Can new technology enhance purpose-driven, democratic dialogue in groups, governments, and societies? Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice is the first book that attempts to sample the full range of work on online deliberation, forging new connections between academic research, technology designers, and practitioners. Since some of the most exciting innovations have occurred outside of traditional institutions, and those involved have often worked in relative isolation from each other, work in this growing field has often failed to reflect the full (...) set of perspectives on online deliberation. This volume is aimed at those working at the crossroads of information/communication technology and social science, and documents early findings in, and perspectives on, this new field by many of its pioneers. -/- CONTENTS: -/- Introduction: The Blossoming Field of Online Deliberation (Todd Davies, pp. 1-19) -/- Part I - Prospects for Online Civic Engagement -/- Chapter 1: Virtual Public Consultation: Prospects for Internet Deliberative Democracy (James S. Fishkin, pp. 23-35) -/- Chapter 2: Citizens Deliberating Online: Theory and Some Evidence (Vincent Price, pp. 37-58) -/- Chapter 3: Can Online Deliberation Improve Politics? Scientific Foundations for Success (Arthur Lupia, pp. 59-69) -/- Chapter 4: Deliberative Democracy, Online Discussion, and Project PICOLA (Public Informed Citizen Online Assembly) (Robert Cavalier with Miso Kim and Zachary Sam Zaiss, pp. 71-79) -/- Part II - Online Dialogue in the Wild -/- Chapter 5: Friends, Foes, and Fringe: Norms and Structure in Political Discussion Networks (John Kelly, Danyel Fisher, and Marc Smith, pp. 83-93) -/- Chapter 6: Searching the Net for Differences of Opinion (Warren Sack, John Kelly, and Michael Dale, pp. 95-104) -/- Chapter 7: Happy Accidents: Deliberation and Online Exposure to Opposing Views (Azi Lev-On and Bernard Manin, pp. 105-122) -/- Chapter 8: Rethinking Local Conversations on the Web (Sameer Ahuja, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, and Andrea Kavanaugh, pp. 123-129) -/- Part III - Online Public Consultation -/- Chapter 9: Deliberation in E-Rulemaking? The Problem of Mass Participation (David Schlosberg, Steve Zavestoski, and Stuart Shulman, pp. 133-148) -/- Chapter 10: Turning GOLD into EPG: Lessons from Low-Tech Democratic Experimentalism for Electronic Rulemaking and Other Ventures in Cyberdemocracy (Peter M. Shane, pp. 149-162) -/- Chapter 11: Baudrillard and the Virtual Cow: Simulation Games and Citizen Participation (Hélène Michel and Dominique Kreziak, pp. 163-166) -/- Chapter 12: Using Web-Based Group Support Systems to Enhance Procedural Fairness in Administrative Decision Making in South Africa (Hossana Twinomurinzi and Jackie Phahlamohlaka, pp. 167-169) -/- Chapter 13: Citizen Participation Is Critical: An Example from Sweden (Tomas Ohlin, pp. 171-173) -/- Part IV - Online Deliberation in Organizations -/- Chapter 14: Online Deliberation in the Government of Canada: Organizing the Back Office (Elisabeth Richard, pp. 177-191) -/- Chapter 15: Political Action and Organization Building: An Internet-Based Engagement Model (Mark Cooper, pp. 193-202) -/- Chapter 16: Wiki Collaboration Within Political Parties: Benefits and Challenges (Kate Raynes-Goldie and David Fono, pp. 203-205) -/- Chapter 17: Debian’s Democracy (Gunnar Ristroph, pp. 207-211) -/- Chapter 18: Software Support for Face-to-Face Parliamentary Procedure (Dana Dahlstrom and Bayle Shanks, pp. 213-220) -/- Part V - Online Facilitation -/- Chapter 19: Deliberation on the Net: Lessons from a Field Experiment (June Woong Rhee and Eun-mee Kim, pp. 223-232) -/- Chapter 20: The Role of the Moderator: Problems and Possibilities for Government-Run Online Discussion Forums (Scott Wright, pp. 233-242) -/- Chapter 21: Silencing the Clatter: Removing Anonymity from a Corporate Online Community (Gilly Leshed, pp. 243-251) -/- Chapter 22: Facilitation and Inclusive Deliberation (Matthias Trénel, pp. 253-257) -/- Chapter 23: Rethinking the ‘Informed’ Participant: Precautions and Recommendations for the Design of Online Deliberation (Kevin S. Ramsey and Matthew W. Wilson, pp. 259-267) -/- Chapter 24: PerlNomic: Rule Making and Enforcement in Digital Shared Spaces (Mark E. Phair and Adam Bliss, pp. 269-271) -/- Part VI - Design of Deliberation Tools -/- Chapter 25: An Online Environment for Democratic Deliberation: Motivations, Principles, and Design (Todd Davies, Brendan O’Connor, Alex Cochran, Jonathan J. Effrat, Andrew Parker, Benjamin Newman, and Aaron Tam, pp. 275-292) -/- Chapter 26: Online Civic Deliberation with E-Liberate (Douglas Schuler, pp. 293-302) -/- Chapter 27: Parliament: A Module for Parliamentary Procedure Software (Bayle Shanks and Dana Dahlstrom, pp. 303-307) -/- Chapter 28: Decision Structure: A New Approach to Three Problems in Deliberation (Raymond J. Pingree, pp. 309-316) -/- Chapter 29: Design Requirements of Argument Mapping Software for Teaching Deliberation (Matthew W. Easterday, Jordan S. Kanarek, and Maralee Harrell, pp. 317-323) -/- Chapter 30: Email-Embedded Voting with eVote/Clerk (Marilyn Davis, pp. 325-327) -/- Epilogue: Understanding Diversity in the Field of Online Deliberation (Seeta Peña Gangadharan, pp. 329-358). -/- For individual chapter downloads, go to odbook.stanford.edu. (shrink)

Providing the most thorough coverage available in one volume, this comprehensive, broadly based collection offers a wide variety of selections in four major genres, and also includes a section on film. Each of the five sections contains a detailed critical introduction to each form, brief biographies of the authors, and a clear, concise editorial apparatus. Updated and revised throughout, the new Fourth Edition adds essays by Margaret Mead, Russell Baker, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Alice Walker; fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, (...) Ursula K. LeGuin, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Donald Barthelme, and James McPherson; poems by John Donne, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Philip Levine, and Louise Gluck; and plays by August Wilson, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, and Vaclav Havel. The chapter devoted to film examines the relation of film to literature and gives the complete screenplay for Citizen Kane plus close analysis of a scene from the film. With its innovative structure, comprehensive coverage, and insightful and stimulating presentation of all kinds of literature, this is an anthology readers will turn to again and again. (shrink)

This paper examines the standard view of realization operative incontemporary philosophy of mind, and proposes an alternative, generalperspective on realization. The standard view can be expressed, insummary form, as the conjunction of two theses, the sufficiency thesis andthe constitutivity thesis. Physicalists of both reductionist and anti-reductionist persuasions share a conception of realization wherebyrealizations are determinative of the properties they realize and physically constitutive of the individuals with those properties. Centralto the alternative view that I explore here is the idea that (...) the requisite,metaphysically robust notion of realization is ineliminably context-sensitive. I shall argue that the sufficiency and constitutivity theses aretypically not jointly satisfied by any one candidate realizer, and that goingcontext-sensitive in one's metaphysics is preferable to the standard view.The context-sensitive views developed here are implicit in a range ofcommon views in both the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of biology,even if they have not been explicitly articulated, and even though theyundermine other views that are commonly endorsed. (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)

A dynamical system is called chaotic if small changes to its initial conditions can create large changes in its behavior. By analogy, we call a dynamical system structurally chaotic if small changes to the equations describing the evolution of the system produce large changes in its behavior. Although there are many definitions of “chaos,” there are few mathematically precise candidate definitions of “structural chaos.” I propose a definition, and I explain two new theorems that show that a set of models (...) is structurally chaotic if it contains a chaotic function. I conclude by discussing the relationship between structural chaos and structural stability. (shrink)

The Architecture of the Mind is itself built on foundations that deserve probing. In this brief commentary I focus on these foundations—Carruthers’ conception of modularity, his arguments for thinking that the mind is massively modular in structure, and his view of human cognitive architecture.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, philosophers of science have argued (implicitly and explicitly) that epistemically rational individuals might compose epistemically irrational groups and that, conversely, epistemically rational groups might be composed of epistemically irrational individuals. We call the conjunction of these two claims the Independence Thesis, as they together imply that methodological prescriptions for scientific communities and those for individual scientists might be logically independent of one another. We develop a formal model of scientific inquiry, define four (...) criteria for individual and group epistemic rationality, and then prove that the four definitions diverge, in the sense that individuals will be judged rational when groups are not and vice versa. We conclude by explaining implications of the inconsistency thesis for (i) descriptive history and sociology of science and (ii) normative prescriptions for scientific communities. (shrink)

In her recent book Persons and Bodies1, Lynne Rudder Baker has defended what she calls the constitution view of persons. On this view, persons are constituted by their bodies, where “constitution” is a ubiquitous, general metaphysical relation distinct from more familiar relations, such as identity and part-whole composition.

Christian B. Miller has noted a “realism challenge” for virtue ethicists to provide an account of how the character gap between virtuous agents and non-virtuous agents can be bridged. This is precisely one of Han Feizi’s key criticisms against Confucian virtue ethics, as Eric L. Hutton argues, which also cuts across the Aristotelian one: appealing to virtuous agents as ethical models provides the wrong kind of guidance for the development of virtues. Hutton, however, without going into detail, notes that the (...) notion of rituals in the Confucian tradition may be able to sidestep Han Feizi’s criticism. In this essay, I wish to explore not only how the notion of rituals, alongside its corollaries in Xunzi’s Confucian program for ethical cultivation, indeed addresses Han Feizi’s criticism, but also observe that Aristotle’s tragic poetry plays functionally equivalent roles in his own understanding of ethical upbringing. I will begin by considering Han Feizi’s critique of ethical cultivation in virtue ethics as such and how it poses a specific problem for the acquisition of the ‘constitutive reasoning’ shared by Aristotle and Xunzi. I will then briefly note that this problem trades on the synthetic structure of human nature found in both Aristotle and Xunzi (the rational/irrational parts of the soul and the heartmind/five faculties), which grounds the way they understand ethical action and agency. Finally, I will suggest how both Aristotle and Xunzi understand the role of the arts in their extensive programme of ethical cultivation, allowing them to respond to Han Feizi’s attack as too narrow a construal of their respective ethical projects. It is hoped that, through this, we may gain a better sense of how more recent virtue ethicists may similarly draw on aesthetic resources for ethical development. (shrink)

Introduction to the Special Volume, “Method, Science and Mathematics: Neo-Kantianism and Analytic Philosophy,” edited by Scott Edgar and Lydia Patton. At its core, analytic philosophy concerns urgent questions about philosophy’s relation to the formal and empirical sciences, questions about philosophy’s relation to psychology and the social sciences, and ultimately questions about philosophy’s place in a broader cultural landscape. This picture of analytic philosophy shapes this collection’s focus on the history of the philosophy of mathematics, physics, and psychology. The following (...) essays uncover, reflect on, and exemplify modes of philosophy that are engaged with these allied disciplines. They make the case that, to the extent that analytic philosophers are still concerned with philosophy’s ties to these disciplines, we would do well to pay attention to neo-Kantian views on those ties. (shrink)

David Sloan Wilson has recently revived the idea of a group mind as an application of group selectionist thinking to cognition. Central to my discussion of this idea is the distinction between the claim that groups have a psychology and what I call the social manifestation thesis-a thesis about the psychology of individuals. Contemporary work on this topic has confused these two theses. My discussion also points to research questions and issues that Wilson's work raises, as well as (...) their connection to externalist conceptions of the mind familiar since the work of Putnam and Burge. (shrink)

This collection of original essays--by philosophers of biology, biologists, and cognitive scientists--provides a wide range of perspectives on species. Including contributions from David Hull, John Dupre, David Nanney, Kevin de Queiroz, and Kim Sterelny, amongst others, this book has become especially well-known for the three essays it contains on the homeostatic property cluster view of natural kinds, papers by Richard Boyd, Paul Griffiths, and Robert A. Wilson.

This volume of twelve specially commissioned essays about species draws on the perspectives of prominent researchers from anthropology , botany, developmental psychology , the philosophy of biology and science, protozoology, and zoology . The concept of species has played a focal role in both evolutionary biology and the philosophy of biology , and the last decade has seen something of a publication boom on the topic (e.g., Otte and Endler 1989; Ereshefsky 1992b; Paterson 1994; lambert and Spence 1995; Claridge, Dawah, (...) and Wilson 1997; Wheeler and Meier 1999; Howard and Berlocher 1998). (shrink)

1. The Situation in Cognition 2. Situated Cognition: A Potted Recent History 3. Extensions in Biology, Computation, and Cognition 4. Articulating the Idea of Cognitive Extension 5. Are Some Resources Intrinsically Non-Cognitive? 6. Is Cognition Extended or Only Embedded? 7. Letting Nature Take Its Course.

This open-access editorial discusses confronting silences in different disciplinary contexts, such as science and technology studies, cultural anthropology, and philosophy. It has a focus on race and concludes with thoughts about Indigenous expertise, the Australian referendum on the Indigenous Voice, to parliament, and racism.

This is an introductory article on sociobiology, particularly its relationship to eugenics. Sociobiology developed in the 1960s as a field within evolutionary biology to explain human social traits and behaviours. Although sociobiology has few direct connections to eugenics, it shares eugenics’ optimistic enthusiasm for extending biological science into the human domain, often with reckless sensationalism. Sociobiology's critics have argued that sociobiology also propagates a kind of genetic determinism and represents the zealous misapplication of science beyond its proper reach that characterized (...) the eugenics movement. More recently, evolutionary psychology represents a sophistication of sociobiology that attends to the mind as the "missing link" between evolution and behaviour (Cosmides and Tooby 1992, Pinker 1997). (shrink)

For anyone approaching the Encheiridion of Epictetus for the first time, this book provides a comprehensive guide to understanding a complex philosophical text. Including a full translation and clear explanatory commentaries, Epictetus's 'Encheiridion' introduces readers to a hugely influential work of Stoic philosophy. Scott Aikin and William O. Stephens unravel the core themes of Stoic ethics found within this ancient handbook. Focusing on the core themes of self-control, seeing things as they are, living according to nature, owning one's roles (...) and fulfilling the responsibilities that those roles entail, the authors elucidate the extremely challenging ideas in Epictetus's brisk chapters. Divided into five distinct parts, this book provides readers with: -/- - A new translation of the Encheiridion by William O. Stephens. - A new introduction to ancient Stoicism, its system of concepts, and the ancient figures who shaped it. - A fresh treatment of the notorious and counter-intuitive 'Stoic paradoxes'. - An accessible overview of the origin and historical context of the Encheiridion. - Detailed commentaries on each chapter of the Encheiridion that clarify its recurring themes and highlight their interconnections. - Careful attention to the presentation of the arguments embedded in Epictetus's aphoristic style. - A thoughtful discussion of serious criticisms of Epictetus's Stoicism and replies to these objections. -/- Written with clarity and authority, Epictetus's 'Encheiridion' provides a foundation from which readers can understand this important text and engage with the fundamental questions of Stoic philosophy and ethics. This guide will aid teachers of Epictetus, students encountering Stoicism for the first time, and readers seeking a greater understanding of Stoic ethics. (shrink)

I defend a new version of the non-identity theodicy. After presenting the theodicy, I reply to a series of objections. I then argue that my approach improves upon similar approaches in the literature.

Eugenics does not feel so distant from where I stand. This essay explains why.

Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has received recent discussion (...) and critique, it remains underdeveloped and is often misrepresented by its critics (section 8). (shrink)

Vision constitutes an interesting domain, or range of domains, for debate over the extended mind thesis, the idea that minds physically extend beyond the boundaries of the body. In part this is because vision and visual experience more particularly are sometimes presented as a kind of line in the sand for what we might call externalist creep about the mind: once all reasonable concessions have been made to externalists about the mind, visual experience marks a line beyond which lies a (...) safe haven for individualists. Here I want to put a little more pressure on such a view of visual experience, as well as to offer a more constructive, positive argument in defense of the idea of extended vision. (shrink)

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)

Genes and the Agents of Life undertakes to rethink the place of the individual in the biological sciences, drawing parallels with the cognitive and social sciences. Genes, organisms, and species are all agents of life but how are each of these conceptualized within genetics, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, and systematics? The 2005 book includes highly accessible discussions of genetic encoding, species and natural kinds, and pluralism above the levels of selection, drawing on work from across the biological sciences. The book (...) is a companion to the author's Boundaries of the Mind (2004), also available from Cambridge, where the focus is the cognitive sciences. The book will appeal to a broad range of professionals and students in philosophy, biology, and the history of science. You can download the table of contents and the first chapter here. (shrink)

The computational argument for individualism, which moves from computationalism to individualism about the mind, is problematic, not because computationalism is false, but because computational psychology is, at least sometimes, wide. The paper provides an early, or perhaps predecessor, version of the thesis of extended cognition.

The Eugenic Mind Project is a wide-ranging, philosophical book that explores and critiques both past and present eugenic thinking, drawing on the author’s intimate knowledge of eugenics in North America and his previous work on the cognitive, biological, and social sciences, the fragile sciences. Informed by the perspectives of Canadian eugenics survivors in the province of Alberta, The Eugenic Mind Project recounts the history of eugenics and the thinking that drove it, and critically engages contemporary manifestations of eugenic thought, newgenics. (...) An accessible, original work of scholarship adopting what the author calls a standpoint eugenics, this book focuses on the roots of eugenic thinking past and present. It will provoke and enrich discussions about human nature and human diversity, the social uses of biotechnology, and social policy governing future generations. You can download the preface and acknowledgements here. (shrink)

RESUMO Versa o presente artigo sobre a regulação do linchamento no Direito Romano do período antigo, em especial sobre o artigo 9º da Tábua III das Leis das XII Tábuas. A partir de uma metodologia de análise qualitativa, revisão bibliográfica e interpretação textual, os autores objetivam ampliar a visão tradicional sobre o linchamento, compreendendo a institucionalização de sua prática no Direito Romano e sua função no contexto de formação da cultura jurídica do período antigo. A hipótese de trabalho é a (...) de que o artigo 9º da Tábua III das Leis das XII Tábuas apresenta, historicamente, uma forma de punição intermediária entre a linchamento popular extralegal e a pena criminal prevista em lei. Do ponto de vista jurídico-antropológico, a comprovação da hipótese permitiria concluir a ideia de que a pena praticada na antiguidade é uma evolução do controle social informal da violência. Palavras-chave: Linchamento; Direito Romano; XII Tábuas; Pena criminal. ABSTRACT The following paper is about the lynching regulation in Roman law in Ancient Era, especially in what comes about the article 9 of Table Three from Twelve Tables. Making use of a methodology based in qualitative analisys, literature review and interpretation, the auctor aim to expande the traditional view about lynching, understanding the institutionalization of their practice in Roman Law and it’s function in the legal culture in Ancient Era. The working hipothesis is that the article 9 of Table Three of Twelve Tables presents, in a historical context, a intermediate form of punishment between extralegal collective lynching and criminal penalty provided by law. From a legal-anthropological point of view, the proof of the hypothesis would allow us to conclude the idea that the penalty practiced in antiquity is an evolution of informal social control of violence. Keywords: Lynching; Roman Law; Twelve Tables; Criminal Penalty. (shrink)

People who report believing in God fear death. They also experience grief when someone they love dies. Philosophers and social scientists sometimes claim that this can only be plausibly explained by the hypothesis that people who claim to believe in God do not really believe in God. I show that this is mistaken. I identify three independently plausible explanations of why people who genuinely believe in God would have these behaviors and attitudes. First, there is an evolutionary explanation of why (...) the fear of death would be resilient even if one genuinely believes God has good things in store for us after death. Second, people often fear low probability outcomes. It may be that religious people are afraid of hell or the cessation of existence even if they judge those outcomes to have a low probability. Third, belief in God is typically combined with views according to which death is accompanied by the permanent loss and radical transformation of important relationships. (shrink)

The impressive variation amongst biological individuals generates many complexities in addressing the simple-sounding question what is a biological individual? A distinction between evolutionary and physiological individuals is useful in thinking about biological individuals, as is attention to the kinds of groups, such as superorganisms and species, that have sometimes been thought of as biological individuals. More fully understanding the conceptual space that biological individuals occupy also involves considering a range of other concepts, such as life, reproduction, and agency. There has (...) been a focus in some recent discussions by both philosophers and biologists on how evolutionary individuals are created and regulated, as well as continuing work on the evolution of individuality. (shrink)

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

Distinctions in fundamentality between different levels of description are central to the viability of contemporary decoherence-based Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM). This approach to quantum theory characteristically combines a determinate fundamental reality (one universal wave function) with an indeterminate emergent reality (multiple decoherent worlds). In this chapter I explore how the Everettian appeal to fundamentality and emergence can be understood within existing metaphysical frameworks, identify grounding and concept fundamentality as promising theoretical tools, and use them to characterize a system of explanatory (...) levels (with associated laws of nature) for EQM. This Everettian level structure encompasses and extends the ‘classical’ levels structure. The ‘classical’ levels of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are recovered, but they are emergent in character and potentially variable across Everett worlds. EQM invokes an additional fundamental level, not present in the classical levels picture, and a novel potential role for self-location in interlevel metaphysics. When given a modal realist interpretation, EQM also makes trouble for supervenience-based approaches to levels. (shrink)

This paper points to some problems for the position that D.M. Walsh calls "alternative individualism," and argues that in defending this view Walsh has omitted an important part of what separates individualists and externalists in psychology. Walsh's example of Hox gene complexes is discussed in detail to show why some sort of externalism about scientific taxonomy more generally is a more plausible view than any extant version of individualism.

This paper offers an overview of "the species problem", arguing for a view of species as homeostatic property cluster kinds, positioning the resulting form of realism about species as an alternative to the claim that species are individuals and pluralistic views of species. It draws on taxonomic practice in the neurosciences, especially of neural crest cells and retinal ganglion cells, to motivate both the rejection of the species-as-individuals thesis and species pluralism.

Jim Joyce argues for two amendments to probabilism. The first is the doctrine that credences are rational, or not, in virtue of their accuracy or “closeness to the truth” (1998). The second is a shift from a numerically precise model of belief to an imprecise model represented by a set of probability functions (2010). We argue that both amendments cannot be satisfied simultaneously. To do so, we employ a (slightly-generalized) impossibility theorem of Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (2012), who show that (...) there is no strictly proper scoring rule for imprecise probabilities. -/- The question then is what should give way. Joyce, who is well aware of this no-go result, thinks that a quantifiability constraint on epistemic accuracy should be relaxed to accommodate imprecision. We argue instead that another Joycean assumption — called strict immodesty— should be rejected, and we prove a representation theorem that characterizes all “mildly” immodest measures of inaccuracy. (shrink)

We evaluate the asymptotic performance of boundedly-rational strategies in multi-armed bandit problems, where performance is measured in terms of the tendency (in the limit) to play optimal actions in either (i) isolation or (ii) networks of other learners. We show that, for many strategies commonly employed in economics, psychology, and machine learning, performance in isolation and performance in networks are essentially unrelated. Our results suggest that the appropriateness of various, common boundedly-rational strategies depends crucially upon the social context (if any) (...) in which such strategies are to be employed. (shrink)

While memory is conceptualized predominantly as an individual capacity in the cognitive and biological sciences, the social sciences have most commonly construed memory as a collective phenomenon. Collective memory has been put to diverse uses, ranging from accounts of nationalism in history and political science to views of ritualization and commemoration in anthropology and sociology. These appeals to collective memory share the idea that memory ‘‘goes beyond the individual’’ but often run together quite different claims in spelling out that idea. (...) This paper reviews a sampling of recent work on collective memory in the light of emerging externalist views within the cognitive sciences, and through some reflection on broader traditions of thought in the biological and social sciences that have appealed to the idea that groups have minds. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the relationship between these kinds of cognitive metaphors in the social sciences and our notion of agency. (shrink)

One might think that if the majority of virtue signallers judge that a proposition is true, then there is significant evidence for the truth of that proposition. Given the Condorcet Jury Theorem, individual virtue signallers need not be very reliable for the majority judgment to be very likely to be correct. Thus, even people who are skeptical of the judgments of individual virtue signallers should think that if a majority of them judge that a proposition is true, then that provides (...) significant evidence that the proposition is true. We argue that this is mistaken. Various empirical studies converge on the following point: humans are very conformist in the contexts in which virtue signalling occurs. And stereotypical virtue signallers are even more conformist in such contexts. So we should be skeptical of the claim that virtue signallers are sufficiently independent for the Condorcet Jury Theorem to apply. We do not seek to decisively rule out the relevant application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem. But we do show that careful consideration of the available evidence should make us very skeptical of that application. Consequently, a defense of virtue signalling would need to engage with these findings and show that despite our strong tendencies for conformism, our judgements are sufficiently independent for the Condorcet Jury Theorem to apply. This suggests new directions for the debate about the epistemology of virtue signalling. (shrink)

Projects of human improvement take both individual and intergenerational forms. The biosciences provide many technologies, including prenatal screening and the latest gene editing techniques, such as CRISPR, that have been viewed as providing the means to human improvement across generations. But who is fit to furnish the next generation? Historically, eugenics epitomizes the science-based attempt to improve human society through distinguishing kinds of people and then implementing social policies—from immigration restriction to sexual sterilization and euthanasia—that influence and even direct what (...) sorts of people populate our future. Despite recognition of the horrors of the eugenic extremes of the past and of the subhumanizing of those sufficiently below appearance or ability norms to be viewed as “defective” or “unfit”, many people continue to be drawn to strands of eugenic thinking. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 148-168, March 2022.

In the good old days, when general philosophy of science ruled the Earth, a simple division was often invoked to talk about philosophical issues specific to particular kinds of science: that between the natural sciences and the social sciences. Over the last 20 years, philosophical studies shaped around this dichotomy have given way to those organized by more fine-grained categories, corresponding to specific disciplines, as the literatures on the philosophy of physics, biology, economics and psychology--to take the most prominent four (...) examples--have blossomed. In general terms, work in each of these areas has become increasingly enmeshed with that in the corresponding science itself, increasingly naturalistic (in at least one sense of that term), and in my view, increasingly interesting. (shrink)

Photography is valued as a medium for recording and visually reproducing features of the world. I seek to challenge the view that photography is fundamentally a recording process and that every photograph is a record—a view that I claim is based on a ‘single-stage’ misconception of the process. I propose an alternative, ‘multi-stage’ account in which I argue that causal registration of light is not equivalent to recording and reproducing an image. Intervention or non-intervention by photographers is more sophisticated than (...) the traditional view allows. Using the multi-stage account, I describe four models for producing photographic images and pictures. (shrink)

Who is recognised as a philosopher and what counts as philosophy influence both the content of a philosophical education and academic philosophy’s continuing demographic skew. The “philosophical who” and the “philosophical what” themselves are a partial function of matters that have been passed over in collective silence, even if that now feels to some like a silence belonging to the distant past. This paper discusses some philosophical silences regarding race, gender, and disability in the context of reflection on philosophical education (...) and on philosophical practice in the public sphere. It focuses on Charles Mills’ writings on race, Susan Babbitt’s on race and gender, and on more collaboratively-generated work on eugenics and disability. (shrink)

Are materially constituted entities, such as statues and glasses of liquid, something more than their material constituents? The puzzle that frames this paper stems from conflicting answers to this question. At the core of the paper is a distinctive way of thinking about material constitution that posits two concepts of constitution, compositional and ampliative constitution, with the bulk of the discussion devoted to developing distinct analyses for these concepts. Distinguishing these concepts solves our initial puzzle and enriches the space of (...) possibilities for constitution views. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that there is a visual field, but the analogous notion of an auditory field is rejected by many philosophers on the grounds that the metaphysics or phenomenology of audition lack the necessary spatial or phenomenological structure. In this paper, I argue that many of the common objections to the existence of an auditory field are misguided and that, contrary to a tradition of philosophical scepticism about the spatiality of auditory experience, it is as richly spatial as (...) visual experience—and in some ways even more so. By carefully considering the spatiality and boundedness of audition, along with how sounds or their sources are experienced as occurring within the surrounding acoustic environment, we can gain a better understanding of (i) our auditory experience of space and (ii) the conditions for the existence of spatial sensory fields in general in a way that does not privilege vision over the other senses. (shrink)

A Guide to Good Reasoning has been described by reviewers as “far superior to any other critical reasoning text.” It shows with both wit and philosophical care how students can become good at everyday reasoning. It starts with attitude—with alertness to judgmental heuristics and with the cultivation of intellectual virtues. From there it develops a system for skillfully clarifying and evaluating arguments, according to four standards—whether the premises fit the world, whether the conclusion fits the premises, whether the argument fits (...) the conversation, and whether it is possible to tell. (shrink)

In On the Plurality of Worlds (Lewis 1986), David Lewis imposes a condition on realist theories of modality which he calls ‘plenitude’. Lewis apparently assigns this condition considerable importance, and uses it to motivate his Humean principle of recombination, but he never says exactly what plenitude amounts to. This chapter first sets aside some obvious ways of reconstructing the plenitude criterion which do not fit with the textual evidence. An objection to modal realism due to John Divers and Joseph Melia (...) (Divers and Melia 2002) is diagnosed as equivocating between an overly-demanding plenitude constraint and a weaker constraint which fails to establish their conclusion. An alternative deflationary interpretation of the plenitude condition has it following from an application of standard theoretical virtues to a modal realist’s total theory; Lewis’ correspondence provides new evidence in support of this interpretation. The deflationary plenitude criterion also has broader application, beyond Lewisian modal realism. (shrink)

This chapter steps back from the important psychological work on collaborative remembering at the heart of the present volume to take up some broader questions about the place of memory in Western cultural thought, both historically and in contemporary society, offering the kind of integrative and reflective perspective for which philosophy is often known. In particular, the text aims to shed some light on the relationship between collaborative memory and the other two topics in this title—group-level cognizing and individuals—beginning with (...) the relationship between collective intentionality and collaborative remembering, and concluding with some brief comments on the politics of collaborative remembering by drawing on recent work that has been undertaken with eugenics survivors in Canada. (shrink)

I think there is something to be said in a positive and constructive vein about collective intentionality in non-human animals. Doing so involves probing at the concept of collective intentionality fairly directly (Section 2), considering the various forms that collective intentionality might take (Section 3), showing some sensitivity to the history of appeals to that concept and its close relatives (Section 4), and raising some broader questions about the relationships between sociality, cognition, and institutions by discussing two different possible cases (...) of collective intentionality in non-human animals: that of the social insects (Section 5) and that of highly social mammals, such as canines (Section 6). If the discussion here is on track, then the widely shared perspective on collective intentionality exemplified by the work of Searle and Tomasello needs to be reconsidered. (shrink)

Studies of the Early Modern debate concerning absolute and relative space and motion often ignore the significance of the concept of true motion in this debate. Even philosophers who denied the existence of absolute space maintained that true motions could be distinguished from merely apparent ones. In this paper, I examine Berkeley's endorsement of this distinction and the problems it raises. First, Berkeley's endorsement raises a problem of consistency with his other philosophical commitments, namely his idealism. Second, Berkeley's endorsement raises (...) a problem of adequacy, namely whether Berkeley can provide an adequate account of what grounds the distinction between true and merely apparent motion. In this paper, I argue that sensitivity to Berkeley's distinction between what is true in the metaphysical, scientific, and vulgar domains can address both the consistency and the adequacy problems. I argue that Berkeley only accepts true motion in the scientific and vulgar domains, and not the metaphysical. There is thus no inconsistency between his endorsement of true motion in science and ordinary language, and his metaphysical idealism. Further, I suggest that sensitivity to these three domains shows that Berkeley possesses resources to give an adequate account of how true motions are discovered in natural science. (shrink)