Odată cu creșterea volumului de date pe Internet, în media socială, cloud computing, dispozitive mobile și date guvernamentale, Big Data devine în același timp o amenințare și o oportunitate în ceea ce privește gestionarea și utilizarea acestor date, menținând în același timp drepturile persoanelor implicate. În fiecare zi, folosim și generăm tone de date, alimentând bazele de date ale agențiilor guvernamentale, companiilor private și chiar cetățenilor privați. Beneficiem în multe feluri de existența și utilizarea Big Data, dar trebuie să (...) ne amintim de asemenea că „nu există nimic gratuit”. Există riscuri în utilizarea Big Data, un fel de parte întunecată. Schimbările de piață pot fi obținute prin utilizarea Big Data: în timp ce acestea pot fi pozitive pentru cineva, ele pot dăuna altcuiva. Riscurile potențiale provin și de la agențiile publice. Este clar că datele mari pot aduce beneficii cetățenilor și companiilor, dar trebuie să fie echilibrate de o conștientizare sporită a „părții întunecate” a Big Data în exploatarea noilor capacități și oportunități pe care le oferă tuturor . -/- CUPRINS -/- 1. Big Data - Definiție - Caracteristici - Clasificarea datelor mari - Arhitectura - Tehnologii - Oportunități - Provocări - Critici - - Criticile paradigmei Big Data - - Criticile modelului "V" - - Criticile de noutate - - Criticile execuției Big Data - 1.1 Viața datelor mari - - Nașterea - - Copilăria - - - Educație - - - Divertisment - - Adolescența - - - Servicii online - - - Comunicații mobile - - - Servicii de streaming - - Adulți tineri - - - Căutarea de locuri de muncă - - - Servicii bancare și asigurări - - - Utilități - - - Dating online și pornografie - - Vârsta medie - - - Servicii de sănătate - - - Aplicații pentru îngrijire și aplicații pentru sănătate și fitness - - - Căutarea de locuri de muncă - - - Dating online - - Bătrânețea - - - Îngrijirea sănătății - - Moartea - 1.2 Aplicații - - Guvern - - Dezvoltare internațională - - Fabrici - - Sănătate - - Educaţie - - Mass-media - - Asigurare - - Internetul obiectelor (IoT) - - Tehnologia informației - 1.3 Studii de caz - - Guvern - - - China - - - India - - - Israel - - - Regatul Unit - - - Statele Unite ale Americii - - Cu amănuntul - - Ştiinţă - - Sport - - Tehnologie - - Activități de cercetare - - - Prelevarea de date mari - 1.4 Agenda europeană privind societatea digitală - - Cadrul juridic - - Peisajul opiniei părților interesate - 1.5 GDPR - - Etapele procesării datelor personale - - Principiile procesării datelor - - Politica de confidențialitate și transparența - - Scopurile procesării datelor - - Confidențialitate prin design și implicită - - - Paradoxul (legal) al Big Data - - Domeniul teritorial al GDPR - - Definirea datelor mari, a datelor personale și a datelor anonime - - Etapele procesării datelor cu caracter personal - - Principii de prelucrare a datelor - - Politica de confidențialitate și Transparența - - Scopuri de prelucrare a datelor - - Confidențialitate prin design și confidențialitate în mod implicit - - Paradoxul (legal) al datelor mari 2. Analiza Big Data - 2.1 Analitica - - Analitica vs. analiză - - Aplicații ale analiticii - - - Optimizarea marketingului - - - Analiza oamenilor - - - Analiza portofoliului - - - Analitica riscurilor - - - Analitica digitală - - - Analitica securității - - - Analitica software-ului - - Provocări - - Riscuri - 2.2 Analitica predictivă - - Definiție - - Procesul de analitica predictivă - - Tipuri - - - Modele predictive - - - Modele descriptive - - - Modele de decizie - - Aplicații - - - Managementul relațiilor cu clienții analitic (CRM) - - - Protecția copilului - - - Sisteme de suport decizional clinic - - - Analiticile colecțiilor - - - Vânzări încrucișate - - - Retenția clienților - - - Marketing direct - - - Detectarea fraudelor - - - Prezicerea rezultatelor deciziilor legale - - - Previziuni privind portofoliul, produsele sau economia - - - Managementul riscului de proiect - - - Acceptanța (Underwriting) - - Tehnologia și influențele big data - - Tehnici analitice - - - Tehnici de regresie - - - - Model de regresie liniară - - - - Modele de alegere discretă - - - - Regresie logistică - - - - Regresie logistică multinomială - - - - Regresie probit - - - - Logit versus probit - - - - Modele pentru serii de timp - - - - Analiza supraviețuirii sau a duratei - - - - Arborele de clasificare și regresie (CART) - - - - Funcții spline adaptive de regresie multivariate - - - Tehnici de învățare automată - - - - Rețele neuronale - - - - Perceptron multistrat (MLP) - - - - Funcții radiale de bază - - - - Mașini cu vectori de suport - - - - Bayesiene naive - - - - Vecinul k-cel mai apropiat - - - - Modelarea predictivă geospațială - - Instrumente - - - PMML - - Critici - 2.3 Analitica prescriptivă - - Istorie - 2.4 Studiul critic al datelor - - Perspective critice - - Abordare: Pragmatismul și etica discursului 3. Etica Big Data - Datele personale ale copiilor - Rolul instituțiilor - - State naționale - - Bănci - Articole relevante de știri despre etica datelor - Legislație relevantă privind etica datelor - 3.1 Principii ale eticii Big Data - - Etica în cercetare - - Conștientizarea - - Consimţământul - - Controlul - - Transparența - - Încrederea - - Proprietatea - - Supravegherea și securitatea - - Identitatea digitală - - Realitatea ajustată - - De-anonimizarea - - Inegalitatea digitală - - Confidențialitatea - - Financiar - - - Cât de mult merită datele? - - Deschidere - 3.2 Probleme etice în cercetare - - Etica cercetării pentru cercetarea socială - - Principalele aspecte etice ale cercetării sociale - - - Intimitate - - - Consimțământ informat - - - De-identificarea - - - Inegalitate – Diviziune digitală - - Integritatea cercetării - - Probleme emergente - - Aviz legal - 3.3 Aspecte filosofice - 3.4 10 reguli de bază în lucrul cu Big Data - - Concluzie Referințe Despre autor - Nicolae Sfetcu - - De același autor - - Contact Editura - MultiMedia Publishing . 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This article reconsiders the relationship between interpretivism about belief and normative standards. Interpretivists have traditionally taken beliefs to be fixed in relation to norms of interpretation. However, recent work by philosophers and psychologists reveals that human belief attribution practices are governed by a rich diversity of normative standards. Interpretivists thus face a dilemma: either give up on the idea that belief is constitutively normative or countenance a context-sensitive disjunction of norms that constitute belief. Either way, interpretivists should embrace the intersubjective (...) indeterminacy of belief. (shrink)

Many psychologists studying lay belief attribution and behavior explanation cite Donald Davidson in support of their assumption that people construe beliefs as inner causes. But Davidson’s influential argument is unsound; there are no objective grounds for the intuition that the folk construe beliefs as inner causes that produce behavior. Indeed, recent experimental work by Ian Apperly, Bertram Malle, Henry Wellman, and Tania Lombrozo provides an empirical framework that accords well with Gilbert Ryle’s alternative thesis that the folk construe beliefs as (...) patterns of living that contextualize behavior. (shrink)

In Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee reveals that American man of integrity Atticus Finch harbors deep-seated racist beliefs. Bob Ewell, Finch's nemesis in To Kill a Mockingbird, harbors the same beliefs. But the two men live out their shared racist beliefs in dramatically different fashions. This article argues that extant dispositionalist accounts of belief lack the tools to accommodate Finch and Ewell's divergent styles of believing. It then draws on literary and philosophical character studies to construct the required tools.

In a recent article in this journal, Krzysztof Poslajko reconstructs—and endorses as probative—a dilemma for interpretivism first posed by Alex Byrne. On the first horn of the dilemma, the interpretivist takes attitudes to emerge in relation to an ideal interpreter (and thus loses any connection with actual folk psychological practices). On the second horn, the interpretivist takes attitudes to emerge in relation to individuals’ judgements (and thus denies the possibility of error). I show that this is a false dilemma. By (...) taking a model-theoretic approach to folk psychology, and marrying interpretivism with dispositionalism, interpretivists can viably reject the notion of an ideal (or canonical) interpreter—and relativize attitudes to actual lay interpreters—without taking on board the unacceptable epistemological consequences of allowing that attitudes are judgement-dependent. (shrink)

In this article, I explore how researchers’ metaphysical commitments can be conducive—or unconducive—to progress in animal cognition research. The methodological dictum known as Morgan’s Canon exhorts comparative psychologists to countenance the least mentalistic fair interpretation of animal actions. This exhortation has frequently been misread as a blanket condemnation of mentalistic interpretations of animal behaviors that could be interpreted behavioristically. But Morgan meant to demand only that researchers refrain from accepting default interpretations of (apparent) actions until other fair interpretations have been (...) duly considered. The Canon backfired largely because of Morgan’s background metaphysical commitment to a univocal, hierarchical, and anthropocentric account of cognitive architecture. I make the case that, going forward, comparative psychologists would do well to pair judicious use of Morgan’s Canon with an openness to the existence of non-humanlike animal minds comprising phenomena belonging to distinct cognitive and folk psychological ontologies. And I argue that this case gives us pragmatic reason to reconcile deep—e.g., psychofunctionalist—and superficial—e.g., dispositionalist—approaches to the metaphysics of belief. (shrink)

I have proposed wedding the theories of belief known as dispositionalism and interpretivism. Krzysztof Poslajko objects that dispositionalism does just fine on its own and, moreover, is better off without interpretivism’s metaphysical baggage. I argue that Poslajko is wrong: in order to secure a principled criterion for individuating beliefs, dispositionalism must either collapse into psychofunctionalism (or some other non-superficial theory) or accept interpretivism’s hand in marriage.

Double dissociations between perceivable colors and physical properties of colored objects have led many philosophers to endorse relationalist accounts of color. I argue that there are analogous double dissociations between attitudes of belief—the beliefs that people attribute to each other in everyday life—and intrinsic cognitive states of belief—the beliefs that some cognitive scientists posit as cogs in cognitive systems—pitched at every level of psychological explanation. These dissociations provide good reason to refrain from conflating attitudes of belief with intrinsic cognitive states (...) of belief. I suggest that interpretivism provides an attractive account of the former. Like colors, attitudes of belief evolved to be ecological signifiers, not cogs in cognitive systems. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind (from eliminative materialists to psychofunctionalists to interpretivists) generally assume that a normative ideal delimits which mental phenomena exist (though they disagree about how to characterize the ideal in question). This assumption is dubious. A comprehensive ontology of mind includes some mental phenomena that are neither (a) explanatorily fecund posits in any branch of cognitive science that aims to unveil the mechanistic structure of cognitive systems nor (b) ideal (nor even progressively closer to ideal) posits in any given (...) folk psychological practice. Indeed, one major function of scientific psychology has been (and will be) to introduce just such (normatively suboptimal but real) mental phenomena into folk psychological taxonomies. The development and public dissemination of IQ research over the course of the 20th century is a case in point. (shrink)

A pluralistic approach to folk psychology must countenance the evaluative, regulatory, predictive, and explanatory roles played by attributions of intelligence in social practices across cultures. Building off of the work of the psychologist Robert Sternberg and the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Daniel Dennett, I argue that a relativistic interpretivism best accounts for the many varieties of intelligence that emerge from folk discourse. To be intelligent is to be comparatively good at solving intellectual problems that an interpreter deems worth solving.

A general article discussing philosophical issues arising in connection with Aristotle's "Generation of Animals" (Chapter from Blackwell's Companion to Aristotle).

Microaggressions are seemingly negligible slights that can cause significant damage to frequently targeted members of marginalized groups. Recently, Scott O. Lilienfeld challenged a key platform of the microaggression research project: what’s aggressive about microaggressions? To answer this challenge, Derald Wing Sue, the psychologist who has spearheaded the research on microaggressions, needs to theorize a spectrum of aggression that ranges from intentional assault to unintentional microaggressions. I suggest turning to Bonnie Mann’s “Creepers, Flirts, Heroes and Allies” for inspiration. Building from Mann’s (...) richer theoretical framework will allow Sue to answer Lilienfeld’s objection and defend the legitimacy of the concept, ‘microaggression’. (shrink)

Psychometric g—a statistical factor capturing intercorrelations between scores on different IQ tests—is of theoretical interest despite being a low-fidelity model of both folk psychological intelligence and its cognitive/neural underpinnings. Psychometric g idealizes away from those aspects of cognitive/neural mechanisms that are not explanatory of the relevant variety of folk psychological intelligence, and it idealizes away from those varieties of folk psychological intelligence that are not generated by the relevant cognitive/neural substrate. In this manner, g constitutes a high-fidelity bridge model of (...) the relationship between its two targets and, thereby, helps demystify the relationship between folk and scientific psychology. (shrink)

This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Darwin and Édouard Glissant to develop an ecopoetic theory of relational form. Gathering perspectives from ecocriticism and new materialism, literary criticism and comparative literature, the history and philosophy of science, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and Black studies, it reads form as an interdisciplinary object that is part of the world, rather than an imposed feature of human language or perception. In this way, it produces (...) a relational theory of form that is not hylomorphic or defined through the relation between form and content but, rather, is defined by the relation between a content and extant and, so, an interaction of relation and repetition. Drawing on the history of ecological science, it further explores how forms combine, how they amplify and interfere with each other, and how they support relations of harm and care. Finally, it uses this ecopoetic theory of form to read the histories of racial violence and migration in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009). (shrink)

Political theory as a discipline has long been skeptical of computational methods. In this paper, I argue that it is time for theory to make a perspectival shift on these methods. Specifically, we should consider integrating recently developed generative large language models like GPT-4 as tools to support our creative work as theorists. Ultimately, I suggest that political theorists should embrace this technology as a method of supporting our capacity for creativity—but that we should do so in a way that (...) is mindful of the content and value of theorizing, the technical constraints of the models, and the ethical questions that the technology raises. (shrink)

This book consolidates emerging research on Aristotle's science and ethics in order to explore the extent to which the concepts, methods, and practices he developed for scientific inquiry and explanation are used to investigate moral phenomena. Each chapter shows, in a different way, that Aristotle's ethics is much more like a science than it is typically represented. The upshot of this is twofold. First, uncovering the links between Aristotle's science and ethics promises to open up new and innovative directions for (...) research into his moral philosophy. Second, showing why Aristotle thinks ethics can never be fully assimilated to the model of science will help shed new light on his views about the limits of science. The volume thus promises to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the epistemological, metaphysical, and psychological foundations of Aristotle's ethics. (shrink)

In this article, we aim to map out the complexities which characterise debates about the ethics of vaccine distribution, particularly those surrounding the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. In doing so, we distinguish three general principles which might be used to distribute goods and two ambiguities in how one might wish to spell them out. We then argue that we can understand actual debates around the COVID-19 vaccine – including those over prioritising vaccinating the most vulnerable – as reflecting disagreements (...) over these principles. Finally, we shift our attention away from traditional discussions of distributive justice, highlighting the importance of concerns about risk imposition, special duties, and social roles in explaining debates over the COVID-19 vaccine. We conclude that the normative complexity this article highlights deepens the need for decision-making bodies to be sensitive to public input. (shrink)

This article offers an interpretation of Descartes’s method of doubt. It wields an examination of Descartes’s pedagogy—as exemplified by The Search for Truth as well as the Meditations—to make the case for the sincerity (as opposed to artificiality) of the doubts engendered by the First Meditation. Descartes was vigilant about balancing the need to use his method of doubt to achieve absolute certainty with the need to compensate for the various foibles of his scholastic and unschooled readers. Nevertheless, Descartes endeavored (...) to instill willful, context-independent, universal doubt across his readership. If all goes well, readers of the Meditations are like method actors; the Meditator is the character they are meant to bring to life, via the method of meditating on reasons for doubt. The article concludes with the suggestion that Descartes was the same kind of skeptic as the early Academic skeptics Arcesilaus and Carneades. (shrink)

Descartes held the following view of declarative memory: to remember is to reconstruct an idea that you intellectually recognize as a reconstruction. Descartes countenanced two overarching varieties of declarative memory. To have an intellectual memory is to intellectually reconstruct a universal idea that you recognize as a reconstruction, and to have a sensory memory is to neurophysiologically reconstruct a particular idea that you recognize as a reconstruction. Sensory remembering is thus a capacity of neither ghosts nor machines, but only of (...) human beings qua mind-body unions. This interpretation unifies Descartes’s various remarks (and conspicuous silences) about remembering, from the 1628 Rules for the Direction of the Mind through the suppressed-in-1633 Treatise of Man to the 1649 Passions of the Soul. It also rebuts a prevailing thesis in the current secondary literature—that Cartesian critters can remember—while incorporating the textual evidence for that thesis—Descartes’s detailed descriptions of the corporeal mechanisms that construct sensory memories. (shrink)

In this paper I address an important question in Aristotle’s biology, What are the causal mechanisms behind the transmission of biological form? Aristotle’s answer to this question, I argue, is found in Generation of Animals Book 4 in connection with his investigation into the phenomenon of inheritance. There we are told that an organism’s reproductive material contains a set of "movements" which are derived from the various "potentials" of its nature (the internal principle of change that initiates and controls development). (...) These movements, I suggest, function as specialized vehicles for communicating the parts of the parent’s heritable form during the act of reproduction. After exploring the details of this mechanism, I then take up Aristotle’s theory of inheritance proper. At the heart of the theory are three general principles (or 'laws') that govern the interactions between the maternal and paternal movements, the outcome of which determines the pattern of inheritance for the offspring. Although this paper is primarily aimed at providing a detailed analysis of Aristotle’s account of inheritance, the results of that analysis have implications for other areas of Aristotle’s biology. One of the most interesting of these is the question of whether Aristotle’s biology is anti-evolutionary (as traditionally assumed) or whether (as I argue) it leaves room for a theory of evolution by natural selection, even if Aristotle himself never took that step. (shrink)

Scientists, philosophers, and policymakers disagree about how to define microaggression. Here, we offer a taxonomy of existing definitions, clustering around (a) the psychological motives of perpetrators, (b) the experience of victims, and (c) the functional role of microaggression in oppressive social structures. We consider conceptual and epistemic challenges to each and suggest that progress may come from developing novel hybrid accounts of microaggression, combining empirically tractable features with sensitivity to the testimony of victims.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the level of gender bias in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals while exercising due care in the analysis of its arguments. I argue that while the GA theory is clearly sexist, the traditional interpretation fails to diagnose the problem correctly. The traditional interpretation focuses on three main sources of evidence: (1) Aristotle’s claim that the female is, as it were, a “disabled” (πεπηρωμένον) male; (2) the claim at GA IV.3, 767b6-8 that females are (...) a departure from the kind; and (3) Aristotle’s supposed claim at GA IV.3, 768a21-8 that the most ideal outcome of reproduction is a male offspring that perfectly resembles its father. I argue that each of these passages has either been misunderstood or misrepresented by commentators. In none of these places is Aristotle suggesting that females are imperfect members of the species or that they result from the failure to achieve some teleological goal. I defend the view that the GA does not see reproduction as occurring for the sake of producing males; rather, what sex an embryo happens to become is determined entirely by non-teleological forces operating through material necessity. This interpretation is consistent with Aristotle’s view in GA II.5 that females have the same soul as the male (741a7) as well as the argument in Metaphysics X.9 that sexual difference is not part of the species form but is an affection (πάθος) arising from the matter (1058b21-4). While the traditional interpretation has tended to exaggerate the level of sexism in Aristotle’s
developmental biology, the GA is by no means free of gender bias as some recent scholarship has claimed. In the final section of the paper I point to one passage where Aristotle clearly falls back on sexist assumptions in order to answer the difficult question, “Why are animals divided into sexes?”. I argue that this passage in particular poses a serious challenge
to anyone attempting to absolve Aristotle’s developmental biology of the charge of sexism. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Aristotle’s views on natural kinds and the compatibility of pluralism and realism, a topic that has generated considerable interest among contemporary philosophers. I argue that, when it came to zoology, Aristotle denied that there is only one way of organizing the diversity of the living world into natural kinds that will yield a single, unified system of classification. Instead, living things can be grouped and regrouped into various cross-cutting kinds on the basis of objective similarities (...) and differences in ways that subserve the explanatory context. Since the explanatory aims of zoology are diverse and variegated, the kinds it recognizes must be equally diverse and variegated. At the same time, there are certain constraints on which kinds can be selected. And those constraints derive more from the causal structure of the world than from the proclivities of the classifier (hence the realism). This distinguishes Aristotle’s version of pluralistic realism from those contemporary versions (like Dupré’s “promiscuous realism”) that treat all or most classifications of a given domain as equally legitimate and not just a sub-set of kinds recognized by the science that studies it. By contrast, Aristotle privileges scientifically important kinds on the basis of their role in causal investigations. On this picture natural kinds are those kinds with the sort of causal structure that allows them to enter into scientific explanations. In the final section I argue that Aristotle’s zoology should remain of interest to philosophers and biologists alike insofar as it combines a pluralistic form of realism with a rank-free approach to classification. (shrink)

It has become somewhat of a platitude to call Aristotle the first epigenesist insofar as he thought form and structure emerged gradually from an unorganized, amorphous embryo. But modern biology now recognizes two senses of “epigenesis”. The first is this more familiar idea about the gradual emergence of form and structure, which is traditionally opposed to the idea of preformationism. But modern biologists also use “epigenesis” to emphasize the context-dependency of the process itself. Used in this sense development is not (...) simply the unfolding of a pre-determined sequence of changes specified in advance by the organism’s genotype. It is also sensitive to inputs from the internal and external environment, which help determine in real-time which of the many potential developmental pathways are actualized during the process. Within this paradigm developing embryos are viewed as dynamic and responsive systems that react to inputs from the internal and external environment ‘on the fly’. In this paper I argue that, while Aristotle was an epigenesist in the first sense, he would have rejected epigenesis in the more modern sense. First, Aristotle’s model of choice for a developing embryo is the automaton that executes a set of preset movements (GA 734b9-13, 741b7-15). The automatons he has in mind are not dynamic AI systems capable of modifying their behaviour on the fly in response to environmental cues but completely deterministic mechanisms whose movements are fixed by their original design. Second, given Aristotle’s views about the different kinds of causal powers there are, it looks like only intentional agents endowed with actual decision-making powers could be capable of the sort of plasticity at the core of a more dynamic epigenesis. For that kind of epigenesis requires powers for alternative outcomes, and Aristotle is explicit that such powers require rational desires (προαίρεσις) that control which of those alternatives to bring about. If I am right, then he could not have made sense of the idea of a developing embryo (as a non-intentional system) making adjustments to its phenotype on the fly in response to emerging problems and opportunities, given the conceptual resources available to him. (shrink)

Many theorists have focused on Wittgenstein’s use of examples, but I argue that examples form only half of his method. Rather than continuing the disjointed style of his Cambridge lectures, Wittgenstein returns to the techniques he employed while teaching elementary school. Philosophical Investigations trains the reader as a math class trains a student—‘by means of examples and by exercises’ (§208). Its numbered passages, carefully arranged, provide a series of demonstrations and practice problems. I guide the reader through one such series, (...) demonstrating how the exercises build upon one another and give us ample opportunity to hone our problem-solving skills. Through careful practice, we learn to pass the test Wittgenstein poses when he claims that something is ‘easy to imagine’ (§19). Whereas other critics have viewed the Investigations as merely a diagnosis of our philosophical delusions, I claim that Wittgenstein also writes a prescription for our disease: Do your exercises. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the role of optimality reasoning in Aristotle’s natural science. By “optimality reasoning” I mean reasoning that appeals to some conception of “what is best” in order to explain why things are the way they are. We are first introduced to this pattern of reasoning in the famous passage at Phaedo 97b8-98a2, where (Plato’s) Socrates invokes “what is best” as a cause (aitia) of things in nature. This passage can be seen as the intellectual ancestor of (...) Aristotle’s own principle, expressed by the famous dictum “nature does nothing in vain but always what is best for the substance from among the possibilities concerning each kind of animal” (Progression of Animals II, 704b12-18). The paper is focused around exploring three questions that arise in connection with Aristotle’s use of this optimality principle: (1) How do we understand the concept of “the best” at work in the principle? (2) How does Aristotle conceive of “the range of possibilities”? And, finally, (3) what role does optimality reasoning play in Aristotle’s natural science? Is it a special form of demonstration in which the optimality principle functions as one of its premises, or is it a heuristic device that helps uncover those causally relevant features of a natural substances that ultimately serve as middle terms in demonstrations? In the final section I return to the comparison between Plato and Aristotle and argue that, while both see the natural world as the product of an optimizing agent and while both see this assumption as licensing a pattern of reasoning that appeals to a certain conception of “the best”, they disagree fundamentally over what the optimization agent is and how it operates. Thus, despite their general agreement, it would be a mistake to think that Aristotle simply took over Plato’s use of optimality reasoning without significant modifications. (shrink)

At first glance, hate speech and microaggressions seem to have little overlap beyond being communicated verbally or in written form. Hate speech seems clearly macro-aggressive: an intentional, obviously harmful act lacking the ambiguity (and plausible deniability) of microaggressions. If we look back at historical discussions of hate speech, however, many of these assumed differences turn out to be points of similarity. The harmfulness of hate speech only became widely acknowledged after a concerted effort by critical race theorists, feminists, and other (...) activists. Before the 1990s, slurs were widely considered socially acceptable behavior: mere jokes that weren’t intended to be harmful. Authors like Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence pushed back against this dismissal. In this chapter, I show that their arguments for the serious harmfulness of hate speech prefigure and provide support for current debates about the serious harmfulness of microaggressions. Exploring resonances with the 1980s hate speech debate will allow us to explain why microaggressions fall below the cutoff for legal liability but remain apt targets for moral blame. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have argued that if you care about how much goodness your actions generate, or how good the state-of-affairs you actions bring about are, then your attention should be directed towards the very far future. But many don’t care about how much goodness their actions generate, nor do they care about things like “states-of-affairs”. Amongst a multitude of things, many people care about how their actions impact individuals. And they also care about the sorts of justifications they (...) are able to offer for those actions. One moral theory which captures this moral viewpoint is contractualism. In this chapter, I argue that contractualism is, in large part, incompatible with longtermism – the view that, in many contexts, we ought to do that which will most improve the prospects of future people. I then discuss what advice, if any at all, contractualism can offer to the longtermist. (shrink)

Epistemic paternalism is the thesis that a paternalistic interference with an individual's inquiry is justified when it is likely to bring about an epistemic improvement in her. In this article I claim that in order to motivate epistemic paternalism we must first account for the value of epistemic improvements. I propose that the epistemic paternalist has two options: either epistemic improvements are valuable because they contribute to wellbeing, or they are epistemically valuable. I will argue that these options constitute the (...) foundations of a dilemma: either epistemic paternalism collapses into general paternalism, or a distinctive project of justified epistemic paternalism is implausible. (shrink)

Literature in epistemology tends to suppose that there are three main types of understanding – propositional, atomistic, and objectual. By showing that all apparent instances of propositional understanding can be more plausibly explained as featuring one of several other epistemic states, this paper argues that talk of propositional understanding is unhelpful and misleading. The upshot is that epistemologists can do without the notion of propositional understanding.

The intellectual history of evolutionary theory really does not begin in earnest until the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. Prior to that, the idea that species might have evolved over time was not a serious possibility for most naturalists and philosophers. There is certainly no substantive debate in antiquity about evolution in the modern sense. There were really only two competing explanations for how living things came to have the parts they do: design or blind chance. Ancient Greek Atomism, for example, (...) taught that all composite bodies, including living things, are generated through the random collision of atoms as they rebel and move in the void. Plato and Aristotle both dismissed this possibility on the grounds that living things are too complex and too well-adapted to be products of chance. This eventually became the central premise in Galen’s own Argument from Design. That species forms might have gradually evolved over time by a process of natural selection was not seen as a plausible alternative. Of course, such a theory had been proposed by Empedocles in the fifth century BCE. But because his theory still relied heavily on chance, it was not taken seriously by any of the later ancient Greek or Roman thinkers. My aim in this paper is to investigate the reasons why evolutionary thinking failed to gain momentum in antiquity after its introduction by Empedocles. (shrink)

Advocates of longtermism point out that interventions which focus on improving the prospects of people in the very far future will, in expectation, bring about a significant amount of good. Indeed, in expectation, such long-term interventions bring about far more good than their short-term counterparts. As such, longtermists claim we have compelling moral reason to prefer long-term interventions. In this paper, I show that longtermism is in conflict with plausible deontic scepticism about aggregation. I do so by demonstrating that, from (...) both an ex-ante and ex-post perspective, longtermist interventions – and, in particular, those which aim to mitigate catastrophic risk – typically generate extremely weak claims of assistance from future people. (shrink)

Although expert consensus states that critical thinking (CT) is essential to enquiry, it doesn’t necessarily follow that by practicing enquiry children are developing CT skills. Philosophy with children programmes around the world aim to develop CT dispositions and skills through a community of enquiry, and this study compared the impact of the explicit teaching of CT skills during an enquiry, to The Philosophy Foundation's philosophical enquiry (PhiE) method alone (which had no explicit teaching of CT skills). Philosophy with children is (...) also said to improve metacognitive (MC) skills but there is little research into this claim. Following observable problems with ensuring genuine metacognition was happening in PhiE sessions - on a reasonably strong understanding of what metacognition is – a method has been developed and trialed in this study to bring together, in mutual support, the development of critical thinking and metacognitive skills. Based on the work of Peter Worley and Ellen Fridland (KCL)The Philosophy Foundation ran an experimental study with King's College London in Autumn 2017 and Autumn 2018 to compare the impact of teaching CT skills and MC skills against classes that just have philosophical enquiry. The approach developed and used for the study employs the explicit teaching of some CT and MC skills within the context of a philosophical enquiry (as opposed to stand-alone teaching of these skills) and yields some positive findings both qualitative and quantitative. Both studies took place over one term (12 weeks) and a control and intervention group were used in each study. This report focuses on the second year of the study, with 220 ten and eleven-year-old children involved in eight classes across three state schools in South East London. Although there were limitations to the study the results indicate that the explicit teaching of these skills during a philosophical enquiry can help children use CT and MC skills more successfully than philosophical enquiry alone. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the representations of Black women in contrast to Black men found within Frantz Fanon’s philosophical work Black Skin, White Masks. I propose that while Fanon’s racial dialectical work is very significant, he often lacks acknowledgement of the multidimensionality of the Black woman’s lived experience specifically. Drawing on the theory of intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, I argue that Fanon does not recognize the different layers of oppression operating in Black women’s lives to the degree (...) that he fails to include them within his framework of both liberation and resistance from racial oppression. (shrink)

In this inaugural lecture I offer, against the background of a discussion of knowledge representation and its tools, an overview of my research in the philosophy of science. I defend a relational model-theoretic realism as being the appropriate meta-stance most congruent with the model-theoretic view of science as a form of human engagement with the world. Making use of logics with preferential semantics within a model-theoretic paradigm, I give an account of science as process and product. I demonstrate the power (...) of the full-blown employment of this paradigm in the philosophy of science by discussing the main applications of model-theoretic realism to traditional problems in the philosophy of science. I discuss my views of the nature of logic and of its role in the philosophy of science today. I also specifically offer a brief discussion on the future of cognitive philosophy in South Africa. My conclusion is a general look at the nature of philosophical inquiry and its significance for philosophers today. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25 (4) 2006: pp. 275-289. (shrink)

Both patients and clinicians frequently report problems around communicating and assessing pain. Patients express dissatisfaction with their doctors and doctors often find exchanges with chronic pain patients difficult and frustrating. This chapter thus asks how we could improve pain communication and thereby enhance outcomes for chronic pain patients. We argue that improving matters will require a better appreciation of the complex meaning of pain terms and of the variability and flexibility in how individuals think about pain. We start by examining (...) the various accounts of the meaning of pain terms that have been suggested within philosophy and suggest that, while each of the accounts captures something important about our use of pain terms, none is completely satisfactory. We propose that pain terms should be viewed as communicating complex meanings, which may change across different communicative contexts, and this in turn suggests that we should view our ordinary thought about pain as similarly complex. We then sketch what a view taking seriously this variability in meaning and thought might look like, which we call the “polyeidic” view. According to this view, individuals tacitly occupy divergent stances across a range of different dimensions of pain, with one agent, for instance, thinking of pain in a much more “bodycentric” kind of way, while another thinks of pain in a much more "mindcentric” way. The polyeidic view attempts to expand the multidimensionality recognised in, e.g., biopsychosocial models in two directions: first, it holds that the standard triumvirate— dividing sensory/cognitive/affective factors— needs to be enriched in order to capture important distinctions within the social and psychological dimensions. Second, the polyeidic view attempts to explain (at least in part) why modulation of experience by these social and psychological factors is possible in the first place. It does so by arguing that because the folk concept of pain is complex, different weightings of the different parts of the concept can modulate pain experience in a variety of ways. Finally, we argue that adopting a polyeidic approach to the meaning of pain would have a range of measurable clinical outcomes. (shrink)

We argue that machine learning algorithms can inflict microaggressions on members of marginalized groups and that recognizing these harms as instances of microaggressions is key to effectively addressing the problem. The concept of microaggression is also illuminated by being studied in algorithmic contexts. We contribute to the microaggression literature by expanding the category of environmental microaggressions and highlighting the unique issues of moral responsibility that arise when we focus on this category. We theorize two kinds of algorithmic microaggression, stereotyping and (...) erasure microaggressions, and argue that corporations are responsible for the microaggressions their algorithms create. As a case study, we look at the problems faced by Google’s autocomplete prediction and at the insufficiency of their solutions. The case study of autocomplete demonstrates our core claim that microaggressions constitute a distinct form of algorithmic bias and that identifying them as such allows us to avoid seeming solutions that recreate the same kinds of harms. Google has a responsibility to make information freely available, without exposing users to degradation. To fulfill its duties to marginalized groups, Google must abandon the fiction of neutral prediction and instead embrace the liberatory power of suggestion. (shrink)

In this article, we redefine classical notions of theory reduction in such a way that model-theoretic preferential semantics becomes part of a realist depiction of this aspect of science. We offer a model-theoretic reconstruction of science in which theory succession or reduction is often better - or at a finer level of analysis - interpreted as the result of model succession or reduction. This analysis leads to 'defeasible reduction', defined as follows: The conjunction of the assumptions of a reducing theory (...) T with the definitions translating the vocabulary of a reduced theory T' to the vocabulary of T, defeasibly entails the assumptions of reduced T'. This relation of defeasible reduction offers, in the context of additional knowledge becoming available, articulation of a more flexible kind of reduction in theory development than in the classical case. Also, defeasible reduction is shown to solve the problems of entailment that classical homogeneous reduction encounters. Reduction in the defeasible sense is a practical device for studying the processes of science, since it is about highlighting different aspects of the same theory at different times of application, rather than about naive dreams concerning a metaphysical unity of science. (shrink)

I investigate a new understanding of realism in science, referred to as ‘interactive realism’, and I suggest the ‘evolutionary progressiveness’ of a theory as novel criterion for this kind of realism. My basic claim is that we cannot be realists about anything except the progress affected by myriad science-reality interactions that are constantly moving on a continuum of increased ‘fitness’ determined according to empirical constraints. Moreover to reflect this movement accurately, there is a corresponding continuum of verdicts about the status (...) of the knowledge conveyed by theories – ranging from stark instrumentalism to full-blown realism. This view may sound like a pessimistic inductivist's dream, but actually this is so only if one evaluates it from within a traditional context where the ‘truth’ of a single theory is the exclusive criterion for realism. I, on the other hand, want to redefine the terms of realist debate in such a way that the units of assessment of realism are sequences of theories evaluated according to their ‘evolutionary progressiveness’. I unpack ‘interactive realism’ by defining my notion of ‘evolutionary progressiveness’, the notion of ‘truth-as-historied reference’ underpinning it, and the continuum of interaction between theories and aspects of reality it affects. I conclude that, although interactive realism is a radically non-standard kind of realism, it is at least more realistic about science as a fractured complex multi-faceted enterprise than most other kinds of realism on the block, because it shows coherence amidst fragmentation. (shrink)

This is a first tentative examination of the possibility of reinstating reduction as a valid candidate for presenting relations between mental and physical properties. Classical Nagelian reduction is undoubtedly contaminated in many ways, but here I investigate the possibility of adapting to problems concerning mental properties an alternative definition for theory reduction in philosophy of science. The definition I offer is formulated with the aid of non-monotonic logic, which I suspect might be a very interesting realm for testing notions concerning (...) localized mental-physical reduction. The reason for this is that non-monotonic reasoning by definition is about appeals made not only to explicit observations, but also to an implicit selection of background knowledge containing heuristic information. The flexibility of this definition and the fact that it is not absolute, i.e. that the relation of reduction may be retracted or allowed to shift without fuss, add at least an interesting alternative factor to current materialist debates. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25(2) 2006: 102-112. (shrink)

Recent discussions of cognitive enhancement often note that drugs and technologies that improve cognitive performance may do so at the risk of “cheapening” our resulting cognitive achievements Arguing about bioethics, Routledge, London, 2012; Harris in Bioethics 25:102–111, 2011). While there are several possible responses to this worry, we will highlight what we take to be one of the most promising—one which draws on a recent strand of thinking in social and virtue epistemology to construct an integrationist defence of cognitive enhancement.. (...) According to such a line, there is—despite initial appearances to the contrary—no genuine tension between using enhancements to attain our goals and achieving these goals in a valuable way provided the relevant enhancement is appropriately integrated into the agent’s cognitive architecture. In this paper, however, we show that the kind of integration recommended by such views will likely come at a high cost. More specifically, we highlight a dilemma for users of pharmacological cognitive enhancement: they can meet the conditions for cognitive integration at the significant risk of dangerous dependency, or remain free of such dependency while foregoing integration and the valuable achievements that such integration enables. After motivating and clarifying the import of this dilemma, we offer recommendations for how future cognitive enhancement research may offer potential routes for navigating past it. (shrink)

In this article I give an overview of some recent work in philosophy of science dedicated to analysing the scientific process in terms of (conceptual) mathematical models of theories and the various semantic relations between such models, scientific theories, and aspects of reality. In current philosophy of science, the most interesting questions centre around the ways in which writers distinguish between theories and the mathematical structures that interpret them and in which they are true, i.e. between scientific theories as linguistic (...) systems and their non-linguistic models. In philosophy of science literature there are two main approaches to the structure of scientific theories, the statement or syntactic approach -- advocated by Carnap, Hempel and Nagel -- and the non- statement or semantic approach --advocated, among others, by Suppes, the structuralists, Beth, Van Fraassen, Giere, Wojcicki. In conclusion, I briefly review some of the usual realist inspired questions about the possibility and character of relations between scientific theories and reality as implied by the various approaches I discuss in the course of the article. The models of a scientific theory should indeed be adequate to the phenomena, but if the theory is 'adequate' to (true in) its conceptual (mathematical) models as well, we have a model-theoretic realism that addresses the possible meaning and reference of 'theoretical entities' without relapsing into the metaphysics typical of the usual scientific realist approaches. (shrink)

I argue that anarchist ideas for organising human communities could be a useful practical resource for Christian ethics. I demonstrate this firstly by introducing the main theological ideas underlying Maximus the Confessor’s ethics, a theologian respected and important in a number of Christian denominations. I compare practical similarities in the way in which ‘love’ and ‘well-being’ are interpreted as the telos of Maximus and Peter Kropotkin’s ethics respectively. I further highlight these similarities by demonstrating them in action when it comes (...) attitudes towards property. I consequently suggest that there are enough similarities in practical aims, for Kropotkin’s ideas for human organising to be useful to Christian ethicists. (shrink)

This article considers the role of emotion in John Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent by distinguishing five different ways (or ‘models’) in which the emotions play a positive epistemic role in relation to cognition. The most important of these, the Cognitive-Emotion Model, offers a new account of Newman's crucial idea of real assent, one that stresses the primary role of the emotions in real assent rather than imagination. This model helps to explain the nature of real assent by highlighting Newman's (...) portrayal of an emotional way of knowing an object that is personal or individual, incommunicable, vivid, and motive. In this study of the relations between emotion and cognition I hope to highlight unexplored aspects of the nature of real assent and the importance of the role of emotion in it and hope to show how Newman's epistemology offers a rich framework for exploring the positive epistemic contributions of the emotions. -/- . (shrink)

A model-theoretic realist account of science places linguistic systems and their corresponding non-linguistic structures at different stages or different levels of abstraction of the scientific process. Apart from the obvious problem of underdetermination of theories by data, philosophers of science are also faced with the inverse (and very real) problem of overdetermination of theories by their empirical models, which is what this article will focus on. I acknowledge the contingency of the factors determining the nature – and choice – of (...) a certain model at a certain time, but in my terms, this is a matter about which we can talk and whose structure we can formalise. In this article a mechanism for tracing "empirical choices" and their particularized observational-theoretical entanglements will be offered in the form of Yoav Shoham's version of non-monotonic logic. Such an analysis of the structure of scientific theories may clarify the motivations underlying choices in favor of certain empirical models (and not others) in a way that shows that "disentangling" theoretical and observation terms is more deeply model-specific than theory-specific. This kind of analysis offers a method for getting an articulable grip on the overdetermination of theories by their models – implied by empirical equivalence – which Kuipers' structuralist analysis of the structure of theories does not offer. (shrink)

If the defenders of typical postmodern accounts of science (and their less extreme social-constructivist partners) are at one end of the scale in current philosophy of science, who shall we place at the other end? Old-style metaphysical realists? Neo-neo-positivists? ... Are the choices concerning realist issues as simple as being centered around either, on the one hand, whether it is the way reality is “constructed” in accordance with some contingent language game that determines scientific “truth”; or, on the other hand, (...) whether it is the way things are in an independent reality that makes our theories true or false? If, in terms of realism, “strong” implies “metaphysical” in the traditional sense, and “weak” implies “non-absolutist” or “non-unique”, what – if anything – could realism after Rorty's shattering of the mirror of nature still entail? In accordance with my position as a model-theoretic realist, I shall show in this article the relevance of the assumption of an independent reality for postmodern (philosophy of) science – against Lyotard's dismissal of the necessity of this assumption for science which he interprets as a non-privileged game among many others. I shall imply that science is neither the “child” of positivist philosophy who has outgrown her mother, freeing herself from metaphysics and epistemology, nor is science, at the other end of the scale, foundationless and up for grabs. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(3) 2003: 220–235. (shrink)

One way in which to address the intriguing relations between science and reality is to work via the models (mathematical structures) of formal scientific theories which are interpretations under which these theories turn out to be true. The so-called 'statement approach' to scientific theories -- characteristic for instance of Nagel, Carnap, and Hempel --depicts theories in terms of 'symbolic languages' and some set of 'correspondence rules' or 'definition principles'. The defenders of the oppositionist non-statement approach advocate an analysis where the (...) language in which the theory is formulated plays a much smaller role. They hold that foundational problems in the various sciences can in general be better addressed by focusing on the models these sciences employ than by reformulating the products of these sciences in some appropriate language. My model-theoretic realist account of science lies decidedly within the non-statement context, although I retain the notion of a theory as a deductively closed set of sentences (expressed in some appropriate language), in this paper I shall focus -- against the background of a model-theoretic account of science -- on the approach to the reality-science dichotomy offered by Nancy Cartwright and briefly comment on a few aspects of Roy Bhaskar's transcendental realism. I shall, in conclusion, show how a model-theoretic approach such as mine can combine the best of these two approaches. (shrink)

I am arguing that it is only by concentrating on the role of models in theory construction, interpretation and change, that one can study the progress of science sensibly. I define the level at which these models operate as a level above the purely empirical (consisting of various systems in reality) but also indeed below that of the fundamental formal theories (expressed linguistically). The essentially multi-interpretability of the theory at the general, abstract linguistic level, implies that it can potentially make (...) claims about systems in reality, other than the particular one which originally induced it. Any so-called correspondence relation between (systems in) reality and the entities and relations in some scientific theory, thus consists of two jumps or interpretations: from the theory (linguistic level) to some model of it (constructural level); and from there to some system in reality. Clearly then the level of fundamental theories cannot be ignored la Nancy Cartwright - in studying the relations between a theory and reality, because the particular features of the theory (the various systems in reality onto which the theory can be mapped) cannot be studied without the underlying knowledge that these systems have one common feature, namely that each of them is the range (or other pole) of a mapping of a context-specific model of the theory - which in itself, is a mapping, or more specifically, an interpretation of the theory. I am also claiming that the nature of these levels and the relations between them necessitate an epistemological rather than an ontological notion of truth criteria, and a referential rather than a representational link between science and reality. (shrink)

Historically embryogenesis has been among the most philosophically intriguing phenomena. In this paper I focus on one aspect of biological development that was particularly perplexing to the ancients: self-organisation. For many ancients, the fact that an organism determines the important features of its own development required a special model for understanding how this was possible. This was especially true for Aristotle, Alexander, and Simplicius, who all looked to contemporary technology to supply that model. However, they did not all agree on (...) what kind of device should be used. In this paper I explore the way these ancients made use of technology as a model for the developing embryo. I argue that their different choices of device reveal fundamental differences in the way each thinker understood the nature of biological development itself. In the final section of the paper I challenge the traditional view (dating back to Alexander's interpretation of Aristotle) that the use of automata in GA can simply be read off from their use in the de motu. (shrink)