L’anormalité du dommage : une notion juridique stabilisée ?

Medical liability, in accordance with liability law, is traditionally based on the triad of operative event, causal link and damage. The emergence of systems of no-fault liability gave rise to the concept of abnormal damage, which is a necessary condition for liability. In terms of medical liability, in 1958 the administrative courts ruled that this criterion was necessary in order to compensate medical damage in situations of liability for alleged misconduct, then from 1990 in situations of no-fault liability. This condition was extended to compensate medical hazard from 1993. The Court of Cassation refused to adopt a no-fault liability system, leading to unequal treatment. Thus, the law of March 4, 2002 created a system which, in situations of no-fault liability, allowed national solidarity to be engaged in the event of abnormal damage. However, the legislation did not clearly set out the character of this abnormality, and jurisprudential hesitation over this criterion has made compensation uncertain. In 2014, the administrative and judicial courts clarified their jurisprudence by adopting a more specific definition of this criterion of abnormality. However, a very restrictive view taken of this criterion means that many victims now risk being excluded from the scope of compensation. As such, this jurisprudential stability is perhaps but temporary.     

How Interpersonal Coordination Affects Individual Behavior (and Vice Versa): Experimental Analysis and Adaptive HKB Model of Social Memory

How one behaves after interacting with a friend may not be the same as before the interaction. The present study investigated which spontaneous coordination patterns formed between 2 persons and whether a remnant of the interaction remained (“social memory”). Pairs of people sat face-to-face and continuously flexed index fingers while vision between partners was manipulated to allow or prevent information exchange. Trials consisted of 3 successive 20-s intervals: without vision, with vision, and again without vision. Steady, transient, or absent phase coupling was observed during vision. In support of social memory, participants tended to remain near each other's movement frequency after the interaction ended. Furthermore, the greater the stability of interpersonal coordination, the more similar partners' postinteractional frequencies became. Proposing that social memory resulted from prior frequency adaptation, a model based on Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) oscillators reproduced the experimental findings, even for patterns observed on individual trials. Parametric manipulations revealed multiple routes to social memory through the interplay of adaptation and other model parameters. The experimental results, model, and interpretation motivate potential future research and therapeutic applications.     

Magnitude comparison in preschoolers: what counts? Influence of perceptual variables

This study examined numerosity comparison in 3-year-old children. Predictions derived from the analog numerical model and the object-file model were contrasted by testing the effects of size and ratio between numerosities to be compared. Different perceptual controls were also introduced to evaluate the hypothesis that comparison by preschoolers is based on correlated perceptual variables rather than on number per se. Finally, the relation between comparison performance and verbal counting knowledge was investigated. Results showed no evidence that preschoolers use an analog number magnitude or an object-file mechanism to compare numerosities. Rather, their inability to compare sets controlled for surface area suggests that they rely on perceptual cues. Furthermore, the development of numerosity-based representations seems to be related to some understanding of the cardinality concept.     

Effect of contextual knowledge on spatial layout extrapolation

Boundary extension (BE) refers to the tendency to remember a previously perceived scene with a greater spatial expanse. This phenomenon is described as resulting from different sources of information: external (i.e., visual) and internally driven (i.e., amodal, conceptual, and contextual) information. Although the literature has emphasized the role of top-down expectations to account for layout extrapolation, their effect has rarely been tested experimentally. In this research, we attempted to determine how visual context affects BE, as a function of scene exposure duration (long, short). To induce knowledge about visual context, the memorization phase of the camera distance paradigm was preceded by a preexposure phase, during which each of the to-be-memorized scenes was presented in a larger spatial framework. In an initial experiment, we examined the effect of contextual knowledge with presentation duration, allowing for in-depth processing of visual information during encoding (i.e., 15 s). The results indicated that participants exposed to the preexposure showed decreased BE, and displayed no directional memory error in some conditions. Because the effect of context is known to occur at an early stage of scene perception, in a second experiment we sought to determine whether the effect of a preview occurs during the first fixation on a visual scene. The results indicated that BE seems not to be modulated by this factor at very brief presentation durations. These results are discussed in light of current visual scene representation theories.     

Dissuasion as a Rhetorical Technique of Creating a General Disposition to Inaction

In this paper, it is argued that the classical rhetorical framework undergoes a transformation because of an important change in Western thought. Following this hypothesis, I analyze a rhetorical notion of “dissuasion” as a rhetorical technique of creating a “general disposition to inaction” in addition to a classical rhetorical notion of “dissuasion” that aims at “refraining from an action”.     

Intensity seeking and novelty seeking: Their relationship to adolescent risk behavior and occupational interests

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that individual differences in sensation seeking account for adolescents’ risk behavior and vocational interests. We relied on Arnett’s (1994) conceptualization of sensation seeking as involving a need for intensity and a need for novelty, neither of which includes the willingness to take risks. Self-report scales measuring intensity seeking, novelty seeking, impulsiveness, risk behavior and vocational interest were administered to 636 adolescents. New scales measuring intensity seeking (IS) and novelty seeking (NS) were used. Regression analyses showed that IS and to a lesser extent NS accounted for a small part of variance of risk behavior, independent of impulsiveness. IS and NS accounted for vocational interests. The discussion emphasizes the importance of disentangling sensation seeking as a trait from willingness to take risks when one intends to analyse the effect of the former on risk behavior.     

Explaining the Feelings of Justice

Philosophical theories about justice feelings and axiological feelings generally suffer from the fact that they look for simple criteria of justice, legitimacy, fairness. For this reason, they appear as of little help to account for the findings from sociological empirical studies. Weber's notion of "axiological rationality" can be interpreted as suggesting a "cognitivist" theory of axiological feelings. According to this theory, the causes responsible for the fact that a social actor endorses an axiological statement would not be basically different from the causes responsible for his endorsement of a representational statement. He would endorse the statement "X is fair" as he endorses "X is true", because these statements appear to him as grounded on strong reasons, though he may not perceive these reasons explicitly. This cognitivist theory was used by analysts of collective moral sentiments, as Adam Smith, before Max Weber. A careful examination of two empirical studies shows that the cognitivist theory can make the observational findings more easily understandable. The "cognitivist theory" eliminates the weaknesses of the major general philosophical and sociological theories of axiological feelings. It shows notably that these feelings can be context-dependent without this contextuality making them irrational. This theory includes two major principles: that instrumental rationality does not overlap with rationality shortly; that there are no simple criteria of "fairness", "legitimacy", etc.     

Automatic identification of storytelling responses to past-behavior interview questions via machine learning

Structured interviews often feature past-behavior questions, where applicants are asked to tell a story about past work experience. Applicants often experience difficulties producing such stories. Automatic analyses of applicant behavior in responding to past-behavior questions may constitute a basis for delivering feedback and thus helping them improve their performance. We used machine learning algorithms to predict storytelling in transcribed speech of participants responding to past-behavior questions in a simulated selection interview. Responses were coded as to whether they featured a story or not. For each story, utterances were also manually coded as to whether they described the situation, the task/action performed, or results obtained. The algorithms predicted whether a response features a story or not (best accuracy: 78%), as well as the count of situation, task/action, and response utterances. These findings contribute to better automatic identification of verbal responses to past-behavior questions and may support automatic provision of feedback to applicants about their interview performance.     

The Notion of Pseudo-Argument in Perelman’s Thought

According to Perelman (Rhétoriques, Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1989: 80), a pseudo-argument is an argument that is supposed to be convincing from a given audience viewpoint, while it is not from another audience viewpoint. Such a claim raises the traditional problem of the boundaries between the well known “convince versus persuade” dichotomy. This paper aims at investigating it from a contemporary rhetorical and argumentative perspective which will take into account the fictional dimension of persuasion. In this perspective, it will be claimed that the notion of an “as if” argument better fits to some rhetorical phenomena.