This study determined undergraduates’ satisfaction of online food and beverage services amidst financial distress in Nnewi urban, Anambra State, Nigeria. Descriptive survey research design was used by the study. Population consisted of 3,509 students. Sample size was 35. Questionnaire was the instrument used for data collection. Data was analyzed using mean and standard deviation. Findings revealed that different types of food and beverage products were purchased online. The problems undergraduates face in online food and beverage services included delayed delivery, use (...) of artificial food colouring and fear of food contamination. Strategies for enhancing students’ satisfaction of online purchases included timely delivery of products ordered and appropriate delivery mechanism. Findings also showed that the ways online food and beverage purchases can influence undergraduate’s finances included high cost of online food products, additional cost for delivery among others. Among recommendations made was that online food vendors should ensure that food products delivered are same with products ordered by customers in order to enhance customer satisfaction. (shrink)

Successful teamwork doesn't work overnight, what makes teamwork potent is team building. (Plagiarism) According to Abdullah, et. al., (2022) team building training can improve group cohesiveness or the quality of sticking together or unity teamwork more likely to be higher with a significant score difference. This study used mixed methods both qualitative and quantitative data collection, and an analysis method to answer the research method, random sampling is named as such because the data set is chosen via random selection, where (...) every member of the population has an equal probability of being selected (Tao, 2023). The respondents were 100 restaurant employees and 10 managers from the chosen restaurant in Malolos City in Bulacan. The subcategories of team building, including activities, communication, skills, personality, problem-solving, and values, have all received a consensus of strong agreement, with weighted averages falling within the range of 3.26 to 3.44. This level of agreement aligns with the scores for motivation at 3.43 and productivity at 3.38. These values have been calculated by determining the mean, which spans from 3.25 to 4.00. The advantages of team building that is being observed by the managers is to create familiarity and teamwork among the employees, to improve the quality of service and the quality of the food especially the respondents are in the food service sector, development, and training for the employees to achieve the establishments’ goal and lastly rebuilding and build a relationship with one employee to another. However, for the disadvantages, it costs a lot of money to conduct team building in the management. Therefore, the null hypothesis is rejected. Despite the fact that there is a low correlation between teambuilding activities and motivation and employee productivity, there is still a significant relationship between the variables. (shrink)

One famous debate in contemporary epistemology considers whether there is always one unique, epistemically rational way to respond to a given body of evidence. Generally speaking, answering “yes” to this question makes one a proponent of the Uniqueness thesis, while those who answer “no” are called “permissivists”. Another influential recent debate concerns whether non-truth-related factors can be the basis of epistemic justification, knowledge, or rational belief. Traditional theories answer “no”, and are therefore considered “purists”. However, more recently many theorists have (...) argued to the contrary, claiming that impurist factors, such as practical stakes, can sometimes encroach or even override truth-related considerations. This paper bridges the two debates by presenting and defending what I call “Impurist Permissivism”. I support Impurist Permissivism by showing how it can resist Roger White’s famous Argument from Arbitrariness (2005). (shrink)

Braun explores the use of digital twin technology in medicine with a particular emphasis on the question of how such simulations can represent a person.1 In defining some first conditions for ethically justifiable forms of representation of digital twins, he argues that digital twins do not threaten an embodied person, as long as that person retains control over their simulated representation via dynamic consent, and ideally with the option to choose both form and usage of the simulation. His thoughtful elaboration (...) provides insight into the challenges inherent in interactions between a person and their digital twin, emphasising the modes of control required to respect personal modes of freedom. This individual-centric approach to the question of representation leaves out the important ethical consideration of ensuring that all, not merely some, can be represented. Braun describes dynamic consent as a necessary mode of control, arguing that where a person is unable to give consent, ‘such simulations threaten to become illegitimate representations. They would then shift the kind of interaction from representation to illegitimate forms of prediction or surveillance and thereby could lead to infringements to individual modes of freedom.’ Consequently, the implementation of digital twin technology in healthcare would seem to exclude the most vulnerable members of society from participation in and benefiting from medical innovation, …. (shrink)

I develop a theory of counterfactuals about relative computability, i.e. counterfactuals such as 'If the validity problem were algorithmically decidable, then the halting problem would also be algorithmically decidable,' which is true, and 'If the validity problem were algorithmically decidable, then arithmetical truth would also be algorithmically decidable,' which is false. These counterfactuals are counterpossibles, i.e. they have metaphysically impossible antecedents. They thus pose a challenge to the orthodoxy about counterfactuals, which would treat them as uniformly true. What’s more, I (...) argue that these counterpossibles don’t just appear in the periphery of relative computability theory but instead they play an ineliminable role in the development of the theory. Finally, I present and discuss a model theory for these counterfactuals that is a straightforward extension of the familiar comparative similarity models. (shrink)

The case is discussed for the doctrine of hell as posing a unique problem of evil for adherents to the Abrahamic religions who endorse traditional theism. The problem is particularly acute for those who accept retributivist formulations of the doctrine of hell according to which hell is everlasting punishment for failing to satisfy some requirement. Alternatives to retributivism are discussed, including the unique difficulties that each one faces.

Based on a critical interpretative review of existing qualitative research investigating accounts of ‘lived experience’ of surrogates and intended parents from a relational perspective, this article proposes a typology of surrogacy arrangements. The review is based on the analysis of 39 articles, which belong to a range of different disciplines (mostly sociology, social psychology, anthropology, ethnology, and gender studies). The number of interviews in each study range from as few as seven to over one hundred. Countries covered include Australia, Canada, (...) Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Sweden, UK, Ukraine, and the USA. Most studies focus only on surrogacy practices in one country (although often with intended parents from other countries), and some include several countries (e.g. interviewees from several countries or fieldwork in different field-sites). The proposed typology goes beyond the division between altruistic versus commercial, and traditional versus gestational surrogacy, in order to inform further research and to contribute to bioethical and policy debates on surrogacy in a transnational context. Four types of relations are identifiable: open, restricted, structured, and enmeshed. The criteria which influence these relationships are: the frequency and character of contact pre- and post-birth; expectations of both parties; the type of exchange involved in surrogacy arrangements; and cultural, legal, and economic contexts. The theoretical contribution of the article is to further the development of a relational justice approach to surrogacy. (shrink)

Adoption may be defined as ‘the legal process through which the state establishes a parental relationship, with all its attendant rights and duties, between a child and a (set of) parent(s) where there exists no previous procreative relationship’ . In adoptions from care, state intervention effectively converts an established, or nascent, adult– child relationship into ‘family’ in the legal sense. From the state’s perspective, adoption thus entails the transfer of parental responsibilities for a child in public care to a private (...) family unit, enabling the state to permanently delegate its duties towards a child to this new unit. This seemingly straightforward legal act raises deeper philosophical questions relating to such state ‘family creation’, particularly when the child’s perspective is taken. Such a child- centric approach normatively regards children as equal moral beings, who ought to be included in actions concerning them, regardless of their capacity to form and express an opinion. Accordingly, adoption from care can be described as a moral decision, aimed at doing what is in the child’s best interests. The purpose of this chapter is to explore a suspicion of a lack of child- centrism in adoption from care practice, and to illustrate how adopted children’s rights are inferior to those of their non- adopted peers. This will shed light on a practice currently lacking transparency and accountability and will increase our understanding of how we fail to treat children as equal moral individuals in decision- making that severely impacts children’s lives. (shrink)

This article argues that personal medical data should be made available for scientific research, by enabling and encouraging individuals to donate their medical records once deceased, similar to the way in which they can already donate organs or bodies. This research is part of a project on posthumous medical data donation developed by the Digital Ethics Lab at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Ten arguments are provided to support the need to foster posthumous medical data donation. (...) Two major risks are also identified—harm to others, and lack of control over the use of data—which could follow from unregulated donation of medical data. The argument that record-based medical research should proceed without the need to secure informed consent is rejected, and instead a voluntary and participatory approach to using personal medical data should be followed. The analysis concludes by stressing the need to develop an ethical code for data donation to minimise the risks, and offers five foundational principles for ethical medical data donation suggested as a draft code. (shrink)

Epistemic akrasia arises when one holds a belief even though one judges it to be irrational or unjustified. While there is some debate about whether epistemic akrasia is possible, this paper will assume for the sake of argument that it is in order to consider whether it can be rational. The paper will show that it can. More precisely, cases can arise in which both the belief one judges to be irrational and one’s judgment of it are epistemically rational in (...) the sense that both are supported by sufficient evidence. (shrink)

Dissertation Prospectus. Exploring the limits of New Mechanism as a general theory of scientific explanation, limiting its scope and proposing constraints.

Over the past 25 years, UK government policy exhortations to promote and increase exercise and physical activity levels in the population have increased in volume. In recent years, too, there has been growing sociological interest in exercise and physical activity embodiment issues, including within phenomenologically-inspired research into lived-body experiences. This article contributes original insights to a developing body of phenomenological-sociological empirical work in this domain, in addressing the lived experience of organised exercise in outdoor environments, and specifically in theorising the (...) role of ‘lived weather’ in contouring these experiences. It thus addresses the call by Vannini et al. (2012) to remedy the notable ‘absent-presence’ of weather in much social science research. Drawing upon data from a two-year multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional ethnographic study of a nationwide exercise programme in Wales, UK, this article examines participants’ (n = 146) lived experience of weather, and theorises their ‘weather learning’, and ‘weather work’, both of which emerged as highly salient in the findings. (shrink)

David Stove's essay “The intellectual capacity of women” was first published in 1990, in the Proceedings of a Sydney philosophical society. It has been re-published twice since his death. It seems though that during his lifetime Stove himself refused to agree to its being re-printed. This raises two questions: Did Stove believe his essay on women contains mistakes? And: does it contain mistakes? The main flaws in the essay stem from a rash adoption of simplistic ideas about probability coupled with (...) a question-begging definition of capacity. The work also contains contradictions and exaggerations and some unwise forays into social history. Stove was an intelligent man so it seems likely that he would have recognised those flaws. (shrink)

This article considers a novel approach to researching sporting embodiment via what has been termed ‘autophenomenography’. Whilst having some similarities with autoethnography, autophenomenography provides a distinctive research form, located within phenomenology as theoretical and methodological tradition. Its focus is upon the researcher’s own lived experience of a phenomenon or phenomena. This article examines some of the key elements of a sociological phenomenological approach to studying sporting embodiment in general before portraying how autophenomenography was utilised specifically within two recent research projects (...) on distance running. The thorny issues of epoche and bracketing within phenomenological and autophenomenographical research are addressed and some practical suggestions tentatively posited. (shrink)

The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the (...) Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research. (shrink)

It is commonly held that the ascription of truth to a sentence is intersubstitutable with that very sentence. However, the simplest subclassical logics available to proponents of this view, namely K3 and LP, are hopelessly weak for many purposes. In this article, I argue that this is much more of a problem for proponents of LP than for proponents of K3. The strategies for recapturing classicality offered by proponents of LP are far less promising than those available to proponents of (...) K3. This undermines the ability of proponents LP to engage in public reasoning in classical domains. (shrink)

Almost every facet of the experience of musical listening—from pitch, to rhythm, to the experience of emotion—is thought to be shaped by the meeting and thwarting of expectations. But it is unclear what kind of mental states these expectations are, what their format is, and whether they are conscious or unconscious. Here, we distinguish between different modes of musical listening, arguing that expectations play different roles in each, and we point to the need for increased collaboration between music psychologists and (...) philosophers in order to arrive at a more detailed characterisation of conscious musical experience and the role of expectations therein. (shrink)

Methodologically rigorous description, analysis, and critique of postmodern phenomena presuppose a rigorous theory of postmodernity, for which the philosophy of Martin Heidegger holds great untapped promise. This essay explicates the basic content of Heidegger’s “metametaphysics,” since for Heidegger a “metaphysics” is the epochally prevailing projection of the meaning of being in general, and he offers a theory of Western metaphysics. I begin with Heidegger’s analysis of the “regional ontologies” of the sciences in his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time, since (...) the metametaphysical works of the “late middle” Heidegger in the 1930s–1940s extend this analytical framework to metaphysics as global ontology. I then explicate Heidegger’s views on modern metaphysics, focusing on his analyses of modern science and the philosophy of Descartes, before turning to his theory of postmodernity, which I extract from his analyses of modern technology and the philosophy of Nietzsche. (shrink)

This article argues that understanding any space or site relies on a knowledge of its fourth dimension - the timescape. It will explore this by situating the investigation in the museum - a place of heightened contrivance which could easily be shallowly interpreted as "mere style". It will defend a new method of investigating museum temporality which combines both phenomenology and literary theory, and will replace the idea of geo-epistemology with geochronic epistemology: an understanding of context and situation which takes (...) on time as well as spatial location. In so doing, it moves on from notions of the museum as a place out of time, situating it in the networks of meaning, power and politics in which we have lived and are living. Thus, "the whole space of the exhibition" as Lyotard said, "becomes the remains of all time": the Museum on the Edge of Forever. (shrink)

In recent years, New Mechanism has become one of the most popular and widely discussed philosophical accounts of scientific explanation. Some of its proponents see it as a successor to traditional deductive nomological and statistical approaches to the philosophy of explanation. New Mechanists thus argue for the generality of their approach as a model of scientific explanation. Here we will show that the generality of NME as an account of scientific explanation is restricted. Most significantly, NME is widely recognized to (...) have trouble in accounting for explanation in traditional physics. Yet, in the face of obstacles to NME in the physical sciences, New Mechanists have yet to provide a convincing defense of the generality of their view. In this paper, I (1) summarize when and how NME works, (2) describe briefly what NME is not and can’t be, (3) outline some areas of contemporary scientific explanation where New Mechanism misses the mark; and (4) demonstrate that New Mechanism does not constitute a general theory of scientific explanation but rather covers a restricted scope of explanations. (shrink)

A significant proportion of child protection cases involve care-experienced mothers, which reveals a continuous cycle of mothers who lose their children to social services after having been in state care themselves as children. While the importance of protecting children requires little explanation and forms the justificatory basis for child protection interventions, it is important to remember that care-experienced mothers were once children entrusted to the state’s care, and who arguably have been failed by the state in that their parenting opportunities (...) are significantly reduced. This paper aims to address this underexplored dilemma between protecting children and safeguarding mothering opportunities for care-experienced mothers. Appealing to the concept of solidarity, I argue that the state has an obligation to increase its compensatory efforts to secure the right of care-experienced women to not only become parents but to be able to be parents, with the aim of breaking the cycle of care experience. (shrink)

While the substantiation of “best interests” has received much attention, the question of how “the child” is conceptualised to ensure any action taken or decision made is in the particular child’s best interests has been largely neglected. In this paper, I argue that the lack of robust understanding of who “the child” is means that we continue to make many generalisations and category-based assumptions in determining the child’s best interests. In addressing the challenge of doing right by the individual child, (...) I propose a three-step approach based on a theoretical model of the child that avoids presumptions about child-typical needs and insists on an assessment of the child’s individual characteristics, needs, qualities, and circumstances, making it the only conceptualisation fully meeting the child centrism criterion required by children’s rights as determined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. (shrink)

In this dissertation I achieve the following: (1) I present motivating criteria for a general comprehensive theory of scientific explanation. I review historical approaches to modeling explanation in light of these criteria. (2) I present New Mechanist Explanation ("NME") as the leading candidate for a contemporary, complete theory of scientific explanation. (3) I present constraints on the applicability of New Mechanism in modeling biology, chemistry, and physics. I argue for the unsuitability of NME as a candidate for a general theory (...) of explanation due to its significant omissions of explanatory content and subsequent incompleteness. (4) I present arguments for the indispensable explanatory power of mathematics in science, noting that much of NME's failures are owed to its poor integration of mathematical explanation as applied to science. (5) I propose a Rational-Relational theory of explanation(“RRE”). I present RRE in detail and demonstrate it as a true working general theory of explanation which best meets the motivating criteria presented in (1). I disambiguate RRE from structural explanation ("SE"). I show that historical models of explanation, including the deductive nomological (DNE) model, statistical relevance ("SRE") model, structural model (SE) and unification model ("UE") may be successfully treated as sub-classes of explanation within the scope of RRE. I provide a rubric for selecting amongst sub-theories of explanation under RRE in the purpose of highlighting particular features of relational explanations. (6) In conclusion, I argue that philosophers of science should move forward using RRE as a general model of scientific explanation as a working alternative to the incomplete model of NME. (shrink)

Do conceivability arguments work against physicalism if properties are causal powers? By considering three different ways of understanding causal powers and the modality associated with them, I will argue that most, if not all, physicalist powers theorists should not be concerned about the conceivability argument because its conclusion that physicalism is false does not hold in their favoured ontology. I also defend specific powers theories against some recent objections to this strategy, arguing that the conception of properties as powerful blocks (...) conceivability arguments unless a rather implausible form of emergence is true. (shrink)

In “What is it like to be boring and myopic?” Kathleen Akins offers an interesting, empirically driven, argument for thinking that there is nothing that it is like to be a bat. She suggests that bats are “boring” in the sense that they are governed by behavioral scripts and simple, non-representational, control loops, and are best characterized as biological automatons. Her approach has been well received by philosophers sympathetic to empirically informed philosophy of mind. But, despite its influence, her work (...) has not met with any critical appraisal. -/- It is argued that a reconsideration of the empirical results shows that bats are not boring automatons, driven by short input-output loops, instincts, and reflexes. Grounds are provided for thinking that bats satisfy a range of philosophically and scientifically interesting elaborations of the general idea that consciousness is best understood in terms of representational functions. A more complete examination of bat sensory capabilities suggests there is something that it is like after all. -/- The discussion of bats is also used to develop an objection to strongly neurophilosophical approaches to animal consciousness. (shrink)

We present a game mechanic called pseudo-visibility for games inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) driven by reinforcement learning (RL). NPCs are incentivized to pretend they cannot see pseudo-visible players: the training environment simulates an NPC to determine how the NPC would act if the pseudo-visible player were invisible, and penalizes the NPC for acting differently. NPCs are thereby trained to selectively ignore pseudo-visible players, except when they judge that the reaction penalty is an acceptable tradeoff (e.g., a guard might accept (...) the penalty in order to protect a treasure because losing the treasure would hurt even more). We describe an RL agent transformation which allows RL agents that would not otherwise do so to perform some limited self-reflection to learn the training environments in question. (shrink)

The following technique has proven effective in helping beginning logic students locate the sections of a three-circled Venn Diagram in which they are to represent a categorical sentence. Very often theses students are unable to identify the parts of the diagram they are to shade or bar.

We respond to a Letter to the Editor regarding "Principlism and contemporary ethical considerations for providers of transgender health care." We address criticisms by Castle & Klein (2024) of blatant fatphobia related to the ethical elements concerning BMI restrictions for gender-affirming surgery. Our response corrects several mischaracterizations of the article and clarifies our position. My co-authors and I remain focused on advocating for patient-centered, ethically sound, evidence-based, and equitable healthcare policies.

Introduction: Over the past twenty-five years the sporting body has been studied in a myriad of ways including via a range of feminist frameworks (Hall 1996; Lowe 1998; Markula 2003; George 2005; Hargreaves 2007) and gender-sensitive lenses (e.g. McKay 1994; Aoki 1996; Woodward 2008). Despite this developing corpus, studies of sport only rarely engage in depth with the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting and exercizing body (Wainwright and Turner 2003; Allen-Collinson 2009) at least from a phenomenological angle, and in (...) relation to female embodiment. It seems that a more corporeally-grounded, phenomenological perspective on women’s sporting embodiment would be a welcome addition to extant studies. In this chapter I suggest that employing a feminist phenomenological framework can provide a powerful lens through which to explore the subjective, richly-textured, lived-body experiences of sport and exercise. Phenomenology of course offers only one of a multiplicity of avenues to investigate the body in sport, and this chapter provides just a small glimpse of its possibilities. To-date studies of sporting experience employing a phenomenological theoretical framework remain surprisingly under-developed (Kerry and Armour 2000), as do those using its ethnomethodological offspring (Coates 1999; Burke et al. 2008). Further, as Fisher (2000) notes, the significance of the interaction between phenomenology and feminism has only relatively recently begun to be explored. It seems timely, therefore, to address this intriguing, potentially productive, but sometimes uneasy nexus, focusing upon female running embodiment in this case. (shrink)

: Agents are enkratic when they intend to do what they believe they should. That rationality requires you to be enkratic is uncontroversial, yet you may be enkratic in a way that does not exhibit any rationality on your part. Thus, what I call the enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic in the right way. In particular, I will argue that it demands that you base your belief about what you should do and your intention to do it on (...) the same considerations. The idea is that, if you base your belief and your intention on different considerations, then you are inconsistent in your treatment of those considerations as reasons. The enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic by treating considerations consistently as reasons. (shrink)

Relevant logics infamously have the property that they only validate a conditional when some propositional variable is shared between its antecedent and consequent. This property has been strengthened in a variety of ways over the last half-century. Two of the more famous of these strengthenings are the strong variable sharing property and the depth relevance property. In this paper I demonstrate that an appropriate class of relevant logics has a property that might naturally be characterized as the supremum of these (...) two properties. I also show how to use this fact to demonstrate that these logics seem to be constructive in previously unknown ways. (shrink)

Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded, and interpretatively contested perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. (...) The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed. Key words: phenomenology; existentialist phenomenology; interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA); sporting embodiment; the lived-body; Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

The French existentialist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, long ago signalled the potentially empowering force of outdoor exercise and recreation for women, drawing on feminist phenomenological perspectives. Feminist phenomenological research in sport and exercise, however, remains relatively scarce, and this article contributes to a small, developing research corpus by employing a feminist phenomenological theoretical framework to analyse lived experiences of running in ‘public’ space. As feminist theorists have argued, such space is gendered and contested, and women’s mobility remains constrained by fears (...) of harassment and violent attack. Running also generates intense pleasure, however, and embodied empowerment. Drawing on findings from two separate but linked automethodological running research projects, here I explore salient and overlapping themes cohering around lived experience of pleasure and danger in both urban and rural spaces. (shrink)

While science is often presented as a body of knowledge or collection of passively accumulated facts, science should be examined and experienced as a performed process, a human endeavor connected to the ways we access the world. In this white paper, I briefly introduce the practice of science from the perspective of performance theory. By examining science in the context of performance, we may approach certain key questions about science directly. How do scientists perform experiments and practice the scientific method (...) (or, more accurately, scientific methodologies)? How does science rely on particular performer(s) and the particular contexts of those performances? What distinguishes the activity of science from other kinds of human performances? By reframing science as a human performance in the context of human practices and rituals, we more closely approach an accurate and communicable explanation of what the process of “doing science” actually is as something that humans do. (shrink)

Fitch's Paradox and the Paradox of the Knower both make use of the Factivity Principle. The latter also makes use of a second principle, namely the Knowledge-of-Factivity Principle. Both the principle of factivity and the knowledge thereof have been the subject of various discussions, often in conjunction with a third principle known as Closure. In this paper, we examine the well-known Surprise Examination paradox considering both the principles on which this paradox rests and some formal characterisations of the surprise notion, (...) crucial in this paradox. Standard formalizations of the Surprise Examination paradox in modal logic do not seem, at first glance, to depend on either factivity or knowledge-of-factivity, but we will argue that both factivity and knowledge-of-factivity play a key implicit role in the paradox. Namely, they are implicitly, perhaps unintentionally, used in order to simplify the definition of surprise. We analyze modal logical formalizations of three versions of the paradox concluding that the Surprise Examination paradox is the result of two flaws: the assumption of knowledge-of-factivity, and the over-simplification of the definition of "surprise" accordingly. By fixing these two flaws, the Surprise Examination paradox vanishes. (shrink)

As has recently been highlighted, despite the prevalence of methodological “confessional tales” in ethnography generally, the challenges of undertaking ethnographic research specifically in institutional sports settings remain underexplored. Drawing on data from a 3-year ethnographic study of competitive swimming in the United Kingdom (UK), here we explore some of the practical challenges of balancing different elements of the researcher’s role when undertaking ethnographic “insider” research in familiar settings. In particular, we consider the difficulties of balancing the role of a doctoral (...) researcher and the chosen research role of a volunteer coach with a competitive swimming program. Employing the anthropological concept of liminality, we also analyze the lived challenges of leaving a highly familiar field and entering a state of liminality, where the researcher was caught on the threshold betwixt and between a return to full-time employment in the former “known” role of coach, and a move forward to embrace a new “unknown” role as a full-time member of academic staff. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a roadmap to AI governance. In contrast to the reigning paradigms, we argue that AI governance should not be merely a reactive, punitive, status-quo-defending enterprise, but rather the expression of an expansive, proactive vision for technology—to advance human flourishing. Advancing human flourishing in turn requires democratic/political stability and economic empowerment. Our overarching point is that answering questions of how we should govern this emerging technology is a chance not merely to categorize and manage narrow risk (...) but also to construe the risks and opportunities much more broadly, and to make correspondingly large investments in public goods, personnel, and democracy itself. To lay out this vision, we take four steps. First, we define some central concepts in the field, disambiguating between forms of technological harms and risks. Second, we review normative frameworks governing emerging technology that are currently in use around the globe. Third, we outline an alternative normative framework based in power-sharing liberalism. Fourth, we walk through a series of governance tasks that ought to be accomplished by any policy framework guided by our model of power-sharing liberalism. We follow these with proposals for implementation vehicles. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is often--but somehow not unfailingly--credited, together with Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, as being one of the central voices in the philosophical turn to the concept of narrative of a generation or more ago. Some have even cited her 1958 The Human Condition as providing a particular impetus for later accounts of narrative. This essay examines what contemporary philosophical accounts of narrative might still owe Arendt, exploring her approach to narrative in theory as well as practice. (...) The first part looks at Arendt's use of philosophical sources from the tradition--Aristotle, Augustine and Hegel--with an eye to how her appropriation of these figures differs from that of contemporary philosophers of narrative. Three of Arendt's typically bold and rich claims about narrative action emerge as important: the notion of action as revealing an agent's own daimon: the condition that such action be revealable within a world or shared public space which has resilience yet vulnerability; and the potential for agents revealed within such a world to discover some form of narrative rebirth in their efforts at storytelling. The second section examines the extent to which Arendt herself allowed those claims to be tested and thought through in her own attempts (in Men in Dark Times, Rahel Varnhagen and elsewhere) at constructing biographical narratives. (shrink)

All parties involved in researching, developing, manufacturing, and distributing COVID-19 vaccines need guidance on their ethical obligations. We focus on pharmaceutical companies' obligations because their capacities to research, develop, manufacture, and distribute vaccines make them uniquely placed for stemming the pandemic. We argue that an ethical approach to COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution should satisfy four uncontroversial principles: optimising vaccine production, including development, testing, and manufacturing; fair distribution; sustainability; and accountability. All parties' obligations should be coordinated and mutually consistent. For (...) instance, companies should not be obligated to provide host countries with additional booster shots at the expense of fulfilling bilateral contracts with countries in which there are surges. Finally, any satisfactory approach should include mechanisms for assurance that all parties are honouring their obligations. This assurance enables countries, pharmaceutical companies, global organisations, and others to verify compliance with the chosen approach and protect ethically compliant stakeholders from being unfairly exploited by unethical behaviour of others. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that selection of the best theory of content is not a matter for mere philosophical reflection on the consequences of each theory for our intuitive judgments about content. Rather, the theories must be judged in a different way that is based on the putative roles of content attribution in the behavioural sciences. The ultimate test of any theory of content will be the success of the sciences that adopt it. Furthermore, alternative semantic theories may be (...) seen as complementary rather than antagonistic. Different approaches to content specification may well be compatible, reflecting different but perhaps equally legitimate explanatory goals. (shrink)

Consider the set of inferences that are acceptable to use in all our theory building endeavors. Call this set of inferences the universal theory building toolkit, or just ’the toolkit’ for short. It is clear that the toolkit is tightly connected to logic in a variety of ways. Beall, for example, has argued that logic just is the toolkit. This paper avoids making a stand on that issue and instead investigates reasons for thinking that, logic or not, the toolkit is (...) substructural. It is presented as a dialogue for the simple reason that it summarizes a range of dialogues on this subject that the author has had with various folks over the past few years. The method I use to investigate the toolkit is inspired in both philosophical and technical details by Alasdair Urquhart’s work on semantics for relevance logics from the early 1970s. (shrink)

Positions taken in the current debate over free will can be seen as responses to the following conditional: -/- If every action is caused solely by another event and a cause necessitates its effect, then there is no action to which there is an alternative (C). -/- The Libertarian, who believes that alternatives are a requirement of free will, responds by denying the right conjunct of C’s antecedent, maintaining that some actions are caused, either mediately or immediately, by events whose (...) effects could be different, even if they were to recur under identical circumstances. We have here a denial of Laplacian Determinism (LD), according to which the condition of the world at any instant makes only one state possible at any other instant. One prominent defender of this view, Robert Kane, holds that unless an agent’s neural mechanisms operated indeterministicly in forming her character she is not responsible for its manifestations. This requirement is entailed by the principle of “ultimate responsibility” (UR) according to which an act is freely willed only if (a) its agent is personally responsible for its performance in the sense of having caused it to occur by voluntarily doing something that was avoidable and (b) there is no sufficient condition for its performance for which its agent is not personally responsible. The orthodox Compatibilist, adducing counterexamples to UR, argues that even if C and its antecedent are true, free will is possible. Ned Markosian has provided the Compatibilist with yet another response to UR-based objections to her view, wedding it to the notion of agent causation: here the deterministic causing of an act by its agent is necessary and sufficient for its being “morally free.” I criticize this view as inconsistent with the agent causalist's belief that moral responsibility precludes causation of a choice by any power other than the maker thereof: he being its efficient cause. (shrink)

Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (...) (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin’s behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin’s own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin’s consumption more exploratory than the culture’s production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean-style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain stimulation). (...) They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean-style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.’s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense. (shrink)

Practical quantum computing devices and their applications to AI in particular are presently mostly speculative. Nevertheless, questions about whether this future technology, if achieved, presents any special ethical issues are beginning to take shape. As with any novel technology, one can be reasonably confident that the challenges presented by "quantum AI" will be a mixture of something new and something old. Other commentators (Sevilla & Moreno 2019), have emphasized continuity, arguing that quantum computing does not substantially affect approaches to value (...) alignment methods for AI, although they allow that further questions arise concerning governance and verification of quantum AI applications. In this brief paper, we turn our attention to the problem of identifying as-yet-unknown discontinuities that might result from quantum AI applications. Wise development, introduction, and use of any new technology depends on successfully anticipating new modes of failure for that technology. This requires rigorous efforts to break systems in protected sandboxes, and it must be conducted at all stages of technology design, development, and deployment. Such testing must also be informed by technical expertise but cannot be left solely to experts in the technology because of the history of failures to predict how non-experts will use or adapt to new technologies. This interplay between experts and non-experts may be particularly acute for quantum AI because quantum mechanics is notoriously difficult to understand. (As Richard Feynman quipped, "Anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics is either lying or crazy.") We will discuss the extent to which the difficulties in understanding the physics underlying quantum computing challenges attempts to anticipate new failure modes that might be introduced in AI applications intended for unsupervised operation in the public sphere. (shrink)

Discussions of the functions of biological traits generally take the notion of a trait for granted. Defining this notion is a non-trivial problem. Different approaches to function place different constraints on adequate accounts of the notion of a trait. Accounts of function based on engineering-style analyses allow trait boundaries to be a matter of human interest. Accounts of function based on natural selection have typically been taken to require trait boundaries that are objectively real. After canvassing problems raised by each (...) approach, I conclude with some facts that satisfactory notions of trait must respect. (shrink)

In her latest book, The End of Progress, Amy Allen embarks on an ambitious and much-needed project: to decolonize contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory. As with all of her books, this is an exceptionally well-written and well-argued book. Allen strives to avoid making assertions without backing them up via close and careful textual reading of the thinkers she engages in her book. In this article, I will state why this book makes a central contribution to contemporary critical theory (...) (in the broader sense), after which I pose a few questions. These questions are not meant to prove that there are any serious problems with her argumentation. Instead, they are meant in the spirit of dialogue and allow her to elaborate her work for her audience. (shrink)

Carruthers argues that knowledge of our own propositional attitudes is achieved by the same mechanism used to attain knowledge of other people's minds. This seems incompatible with "privileged access"---the idea that we have more reliable beliefs about our own mental states, regardless of the mechanism. At one point Carruthers seems to suggest he may be able to maintain privileged access, because we have additional sensory information in our own case. We raise a number of worries for this suggestion, concluding that (...) Carruthers's new theory cannot clearly preserve the superior reliability of our beliefs about our own attitudes. (shrink)

Respiratory rhythms sustain biological life, governing the homeostatic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Until recently, however, the influence of breathing on the brain has largely been overlooked. Yet new evidence demonstrates that the act of breathing exerts a substantive, rhythmic influence on perception, emotion, and cognition, largely through the direct modulation of neural oscillations. Here, we synthesize these findings to motivate a new predictive coding model of respiratory brain coupling, in which breathing rhythmically modulates both local and global neural (...) gain, to optimize cognitive and affective processing. Our model further explains how respiratory rhythms interact with the topology of the functional connectome, and we highlight key implications for the computational psychiatry of disordered respiratory and interoceptive inference. (shrink)