Kairos Collective ⁽¹¹⁾

Social sciences are shaped by a permanent debate about the relative role of structure and agency in producing human behavior. On one hand, it is undeniable that social roles, cultural norms, linguistic categories and institutions play some role in producing the patterns of social activity.

In 2005, John Ioannidis published an earth-shaking article titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”. It outlined the fact that most empirical findings in science failed to be replicated, meaning that they are likely the product of experimental settings or statistical fluctuations and do…

The increasing scale of human activity has led to a dramatic impact on the ecological condition of life on Earth, mostly notably (but not exclusively) through the increase in average temperature driven by the massive burning of fossil fuel and deforestation. This led some researcher…

Contemporary research institutions find their roots in the cooptation of scholastic guilds by the Latin Church in the medieval era, giving rise to the first Universities. The interest of those institutions directly echoed the interests of elites at the time: law, theology, arts and (in…

Like any living system, human societies continuously re-construct themselves through their own activity. Humans integrate cultural expectations through their social interactions, but can only do so by recreating the meaning of their experience from their own viewpoint. This gives the opportunity for ambiguity in the…

When we consider the manner in which human collectives take decisions or establish norms, we tend to think of these phenomenons as belonging to the discrete domain of the political. This conception is inherited from the social organization of ancient Greeks, which was centered around…

Our growing ability to describe and represent natural process has driven an undeniable progress of scientific knowledge, instantiated in a multitude of context-specific models of the dynamics of biological, cognitive, and social systems. However, philosophy (and especially the philosophy of science) struggle to capture the…

Unlike simpler physical system, biological and cognitive systems are not simply defined by their boundary conditions and their basic physical structure. They capture ambient energy gradients (sunlight, thermal sources, chemical potential within other biological systems…) and canalize them into continuously (re)constructing their own organization. This…

As a collective and as individuals, we participate in a broader process of scientific enquiries. Here is an overview of our academic work : 2023 October 18 : “Social constraints and the existential stance - What makes us human”, Session of the Active Inference in…

Our mission Kairos implements a participatory research and scientific mediation approach integrating several disciplines at the interface between natural and social sciences: cognitive sciences, cliodynamics, cultural evolution, computational sociology… Our objective is above all to integrate into the collective conception of the social, economic and…

Kairos is the ancient Greek word traducing the notion of the “instant”, the discrete time when an opportunity occurs and one can either act to seize it or fail to do so. It is meant here to convey the subjective perspective of an agent struggling…