School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

The Politics of the Taliban’s Shadow Judiciary, 2003–2013

Abstract: The Taliban established their own judicial system in Afghanistan as both an instrument of population control and as a means to project themselves as an effective parallel government. Despite the heavy reliance on coercion, the Taliban’s method of dealing with common criminality and resolving disputes was often welcome, though the weak appeal system and the rapidity of the trials was sometimes criticized. A more structured approach to coercion, featuring rules, regulation and supervision over the military, allows less use of violence and promises increased predictability for the population, making active resistance less of a necessity. In the long run, the establishment of credible judiciary institutions reshapes the social environment and creates vested interests in favor of Taliban domination.

The Problem of De Se Assertion

Abstract: It has been long known (Perry in Philos Rev 86: 474–497, 1977; Nous 13: 3–21, 1979, Lewis in Philos Rev 88: 513–543 1981) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself, call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content. The received view, inherited from Kaplan (1989), has it that if Alma says “I am hungry,” the asserted content, or what is said, is the proposition that Alma is hungry (at a given time). I argue that the received view has difficulties handling de se assertion, i.e., contents that one expresses using the first person pronoun, to assert something about oneself. I start from the observation that when two speakers say “I am hungry,” one may truly report them as having said the same thing. It has often been held that the possibility of such reports comes from the fact that the two speakers are, after all, uttering the same words, and are in this sense “saying the same thing”. I argue that this approach fails, and that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to use the same words, or words endowed with the same meaning, in order to be truly reported as same-saying. I also argue that reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion differ significantly from such reports in the case of two speakers merely implicating the same thing.

Subliminal response priming in mixed reality: The ecological validity of a classic paradigm of perception

Abstract: Subliminal stimuli can affect perception, decision-making, and action without being accessible to conscious awareness. Most evidence supporting this notion has been obtained in highly controlled laboratory conditions. Hence, its generalization to more realistic and ecologically valid contexts is unclear. Here, we investigate the impact of subliminal cues in an immersive navigation task using the so-called eXperience Induction Machine XIM, a human accessible mixed-reality system. Subjects were asked to navigate through a maze at high speed. At irregular intervals, one group of subjects was exposed to subliminal aversive stimuli using the masking paradigm. We hypothesized that these stimuli would bias decision-making. Indeed, our results confirm this hypothesis and indicate that a subliminal channel of interaction exists between the user and the XIM. These results are relevant in our understanding of the bandwidth of communication that can be established between humans and their physical and social environment, thus opening up to new and powerful methods to interface humans and artefacts.