individual member is even aware that p, thereby showing that social knowledge does not supervene on  the mental states of individuals. In this paper, I argue that knowledge is not socially extended in the very radical sense defended by Bird. My argument is twofold: first, I show that endorsing “social knowing” or “social knowledge” leads to serious epistemological problems and, second, I suggest that the work done by ascribing social knowledge to collective entities can instead be done by describing such entities as being in a position to know.

Jeudi 22 mars (salle BS1_05, 1^er sous-sol, 54 bd Raspail, de 14 h à 18 h) : Atelier Testimony and expertise/Témoignage et expertise (programme KNOW SOC PSL)

• Jennifer Lackey, « Experts and Peer Disagreement »
  It is often argued that widespread disagreement among epistemic peers in a domain threatens expertise in that domain. This is taken to lead to a fairly robust form of skepticism: there are no experts in areas rife with peer disagreement, such as religion and politics. In this paper, I sketch two different conceptions of expertise: what I call the expert-as-authority and the expert-as-advisor models. While expertise understood as authoritative renders the problem posed by widespread peer disagreement intractable, I argue that understanding expertise in terms of advice has the resources for a much more satisfying response to this problem.
• Robin McKenna (Vienna), « The genealogical method in epistemology »
  In 1990 Edward Craig published a book called Knowledge and the State of Nature in which he introduced and defended a genealogical approach to epistemology. In recent years Craig’s book has attracted a lot of attention, and his distinctive approach has been put to a wide range of uses including anti-realist metaepistemology, contextualism, relativism, anti-luck virtue epistemology, epistemic injustice, value of knowledge, pragmatism and virtue epistemology. While the number of objections to Craig’s approach has accumulated, there has been no sustained attempt to develop answers to these objections. In this paper we provide answers to several important objections in the literature.
• Giovanni Tuzet (Bocconi), « Testimony and Hearsay »
  The traditional ban on hearsay in legal factfinding seems to support a reductionist view of testimony: testimony is valuable insofar as it is based on first-hand knowledge, that is, on perception reported as such, with no inference nor assessment by the testifier. However, contemporary legal systems are quite liberal in the admission of hearsay, and this counts as an argument in favor of anti-reductionism.

28 mars : Jennifer Lackey, « More on Group Belief »

4 avril : Baron Reed (Northwestern, programme Knowsoc PSL) : Practical interests and reasons for belief

I examine the relationship between the practical and the epis temic. I reject two broad ways of thinking about that relationship—pragmatic encroachment and an epistemology centered on the truth norm—before offering a new approach, which explains epistemic normativity as arisingfrom our practical commitment to a social practice that has arisen from our need to share information with one another. The social practice view captures theimportance of knowledge and epistemic reasons to action, while preventing our practical interests from playing a disruptive role in how we arrive at our beliefs.

11 avril (salle A04_47, 54 bd Raspail 75006 Paris) : Baron Reed (Northwestern, programme Knowsoc PSL) Doubt  

9 mai (salle AS1_24, 54 bd Raspail 75006 Paris) : L’esprit étendu

16 mai : La connaissance étendue

23 mai : Le problème des fake news

30 mai : Massimo Salgaro (IEA, Paris et Université de Vérone), « Does the (e-) book have an aura ? »

Starting from Walter Benjamin’s definition  of aura as an “effect of a work of art being uniquely present in time and space,” the aim of the present study is to investigate whether the kind of reading support (antique book and kindle) and age of participants might affect the social prestige (the so-called aura) judgment of a literary work (prose and verse). The experiment consists of an offline study. Participants, belonging to two age groups, are first asked to read short prose and poetry texts in two different formats and then to complete a questionnaire. Our hypothesis is that the antique book carries higher social prestige for the older generation than the digital one, whereas the younger generation doesn’t make any difference between the two different formats. The study is going to be embedded in a growing body of studies on the difference between reading literature on paper and on screen and on the familiarity of the digital media as a core problem of contemporary mediorama.

Séance supplémentaire date à déterminer 6 juin

Le séminaire a porté sur la connaissance étendue. Il a porté sur les problèmes épistémologiques de la connaissance de groupe et particulièrement celui de la connaissance étendue : des connaissances externes à un individu, telles que celles que stockent les ordinateurs et l’internet, peuvent-elles faire partie d’une connaissance sociale étendue ? Ce séminaire a été associé au programme PSL EHESS Know soc Knowledge first social Epistemology, à travers notamment trois colloques. Il a discuté également des problèmes touchant aux fake news, à la vérité et la démocratie, et à la nature de la connaissance digitale.
Des travaux de psychologues cognitifs, d’épistémologues et de logiciens ont été associés à ce séminaire, qui a reçu trois invités : Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern University), Baron Reed (Northwestern University) et Massimo Salgaro (Università di Verona, IEA, Paris).
Le séminaire a également été associé à 3 colloques organisés dans le cadre du projet PSL EHESS Knowledge first social epistemology :
21 novembre 2017 : Épistémologie digitale (K. Ahlstrom, London, E. Olsson, Lund, M. Cozic, Paris-Est) ; 21 novembre 2017 : Politique, Démocratie et vérité, Collège de France (M.-P. Lynch, Storrs, J.-B. Guillon, CdF, C. Tiercelin, CdF, P. Roussin, CRAL, P. Engel) ; 10 avril 2018 : Épistémologie sociale et scepticisme, Collège de France (B. Reed, Northwestern, C. Grellard, EPHE, P. Engel, J.-B. Guillon, CdF, J. Vollet, Hambourg).
Chacun de ces séminaires a été accompagné de travaux dirigés sous la responsabilité de Charles Groulier, doctorant.

Publications

• « Alain Dewerpe et l’histoire dormante du secret », L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, 17 bis, 2017, [en ligne], http://journals.openedition.org/acrh/7996 ; DOI : 10.4000/acrh.7996
• « Davidson on the Objectivity of Values and Reasons », Argumenta, 3, 1, 2017, p. 54-68.
• « La connaissance », dans Petit traité des valeurs, sous la dir. de J. Deonna et E. Tieffenbach, Paris, Ithaque, 2017, p. 87-96.
• « Benda and Mencken, a Parallel », dans Mélanges offerts à Patrizia Lombardo, Université de Genève, 2017, https://www.unige.ch/lettres/framo/files/7415/1733/1688/Benda_and_Mencken_11.17-_.pdf
• Direction du Dossier Bêtises, En attendant Nadeau, n° 60, 2018, https://www.en-attendant-nadeau.fr/dossier-betises/
• « The Doxastic Zoo », dans Eva Picardi on Language, Analysis and History, sous la dir. d’A. Coliva et P. Leonardi, Londres, Palgrave McMillan, 2018, p. 297-316.
• « Curiosity as an Epistemic Vice », dans The Moral Psychology of curiosity, sous la dir. d’I. Inan et alii, Lanham-Londres, Rowan and Littlefield, 2018, p. 265-290.
• « René Pommier, le dernier des Voltairicans », revue Zilsel, 2018, p. 413-423.
• « De la bêtise à la connerie », dans Psychologie de la connerie, sous la dir. de J.-F. Marmion, Sciences Humaines, Auxerre, 2018.
• Préface à Larry Laudan, Science et relativisme, Éditions Matériologiques, 2018, p. 3-20.
• Préface à Jay R. Rosenberg, Philosopher, kit de démarrage, Markus, Haller, Geneve, 2018, p. 4-20.
• Review of Verheggen et Myers, Notre Dame Reviews in philosophy, 2018, https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/donald-davidsons-triangulation-argument-a-philosophical-inquiry/