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Transphilosophies: the Migration of Ideas and the Decolonization of Knowledge

Seloua Luste Boulbina, Etienne Balibar, Ali Benmaklouf, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, moderated by Madeleine Dobie

Table ronde en français / Roundtable in French.

This event is featured as part of a series of events on “Le français dans tous ses états,” with sponsorship provided by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S.

Tracing the migration of ideas—between countries and among theoretical and artistic practices—is an important dimension of the decolonization of knowledge. How do ideas cross borders? If translation is one route, ideas also circulate within linguistic areas, for example between former colonial powers and colonized countries. If western thought is widely disseminated throughout the world, what movements are occurring in other directions, for instance in the exchanges between contemporary art, philosophy and history? In this cross-disciplinary roundtable, five leading thinkers share their perspectives on the movement of ideas across media, disciplines, languages, and regions, considering how art and philosophy come together in the decolonization of knowledge. The discussion will be preceded by screenings of four recent short films that explore the politics of decolonization in an experimental visual language: Le Voyage à Bandung (Jean-François Boclé, 2015, 5 min.); Corps à corps (Louisa Babari and Celio Paillard, 2015, 8 min.); The Storyteller (Katia Kameli, 2012, 12 min.); Kaleta Kaleta (Emo de Medeiros, 2015, 6 min.).

“Transphilosophies” entend développer une politique de la relation. En ouvrant un espace partagé de réflexion élargie, l’intention est de produire du commun. Transphilosophies est conçu comme une rencontre entre approches visuelles et discursives à des questions partagées. L’image et la fiction entretiennent des liens étroits avec les mots et l’analyse qu’il convient d’explorer. La migration des idées, entre les pays, entre les pratiques – théoriques et artistiques – permet de mieux appréhender les enjeux et les objets de la décolonisation  des savoirs. Comment les passages de frontières s’effectuent-ils ? La traduction est bien sûr une voie à interroger. Mais elle ne suffit pas à rendre compte des constantes remarquables qui permettent de passer, intercontinentalement, d’un monde à l’autre. Qu’en est-il lorsque l’on se trouve dans la même aire linguistique et que les idées circulent entre anciennes puissances impériales et anciens pays colonisés ? Si la pensée occidentale est particulièrement bien diffusée à travers le monde, qu’en est-il dans l’autre sens ? La porosité entre les champs – entre art contemporain, philosophie contemporaine et histoire – ouvre la porte à de nouveaux voisinages qu’il faut également examiner.

Participants:

Seloua Luste Boulbina est Agrégée de philosophie, docteur en sciences politiques, directrice de programme au Collège International de philosophie à Paris (« La décolonisation des savoirs ») et chercheuse (HDR) au LCSP (EA7335) à l’Université Diderot Paris 7. Théoricienne de la décolonisation, elle s’intéresse aux questions coloniales et postcoloniales, dans leurs dimensions politiques, intellectuelles et artistiques. Son dernier livre est L’Afrique et ses fantômes, Écrire l’après (Présence Africaine, 2015).

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of Philosophy and French and Chair of the Department of French at Columbia University. Previously he taught philosophy for many years at Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar (Senegal) and at Northwestern University. His field of research includes history of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature. One of his recent books, Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal, Paris, Editions du CNRS, 2011) was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011 and he received the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work in 2011.

Etienne Balibar is Visiting Professor at Columbia in the Department of French and Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.  He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He has published widely in the area of Marxist philosophy and moral and political philosophy in general. His many works include Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, Roger Establet, and F. Maspero) (1965);Spinoza et la politique (1985); Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le peuple(2001); Politics and the Other Scene (2002); L’Europe, l’Amérique, la Guerre. Réflexions sur la mediationeuropéenne (2003);  Europe, Constitution, Frontière (2005).

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Rationalizability, originally proposed by Bernheim and Pearce, generalizes the notion of Nash equilibrium. Nash equilibrium requires common knowledge of strategies. Rationalizability only requires common knowledge of rationality. However, their original notion assumes that the payoffs are common knowledge. I.e. agents do know what world they are in, but may be ignorant of what other agents are playing.

We generalize the original notion of rationalizability to consider situations where agents do not know what world they are in, or where some know but others do not know. Agents who know something about the world can take advantage of their superior knowledge. It may also happen that both Ann and Bob know about the world but Ann does not know that Bob knows. How might they act?

We will show how a notion of rationalizability in the context of partial knowledge, represented by a Kripke structure, can be developed.

A subjective probability function is broadminded to the extent that it assigns positive probabilities to conjectures that can be possibly true. Assigning to such a conjecture the value 0 amounts to a priori ruling out the possibility of confirming the conjecture to any extent by the growing evidence. A positive value leaves, in principle, the possibility of learning from the evidence. In general, broadmindedness is not an absolute notion, but a graded one, and there is a price for it: the more broadminded the probability, the more complicated it is, because it has to assign non-zero values to more complicated conjectures. The framework which is suggested in the old Gaifman-Snir paper is suitable for phrasing this claim in a precise way and proving it. The technique by which this claim is established is to assume a definable probability function, and to state within the same language a conjecture that can be possibly true, whose probability is 0.

The complexity of the conjecture depends on the complexity of the probability, i.e., the complexity of the formulas that are used in defining it. In the Gaifman-Snir paper we used the arithmetical hierarchy as a measure of complexity. It is possible however to establish similar results with respect to a more “down to earth” measures, defined in terms of the time that it takes to calculate the probabilities, with given precisions.

A claim of this form, for a rather simple setup, was first proven by Hilary Putnam in his paper ““Degree of Confirmation” and inductive logic”, which was published in the 1963 Schilpp volume dedicated to Carnap. The proof uses in a probabilistic context, a diagonalization technique, of the kind used in set theory and in computer science. In the talk I shall present Putnam’s argument and show how diagonalization can be applied in considerably richer setups.

The second part of the talk is rather speculative. I shall point out the possibility that there might be epistemic limitations to what human science can achieve, which are imposed by certain pragmatic factors ‒ such as the criterion of repeatable experiments. All of which would recommend a skeptic attitude.

Reception to follow