Can it be better or worse for a person to be than not to be, that is, can it be better or worse to exist than not to exist at all? This old 'existential question' has been raised anew in contemporary moral philosophy. There are roughly two reasons for this renewed interest. Firstly, traditional so-called “impersonal” ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, have counter-intuitive implications in regard to questions concerning procreation and our moral duties to future, not yet existing people. Secondly, (...) it has seemed evident to many that an outcome can only be better than another if it is better for someone, and that only moral theories that are in this sense “person affecting” can be correct. The implications of this Person Affecting Restriction will differ radically, however, depending on which answer one gives to the existential question. Melinda Roberts (2003) and Matthew Adler (2009) have defended an affirmative answer to the existential question using an assumption that one can asribe a zero level of wellbeing to a person in a world in which that person doesn't exist. Contrariwise, Derek Parfit (1984), John Broome (1999), and others have worried that if we take a person’s life to be better for her than non-existence, then we would have to conclude that it would have been worse for her if she did not exist, which is absurd: Nothing would have been worse or better for a person if she had not existed. The paper suggests that an affirmative answer to the existential question can avoid such absurdities: One can claim that, say, it is better for a person to exist than not to exist, without implying that it would have been worse for a person if she had not existed or that her level of wellbeing would then have been lower. (shrink)

In addiction, apparently causally significant phenomena occur at a huge number of levels; addiction is affected by biomedical, neurological, pharmacological, clinical, social, and politico-legal factors, among many others. In such a complex, multifaceted field of inquiry, it seems very unlikely that all the many layers of explanation will prove amenable to any simple or straightforward, reductive analysis; if we are to unify the many different sciences of addiction while respecting their causal autonomy, then, what we are likely to need is (...) an integrative framework. In this paper, we propose the theory of “Externalist” or “4E” – for extended, embodied, embedded, and enactive – cognition, which focuses on the empirical and conceptual centrality of the wider extra-neural environment to cognitive and mental processes, as a candidate for such a framework. We begin in Section 2 by outlining how such a perspective might apply to psychiatry more generally, before turning to some of the ways it can illuminate addiction in particular: Section 3 points to a way of dissolving the classic dichotomy between the “choice model” and “disease model” in the addiction literature; Section 4 shows how 4E concepts can clarify the interplay between the addict’s brain and her environment; and Section 5 considers how these insights help to explain the success of some recovery strategies, and may help to inform the development of new ones. (shrink)

Nos meses de Junho/Julho - 2019, houve relatos de vazamento de patógenos do Fort Detrick, instalação do Comando Médico do Exército dos EUA, conhecido por desenvolver armas biológicas e que abriga um dos muitos laboratórios BSL-4 do país. Em agosto de 2019, a instalação foi fechada para investigação e a imprensa não teve acesso a informações detalhadas. -/- Em setembro de 2019, um vírus mortal começou a se espalhar nos EUA infectando 26 milhões de pessoas naquele outono, com pelo menos (...) 250.000 hospitalizadas e 20.000 mortes. Posteriormente o Dr. Robert Redfield, diretor do Centro de Controle e Prevenção de Doenças dos EUA, reconheceu perante o Comitê do Congresso, que algumas mortes por influenza foram mais tarde diagnosticadas como de Covid-19. -/- Em 18 de outubro de 2019, dia do início dos Jogos Mundiais Militares em Wuhan, que contou com a presença de militares americanos, a Fundação Bill & Melinda Gates e o Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security em parceria com o Fórum Econômico Mundial, promovem uma simulação de pandemia de coronavírus em Nova York, reunindo líderes empresariais e agentes do governo. -/- Em novembro de 2019, o prefeito de Belleville, Nova Jersey, Michael Melham, passou mal e seu diagnóstico foi uma grave pneumonia posteriormente confirmado como sendo Covid-19. Falei com Michael sobre a veracidade dos fatos e ele me confirmou o diagnóstico. Disse que possui dois testes de anticorpos positivos para a Covid-19. -/- Em janeiro de 2019 a revista Science publicou um artigo questionando a teoria oficial de que o vírus havia sido transmitido de um animal para um ser humano no mercado de Wuhan e outro estudo publicado na revista The Lancet, concluiu que 13 das primeiras 41 pessoas diagnosticadas com Covid-19 não tiveram nenhum contato com o mercado de Wuhan, além disso, o Dr. Daniel Lucey, professor de doenças infecciosas da Georgetown University Medical Center, disse baseado em evidências, que o "paciente zero", foi infectado antes de dezembro de 2019, mais precisamente entre outubro e início de novembro de 2019, mas o diagnóstico era de pneumonia e assim o vírus começou a se espalhar por Wuhan. -/- Agora, não é porque o novo coronavírus surgiu na China, que sua origem seja o laboratório de Wuhan, a gripe espanhola por exemplo, se disseminou no mundo a partir da Europa matando 50 milhões de pessoas e sua origem estava no Fort Riley, em Kansas, EUA. (shrink)

Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g., "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, has (...) either disregarded the oddity (e.g., Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g., Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue—based on a corpus study—that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality. (shrink)

Research on the ethics of algorithms has grown substantially over the past decade. Alongside the exponential development and application of machine learning algorithms, new ethical problems and solutions relating to their ubiquitous use in society have been proposed. This article builds on a review of the ethics of algorithms published in 2016, 2016). The goals are to contribute to the debate on the identification and analysis of the ethical implications of algorithms, to provide an updated analysis of epistemic and normative (...) concerns, and to offer actionable guidance for the governance of the design, development and deployment of algorithms. (shrink)

The empirical phenomenon at the center of this paper is projection, which we define (uncontroversially) as follows: (1) Definition of projection An implication projects if and only if it survives as an utterance implication when the expression that triggers the implication occurs under the syntactic scope of an entailment-cancelling operator. Projection is observed, for example, with utterances containing aspectual verbs like stop, as shown in (2) and (3) with examples from English and Paraguayan Guaraní (Paraguay, Tupí-Guaraní).1 The Guaraní example in (...) (2) and its English translation have at least the following implications: (i) Carla has previously smoked, and (ii) Carla stopped smoking. The first but not the second of these implications is also conveyed by the question version of sentence (2), as in (3a), or when (2) is embedded under entailment-cancelling sentential operators, such as negation, as in (3b), the antecedent of a conditional, as in (3c), or an epistemic modal, as in (3d). Hence, by the definition in (14), the first but not the second implication of (2) projects. (shrink)

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) continues to be controversial with arguments for and against its veracity being waged by individuals representing a variety of disciplines from behavioral scientists to philosophers. Our perspective focuses on the epistemological underpinnings of what is now commonly known as ADHD. Its ignominious history and current disputes may stem from a "pessimistic" epistemology, meaning that truth is only the province of persons in authority and power. The authoritative organizations that govern the diagnostic labels and criteria are (...) the American Psychiatric Association and their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the World Health Organization that sponsors the International Classification of Disease. We contrast the pessimistic epistemology with criteria for truth from the scientific method. Although scientific scrutiny has been and is being applied subsequent to "authoritarian edicts" of the disorder, we opine that ADHD currently does not have status beyond that of the "hypothetical construct." Moreover, current brain-based causal models have failed to provide rigorous supporting data that comes from testing falsifiable hypotheses. (shrink)

This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (Intervention). The objectives are as follows: -/- The main aim of this review will be to assess the effects of changing practitioner empathy or patient expectations for all conditions. The main objective is to conduct a systematic review of randomised trials where the intervention involves manipulating either (a) practitioner empathy or (b) patient expectations, or (c) both.

The Protein Ontology (PRO) provides a formal, logically-based classification of specific protein classes including structured representations of protein isoforms, variants and modified forms. Initially focused on proteins found in human, mouse and Escherichia coli, PRO now includes representations of protein complexes. The PRO Consortium works in concert with the developers of other biomedical ontologies and protein knowledge bases to provide the ability to formally organize and integrate representations of precise protein forms so as to enhance accessibility to results of protein (...) research. PRO (http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro) is part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. (shrink)

Overconfidence is typically damaging to one’s reputation as a trustworthy source of information. Previous research shows that the reputational cost associated with conveying a piece of false information is higher for confident than unconfident speakers. When judging speaker trustworthiness, individuals do not exclusively rely on past accuracy but consider the extent to which speakers expressed a degree of confidence that matched the accuracy of their claims (their “confidence-accuracy calibration”). The present study experimentally examines the interplay between confidence, accuracy and a (...) third factor, namely evidence, in the assessment of speaker trustworthiness. Experiment 1 probes the hypothesis that overconfidence does not backfire when a confident but inaccurate claim is justified: the trustworthiness of a confident speaker who turns out to be wrong is restored if the confidence expressed is based on strong evidence (good confidence-evidence calibration). Experiment 2 investigates the hypothesis that confidence can backfire if a confident and accurate claim is not justified: the trustworthiness of a confident speaker who turns out to be right is damaged if the confidence expressed is based on weak evidence (bad confidence-evidence calibration). Our results support both hypotheses and thus suggest that “confidence-evidence calibration” plays a crucial role in the assessment of speaker trustworthiness. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of “conceptual pacts,” or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measured the effect of this manipulation on epistemic and practical trust. Our results showed that participants were more likely to trust a coordinated partner than an (...) uncoordinated one, but only when the latter broke previously established conceptual pacts. (shrink)

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. Because (...) proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted 'The Dream of the Three Orcas' knowing nothing of the dreamer beyond age and gender, and having none of the dreamer’s associations. -/- Our interpretation included nine predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had not been present before our interpretation was complete) to give us more information about the dreamer. Later the dreamer also gave us more information. Our predictions were mostly confirmed. The (...) dreamer is standing on beach when huge orca-like floats appear. -/- This record is another iteration of an experiment that is described more fully in the paper 'The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog: An Experimental System that Tests Symbolic Meaning,' soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. ONLINE AUDIO RECORD OF ENTIRE ORCAS' CLASS : link is on title page of the paper you can download here. (shrink)

Ontologies of living things are increasingly grounded on the concepts and practices of current life science. Biological development is a process, undergone by living things, which begins with a single cell and (in an important class of cases) ends with formation of a multicellular organism. The process of development is thus prima facie central for ideas about biological individuality and organismality. However, recent accounts of these concepts do not engage developmental biology. This paper aims to fill the gap, proposing the (...) lineage view of stem cells as an ontological framework for conceptualizing organismal development. This account is grounded on experimental practices of stem cell research, with emphasis on new techniques for generating biological organization in vitro. On the lineage view, a stem cell is the starting point of a cell lineage with a specific organismal source, time-interval of existence, and ‘tree topology’ of branch-points linking the stem to developmental termini. The concept of ‘enkapsis’ accommodates the cell-organism relation within the lineage view; this hierarchical notion is further explicated by considering the methods and results of stem cell experiments. Results of this examination include a (partial) characterization of stem cells’ developmental versatility, and the context-dependence of developmental processes involving stem cells. (shrink)

Despite the frequency of stillbirths, the subsequent implications are overlooked and underappreciated. We present findings from comprehensive, systematic literature reviews, and new analyses of published and unpublished data, to establish the effect of stillbirth on parents, families, health-care providers, and societies worldwide. Data for direct costs of this event are sparse but suggest that a stillbirth needs more resources than a livebirth, both in the perinatal period and in additional surveillance during subsequent pregnancies. Indirect and intangible costs of stillbirth are (...) extensive and are usually met by families alone. This issue is particularly onerous for those with few resources. Negative effects, particularly on parental mental health, might be moderated by empathic attitudes of care providers and tailored interventions. The value of the baby, as well as the associated costs for parents, families, care providers, communities, and society, should be considered to prevent stillbirths and reduce associated morbidity. (shrink)

Extant theoretical work on the political resource curse implies that dependence on resource revenues should decrease autocracies’ likelihood of democratizing but not necessarily affect democracies’ chances of survival. Yet most previous empirical studies estimate models that are ill-suited to address this claim. We improve upon earlier studies, estimating a dynamic logit model that interacts a continuous measure of resource dependence with an indicator of regime type using data from 166 countries, covering the period from 1816-2006. We find that an increase (...) in resource dependence at time t - 1 increases the likelihood of autocratic persistence at t, but has no appreciable effect on democratic survival. We go beyond existing empirical studies to show that increases in resource dependence have persistent and substantial cumulative effects on autocracies' likelihood of becoming democratic over the long-term, showing that the total effect of resource dependence on regime type is much larger than the short-term (one period) effect indicates. (shrink)

Three important 20th-century American films prominently feature a hotel as the site for morally ambiguous and sexually charged events depicted in the plot: Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), and Joel and Ethan Coen's Barton Fink (1991). While all three films have a multiplicity of elements that present how hotel spaces open horizons displaying human behaviors both normal and abnormal, moral and immoral, secret and public, sane and insane, the paper presents an extended argument for seeing (...) these particular cinematic efforts as being built around the same theme: that transgression (of a violent, misogynous nature) is the path to transcendence. (shrink)

The general concept of a trope – that of a non-shareable character-grounder – admits of a distinction between modifier tropes and module tropes. Roughly, a module trope is self-exemplifying whereas a modifier trope is not. This distinction has wide-ranging implications. Modifier tropes are uniquely eligible to be powers and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes are uniquely eligible to play a direct role in perception and causation. Moreover, each type of trope theory faces unique challenges concerning character- grounding. Modifier trope theory (...) faces challenges concerning the inscrutability of predication and the incompatibility with bundle theory, whereas module trope theory faces challenges concerning character overdetermination and a collapse into austere nominalism. These differences indicate that the modifier/module distinction divides the advantages of general trope theory and thus presents the trope theorist with a pivotal choice. (shrink)

A novel advantage of the use of machine learning (ML) systems in medicine is their potential to continue learning from new data after implementation in clinical practice. To date, considerations of the ethical questions raised by the design and use of adaptive machine learning systems in medicine have, for the most part, been confined to discussion of the so-called “update problem,” which concerns how regulators should approach systems whose performance and parameters continue to change even after they have received regulatory (...) approval. In this paper, we draw attention to a prior ethical question: whether the continuous learning that will occur in such systems after their initial deployment should be classified, and regulated, as medical research? We argue that there is a strong prima facie case that the use of continuous learning in medical ML systems should be categorized, and regulated, as research and that individuals whose treatment involves such systems should be treated as research subjects. (shrink)

이 책자는 형식 논리의 일종인 양상논리에 입문하고 싶으신 분들을 위한 짧은 교재입니다. “양상논리 맛보기” 라는 말마따나, 이 책자는 양상논리에 관심은 있지만 아직 본격적으로 공부를 시작하진 않은 분들께서 ‘맛보기’를 하기에 적합한 안내 책자입니다. 아무쪼록 이 책자가 양상논리를 공부해나가시는데 유용한 첫 발판이 될 수 있기를 바랍니다. / This booklet is a Korean adaptation and translation of Part VIII of forall x: Calgary (Fall 2021 edition), which is intended to be introductory material for modal logic. The original text is based on Robert Trueman's (...) A Modal Logic Primer, which is revised and expanded by Richard Zach and Aaron Thomas-Bolduc in forall x: Calgary. (forall x: Calgary is based on forall x: Cambridge by Tim Button, which is in turn based on forall x by P. D. Magnus, and also includes material from forall x: Lorain County Remix by Cathal Woods and J. Robert Loftis.) This booklet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. (shrink)

We should drop the marketplace of ideas as our go-to metaphor in free speech discourse and take up a new metaphor of the connected city. Cities are more liveable when they have an integrated mix of transport options providing their occupants with a variety of locomotive affordances. Similarly, societies are more liveable when they have a mix of communication platforms that provide a variety of communicative affordances. Whereas the marketplace metaphor invites us to worry primarily about authoritarian control over the (...) content that circulates through our communication networks, the connected-city metaphor invites us to worry, more so, about the homogenization of the tools and formats through which we communicate. I argue that the latter worry demands greater attention under emerging technological conditions. (shrink)

This paper explores the state of teacher training in philosophy graduate programs in the English-speaking world. Do philosophy graduate programs offer training regarding teaching? If so, what is the nature of the training that is offered? Who offers it? How valuable is it? We conclude that philosophers want more and better teaching training, and that collectively we know how to deliver and support it.

A common compatibilist view says that we are free and morally responsible in virtue of the ability to respond aptly to reasons. Many hold a version of this view despite disagreement about whether free will requires the ability to do otherwise. The canonical version of this view is reductive. It reduces the pertinent ability to a set of modal properties that are more obviously compatible with determinism, like dispositions. I argue that this and any reductive view of abilities faces a (...) significant challenge: it cannot adequately explain the freedom-grounding element of this ability. The problem has the form of a dilemma. This leaves reasons-responsive compatibilists with two options: abandon theories of free will grounded in abilities or abandon reductive theories of abilities. (shrink)

Robert Cowton’s questions commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences originated ca. 1309–1311. This is a pdf of the edition prepared by Michiel Streijger containing Cowton’s questions on distinctions 1–14 of the second book of Sentences.

Eugenic thinking involves distinguishing between sorts or kinds of people in terms of the perceived desirable or undesirable traits that those people are likely to transmit to future generations. While eugenics itself is often thought of as an ideology that generated a social movement of global influence from roughly 1900 to 1945, eugenic thinking both pre-dates this period and continues to inform a range of contemporary debates and social policies, including those concerning prenatal screening, transhumanism, population control, and disability. Various (...) sciences, including the then-nascent sciences of psychology and psychiatry, played important roles in early twentieth-century eugenics, and their legacy is reflected in contemporary eugenic thinking and policies. Understanding the history of eugenics and the role of these early sciences of cognition in that history is useful in reflecting further on ongoing forms of eugenic thinking to which the contemporary cognitive sciences are relevant. (shrink)

In this paper I begin by explaining what epistemic injustice is and what ordinary language philosophy is. I then go on to ask why we might doubt the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy in examining epistemic injustice. In the first place, we might wonder how ordinary language philosophy can be of use, given that many of the key terms used in discussing epistemic injustice, including ‘epistemic injustice’ itself, are not drawn from our ordinary language. We might also have doubts about (...) the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy in this area, given ordinary language philosophers’ aversion to theory. Finally, we might have doubts about the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy due to the fact that the study of epistemic injustice is clearly a study of practical matters concerning the way the world is and has been historically. If ordinary language philosophy is just concerned with grammar, what use can it be to practical and social philosophy concerning current issues? In response to these worries, I demonstrate the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy in practice by applying the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alan R. White to a problem that Miranda Fricker raises, but does not answer: about whether there is a confidence condition on knowledge. I also make use of Gilbert Ryle's distinction between ‘the use of ordinary language’ and ‘the ordinary use of an expression’ to show that the terminology used in examining epistemic injustice is ordinary in some sense. (shrink)

We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith in themselves as a social agent, too, can be compromised or lost, thus altering their experience of what is afforded by (...) the social environment. We highlight how a loss of bodily or social certainty can be shaped and sustained by the environments in which one finds oneself. As such, we show how certain individuals might be more vulnerable to experiences of bodily and social doubt than others. (shrink)

How are justified belief and rational belief related? Some philosophers think that justified belief and rational belief come to the same thing. Others take it that justification is a matter of how well a particular belief is supported by the evidence, while rational belief is a matter of how well a belief coheres with a person’s other beliefs. In this paper, I defend the view that justification is a dimension of rationality, a view that can make sense of both of (...) these conflicting accounts. When it modifies belief, ‘rational’ is a multidimensional adjective, as there are multiple dimensions along which a belief can be rational. I will argue that one of these dimensions is justification, an account that can not only explain why philosophers give diverging theories of the relationship between justified belief and rational belief, but can also reveal why rational belief and justified belief are closely related despite being distinct. (shrink)

'The arrow of time' refers to the curious asymmetry that distinguishes the future from the past. Reversing the Arrow of Time argues that there is an intimate link between the symmetries of 'time itself' and time reversal symmetry in physical theories, which has wide-ranging implications for both physics and its philosophy. This link helps to clarify how we can learn about the symmetries of our world, how to understand the relationship between symmetries and what is real, and how to overcome (...) pervasive illusions about the direction of time. Roberts explains the significance of time reversal in a way that intertwines physics and philosophy, to establish what the arrow of time means and how we can come to know it. This book is both mathematically and philosophically rigorous yet remains accessible to advanced undergraduates in physics and the philosophy of physics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 46-48.

Given the significant exculpatory power that ignorance has when it comes to moral, legal, and epistemic transgressions, it is important to have an accurate understanding of the concept of ignorance. According to the Standard View of factual ignorance, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not know that p, while on the New View, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not truly believe that p. On their own though, neither of these accounts explains how ignorance (...) can often be a degreed notion—how we can sometimes be slightly ignorant, quite ignorant, or completely ignorant that p. In this paper, I will argue that there is a route for advocates of the Standard View and the New View to accommodate the gradability of ignorance. On the view I defend, ‘ignorant’ picks out everyone that is ignorant to some degree, making it possible that ignorance can be both degreed and characterized as a lack of knowledge or true belief. Even though we can be ignorant to a greater or lesser extent, the only way to avoid being ignorant that p is to know or truly believe. (shrink)

In Pascal Boyer’s book Religion Explained inference systems are made to do a lot of work in his attempts to explain cognition in religion. These inference systems are systems in the brain that produces inferences when they are activated by things we perceive in our environment. According to Boyer they perceive things, produce explanations, and perform calculations. However, if Wittgenstein’s observation, that “only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it (...) has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious” is correct then it seems that Boyer’s talk of inference systems perceiving and inferring is confused. (shrink)

The world of artificial intelligence appears to be in rapid transition, and claims that artificial general intelligence is impossible are competing with concerns that we may soon be seeing Artificial Godlike Intelligence and that we should be very afraid of this prospect. This article discusses the issues from a psychological and social perspective and suggests that with the advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence, something that looks to humans like Artificial General Intelligence has become a distinct possibility as is the idea (...) of making it semi-autonomous: not just responding to discrete external inputs or performing specific tasks but able to prompt itself to create an ongoing stream of cognition that can possess something akin to a ‘purpose’. Add to that the ability of computers to be connected in vast networks, and we can envisage intelligences with staggering amounts of knowledge and reasoning capability, engaging with humans to anticipate and grant wishes. Such Semi-Autonomous Godlike Artificial Intelligences (SAGAIs—meaning ‘engagements’ in Hindi) could end up like Kali, wreaking death and destruction on our species or like Thor, acting as a saviour and protector of humanity. Which of these our SAGAIs most resemble could depend on whose wishes it is designed to serve: a rich oligarchy seeking ever greater wealth and power whatever the cost to others, or a populace that has compassion for each other and for life on the planet. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron has recently raised the question of whether there is anything approximating the creative self-authorship of personal autonomy in the writings of Immanuel Kant. After considering the possibility that Kantian prudential reasoning might serve as a conception of personal autonomy, I argue that the elements of a more suitable conception can be found in Kant’s Tugendlehre, or “Doctrine of Virtue”—specifically, in the imperfect duties of self-perfection and the practical love of others. This discovery is important for at least three (...) reasons: first, it elucidates the relationship among the various conceptions of autonomy employed by personal-autonomy theorists and contemporary Kantians; second, it brings to the surface previously unnoticed or undernoticed features of Kant’s moral theory; and third, it provides an essential line of defense against certain critiques of contemporary Kantian theories, especially that of John Rawls. (shrink)

I attribute to Aristotle a theory of sensible qualities that straddles the modern debate between reductive physicalist and primitivist theories of color. On the interpretation I defend, Aristotle identifies sensible qualities with the physical properties of sensibly qualified bodies in virtue of which they move and affect perceivers and sense media. Nevertheless, I argue, Aristotle thinks that the essential nature of these qualities is revealed in ordinary sense experience. From a modern perspective, the resulting picture of sensible qualities as simultaneously (...) causes and manifest features of sense experience appears naive. But as I hope to show, it is in fact the product of an explanatorily sophisticated scientific theory, one which Aristotle finds necessary to meet the complex demands that, for him, make sensible qualities an ontological problem. (shrink)

Nicomachean Ethics/NE, Book III, Chapters 1-5, provides Aristotle’s account of “Voluntary Movement.” It, thus, draws the Passion-Action distinction, only posited earlier in Categories, while also serving as the linchpin of NE’s discussion of Virtue, in explicitly connecting it to Right Reason. My explication of this text renders its terminology consistent with the Law of Excluded Middle and rebuts two criticisms of the Eudaimonistic Axiology on which it is based. These results are shown to be entailments of Aristotle’s doctrine that Voluntary (...) is (a) Relative. That categorization is then used to help treat a problematic case of Deliberation beyond his purview. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper is an argument to the conclusion that the definition of metaphysical possibility in terms of correct conceivability, conceivability informed by knowledge of relevant essences, found in Rosen (2006) is equivalent to a version of the essentialist definition of metaphysical necessity. This argument appears to show that correct conceivability is a notion of conceivability by name only and is therefore of no interest to epistemologists of modality. In this paper, I present the equivalence argument, explain (...) the idealizing assumptions involved in it and sketch a version of the conceivability approach which weakens these assumptions in order to show that the notion of correct conceivability can still play a specific limited role in the epistemology of modality. (shrink)

In July 2017, China’s State Council released the country’s strategy for developing artificial intelligence, entitled ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’. This strategy outlined China’s aims to become the world leader in AI by 2030, to monetise AI into a trillion-yuan industry, and to emerge as the driving force in defining ethical norms and standards for AI. Several reports have analysed specific aspects of China’s AI policies or have assessed the country’s technical capabilities. Instead, in this article, we focus on (...) the socio-political background and policy debates that are shaping China’s AI strategy. In particular, we analyse the main strategic areas in which China is investing in AI and the concurrent ethical debates that are delimiting its use. By focusing on the policy backdrop, we seek to provide a more comprehensive and critical understanding of China’s AI policy by bringing together debates and analyses of a wide array of policy documents. (shrink)

The commentaries provided by Haig; Derksen and Morawski; and Trafimow vary considerably in how they address critical realism and its implications for replication. Haig’s preference for Kaidesoja’s “naturalised” version of critical realism and Lipton’s inference to the best explanation is deeply problematic. While Derksen and Morawski concede that they deal only indirectly with critical realism, their endorsement of “performativity” negates it. In Trafimow’s case, ontology’s regulative role is untenably diminished and ultimately supplanted by classic methodologism. I conclude that replication should (...) be replaced by exploratory stratified contextualism. (shrink)

Where does the mind begin and end? Most philosophers and cognitive scientists take the view that the mind is bounded by the skull or skin of the individual. Robert Wilson, in this provocative and challenging 2004 book, provides the foundations for the view that the mind extends beyond the boundary of the individual. The approach adopted offers a unique blend of traditional philosophical analysis, cognitive science, and the history of psychology and the human sciences. The companion volume, Genes and the (...) Agents of Life, explores the theme in the biological sciences. Written with verve and clarity, this ambitious book will appeal to a broad swathe of professionals and students in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and the history of the behavioural and human sciences. You can download the table of contents here. (shrink)

It is widely held by philosophers not only that there is a causal condition on perception but also that the causal condition is a conceptual truth about perception. One influential line of argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to a style of thought experiment popularized by Grice. Given the significance of these thought experiments to the literature, it is important to see whether the folk in fact respond to these cases in the way that philosophers assume they (...) should. We test folk intuitions regarding the causal theory of perception by asking our participants to what extent they agree that they would ‘see’ an object in various Gricean scenarios. We find that the intuitions of the folk do not strongly support the causal condition; they at most strongly support a ‘no blocker’ condition. We argue that this is problematic for the claim that the causal condition is a conceptual truth. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an analysis of the structure and content of loneliness. We argue that this is an emotion of absence-an affective state in which certain social goods are regarded as out of reach for the subject of experience. By surveying the range of social goods that appear to be missing from the lonely person's perspective, we see what it is that can make this emotional condition so subjectively awful for those who undergo it, including the profound sense (...) of being unable to realise oneself, in collaboration with others. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology and biologists themselves for the most part assume that the concept of kin is progenerative: what makes two individuals kin is a direct or indirect function of reproduction. Derivatively, kinship might likewise be presumed to be progenerative in nature. Yet a prominent view of kinship in contemporary cultural anthropology is a kind of constructivism or performativism that rejects such progenerativist views. This paper critically examines an influential line of thinking used to critique progenerativism and support performativism that (...) cites cross-cultural diversity in what I will call kinmaking. I challenge several key assumptions made in moving from this appeal to ethnography to conclusions about kinship and progeneration, arguing that closer scrutiny of both the ethnographic record and inferences that draw on it in fact support progenerative views of both kinship and kinmaking. (shrink)

Political theorists remain divided on the question of Plato's utopianism. Some associate his dialogues with an uncompromising vision of the human good, one that Plato is thought to build into blueprints that he would have humanity implement as far as possible. Others read Plato as a brilliant critic of utopian thinking and insist that his blueprints are not to be understood as normative paradigms at all, but rather as self-destructive parodies. This article develops a third approach to Plato's utopianism by (...) turning to the treatment of 'imitation' (mimesis) in the Laws. I argue that the Laws requires a distinction between three ways in which an imitation might resemble its 'model' (paradeigma). Attending to this distinction adds credence to the view that, for Plato, the good in speech must be 'revised' in order to find satisfactory expression in human deeds. (shrink)

This paper explains how the practice of ‘no platforming’ can be reconciled with a liberal politics. While opponents say that no platforming flouts ideals of open public discourse, and defenders see it as a justifiable harm-prevention measure, both sides mistakenly treat the debate like a run-of-the-mill free speech conflict, rather than an issue of academic freedom specifically. Content-based restrictions on speech in universities are ubiquitous. And this is no affront to a liberal conception of academic freedom, whose purpose isn’t just (...) to protect the speech of academics, but also to give them the prerogative to determine which views and speakers have sufficient disciplinary credentials to receive a hearing in academic contexts. No platforming should therefore be acceptable to liberals, in principle, in cases where it is used to support a university culture that maintains rigorous disciplinary standards, by denying attention and credibility to speakers without appropriate disciplinary credentials. (shrink)

ABSTRACT According to edenic idealism, our ordinary object terms refer to items in the manifest world—the world of primitive objects and properties presented in experience. I motivate edenic idealism as a response to scenarios where it is difficult to match the objects in experience with corresponding items in the external world. I argue that edenic idealism has important semantic advantages over realism: it is the most intuitive view of what we are actually talking about when we use terms for objects.