This article describes a method for analysing human trajectories through a cognitive process of trajectorisation. The method aims at sheding light on the motives of an individual who has committed violent action. Since September the 11st of 2001 attacks in the United States, studies about jihadist radicalisation processes aimed at understanding or even preventing a terrorist act and have mobilised many researchers in the human and social sciences. The challenge of anticipation, as well as the lack of effective analysis methods and tools, appears to be very important, especially because observing an individual is already acting on it and on its behaviour. By adopting a cognitive science approach and an interdisciplinary stance, we have sought to respond to this need of an analysis method for radicalisation trajectories. We will see that there are many models aimed at understanding the process of radicalisation, yet few of them are confronted with reality, and few are adapted to the contingency and the evolving nature of the contexts of production of the radicalisation phenomenon. In this sense, we will present the concept of trajectory, redefined to be adapted to the analysis of radicalisation and enriched with a method that is actionable and replicable. This method of analysis aims at allowing us to highlight recurring actions and behaviours in an individual and to understand their levers, but it is not a predictive method. Nevertheless, we will see how the method could be part of the intelligence cycle and could support the production of enlightening analyses to be able to decide and act.
Cet article rend compte des premiers travaux d’ingénierie relatifs à la conception d'une plateforme de simulation d'une opération de renseignement de niveau stratégique à des fins de formation, d'expérimentation, de recherche et d'innovation. Au cœur de ces travaux se trouve le concept de jeu de renseignement, qu'il s'agit ici de définir et de caractériser pour en maîtriser les paramètres en fonction des objectifs de chaque séance. Nous plaçons le jeu de renseignement dans le contexte des jeux sérieux pour en comprendre les spécificités, puis nous proposons une analyse basée sur une analogie avec la lecture. Cela nous permet de définir notre objet « jeu de renseignement » comme un dispositif de lecture critique collective d'une fiction numérique interactive. Nous en identifions ainsi deux composants, le dispositif collectif et la fiction interactive, et nous formulons des hypothèses sur la façon dont chacun contribue à la représentativité de l'expérience des joueurs par rapport à celle d’analystes en situation réelle. Cela nous permet de proposer des pistes pour la conception de ces jeux à partir d'hypothèses, vérifiées empiriquement lors de premières sessions, et que de futurs travaux, en sciences de la cognition notamment, devront valider ou invalider.
A growing number of countries are adopting the American concept of ‘Intelligence Community’, either as an informal term or with an institutional dimension. This is the case in France, where the notion of community has been defined by Law. However, the term covers conceptual realities that differ greatly from one country to another. Once the common ground of the notion has been identified in a definitional and comparative effort, the article examines the connection between these intelligence communities and the ‘scientific communities’ composed of universities and academic research through so-called ‘outreach’ mechanisms. Once intelligence/academic research interactions have been described, two questions emerge : can we imagine an epistemic community encompassing both intelligence services and academic production, and can intelligence communities be described as epistemic communities ?
The intelligence analyst, whether he practices in the public or private sector, is confronted with a multitude of issues throughout his activity, from the collection to the diffusion of information, passing through the phases of comprehension and analysis : the overabundance of available data obliges him to refine his research techniques, while the emergence of fake news, alternative discourses and oriented contents aiming at influencing opinion pushes him to permanently exercise a critical look at the knowledge he is questioning. However, the relationship between intelligence practitioners and knowledge is not only passive, in the sense that on the one hand there is a mass of available information and, on the other, professionals in charge of analyzing it in order to answer a problem. Indeed, depending on the interpretation of the role of intelligence, it can be led to become itself, directly or not, a creator of knowledge. This article therefore returns to the issues of collection, but also to the reading grids adopted by the decision-makers and which define the extent to which knowledge may be used by the intelligence community.
The subject of intelligence analysis and its corollary, individual training in it, is a subject that is both complex and crucial. Paradoxically, however, it is one of the subjects on which there has been the least reflection and innovation in France, except via an academic approach or from Think-tank, and very often based on studies and processes related to economic intelligence or to entrepreneurship. Two major references nevertheless dominate these studies, which are for the first, the obvious and known failures of intelligence (in particular the intervention of a US-led coalition in Iraq in 2003), through a post-mortem approach and, for the second, the American integrated model, with very often the temptation to replicate this model by forgetting the context as well as the purposes. These references, if they prove to be useful, do not exempt from a complete and different reasoning in its approach to allow analysts to be better trained in order to be more efficient in their job. The purpose of this article is to describe potential ways of individual training in analysis, currently imperfectly explored in order to have a training system considered under a holistic prism, covering the knowledge, know-how and interpersonal skills, but also seen as an ecosystem, always with the aim of improving decision-making, the primary goal of intelligence.
This issue is essentially an invitation to a fruitful and controlled dialogue between the French communities of intelligence professionals and researchers in cognitive science and technology. For a variety of reasons, we are one of the last countries, if not the last, not to have initiated this joint work. And yet, as we shall see, intelligence is a total cognitive fact whose multiple dimensions need to be understood. The activities of analysts, carried out individually and as a team, in a wide range of contexts, are at the heart of it and demonstrate the complexity of the production of this particular knowledge, which is so critical to the strategy of states, companies or non-governmental organisations. Particular attention will be paid to technologies and methods, which can play a decisive role in this dialogue.
Le monde du renseignement combine une dimension bureaucratique interne avec une large capacité à produire de multiples narratifs, imaginaires et fantasmes. Le secret, pivot anthropologique du domaine, constitue le puissant moteur de ces proliférations socio-culturelles et politiques. En exposant la triple relation de la culture et du renseignement et l’évolution récente des rapports entre fiction et mondes du renseignement en France, cet article programmatique souligne en conclusion l’intérêt d’une histoire et d’une anthropologie culturelle de ces enjeux entre mondes du renseignement, culture et imaginaires populaires dans le contexte français.
Comme en témoignent de nombreux articles et ouvrages, la science du raisonnement est aujourd’hui un chantier très ouvert après une longue phase où cette activité cognitive a été conçue comme relevant d’un moteur logique dont la mise en œuvre s’opère avec des niveaux de conscience variables, déclinés aux extrêmes en intuitif et délibératif. Si cette conception articulant ces niveaux (par ex. système 1 et 2, rapide et lent, implicite et explicite) continue d’être mobilisée, d’autres propositions mettent par exemple en avant la fonction communicationnelle ou interactionnelle de l’activité rationnelle à des fins de justification et argumentation. Le raisonnement (ou l’analyse) tel qu’il est conduit par les agents au sein du cycle du renseignement (et plus généralement dans tout travail d’enquête visant à révéler des intentions cachées) est encore mal connu et a principalement été envisagé à l’aune de cette partition duale intuition/délibération, principalement au sein du cadre computationnaliste, représentationnaliste et modulariste des sciences de la cognition. Après avoir rappelé brièvement ces travaux et leurs évolutions, quelques pistes seront proposées pour enrichir cette science du raisonnement, de l’analyse et contribuer au développement d’une démarche de conception dite Intelligence Design ayant vocation à faire advenir de nouveaux environnements technologiques dédiés à la production de renseignement.
Traditionally, intelligence officers use an alphanumeric scale known as the Admiralty System to evaluate informational messages by rating the credibility of their contents and the reliability of their sources (e.g. NATO AJP-2.1, 2016). Amongst other duties, they are expected to clearly distinguish objective facts from subjective interpretations during this evaluation (NATO STANAG-2511, 2003). That being said, various experimental results show that officers are unable to properly fulfill this methodological duty (e.g. Baker et al., 1968; Kelly & Peterson, 1971; Johnson, 1973). Our explanation is that the extant scale, which is evaluative by nature, does not allow them to endorse a more objective, that is to say descriptive, perspective on information. In this article, we aim to help enforce the facts versus interpretations recommendation in the intelligence domain. By extracting the descriptive dimensions that underlie the scale, and by grouping them by linguistic directionality (e.g. Teigen & Brun, 1995; Mandel et al., 2022), we introduce a taxonomy to categorize intelligence messages more objectively. This taxonomy is fine-grained: it integrates messages which are informative or deceptive in the classical sense (e.g. misinformation, lying), but also more borderline messages, such as omissions and half-truths, which rely on the use of linguistic vagueness (following Égré & Icard, 2018; Icard et al., 2022). By putting descriptive lenses on information evaluation, we seek to provide new categories to help officers make more acute evaluations of information.
Aiming at establishing an objective and disengaged biography of John Stewart would go against his own conception of life, science and thought. In this text, I therefore present some recollections of my encounter and collaborations with John, and sketch some steps of his rich intellectual career. In the continuity of the discussions and disagreements I had the chance to develop with him, I also propose some reflections on the place of values in science, and on the value of science itself.
L’ouvrage est l’occasion d’une mise en situation générale des connaissances plus ou moins établies sur ce qu’était la vie des femmes, des hommes et des enfants à l’ère préhistorique. Pour dépasser les clichés issus des travaux du XIX e siècle, l’autrice choisit de partir de l’étude de l’usage des corps des femmes, des hommes et des enfants qui vivaient il y a 100 000 à 40 000 ans, en Europe, même si le lecteur découvrira que l’étude concerne des sites du monde entier en intégrant l’observation de pratiques contemporaines étudiées dans des zones longtemps isolées des modes de vie modernes. Par l’archéologie du corps, il s’agit d’étudier les activités, les rapports entre femmes et hommes, le statut des enfants, le statut des malades… mais aussi ce qu’il est possible de saisir des émotions, des affects. Toutes choses réputées invisibles que l’autrice entend bien révéler à partir de traces indirectes et avec une méthode scientifique rigoureuse. Le message de l’ouvrage est un signal à destination des préhistoriens mais s’adresse aussi à toute autre personne en l’invitant à se laisser porter par le patchwork des résultats de recherche présentés afin de laisser l’image de la vie préhistorique s’installer progressivement. Un livre à mettre entre toutes les mains, un régal pour imaginer nos racines communes.
It is argued here that the notion of complexity, fashionable as it is in many considerations about contemporary science, is of little relevance for physics, except perhaps in some restricted areas of statistical physics. The point is that theoretical physics, due to its intrinsic mathematical formalisation, may in general, as will be shown through several examples, escape the vexed problem of treating the reciprocal couplings between different levels of analysis or heterogeneous parts of a system — which is taken here as a minimal characterisation of complexity. However, it must be granted that physics, if not a theoretical science of the complex, is indeed a complex science when considered from the point of view of practice. But this is hardly a deep statement, as it only shows that if it is certainly worthwhile to recognise complexity as a feature of scientific activity, the word here may hardly go beyond its meaning in ordinary parlance and cannot pretend to a serious scientific or philosophical content.
As it is Tribute to John Stewart our remarks refer to a working group which met regularly at the UTC and at the IHPST between 2014 and 2016 and which had as central concern the modeling of living organization and the development of certain mathematical formalisms favorable to this modeling. First, we briefly recall the heart of the work carried out by this informal working group. Then in a second step, we evoke in more detail the position of John Stewart relative to this problematic in particular his analysis of the work of Robert Rosen. Finally, in a third and final step, we propose to present some recent works resulting from a critical reading of an article by Mossio, Longo and Stewart (2009) dealing with the Rosen conjecture. We take up the resolution of Rosens equations in lambda-calculus and propose an implementation in Haskell as well as a new interpretation of his causal graphs in terms of autocategories, a variant of the categories used by Andrée Ehresmann and Jean-Paul Vanbremeersch for the modeling and understanding of living and cognitive systems.
Ce court texte, en partie biographique, a été rédigé à l’occasion du séminaire d’hommage à John Stewart qui s’est tenu les 8 et 9 juillet 2021 à l’Université de Technologie de Compiègne. Il n’a pas les qualités de forme ou les gages de scientificité que l’on peut d’ordinaire attendre d’un article de recherche et s’apparente plus à un essai qu’à un produit achevé. On peut le lire comme l’amorce d’un dialogue qui n’aura plus lieu. J’y défends, à partir d’une analyse critique du modèle de l’autopoïèse – qui était l’une des grandes références théoriques de John Stewart – que le concept biologique de vie est indissociable du concept biographique de vie, que l’ être en vie –aussi bien dans l’acte de reconnaissance des vivants qui inaugure l’enquête du biologiste, que dans l’attitude naïve face aux vivants – est d’abord appréhendé comme un avoir une vie , et qu’une biologie qui voudrait – comme John Stewart l’encourageait, non sans véhémence, à le faire – clarifier son objet devrait considérer la structure narrative qui préside à l’apparition du vivant, toute vie étant, comme le tenait Paul Ricœur, une vie racontée.
Can we define what life is ? This question tormented John Stewart, to the point that he gave one of his books the following title : “Does Life Exist ?”. As a biologist like him, I branched off into the didactics and epistemology of biology. Let me first recall that the definitions of what life is evolve both during childhood and during historical periods. John Stewarts contribution is then presented into three points : life is an open thermodynamic system which is auto-poietic and has functions. After summarizing and discussing these three points, I add a fourth which has achieved consensus in the scientific community : it is a system which reproduces itself almost identically. But these attempts to define Life remain questions that are still open. John Stewarts incessant desire not to reduce the living to physico-chemical processes could recall a vitalist position, but the complexity of the living is rather defined for him as that of an autopoietic system capable of emergences, which he illustrated minimally by computer simulations. Finally, a coherence is suggested between the attempts at definitions of life proposed by John Stewart, and his militant positions full of life !
Quelle est la part de la surprise dans un entretien d’explicitation micro-phénoménologique ? En quoi la relation entre interviewé.e et intervieweuse.eur est-elle placée sous le signe de la surprise ? Comment la nouveauté de l’expérience découverte lors d’un entretien offre-t-elle un critère décisif pour sa réussite voire sa validation ? A travers ces questions se trouvent identifiées quelques dimensions où la surprise, quoique non-relevée jusqu’alors explicitement par les chercheurs qui travaillent dans le champ de la micro-phénoménologie, paraît jouer un rôle déterminant. Dans cette contribution, je voudrais explorer le rôle de la surprise dans le type d’intersubjectivité en jeu dans l’entretien d’explicitation micro-phénoménologique, en relisant à cette lumière l’épistémologie varelienne de l’énaction, qui s’est formulée de son côté au fil des décennies sous des noms qui appellent spontanément la surprise et l’altérité comme sa figure exemplaire, sans que celle-ci ait été pour autant thématisée elle non plus dans ce cadre. En effet, qu’il s’agisse de l’émergence du sens, de la création, de la production, du faire, de la dynamique sensori-motrice, du schème perception-action ou de la générativité, on a là semble-t-il différentes formulations de la surprise en jeu. Où l’énaction s’oppose dès lors frontalement à la représentation et au déjà donné, lesquels ne favorisent pas, c’est le moins qu’on puisse dire, l’émergence du surprenant.
John Stewart has deeply influenced several generations of scientists in cognitive science. His catching passion and his gift to start debates and arguments offered to the scientific field of cognitive science colors and issues on the existential as well as theoretical grounds. He stood up for an initiative of non-reductional naturalism, binding phenomenological experiences and scientific explanations. In biology, he fought against the reduction of the living (evolution and morphogenesis) to the sole genetic information. In cognitive science, he promoted an enactive approach against several forms of computationalism. These two struggles were gathered under the banner “Life = cognition”. Meanwhile, inside the Compiègne school, he defended the idea of the technical and social constitutivity of human cognition. He searched for the understanding of both the origins and the structures of high-and low-order cognitive abilities (perception, language or reasoning) through the species evolution, the hominization process, the history of technics and the development of social organization. This special issue aims at gathering several contributions to these issues that could challenge the writings of John Stewart, in order to show that the multiform work he left to the community and to the society is still alive. This issue-tribute includes several contribution presenting such debates dear to John.
Ce texte évoque d’abord la manière dont John Stewart refuse le réductionnisme en biologie tout en travaillant à une formalisation mathématique de l’autopoïèse, puis la manière dont Bernard Stiegler discuta en philosophe, qui plus est en philosophe de la technique constituante, les entreprises de ce type. Il prolonge ensuite les discussions ainsi mises en place entre vie et mort, et encore sciences de la cognition et philosophie, par une lecture du séminaire de J. Derrida La vie la mort.
This article, in homage to John Stewart, aims at proposing a new approach to the perception of the position of an object at a distance, which implies giving an ontological status to the possible positions in the distal space. After having recalled the difficulty of explaining the perception of exteriority within the framework of enactive approaches, we will proceed in two steps. In the first stage, we will present the attempts to explain distal perception in terms of individual sensorimotor invariants. This seems to us to pose the problem well but fails to solve it. Then, in a second step, we will propose a new way to account for spatial perception, a way that does not deny the initial intuitions of the enactive autopoietic approaches, but that radically changes the conception of cognition by considering, as early as the perceptual stage, the necessity of taking into account interindividual interactions. The protocol of an original experimental study will allow us to characterize this new approach to account, without leaving the domain of coupling, for the perceptual experience of objects at a distance, in exteriority in a space of possibilities. For this we will have to analyze the limits of the perceptual crossing, that is to say the moment when the perceptual reciprocity between different subjects starts to disappear.
Cet article est une réflexion théorique autour de la question de l’adaptation de la psychologie phénoménologique d’Edmund Husserl à un paradigme expérientiel. Il s’agit de confronter la phénoménologie, la psychologie et la micro-phénoménologie pour sortir du cadre husserlien. Comment cette confrontation permet-elle de dépasser leurs différences disciplinaires pour considérer le projet transdisciplinaire d’une psychologie phénoménologique expérientielle ? Nous commençons par présenter quelques considérations gnoséologiques autour du projet de psychologie phénoménologique de Husserl. Puis, à partir de celui-ci, nous explorons la porosité gnoséologique existante entre phénoménologie, psychologie et micro-phénoménologie. À la suite de cette recherche, nous avons des pistes de travail pour l’élaboration d’une psychologie phénoménologique expérientielle. Nous montrons notamment qu’il y a une circularité gnoséologique entre la phénoménologie, la psychologie et la micro-phénoménologie.
