Icarus

Icarus (6)

On participatory realism

Our views of the relation between science and the natural world tend to gravitate between two defining positions : either science offers us a true (although perhaps limited) representation of physical reality, or our representations of the world (although perhaps useful) simply lack the properties…

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Cognition *in eco*, cognition *in vitro*

The cognitive sciences are an interdisciplinary research project, built in the context of Macy’s conferences which established the computationalist paradigm comparing the functioning of the human mind with that of a computer. Sixty-seven years later, this project seems to have exploded between many competing approaches…

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Naturalism in the social sciences : a short review

“Naturalizing” social sciences ? Naturalism is a family of philosophical and scientific positions broadly stating that all observable phenomenon are part to the same causally integrated world. Natural scientist typically work toward explain those phenomenons by exposing and formalizing underlying causal relations, notably through building…

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Cliodynamics, or the study of historical processes

Cliodynamics and science-fiction Cliodynamics is a field which very existence is controversial. Among all subdisciplines of cultural evolution, “history as a science” is the only one that consistently draw criticism when it is discussed - while its claims are by no mean stronger than those…

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Beyond State

States today seem to exert an undisputed hegemony over the governance of human societies. It seems natural to project their predominance on the past as well as on the future, or at least to imagine the world outside state regulation as wild, uncultivated, and unfit…

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