Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Experimental Pragmatics'

This thesis presents a novel pragmatic account of the meaning and use of numerically-quantified expressions. It can readily be seen that quantities can typically be described by many semantically truthful expressions - for instance, if 'more than 12' is true of a quantity, so is 'more than 11', 'more than 10', and so on. It is also intuitively clear that some of these expressions are more suitable than others in a given situation, a preference which is not captured by the semantics but appears to rely upon on wider-ranging considerations of communicative effectiveness. Motivated by these observations, I lay out a set of criteria that are demonstrably relevant to the speaker's choice of utterance in such cases. Observing further that it is typically impossible to satisfy all these criteria with a single utterance, I suggest that the speaker's choice of utterance can be construed as a problem of multiple constraint satisfaction. Using the formalism of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), I proceed to specify a model of speaker behaviour for this domain of usage. The model I propose can be used to draw predictions both about the speaker's choice of utterance and the hearer's interpretation of utterances. I discuss the relation between these two aspects of the model, showing how constraints on the speaker's choice of utterance are predicted to make pragmatic enrichments available to the hearer. I then consider applications of this idea to specific issues that have been discussed in the literature. Firstly, with respect to superlative quantifiers, I show how this model provides an alternative account to that of Geurts and Nouwen (2007), building upon that offered by Cummins and Katsos (2010), and I present empirical evidence in its favour. Secondly, I show how this model yields the novel prediction that comparative quantifiers give rise to implicatures that are conditioned both by granularity and by prior mention of the numeral, and demonstrate these implicatures empirically. Finally I discuss the predictions that the model makes about the frequency of quantifiers in corpora, and investigate their validity. I conclude that the model presented here proves its worth as a source of hypotheses about speaker and hearer behaviour in the numerical domain. In particular, it serves as a way to integrate insights from distinct domains of enquiry including psycholinguistics, theoretical semantics and numerical cognition. I discuss the claim of this model to psychological plausibility, its relation to existing approaches, and its potential utility when applied to broader domains of language use.

In the first part of my dissertation I present some experimental works that investigate how adults interpret scalar items such as or in different syntactic contexts, such as (1) and (2), and ambiguous sentences like (3), in which the pronoun "it" admits of two interpretations, due to the presence of an indefinite antecedent: (1) If an A has a B or a C, then she also has a D (2) If an A has a D, then she also has a B or a C (3) If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it In interpreting these sentences, adults display a high degree of “spontaneous logicality”, showing sensitivity to logic properties (such as entailment patterns and monotonicity properties) of the elements in the sentence. The second part is focused on the investigation of “pragmatic” inferences in children, aiming at attesting which factors may influence children’s computation of Scalar Implicatures (like the ones arising in (2)) and eventually contribute to their failure or their improvement in this task

In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speaker’s intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, ‘what did you put in the bag?’, the speaker says, ‘I put in a book’, then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning – a quantity implicature – involves reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state. This thesis examines children’s development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state is part of children’s pragmatic competence. This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of children’s development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill – implicatures – and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that children’s early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speaker’s epistemic state is at stake. I present a series of experiments based on a sentence-to-picture-matching task, with children aged 3 to 7 years. In the first study, I identify a developmental trajectory whereby word learning by exclusion inferences emerge first, followed by ad hoc quantity and relevance, and finally scalar quantity inferences, which reflects their increasing complexity in a Gricean model. Then, I explore cognitive and environmental factors that might be associated with children’s pragmatic skills, and show that structural language knowledge – and, associated with it, socioeconomic status – is a main predictor of their implicature understanding. In the second study, I lay out some predictions for the development of manner implicatures, find similar patterns of understanding in children and adults, and highlight the particular challenges of studying manner implicatures experimentally. Finally, I focus on children’s ability to take into account the speaker’s epistemic state in pragmatic inferencing. While adults do not derive a quantity implicature appropriately when the speaker is ignorant, children tend to persist in deriving implicatures regardless of speaker ignorance, suggesting a continuing challenge of integrating contextual with linguistic information in utterance interpretation.

Zwei Theorien über die Verarbeitung von Metaphern postulieren die Beteiligung unterschiedlicher kognitiven. Die erste, die „Implicit Comparison View“, behauptet, dass Metaphern durch einen Prozess des analogen Denkens verstanden werden (z. B. Gentner et al., 2001; Gentner & Bowdle, 2008). Eine zweite Ansicht, die „Category Inclusion View“, sieht das Verstehen einer Metapher als einen Prozess, bei dem die lexikalische Bedeutung des metaphorischen Vehikels spontan moduliert wird, um eine ad-hoc, zielorientierte Kategorie zu schaffen (z. B. Glücksberg, 2008; Sperber & Wilson, 2008). Obwohl es eine große Anzahl an Experiment gibt, die die Vorhersagen dieser beiden Theorien testen (z. B. Bowdle & Gentner, 2005; Gernsbacher et al., 2001; Jones & Estes, 2005; Jones & Estes, 2006; McGlone & Manfredi, 2001; Wolff & Gentner, 2011) ist es bis jetzt nicht möglich gewesen, das Problem der Metaphernverarbeitung zu lösen zugunsten einer der beiden Theorien. Diese Dissertation versucht genau das zu tun, indem die Verarbeitung von zwei Arten deutscher nicht-nominaler Metaphern untersucht werden: verbale Metaphern und Verb-Objekt-Metaphern. Dies wurde gemacht durch eine Untersuchung der Rolle des Kontexts während der Verarbeitung von nicht-nominalen Metaphern. Dabei wurde auf die Literatur zur situierten und inkrementellen Sprachverarbeitung zurückgegriffen (siehe Huettig et al., 2011; Huettig et al., 2012; Kamide, 2008; Knoeferle & Guerra, 2016). Insgesamt die Ergebnisse von 14 verschiedenen Experimeten als besser zu vereinbaren mit der „Category Inclusion View“ als mit der „Implicit Comparison View“.
Two main sets of theories of metaphor comprehension posit the involvement of different cognitive mechanisms. The first one, the Implicit Comparison View, claims that metaphors are understood through a process of analogical reasoning in which the elements of a metaphoric expression (in the example above my cat, which is known as the ‘topic’ and princess, which is known as the ‘vehicle’) are scanned for relational similarities (e.g. Gentner et al., 2001; Gentner & Bowdle, 2008). A second view, the Category Inclusion View, sees metaphor comprehension as a process in which the lexical meaning of the metaphoric vehicle is spontaneously changed to represent a newly created, goal-oriented category (e.g. Glucksberg, 2008; Sperber & Wilson, 2008). Despite there being a large body of experimental data testing the predictions made by these theories (e.g. Bowdle & Gentner, 2005; Gernsbacher et al., 2001; Jones & Estes, 2005; Jones & Estes, 2006; McGlone & Manfredi, 2001; Wolff & Gentner, 2011), it has not been possible to settle this debate and tip the scale in favor of one or the other view. This dissertation attempts to do just that by examining the processing of two types of German non-nominal metaphors: Verbal metaphors and verb-object metaphors. This was done by investigating the role of context during metaphor comprehension in order to further specify the available theories, and, more generally, by drawing on the literature on situated and incremental language processing (see Huettig et al., 2011; Huettig et al., 2012; Kamide, 2008; Knoeferle & Guerra, 2016, for reviews). Overall the results of 14 experiments are interpreted as being more consistent with the Category Inclusion View than with the Indirect Comparison View.

In the light of recent changes on the audiovisual scene in Poland, audiences can choose among different AVT modalities. Although voice-over still prevails on Polish TV, subtitles have become more and more popular as an alternative form of film translation on television. Due to rapid technological advances, commercial requirements and differences in Polish viewers’ preferences, it is thus crucial to understand how audiences at different levels of English proficiency (low, medium, high) retrieve meaning, especially complex ironic meaning relayed through different methods of film translation, such as subtitles and voice-over and the extent to which verbal and non-verbal semiotic channels contribute to irony comprehension. Wilson and Sperber’s (1981, 1992; 1995) echoic theory of irony has been selected as the theoretical framework, given its ability to account for multimodal irony in audiovisual texts as well as the significant importance of non-verbal semiotic resources in the generation and interpretation of irony. The study employs triangulation, incorporating descriptive, experimental and interactionist components. The descriptive component involves multimodal transcription (Baldry and Thibault, 2006) of selected fragments in which irony plays a pivotal narrative role. This procedure aims to determine what non-verbal modes contribute to the multimodal construal of irony and how it is relayed in the subtitled and voiced-over translations. In the experimental component, viewers’ eye movements are recorded using eye-tracking technology while watching subtitled and voiced-over fragments of Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). In the interactionist components, a questionnaire is used in order to elucidate how and/or whether they retrieve ironic meaning as intended by the filmmakers in the selected excerpts. The most obvious finding to emerge from the descriptive data analysis is that multimodal irony is not relayed by the film dialogue alone but, rather, in unison with non-verbal semiotic resources. The instances of multimodal irony in the two Sherlock Holmes films were found to perform narrative and comedic functions by combining the visual, kinesic and acoustic modes of film language. The analysis and comparison of SL dialogues and TL translations revealed two broad categories of irony relay, namely: preservation and modification. The majority of the instances of multimodal irony were modified in the subtitled version, while preservation is only sporadically opted for. In its voiced-over counterpart, the intended meaning is preserved and modified in equal proportions. The experimental component showed major differences in gaze patterns among the participants with different language skills in the subtitled clips. For instance, on average, LLPs spent more time reading the subtitles than HLPs or MLPs. Similar visual behavior, on the other hand, was observed among all viewers in the voiced-over clips in which the on-screen character’s face attracted the greatest amount of visual attention. The interactionist strand showed that the viewers retrieved the intended meaning to various extents depending on their English language proficiency. This data undergirds an assessment of the effectiveness of subtitles and voice-over in the translation and reception of multimodal irony on screen.

In a world which continuously becomes more globalised, the need to adapt one's language depending on context becomes increasingly important. This is acknowledged in the Swedish syllabus for the upper-secondary school, which emphasises communicative competence and the need to adapt to situation and hearer. This study uses a foundation based on politeness theory, where the act of requesting is considered a threat to the notion of face. The concept of face that is being used is based on the work of Brown and Levinson (1987) and the idea is that everyone has a positive- and negative face where the former is the need for one’s self-image to be respected and the latter is the freedom to act without imposition from others. By role-playing different scenarios, the participants of the study, all students of the English 7 course, were asked to perform requests which varied in imposition and which targeted hearers of different statuses. The results were analysed using a qualitative approach, which leads to the conclusion that half of the six participants adapted their language appropriately to the communicative situation. Those three had managed to show an increase in face-saving acts where the imposition was greater, or the hearer was of a higher status. That only half of the participants managed to do this shows a lack of success in teaching the students the necessary pragmatic skills encoded in the syllabus and more focused studies in this area are recommended to address this issue. Due to the small number of participants, further studies are needed to fully confirm the results presented in this study.

Les locuteurs communiquent plus que ce qu’ils disent explicitement. C’est pourquoi les destinataires s’appuient sur des indices linguistiques et extra-linguistiques pour récupérer différentes strates de signification qui peuvent être explicites aussi bien qu’implicites. Les déclencheurs de présuppositions représentent l’un de ces indices. Il s’agit d’expressions ou de constructions linguistiques (par exemple, les verbes de changement, les verbes factifs, les clivées, etc.) qui déclenchent la récupération de propositions que le locuteur présuppose, ou considère comme acquises, pour les besoins de la conversation. Cette thèse étudie le phénomène de la présupposition dans le cadre de la pragmatique expérimentale et comprend trois études basées sur les méthodes expérimentales suivantes : les tâches de jugement, la méthode de l’EEG et la méthode du capteur de force de préhension. Cette thèse combine une perspective sociale, qui se concentre sur la gestion de la réputation via des stratégies discursives alternatives (étude 1), avec une perspective cognitive, qui examine les coûts cognitifs et les corrélats sensori-moteurs associés au traitement des présuppositions (études 2 et 3). L’étude 1 examine l’impact des différentes stratégies discursives (un locuteur qui communique une information explicitement, qui l’implique ou la présuppose) sur l’attribution de l’engagement du locuteur envers le message communiqué. En étudiant l’engagement du locuteur (sa responsabilité) en fonction du coût de réputation (perte de confiance) lié à la transmission de fausses informations, l’étude 1 montre que le présupposé est perçu comme étant tout aussi responsabilisant que le dire explicite et plus responsabilisant que l’implicite non présuppositionel. L’étude 2 examine les coûts cognitifs associés au ciblage des présuppositions dans les continuations du discours. En se concentrant sur les contextes additifs introduits par la particule discursive aussi, l’étude 2 montre que les continuations discursives appropriées ciblant une présupposition suscitent la même réponse en potentiels évoqués que les continuations discursives appropriées ciblant un contexte affirmé. Cette conclusion suggère que, lorsque le traitement de présuppositions fait partie d’une stratégie discursive appropriée et pragmatique, il n’entraîne pas de coûts cognitifs supplémentaires. L’étude 3 examine les corrélats sensori-moteurs du traitement du langage lié à l’action dans les constructions présupposées (clause-complément des verbes factifs comme savoir) et non-présupposées (clause-complément des verbes non-factifs). Les résultats montrent que les premières provoquent une activation sensori-motrice plus importante que les secondes, révélant ainsi que les informations présupposées, dont la vérité est prise comme acquise, sont traitées différemment des informations dont la vérité n’a pas été établie dans le discours. Dans l’ensemble, cette thèse contribue à l’étude de la présupposition en fournissant des preuves empiriques à l’appui de la distinction théorique entre les différentes couches de signification. D’une part, elle montre que leur emploi conduit à des responsabilisations différentes dans le discours et a des implications sur la négociation interpersonnelle de la confiance. D’autre part, elle montre que, si le traitement des présuppositions n’est pas intrinsèquement plus coûteux d’un point de vue cognitif, ses corrélats cognitifs (tels que la mobilisation du système sensori-moteur) peuvent être différents de ceux qui mettent en correspondance des informations ayant un statut discursif différent
Speakers communicate more than what they explicitly state. For this reason, addressees rely on linguistic and extra-linguistic cues to recover different levels of explicit and implicit meaning. Presupposition triggers are one of these cues. These are linguistic expressions or constructions (e.g. change of state verbs, factive verbs, it-clefts, etc.) which trigger the recovery of propositions that the speaker presupposes, or takes for granted, for the purpose of the conversation. This thesis investigates the phenomenon of presupposition within the framework of experimental pragmatics, and it comprises three studies based on the following experimental methods: judgement-tasks, EEG method and grip-force sensor method. This thesis combines a social perspective, which focuses on reputation-management via alternative discourse strategies (Study 1), with a cognitive perspective, which examines the cognitive costs and sensori-motor correlates associated with presupposition processing (Studies 2 and 3). Study 1 examines the impact of different discourse strategies (saying, implicating and presupposing) on the attribution of speaker commitment towards the message communicated. By operationalizing commitment as a function of the reputational cost (drop of trust) related to the transmission of false information, Study 1 shows that presupposing is perceived as equally committal than saying and more committal than implicating. Study 2 investigates the cognitive costs associated with targeting presuppositions in discourse continuations. By focusing on additive contexts introduced by the French discourse particle aussi, Study 2 shows that felicitous discourse continuations targeting a presupposition elicit the same ERP response than felicitous discourse continuations targeting an asserted context. This finding suggests that when presupposition processing is part of an appropriate, pragmatically felicitous, discourse strategy, it does not come with any additional cognitive costs. Study 3 examines the sensori-motor correlates of processing action-related language in presuppositional constructions (complement clause of factive verbs) and non-presuppositional ones (complement clause of non-factive verbs). The results show that the former elicit a greater sensori-motor activation than the latter, thus revealing that presupposed information, whose truth is taken for granted, is processed differently from information whose truth has not been established in discourse. Overall, this thesis contributes to the study of presupposition by providing empirical evidence in support of the theoretical distinction between different layers of meaning. On the one hand, it shows that their employment leads to different commitments in discourse and has implications on the interpersonal negotiation of trust. On the other hand, it shows that while presupposition processing is not inherently more costly from a cognitive perspective, its cognitive correlates (such as the engagement of the sensori-motor system) can differ from those mapping information with a different discourse status

Cette thèse s’est proposé d’explorer le rôle de l’intentionnalité et de l’affiliation sociale dans la compréhension des inférences communicatives. Trois des quatre études principales portent sur l’inférence contrastive, qui consiste à déduire d’une expression référentielle telle que le chien sec, l’existence d’un autre objet de même nature (un autre chien) dans le contexte de la communication en cours. Les études que j’ai menées dans ce travail de thèse suivent une réflexion autour de cette inférence particulière, s’inscrivant à ses débuts dans le champ traditionnel de la pragmatique expérimentale et portant une attention croissante au rôle de l’affiliation sociale dans la communication inférentielle.L’Etude 1 propose un paradigme original qui capte de façon précise la capacité des sujets à faire une inférence contrastive, dans un contexte théorique qui fait généralement l’hypothèse d’un traitement par défaut lorsque les conditions contextuelles sont réunies. Une trajectoire développementale a été mise en évidence chez les enfants, et les performances des adultes mettent en évidence le caractère optionnel de cette inférence. L’Etude 2 s’intéresse à l’âge à partir duquel les enfants se montrent capables d’utiliser leurs attentes de rationalité sur les actes référentiels du locuteur pour se poser la question des raisons qui incite celui-ci à utiliser une description plus informative que nécessaire a priori. Les résultats de cette expérience montrent qu’à 5 ans, mais pas à 3 ans, les enfants sont ralentis dans le processus de compréhension d’une instruction lorsqu’elle est sur-informative, suggérant qu’ils sont sensibles à la pertinence d’un choix référentiel.Dans la continuité de cette réflexion sur le rôle fondamental de la prise en compte des intentions d’autrui dans les inférences pragmatiques, la question s’est posée de savoir si la relation entre le sujet et le locuteur pouvait influencer le processus inférentiel lui-même. Une première démarche a été de regarder si une induction de groupe minimal aurait un effet sur la propension à prendre la perspective visuelle de l’autre dans une tâche communicative (Etude exploratoire). Les études suivantes suivent une approche différente pour répondre à cette même question, à partir de l’idée que les inférences pragmatiques jouent un rôle dans l’établissement et le maintien des liens sociaux. L’Etude 3 est une étude en électromyographie et porte sur le cas particulier des blagues. L’affiliation sociale entre le locuteur et le sujet a été manipulée à partir d’une induction politique. Cette étude sur les blagues montre que la compréhension d’une inférence humoristique est mieux valorisée et génère davantage de réactions positives lorsque le locuteur a une pertinence sociale pour le sujet. L’Etude 4 teste avec un paradigme d’eyetracking l’hypothèse d’un effet de l’affiliation sociale sur l’inférence contrastive. Les résultats montrent qu’une induction politique influence la manière dont l’inférence d’un objet contraste est traitée. Précisément, lorsque le locuteur est un membre de l’outgroup, les individus vérifient davantage le contexte épistémique du locuteur pour s’assurer de la présence d’un objet contraste qui justifie l’utilisation d’une expression référentielle sur-informative du point de vue du sujet. L’ensemble de ces études apportent un éclairage nouveau sur l’inférence contrastive, à partir d’une démarche issue des récents développements de la pragmatique expérimentale. Elles contribuent également à caractériser le rôle des mécanismes sociaux impliqués dans la communication inférentielle
This thesis aimed to explore the role of intentionality and social affiliation in the processing of communicative inferences. Three of the four main studies deal with contrastive inference, which consists in inferring from a referential expression such as the dry dog, the existence of a contrast object of the same kind (e.g. another dog) in the context at hand. The studies that I conducted in this work were developed within the traditional framework of experimental pragmatics, with a growing interest for the role of social affiliation in inferential communication.Study 1 uses an original paradigm that captures in a fine-grained manner subjects’ propensity to draw a contrastive inference, in a theoretical background that generally assumes that its computation is done by default when the context allows it. A developmental trajectory was observed among children, and adults’ performance suggests that drawing a contrastive inference is actually optional. Study 2 was interested in determining when children start using their expectations of optimal relevance when interpreting under- and over-informative instructions. It shows that at the age of five, but not three, children are slowed in responding to a modified instruction in a context where it is over-informative, compared to optimal, suggesting that they are sensitive to the relevance of a referential choice.Building on the idea that intentionality is crucial for pragmatic communication, I asked the question of whether features of the speaker-listener relationship could influence the inferential process itself. A first step was to test the effect of group affiliation on perspective taking abilities (Exploratory study). The next studies follow a different approach, by viewing inferential communication as a way to establish and maintain social affiliation.Study 3 is an electromyography study that deals with the particular case of jokes. Social affiliation between speakers and subjects were manipulated using a political induction. The results show that a humorous inference is better evaluated and triggers more positive reactions when the speaker’s identity is socially relevant to the subject.Study 4 uses an eyetracking procedure to test the hypothesis of an effect of social affiliation on contrastive inference. Manipulating political affiliation proved to affect the processing of a possible contrast object when responding to an over-informative instruction. Specifically, when the speaker was a member of the outgroup, subjects tended to check more on a hidden image that possibly contained a contrast object, in order to ascertain the relevance of the speaker’s referential choice.In sum, these studies shed a new light on contrastive inference, taking advantage of the recent developments in experimental pragmatics. They also allow for a better characterization of the social mechanisms involved in inferential communication

Cette thèse s’est proposé d’explorer le rôle de l’intentionnalité et de l’affiliation sociale dans la compréhension des inférences communicatives. Trois des quatre études principales portent sur l’inférence contrastive, qui consiste à déduire d’une expression référentielle telle que le chien sec, l’existence d’un autre objet de même nature (un autre chien) dans le contexte de la communication en cours. Les études que j’ai menées dans ce travail de thèse suivent une réflexion autour de cette inférence particulière, s’inscrivant à ses débuts dans le champ traditionnel de la pragmatique expérimentale et portant une attention croissante au rôle de l’affiliation sociale dans la communication inférentielle.L’Etude 1 propose un paradigme original qui capte de façon précise la capacité des sujets à faire une inférence contrastive, dans un contexte théorique qui fait généralement l’hypothèse d’un traitement par défaut lorsque les conditions contextuelles sont réunies. Une trajectoire développementale a été mise en évidence chez les enfants, et les performances des adultes mettent en évidence le caractère optionnel de cette inférence. L’Etude 2 s’intéresse à l’âge à partir duquel les enfants se montrent capables d’utiliser leurs attentes de rationalité sur les actes référentiels du locuteur pour se poser la question des raisons qui incite celui-ci à utiliser une description plus informative que nécessaire a priori. Les résultats de cette expérience montrent qu’à 5 ans, mais pas à 3 ans, les enfants sont ralentis dans le processus de compréhension d’une instruction lorsqu’elle est sur-informative, suggérant qu’ils sont sensibles à la pertinence d’un choix référentiel.Dans la continuité de cette réflexion sur le rôle fondamental de la prise en compte des intentions d’autrui dans les inférences pragmatiques, la question s’est posée de savoir si la relation entre le sujet et le locuteur pouvait influencer le processus inférentiel lui-même. Une première démarche a été de regarder si une induction de groupe minimal aurait un effet sur la propension à prendre la perspective visuelle de l’autre dans une tâche communicative (Etude exploratoire). Les études suivantes suivent une approche différente pour répondre à cette même question, à partir de l’idée que les inférences pragmatiques jouent un rôle dans l’établissement et le maintien des liens sociaux. L’Etude 3 est une étude en électromyographie et porte sur le cas particulier des blagues. L’affiliation sociale entre le locuteur et le sujet a été manipulée à partir d’une induction politique. Cette étude sur les blagues montre que la compréhension d’une inférence humoristique est mieux valorisée et génère davantage de réactions positives lorsque le locuteur a une pertinence sociale pour le sujet. L’Etude 4 teste avec un paradigme d’eyetracking l’hypothèse d’un effet de l’affiliation sociale sur l’inférence contrastive. Les résultats montrent qu’une induction politique influence la manière dont l’inférence d’un objet contraste est traitée. Précisément, lorsque le locuteur est un membre de l’outgroup, les individus vérifient davantage le contexte épistémique du locuteur pour s’assurer de la présence d’un objet contraste qui justifie l’utilisation d’une expression référentielle sur-informative du point de vue du sujet. L’ensemble de ces études apportent un éclairage nouveau sur l’inférence contrastive, à partir d’une démarche issue des récents développements de la pragmatique expérimentale. Elles contribuent également à caractériser le rôle des mécanismes sociaux impliqués dans la communication inférentielle
This thesis aimed to explore the role of intentionality and social affiliation in the processing of communicative inferences. Three of the four main studies deal with contrastive inference, which consists in inferring from a referential expression such as the dry dog, the existence of a contrast object of the same kind (e.g. another dog) in the context at hand. The studies that I conducted in this work were developed within the traditional framework of experimental pragmatics, with a growing interest for the role of social affiliation in inferential communication.Study 1 uses an original paradigm that captures in a fine-grained manner subjects’ propensity to draw a contrastive inference, in a theoretical background that generally assumes that its computation is done by default when the context allows it. A developmental trajectory was observed among children, and adults’ performance suggests that drawing a contrastive inference is actually optional. Study 2 was interested in determining when children start using their expectations of optimal relevance when interpreting under- and over-informative instructions. It shows that at the age of five, but not three, children are slowed in responding to a modified instruction in a context where it is over-informative, compared to optimal, suggesting that they are sensitive to the relevance of a referential choice.Building on the idea that intentionality is crucial for pragmatic communication, I asked the question of whether features of the speaker-listener relationship could influence the inferential process itself. A first step was to test the effect of group affiliation on perspective taking abilities (Exploratory study). The next studies follow a different approach, by viewing inferential communication as a way to establish and maintain social affiliation.Study 3 is an electromyography study that deals with the particular case of jokes. Social affiliation between speakers and subjects were manipulated using a political induction. The results show that a humorous inference is better evaluated and triggers more positive reactions when the speaker’s identity is socially relevant to the subject.Study 4 uses an eyetracking procedure to test the hypothesis of an effect of social affiliation on contrastive inference. Manipulating political affiliation proved to affect the processing of a possible contrast object when responding to an over-informative instruction. Specifically, when the speaker was a member of the outgroup, subjects tended to check more on a hidden image that possibly contained a contrast object, in order to ascertain the relevance of the speaker’s referential choice.In sum, these studies shed a new light on contrastive inference, taking advantage of the recent developments in experimental pragmatics. They also allow for a better characterization of the social mechanisms involved in inferential communication

Devoir et pouvoir, comme les verbes modaux d’autres langues, ont déjà fait l’objet d’une littérature abondante. Le fait qu’ils puissent recevoir des sens différents selon leur contexte d’emploi a particulièrement suscité l’attention des sémanticiens et des pragmaticiens. Cette thèse revient sur la question de la nature des différentes interprétations de devoir et pouvoir, et tente d’établir si leur plurivocité relève de la polysémie ou de la sous-spécification. L’hypothèse polysémique, la plus répandue dans la littérature française, implique qu’au moins le sens radical et le sens épistémique soient inscrits dans la langue et donc représentés en mémoire. Selon l’hypothèse de la sous-spécification, la multiplicité de sens relève de l’enrichissement contextuel d’un unique sens sous-spécifié stocké dans le lexique mental. L’état actuel des recherches, l’examen des différentes interprétations de devoir et pouvoir et de la sous-détermination potentielle de leur sens en contexte, comme l’étude de leur évolution sémantique en diachronie, ne permettent pas de falsifier l’une ou l’autre hypothèse. Des méthodes expérimentales, développées en psycholinguistique et en pragmatique expérimentale, sont donc convoquées. Notamment, l’examen des temps de traitement en lecture, dans une expérience d’eye tracking manipulant le sens et le contexte, suggère une représentation effectivement polysémique pour devoir, mais une représentation monosémique sous-spécifiée pour pouvoir. Devoir et pouvoir sont souvent traités ensemble, les études considérant que l’un constitue, dans son domaine modal, le pendant de l’autre. Nous relevons que le parallèle effectué n’est pas aussi motivé qu’il n’y paraît
Devoir and pouvoir, as modal verbs in other languages, have already been the subject of extensive literature. The fact that they can convey different meanings depending on the specific context in which they occur is of particular interest to semanticists andpragmaticians. This thesis focuses on the nature of the various interpretations of devoir and pouvoir and attempts to ascertain whether their meaning multiplicity is a result of their polysemy or of their underspecified semantics. The polysemy hypothesis, which is the prevalent view in the French literature, implies that at least both the root sense and the epistemic sense fully belong to the linguistic system and hence that both are represented in memory. On the contrary, according to the underspecification model, contextual enrichment of a unique underspecified meaning stored in the mental lexicon accounts for meaning multiplicity. The current state of research, the review of the several possible interpretations of devoir and pouvoir, the investigation of potential meaning underdetermination in context, as well as the study of their semantic evolution in diachrony, do not allow us to rule out any of the two hypotheses. Experimental methods, developed in psycholinguistics and in experimental pragmatics, are thus used. Notably, analysis of processing times in reading in an eye tracking experiment in which both meaning and context are manipulated favours a polysemic representation for devoir, but a monosemic and underspecified representation for pouvoir. The two modal verbs are traditionally examined together since it is assumed that one matches the other in its own modal domain. This thesis casts doubt on this assumption

This dissertation will make the case that education at the post-secondary level must be reimagined. Rather than being organized around abstract bodies of information, it must be centered on moments of transformation out of which teaching, learning, knowing and -- in fact -- democratic individuals emerge. This reconstruction of education takes place through two primary moves. First, I make the case that contemporary schooling is grounded in a flawed model of knowing, which draws together mistakes in thinking about the nature of the self, of knowledge, and of the world, which are contained in the epistemological proposition: "S knows that p." In doing so, I argue that the German conception of Bildung must replace "S knows that p" as the guiding paradigm of knowing within educational practice. In doing so, I develop a theory of creative inquiry in order to claim that knowledge emerges from embodied, social action and is a form of artistic practice. Second, I develop a pedagogy, which I call emergent pedagogy, based on the theory of inquiry articulated in the first half. Here, I argue that post-secondary pedagogy must emerge out of the contexts, situations, and communities in which students and faculty are embedded. In this way, pedagogy must be considered a kind of artistic practice in which methods are adapted to and intuited from unique problems experienced by the university community. Ultimately, I show that pedagogy must shift from being viewed as a kind of telling and hearing to a form of participatory making.
Ph. D.

Uno de los objetivos de los sistemas multiagente es permitir la colaboración entre agentes heterogéneos. Esto puede resultar en la interacción entre participantes con distintos tipos de conocimiento, habilidades, y recursos, creando un ambiente abierto y diverso. Para que esta colaboración funcione, es necesario tener en cuenta los diferentes tipos de heterogeneidad que pueden existir entre los agentes; por ejemplo, la heterogeneidad lingüística. Para poder coordinar sus acciones, es necesario que los agentes puedan comunicarse entre ellos; y esta comunicación sólo puede ser exitosa si todos usan el mismo vocabulario, y lo entienden de la misma manera. El problema del entendimiento mutuo entre agentes con diferentes vocabularios ha sido, mayoritariamente, analizado con técnicas que asumen la existencia de elementos externos comunes, como un meta-lenguaje, un ambiente físico, o recursos semánticos. Sin embargo, estos elementos no siempre están disponibles. Incluso cuando lo están, es posible que generen alineamientos que no sean útiles, en particular, para las interacciones que los agentes quieren completar, dado que no están contextualizados. Esta tesis propone una visión diferente del alineamiento entre vocabularios, considerando agentes que solamente comparten el conocimiento sobre como llevar a cabo una tarea. Esta información está especificada en un protocolo de interacción. Específicamente, proponemos la idea de alineamiento basado en la interacción, en la cual los agentes aprenden un alineamiento a base de interactuar entre ellos, observando lo que funciona y lo que no en una conversación. La situación en la cual un turista intenta pedir un café en un idioma que no domina es una analogía útil. Aún cuando no hay un lenguaje común, es probable que esta interacción termine exitosamente, dado que está compuesta de pasos simples en los cuales todos coinciden. Más aún, si la interacción se repite varias veces, es posible que el turista aprenda como se pide café en el idioma extranjero. A pesar de que este tipo de adaptación resulta natural para humanos, esta idea aún no ha sido explorada en detalle para agentes artificial. A lo largo de esta tesis estudiamos como agentes que tienen especificaciones formalizadas de diferentes maneras pueden aprender un vocabulario nuevo. Concretamente, proponemos técnicas de alineamiento basadas en la interacción para protocolos especificados con autómatas, con restricciones lógicas, y con semánticas sociales. Para cada uno de estos casos, proveemos técnicas que permiten inferir información semántica a partir de interacciones, o de la observación de interacciones entre otros. También analizamos como combinar estas técnicas con alineamientos externos, mostrando como pueden repararlos cuando contienen errores. Los métodos que proponemos para cada tipo de especificación son evaluados mediante simulaciones, usando protocolos artificiales generados aleatoriamente. De esta manera obtenemos una evaluación general, que no está sesgada por particularidades de los datos. Además, estudiamos como aplicar nuestros métodos a datos empíricos creados por humanos, extraídos de la página web WikiHow. En esta evaluación discutimos los desafíos enfrentados al aplicar nuestros métodos al lenguaje natural, y mostramos que mejoramos los resultados obtenidos al usar un reconocido diccionario. En resumen, en esta tesis proponemos un método de alineamiento de vocabulario que depende del contexto y no requiere recursos externos, ni de la colaboración de otros agentes. Nuestro método, por si solo, permite encontrar alineamientos útiles, pero puede ser lento. Sin embargo, cuando son combinadas con otros recursos, nuestras técnicas permiten agilizar el aprendizaje y reparar alineamientos externos, a la vez que proveen información sobre el uso de palabras en contexto, la cual puede ser difícil de obtener de otra manera.
Enabling collaboration between agents with different backgrounds is one of the objectives of open and heterogeneous multiagent systems. This can bring together participants with different knowledge, abilities, and access to resources. For this collaboration to succeed, it needs to deal with different kinds of heterogeneity that can exist between agents. An important aspect of this heterogeneity is the linguistic one. To coordinate their collaborative actions, agents need to communicate with each other; and to ensure meaningful communication it is essential that they use the same vocabulary (and understand it in the same way). The problem of achieving common understanding between agents that use different vocabularies has been mainly addressed by techniques that assume the existence of shared external elements, such as a meta-language, a physical environment, or semantic resources. These elements are not always available and, even when they are, they may yield alignments that are not useful for the particular type of interactions agents need to perform, as they are not contextualized. In this dissertation we investigate a different approach to vocabulary alignment. We consider agents that only share knowledge of how to perform a task, given by the specification of an interaction protocol. We study the idea of interaction-based vocabulary alignment, a framework that lets agents learn a vocabulary alignment from the experience of interacting; by observing what works and what does not in a conversation. To give an intuition, consider someone trying to order a coffee in a foreign country. Even if there is no common language, the interaction is likely to succeed, since it consists of simple, well-understood steps that interlocutors agree on. Moreover, it is likely that, if our subject repeats the ordering coffee interaction many times, she will end up learning how it is performed in the foreign language. While humans are very good at adapting in this way, this idea has not been explored in depth for the case of artificial agents. Throughout this dissertation we study how agents can learn a new vocabulary when they follow specifications that use different formalizations. Concretely, we consider interaction-based vocabulary alignment for protocols specified with finite state machines, with logical constraints, and with a social semantics based on commitments. For each case, we provide techniques to infer semantic information from interacting, or observing interactions between other agents. We also analyze how these techniques can be used in combination with external alignments obtained in a different way. When these alignments are not necessarily correct, our techniques provide ways of repairing them. For each type of specification we evaluate the proposed methods by simulating their use in a set of artificial, randomly generated protocols. This provides a general evaluation that does not suffer the biases of particular datasets. Later, we apply our methods to an empirical dataset of human-crafted instructional protocols, obtained from the WikiHow webpage. We discuss the challenges of using our methods in protocols with natural language labels, and we show how the resulting method improves on the performance of using a well-known dictionary. Summarizing, we present a vocabulary alignment method that is context-specific, lightweight, cheap and independent of external resources. This method can be used by agents as a low profile method of learning the vocabulary used in particular situations. Our method allows agents to find a useful alignment, although slowly. In combination with other resources, our technique provides not only a way of learning alignments faster, but also a way of obtaining different information (about the use of words in context) that may be difficult to find otherwise, and to repair external alignments.

La thèse porte sur le statut sémantico-pragmatique des propositions relatives appositives (PRA), étudié à travers l’examen du fonctionnement discursif des phrases complexes de la forme ‘Matrice, qui PRA’ du français. Dans beaucoup de langues, les PRA n’interagissent pas sémantiquement avec les opérateurs présents dans leurs propositions enchâssantes et tendent à s’interpréter pragmatiquement comme porteuses d’informations non-centrales ou secondaires pour la question en discussion (QUD) du discours en cours. Plusieurs analyses (Holler 2005, Arnold 2007, Koev 2012) dissocient ces deux propriétés en dérivant la projection des PRA de leur statut d’assertions indépendantes et en expliquant leur lecture pragmatique à l’aide de principes généraux de gestion du flot discursif. En effet, lorsque les PRA apparaissent en fin de phrase, elles sont susceptibles d’interagir avec la QUD tout en ayant une portée large vis-à-vis du reste de la phrase. Certains phénomènes discursifs semblent néanmoins contredire l’idée que les PRA constituent des assertions indépendantes. D’abord, les PRA peuvent interagir avec la QUD seulement si leurs matrices véhiculent également des informations pertinentes pour le sujet en discussion. Ensuite, contrairement à ce que l’on peut observer dans une séquence de deux propositions indépendantes, dans une séquence formée d’une proposition matrice et d’une PRA, quel que soit l’ordre de leur linéarisation, la matrice s’interprète toujours comme centrale pour le discours, alors que le statut pragmatique de la PRA dépend fortement du degré d’informativité du reste de la phrase vis-à-vis de la QUD. Enfin, les résultats de deux études comportementales conduites pour la thèse montrent que, suite au traitement de phrases complexes comme ‘Matrice, qui PRA’, les référents du type ‘individu’ mentionnés par la matrice restent hautement saillants pour le discours subséquent contrairement à ceux dont il est question dans la PRA, qui jouissent d’un degré d’accessibilité assez faible. Partant de ces données, nous concluons que la lecture pragmatique centrale des PRA n’est pas une conséquence de leur statut d’assertions indépendantes mais résulte de l’intégration de leur contenu dans le domaine focal de leurs matrices. Plus généralement, en nous appuyant sur les travaux d’Ander Bois & al. (2010) et Schlenker (2013, ms), nous défendons l’idée que le manque d’interaction entre les PRA et le reste de leurs phrases d’accueil ainsi que leur prédisposition à une interprétation non-centrale pour le discours proviennent du fait, qu’à la différence de leurs matrices, dont l’énonciation s’accompagne de l’introduction d’un référent propositionnel nouveau, les PRA sont des anaphores propositionnelles, dont la portée sémantique et l’interprétation pragmatique dépendent de la position discursive de l’expression important dans l’univers du discours le référent auquel s’applique le contenu qu’elles expriment
The thesis focuses on the semantic-pragmatic status of appositive relative clauses (ARC). We address this question by examining discourse functioning of complex sentences of the form ‘Matrix, qui ARC’ in French. Crosslinguistically, ARC fail to interact semantically with scope taking operators contained in their embedding clauses and tend to be interpreted pragmatically as carrying non-central or secondary information for the question under discussion (QUD) in the ongoing discourse. Several analysis (Holler 2005, Arnold 2007, Koev 2012) dissociate these two properties, deriving the ARC projection from their status of independent assertions and explaining their pragmatic reading with independent principles of the discourse flow management. Indeed, when an ARC follows linearly its embedding clause, it can interact with the QUD while still receiving a wide scope relatively to the rest of the host sentence. Some discursive phenomena seem nevertheless contradict the idea that ARC constitute independent assertions. First, an ARC can interact with a QUD only if its matrix clause also conveys information relevant to the subject under discussion. Second, contrary to what we observe examining sequences of two independent clauses, in sequences formed of a matrix clause and an ARC, regardless of the order of their linearization, the matrix clause is always interpreted as being at-issue for the discourse, while the pragmatic status of the ARC depends to a great extent on the degree of informativeness of the rest of the sentence relatively to the QUD. And, third, the results of two psycholinguistic experiments conducted as part of this study show that after processing a sentence such as ‘Matrix, qui ARC’, the entity-type referents realized by the matrix clause are highly salient for the subsequent discourse unlike those realized by the ARC, which have a rather low accessibility degree. Based on these data, we conclude that at-issue pragmatic reading of ARC is not a consequence of their functioning as independent assertions but results from integration of their content into the focal domain of the embedding clause. More generally, building on the works of AnderBois & al. (2010) and Schlenker (2013, ms), we defend the idea that the lack of interaction between ARC and the host sentences as well as their tendency to receive a not at-issue reading in discourse arise from the fact that unlike their matrix clauses, whose utterance has the effect of introducing a new propositional referent, ARC are propositional anaphora, the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of which depends thus on the discourse position of their antecedent expression, importing into the discourse the propositional referent the ARC’s content applies to

This thesis consists of four empirical studies on ethnic integration in the Swedish labor market. Studies I-III draw on a field experiment testing ethnic discrimination in the hiring process. Study I documents the existence of employer discrimination in response to equally merited applications with Arabic/African or Swedish names, and shows that foreign-named applicants have to send twice as many applications to receive a callback compared to Swedish-named applicants. Results also suggest that employers in female-dense occupations practice ethnic and gender compensation while employers in male-dense occupations practice only gender compensation. Study II reveals gendered differences in the intensity of employer stereotypes by testing how much more work experience is needed to eliminate the disadvantage of having an Arabic name on a job application. Results indicate a reverse gender gap, as initial differences in call-backs disappear for female applicants when CVs for Arabic-named applications are enhanced but remain strong and significant for male applicants. Study III evaluates criticism directed at residual analysis and field experiments that claims that they tell us nothing about real world discrimination and its long-term effects. By combining experimental and register data, Study III responds to this criticism by showing that the results of Study I correspond closely with real world labor market inequality of identical ‘twins’ (identified through propensity score matching) to the fictive individuals of Study I. Study IV explores the strategies underlying surname change from a Middle Eastern name to a more Swedish sounding one, drawing on 45 interviews with surname changers with a Middle Eastern background. The results indicate that immigrant name change is a pragmatic assimilation strategy. The study also illustrates how the institutional enabling of name change both creates and enables pragmatic assimilation.

At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Submitted. Paper 2: Submitted. Paper 3: Manuscript.

The objective of this thesis is to describe and analyse customs of science teaching in secondary schools and teacher education programmes in Sweden in relation to the notion of “inquiry” in science education. The main focus is on customs of language use and the educational goal of learning about scientific inquiry as distinct from the related goals of learning to do inquiry and learning canonical science content. There is also an exploration and description of different teaching approaches associated with “inquiry”. Previous research has noted that a key issue for reaching the goal of learning about scientific inquiry is the extent to which teachers are able to guide students to explicitly reflect upon this topic. A prerequisite is that teachers give students access to relevant categories of language for explicit reflection on the characteristics of scientific inquiry. Because of the situated nature of language use and learning, this also raises the need to address topics of context, culture and customs in science education. This thesis addresses the questions of how existing customs of teaching science are related to the goal of learning about scientific inquiry, how inquiry-related terminology is used in this context, and how relevant distinctions can be made to aid explicit reflection on these issues. Data has been collected in two studies and analysed and presented in four papers. Study 1 is based on interviews with twelve secondary school science teachers, and Study 2 is based on focus group interviews with 32 pre-service teacher students. The results include a description of the existing customs of inquiry-oriented instructional approaches in Swedish secondary schools. They show that these are often not connected with an explicit focus on teaching about the characteristics of scientific inquiry.  Inquiry-related terminology is analysed with a focus on the role and use of the terms “hypothesis” and “experiment”. Based on a theoretical framework of sociocultural and pragmatist views on language and learning, it is shown how the use of these terms, both in secondary schools and teacher education, tend to conflate the two categories methods of teaching and methods of scientific inquiry. Some problematic consequences for reaching the goal of learning about scientific inquiry are discussed, as well as possible origins of the problems and how the results from this thesis can be useful in overcoming these.
At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Submitted. Paper 4: Submitted.

Understanding how scientists explain has been one of the major goals of the philosophy of science. Given that explaining is one of the most important tasks that scientists aim at and given the high specialization that currently affects all scientific disciplines, we encounter what might at first glance appear to us as many different types of explanations and very different ways of explaining natural phenomena. This suggests a pluralist picture regarding scientific explanation, particularly in biology, namely the existence of different accounts of explanation that do not share an interesting common core. However, the main goal of the traditional analysis of scientific explanation was to elaborate a monist theory of explanation according to which all scientific explanations share a common core that makes them what they are - i.e. that they can be identified by a commonly shared set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. The monist accounts mainly draw on examples from physics to illustrate how this is supposed to work, leaving examples from the special science, like biology, aside. In the last twenty years, nonetheless, the rise of the New Mechanism philosophy, with its notion of mechanistic explanation, has become the dominant and widely accepted account among the philosophers of science to analyze scientific explanation in biology, challenging the pluralist view. The New mechanist account of scientific explanation is essentially monist since their defenders claim that mechanisms are all what really matters to explanation. According to mechanistic explanation, in order to explain a biological phenomenon, we have to discover the mechanism that is responsible for it. Further, we have to decompose this mechanism in order to identify its component parts and identify the causal story that connects the components with the phenomenon. Mechanistic explanations are thus considered causal explanations. The New Mechanism philosophy has arguably been very successful in analyzing how explanation works in a huge diversity of models in biology, suggesting that their account of mechanistic explanation is the only legitimate of in biology. Furthermore, New Mechanism philosophy provides a new framework that contributed to tackle traditional problems of the philosophy of science related to notions such as laws of nature, function, causation, etc. Although mechanistic explanation has proved very successful in analyzing the explanatory force of many biological models, its scope in biology is still under discussion. In the last few years, there has been voices limiting the extension of this account. On the one hand, there has been philosophers claiming that in some biological models, mathematics plays not only a representational role but an explanatory role, suggesting that those models provide explanations that rather than identifying a mechanism with its components and causal story, identify mathematical properties that are explanatory of some phenomenon. They claim that in those explanations, the system under analysis has a mathematical structure whose mathematical properties are explanatory of a particular range of explananda. On the other hand, and despite the claim widely accepted that there are no laws in biology, some philosophers claim we can still consider that some biological models explain by appeal to laws of nature, suggesting covering law accounts of scientific explanation. The present thesis dissertation is a contribution to the aforementioned debate. It provides examples of biological models whose explanatory power does not lie in its identification of mechanisms with its parts and causal story, even if the models look somehow mechanistic. I claim they provide non-mechanistic (and non-causal) explanations, in so far as the models, even if they could identify a mechanism, do not explain by pinpointing information about its causal story.

abstract: ABSTRACT In this work, I provide two novel pieces of evidence in favor of the view that there is pragmatic encroachment on knowledge. First, I present an empirical case via the results of a series of recent experiments to show that folk-knowledge attributions may be sensitive to time constraints even when the latter are construed in a non-truth relevant manner. Along the way, I consider some comments made by Jonathan Schaffer (2006) as it pertains to interpreting time constraints-sensitivity in a manner that supports contextualism, before offering reasons to resist such a treatment. I proceed by applying interest relative invariantism to adjudicate a conflict in the epistemology of testimony namely, the positive reasons requirement a la, reductionism vs. non-reductionism. In particular, I highlight how whether an epistemic subject H needs positive non-testimonial reasons to be justified in accepting S's testimony that p, depends on what is at stake for H in believing that p and how much time H has in deliberating about p.
Dissertation/Thesis
M.A. Philosophy 2013

The topic of my thesis is experimental schools in Prague Michle, Nusle and Hostivař. It tries to shed light on the circumstances of the birth and end of these schools and to determine their characteristic features. Emphasis is put on the social aspect of experimentation and its close relation to the environment of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Inspiration by modern pedagogical theories is taken into account. The thesis traces the lives of several teachers. As sources were used not only archives but also a series of interviews with graduates of these schools. It aims, on the basis of a comparison of written and oral sources, to give a complex image of experimental education in Czechoslovakia at the time of the First Republic and the Protectorate. Last but not least it tries to answer the question whether experimental schools can contribute to today's education. Keywords: experimental schools, Dalton plan, pragmatism, globalisation, individualisation, differentiation, social studies, coeducation

Actuellement au Québec, une majorité d’électeurs ont exprimé leur mécontentement vis-à-vis du système politique actuel. Les citoyens déclarent être privés de contrôle et ressentir un manque de choix réel dans le processus politique. À l’ère du populisme croissant, cela représente une préoccupation urgente pour assurer la vitalité de notre démocratie. L’objectif de ce mémoire est d’aborder la question de l’engagement civique et de la transformation sociale et politique à partir d’une évaluation critique de la Philosophie pour enfants (PPE). La question de la recherche peut être formulée ainsi : « Comment la Philosophie pour enfants peut-elle aider à répondre aux aspirations non satisfaites qu’une majorité de citoyens ressentent à l’égard du système politique actuel ? » Afin de répondre à cette question, nous évaluons la valeur et le potentiel démocratique de la PPE à travers une théorie sociale et politique radicale. Nous nous éloignons des philosophies politiques plus « traditionnelles » pour nous intéresser au programme politique de « démocratie expérimentale » développé par Roberto Unger pour montrer comment il peut offrir un moyen d'envisager la PPE comme un moyen de perturber la simple reproduction de la structure sociale et de la rapprocher d'une activité qui le transforme à travers l'expérimentation et l'engagement collectif. Pour ce faire, nous argumentons que les pratiques et les fondements théoriques de la PPE peuvent être considérés comme compatibles avec une telle vision démocratique. Nous soutenons néanmoins que son potentiel démocratique est limité par le manque de l’aspect pratique ainsi que par l'absence de soutien institutionnel capable de permettre l'expérimentation et la collaboration collective.
Recently in Quebec, a majority of eligible voters have expressed their discontent with the current political system. Citizens say they experience disempowerment and feel a lack of real choice in the political process. In the age of rising populism, this represents a pressing concern to ensure the vitality of our democracy. The purpose of this thesis is to engage with the issue of civic engagement and social reform from the standpoint of Philosophy for children (P4C). The research question can be formulated as such: “How can P4C contribute to an effective response towards the unsatisfied aspirations that a majority of citizens feel toward the current political system?” In order to answer this question, we assess P4C’s democratic value and democratic potential through a radical social and political theory. We depart from more “traditional” political philosophies and direct our attention to Democratic Experimentalism developed by Roberto Unger to show how it can offer a way to envisage P4C as a means to disrupt the mere reproduction of the structure of society and bring it closer to an activity that transforms it through experimentation and collective engagement. To do so, we examine how P4C’s practices and theoretical underpinnings can be said to be compatible with such a vision of democratic life and how nonetheless its democratic potential is limited by the lack of practicality and the absence of institutional support capable of enabling experimentation and collective engagement.