I argue that most counterfactuals are false.

Algorithms influence every facet of modern life: criminal justice, education, housing, entertainment, elections, social media, news feeds, work… the list goes on. Delegating important decisions to machines, however, gives rise to deep moral concerns about responsibility, transparency, freedom, fairness, and democracy. Algorithms and Autonomy connects these concerns to the core human value of autonomy in the contexts of algorithmic teacher evaluation, risk assessment in criminal sentencing, predictive policing, background checks, news feeds, ride-sharing platforms, social media, and election interference. Using these (...) case studies, the authors provide a better understanding of machine fairness and algorithmic transparency. They explain why interventions in algorithmic systems are necessary to ensure that algorithms are not used to control citizens' participation in politics and undercut democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to the ways in which meaning is conveyed in language. Alan Cruse covers semantic matters, but also deals with topics that are usually considered to fall under pragmatics. A major aim is to highlight the richness and subtlety of meaning phenomena, rather than to expound any particular theory.

Bayesianism is our leading theory of uncertainty. Epistemology is defined as the theory of knowledge. So “Bayesian Epistemology” may sound like an oxymoron. Bayesianism, after all, studies the properties and dynamics of degrees of belief, understood to be probabilities. Traditional epistemology, on the other hand, places the singularly non-probabilistic notion of knowledge at centre stage, and to the extent that it traffics in belief, that notion does not come in degrees. So how can there be a Bayesian epistemology?

Algorithmic systems and predictive analytics play an increasingly important role in various aspects of modern life. Scholarship on the moral ramifications of such systems is in its early stages, and much of it focuses on bias and harm. This paper argues that in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems it is essential to understand the relation between algorithms, autonomy, and agency. We draw on several recent cases in criminal sentencing and K–12 teacher evaluation to outline four key ways in (...) which issues of agency, autonomy, and respect for persons can conflict with algorithmic decision-making. Three of these involve failures to treat individual agents with the respect they deserve. The fourth involves distancing oneself from a morally suspect action by attributing one’s decision to take that action to an algorithm, thereby laundering one’s agency. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). -/- In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to exercise (...) power, may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy is another way in which autonomy and responsibility are linked. This relationship is the basis of the current chapter, and it is important in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems. We will draw the connection as follows. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we will explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We will conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools. -/- The link below is to an open-access copy of the chapter. (shrink)

Hans Reichenbach was a formidable figure in early-twentieth-century philosophy of science. Educated in Germany, he was influential in establishing the so-called Berlin Circle, a companion group to the Vienna Circle founded by his colleague Rudolph Carnap. The movement they founded—usually known as "logical positivism," although it is more precisely known as "scientific philosophy" or "logical empiricism"—was a form of epistemology that privileged scientific over metaphysical truths. Reichenbach, like other young philosophers of the exact sciences of his generation, was deeply impressed (...) by the far-reaching changes in physics brought about by Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. Reichenbach responded to scientific advances by doing fundamental work in space-time theories, in quantum mechanics, in statistical mechanics, and in the development of probability theory—making him the most important philosopher of physics in the first generation of logical empiricism. Forced from his academic position by the Nazi race laws in 1933, Reichenbach wrote _Experience and Prediction_ at the University of Istanbul, where had had fled, expressly to introduce logical positivism to English speakers. In the two decades following World War II, during the explosion of scientific advances in North America, logical positivism was the reigning theory of the philosophy of science and Reichenbach was at the peak of his career. But, inevitably, support for logical positivism began to wane as it became obvious that the justification of scientific theories could not be entirely resolved by relying on strictly formal, technical processes. The growth of the discipline of the history of philosophy of science, which has created an audience of scholars eager for seminal classics in scientific philosophy, and the evidence supporting a historicist paradigm within logical positivism are two important reasons to make _Experience and Prediction_ available once again. "Hans Reichenbach's_ Experience and Prediction_ is one of the most important books in twentieth-century philosophy of science. Its author was, along with Rudolf Carnap, one of the two principal ambassadors to North America of the exciting new European philosophical movement known here under the names 'Logical Positivism' and 'Scientific Philosophy.' In 1938, when the book was published, Reichenbach was an exile from his native Germany, teaching in Istanbul, Turkey, and about to emigrate to the United States to take up a prestigious position at UCLA. He wrote_ Experience and Prediction_ in English as his calling card to his new American colleagues. More than any other single book,_ Experience and Prediction_ set the agenda for the new discipline of the philosophy of science that was to emerge after World War II as, perhaps, the most exciting new area in North American philosophy. Many of the problems still at the focus of discussion were given their classic formulations in this book. Long out of print,_ Experience and Prediction_ appears here in a new edition accompanied by a splendid historical introduction by the noted young philosopher and historian of the philosophy of science, Alan Richardson. A jewel of a book may once again be appreciated in its proper setting." —Don A. Howard, University of Notre Dame. (shrink)

When agents insert technological systems into their decision-making processes, they can obscure moral responsibility for the results. This can give rise to a distinct moral wrong, which we call “agency laundering.” At root, agency laundering involves obfuscating one’s moral responsibility by enlisting a technology or process to take some action and letting it forestall others from demanding an account for bad outcomes that result. We argue that the concept of agency laundering helps in understanding important moral problems in a number (...) of recent cases involving automated, or algorithmic, decision-systems. We apply our conception of agency laundering to a series of examples, including Facebook’s automated advertising suggestions, Uber’s driver interfaces, algorithmic evaluation of K-12 teachers, and risk assessment in criminal sentencing. We distinguish agency laundering from several other critiques of information technology, including the so-called “responsibility gap,” “bias laundering,” and masking. (shrink)

Pascal’s Wager involves expected utilities. In this chapter, we examine the Wager in light of two main features of expected utility theory: utilities and probabilities. We discuss infinite and finite utilities, and zero, infinitesimal, extremely low, imprecise, and undefined probabilities. These have all come up in recent literature regarding Pascal’s Wager. We consider the problems each creates and suggest prospects for the Wager in light of these problems.

Many biologists and philosophers have worried that importing models of reasoning from the physical sciences obscures our understanding of reasoning in the life sciences. In this paper we discuss one example that partially validates this concern: part-whole reductive explanations. Biology and physics tend to incorporate different models of temporality in part-whole reductive explanations. This results from differential emphases on compositional and causal facets of reductive explanations, which have not been distinguished reliably in prior philosophical analyses. Keeping these two facets distinct (...) facilitates the identifi cation of two further aspects of reductive explanation: intrinsicality and fundamentality. Our account provides resources for discriminating between different types of reductive explanation and suggests a new approach to comprehending similarities and differences in the explanatory reasoning found in biology and physics. (shrink)

Questions of privacy have become particularly salient in recent years due, in part, to information-gathering initiatives precipitated by the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, increasing power of surveillance and computing technologies, and massive data collection about individuals for commercial purposes. While privacy is not new to the philosophical and legal literature, there is much to say about the nature and value of privacy. My focus here is on the nature of informational privacy. I argue that the predominant accounts of privacy (...) are unsatisfactory and offer an alternative: for a person to have informational privacy is for there to be limits on the particularized judgments that others are able to reasonably make about that person. (shrink)

The intersection of development and evolution has always harbored conceptual issues, but many of these are on display in contemporary evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). These issues include: (1) the precise constitution of evo-devo, with its focus on both the evolution of development and the developmental basis of evolution, and how it fits within evolutionary theory; (2) the nature of evo-devo model systems that comprise the material of comparative and experimental research; (3) the puzzle of how to understand the widely used (...) notion of 'conserved mechanisms'; (4) the definition of evolutionary novelties and expectations for how to explain them; and (5) the demand of interdisciplinary collaboration that derives from investigating complex phenomena at key moments in the history of life, such as the fin-limb transition. This Element treats these conceptual issues with close attention to both empirical detail and scientific practice to offer new perspectives on evolution and development. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: One important criticism of algorithmic systems is that they lack transparency. Such systems can be opaque because they are complex, protected by patent or trade secret, or deliberately obscure. In the EU, there is a debate about whether the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) contains a “right to explanation,” and if so what such a right entails. Our task in this chapter is to address this informational component of algorithmic systems. We argue that information access is integral for respecting (...) autonomy, and transparency policies should be tailored to advance autonomy. -/- To make this argument we distinguish two facets of agency (i.e., capacity to act). The first is practical agency, or the ability to act effectively according to one’s values. The second is what we call cognitive agency, which is the ability to exercise what Pamela Hieronymi calls “evaluative control” (i.e., the ability to control our affective states, such as beliefs, desires, and attitudes). We argue that respecting autonomy requires providing persons sufficient information to exercise evaluative control and properly interpret the world and one’s place in it. We draw this distinction out by considering algorithmic systems used in background checks, and we apply the view to key cases involving risk assessment in criminal justice decisions and K-12 teacher evaluation. -/- The link below is to an open access version of the chapter. (shrink)

This book is a critical analysis of Australian family policy issues. The argument of the book rests on three cardinal principles. The first is that the family is a miniature society, a social unit. The second is that in producing, caring for, and educating children the family contributes to the good of the wider society. The third is that in caring for dependants – young or old – the family is a welfare institution. The general thrust of the book is (...) in favour of the principle of financial support for families with children, but with equity between separated and divorced families and intact families. (shrink)

This paper defends the traditional view that the laws of nature are contingent, or, if some of them are necessary, this is due to analytic principles for the individuation of the law-governed properties. Fundamentally, I argue that the supposed explanatory purposes served by taking the laws to be necessary --showing how laws support counterfactuals, how properties are individuated, or how we have knowledge of properties--are in fact undermined by the continued possibility of the imagined scenarios--this time, described neutrally--which seemed to (...) disprove the claim to necessity in the first place. I speculate that this will be true for any proposed necessary a posteriori truths, and is a basis for rejecting their supposed metaphysical significance. (shrink)

There have long been calls from industry for guidance in implementing strategies for sustainable development. The Circular Economy represents the most recent attempt to conceptualize the integration of economic activity and environmental wellbeing in a sustainable way. This set of ideas has been adopted by China as the basis of their economic development, escalating the concept in minds of western policymakers and NGOs. This paper traces the conceptualisations and origins of the Circular Economy, tracing its meanings, and exploring its antecedents (...) in economics and ecology, and discusses how the Circular Economy has been operationalized in business and policy. The paper finds that while the Circular Economy places emphasis on the redesign of processes and cycling of materials, which may contribute to more sustainable business models, it also encapsulates tensions and limitations. These include an absence of the social dimension inherent in sustainable development that limits its ethical dimensions, and some unintended consequences. This leads us to propose a revised definition of the Circular Economy as “an economic model wherein planning, resourcing, procurement, production and reprocessing are designed and managed, as both process and output, to maximize ecosystem functioning and human well-being”. (shrink)

I argue that metaphysical views of material objects should be understood as 'packages', rather than individual claims, where the other parts of the package include how the theory addresses 'recalcitant data', and that when the packages meet certain general desiderata - which all of the currently competing views *can* meet - there is nothing in the world that could make one of the theories true as opposed to any of the others.

In this paper we suggest a revisionist perspective on two significant figures in early modern life science and philosophy: William Harvey and John Locke. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is often named as one of the rare representatives of the ‘life sciences’ who was a major figure in the Scientific Revolution. While this status itself is problematic, we would like to call attention to a different kind of problem: Harvey dislikes abstraction and controlled experiments (aside from (...) the ligature experiment in De Motu Cordis), tends to dismiss the value of instruments such as the microscope, and emphasizes instead the privileged status of ‘observed experience’. To use a contemporary term, Harvey appears to rely on, and chiefly value, ‘tacit knowledge’. Secondly, Locke’s project is often explained with reference to the image he uses in the Epistle to the Reader of his Essay, that he was an “underlabourer” of the sciences. In fact, despite the significant medical phase of his career, Locke’s ‘empiricism’ turns out to be above all a practical (i.e. ‘moral’) project, which focuses on the delimitation of our powers in order to achieve happiness, and rejects the possibility of naturalizing knowledge. When combined, these two cases suggest a different view of some canonical moments in early modern natural philosophy. (shrink)

The mature materialism of Joseph Priestley's Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit of 1777 is based on three main arguments: that Newton's widely-accepted scientific methodology requires the rejection of the 'hypothesis' of the soul; that a dynamic theory of matter breaks down the active/passive dichotomy assumed by many dualists; and that interaction between matter and spirit is impossible. In Matter and Spirit it is the first two arguments which are given greatest prominence; but it is the third argument which first (...) brought Priestley to take materialism seriously. It was an argument which had persistently troubled him in his dualist years, but it was not until 1774 in the Examination that he 'first entertained a serious doubt of the truth of the vulgar hypothesis'. Underlying this fact is an episode of some complexity which this article examines. (shrink)

So-called “traditional epistemology” and “Bayesian epistemology” share a word, but it may often seem that the enterprises hardly share a subject matter. They differ in their central concepts. They differ in their main concerns. They differ in their main theoretical moves. And they often differ in their methodology. However, in the last decade or so, there have been a number of attempts to build bridges between the two epistemologies. Indeed, many would say that there is just one branch of philosophy (...) here—epistemology. There is a common subject matter after all. In this paper, we begin by playing the role of a “bad cop,” emphasizing many apparent points of disconnection, and even conflict, between the approaches to epistemology. We then switch role, playing a “good cop” who insists that the approaches are engaged in common projects after all. We look at various ways in which the gaps between them have been bridged, and we consider the prospects for bridging them further. We conclude that this is an exciting time for epistemology, as the two traditions can learn, and have started learning, from each other. (shrink)

Civil liberty and privacy advocates have criticized the USA PATRIOT Act (Act) on numerous grounds since it was passed in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. Two of the primary targets of those criticisms are the Act’s sneak-and-peek search provision, which allows law enforcement agents to conduct searches without informing the search’s subjects, and the business records provision, which allows agents to secretly subpoena a variety of information – most notoriously, library borrowing records. Without attending to (...) all of the ways that critics claim the Act burdens privacy, I examine whether those two controversial parts of the Act, the section 213 sneak-and-peak search and the section 215 business records gag-rule provisions, burden privacy as critics charge. I begin by describing the two provisions. Next, I explain why those provisions don’t burden privacy on standard philosophical accounts. Moreover, I argue that they need not conflict with the justifications for people’s claims to privacy, nor do they undermine the value of privacy on the standard accounts. However, rather than simply concluding that the sections don’t burden privacy, I argue that those provisions are problematic on the grounds that they undermine the value of whatever rights to privacy people have. Specifically, I argue that it is important to distinguish rights themselves from the value that those rights have to the rights-holders, and that an essential element of privacy rights having value is that privacy right-holders be able to tell the extent to which they actually have privacy. This element, which is justified by the right-holders’ autonomy interests, is harmed by the two provisions. (shrink)

In recent years, educational institutions have started using the tools of commercial data analytics in higher education. By gathering information about students as they navigate campus information systems, learning analytics “uses analytic techniques to help target instructional, curricular, and support resources” to examine student learning behaviors and change students’ learning environments. As a result, the information educators and educational institutions have at their disposal is no longer demarcated by course content and assessments, and old boundaries between information used for assessment (...) and information about how students live and work are blurring. Our goal in this paper is to provide a systematic discussion of the ways in which privacy and learning analytics conflict and to provide a framework for understanding those conflicts. -/- We argue that there are five crucial issues about student privacy that we must address in order to ensure that whatever the laudable goals and gains of learning analytics, they are commensurate with respecting students’ privacy and associated rights, including (but not limited to) autonomy interests. First, we argue that we must distinguish among different entities with respect to whom students have, or lack, privacy. Second, we argue that we need clear criteria for what information may justifiably be collected in the name of learning analytics. Third, we need to address whether purported consequences of learning analytics (e.g., better learning outcomes) are justified and what the distributions of those consequences are. Fourth, we argue that regardless of how robust the benefits of learning analytics turn out to be, students have important autonomy interests in how information about them is collected. Finally, we argue that it is an open question whether the goods that justify higher education are advanced by learning analytics, or whether collection of information actually runs counter to those goods. (shrink)

In this article, I re-examine Kant’s many senses of cognition, thought, and object in order to better understand his account of logic, and, in particular, transcendental logic. In laying out the multiple and conflicting ways Kant defines each of those terms, the relation between transcendental logic and pure general logic can be revealed as analogous to, and, indeed, linked to, the isomorphism that exists between the categories of the understanding and the logical forms of judgment, which are equivalent if one (...) ignores the manifold of intuition. This means transcendental logic is a general logic, even as a logic of (some) cognizing. (shrink)

This article reexamines Vico’s early critique of Cartesian reasoning and of how the Cartesian method, which comes from epistemology, creates problems for the sciences once embedded into their methodologies and given a foundational role. The focus will be on De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), where Vico argues against generalizing the Cartesian method and overemphasizing clarity and distinctness in the search for truth. To this end, Vico’s relation to Cartesianism is first carefully contextualized. Then, Vico is presented as a hylomorphist (...) when it comes to how scientific disciplines and their instruments interrelate, something key for understanding why he questions the “instrumentalization” of the Cartesian method in the first place. Afterwards, Vico’s account of the impossibility of maximal scientific progress when the Cartesian method is prioritized across the sciences is presented, as probabilistic reasoning and the importance of the imagination and memory take centerstage. Lastly, the article looks at Vico’s opposition to the geometrical method’s role in physics and his defense of visual thinking in mathematics. The hope throughout is to advance a picture of the early Vico as being not only a neo- Baconian pragmatist, but a hypermodern ”meta-Cartesian” thinker concerned with humanity’s optimizing its creative potential in order to achieve scientific advances. (shrink)

The Golden Rule (“what you want done [or not done] to yourself, do [or don’t do] to others”) is the most widely accepted summary statement of human morality, and even today it continues to have philosophical supporters. This article argues that the Golden Rule suffers from four faults, the first two related to the ethics of justice and the second two related to the ethics of benevolence. One, it fails to explain how to deal with non-reciprocation. Two, it fails to (...) make clear that my obligations are obligations regardless of how I would wish to be treated by others. Three, it lacks any special value in explaining the right occasions for benevolence. And, four, it has no power to motivate benevolence. (shrink)

The artform of standup comedy can be seen as having much in common with the discipline of philosophy, particularly with the way philosophy is carried out or “performed,” whether professionally or otherwise. There are, for instance, certain basic similarities between how standup comedians and philosophers value ideals of clarity and precision when it comes to the issue of determining what kind of language is best to employ if one seeks to either effectively deliver a funny joke, as in the case (...) of standup comedy, or if one seeks to effectively articulate and present an argument that can later be assessed as sound, as in the case of philosophy. The reason this is of note is because it is rooted in another similarity that serves not only to bring these two activities significantly closer but to isolate standup comedy from most artforms when it comes to how it conceives of matters pertaining to interpretation and purpose. More specifically, this is the fact that standup comedians and philosophers alike hope, and even expect on some level, that, in the best of cases, their respective jokes and reasoned arguments will compel some form of unanimous approval from those who properly understand and engage with their content. When this observation is combined with the additional observation that jokes can also serve as vehicles for imparting wisdom of a genuinely philosophical nature despite the fact that generating laughter rather than seeking truth per se represents standup comedy’s ostensive primary goal, this leads one to wonder how porous the boundaries that otherwise serve to distinguish these two activities might be. In particular, in light of the nature and scope of the many similarities that can be said to exist between them, which I lay out and discuss in the article, it seems that standup comedy could even be reasonably argued to be the artform closest to philosophy. (shrink)

Critiques John Martin Fischer's bootstrapping model of divine foreknowledge. Invited contribution to a special journal issue on John Martin Fischer's _Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will_ (Oxford, 2016).

This article discusses the views of Immanuel Kant on sexual perversion (what he calls "carnal crimes against nature"), as found in his Vorlesung (Lectures on Ethics) and the Metaphysics of Morals (both the Rechtslehre and Tugendlehre). Kant criticizes sexual perversion by appealing to Natural Law and to his Formula of Humanity. Neither argument for the immorality of sexual perversion succeeds.

The topic ‘ethics in politics’ might cover a multitude of sins. Here it will be restricted to the ethics of politicians in representative liberal democracies. The ethics of public servants will be left aside, as will be the ethics of politicians in other political systems. Plain criminal wrongdoing by politicians will also be outside our scope. The subject is still very large. It includes all those matters that reflect on a politician’s ethical reputation. Political wrongdoing can range in magnitude from (...) taking a country to war on inadequate grounds to fiddling with one’s parliamentary expenses. (shrink)

In spite of its everyday connotations, the term independence as republicans understand it is not a celebration of individualism or self-reliance but embodies an acknowledgement of the importance of personal and social relationships in people’s lives. It reflects our connectedness rather than separateness and is in this regard a relational ideal. Properly understood, independence is a useful concept in addressing a fundamental problem in social philosophy that has preoccupied theorists of relational autonomy, namely how to reconcile the idea of individual (...) human agency with the inevitable and necessary influence of other people, both directly and indirectly. I derive my account from the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay, whose contributions have remained largely overlooked by current republican theorists. I have three purposes in this chapter. First, I set out the relational character of independence. Secondly, I outline a republican approach to the problem of structural social threats to agency. Finally, I hope to establish the basis for a fruitful dialogue between republicans and relational autonomy theorists on the requirements and dynamics of individual agency and freedom in oppressive social situations. I identify three distinctive features of the internal logic of freedom as independence that give it a relational character: it always locates the person within a community; there is a mediating role played by the notion of arbitrariness in connecting individual and collective perspectives; a causal relationship exists linking each person’s freedom as independence such that that the dependence of one class of persons jeopardizes the independence of the whole community. (shrink)

Robert Wilson’s The Eugenic Mind Project is a major achievement of engaged scholarship and socially relevant philosophy and history of science. It exemplifies the virtues of interdisciplinarity. As principal investigator of the Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada project, while employed in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta, Wilson encountered a proverbial big ball of mud with questions and issues that involved local individuals living through a painful set of memories and implicated his institutional home in (...) outstanding moral obligations. It is engaged scholarship because it required building relationships with affected persons and taking responsibility for his institution’s legacy, as well as transforming Wilson’s own outlook along the way. It is socially relevant philosophy and history of science because it brings to light issues that remain salient today, especially how eugenic themes are ubiquitous in societal discourse and evinced in everyday decisions. It is interdisciplinary because to accomplish this type of analysis requires intellectual gymnastics that range over diverse domains of research: from standpoint theory and disability studies to oral history and governmental policy; from the evolutionary biology of prosociality and variation to conceptual questions about the categorization of human traits and types. (shrink)

An analytic investigation of Antioch's "Sexual Offense Policy.".

Julius Kovesi was a moral philosopher whose work rested on a theory of concepts and concept-formation, which he outlined in his 1967 book Moral Notions. But his contribution goes further than this. In sketching a theory of concepts and concept-formation, he was entering the philosophy of language. To make his account of moral concepts credible, he needs a broader story about how moral concepts compare with other sorts of concepts. Yet philosophy of language, once dominated by Wittgenstein and Austin, came (...) rather suddenly in the 1960s to be dominated by metaphysicians and philosophers of science trying to give an account of natural science concepts. How then does Kovesi’s theory of concepts fare when viewed in the light of this shift of interests? Does he have a theory of natural world concepts that can stand scrutiny? I will try to show that he does. To show this, I will focus on the concept of water. However, before doing this we need an outline of Kovesi’s account of what he called ‘notions formed about the inanimate world’. (shrink)

Deception of subjects is used frequently in the social sciences. Examples are provided. The ethics of experimental deception are discussed, in particular various maneuvers to solve the problem. The results have implications for the use of deception in the biomedical sciences.

In his magnum opus, David Hume asserts that a person is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” (Treatise 252) Hume is clearly proud of his bold thesis, as is borne out by his categorical arguments and analyses on the self. Contributions like this will, in his opinion, help establish a new science of human nature, “which will not be inferior in certainty, (...) and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension.” (Treatise xix) Unfortunately for Hume, the bundle theory of the self subsequently elicits substantial criticism and hostility from numerous critics, both philosophical and non-philosophical. As confident as the young Scot is about the merits of his theory when he first proposes it, the sharp critical responses to his thought on the self ultimately compel him to withdraw his controversial views from public scrutiny. The irony is that the author of the bundle theory of the self himself acknowledges that his account of the self is seriously defective. In his appendix to the Treatise, Hume decries the labyrinth that his views on the self have driven him into. Five years in the making, Hume's Labyrinth: A Search for the Self explores in detail both Hume's views on the self and his critical reservations on an account of the self that would subsequently become highly influential in the philosophy of mind. -/- Central to Hume's Labyrinth is the suggestion that a careful analysis of the appendix to the Treatise throws an invaluable light on a number of elements fundamental to Hume's views on the self, not least of which is the role of Berkeley s views on language. While Hume often acknowledges the significance of Berkeley's philosophy in the Treatise, the argument here is that Berkeley's account of terms is the foundation of Hume's philosophy of the mind, with its contentious bundle theory of the self. And when this influence is assayed a new dimension of Hume's views on the self emerges. For now it appears that the bundle theory of the self is nothing but a heuristic device adopted by Hume to help further philosophical investigations into the mind. In short, it turns out that Hume is a pragmatist, intent on presenting an account of the self that researchers interested in the problems of human nature will find useful. (shrink)

Argues that divine timelessness is at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive for addressing the problem of foreknowledge and future contingents.

Ancient Greek comedy takes interesting approaches to mythological narrative. This article analyzes one excerpt and eight fragments of ancient Greek Old, Middle, and New Comedy. It attempts to show a comic rationalizing approach to mythology. Poets analyzed include Aristophanes, Cratinus, Anaxilas, Timocles, Antiphanes, Anaxandrides, Philemon, Athenion, and Comic Papyrus. Comparisons are made to known rationalizing approaches as found in the mythographers Palaephatus and Heraclitus the Paradoxographer. Ancient comedy tends to make jokes about the ludicrous aspects of myth. Early Greek myth (...) rationalization and mythography share a similar approach to comedy in that they attempt to rationalize the improbable parts of myth narrative. (shrink)

Grounding has become all the rage in recent philosophical work and metaphilosophical discussions. While I agree that the concept of ground marks something useful, I am skeptical about the metaphysical weight many imbue it with, and the picture of ‘worldly layering’ that grounding talk inspires. My skepticism centers around the fact that grounding involves necessitation, combined with reasons for thinking matters of necessity are matters of logical or conceptual (semantic, psychological) relations. I sketch an argument for deflationism about ground based (...) on this sort of deflationism about necessity and essence. I also note that in at least some cases, the considerations supporting modal deflationism directly support deflationism about whatever grounding relations may obtain in these cases. (shrink)

There is increasing concern about “surveillance capitalism,” whereby for-profit companies generate value from data, while individuals are unable to resist (Zuboff 2019). Non-profits using data-enabled surveillance receive less attention. Higher education institutions (HEIs) have embraced data analytics, but the wide latitude that private, profit-oriented enterprises have to collect data is inappropriate. HEIs have a fiduciary relationship to students, not a narrowly transactional one (see Jones et al, forthcoming). They are responsible for facets of student life beyond education. In addition to (...) classrooms, learning management systems, and libraries, HEIs manage dormitories, gyms, dining halls, health facilities, career advising, police departments, and student employment. HEIs collect and use student data in all of these domains, ostensibly to understand learner behaviors and contexts, improve learning outcomes, and increase institutional efficiency through “learning analytics” (LA). ID card swipes and Wi-Fi log-ins can track student location, class attendance, use of campus facilities, eating habits, and friend groups. Course management systems capture how students interact with readings, video lectures, and discussion boards. Application materials provide demographic information. These data are used to identify students needing support, predict enrollment demands, and target recruiting efforts. These are laudable aims. However, current LA practices may be inconsistent with HEIs’ fiduciary responsibilities. HEIs often justify LA as advancing student interests, but some projects advance primarily organizational welfare and institutional interests. Moreover, LA advances a narrow conception of student interests while discounting privacy and autonomy. Students are generally unaware of the information collected, do not provide meaningful consent, and express discomfort and resigned acceptance about HEI data practices, especially for non-academic data (see Jones et al. forthcoming). The breadth and depth of student information available, combined with their fiduciary responsibility, create a duty that HEIs exercise substantial restraint and rigorous evaluation in data collection and use. (shrink)

Despite widespread agreement that privacy in the context of education is important, it can be difficult to pin down precisely why and to what extent it is important, and it is challenging to determine how privacy is related to other important values. But that task is crucial. Absent a clear sense of what privacy is, it will be difficult to understand the scope of privacy protections in codes of ethics. Moreover, privacy will inevitably conflict with other values, and understanding the (...) values that underwrite privacy protections is crucial for addressing conflicts between privacy and institutional efficiency, advising efficacy, vendor benefits, and student autonomy. -/- My task in this paper is to seek a better understanding of the concept of privacy in institutional research, canvas a number of important moral values underlying privacy generally (including several that are explicit in the AIR Statement), and examine how those moral values should bear upon institutional research by considering several recent cases. (shrink)

Julius Kovesi was a moral philosopher contemporary with Alasdair MacIntyre, and dealing with many of the same questions as MacIntyre. In our view, Kovesi’s moral philosophy is rich in ideas and worth revisiting. MacIntyre agrees: Kovesi’s Moral Notions, he has said, is ‘a minor classic in moral philosophy that has not yet received its due’. Kovesi was not a thinker whose work fits readily into any one tradition. Unlike the later MacIntyre, he was not a Thomistic Aristotelian, nor even an (...) Aristotelian. He saw his viewpoint as Platonic, or perhaps more accurately as Socratic. His writings, unlike MacIntyre’s, have little to say about justice. However, Kovesi did offfer a theory of practical reason. His main contention was that all human social life embodies a set of concepts that govern and guide that life, concepts without which that life would be impossible. These include our moral concepts. For Kovesi, moral concepts are not external to, but constitutive of social life in any of its possible forms. But in the course of his argument he also developed a way of thinking about how concepts work, which we term ‘conceptual functionalism’, and which we will elucidate. (shrink)

In Wollstonecraft’s early writings, she articulates the foundational theological and philosophical principles that would underpin her work throughout her career. One difference between her early and later work lies in the way that the values to which she refers are combined. Whereas Wollstonecraft at first appeals to the separate ideals of independence, equality, and virtue, from the 1790s onwards she integrates these into a characteristic republican framework that was in common use amongst dissenting theorists at the time. The set of (...) values on which Wollstonecraft draws, and the version of the republican framework that she develops, closely resemble those of Richard Price with whose work she was familiar. Examining the structural similarities between their respective models, I argue, gives us an insight into the systematic manner of aspects of Wollstonecraft’s own thought. It also allows us to see how Wollstonecraft goes beyond the republicanism of Price and others as she develops her own feminist solutions to the problems of structural domination. (shrink)

Public and research libraries have long provided resources in electronic formats, and the tension between providing electronic resources and patron privacy is widely recognized. But assessing trade-offs between privacy and access to electronic resources remains difficult. One reason is a conceptual problem regarding intellectual freedom. Traditionally, the LIS literature has plausibly understood privacy as a facet of intellectual freedom. However, while certain types of electronic resource use may diminish patron privacy, thereby diminishing intellectual freedom, the opportunities created by such resources (...) also appear liberty-enhancing. Adjudicating between privacy loss and enhanced opportunities on intellectual freedom grounds must therefore provide an account of intellectual freedom capable of addressing both privacy and opportunity. I will argue that intellectual freedom is a form of positive freedom, where a person’s freedom is a function of the quality of her agency. Using this view as the lodestar, I articulate several principles for assessing adoption of electronic resources and privacy protections. (shrink)

Morality is often thought of as non-rational or sub-rational. In Moral Notions, first published in 1967, Julius Kovesi argues that the rationality of morality is built into the way we construct moral concepts. In showing this he also resolves the old Humean conundrum of the relation between 'facts' and 'values'. And he puts forward a method of reasoning that might make 'applied ethics' (at present largely a hodge-podge of opinions) into a constructive discipline. Kovesi's general theory of concepts - important (...) in its own right - is indebted to his interpretation of Plato, and his three papers on Plato, first published here, explain this debt. This new edition of Moral Notions also includes a foreward by Philippa Foot, a biography of the author, and a substantial afterword in which the editors, Robert Ewin and Alan Tapper, explain the signficance of Kovesi's work. (shrink)

While the image of the slave as the antithesis of the freeman is central to republican freedom, it is striking to note that slaves themselves have not contributed to how this condition is understood. The result is a one-sided conception of both freedom and slavery, which leaves republicanism unable to provide an equal and robust protection for historically outcast people. I draw on the work of Frederick Douglass – long overlooked as a significant contributor to republican theory – to show (...) one way why this is so. Focusing the American Revolution, the subsequent republican government established new political institutions to maintain the collective interests of the whole population. The political revolution was held in place by processes of public reason that reflected the values and ideas of the people that had rebelled. The black population, however, had not been part of this revolution. After emancipation, black Americans were required to accept terms of citizenship that had already been defined, leaving them socially dominated, subject to the prejudices and biases within the prevailing ideas of public discourse. Douglass argued that republican freedom under law is always dependent on a more fundamental revolution, that he calls a ‘radical revolution in thought’, in which the entire system of social norms and practices are reworked together by members of all constituent social groups – women and men, black and white, rich and poor – so that it reflects a genuinely collaborative achievement. Only then can we begin the republican project of contestatory freedom as independence or non-domination that today’s republicans take for granted. (shrink)

In this state-of-the-field article, I examine some of the problems plaguing present-day analytic Hegel studies and try to find out what can be done to remedy the situation as scholars collectively (and finally) begin grappling with the metaphysico-logical core of Hegel’s thought. In so doing, I go over the various currents of Hegelian interpretation and describe some of the limitations behind the usual analytic approaches which have often tended to downplay key aspects of Hegel’s thought, like his dialectical logic, and (...) which have also partly helped create enthusiasm for metaphysically deflationary approaches to Hegel’s thought. I then propose three practical directives for the betterment of the field in terms of future research, ones which essentially advocate for the generalized adoption of a more historicist approach to certain matters, one that is not mutually exclusive with the overarching scholarly desire to extract something that is philosophically relevant or contemporarily useful from Hegel’s thought, which is what seems to drive analytic Hegel studies in general. (shrink)

In this article, I reconstruct and interpret the early Vico’s oft-neglected theory of scientific cognition, as found in his 1710 metaphysical treatise On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, a work whose aim was to be the handmaid to experimental physics. In particular, I offer a new reading of his verum-factum principle, which holds that the true and the made are interchangeable, by examining this doctrine in light of its unexpected connections to much later trends in philosophy. I also (...) present his criticism of Descartes’ cogito and, finally, Vico’s own solution to the problem of skepticism, which is meant to provide a new foundation for the sciences. (shrink)

Entanglement has been called the most important new feature of the quantum world. It is expressed in the quantum formalism by the joint measurement formula. We prove the formula for projection valued observables from a plausible assumption, which for spacelike separated measurements is an expression of relativistic causality. The state reduction formula is simply a way to express the joint measurement formula after one measurement has been made, and its result known.

In this paper, we consider the role of conversations in contributing to healthcare quality improvement. More specifically, we suggest that conversations can be important in responding to what we call ’normative complexity’. As well as reflecting on the value of conversations, the aim is to introduce the dimension of normative complexity as something that requires theoretical and practical attention alongside the more recognised challenges of complex systems, which we label, for short, as ’explanatory complexity’. In brief, normative complexity relates to (...) the inherent difficulty of deciding what kinds of changes are ’improvements’ or, more broadly, what is valuable in healthcare. We suggest that explanatory and normative complexity intersect and that anyone interested in healthcare improvement needs to be sensitive to both. After briefly introducing the idea of normative complexity, we consider some contrasting examples of conversations, reflecting on how they do and might contribute to healthcare quality. We discuss both conversations that are deliberately organised and facilitated (’orchestrated conversations’) and more informally occurring and routine conversations. In the first half of the paper, we draw on some examples of orchestrated and routine conversations to open up these issues. In the second half of the paper, we bring some more theoretical lenses to bear on both conversations and normative complexity, summarise what we take to be the value of conversations and draw together some of the implications of our discussion. In summary, we argue that conversations can play a crucial role in negotiating the normative complexity of healthcare quality improvement because of their capacity to hold together a plurality of perspectives, to contribute and respond to emergence and to help underpin institutional conditions for empathy and imagination. (shrink)