Paul Jorion

• Lille Catholic University

Paul Jorion est chroniqueur au Monde-Économie et sur BFM Radio. Il est diplômé en sociologie et en anthropologie sociale (Docteur en Sciences Sociales de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles). Il a enseigné aux universités de Bruxelles, Cambridge, Paris VIII et à l’Université de Californie à Irvine. Il a également été fonctionnaire des Nations-Unies (FA...

Finance has undergone a rapid evolution during the fifteen years that separates us from the birth of personnel computer. The acceleration in the dissemination of information, the speed of transactions, and the possibility of calculing prices by means of complex formulas allow human beings to produce a machine unafraid of a loss, an emotion that up...

Finance has undergone a rapid evolution during the fifteen years that separates us from the birth of personnel computer. The acceleration in the dissemination of information, the speed of transactions, and the possibility of calculing prices by means of complex formulas allow human beings to produce a machine unafraid of a loss, an emotion that up...

Theirs was a world to win Abused by a Hegelian dichotomy, Marx fused as a single class, the “bourgeoisie”, “renters” or capitalists properly so called and “entrepreneurs” two classes whose interests were in truth antagonistic. With the invention of stock options in 1975, the interests of capitalists and entrepreneurs effectively merged. Their commo...

Le recrutement familial (père et fils, groupe de frères) des équipages de pêche côtière dans l'Atlantique nord constitue une caractéristique constante. Même si ce type de recrutement peut être considéré comme une suite de stages successifs dans un cycle de développement, on a porté peu d'attention à l'évolution des équipages familiaux. A partir de...

What part has to be indebted to the financial speculation in the recent food an energy price inflation? Informations on this controversial question may be found through the works of different commissions of the US Senate. Particularly lights have been bring upon the mechanisms by which new speculators, made “investments” in the commodities futures...

What part has to be indebted to the financial speculation in the recent food an energy price inflation? Informations on this controversial question may be found through the works of different commissions of the US Senate. Particularly lights have been bring upon the mechanisms by which new speculators, made "investments" in the commodities futures...

Depuis l’été 2007, les marchés financiers sont secoués par une crise majeure. Paul Jorion nous explique l’origine du phénomène. D’où viennent les crédits « subprime » ? Comment les crédits a risque se sont-ils répandus ? Tout part du marché immobilier américain, mais c’est surtout le mécanisme financier de la titrisation qui a permis à la crise de...

Have been gathered here the introduction and the conclusion of a manuscript entitled Price. The introduction emphasizes the parallel existing between the way price and truth mould human relations within the social tissue, where price acts as the truth of human matters as expressed by numbers while truth is the price of things when expressed with wo...

Because they are in constant interaction with each other, human beings are often agents within emergent collective processes. Although they are then acting as particles in a field-type phenomenon, their awareness of what they are part of entails that they hold views about why they’re acting the way they do, these, they call “reasons.” Should physic...

The article shows that if the notion of the Welfare State seems at first sight absent nowadays in the United States, firstly, such has not always been the case, as the New Deal (1933-1941) represented a typical version of the Welfare State ; secondly, the Welfare State still dominates in housing. In recent years delegation by the Federal Government...

The biological basis of money lies in a three-term relationship between one subject and some others, with money acting as a mediator. The drive to acquire money is a special case of a desire for recognition. What is aimed at by subjects is their desire for the desire of some others: the former derive satisfaction from representing to themselves the...

Accounting for human activity through physics does not require anything more than a switch of mind. Objectivity needs first to be recognized as an epistemological principle that should mostly be ignored when modeling human activity, lest it is decided that methods from physics should not apply to man out of principle. Second, it needs to be underst...

À propos de : Wiktor Stoczkowski, Des hommes, des dieux et des extraterrestres. Ethnologie d'une croyance moderne, Paris, Flammarion, 1999, 474 p., et de Benson Saler, Charles A. Ziegler & Charles B. Moore, UFO Crash at Roswell : The Genesis of a Modern Myth, Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997, 198 p.

Examining the implications of a localist model for linguistic performance, I show the strengths of the P-graph, a network of elementary units of meaning where utterance results from relaxation through the operation of a dynamics of affect values. A unit of meaning is stored in a synaptic connection that brings together two words. Such a model, cons...

Syntax is better viewed as the dynamics of a morphogenetic field on a semantic universe of “content” words. This may take widely different forms, making the acquisition of any language by an aspiring speaker an entirely new experience. The existence of an underlying “universal syntax” might be illusory.

In their quality as acoustic or visual percepts, words are linked to the emotional values of the state-of-affairs they evoke. This allows them to engender meanings capable of operating nearly entirely detached from percepts. Such a laying flat of meanings permits deliberation to take place within the window of consciousness. In such a theatre...

It is shown, both deductively and with the help of the empirical evidence provided by Libet, that consciousness is deprived of any decisional power. Consciousness' role is confined to transmitting instructions to the body as a function of the affect both generated and evoked by perception. The existence of language allows human subjects to produce...

A Hebbian model for speech generation opens a number of paths. A cross-linguistic scheme of functional relationships (inspired by Aristotle) dispenses with distraction by the "parts of speech" distinctions, while bridging the gap between "contents" and "structure" words. A gradient model identifies emotional and rational dynamics and shows speech g...

The activity of mathematicians is examined here in an anthropological perspective. The task effectively performed reveals that, independently of their own representation, mathematicians produce in actuality a « virtual physics ». The principles of demonstrative proof as described and assessed by Aristotle, are first introduced, displaying a latitud...

The notion of "value" developed over the ages to connote the variability of price. It was spontaneously assumed that if price varies, there must be an underlying, more constant essence of which price is a phenomenal manifestation. Both seminal and representative of various attempts at establishing the foundations of the concept of value, Adam Smith...

The notion of "value" developed over the ages to connote the variability of price. It was spontaneously assumed that if price varies, there must be an underlying, more constant essence of which price is a phenomenal manifestation. Both seminal and representative of various attempts at establishing the foundations of the concept of value, Adam Smith...

In "The g Factor," Jensen (1998, 1999) fails to establish his claim of the existence of an 18 point lag between the average IQ score for American blacks compared to American whites. The populations upon which he tested his hypothesis are constructed in a faulty manner, leading to an invalid treatment of data. The gap he discovers may therefore be a...

Byrne & Russon's text displays all the difficulties involved in approaching imitation in a non- methodological behaviourist perspective. Their conceptual apparatus is grounded in a mix of introspection and folk psychology. Their distinction between action level and program level imitation falters on goal imputation for sequential acts. An alternati...

Etude de la theorie du calcul des prix developpee par Aristote en termes de proportion fondee sur le statut relatif de l'acheteur et du vendeur. Comparant la theorie mathematique d'Aristote avec les agences d'evaluation des marches financiers contemporains, l'A. souligne la validite du modele aristotelicien au regard du risque de credit qui concern...

In an article published in 1984, Jean Pouillon claimed that a better rendition of a text heard can be achieved when contents is ignored and attention is focused only on syntactic structure. I examine the implications of this statement in the light of Pouillon’s earlier Temps et Roman, a theory of the novel published in 1946. The fact is that if we...

Confusions between substantive and relational concepts of kinship as a social network have led to a number of problems that are clarified by a temporally ordered relational theory of network structure. The ordered-network approach gives rise to a novel means of graphing the social field of kinship relations, while allowing kinship to be locally def...

Etude des techniques du mariage chez les aborigenes d'Australie, plus precisement des relations de parente qu'il exige. Comment le modele de mariage caracterise de maniere generale les moeurs de la societe aborigene australienne

The study of kinship is hampered by the lack of a com- mon language of description for basic structures and processes in the formation of kinship relations. This paper develops such a representational language, one that overcomes conventional approaches to kinship and marriage and the genealogical diagram, which represents marriage and parent/child...

This book, published in a series called “Cognitive Science”, aims -- as suggested in the title -- at defining general properties of « intelligent systems ». The question of the intelligence of a computer system running a piece of software can be considerably simplified if no consideration is given to the concept of a « subject » displaying intellig...

This article contrasts within a unified setting-a small island community off the southern coast of Brittany-two varieties of the same religion stemming from discrepant approaches to a common creed. The 400 inhabitants of Houat are Roman Catholics and their religious life is organised by the Rector who, until recently, combined spiritual guidance wi...

In this paper, using the most common marriage rules occuring in primitive tribes, we construct a 16 classes model. The corresponding group of order 16 yields by morphic images quotients of order 2, 4 or 8.One observes among the Australian tribes several societies corresponding to those quotient groups; we make the assumption that distinct societies...

The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We...

Over the last two or three decades, ethnographers of Australia have increasingly questioned Radcliffe-Brown's understanding of Aboriginal social organisations. Some, mostly committed to ecological models, have rallied to the master's posthumous defence, and to this day the debate about the Australian `horde' still rages. We look back on Radcliffe-B...

The Moral Order on a Small Breton Island. In this paper the author brings together various reflexions about the moral and social set-up of a small Breton island where he was in the field from February 1973 up to May 1974. The author's purpose is in delineating politics at the minutest scale by showing how a community polity stems from kin, vicinit...

An agent-based simulation of the New York Stock Exchange shows that the market is more unstable when agents adopt buy/sell strategies than when they abstain. The claim is made that the relative stability observed on stock markets is not due to an "invisible hand" resulting from "the selfish pursuit by agents of their own interest" but from the prac...

The divide between semantics, syntax and logic is absent from Aristotle’s linguistics where the progress from concept to discourse is continuous: concepts linked in pairs constitute judgments, judgments linked make clauses, clauses linked amount to discourse. One’s degree of adhesion to one’s own speech - from simple quotation to expression of pers...

This paper introduces the P-Graph representation of a neural network as an alternative to the classical « semantic networks » introduced in knowledge representation by Quillian. None of the shortcomings of Quillian-type semantic networks are displayed by it. The P-Graph is a particular type of dual of a graph: memory traces (typically “words”) are...

Artificial Intelligence still lacks an adequate theory of meaning. Maybe the obstacles we observe to the progress of AI are partially imaginary. We suppose for instance that there is an essential difference between opening a window « mechanically » because someone has asked us to do so and converting to a religion under the inspiration of a preache...

Artificial Intelligence betrays the special dispositions and traditions of the fields which constitute its ancestry: neuro-physiology, psychology, logic and mathematics. The common thread between the divergent pull of these fields emerges in a model of thought processes as a gradient on a “memory trace” landscape. Paths generated on this landscape...

189 p., ref. bib. : 15 p. Analysant les principes généraux réglant le fonctionnement des systèmes intelligents, Paul Jorion projette sur eux les éclairages inattendus qu'offrent la logique chinoise, la linguistique médiévale, le débat anthropologique sur la "mentalité primitive", ou la psychanalyse. Élaborant par étapes une conception connexionnist...