Proponents of IBE claim that the ability of a hypothesis to explain a range of phenomena in a unifying way contributes to the hypothesis’s credibility in light of these phenomena. I propose a Bayesian justification of this claim that reveals a hitherto unnoticed role for explanatory unification in evaluating the plausibility of a hypothesis: considerations of explanatory unification enter into the determination of a hypothesis’s prior by affecting its ‘explanatory coherence’, that is, the extent to which the hypothesis offers mutually (...) cohesive explanations of various phenomena. (shrink)

Theories of explanation need to account for a puzzling feature of our explanatory practices: the fact that we prefer explanations that are relatively abstract but only moderately so. Contra Franklin-Hall ([2016]), I argue that the interventionist account of explanation provides a natural and elegant explanation of this fact. By striking the right balance between specificity and generality, moderately abstract explanations optimally subserve what interventionists regard as the goal of explanation, namely identifying possible interventions that would have changed the explanandum.

International regulation of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) is increasingly conceived as an exercise in risk management. This requires a shared approach for assessing the risks of AWS. This paper presents a structured approach to risk assessment and regulation for AWS, adapting a qualitative framework inspired by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It examines the interactions among key risk factors—determinants, drivers, and types—to evaluate the risk magnitude of AWS and establish risk tolerance thresholds through a risk matrix informed by (...) background knowledge of event likelihood and severity. Further, it proposes a methodology to assess community risk appetite, emphasizing that such assessments and resulting tolerance levels should be determined through deliberation in a multistakeholder forum. The paper highlights the complexities of applying risk-based regulations to AWS internationally, particularly the challenge of defining a global community for risk assessment and regulatory legitimization. (shrink)

Many of us are unmoved when it is objected that some morally or intellectually suspect source agrees with our belief. While we may tend to find this kind of guilt by epistemic association unproblematic, I argue that this tendency is a mistake. We sometimes face what I call the problem of unwelcome epistemic company. This is the problem of encountering agreement about the content of your belief from a source whose faults give you reason to worry about the belief's truth, (...) normative status, etiology, or implications. On the basis of an array of cases, I elaborate four distinct kinds of problems that unwelcome epistemic company poses. Two of these are distinctly epistemic, and two are moral. I canvass possible responses, ranging from stubbornness to an epistemic prudishness that avoids unwelcome company at all costs. Finally, I offer preliminary lessons of the problem and distinguish it from the problem of peer disagreement. (shrink)

Drawing on the writings of the Jewish thinker, Abraham Joshua Heschel, I defend a partial response to the problem of divine hiddenness. A Jewish approach to divine love includes the thought that God desires meaningful relationship not only with individual persons, but also with communities of persons. In combination with John Schellenberg’s account of divine love, the admission of God’s desire for such relationships makes possible that a person may fail to believe that God exists not because of any individual (...) failing, but because the individual is a member of a larger community that itself is culpable. (shrink)

The increasing use of opioid treatment agreements has prompted debate within the medical community about ethical challenges with respect to their implementation. The focus of debate is usually on the efficacy of OTAs at reducing opioid misuse, how OTAs may undermine trust between physicians and patients and the potential coercive nature of requiring patients to sign such agreements as a condition for receiving pain care. An important consideration missing from these conversations is the potential for racial bias in the current (...) way that OTAs are incorporated into clinical practice and in the amount of physician discretion that current opioid guidelines support. While the use of OTAs has become mandatory in some states for certain classes of patients, physicians are still afforded great leeway in how these OTAs are implemented in clinical practice and how their terms should be enforced. This paper uses the guidelines provided for OTA implementation by the states of Indiana and Pennsylvania as case studies in order to argue that giving physicians certain kinds of discretion may exacerbate racial health disparities. This problem cannot simply be addressed by minimising physician discretion in general, but rather by providing mechanisms to hold physicians accountable for how they treat patients on long-term opioid therapy to ensure that such treatment is equitable. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

In a previous volume of Ethical Theory & Moral Practice, Melis Erdur defends the provocative claim that postulating a stance-independent ground for morality constitutes a substantive moral mistake that is isomorphic to the substantive moral mistake that many realists attribute to antirealists. In this discussion paper I reconstruct Erdur’s argument and raise two objections to the general framework in which it arises. I close by explaining why rejecting Erdur’s approach doesn’t preclude normative criticism of metaethical theories.

Much recent work on explanation in the interventionist tradition emphasizes the explanatory value of stable causal generalizations—i.e., causal generalizations that remain true in a wide range of background circumstances. We argue that two separate explanatory virtues are lumped together under the heading of `stability’. We call these two virtues breadth and guidance respectively. In our view, these two virtues are importantly distinct, but this fact is neglected or at least under-appreciated in the literature on stability. We argue that an adequate (...) theory of explanatory goodness should recognize breadth and guidance as distinct virtues, as breadth and guidance track different ideals of explanation, satisfy different cognitive and pragmatic ends, and play different theoretical roles in helping us understand the explanatory value of mechanisms. Thus keeping track of the distinction between these two forms of stability yields a more accurate and perspicuous picture of the role that stability considerations play in explanation. (shrink)

An important question for the causal modeling approach is how to integrate non‐causal dependence relations such as asymmetric supervenience into the approach. The most prominent proposal to that effect (due to Gebharter) is to treat those dependence relationships as formally analogous to causal relationships. We argue that this proposal neglects some crucial differences between causal and non‐causal dependencies, and that in the context of causal modeling non‐causal dependence relationships should be represented as mutual dependence relationships. We develop a new kind (...) of model – “hybrid models” ‐ based on this suggestion, and formulate a set of axioms for those models. Our formalism has important implications for Kim's exclusion problem: whereas Gebharter's framework vindicates Kim's causal exclusion objection against nonreductive physicalism, our framework has no such implication, and can help non‐reductive physicalists vindicate the efficacy of high‐level properties. A further benefit of our formalism is that it yields a natural and plausible way of thinking about interventions in multi‐level contexts. (shrink)

This paper defends pro-realism, the view that it is better if moral realism is true rather than any of its rivals. After offering an account of philosophical angst, I make three general arguments. The first targets nihilism: in securing the possibility of moral justification and vindication in objecting to certain harms, moral realism secures something that is non-morally valuable and even essential to the meaning and intelligibility of our lives. The second argument targets antirealism: moral realism secures a desirable independence (...) for moral justification that is qualitatively different from the anti-realistic construal of independence that is only explicable in terms of degrees of distance from our subjective responses and attitudes. Finally, I argue that while the pan-expressivist semantic program of quasi-realism has significant effects on what can be appropriately said in meta-ethical discourse, it provides no comfort to the pro-realist who is already angsty about anti-realism. (shrink)

Moral realism and some of its constitutive theses, e.g., cognitivism, face the following challenge. If they are true, then it seems that we should predict that deference to moral testimony is appropriate under the same conditions as deference to non-moral testimony. Yet, many philosophers intuit that deference to moral testimony is not appropriate, even in otherwise ordinary conditions. In this paper I show that the challenge is cogent only if the appropriateness in question is disambiguated in a particular way. To (...) count against realism and its constitutive theses, moral deference must fail to be appropriate in specifically the way that the theses predict it is appropriate. I argue that this is not the case. In brief, I argue that realism and allied theses predict only that deference to moral testimony is epistemically appropriate, but that the intuitive data plausibly show only that it is not morally appropriate. If I am right, then there is reason to doubt the metaethical relevance of much of the skepticism regarding moral deference in recent literature. (shrink)

Intuitions play an important role in the debate on the causal status of high‐level properties. For instance, Kim has claimed that his “exclusion argument” relies on “a perfectly intuitive … understanding of the causal relation.” We report the results of three experiments examining whether laypeople really have the relevant intuitions. We find little support for Kim's view and the principles on which it relies. Instead, we find that laypeople are willing to count both a multiply realized property and its realizers (...) as causes, and regard the systematic overdetermination implied by this view as unproblematic. (shrink)

Peer disagreement presents religious believers, agnostics, and skeptics alike with an epistemological problem: how can confidence in any religious claims (including their negations) be epistemically justified? There seem to be rational, well-informed adherents among a variety of mutually incompatible religious and non-religious perspectives, and so the problem of disagreement arises acutely in the religious domain. In this paper, we show that the transformative nature of religious experience and identity poses more than just this traditional, epistemic problem of conflicting religious beliefs. (...) In encountering one another, believers, agnostics, and skeptics confront not just different beliefs, but different ways of being a person. -/- To transition between religious belief and skepticism is not just to adopt a different set of beliefs, but to transform into a different version of oneself. We argue that the transformative nature of religious identity intensifies the problem of pluralism by adding a new dimension to religious disagreement, for there are principled reasons to think we can lack epistemic and affective access to our potential religious, agnostic, or skeptical selves. Yet, access to these selves seems to be required for the purposes of decision-making that is to be both rational and authentic. Finally, we reflect on the relationship between the transformative problem of religious disagreement and what it shows about the epistemic status of religious conversion and de-conversion, in which one disagrees with one’s own (transformed) self. (shrink)

In the Hebrew Scriptures, there are familiar consequences for disobedience to God—destruction of holy sites, slavery, exile, and death. But there is one consequence that is less familiar and of special interest in this chapter. Disobedience to God sometimes results in stark reversals in God’s very relationship and experiential availability to God’s own people. Such people may even remove God’s very presence. This is a curious form of punishment that threatens the very spiritual identity of the victims of the reversal. (...) This chapter explores divine reversal in the Hebrew Scriptures (and its continuation in the New Testament). Insofar as the self-identified people of God commit positive injustices against others, and even insofar as they are culpable for failing to prevent such injustices from occurring, devotees of the Hebrew Scriptures—so, devout Jews and Christians alike—ought to take seriously the possibility that God will side with those who suffer the injustices and even, in a sense, sanctify their life, practices, and identity. Divine reversals pose problems for Jewish and Christian ethics, which must grapple with the possibility that God might seem to adopt inconsistent moral positions across time—or at least inconsistent moral postures. (shrink)

This anthology aims to explore the current Norwegian context of implementation of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR),as well as the challenges and fragilities associated with it. It is grounded in the experience of a networking and learning centre called AFINO (acronym for‘ Ansvarlig Forskning og Innovasjon i NOrge’, or Responsible Research and Innovation in Norway),to which most of the authors of this book are affiliated. Whether the authors are trying to illustrate a fragility or challenge, (...) to understand its origins, or to illustrate how they have been tackled or how things developed in unexpected ways that raise new fragilities and questions, we believe that all chapters contribute to bringing to light the richness of the domains of research, innovation, policy, and business. (shrink)

In recent years, an active research program has emerged that aims to develop a Humean best-system account (BSA) of laws of nature that improves on Lewis’s canonical articulation of the view. Its guiding idea is that the laws are cognitive tools tailored to the specific needs and limitations of creatures like us. While current versions of this “pragmatic Humean” research program fare much better than Lewis’s account along many dimensions, I will argue that they have trouble making sense of certain (...) key features of the practice of fundamental physics. Indeed, these features seem to go against the very idea that laws are useful for agents like us. In my view, Humeans can address these issues by paying more attention to the explanatory role of laws. Following this idea, I will propose an account on which what makes a systematization the best is a kind of explanatory power, understood along the lines of the unificationist theory of explanation. The resulting view, I will argue, can make sense of those features of laws that other pragmatic accounts of laws have trouble explaining. (shrink)

The epidemiologist Bradford Hill famously argued that in epidemiology, specificity of association (roughly, the fact that an environmental or behavioral risk factor is associated with just one or at most a few medical outcomes) is strong evidence of causation. Prominent epidemiologists have dismissed Hill’s claim on the ground that it relies on a dubious `one-cause one effect’ model of disease causation. The paper examines this methodological controversy, and argues that specificity considerations do have a useful role to play in causal (...) inference in epidemiology. More precisely, I argue that specificity considerations help solve a pervasive inferential problem in contemporary epidemiology: the problem of determining whether an exposure-outcome correlation might be due to confounding by a social factor. This examination of specificity has interesting consequences for our understanding of the methodology of epidemiology. It highlights how the methodology of epidemiology relies on local tools designed to address specific inference problems peculiar to the discipline, and shows that observational causal inference in epidemiology can proceed with little prior knowledge of the causal structure of the phenomenon investigated. I also argue that specificity of association cannot (despite claims to the contrary) be entirely explained in terms of Woodward’s well-known concept of “one-to-one” causal specificity. This is because specificity as understood by epidemiologists depends on whether an exposure (or outcome) is associated with a `heterogeneous’ set of variables. This dimension of heterogeneity is not captured in Woodward’s notion, but is crucial for understanding the evidential import of specificity of association. (shrink)

The first two thirds or so of this book is a thorough, severe, and at times somewhat difficult, philosophical analysis and critique of atheistic naturalistic answers to “What caused the Big Bang?” Most contemporary astrophysicists accept one of the following non-theistic accounts of the origin of the Big Bang: Steady State, Plasma, Oscillationist, Big Fizz, Big Divide, Quantum Observership, Big Accident, Atheistic Anthropic, and Plenitude cosmologies. The last third or so of the book develops a highly plausible theistic process cosmology (...) which includes creation ex nihilo. This book critically explores answers to the big question, What produced our universe around fifteen billion years ago in a Big Bang? It defends and revises Process Theology and develops contemporary arguments for God's existence based on the universe's life-supporting order and contingent existence. (shrink)

This book is a collection of articles dealing with criticisms of Robert S. Hartman’s theory of formal axiology. During his lifetime, Hartman wrote responses to many of his critics. Some of these were previously published but many are published here for the first time. In particular, published here are Hartman’s replies to such critics as Hector Neri Castañeda, Charles Hartshorne, Rem B. Edwards, Robert E. Carter, G. R. Grice, Nicholas Rescher, Robert W. Mueller, Gordon Welty, Pete Gunter, George Kimball Plochmann, (...) William Eckhardt, and Robert S. Brumbaugh. Crticial essays and responses to them developed by Rem B. Edwards, Frank G. Forrest, and Mark A. Moore after Hartman’s untimely death in 1973 are also included. (shrink)

This book explores three easily recognized personality types of great spiritual significance--worldliness, ideology, and saintliness. These spiritual types are defined by the dominant values they manifest--extrinsic, systemic, or intrinsic. The thoughts, experiences, actions, feelings, and overall characters and behaviors of people belonging to these types are shaped and expressed by what and how they value, as the chapters in the book explain. A distinctive mode of spirituality is correlated with each type, based on what and how religious people most value. (...) What and how people value are the keys to everyone's personalities, whether spiritual or not. Real people do not fall neatly or completely into any one of these types, but in most people some dimension of value is dominant over the others, and this has great spiritual, moral, and practical significance. (shrink)

Ambient assisted living technologies are increasingly presented and sold as essential smart additions to daily life and home environments that will radically transform the healthcare and wellness markets of the future. An ethical approach and a thorough understanding of all ethics in surveillance/monitoring architectures are therefore pressing. AAL poses many ethical challenges raising questions that will affect immediate acceptance and long-term usage. Furthermore, ethical issues emerge from social inequalities and their potential exacerbation by AAL, accentuating the existing access gap between (...) high-income countries and low and middle-income countries. Legal aspects mainly refer to the adherence to existing legal frameworks and cover issues related to product safety, data protection, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and access to data by public, private, and government bodies. Successful privacy-friendly AAL applications are needed, as the pressure to bring Internet of Things devices and ones equipped with artificial intelligence quickly to market cannot overlook the fact that the environments in which AAL will operate are mostly private. The social issues focus on the impact of AAL technologies before and after their adoption. Future AAL technologies need to consider all aspects of equality such as gender, race, age and social disadvantages and avoid increasing loneliness and isolation among, e.g. older and frail people. Finally, the current power asymmetries between the target and general populations should not be underestimated nor should the discrepant needs and motivations of the target group and those developing and deploying AAL systems. Whilst AAL technologies provide promising solutions for the health and social care challenges, they are not exempt from ethical, legal and social issues. A set of ELSI guidelines is needed to integrate these factors at the research and development stage. (shrink)

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from The Unity of Consciousness and Sensory Integration conference at Brown University in November of 2011. This portion of the report explores the question: How should we model the unity of consciousness?

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from The Unity of Consciousness and Sensory Integration conference at Brown University in November of 2011. This portion of the report explores the question: Is the mechanism of sensory integration spatio-temporal?

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from The Unity of Consciousness and Sensory Integration conference at Brown University in November of 2011. This portion of the report explores the question: How should we study experience, given unity relations?

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from The Unity of Consciousness and Sensory Integration conference at Brown University in November of 2011. This portion of the report explores the question: Are some of the basic units of consciousness multimodal?

In the intersection between eugenics past and present, disability has never been far beneath the surface. Perceived and ascribed disabilities of body and mind were one of the core sets of eugenics traits that provided the basis for institutionalized and sterilization on eugenic grounds for the first 75 years of the 20th-century. Since that time, the eugenic preoccupation with the character of future generations has seeped into what have become everyday practices in the realm of reproductive choice. As Marsha Saxton (...) (2000) and Adrienne Asch (2000, 2003) have forcefully argued, the use of prenatal screening technologies to facilitate the selective abortion of fetuses with features that signify disabling traits—the paradigm here being trisomy 21 in a fetus indicating Down Syndrome in the child—express a negative view of such disabilities sufficient to warrant terminating an otherwise wanted pregnancy. The eliminative structure of what Rosemary Garland Thompson (2012) has called eugenic logic persists in contemporary practices governing reproductive choice, social inclusion, and democratic participation and their relationship to disability. The tie between eugenics and contemporary disability studies suggests that eugenics and reflection on its history can also play a more positive role in disability politics. After focusing on eugenics in the first half of the paper, we will shift in the second half of the paper to eugenic resonances in contemporary thought and practice, concluding with some thoughts about ongoing practices of silencing and the very idea of eradicating disability. (shrink)

In “Accepting Moral Responsibility for the Actions of Autonomous Weapons Systems—a Moral Gambit” (2022), Mariarosaria Taddeo and Alexander Blanchard answer one of the most vexing issues in current ethics of technology: how to close the so-called “responsibility gap”? Their solution is to require that autonomous weapons systems (AWSs) may only be used if there is some human being who accepts the ex ante responsibility for those actions of the AWS that could not have been predicted or intended (in such (...) cases, the human being takes what the authors call the “moral gambit”). The authors then propose several institutional safeguards to implement in order to ensure that the moral gambit is taken in a fair and just way. This paper explores this suggestion in the context of the institutional settings within which AWSs are most likely to be deployed. It raises some concerns as to the feasibility of Taddeo and Blanchard’s proposal, in light of the recent empirical work on the incentive structures likely to exist within militaries. It then presents a potential problem that may arise in case the accountability mechanisms are successfully implemented. (shrink)

This paper introduces and defends a new principle for when a structural equation model is apt for analyzing actual causation. Any such analysis in terms of these models has two components: a recipe for reading claims of actual causation off an apt model, and an articulation of what makes a model apt. The primary focus in the literature has been on the first component. But the problem of structural isomorphs has made the second especially pressing (Hall 2007; Hitchcock 2007a). Those (...) with realist sympathies have reason to resist the standard response to this problem, which introduces a normative parameter into the metaphysics (Hall 2007; Halpern and Hitchcock 2010, 2015; Halpern 2016a; Menzies 2017; Gallow 2021). However, the only alternative solution in the literature leaves central questions unanswered (Blanchard and Schaffer 2017). I propose an independently motivated aptness requirement, Evident Mediation, that provides the missing details and resolves the structural isomorph problem without need for a normative parameter. (shrink)

Cet essai a été présenté à l’atelier sur La démocratie de l’espace et l’espace de la démocratie, qui a eu lieu à Newcastle, en Angleterre, le 11 janvier 2008. Une version antérieure a été présentée à l’Université de Tokyo le 13 novembre 2007. Il sera publié en néerlandais, traduit par Freek Jansens, sous le titre “het plannen van ruimtes van (on)mogelijkheid” dans une collection éditée par Maarten Hajer et Jantine Grijzen sur les questions de politique contemporaine. Il a été traduit (...) de l’anglais par Martin Blanchard et révisé par Daniel Weinstock. (shrink)

This article considers the question ‘What makes hope rational?’ We take Adrienne Martin’s recent incorporation analysis of hope as representative of a tradition that views the rationality of hope as a matter of instrumental reasons. Against this tradition, we argue that an important subset of hope, ‘fundamental hope’, is not governed by instrumental rationality. Rather, people have reason to endorse or reject such hope in virtue of the contribution of the relevant attitudes to the integrity of their practical identity, (...) which makes the relevant hope not instrumentally but intrinsically valuable. This argument also allows for a new analysis of the reasons people have to abandon hope and for a better understanding of non-fundamental, ‘prosaic’ hopes. (shrink)

Today, when reading about multicollinearity – one of the most dreaded problems in regression analysis, I came across the statement of Blanchard [8]: “Multicollinearity is God’s will, not a problem with OLS or statistical techniques in general.” Immediately, I thought: “If it is really God’s will, we should keep the problem within our grasp, but not rely on God.”.

In this article, Catherine Kirchner-Blanchard et Frédéric Lefrançois question the decolonial stance of Caribbean artists who pursue artistic freedom and agency without relating or comparing their work to the great models of Western art history.

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...) And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

In temporal binding, the temporal interval between one event and another, occurring some time later, is subjectively compressed. We discuss two ways in which temporal binding has been conceptualized. In studies showing temporal binding between a voluntary action and its causal consequences, such binding is typically interpreted as providing a measure of an implicit or pre-reflective “sense of agency”. However, temporal binding has also been observed in contexts not involving voluntary action, but only the passive observation of a cause-effect sequence. (...) In those contexts, it has been interpreted as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. These two views need not be in conflict with one another, if one thinks of them as concerning two separate mechanisms through which temporal binding can occur. In this paper, we explore an alternative possibility: that there is a unitary way of explaining temporal binding both within and outside the context of voluntary action as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. Any such explanation needs to account for ways in which agency, and factors connected with agency, have been shown to affect the strength of temporal binding. We show that principles of causal inference and causal selection already familiar from the literature on causal learning have the potential to explain why the strength of people’s causal beliefs can be affected by the extent to which they are themselves actively involved in bringing about events, thus in turn affecting binding. (shrink)

If knowledge is sensitive to practical stakes, then whether one knows depends in part on the practical costs of being wrong. When considering religious belief, the practical costs of being wrong about theism may differ dramatically between the theist (if there is no God) and the atheist (if there is a God). This paper explores the prospects, on pragmatic encroachment, for knowledge of theism (even if true) and of atheism (even if true), given two types of practical costs: namely, by (...) holding a false belief, or by missing out on a true belief. These considerations set up a more general puzzle of epistemic preference when faced with the choice between two beliefs, only one of which could become knowledge. (shrink)

This compilation of references includes all references for the knowledge-how chapters included in Bengson & Moffett's edited volume. The volume and the compilation of references may serve as a good starting point for people who are unfamiliar with the philosophical literature on knowledge-how.

I argue that a standard formulation of hinge epistemology is host to epistemic relativism and show that two leading hinge approaches (Coliva’s acceptance account and Pritchard’s nondoxastic account) are vulnerable to a form of incommensurability that leads to relativism. Building on both accounts, I introduce a new, minimally epistemic conception of hinges that avoids epistemic relativism and rationally resolves hinge disagreements. According to my proposed account, putative cases of epistemic incommensurability are rationally resolvable: hinges are propositions that are the objects (...) of our belief-like attitudes and are rationally revisable in virtue of our overarching commitment to avoid systematic deception in our epistemic practices. (shrink)

Assertion is governed by an epistemic norm requiring knowledge. This idea has been hotly debated in recent years, garnering attention in epistemology, philosophy of language, and linguistics. This chapter presents and extends the main arguments in favor of the knowledge norm, from faulty conjunctions, several conversational patterns, judgments of permission, excuse, and blame, and from showing how. (Paired with a chapter by Peter J. Graham and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen, "Knowledge is Not Our Norm of Assertion.").

This is a critical response to "Defending Eugenics", published in MBR in 2018.

Abstract: The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Human Resource Management (HRM) is fundamentally transforming how organizations approach recruitment, performance management, and employee engagement. This paper explores the multifaceted impact of AI on HR practices, highlighting its role in enhancing efficiency, reducing bias, and driving strategic decision-making. Through an in-depth analysis of AI-driven recruitment tools, performance management systems, and personalized employee engagement strategies, this study examines both the opportunities and challenges associated with AI in HRM. Ethical considerations, including data privacy, (...) algorithmic bias, and the potential displacement of human jobs, are critically discussed to provide a balanced perspective on the adoption of AI technologies in the HR domain. By presenting case studies of organizations successfully leveraging AI, this paper offers insights into the future trajectory of HRM in an increasingly AI-driven world. Ultimately, the findings underscore the need for HR professionals to adapt and innovate in response to the growing influence of AI, ensuring a harmonious balance between technological advancement and the human element in the workplace. (shrink)

Abstract: In this study, we explore the possibility of classifying the plant species. We collected the plant species from Kaggle website. This dataset encompasses 544 samples, encompassing 136 distinct plant species. Recent advancements in machine learning, particularly Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), offer promise in enhancing plant Species classification accuracy and efficiency. This research explores plant Species classification, harnessing neural networks' power. Utilizing a rich dataset from Kaggle, containing 544 entries, we develop and evaluate a neural network model. Our neural network, (...) featuring a single hidden layer, achieves remarkable results—a staggering 100% accuracy and a minute average error rate of 0.002. Beyond performance metrics, we delve into the intricacies of plant Species classification through feature importance analysis. The most influential features— Vegsout, durflow, semiros, pdias, begflow, wind, leafy, autopoll and insects— uncover the physiological traits underpinning accurate rice classification. This research contributes to advancing rice classification methods and highlights the potential of ANNs in optimizing agricultural practices, ensuring plant safety, and bolstering global trade. (shrink)

We respond to Stephen T. Davis’ criticism of our earlier essay, “Assessing the Resurrection Hypothesis.” We argue that the Standard Model of physics is relevant and decisive in establishing the implausibility and low explanatory power of the Resurrection hypothesis. We also argue that the laws of physics have entailments regarding God and the supernatural and, against Alvin Plantinga, that these same laws lack the proviso “no agent supernaturally interferes.” Finally, we offer Bayesian arguments for the Legend hypothesis and against the (...) Resurrection hypothesis. (shrink)

This report highlights and explores five questions which arose from The Unity of Consciousness and Sensory Integration conference at Brown University in November of 2011: 1. What is the relationship between the unity of consciousness and sensory integration? 2. Are some of the basic units of consciousness multimodal? 3. How should we model the unity of consciousness? 4. Is the mechanism of sensory integration spatio-temporal? 5. How Should We Study Experience, Given Unity Relations?

We address a long-standing debate over whether classical magnetic forces can do work, ultimately answering the question in the affirmative. In detail, we couple a classical particle with intrinsic spin and elementary dipole moments to the electromagnetic field, derive the appropriate generalization of the Lorentz force law, show that the particle's dipole moments must be collinear with its spin axis, and argue that the magnetic field does mechanical work on the particle's elementary magnetic dipole moment. As consistency checks, we calculate (...) the overall system's energy-momentum and angular momentum, and show that their local conservation equations lead to the same force law and therefore the same conclusions about magnetic forces and work. We also compute the system's Belinfante-Rosenfeld energy-momentum tensor. (shrink)

This paper is an examination of the concept of recognition and its connection with identity and respect. This is related to the question of how women are or are not adequately recognised or respected for their achievements in sport and whether eliminating sex segregation in sport is a solution. This will require an analysis of the concept of excellence in sport, as well as the relationship between fairness and inclusion in an activity that is fundamentally about bodily movement. I argue (...) that attempts to address the problem of women’s recognition in sport need to do so in ways that neither eliminate sport as a fairness regulated system for developing individual excellence in bodily movement nor that prevent women’s achievement of sporting excellence, with the regard that belongs to them. Doing this requires us to decide whether sport is about champions or about individual excellence. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationships between forms of humor that conjure up possible worlds and real-world social critiques. The first part of the article will argue that subversive humor, which is from or on behalf of historically and continually marginalized communities, constitutes a kind of aesthetic experience that can elicit enjoyment even in adversarial audiences. The second part will be a connecting piece, arguing that subversive humor can be constructed as brief narrative thought experiments that employ the use of fictionalized (...) scenarios to facilitate an open, playful attitude, encouraging a space for collaborative interpretation. This interaction between humorist and audience is an aesthetic experience that is enjoyable in and of itself, as the feelings of mirth are intrinsically valuable. But connected to the “Ha-ha!” experience of these sorts of humorous creations is an “Aha!” or potentially revelatory experience that is a mixture of cognitive comprehension and motivated (emotional) response. The third part of the article will attempt to go beyond the consciousness-raising element with an account of how such possible worlds created in the realm of imagination through subversive humor can bleed into the real world of flesh and blood people. Finally, an example of subversive humor will be analyzed. (shrink)

One of the most plausible and widely discussed examples of strong emergence is molecular structure. The only detailed account of it, which has been very influential, is due to Robin Hendry and is formulated in terms of downward causation. This paper explains Hendry’s account of the strong emergence of molecular structure and argues that it is coherent only if one assumes a diachronic reflexive notion of downward causation. However, in the context of this notion of downward causation, the strong emergence (...) of molecular structure faces three challenges that have not been met and which have so far remained unnoticed. First, the putative empirical evidence presented for the strong emergence of molecular structure equally undermines supervenience, which is one of the main tenets of strong emergence. Secondly, it is ambiguous how the assumption of determinate nuclear positions is invoked for the support of strong emergence, as the role of this assumption in Hendry’s argument can be interpreted in more than one way. Lastly, there are understandings of causation which render the postulation of a downward causal relation between a molecule’s structure and its quantum mechanical entities, untenable. (shrink)