In the natural and social sciences, it is common to use toy models—extremely simple and highly idealized representations—to understand complex phenomena. Some of the simple surrogate models used to understand opaque machine learning (ML) models, such as rule lists and sparse decision trees, bear some resemblance to scientific toy models. They allow non-experts to understand how an opaque ML model works globally via a much simpler model that highlights the most relevant features of the input space and their effect on (...) the output. The obvious difference is that the common target of a toy and a full-scale model in the sciences is some phenomenon in the world, while the target of a surrogate model is another model. This essential difference makes toy surrogate models (TSMs) a new object of study for theories of understanding, one that is not easily accommodated under current analyses. This paper provides an account of what it means to understand an opaque ML model globally with the aid of such simple models. (shrink)

Issues of reliability are claiming center-stage in the epistemology of machine learning. This paper unifies different branches in the literature and points to promising research directions, whilst also providing an accessible introduction to key concepts in statistics and machine learning – as far as they are concerned with reliability.

This article provides a methodology for the interpretation of AI ethics principles to specify ethical criteria for the development and deployment of AI systems in high-risk domains. The methodology consists of a three-step process deployed by an independent, multi-stakeholder ethics board to: (1) identify the appropriate level of abstraction for modelling the AI lifecycle; (2) interpret prescribed principles to extract specific requirements to be met at each step of the AI lifecycle; and (3) define the criteria to inform purpose- and (...) context-specific balancing of the principles. The methodology presented in this article is designed to be agile, adaptable, and replicable, and when used as part of a pro-ethical institutional culture, will help to foster the ethical design, development, and deployment of AI systems. The application of the methodology is illustrated through reference to the UK Ministry of Defence AI ethics principles. (shrink)

This paper is about the opposite of judgement and calculation. This opposition has been a traditional anchor of critiques concerned with the rise of AI decision making over human judgement. Contrary to these approaches, it is argued that human judgement is not and cannot be replaced by calculation, but that it is human judgement that contextualises computational structures and gives them meaning and purpose. The article focuses on the epistemic structure of algorithms and artificial neural networks to find that they (...) always depend on human judgement to be related to real life objects or purposes. By introducing the philosophical concept of judgement, it becomes clear that the property of judgement to provide meaning and purposiveness is based on the temporality of human life and the ambiguity of language, which quantitative processes lack. A juxtaposition shows that calculations and clustering can be used and referred to in more or less prejudiced and reflecting as well as opaque and transparent ways, but thereby always depend on human judgement. The paper clearly asserts that the transparency of AI is necessary for their autonomous use. This transparency requires the explicitness of the judgements that constitute these computational structures, thereby creating an awareness of the conditionality of such epistemic entities. (shrink)

The ongoing explosion of interest in artificial intelligence is fueled in part by recently developed techniques in machine learning. Those techniques allow automated systems to process huge amounts of data, utilizing mathematical methods that depart from traditional statistical approaches, and resulting in impressive advancements in our ability to make predictions and uncover correlations across a host of interesting domains. But as is now widely discussed, the way that those systems arrive at their outputs is often opaque, even to the experts (...) who design and deploy them. Is it morally problematic to make use of opaque automated methods when making high-stakes decisions, like whether to issue a loan to an applicant, or whether to approve a parole request? Many scholars answer in the affirmative. However, there is no widely accepted explanation for why transparent systems are morally preferable to opaque systems. We argue that the use of automated decision-making systems sometimes violates duties of consideration that are owed by decision-makers to decision-subjects, duties that are both epistemic and practical in character. Violations of that kind generate a weighty consideration against the use of opaque decision systems. In the course of defending our approach, we show that it is able to address three major challenges sometimes leveled against attempts to defend the moral import of transparency in automated decision-making. (shrink)

Unsupervised learning algorithms are widely used for many important statistical tasks with numerous applications in science and industry. Yet despite their prevalence, they have attracted remarkably little philosophical scrutiny to date. This stands in stark contrast to supervised and reinforcement learning algorithms, which have been widely studied and critically evaluated, often with an emphasis on ethical concerns. In this article, I analyze three canonical unsupervised learning problems: clustering, abstraction, and generative modeling. I argue that these methods raise unique epistemological and (...) ontological questions, providing data-driven tools for discovering natural kinds and distinguishing essence from contingency. This analysis goes some way toward filling the lacuna in contemporary philosophical discourse on unsupervised learning, as well as bringing conceptual unity to a heterogeneous field more often described by what it isnot(i.e., supervised or reinforcement learning) than by what itis. I submit that unsupervised learning is not just a legitimate subject of philosophical inquiry but perhaps the most fundamental branch of all AI. However, an uncritical overreliance on unsupervised methods poses major epistemic and ethical risks. I conclude by advocating for a pragmatic, error-statistical approach that embraces the opportunities and mitigates the challenges posed by this powerful class of algorithms. (shrink)

Definition of the problem The umbrella term “explicability” refers to the reduction of opacity of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. These efforts are challenging for medical AI applications because higher accuracy often comes at the cost of increased opacity. This entails ethical tensions because physicians and patients desire to trace how results are produced without compromising the performance of AI systems. The centrality of explicability within the informed consent process for medical AI systems compels an ethical reflection on the trade-offs. Which (...) levels of explicability are needed to obtain informed consent when utilizing medical AI? Arguments We proceed in five steps: First, we map the terms commonly associated with explicability as described in the ethics and computer science literature, i.e., disclosure, intelligibility, interpretability, and explainability. Second, we conduct a conceptual analysis of the ethical requirements for explicability when it comes to informed consent. Third, we distinguish hurdles for explicability in terms of epistemic and explanatory opacity. Fourth, this then allows to conclude the level of explicability physicians must reach and what patients can expect. In a final step, we show how the identified levels of explicability can technically be met from the perspective of computer science. Throughout our work, we take diagnostic AI systems in radiology as an example. Conclusion We determined four levels of explicability that need to be distinguished for ethically defensible informed consent processes and showed how developers of medical AI can technically meet these requirements. (shrink)

The ‘black box problem’ is a long-standing talking point in debates about artificial intelligence. This is a significant point of tension between ethicists, programmers, clinicians and anyone else working on developing AI for healthcare applications. However, the precise definition of these systems are often left undefined, vague, unclear or are assumed to be standardised within AI circles. This leads to situations where individuals working on AI talk over each other and has been invoked in numerous debates between opaque and explainable (...) systems. This paper proposes a coherent and clear definition for the black box problem to assist in future discussions about AI in healthcare. This is accomplished by synthesising various definitions in the literature and examining several criteria that can be extrapolated from these definitions. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 6, June 2022.

The AI Robotics Ethics Society (AIRES) is a non-profit organization founded in 2018 by Aaron Hui to promote awareness and the importance of ethical implementation and regulation of AI. AIRES is now an organization with chapters at universities such as UCLA (Los Angeles), USC (University of Southern California), Caltech (California Institute of Technology), Stanford University, Cornell University, Brown University, and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). AIRES at PUCRS is the first international chapter of AIRES, and (...) as such, we are committed to promoting and enhancing the AIRES Mission. Our mission is to focus on educating the AI leaders of tomorrow in ethical principles to ensure that AI is created ethically and responsibly. As there are still few proposals for how we should implement ethical principles and normative guidelines in the practice of AI system development, the goal of this work is to try to bridge this gap between discourse and praxis. Between abstract principles and technical implementation. In this work, we seek to introduce the reader to the topic of AI Ethics and Safety. At the same time, we present several tools to help developers of intelligent systems develop "good" models. This work is a developing guide published in English and Portuguese. Contributions and suggestions are welcome. (shrink)

Philosophers increasingly argue that collective agents can be blameworthy for wrongdoing. Advocates tend to endorse functionalism, on which collectives are analogous to complicated robots. This is puzzling: we don’t hold robots blameworthy. I argue we don’t hold robots blameworthy because blameworthiness presupposes the capacity for a mental state I call ‘moral self-awareness’. This raises a new problem for collective blameworthiness: collectives seem to lack the capacity for moral self-awareness. I solve the problem by giving an account of how collectives have (...) this capacity. The trick is to take seriously individuals’ status as flesh-and-blood material constituents of collectives. The idea will be: under certain conditions that I specify, an individual can be the locus of a collective's moral self-awareness. The account provides general insights concerning collectives’ dependence on members, the boundaries of membership, and the locus of collectives’ phenomenology. (shrink)

Data‐driven algorithms are widely used to make or assist decisions in sensitive domains, including healthcare, social services, education, hiring, and criminal justice. In various cases, such algorithms have preserved or even exacerbated biases against vulnerable communities, sparking a vibrant field of research focused on so‐called algorithmic biases. This research includes work on identification, diagnosis, and response to biases in algorithm‐based decision‐making. This paper aims to facilitate the application of philosophical analysis to these contested issues by providing an overview of three (...) key topics: What is algorithmic bias? Why and how can it occur? What can and should be done about it? Throughout, we highlight connections—both actual and potential—with philosophical ideas and concerns. (shrink)

Explainable AI (xAI) methods are important for establishing trust in using black-box models. However, recent criticism has mounted against current xAI methods that they disagree, are necessarily false, and can be manipulated, which has started to undermine the deployment of black-box models. Rudin (2019) goes so far as to say that we should stop using black-box models altogether in high-stakes cases because xAI explanations ‘must be wrong’. However, strict fidelity to the truth is historically not a desideratum in science. Idealizations (...) – the intentional distortions introduced to scientific theories and models – are commonplace in the natural sciences and are seen as a successful scientific tool. Thus, it is not falsehood qua falsehood that is the issue. In this paper, I outline the need for xAI research to engage in idealization evaluation. Drawing on the use of idealizations in the natural sciences and philosophy of science, I introduce a novel framework for evaluating whether xAI methods engage in successful idealizations or deceptive explanations (SIDEs). SIDEs evaluates whether the limitations of xAI methods, and the distortions that they introduce, can be part of a successful idealization or are indeed deceptive distortions as critics suggest. I discuss the role that existing research can play in idealization evaluation and where innovation is necessary. Through a qualitative analysis we find that leading feature importance methods and counterfactual explanations are subject to idealization failure and suggest remedies for ameliorating idealization failure. (shrink)

Many AI systems that make important decisions are black boxes: how they function is opaque even to their developers. This is due to their high complexity and to the fact that they are trained rather than programmed. Efforts to alleviate the opacity of black box systems are typically discussed in terms of transparency, interpretability, and explainability. However, there is little agreement about what these key concepts mean, which makes it difficult to adjudicate the success or promise of opacity alleviation methods. (...) I argue for a unified account of these key concepts that treats the concept of understanding as fundamental. This allows resources from the philosophy of science and the epistemology of understanding to help guide opacity alleviation efforts. A first significant benefit of this understanding account is that it defuses one of the primary, in-principle objections to post hoc explainable AI (XAI) methods. This “rationalization objection” argues that XAI methods provide mere rationalizations rather than genuine explanations. This is because XAI methods involve using a separate “explanation” system to approximate the original black box system. These explanation systems function in a completely different way than the original system, yet XAI methods make inferences about the original system based on the behavior of the explanation system. I argue that, if we conceive of XAI methods as idealized scientific models, this rationalization worry is dissolved. Idealized scientific models misrepresent their target phenomena, yet are capable of providing significant and genuine understanding of their targets. (shrink)

Machine learning-based AI algorithms lack transparency. In this article, I offer an interpretation of AI’s explainability problem and highlight its ethical saliency. I try to make the case for the legal enforcement of a strong explainability requirement: human organizations which decide to automate decision-making should be legally obliged to demonstrate the capacity to explain and justify the algorithmic decisions that have an impact on the wellbeing, rights, and opportunities of those affected by the decisions. This legal duty can be derived (...) from the demands of Rawlsian public reason. In the second part of the paper, I try to show that the argument from the limitations of human cognition fails to get AI off the hook of public reason. Against a growing trend in AI ethics, my main argument is that the analogy between human minds and artificial neural networks fails because it suffers from an atomistic bias which makes it blind to the social and institutional dimension of human reasoning processes. I suggest that developing interpretive AI algorithms is not the only possible answer to the explainability problem; social and institutional answers are also available and in many cases more trustworthy than techno-scientific ones. (shrink)

As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence, in particular machine learning, has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the theory of (...) AI ethics principles and the practical design of AI systems. In previous work, we analysed whether it is possible to close this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the use of tools and methods designed to help AI developers, engineers, and designers translate principles into practice. We concluded that this method of closure is currently ineffective as almost all existing translational tools and methods are either too flexible or too strict. This raised the question: if, even with technical guidance, AI ethics is challenging to embed in the process of algorithmic design, is the entire pro-ethical design endeavour rendered futile? And, if no, then how can AI ethics be made useful for AI practitioners? This is the question we seek to address here by exploring why principles and technical translational tools are still needed even if they are limited, and how these limitations can be potentially overcome by providing theoretical grounding of a concept that has been termed ‘Ethics as a Service.’. (shrink)

This paper investigates how unsupervised machine learning methods might make hermeneutic interpretive text analysis more objective in the social sciences. Through a close examination of the uses of topic modeling—a popular unsupervised approach in the social sciences—it argues that the primary way in which unsupervised learning supports interpretation is by allowing interpreters to discover unanticipated information in larger and more diverse corpora and by improving the transparency of the interpretive process. This view highlights that unsupervised modeling does not eliminate the (...) researchers’ judgments from the process of producing evidence for social scientific theories. The paper shows this by distinguishing between two prevalent attitudes toward topic modeling, i.e., topic realism and topic instrumentalism. Under neither can modeling provide social scientific evidence without the researchers’ interpretive engagement with the original text materials. Thus the unsupervised text analysis cannot improve the objectivity of interpretation by alleviating the problem of underdetermination in interpretive debate. The paper argues that the sense in which unsupervised methods can improve objectivity is by providing researchers with the resources to justify to others that their interpretations are correct. This kind of objectivity seeks to reduce suspicions in collective debate that interpretations are the products of arbitrary processes influenced by the researchers’ idiosyncratic decisions or starting points. The paper discusses this view in relation to alternative approaches to formalizing interpretation and identifies several limitations on what unsupervised learning can be expected to achieve in terms of supporting interpretive work. (shrink)

The high predictive accuracy of contemporary machine learning-based AI systems has led some scholars to argue that, in certain cases, we should grant them epistemic expertise and authority over humans. This approach suggests that humans would have the epistemic obligation of relying on the predictions of a highly accurate AI system. Contrary to this view, in this work we claim that it is not possible to endow AI systems with a genuine account of epistemic expertise. In fact, relying on accounts (...) of expertise and authority from virtue epistemology, we show that epistemic expertise requires a relation with understanding that AI systems do not satisfy and intellectual abilities that these systems do not manifest. Further, following the Distribution Cognition theory and adapting an account by Croce on the virtues of collective epistemic agents to the case of human-AI interactions we show that, if an AI system is successfully appropriated by a human agent, a _hybrid_ epistemic agent emerges, which can become both an epistemic expert and an authority. Consequently, we claim that the aforementioned hybrid agent is the appropriate object of a discourse around trust in AI and the epistemic obligations that stem from its epistemic superiority. (shrink)

A central goal of research in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is to facilitate human understanding. However, understanding is an elusive concept that is difficult to target. In this paper, we argue that a useful way to conceptualize understanding within the realm of XAI is via certain human abilities. We present four criteria for a useful conceptualization of understanding in XAI and show that these are fulfilled by an abilities-based approach: First, thinking about understanding in terms of specific abilities is motivated (...) by research from numerous disciplines involved in XAI. Second, an abilities-based approach is highly versatile and can capture different forms of understanding important in XAI application contexts. Third, abilities can be operationalized for empirical studies. Fourth, abilities can be used to clarify the link between explainability, understanding, and societal desiderata concerning AI, like fairness and trustworthiness. Conceptualizing understanding as abilities can therefore support interdisciplinary collaboration among XAI researchers, provide practical benefit across diverse XAI application contexts, facilitate the development and evaluation of explainability approaches, and contribute to satisfying the societal desiderata of different stakeholders concerning AI systems. (shrink)

In this article, I will argue in favor of both the ethical and epistemological utility of explanations in artificial intelligence -based medical technology. I will build on the notion of “explicability” due to Floridi, which considers both the intelligibility and accountability of AI systems to be important for truly delivering AI-powered services that strengthen autonomy, beneficence, and fairness. I maintain that explicable algorithms do, in fact, strengthen these ethical principles in medicine, e.g., in terms of direct patient–physician contact, as well (...) as on a longer-term epistemological level by facilitating scientific progress that is informed through practice. With this article, I will therefore attempt to counter arguments against demands for explicable AI in medicine that are based on a notion of “whatever heals is right.” I will elucidate my elaboration on the positive aspects of explicable AI in medicine as well as by pointing out risks of non-explicable AI. (shrink)

This paper argues that a notion of statistical explanation, based on Salmon’s statistical relevance model, can help us better understand deep neural networks. It is proved that homogeneous partitions, the core notion of Salmon’s model, are equivalent to minimal sufficient statistics, an important notion from statistical inference. This establishes a link to deep neural networks via the so-called Information Bottleneck method, an information-theoretic framework, according to which deep neural networks implicitly solve an optimization problem that generalizes minimal sufficient statistics. The (...) resulting notion of statistical explanation is general, mathematical, and subcausal. (shrink)

We explore aversion to the use of algorithms in moral decision-making. So far, this aversion has been explained mainly by the fear of opaque decisions that are potentially biased. Using incentivized experiments, we study which role the desire for human discretion in moral decision-making plays. This seems justified in light of evidence suggesting that people might not doubt the quality of algorithmic decisions, but still reject them. In our first study, we found that people prefer humans with decision-making discretion to (...) algorithms that rigidly apply exogenously given human-created fairness principles to specific cases. In the second study, we found that people do not prefer humans to algorithms because they appreciate flesh-and-blood decision-makers per se, but because they appreciate humans’ freedom to transcend fairness principles at will. Our results contribute to a deeper understanding of algorithm aversion. They indicate that emphasizing the transparency of algorithms that clearly follow fairness principles might not be the only element for fostering societal algorithm acceptance and suggest reconsidering certain features of the decision-making process. (shrink)

A AI Robotics Ethics Society (AIRES) é uma organização sem fins lucrativos fundada em 2018 por Aaron Hui, com o objetivo de se promover a conscientização e a importância da implementação e regulamentação ética da AI. A AIRES é hoje uma organização com capítulos em universidade como UCLA (Los Angeles), USC (University of Southern California), Caltech (California Institute of Technology), Stanford University, Cornell University, Brown University e a Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (Brasil). AIRES na PUCRS é (...) o primeiro capítulo internacional da AIRES, e como tal, estamos empenhados em promover e aprimorar a Missão AIRES. Nossa missão é focar na educação dos líderes da IA de amanhã em princípios éticos, para assegurar que a IA seja criada de forma ética e responsável. Como ainda existem poucas propostas de como devemos implementar princípios éticos e diretrizes normativas na prática do desenvolvimento de sistemas de IA, o objetivo deste trabalho é tentar diminuir esta lacuna entre o discurso e a práxis. Entre princípios abstratos e implementação técnica. Neste trabalho, buscamos introduzir o leitor ao tema da Ética e Segurança da IA. Ao mesmo tempo, apresentamos uma série de ferramentas para auxiliar desenvolvedores de sistemas inteligentes a desenvolver “bons” modelos. Este trabalho é um guia em desenvolvimento publicado em inglês e português. Contribuições e sugestões são bem vindas. (shrink)

As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular machine learning (ML), has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the (...) theory of AI ethics principles and the practical design of AI systems. In previous work , we analysed whether it is possible to close this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the use of tools and methods designed to help AI developers, engineers, and designers translate principles into practice. We concluded that this method of closure is currently ineffective as almost all existing translational tools and methods are either too flexible (and thus vulnerable to ethics washing) or too strict (unresponsive to context). This raised the question: if, even with technical guidance, AI ethics is challenging to embed in the process of algorithmic design, is the entire pro-ethical design endeavour rendered futile? And, if no, then how can AI ethics be made useful for AI practitioners? This is the question we seek to address here by exploring why principles and technical translational tools are still needed even if they are limited, and how these limitations can be potentially overcome by providing theoretical grounding of a concept that has been termed ‘Ethics as a Service’. (shrink)

The initial successes in recent years in harnessing machine learning technologies to improve medical practice and benefit patients have attracted attention in a wide range of healthcare fields. Particularly, it should be achieved by providing automated decision recommendations to the treating clinician. Some hopes placed in such ML-based systems for healthcare, however, seem to be unwarranted, at least partially because of their inherent lack of transparency, although their results seem convincing in accuracy and reliability. Skepticism arises when the physician as (...) the agent responsible for the implementation of diagnosis, therapy, and care is unable to access the generation of findings and recommendations. There is widespread agreement that, generally, a complete traceability is preferable to opaque recommendations; however, there are differences about addressing ML-based systems whose functioning seems to remain opaque to some degree—even if so-called explicable or interpretable systems gain increasing amounts of interest. This essay approaches the epistemic foundations of ML-generated information specifically and medical knowledge generally to advocate differentiations of decision-making situations in clinical contexts regarding their necessary depth of insight into the process of information generation. Empirically accurate or reliable outcomes are sufficient for some decision situations in healthcare, whereas other clinical decisions require extensive insight into ML-generated outcomes because of their inherently normative implications. (shrink)

We argue that artificial networks are explainable and offer a novel theory of interpretability. Two sets of conceptual questions are prominent in theoretical engagements with artificial neural networks, especially in the context of medical artificial intelligence: Are networks explainable, and if so, what does it mean to explain the output of a network? And what does it mean for a network to be interpretable? We argue that accounts of “explanation” tailored specifically to neural networks have ineffectively reinvented the wheel. In (...) response to, we show how four familiar accounts of explanation apply to neural networks as they would to any scientific phenomenon. We diagnose the confusion about explaining neural networks within the machine learning literature as an equivocation on “explainability,” “understandability” and “interpretability.” To remedy this, we distinguish between these notions, and answer by offering a theory and typology of interpretation in machine learning. Interpretation is something one does to an explanation with the aim of producing another, more understandable, explanation. As with explanation, there are various concepts and methods involved in interpretation: Total or Partial, Global or Local, and Approximative or Isomorphic. Our account of “interpretability” is consistent with uses in the machine learning literature, in keeping with the philosophy of explanation and understanding, and pays special attention to medical artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is an emerging, multidisciplinary field of research that seeks to develop methods and tools for making AI systems more explainable or interpretable. XAI researchers increasingly recognise explainability as a context-, audience- and purpose-sensitive phenomenon, rather than a single well-defined property that can be directly measured and optimised. However, since there is currently no overarching definition of explainability, this poses a risk of miscommunication between the many different researchers within this multidisciplinary space. This is the problem we (...) seek to address in this paper. We outline a framework, called Explanatory Pragmatism, which we argue has two attractive features. First, it allows us to conceptualise explainability in explicitly context-, audience- and purpose-relative terms, while retaining a unified underlying definition of explainability. Second, it makes visible any normative disagreements that may underpin conflicting claims about explainability regarding the purposes for which explanations are sought. Third, it allows us to distinguish several dimensions of AI explainability. We illustrate this framework by applying it to a case study involving a machine learning model for predicting whether patients suffering disorders of consciousness were likely to recover consciousness. (shrink)

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) seeks to produce explanations for those machine learning methods which are deemed opaque. However, there is considerable disagreement about what this means and how to achieve it. Authors disagree on what should be explained (topic), to whom something should be explained (stakeholder), how something should be explained (instrument), and why something should be explained (goal). In this paper, I employ insights from means-end epistemology to structure the field. According to means-end epistemology, different means ought to be (...) rationally adopted to achieve different epistemic ends. Applied to XAI, different topics, stakeholders, and goals thus require different instruments. I call this the means-end account of XAI. The means-end account has a descriptive and a normative component: on the one hand, I show how the specific means-end relations give rise to a taxonomy of existing contributions to the field of XAI; on the other hand, I argue that the suitability of XAI methods can be assessed by analyzing whether they are prescribed by a given topic, stakeholder, and goal. (shrink)

The modern abundance and prominence of data have led to the development of “data science” as a new field of enquiry, along with a body of epistemological reflections upon its foundations, methods, and consequences. This article provides a systematic analysis and critical review of significant open problems and debates in the epistemology of data science. We propose a partition of the epistemology of data science into the following five domains: (i) the constitution of data science; (ii) the kind of enquiry (...) that it identifies; (iii) the kinds of knowledge that data science generates; (iv) the nature and epistemological significance of “black box” problems; and (v) the relationship between data science and the philosophy of science more generally. (shrink)

As machine learning has gradually entered into ever more sectors of public and private life, there has been a growing demand for algorithmic explainability. How can we make the predictions of complex statistical models more intelligible to end users? A subdiscipline of computer science known as interpretable machine learning (IML) has emerged to address this urgent question. Numerous influential methods have been proposed, from local linear approximations to rule lists and counterfactuals. In this article, I highlight three conceptual challenges that (...) are largely overlooked by authors in this area. I argue that the vast majority of IML algorithms are plagued by (1) ambiguity with respect to their true target; (2) a disregard for error rates and severe testing; and (3) an emphasis on product over process. Each point is developed at length, drawing on relevant debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. Examples and counterexamples from IML are considered, demonstrating how failure to acknowledge these problems can result in counterintuitive and potentially misleading explanations. Without greater care for the conceptual foundations of IML, future work in this area is doomed to repeat the same mistakes. (shrink)

Developments in Machine Learning (ML) have attracted attention in a wide range of healthcare fields to improve medical practice and the benefit of patients. Particularly, this should be achieved by providing more or less automated decision recommendations to the treating physician. However, some hopes placed in ML for healthcare seem to be disappointed, at least in part, by a lack of transparency or traceability. Skepticism exists primarily in the fact that the physician, as the person responsible for diagnosis, therapy, and (...) care, has no or insufficient insight into how such recommendations are reached. The following paper aims to make understandable the specificity of the deliberative model of a physician-patient relationship that has been achieved over decades. By outlining the (social-)epistemic and inherently normative relationship between physicians and patients, I want to show how this relationship might be altered by non-traceable ML recommendations. With respect to some healthcare decisions, such changes in deliberative practice may create normatively far-reaching challenges. Therefore, in the future, a differentiation of decision-making situations in healthcare with respect to the necessary depth of insight into the process of outcome generation seems essential. (shrink)

In the last decades, supervised machine learning has seen the widespread growth of highly complex, non-interpretable models, of which deep neural networks are the most typical representative. Due to their complexity, these models have showed an outstanding performance in a series of tasks, as in image recognition and machine translation. Recently, though, there has been an important discussion over whether those non-interpretable models are able to provide any sort of understanding whatsoever. For some scholars, only interpretable models can provide understanding. (...) More popular, however, is the idea that understanding can come from a careful analysis of the dataset or from the model’s theoretical basis. In this paper, I wish to examine the possible forms of obtaining understanding of such non-interpretable models. Two main strategies for providing understanding are analyzed. The first involves understanding without interpretability, either through external evidence for the model’s inner functioning or through analyzing the data. The second is based on the artificial production of interpretable structures, through three main forms: post hoc models, hybrid models, and quasi-interpretable structures. Finally, I consider some of the conceptual difficulties in the attempt to create explanations for these models, and their implications for understanding. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of the opacity problem in medical machine learning (ML). Guided by pragmatist assumptions, I argue that opacity in ML models is problematic insofar as it potentially undermines the achievement of two key purposes: ensuring generalizability and optimizing clinician–machine decision-making. Three opacity amelioration strategies are examined, with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) as the predominant approach, challenged by two revisionary strategies in the form of reliabilism and the interpretability by design. Comparing the three strategies, I argue that (...) interpretability by design is most promising to overcome opacity in medical ML. Looking beyond the individual opacity amelioration strategies, the paper also contributes to a deeper understanding of the problem space and the solution space regarding opacity in medical ML. (shrink)