Drawing on recent phenomenological discussions of collective intentionality and existential phenomenological accounts of agency, this article proposes a novel interpretation of shared action. First, I argue that we should understand action on the basis of how an environment pre-reflectively solicits agents to behave based on (a) the affordances or goals inflected by their abilities and dispositions and (b) their self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances. Second, I show that this definition of action is sufficiently (...) flexible to account for not only individual action (in which both (a) and (b) refer only to an individual) but also several distinct subtypes of shared action. My thesis is that behaviour counts as shared action if and only if it is caused by a solicitation in which either (a) the goals, or (b) the commitments, or both (a) goals and (b) commitments are joint, i.e., depend on several individuals. We thereby get three distinct subtypes of shared actions: (i) jointly coordinated individually committed action, (ii) individually coordinated jointly committed action, and (iii) jointly coordinated jointly committed action. (shrink)

It is frequently argued that to address structural injustice, individuals should participate in collective actions organized by civil society organizations, but the role and the normative status of CSOs are rarely discussed. In this paper, we argue that CSOs semi-perfect our shared obligation to address structural injustice by defining shared goals as well as taking actions to further them. This assigns a special moral status to CSOs, which in turn gives rise to our duty to support them. Thus, (...) we do not have full discretion when deciding whether to join collective actions or not. Under certain conditions, we can even be forced by others to do our share. (shrink)

I defend the proposal that certain forms of work—specifically forms that are socially necessary but involve the imposition of considerable burdens—be shared between citizens. I argue that sharing burdensome work would achieve several goals, including a more equal distribution of the benefits and burdens of work, a greater appreciation of each other's labour contributions, and an amelioration of problematic inequalities of status. I conclude by considering three objections: that sharing burdensome work would (1) involve morally unacceptable constraints on freedom, (...) (2) be prohibitively inefficient, and (3) forbid mutually advantageous trades. I argue that none of these objections succeed. (shrink)

Shared decision-making involves health professionals and patients/clients working together to achieve true person-centred health care. However, this goal is infrequently realized, and most barriers are unknown. Discussion between philosophers, clinicians, and researchers can assist in confronting the epistemic and moral basis of health care, with benefits to all. The aim of this paper is to describe what shared decision-making is, discuss its necessary conditions, and develop a definition that can be used in practice to support excellence in (...) maternity care. Discussion between the authors, with backgrounds in philosophy, clinical maternity care, health care management, and maternity care research, assisted the team to confront established norms in maternity care and challenge the epistemic and moral basis of decision-making for caesarean section. The team concluded that shared decision-making must start in pregnancy and continue throughout labour and birth, with equality in discourse facilitated by the clinician. Clinicians have a duty of care for the adequacy of women's knowledge, which can only be fulfilled when relevant knowledge is offered freely and when personal beliefs and biases that may impinge on decision-making (defeaters) are disclosed. Informed consent is not shared decision-making. Key barriers include existing cultural norms of “the doctor knows best” and “patient acquiescence” that prevent defeaters being acknowledged and discussed and can lead to legal challenges, overuse of medical intervention and, in some areas, obstetric violence. Shared decision-making in maternity care can thus be defined as an enquiry by clinician and expectant woman aimed at deciding upon a course of care or none, which takes the form of a dialogue within which the clinician fulfils their duty of care to the client's knowledge by making available their complete knowledge (based on all types of evidence) and expertise, including an exposition of any relevant and recognized potential defeaters. Research to develop measurement tools is required. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on the evolution of human social norm psychology. More precisely, I want to show how the emergence of our distinctive capacity to follow social norms and make social normative judgments is connected to the lineage explanation of our capacity to form shared intentions, and how such capacity is related to a diverse cluster of prototypical moral judgments. I argue that in explaining the evolution of this form of normative cognition we also require an understanding of the (...) developmental trajectory of this capacity. For this purpose, the thesis is organized as follow. In the first chapter, I make some methodological remarks and provide the general overview and plan for the dissertation. In the second chapter, I explain what my explanatory target is and why it matters. On the view I am defending, shared intentional psychology gives rise to a special form of psychology that enables us to engage in social normative thinking. These norms are represented as shared intentional states. Moral psychology, in contrast, is more diverse. For moral judgments define a quite heterogeneous class of mental states—although some moral judgments may involve the representation and execution of norms, certainly not all of them do. I show that although much of our distinctive social norm psychology can be explained within the framework of shared intentionality, moral judgments cannot be unified in the same way. In the third chapter, I provide the baseline of social-cognitive capacities that serve as starting point for my lineage explanation. I argue that hominin social cognition was for a very long period of our evolutionary history essentially a matter of low-level cognitive and motivational processes. On this picture, bottom-up affective processes regulated the social lives of early hominins without requiring any special top-down mechanism of normative thinking such as a capacity for understanding and representing social norms. In the fourth chapter, I argue that human-like social norm psychology evolved as a result of the selective pressures that gave rise to shared intentionality, especially the demands that came from collective hunting. Yet collective hunting was not the whole story of the evolution of shared intentionality, for our capacity to form shared intentional mental states emerged from the interplay between the selective pressures that led to cooperative breeding in humans as well as organized, goal-oriented, collective hunting. Thus, I propose an evo-devo account of shared intentionality and its normative dimension since I argue that explaining the evolution of this particular form of normative thinking crucially depends on information about the developmental trajectory of this capacity. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I focus on how social norms are acquired and how the way we learn them gives rise to some prototypical cluster of moral judgments. Thus, this chapter returns to some of themes and arguments of the first chapter by explaining how the distinction between moral judgments and nonmoral judgments can be culturally transmitted. (shrink)

Pietraszewski provides a compelling case that representations of certain interaction-types are the “cognitive primitives” that allow all tokens of group-in-conflict to be represented within the mind. Here, I argue that the folk concept GROUP encodes shared intentions and goals as more central than these interaction-types, and that providing a computational theory of social groups will be more difficult than Pietraszewski envisages.

The growth of the sharing economy is important for developing countries because it creates value, economic growth, technological innovation, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion. Macedonian citizens have a long tradition of sharing things between friends, relatives, and neighbours. However, the new concept of sharing economy that enables strangers globally to share goods and services is still not developed and used by the Macedonian citizens. The goal of this study is by empirical analysis to give the state and potential of (...) the usage of sharing economy by Macedonian citizens from the perspectives of providers and consumers. The results of the observational study and survey address future actions to boost the development of the sharing economy. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on normative cognition by providing a lineage explanation of human social norm psychology. This approach builds upon theories of goal-directed behavioral control in the reinforcement learning and control literature, arguing that this form of control defines an important class of intentional normative mental states that are instrumental in nature. I defend the view that great ape capacities for instrumental reasoning and our capacity (or family of capacities) for shared intentionality (...) coadapted to each other and argue that the evolution of this capacity has allowed the representation of social norms and the emergence of our capacity for normative guidance. (shrink)

This article identifies and compares meanings of wildfire risk mitigation for stakeholders in the Front Range of Colorado, USA. We examine the case of a collaborative partnership sponsored by government agencies and directed to decrease hazardous fuels in interface areas. Data were collected by way of key informant interviews and focus groups. The analysis is guided by the Circuit of Culture model in communication research. We found both shared and differing meanings between members of this partnership (the ‘‘producers’’) and (...) other stakeholders not formally in the partnership (the ‘‘consumers’’). We conclude that those promoting the partnership’s project to mitigate risk are primarily aligned with a discourse of scientific management. Stakeholders outside the partnership follow a discourse of community. We argue that failure to recognize and account for differences in the way risk mitigation is framed and related power dynamics could hamper the communicational efforts of the collaborative partnership and impact goals for fuels reduction. We recommend ways that both groups can capitalize on shared meanings and how agency managers and decision makers can build better working relationships with interface communities and other external stakeholders. (shrink)

This chapter explores two questions in detail: How should we determine the threshold for costs that individuals are asked to bear through insurance premiums or care-related out-of-pocket costs, including user fees and copayments? and What is an adequate relationship between costs and benefits? This chapter argues that preventing impoverishment is a morally more urgent priority than protecting households against income fluctuations, and that many health insurance plans may not adequately protect individuals from health care costs that threaten to drop their (...) financial status below a decent minimum. A design that places greater emphasis on preventing impoverishment and finances the achievement of that goal by reducing unnecessary subsidies to better-off households would better accord with a sufficientarian approach to health care. -/- . (shrink)

Representative theorists of joint action traditionally argue that shared intention is necessary for joint action and that it must be common knowledge among participants that they share intentions (Bratman 1993; 2014; Gilbert 1996; 2014; Miller 2001; Searle 1990; 2010; Tuomela 2005; 2013; Tuomela & Miller 1985) However, minimalists criticize these conditions; many of them contend that common knowledge is unnecessary (Blomberg, 2016). In fact, the absence of common knowledge is occasionally necessary to induce the occurrence of joint action (Schönherr, (...) 2019). Other minimalists even argue that the assertion of shared intentions is too zealous (Butterfill, 2012). In general, however, even minimalists accept or not seriously question the following assumption: The goal shared by people in initiating a joint action is the one whose realization amounts to the accomplishment of that action. I utilize a class of counterexamples that I label concessive joint action to argue that this assumption is excessive. (shrink)

The Universal Core (UCore) is a central element of the National Information Sharing Strategy that is supported by multiple U.S. Federal Government Departments, by the intelligence community, and by a number of other national and international institutions. The goal of the UCore initiative is to foster information sharing by means of an XML schema providing consensus representations for four groups of universally understood terms under the headings who, what, when, and where. We here describe a project to create an (...) ontology-based supporting layer for UCore, entitled ‘Universal Core Semantic Layer’ (UCore SL), and describe how UCore SL can be applied to further UCore’s information sharing goals. (shrink)

There is broad agreement among social researchers and social ontologists that the project of dividing humans into social kinds should be guided by at least two methodological commitments. First, a commitment to what best serves moral and political interests, and second, a commitment to describing accurately the causal structures of social reality. However, researchers have not sufficiently analyzed how these two commitments interact and constrain one another. In the absence of that analysis, several confusions have set in, threatening to undermine (...) shared goals for the responsible modeling of social kinds of humans. This essay first explains the source and substance of these confusions. Then, by distinguishing different value-laden investigative questions into the classification of social kinds of humans, it sets out specific relations of dependence and constraint between empirically-driven investigations and value-driven investigations into social kinds of humans. The result is a more detailed and fruitful framework for thinking about the classification of social kinds that respects both normative interests and mind-independent causal regularities. (shrink)

As a continuation of this author’s previous cosmological neuroscience papers on the hypothesized Soul of Multiverse and its possible laws, the present work examined the social aspects of four of these laws. The following key aspects were recognized: (1) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Coexistence in Diversity can let our mind respect not only the endless diversity of human beings but also the cohesive force of space-time in which all are connected. This may help realizing the superiority of cooperation (...) for shared goals over competition for gaining by harming others. (2) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Truth in Complexity can ready our mind to confront the problems of societies with the understanding that these problems are much more complex than generally thought. This may help initiating the needed intellectual renaissance of the 21st century. (3) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Divine - Evil Asymmetry can make our mind appreciate the slight yet sufficient supremacy of divine over evil. This may help restoring faith in the eventual creation of a just society, where social justice is defined as an administrative mechanism providing the right conditions for every human being to accomplish his or her Conscience-led Mission throughout life, while allowing each of these accomplishments to be reciprocated with the gratitude it induced in the involved social systems, small or large, to let equal opportunities in life coexist with due diversity in welcomed, not abused, social recognitions. And (4) knowing about the cosmic Law of Lives to Transcend can empower our mind to build on these advances. This may help moving evolution towards the human species worthy of its origin and destination. (shrink)

Duties to reduce global poverty are often portrayed as collective duties to assist. At first glance this seems to make sense: since global poverty is a problem that can only be solved by a joint effort, the duty to do so should be considered a collective duty. But what exactly is meant by a ‚joint‘ or ‚collective‘ duty? This paper introduces a distinction between genuinely cooperative and cumulative collective actions. Genuinely cooperative actions require mutually responsive, carefully adjusted contributory actions by (...) cooperating agents, while contributions to cumulative actions are largely independent. The global affluent’s obligation to combat global poverty is not an obligation to perform a genuinely cooperative action. Instead, for most of us the morally best response is to contribute to existing cumulative endeavours. Our obligation to donate money to suitable organisations is a duty to contribute to cumulative action. Collective actions can produce fixed-sum or incremental goods. A collective obligation to produce a fixed-sum good is not distributive, that is, it is an obligation of the plurality of agents as such. This applies to obligations requiring both genuinely cooperative and cumulative actions. I call these kinds of obligations strongly collective obligations. However, for incremental goods the implications are less clear. There, the parameters for moral compliance are not dictated by problem for remedy as such. Rather, the magnitude of the required good is the sum of individually adequate contributions. What is collectively required depends on what is individually required. I propose to call these kinds of obligations weakly collective obligations. It turns out that we – the affluent – have a collective obligation to combat global poverty only in the weak sense. The obligation is collective in the sense that there is joint necessity and that we must contribute to a collective endeavour. Our donations are intended as contributions to a shared goal. But our duty to combat poverty is not a collective duty in the non-distributive, strong sense. This means that we need not necessarily take up the slack left by others or else stop contributing when others do more than their fair share. (shrink)

At the end of 1671 and start of 1672, while in the service of the Archbishop and Elector of Mainz, Leibniz composed his Egypt Plan, which sought to persuade Louis XIV to invade Egypt. Scholars have generally supposed that Leibniz’s rationale for devising the plan was to divert Louis from his intended war with Holland. Little attention has been paid to the religious benefits that Leibniz identified in the plan, and those who do acknowledge them are often quick to downplay (...) them. This tendency to downplay or even dismiss the religious benefits Leibniz claimed of the Egypt Plan is undermotivated and stems from a very superficial reading of the documents that together comprise it. In this paper I argue that we should take seriously Leibniz’s claim that a French invasion of Egypt would bring religious benefits, and that he saw them as important and intrinsically desirable inasmuch as he came to believe that the execution of the plan would lead to the flowering of co-operation and brotherhood among Christians in a show of inter-denominational koinonia, that is, fellowship with other Christians in the participation of shared goals. (shrink)

The goal of this short chapter, aimed at philosophers, is to provide an overview and brief explanation of some central concepts involved in predictive processing (PP). Even those who consider themselves experts on the topic may find it helpful to see how the central terms are used in this collection. To keep things simple, we will first informally define a set of features important to predictive processing, supplemented by some short explanations and an alphabetic glossary. -/- The features described (...) here are not shared in all PP accounts. Some may not be necessary for an individual model; others may be contested. Indeed, not even all authors of this collection will accept all of them. To make this transparent, we have encouraged contributors to indicate briefly which of the features are necessary to support the arguments they provide, and which (if any) are incompatible with their account. For the sake of clarity, we provide the complete list here, very roughly ordered by how central we take them to be for “Vanilla PP” (i.e., a formulation of predictive processing that will probably be accepted by most researchers working on this topic). More detailed explanations will be given below. Note that these features do not specify individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of “predictive processing”. All we currently have is a semantic cluster, with perhaps some overlapping sets of jointly sufficient criteria. The framework is still developing, and it is difficult, maybe impossible, to provide theory-neutral explanations of all PP ideas without already introducing strong background assumptions. (shrink)

In 1976, Jo Freeman wrote an article for Ms. Magazine, entitled ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood’. It provoked an outpouring of letters from women relating their own experiences of trashing during the course of the second wave feminist movement—more letters than Ms. had received about any previous article. Since then, the technology has improved but the climate among feminists has not; trashing is now conducted on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, in front of ever-larger audiences and with (...) the magnified opportunities for destruction that these new platforms bring with them. Women already experience disproportionate harassment on social media; many feel trashing by other feminists to be much harder to accept. It’s one thing for people to hate feminists; resistance from those for whom a social justice movement represents a threat is par for the course. But it’s something else for feminists to hate each other. These are people with shared goals and a common enemy. What are the psychological mechanisms underlying this fact of life for feminist activists? Various explanations might be offered, from internalised misogyny, through volatility caused by histories of oppression, through envy and competitiveness, through ideological purity policing. Which are correct? Is the hatred that motivates trashing within feminism the same in quality and quantity, or different, from the affective dynamics inside other social movements? How does tribalism between warring feminist factions contribute to these dynamics, and to what extent is trashing underwritten by laudable moral goals (such as anti-elitism and anti-hierarchy) even when it goes too far or misfires? Can a liberation movement be successful without ideological purity policing, or is there a tension between achieving social justice outcomes and facilitating a healthy amount of disagreement and constructive criticism within a group? In this paper I’ll focus on potential explanations of the phenomena of trashing, including tribalism, power grabs, and purity policing; and the moral commitments that might lead feminists to trash each other. (shrink)

This chapter addresses an interpretive question about why Aristotle identifies generation, growth and nourishment as the three distinct functions or activities of nutritive soul. Scholars typically try to explain this by appealing to the shared goal of these activities, though there is no consensus about what that goal is: Does Aristotle think that generation is a way of keeping oneself alive (and thus that the shared goal is self-maintenance), or is nourishment really a quasi-generative activity (...) (and thus that the shared goal is “form (re)production”)? Rather than taking that approach, Gelber offers a different but complementary way of accounting for the unity of these activities, by focussing on the continuity of their shared physiological basis. As it is argued here, the fact that these biological processes form a continuous cycle stems from Aristotle’s adherence, in his biological theory, to principles from his hylomorphic metaphysics. Attending to the details in works such as Generation of Animals that focus on the mechanisms underlying generation, growth and nourishment, it is shown how we can construct a coherent account of the unity of the three nutritive soul activities. (shrink)

This paper commences from the critical observation that the Turing Test (TT) might not be best read as providing a definition or a genuine test of intelligence by proxy of a simulation of conversational behaviour. Firstly, the idea of a machine producing likenesses of this kind served a different purpose in Turing, namely providing a demonstrative simulation to elucidate the force and scope of his computational method, whose primary theoretical import lies within the realm of mathematics rather than cognitive modelling. (...) Secondly, it is argued that a certain bias in Turing’s computational reasoning towards formalism and methodological individualism contributed to systematically unwarranted interpretations of the role of the TT as a simulation of cognitive processes. On the basis of the conceptual distinction in biology between structural homology vs. functional analogy, a view towards alternate versions of the TT is presented that could function as investigative simulations into the emergence of communicative patterns oriented towards shared goals. Unlike the original TT, the purpose of these alternate versions would be co-ordinative rather than deceptive. On this level, genuine functional analogies between human and machine behaviour could arise in quasi-evolutionary fashion. (shrink)

WINNER BEST SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY BOOK IN 2021 / NASSP BOOK AWARD 2022 -/- Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by herself. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others? This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral (...) agents hold jointly, but not as unified collective agents. To think of some of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems. Where we have reason to believe that our efforts are most efficient as part of a collective endeavor we may incur collective obligations together with others who are similarly placed as long as we are able to establish compossible individual contributory strategies towards that goal. The book concludes with a discussion of “massively shared obligations” to large-scale moral problems such as global poverty. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is show how an initially appealing objection to David Hume's account of judgment can only be put forward by philosophers who accept an account of judgment that has its own sizable share of problems. To demonstrate this, I situate the views of John Locke, David Hume, and Thomas Reid with respect to each other, so as to illustrate how the appealing objection is linked to unappealing features of Locke's account of judgment.

The goal of the Department of Defense Net-Centric Data Strategy is to improve data sharing throughout the DoD. Data sharing is a critical element of interoperability in the emerging system-of-systems. Achieving interoperability requires the elimination of two types of data heterogeneity: differences of syntax and differences of semantics. This paper builds a path toward semantic uniformity through application of a disciplined approach to ontology. An ontology is a consensus framework representing the types of entities within a given domain and (...) the relations between them. The construction of an ontology begins when a Community of Interest (COI) identifies its authoritative data sources (ADS), which are usually manifest in relevant doctrinal publications, glossaries, data dictionaries, and logical data models. The identified terms are then defined in relation to a common logical framework that has been designed to ensure interoperability with other ontologies created on the basis of the same strategy. As will be described, the Command and Control (C2) Ontology will include representations of a substantial number of entities within the Command and Control (C2) domain. If domain ontologies (e.g. Strike and Counterinsurgency) semantically align with the C2 Ontology, then a substantial barrier to systems interoperability is thereby crossed. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to see how mental and language representations are unique from a video-game perspective, using two main criteria. First, I will posit that the level of being both an interactive work of fiction and a self-involving interactive fiction belongs to a fuzzy interval and that some works – and, therefore, some video games – are more immersive than others. Second, I will observe how propositions tie the player’s representations of the real world and the (...) game world. Starting from psychological theories of pretense in children’s make-believe games, I will then expand Nichols and Stich’s cognitive theory of pretense to include an extra layer related to the game world, i.e., player-specific representations that govern player-specific propositions. The representations dealing with the work world are the socially shared ones, while the possible-world representations, dealing with most of the game world, are player-specific and tied to unique language use. (shrink)

The advance of mechanism in science and philosophy in the 17th century created a great interest to machines or automata. Leibniz was no exception - in an early memoir Drôle de pensée he wrote admiringly about a machine that could walk on water, exhibited in Paris. The idea of automatic processing in general had a large role in his thought, as can be seen, for example, in his invention of the binary code and the so-called Calculemus!-model for solving controversies. In (...) metaphysics, the idea of an automata was expressed most clearly in the 1695 article New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication, and the ensuing correspondence with, among others, Foucher, Bayle, Lamy, Jaquelot and Masham. In the article Leibniz discusses the soul as a spiritual machine in the context of pre-established harmony, arguing that God can "give to a substance at the outset a nature or internal force which could produce in it an orderly way (as in spiritual or formal automaton; but a free one, in the case of a substance which is endowed with a share of reason) everything that is going to happen to it, that is to say, all the appearances or expressions it is going to have, and all without the help of any created thing." The basic idea of Leibniz's spiritual machine is that the soul or entelechy is an autonomous and spontaneous unity, consisting of internal active force and producing its own perceptions (both confused and distinct). It is a self-moving machine, driven by its perceptions and appetites, but it follows (without being conscious of it) a lawful series or programme created by God. The entelechy remains the same despite undergoing an infinite number of changes. To Foucher he explained that each state of the individual substance is a consequence of its preceding one, "as if there were only God and the substance in the world". Despite this, the spiritual machine is related not only to God, but through the pre-established harmony to bodies or natural machines. However, as it is not dependent on them, the spiritual machine is superiot to natural machines. In this paper I concentrate on three moral themes related to the spiritual machine: moral deliberation, moral identity and the goal of moral action. All these themes are more or less implicit in the New System, but are discussed in more detail in the ensuing correspondence after the publication of the article. Finally, the themes are given an extended discussion especially in the second book of New Essays on Human Understanding (1704, published 1765), written partly at the same time as some of the correspondence and unpublished related material. I will first give an overview of Leibniz's position concerning the spiritual machine or automaton in the New System and then go on to explore the three moral themes one by one, as they feature in the subsequent correspondence and in the New Essays. I will show that the three topics are essential to the function of the spiritual machine – to Sophie Charlotte Leibniz wrote: "...let us say that everything in bodies happens mechanically, or in accordance with laws of motion, and that everything in the soul happens morally, or in accordance with perceived good or evil." There are many texts that anticipate the views in the New System (notably the unpublished memoir De Affectibus of 1679) and Leibniz continued to discuss its themes later on (in addition to correpondence, for example, in Theodicy of 1710 and Monadology and Principles of Nature and Grace of 1714). Here I focus on the short-term development of Leibniz's views on the topic (around 1695-1705), but I argue that his basic view of the spiritual machine did not change much after finishing the dialogue with Locke in 1704. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the role of intention and joint attention in joint actions. Depending on the shared intentions the agents have, we distinguish between joint path-goal actions and joint final-goal actions. We propose an instrumental account of basic joint action analogous to a concept of basic action and argue that intentional joint attention is a basic joint action. Furthermore, we discuss the functional role of intentional joint attention for successful cooperation in complex joint actions. Anika (...) Fiebich is PhD student in Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Shaun Gallagher is Lilian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. (shrink)

We trace the difference between the ways in which apes and humans co–operate to differences in communicative abilities, claiming that the pressure for future–directed co–operation was a major force behind the evolution of language. Competitive co–operation concerns goals that are present in the environment and have stable values. It relies on either signalling or joint attention. Future–directed co–operation concerns new goals that lack fixed values. It requires symbolic communication and context–independent representations of means and goals. We analyse these ways of (...) co–operating in game–theoretic terms and submit that the co–operative strategy of games that involve shared representations of future goals may provide new equilibrium solutions. (shrink)

Two goals - improving replicability and accountability of Machine Learning research respectively, have accrued much attention from the AI ethics and the Machine Learning community. Despite sharing the measures of improving transparency, the two goals are discussed in different registers - replicability registers with scientific reasoning whereas accountability registers with ethical reasoning. Given the existing challenge of the Responsibility Gap - holding Machine Learning scientists accountable for Machine Learning harms due to them being far from sites of application, this paper (...) posits that reconceptualizing replicability can help bridge the gap. Through a shift from model performance replicability to claim replicability, Machine Learning scientists can be held accountable for producing non-replicable claims that are prone to eliciting harm due to misuse and misinterpretation. In this paper, I make the following contributions. First, I define and distinguish two forms of replicability for ML research that can aid constructive conversations around replicability. Second, I formulate an argument for claim-replicability's advantage over model performance replicability in justifying assigning accountability to Machine Learning scientists for producing non-replicable claims and show how it enacts a sense of responsibility that is actionable. In addition, I characterize the implementation of claim replicability as more of a social project than a technical one by discussing its competing epistemological principles, practical implications on Circulating Reference, Interpretative Labor, and research communication. (shrink)

If the concept of “free will” is reduced to that of “choice” all physical world shares the latter quality. Anyway the “free will” can be distinguished from the “choice”: The “free will” involves implicitly a certain goal, and the choice is only the mean, by which the aim can be achieved or not by the one who determines the target. Thus, for example, an electron has always a choice but not free will unlike a human possessing both. Consequently, and (...) paradoxically, the determinism of classical physics is more subjective and more anthropomorphic than the indeterminism of quantum mechanics for the former presupposes certain deterministic goal implicitly following the model of human freewill behavior. Quantum mechanics introduces the choice in the fundament of physical world involving a generalized case of choice, which can be called “subjectless”: There is certain choice, which originates from the transition of the future into the past. Thus that kind of choice is shared of all existing and does not need any subject: It can be considered as a low of nature. There are a few theorems in quantum mechanics directly relevant to the topic: two of them are called “free will theorems” by their authors (Conway and Kochen 2006; 2009). Any quantum system either a human or an electron or whatever else has always a choice: Its behavior is not predetermined by its past. This is a physical law. It implies that a form of information, the quantum information underlies all existing for the unit of the quantity of information is an elementary choice: either a bit or a quantum bit (qubit). (shrink)

The value of science partly lies on the development of useful products for humanity’s needs, but basic sciences cannot be said the “protagonists” of their obtention. Human history shows that these processes occur as a result of interactions between science and technology, mathematics, and engineering, as well as ethics and aesthetics. This network of disciplinary relationships facilitating the impact of scientific knowledge on human lives is at the center of discussions in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) (...) education, and will be the focus of this article. Since the problems encountered in people’s everyday activities cannot be solved with the knowledge and skill of a single discipline, there emerges an aim for general education to attain more holistic understandings required by human needs. Our conceptualization of STEM education, based on classical Greek philosophy, addresses this issue. We acknowledge that the traditional paradigm of monodisciplinary education, formed as a result of the separation of sciences over history, has been challenged in the last two decades with the rise of integrating approaches in science and technology education. STEM is consistently mentioned as a way for gaining the integrated knowledge and skills deemed important for the near future, but theoretical searches towards solving its basic problems are still ongoing and we take this as our general research problem. In this argumentative study, the philosophical approach proposed to shed light on STEM education practices is structured along two conceptual axes: integration of disciplines and inclusion of humanistic goals. Suitable foundations for our proposal are sought in Aristotelian philosophy: We use Aristotle’s conception of a particular kind of human activity—poiesis, that aims to create “useful” and “aesthetic” products in order to propose an engineering “center” or “core” in the design of STEM school practices. Our model, labeled as “poietic” STEM, incorporates key elements of the nature of engineering; under the light of such a model, some aspects of what is called the “nature of STEM” are discussed. We conclude that, in an education envisaging more holistic approaches towards citizen literacy, it is necessary to connect the performance of STEM with responsible human interaction. In accordance with this requirement, our approximation to STEM centered on an epistemologically sophisticated conception of engineering makes room for fostering shared awareness in students. (shrink)

In this paper, the goal is to investigate the nature of freedom enjoyed by participants in collective agency. Specifically, we aim to address the fol- lowing questions: in what respects are participants in collective agency able to exercise freedom in some weaker or stronger sense? In what ways is such col- lective or common freedom distinct from the freedom ascribed to individuals? Might there be different sorts of freedoms involved in and tolerated by collec- tive agency, each of which (...) has its own role in determining the nature and effi- cacy of the bond uniting its participants? Clarification of just what such free- dom may involve and how it subsists within collective agency is not only im- portant for being able to demonstrate the instrumental value of social ontology to contemporary political debates. It may likewise contribute an important di- mension to the descriptive psychology of collective agency and shared inten- tionality, which is an approach deserving of more attention. Here, such clari- fication is undertaken via a comparison to the notions of freedom at stake in the respective accounts of sociality and collective agency provided by Raimo Tuomela and Jean-Paul Sartre. (shrink)

This Research Topic focuses on both strengths and weaknesses of social innovation, technological innovation, and health innovation that are increasingly recognized as crucial concepts related to the formulation of responses to the social, health, and environmental challenges. Goals of this Research Topic: (1) to identify and share the best recent practices and innovations related to social, environmental and health policies; (2) to debate on relevant governance modes, management tools as well as evaluation and impact assessment techniques; (3) to discuss dilemmas (...) in the fields of management, financing, designing, implementing, testing, and maintaining the sustainability of innovative models of delivering social, health and care services; and (4) to recognize and analyze social, technological and health innovation that has emerged or has been scaled-up to respond to crisis situations, for example, a pandemic of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease. (shrink)

Perceptual systems respond to proximal stimuli by forming mental representations of distal stimuli. A central goal for the philosophy of perception is to characterize the representations delivered by perceptual systems. It may be that all perceptual representations are in some way proprietarily perceptual and differ from the representational format of thought (Dretske 1981; Carey 2009; Burge 2010; Block ms.). Or it may instead be that perception and cognition always trade in the same code (Prinz 2002; Pylyshyn 2003). This paper (...) rejects both approaches in favor of perceptual pluralism, the thesis that perception delivers a multiplicity of representational formats, some proprietary and some shared with cognition. The argument for perceptual pluralism marshals a wide array of empirical evidence in favor of iconic (i.e., image-like, analog) representations in perception as well as discursive (i.e., language-like, digital) perceptual object representations. (shrink)

In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public transparency – that is, transparency to the public over expert domains. (...) I offer two versions of the criticism. First, the epistemic intrusion argument: The drive to transparency forces experts to explain their reasoning to non-experts. But expert reasons are, by their nature, often inaccessible to non-experts. So the demand for transparency can pressure experts to act only in those ways for which they can offer public justification. Second, the intimate reasons argument: In many cases of practical deliberation, the relevant reasons are intimate to a community and not easily explicable to those who lack a particular shared background. The demand for transparency, then, pressures community members to abandon the special understanding and sensitivity that arises from their particular experiences. Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption — but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual’s capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust — if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non-expert public — then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise. (shrink)

This paper analyses the connection between Nietzsche’s early employment of the genealogical method and contemporary neo-pragmatism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by viewing Nietzsche’s writings in the light of neo-pragmatist ideas and reconstructing his approach to justice as a pragmatic genealogy, it seeks to bring out an under-appreciated aspect of his genealogical method which illustrates how genealogy can be used to vindicate rather than to subvert, and accounts for Nietzsche’s lack of historical references. On the other (...) hand, by highlighting what Nietzsche has to offer neo-pragmatism, it seeks to contribute to neo-pragmatism’s conception of genealogy. The paper argues that Nietzsche and the neo-pragmatists share a naturalistic concern and a pragmatist strategy in responding to it. The paper then shows that Nietzsche avoids a reductive form of functionalism by introducing a temporal axis, but that this axis should be understood as a developmental model rather than as historical time. This explains Nietzsche’s failure to engage with history. The paper concludes that pragmatic genealogy can claim a genuinely Nietzschean pedigree. (shrink)

According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t (...) been given the attention they deserve, that complicate the application of the standard conception to cases, and that reveal it to be underspecified at the core—in ways that aren’t resolved but inherited by more specific (extant) versions of it. The goal isn’t to answer the questions, but to articulate them, explain what turns on them, and invite a critical re-examination of the standard conception. (shrink)

Our life with art is suffused with trust. We don’t just trust one another’s aesthetic testimony; we trust one another’s aesthetic actions. Audiences trust artists to have made it worth their while; artists trust audiences to put in the effort. Without trust, audiences would have little reason to put in the effort to understand difficult and unfamiliar art. I offer a theory of aesthetic trust, which highlights the importance of trust in aesthetic sincerity. We trust in another’s aesthetic sincerity when (...) we rely on them to fulfill their commitments to act for aesthetic reasons — rather than for, say, financial, social, or political reasons. We feel most thoroughly betrayed by an artist, not when they make bad art, but when they sell out. This teaches us something about the nature of trust in general. According to many standard theories, trust involves thinking the trusted to be cooperative or good-natured. But trust in aesthetic sincerity is different. We trust artists to be true to their own aesthetic sensibility, which might involve selfishly ignoring their audience’s needs. Why do we care so much about an artist’s sincerity, rather than merely trusting them to make good art? We emphasize sincerity when wish to encourage originality, rather than to demand success along predictable lines. And we ask for sincerity when our goal is to discover a shared sensibility. In moral life, we often try to force convergence through coordinated effort. But in aesthetic life, we often hope for the lovely discovery that our sensibilities were similar all along. And for that we need to ask for sincerity, rather than overt coordination. (shrink)

The received wisdom on ability modals is that they differ from their epistemic and deontic cousins in what inferences they license and better receive a universal or conditional analysis instead of an existential one. The goal of this paper is to sharpen the empirical picture about the semantics of ability modals, and to propose an analysis that explains what makes the can of ability so special but that also preserves the crucial idea that all uses of can share a (...) common lexical semantics. The resulting framework combines tools and techniques from dynamic and inquisitive semantics with insights from the literature of the role of agency in deontic logic. It explains not only why the can of ability, while essentially being an existential modal operator, sometimes resists distribution over disjunction and interacts with its duals in particular and hitherto unnoticed ways, but also has a tendency to license free choice inferences. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper compares Spinoza with Daniel Dennett and uncovers a number of striking parallels. Genevieve Lloyd’s recent work on Spinoza reveals a picture of a philosopher that anticipated many of Dennett’s later ideas. Both share a fervent opposition to Descartes’ conception of mind and body and endorse a strikingly similar naturalist philosophy. It is the goal of this paper to tease out these connections and once again highlight the richness of a Spinozist lens of the world.

Epistemic instrumentalists think that epistemic normativity is just a special kind of instrumental normativity. According to them, you have epistemic reason to believe a proposition insofar as doing so is conducive to certain epistemic goals or aims—say, to believe what is true and avoid believing what is false. Perhaps the most prominent challenge for instrumentalists in recent years has been to explain, or explain away, why one’s epistemic reasons often do not seem to depend on one’s aims. This challenge can (...) arguably be met. But a different challenge looms: instrumental reasons in the practical domain have various properties that epistemic reasons do not seem to share. In this chapter, we offer a way for epistemic instrumentalists to overcome this challenge. Our main thesis takes the form of a conditional: if we accept an independently plausible transmission principle of instrumental normativity, we can maintain that epistemic reasons in fact do share the relevant properties of practical instrumental reasons. In addition, we can explain why epistemic reasons seem to lack these properties in the first place: some properties of epistemic reasons are elusive, or easy to overlook, because we tend to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an ‘elliptical’ manner. (shrink)

In virtue of what are we responsible for our beliefs? I argue that doxastic responsibility has a crucial social component: part of being responsible for our beliefs is being responsible to others. I suggest that this responsibility is a form of answerability with two distinct dimensions: an individual and an interpersonal dimension. While most views hold that the individual dimension is grounded in some form of control that we can exercise over our beliefs, I contend that we are answerable for (...) our beliefs as long as they reflect our evaluative commitments and dispositions, or are products of our reasoning, where this does not amount to a form of control. I next argue that answerability has a second, largely neglected dimension: the interpersonal dimension, which is grounded in what I call our relations of doxastic dependence. As social creatures, we depend on one another in our capacity as believers. We depend on one another as believers not only in epistemic ways, but also in practical ways, because our beliefs inform and motivate our actions, and allow us to participate in shared practical goals. Depending on one another in these ways is an unavoidable part of cooperating in the shared project of pursuing epistemic and practical success, and it makes us vulnerable to both epistemic and moral harm. It is because of this, I argue, that answerability has interpersonal normative force upon us: we are subject to legitimate expectations associated with participating in relations of doxastic dependence. (shrink)

Napolitano (2021) argues that the Minimalist Account of conspiracy theories—i.e., which defines conspiracy theories as explanations, or theories, about conspiracies—should be rejected. Instead, she proposes to define conspiracy theories as a certain kind of belief—i.e., an evidentially self-insulated belief in a conspiracy. Napolitano argues that her account should be favored over the Minimalist Account based on two considerations: ordinary language intuitions and theoretical fruitfulness. I show how Napolitano’s account fails its own purposes with respect to these two considerations and so (...) should not be favored over the Minimalist Account. Furthermore, I propose that the Minimalist Account is the best conception of ‘conspiracy theory’ if we share Napolitano’s goal of advancing the understanding of conspiracy theories. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently found it congenial to talk in terms of grounding. Grounding discourse features grounding sentences that are answers to questions about what grounds what. The goal of this article is to explore and defend a counterpart-theoretic interpretation of grounding discourse. We are familiar with David Lewis's applications of the method of counterpart theory to de re modal discourse. Counterpart-theoretic interpretations of de re modal idioms and grounding sentences share similar motivations, mechanisms, and applications. I (...) shall explain my motivations and describe two applications of a counterpart theory for grounding discourse. But, in this article, my main focus is on counterpart-theoretic mechanisms. (shrink)

Apoha, a Sanskrit term meaning exclusion, was used by the late fifth- to early sixth-century Buddhist philosopher Dignā ga as a keystone in his theory of denotation. According to Dignā ga, a word denotes its meaning through the exclusion of what is other (anyā poha). This idea provoked celebration and controversy that would last through the end of Sanskritic Indian Buddhism. In the hands of Dignā ga’s successor Dharmakīrti (seventh century), who developed what became the normative version of this theory, (...) apoha leverages the fact that a causally efficacious real thing is different from everything else to describe how the interaction between living beings and their worlds produces judgements that are either shared or not in accord with the various factors contributing to the judgement’s formation. Dharmakīrti argues that there’s an infinite number of ways that a real thing could be conceptualised since each real thing is different from the infinite expanse of other real things. Acting toward a real thing requires delimiting the scope of what one ignores so that just some of the differences are left over. A living being can afford to ignore the differences between the differences that are left over in this exclusion because these differences don’t impact the specific goal based on which the living being judges an object to be efficacious or not. (shrink)

Effective altruism sounds so innocuous—who could possibly be opposed to doing good more effectively? Yet it has inspired significant backlash in recent years. This paper addresses some common misconceptions and argues that the core “beneficentric” ideas of effective altruism are both excellent and widely neglected. Reasonable people may disagree on details of implementation, but all should share the basic goals or values underlying effective altruism.

The analytical notions of ‘thought style’, ‘paradigm’, ‘episteme’ and ‘style of reasoning’ are some of the most popular frameworks in the history and philosophy of science. Although their proponents, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Ian Hacking, are all part of the same philosophical tradition that closely connects history and philosophy, the extent to which they share similar assumptions and objectives is still under debate. In the first part of the paper, I shall argue that, despite the fact that (...) these four thinkers disagree on certain assumptions, their frameworks have the same explanatory goal – to understand how objectivity is possible. I shall present this goal as a necessary element of a common project -- that of historicising Kant's a priori. In the second part of the paper, I shall make an instrumental use of the insights of these four thinkers to form a new model for studying objectivity. I shall also propose a layered diagram that allows the differences between the frameworks to be mapped, while acknowledging their similarities. This diagram will show that the frameworks of style of reasoning and episteme illuminate conditions of possibility that lie at a deeper level than those considered by thought styles and paradigm. (shrink)

Our moral obligations can sometimes be collective in nature: They can jointly attach to two or more agents in that neither agent has that obligation on their own, but they – in some sense – share it or have it in common. In order for two or more agents to jointly hold an obligation to address some joint necessity problem they must have joint ability to address that problem. Joint ability is highly context-dependent and particularly sensitive to shared (or (...) even common) beliefs. As such, joint ability can be deliberately generated in a given collection of agents by providing information related to collective goals and contributory actions. As moral agents, we regularly face problems wherein the outcome of our actions depends on how others choose. There are two ways of deliberating about our own choices in such cases. We can either think of our choices as best responses to others’ choices (I-mode reasoning). Or we can think of our own choices as contributions to the collectively best option (even when we do not know how others are (likely) to choose) (we-mode reasoning). In deliberating about the right (individual) course of action vis-à-vis collective action problems, agents regularly we-frame the case at hand, that is, they include options in their deliberation that are only collectively available, and they we-reason with regard to their individual contributory actions. It is a necessary condition for collective obligations that potential collaborators facing a joint necessity case have grounds to privilege we-reasoning over reasoning in I-mode. (shrink)

The automatic integration of information resources in the life sciences is one of the most challenging goals facing biomedical informatics today. Controlled vocabularies have played an important role in realizing this goal, by making it possible to draw together information from heterogeneous sources secure in the knowledge that the same terms will also represent the same entities on all occasions of use. One of the most impressive achievements in this regard is the Gene Ontology (GO), which is rapidly acquiring (...) the status of a de facto standard in the field of gene and gene product annotations, and whose methodology has been much intimated in attempts to develop controlled vocabularies for shared use in different domains of biology. The GO Consortium has recognized, however, that its controlled vocabulary as currently constituted is marked by several problematic features - features which are characteristic of much recent work in bioinformatics and which are destined to raise increasingly serious obstacles to the automatic integration of biomedical information in the future. Here, we survey some of these problematic features, focusing especially on issues of compositionality and syntactic regimentation. (shrink)

What does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of (...) the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged. (shrink)

Hilde Lindemann argues that personhood is the shared practice of recognizing and responding to one another. She calls this practice holding. Holding, however, can fail. Holding failure, by stereotyping for example, can inhibit others’ epistemic confidence and ability to recall true beliefs as well as create an environment of racism or sexism. How might we avoid holding failure? Holding failure, I argue, has many epistemic dimensions, so I argue that moral encroachment has the theoretical tools available to avoid holding (...) failures. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to articulate and understand the epistemology of holding in an attempt to remedy holding failure. I show that the virtue of wokeness emerges from an epistemic environment tainted with moral encroachment. I argue that as long as an individual is woke, she will have a tendency to avoid holding failures. Wokeness and moral encroachment, consequently, are fundamental to the epistemology of holding and consistent proper holding. (shrink)