Dear members of the ILCB community,

The new academic year is now well underway, and I would like to extend a particularly warm welcome to all our new PhD students and new colleagues! I hope you will quickly feel at home in the ILCB community and take full advantage of the many opportunities the ILCB has to offer. A small reminder to their supervisors: please make sure your new PhD students join the ILCB and our PhD group! All it takes is a simple email to Nadera Bureau (at univ-amu dot fr). 

A big thank you to everyone who attended our October Lunch Talk with Christian Kell. It was an excellent talk, followed by lively discussions, and we even managed to hold it in person at the INS, despite the somewhat unpredictable circumstances of the past few weeks. 

This month's newsletter once again illustrates the remarkable diversity of research within the ILCB, from spontaneous conversations and early child–caregiver interactions to dopamine, neural oscillations, predictive processing, and the neural dynamics of speech and music. Quite a range of topics, but that is precisely what makes the ILCB such an exciting place.

I particularly enjoyed this month's quote from our colleagues' recent Intellectica paper on the theoretical challenges of cognitive science. Their suggestion that cognitive scientists may no longer have the time or energy to engage in major theoretical battles is an intriguing one. Whether that is a sign of scientific maturity or just collective exhaustion is, of course, open to debate!

Best wishes,

Johannes

« Cette " guerre globale " dont il est question chez Taylor est le nom qu’il donne à un conflit entre une modernité naturaliste (les " Lumières "), qui considère le langage comme un pur outil de désignation descriptible formellement […] et une modernité romantique-herméneutique qui voit dans le langage le médium constitutif de l’humain. Or si cette guerre a eu lieu, […] cette guerre n’est plus aujourd’hui qu’un objet d’histoire. Non pas que les deux camps se soient réconciliés, au bénéfice d’une voie moyenne qui convienne à toutes et tous sur le mode du compromis, mais tout simplement parce qu’il semble que les acteurs et actrices des sciences cognitives, comme nous l’avons déjà indiqué, n’ont plus le temps ni l’énergie d’entrer dans des conflits théoriques. »

"This 'global war' that Taylor refers to is the name he gives to a conflict between a naturalist modernity (the 'Enlightenment'), which views language as a purely designative tool that can be formally described, and a Romantic-hermeneutic modernity that sees language as the constitutive medium of the human. Yet, if this war did take place, today it is nothing more than a historical artifact. Not because the two sides have reconciled, yielding to a middle path that satisfies everyone through compromise, but simply because, as we have already noted, cognitive scientists no longer have the time or energy to engage in theoretical conflicts."

Voir aussi 

Charles Taylor. (1985).
Language and human nature.
In Philosophical Papers (pp. 215–247).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

et

Daniel Andler, Teresa Collins, & Catherine Tallon-Baudry (2018).
La cognition: du neurone à la société.
Gallimard.

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