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The Hume Machine: can associations networks do more than formal rules?

Geneviéve Teil, Bruno Latour

By pushing to its extreme conclusions recent accounts of formal reasoning in context, this article claims that a machine that cumulates enough context - in the highly reduced forms of co-occurences of words- is able to capture the solidity of most micro-theories; emergent properties are studied of what is a prototype for a work station allowing social science students to treat full texts in a "quali-quantitative" manner.