The study aims to help characterize the sort of structures about which people can acquire unconscious knowledge. It is already well established that people can implicitly learn n-grams and also repetition patterns. We explore the acquisition of unconscious structural knowledge of symmetry. Chinese Tang poetry uses a specific sort of mirror symmetry, an inversion rule with respect to the tones of characters in successive lines of verse. We show, using artificial poetry to control both n-gram structure and repetition patterns, that (...) people can implicitly learn to discriminate inversions from non-inversions, presenting a challenge to existing models of implicit learning. (shrink)

Research investigating listeners’ neural sensitivity to speech sounds has largely focused on segmental features. We examined Australian English listeners’ perception and learning of a supra-segmental feature, pitch direction in a non-native tonal contrast, using a passive oddball paradigm and electroencephalography. The stimuli were two contours generated from naturally produced high-level and high-falling tones in Mandarin Chinese, differing only in pitch direction ( Liu and Kager, 2014 ). While both contours had similar pitch onsets, the pitch offset of the falling (...) contour was lower than that of the level one. The contrast was presented in two orientations (standard and deviant reversed) and tested in two blocks with the order of block presentation counterbalanced. Mismatch negativity (MMN) responses showed that listeners discriminated the non-native tonal contrast only in the second block, reflecting indications of learning through exposure during the first block. In addition, listeners showed a later MMN peak for their second block of test relative to listeners who did the same block first, suggesting linguistic (as opposed to acoustic) processing or a misapplication of perceptual strategies from the first to the second block. The results also showed a perceptual asymmetry for change in pitch direction: listeners who encountered a falling tone deviant in the first block had larger frontal MMN amplitudes than listeners who encountered a level tone deviant in the first block. The implications of our findings for second language speech and the developmental trajectory for tone perception are discussed. (shrink)

The thesis develops a cognitivist account of the supposed ineffability of musical experience. It is contended that, when the ineffability is viewed as adhering to a certain kind of perceptual knowledge of a musical signal, its nature can be illuminated by the adoption of a recent cognitivist theory of perception in conjunction with a generative grammar for tonal music . On this two-headed view, music perception consists in a rule-governed process of computing a series of increasingly abstract mental representations (...) of a musical signal. In this framework the investigation of musical ineffability is recast as the search for a level of mental representation of whose content we are conscious but cannot make verbal report. Two types of report are distinguished--one consisting in so-called absolute identification, the other in comparative identification or discrimination. It turns out that certain features of the signal are likely to be computed at such superficial or "shallow" neuronal levels that they fail to be mentally categorized in the manner thought necessary for the learning of verbal labels and ipso facto for report of the first kind. Therein, on the present account, lies their ineffability, called 'perceptual ineffability'. These shallow features do, however, admit of comparative identification and ipso facto of the second kind of report. Hence a principal task of the thesis is to show how a kind of ineffability and a kind of report are compatible. ;The account of perceptual ineffability is then set against two well-known texts in contemporary philosophy of art in order to show that it squares with more standard approaches and makes good on its explanatory promises. It is hoped that, over and above its proposed solution to a longstanding problem in aesthetics, the present study may shed some light on the relationship between philosophical and scientific theorizing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Style: A Queer Cosmology by S. Taylor BlackJoe Edward HatfieldStyle: A Queer Cosmology. By Taylor Black. New York: New York University Press, 2023. 304 pp. Hardcover $99.00, paper $35.00. ISBN- 10: 147982500X.Style is a perennial concern within rhetorical studies. As one of Aristotle's five canons, style has inspired a great deal of rhetorical theory over the past two millennia and counting. Hence, it would be reasonable to presume (...) that there is not much, if anything, else original to contribute to the well-trodden domain of the stylistic. However, Taylor Black's Style: A Queer Cosmology challenges this assumption by offering a fresh take on its titular concept. The book's grounding in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies allows its author to speak to multiple audiences at once, including those invested in queer theory, race and ethnicity, popular culture, new materialism, and literary criticism. To this inventory, I would add anyone interested in the art of rhetoric, particularly those committed to incorporating new, diverse perspectives into the field's existing analytical tool chest. Tonally whimsical but nonetheless boldly argued, Style dramatically reframes a timeworn concept in the rhetorical lexicon that many of us have likely—and mistakenly—come to take for granted.Readers of this journal will be immediately seduced by Black's provocative rethinking of style as elemental. Here, the term "elemental" directs attention toward style as "the rudimentary source of difference that distinguishes one thing from another, something perhaps, more closely aligned with myth than fact: an immaterial force or energy, perhaps supernatural in essence, that imbues everything under the sun" (5). As Black infers throughout the book's introduction, style is the expression of difference available to all human and nonhuman beings. More than aesthetic ornamentation, or the mere ability to make oneself appear outwardly beautiful, style is a mysterious yet universal condition of possibility underlying the cultivation [End Page 226] of a personality. Style names the intertwined processes of self-fashioning and self-discovery that produce individuation as its outcome. And though everyone "has" a style, Black asserts, "not everyone is a stylist" (15). Black posits the figure of the stylist to denote a minoritarian subject who transmutes the experience of oppression into a purposeful performance of self. Upon realizing their exclusion from a majoritarian social order organized by deeply embedded attachments to a hierarchy of difference that discriminates on bases of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other intersecting codes of identification, stylists turn their failure to conform into an opportunity for opening possibilities for alternative futures.In other words, from the limitations that accompany experiences of structural oppression, style authorizes potential. Referencing Zora Neale Hurston's 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Black suggests stylists tend to dwell in cosmology, a form of storytelling or narrative fabulation about the universe's origins and one's place in its ongoing unfolding. "Stylists," Black poetically avers, are "naturally drawn to understanding the universe better by virtue of developing a more and more acute consciousness of who and what they are and how they came to be" (20). Black highlights style's fundamental elementality as emerging from cosmic renderings of marginalized experience and the pursuit of a future otherwise. To further illustrate this elemental notion of the stylistic, Black assembles an eclectic corpus of texts by those he calls "subterranean American stylists" (5), namely Quentin Crisp, Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, whose lives and work he examines over seven chapters divided into three main parts. Each chapter supplies unique insights on the elementals of style, as well as its subject matter, thus allowing Black to support the thesis constructed in the introduction without ever seeming overly redundant.The first part of Style, "The Mystery of Personality: Queerness as Style," consists of a preface and two chapters oriented around the specific ways stylizations of queer selfhood may function as a survival strategy and, relatedly, a means for exploring elemental mysteries of personality and being. In the initial chapter, Black analyzes texts authored by openly gay memoirist and cultural commentor Quentin Crisp, who became famous for his humorous and often brash... (shrink)

Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists. One controversy concerns the existence of a typological class of “pitch accent languages,” another the underlying phonological nature of surface tone contrasts, (...) which in some cases have been claimed to be metrical rather than tonal. We address the question whether the Sequence Recall Task, which has been shown to discriminate between languages with and without word stress, can distinguish languages with and without lexical tone. Using participants from non-tonal Indonesian, semi-tonal Swedish, and two varieties of tonal Mandarin, we ran SRTs with monosyllabic tonal contrasts to test the hypothesis that high performance in a tonal SRT indicates the lexical status of tone. An additional question concerned the extent to which accuracy scores depended on phonological and phonetic properties of a language’s tone system, like its complexity, the existence of an experimental contrast in a language’s phonology, and the phonetic salience of a contrast. The results suggest that a tonal SRT is not likely to discriminate between tonal and non-tonal languages within a typologically varied group, because of the effects of specific properties of their tone systems. Future research should therefore address the first hypothesis with participants from otherwise similar tonal and non-tonal varieties of the same language, where results from a tonal SRT may make a useful contribution to the typological debate on word prosody. (shrink)

Credible signaling may have provided a selection pressure for producing and discriminating increasingly elaborate proto-musical signals. But, why evolve them to have hierarchical structure? We argue that the hierarchality of tonality and meter is a byproduct of domain-general mechanisms evolved for reasons other than credible signaling.

Similar to visual perception, auditory perception also has a clearly described “pop-out” effect, where an element with some extra feature is easier to detect among elements without an extra feature. This phenomenon is better known as auditory perceptual asymmetry. We investigated such asymmetry between shorter or longer duration, and level or falling of pitch of linguistic stimuli that carry a meaning in one language (Estonian), but not in another (Russian). For the mismatch negativity (MMN) experiment, we created four different types (...) of stimuli by modifying the duration of the first vowel [ɑ] (170, 290 ms) and pitch contour (level vs. falling pitch) of the stimuli words (‘SATA,’ ‘SAKI’). The stimuli were synthesized from Estonian words (‘SATA,’ ‘SAKI’) and follow the Estonian language three-way quantity system, which incorporates tonal features (falling pitch contour) together with temporal patterns. This made the meaning of the word dependent on the combination of both features and allows us to compare the relative contribution of duration and pitch contour in discrimination of language stimuli in the brain via MMN generation. The participants of the experiment were 12 Russian native speakers with little or no experience in Estonian and living in Estonia short-term, and 12 Estonian native speakers (age 18–27 years). We found that participants’ perception of the linguistic stimuli differed not only according to the physical features but also according to their native language, confirming that the meaning of the word interferes with the early automatic processing of phonological features. The GAMM and ANOVA analysis of the reversed design results showed that the deviant with longer duration among shorter standards elicited a MMN response with greater amplitude than the short deviant among long standards, while changes in pitch contour (falling vs. level pitch) produced neither strong MMN nor asymmetry. Thus, we demonstrate the effect of language background on asymmetric perception of linguistic stimuli that aligns with those of previous studies (Jaramillo et al., 2000), and contributes to the growing body of knowledge supporting auditory perceptual asymmetry. (shrink)

“Consonance” and “dissonance” can be shown to denote a syndrome of relative characteristics falling within three distinct dimensions of experience: 1) tension-repose, 2) pleasure-displeasure, 3) coherence-incoherence. There is a demonstrable, complex relationship between the specific degree of each of those characteristics associated with a particular tonal interval and the degree of complication of the ratio of that interval. No extant theory is able to explain that correlation, including the currently popular theory of psychological expectation. Using micro-phenomenology, I hypothesize that (...) a consonant tonal interval is simply one that can be subliminally discriminated with relative ease and a dissonant interval is one that is relatively indiscriminable. Predictions implied by the hypothesis can be shown consistent with musical experience. If the theory is true, the affective character of harmonic progression is more the result of the need to discriminate tonal proportionality than the effect of expectation. (shrink)

The gaze cueing effect is characterized by faster attentional orienting to a gazed-at than a non-gazed-at target. This effect is often enhanced when the gazing face bears an emotional expression, though this finding is modulated by a number of factors. Here, we tested whether the type of task performed might be one such modulating factor. Target localization and target discrimination tasks are the two most commonly used gaze cueing tasks, and they arguably differ in cognitive resources, which could impact (...) how emotional expression and gaze cues are integrated to orient attention. In a within-subjects design, participants performed both target localization and discrimination gaze cueing tasks with neutral, happy, and fearful faces. The gaze cueing effect for neutral faces was greatly reduced in the discrimination task relative to the localization task, and the emotional enhancement of the gaze cueing effect was only present in the localization task and only when this task was performed first. These results suggest that cognitive resources are needed for gaze cueing and for the integration of emotional expressions and gaze cues. We propose that a shift toward local processing may be the mechanism by which the discrimination task interferes with the emotional modulation of gaze cueing. The results support the idea that gaze cueing can be greatly modulated by top-down influences and cognitive resources and thus taps into endogenous attention. Results are discussed within the context of the recently proposed EyeTune model of social attention. (shrink)

The article argues that discrimination is bad as such when and because it undermines equality of opportunity. It shows, first, that other accounts, such as those concerning intent, efficiency, false representation, prejudice, respect and desert cannot account for the badness of discrimination as such. The inequality of opportunity account, in contrast, captures everything that is bad about discrimination. The article then addresses some counter-examples of practices that are discriminatory without arguably entailing inequality of opportunity, where the notable (...) case is that of segregation. It is further demonstrated that the account successfully handles some of the tricky aspects associated with discrimination, such as those concerning the confinement of discrimination to salient groups, discriminatees by means of financial compensation, in the selection of life partners, and the duties of employers. (shrink)

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social (...) constructionism has always had its critics. Sesardic (2010) has compiled these criticisms into one of the strongest defences of racial naturalism in recent times. In this paper I argue that Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism: a weak version and a strong version. As I shall argue, the strong version is not supported by the relevant science. The weak version, on the other hand, does not contrast properly with what social constructionists think about ‘race’. By leaning on this weak view Sesardic’s racial naturalism intermittently gains an appearance of plausibility, but this view is too weak to revive racial naturalism. As Sesardic demonstrates, there are new arguments for racial naturalism post-Human Genome Diversity Project. The positive message behind my critique is how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era. (shrink)

I develop a theory of (mental) reference according to which there are two ways of referring to an object. One can refer to an object by relying on a previous instance of successful reference to that (or some other) object. I call this type of reference 'dependent reference'. Alternatively, one can refer to an object 'independently'. A referential attempt is independent if and only if it is not dependent. I argue that these two types of reference differ as they adhere (...) to different norms. While it may be possible to think about an object without the ability to uniquely individuate it if one thinks about it dependently, the same may not hold true in the case of independent thought. At least, the classic arguments that attempt to demonstrate the possibility of thinking about something without the ability to uniquely individuate it are irrelevant to independent reference. Furthermore, not all reference could be dependent. -/- Along the way, I do a few other things as well. (shrink)

The increasing implementation of and reliance on machine-learning (ML) algorithms to perform tasks, deliver services and make decisions in health and healthcare have made the need for fairness in ML, and more specifically in healthcare ML algorithms (HMLA), a very important and urgent task. However, while the debate on fairness in the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) and in HMLA has grown significantly over the last decade, the very concept of fairness as an ethical value has not yet been sufficiently (...) explored. Our paper aims to fill this gap and address the AI ethics principle of fairness from a conceptual standpoint, drawing insights from accounts of fairness elaborated in moral philosophy and using them to conceptualise fairness as an ethical value and to redefine fairness in HMLA accordingly. To achieve our goal, following a first section aimed at clarifying the background, methodology and structure of the paper, in the second section, we provide an overview of the discussion of the AI ethics principle of fairness in HMLA and show that the concept of fairness underlying this debate is framed in purely distributive terms and overlaps with non-discrimination, which is defined in turn as the absence of biases. After showing that this framing is inadequate, in the third section, we pursue an ethical inquiry into the concept of fairness and argue that fairness ought to be conceived of as an ethical value. Following a clarification of the relationship between fairness and non-discrimination, we show that the two do not overlap and that fairness requires much more than just non-discrimination. Moreover, we highlight that fairness not only has a distributive but also a socio-relational dimension. Finally, we pinpoint the constitutive components of fairness. In doing so, we base our arguments on a renewed reflection on the concept of respect, which goes beyond the idea of equal respect to include respect for individual persons. In the fourth section, we analyse the implications of our conceptual redefinition of fairness as an ethical value in the discussion of fairness in HMLA. Here, we claim that fairness requires more than non-discrimination and the absence of biases as well as more than just distribution; it needs to ensure that HMLA respects persons both as persons and as particular individuals. Finally, in the fifth section, we sketch some broader implications and show how our inquiry can contribute to making HMLA and, more generally, AI promote the social good and a fairer society. (shrink)

It is common for conservationists to refer to non-native species that have undesirable impacts on humans as “invasive”. We argue that the classification of any species as “invasive” constitutes wrongful discrimination. Moreover, we argue that its being wrong to categorize a species as invasive is perfectly compatible with it being morally permissible to kill animals—assuming that conservationists “kill equally”. It simply is not compatible with the double standard that conservationists tend to employ in their decisions about who lives and (...) who dies. (shrink)

Victims of oppressive (e.g., sexist, racist or ableist) structures sometimes internalize the unjust norms that prevail in society. This can cause these victims to develop preferences or make deci-sions that seem bad for them. Focusing on such cases, we ask: is self-discrimination disrespectful? We show that some of the most sophisticated respect theories fail to provide any clear guidance. Specifically, we show that the widely recognized view that respect has two dimensions—an interest dimension and an autonomy dimension—delivers completely opposite (...) verdicts depending on how these two dimensions (and the relation between them) are specified. A main takeaway point is that we need to distinguish between at least four different respect-based views. Whether self-discrimination caused by internalized oppression is disrespectful depends on which view one supports. (shrink)

Algorithmic discrimination has rapidly become a topic of intense public and academic interest. This article explores three issues raised by algorithmic discrimination: 1) the distinction between direct and indirect discrimination, 2) the notion of disadvantageous treatment, and 3) the moral badness of discriminatory automated decision-making. It argues that some conventional distinctions between direct and indirect discrimination appear not to apply to algorithmic discrimination, that algorithmic discrimination may often be discrimination between groups, as opposed (...) to against groups, and that it is not necessarily the case that morally bad algorithmic discrimination gives us reason to not use automated decision-making. For each of the three issues, the article explores implications for algorithmic discrimination, suggests some alternative answers, and clarifies how we may want to think of discrimination more broadly in light of lessons drawn from the context of algorithmic discrimination. (shrink)

In this article I critically examine a standard feature in conceptions of discrimination: the group-criterion, specifically the idea that there is a limited and definablegroup of traits that can form the basis of discrimination. I review two types of argument for the criterion. One focuses on inherently relevant groups and relies ultimately on luck-egalitarian principles; the other focuses on contextually relevant groups and relies ultimately on the badness of outcomes. I conclude that as neither type of argument is (...) convincing, the criterion is morally arbitrary, and as such untenable. Finally, I suggest both some of the conceptual and some of the practical implications of abandoning the criterion. (shrink)

Australia, Canada, and New Zealand currently apply health requirements to prospective immigrants, denying residency to those with health conditions that are likely to impose an “excessive demand” on their publicly funded health and social service programs. In this paper, I investigate the charge that such policies are wrongfully discriminatory against persons with disabilities. I first provide a freedom-based account of the wrongness of discrimination according to which discrimination is wrong when and because it involves disadvantaging people in the (...) exercise of their freedom on the basis of morally arbitrary features of their identity. Discrimination is permissible, I suggest, when it is necessary to advance a valuable exercise of the discriminating agent’s freedom. I then apply this account to the case of social cost health requirements. Against critics of these requirements, I argue that it is sometimes permissible for states to discriminate against prospective immigrants with disabilities. States may do so, I suggest, when such discriminatory treatment is necessary to prevent an increase in rates of mortality and/or morbidity amongst citizens. Alongside critics of social cost health requirements however, I argue that existing policies are likely a form of wrongful discrimination insofar as they are too broad to satisfy this standard. (shrink)

Categorical perception (CP) is said to occur when a continuum of equally spaced physical changes is perceived as unequally spaced as a function of category membership (Harnad, S. (Ed.) (1987). Psychophysical and cognitive aspects of categorical perception: A critical overview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A common suggestion is that CP for color arises because perception is qualitatively distorted when we learn to categorize a dimension. Contrary to this view, we here report that English speakers show no evidence of lowered (...) class='Hi'>discrimination thresholds at the boundaries between blue and green categories even though CP is found at these boundaries in a supra-threshold task. Furthermore, there is no evidence of different discrimination thresholds between individuals from two language groups (English and Korean) who use different color terminology in the blue-green region and have different supra-threshold boundaries. Our participants' just noticeable difference (JND) thresholds suggest that they retain a smooth continuum of perceptual space that is not warped by stretching at category boundaries or by within-category compression. At least for the domain of color, categorical perception appears to be a categorical, but not a perceptual phenomenon. (shrink)

This article explores the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the recognition of a ground of unlawful discrimination. It is important not only to have a coherent understanding of the currently enumerated grounds, but also to have a theoretical framework that can assist in enumerating new grounds through the open-ended “other status” aspect of many legal frameworks. To that end, this article argues that personal characteristics that are generally morally irrelevant, and that are socially salient in that they carry (...) with them a prevalence of inequality-laden attitudes, amount to necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for recognizing a ground of unlawful discrimination. Other conditions, such as immutability and the presence of relative group disadvantage, will be assessed and dismissed as contingent but not necessary conditions. (shrink)

In a co-authored piece with Adam Slavny, I argued that any promising account of the wrongness of discrimination must focus not only on the harmful outcomes of discriminatory acts but also on the deliberation of the discriminator and in particular on the reasons that motivate or fail to motivate her action. In this brief paper, I defend this conclusion against an objection that has recently been pressed against our view by Richard Arneson. This task is important not only because (...) Arneson’s objection is an intriguing one, but also -- and more importantly -- because my response sheds further light on the content and structure of an attractive theory of wrongful discrimination, as well as on more fundamental ideas in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Our concern in this paper lies with a common argument from racial discrimination to realism about races: some people are discriminated against for being members of a particular race (i.e., racial discrimination exists), so some people must be members of that race (i.e., races exist). Error theorists have long responded that we can explain racial discrimination in terms of racial attitudes alone, so we need not explain it in terms of race itself. But to date there has (...) been little detailed discussion of whether it is better to explain racial discrimination in terms of race or in terms of racial attitudes alone. Our goal is to offer a novel and detailed argument in defense of explaining racial discrimination in terms of racial attitudes alone, by attending to the neglected phenomenon of misperception discrimination, which involves differential treatment due to misperceived race. We argue that the discriminatory action in misperception cases must be explained in the same way as cases where (according to the realist) the victim’s race is accurately perceived. Thus, the victim’s actual race cannot provide the best explanation. The main upshot of our argument is that explanatory arguments from racial discrimination to realism about race fail. (shrink)

The current public health crisis has exposed deep cracks in social equality and justice for marginalised and vulnerable communities around the world. The reported rise in the number of ‘do not resuscitate’ orders being imposed on people with disabilities has caused particular concerns from a human rights perspective. While the evidence of this is contested, this article will consider the human rights implications at stake and the dangers associated with using ‘quality of life’ measures as determinant of care in medical (...) decision-making and triage assessments. (shrink)

People with cognitive impairments often have difficulties formulating, understanding, or articulating decisions that others judge reasonable. The frequent response shifts decision-making authority to substitutes through advance directives of the person or guardianship orders from a court. The Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities defends supported decision-making as an alternative to such forms of supplanted decision-making. But supported decision-making raises both metaphysical questions—what is required for a decision to be the person’s own?—and epistemological questions: how do we know what (...) persons judge to be their good, when they have difficulty conceptualizing and articulating? It raises practical questions, too, such as protection against risks of exploitation. This article uses a non-discrimination account of legal personhood drawn from the CRPD to explore how common features of decisions employed by people without cognitive disabilities are important in supported decision-making too. These features include prostheses, guardrails, relationships, and social contexts. (shrink)

In 2015, the predominantly visible minority immigrant community of Herongate, in Ottawa, Ontario, was slated for redevelopment by its landlord, Timbercreek Asset Management. This redevelopment involved mass eviction of the incumbent tenants, demolition of the existing affordable housing and its replacement with luxury rentals, which, by all indications, are beyond the financial reach of the former Herongage tenants. This paper seeks to problematize large-scale residential real estate redevelopment in Canada and examine its impact, using the Herongate situation as a case (...) study. Among other things, it profiles the Herongate community, its history and present redevelopment, and explores the legal framework, and the limits thereof, constraining mass evictions of this type in Ontario. The findings indicate that the selection of Herongate for redevelopment was not fortuitous; generally, racialized and immigrant communities like Herongate are disproportionately likely to be selected for large-scale redevelopment projects, and thus subjected to mass-evictions. Further results suggest that the dissolution of the Herongate community – and the attendant dislocation of its members – has exacted a pronounced social and economic toll and compounded the racial discrimination already experienced by the former Herongate residents, most of whom are visible minorities. The paper concludes with an appeal to imbue the redevelopment process with a greater regard for social justice, and a right to housing as a policy solution to address the injustice caused by real estate redevelopment. (shrink)

The current WSN is vulnerable to a variety of malicious attacks, resulting in the decline of its comprehensive performance. Multihop routing involves a number of safety and privacy issues. Problems such as snooping, sinkhole, manipulation, cloning, wormhole, spoofing, and so on affect the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of the WSNs. Therefore, this paper mainly studies the mathematical modeling of WSN multiattack behavior discrimination based on the incidence matrix. The WSN node model is used to collect relevant data and mark (...) and map the disguised data, so as to determine the characteristics of multiattack behavior and establish the WSN multiattack behavior discrimination model based on the incidence matrix. The experimental results show that the designed multiattack behavior discrimination model can distinguish the attack type according to the characteristics, has high recognition ability, can spend a short time to effectively distinguish the attack behavior, has a low false positive rate, and can effectively improve the antiattack ability of the WSN. (shrink)

This paper offers the first philosophical analysis of a form of artificial intelligence (AI) which the author calls facial profiling technology (FPT). FPT is a type of facial analysis technology designed to predict criminal behavior based solely on facial structure. Marketed for use by law enforcement, face classifiers generated by the program can supposedly identify murderers, thieves, pedophiles, and terrorists prior to the commission of crimes. At the time of this writing, an FPT company has a contract with the United (...) States federal government. After recounting how FPT resurrects the same moral problems associated with the pseudoscience of physiognomy, the author of this manuscript develops and defends the ‘Liberal Argument Against Facial Discrimination’ (LAAFD), which concludes that government use of FPT poses a significant risk of violating the classical liberal value of equality before the law by committing unjust discrimination against groups of people whose faces happen to match FPT classifiers. A key move in the argument suggests how a future scenario that results in widespread discrimination based solely on facial structure could be as unjustified and harmful, mutatis mutandis, as similar discrimination based solely on racial background. In the final section, the author of this paper develops prima facie policy proposals designed to protect classical liberal values if FPT is to be utilized by governments in liberal democratic societies. (shrink)

In some applications to human beings, the precautionary principle seems to raise specific ethical concerns. For instance, it has been used by a business owner in a court of justice to justify his refusal to hire applicants with a certain geographical origin for safety reasons. Or in public management, the precautionary principle has been used to exclude men who have sexual relations with men from donating blood on the basis of a higher HIV prevalence in this group. Does not the (...) precautionary principle here amount to justifying a form of discrimination? To help analyze what is at stake from a decision-theoretic viewpoint and to consider the possibility of ethical catastrophes, we offer a lexical utility model of the precautionary principle, which generalizes a previous model by Bartha and DesRoches (Synthese 199:8701–8740, 2021), Steel and Bartha (Risk Anal https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13892, 2022). Traditional expected utility theory also comes out as a special case of the model. Our proposal opens new perspectives for considering ethical dilemmas within a precautionary approach. It is intended to serve as a guiding tool for management teams in socially responsible companies, public institutions, and government agencies. (shrink)

Analysing two reproductive rights claims brought before the High Court of Namibia and the European Court of Human Rights, this article argues that human dignity is not reducible to a recognized warrant to demand a particular set of goods, services, or treatments. Rather, dignity in the contexts in which women experience sterilization abuse would be better characterized as an existential protest against degradation, a protest that takes concrete form in legal demands for equal citizenship. Equality is conceived here as necessitating (...) the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women in public and private life. The dignity as non-discrimination framework developed in the article thus integrates two of the leading interpretations of dignity in contemporary political philosophy – the existentialist approach that attends to the inward cry against degradation and the view of dignity as the equal, public status of democratic citizenship. (shrink)

One prominent criticism of luck egalitarianism is that it requires either shameful revelations or otherwise problematic declarations by the state toward those who have had bad brute luck. Relational egalitarianism, by contrast, is portrayed as an alternative that requires no such revelations or declarations. I argue that this is false. Relational equality requires the state to draft anti-discrimination laws for both state and private action. The ideal of relational egalitarianism requires these laws to be asymmetric, that is to allow (...) affirmative action for disadvantaged groups while prohibiting affirmative action for advantaged groups. Hence, the state needs to make a public declaration on which groups are privileged and which are underprivileged; and individuals need to reveal whether they belong to groups officially declared underprivileged. These declarations are no more problematic in this case than in the case of luck egalitarianism. (shrink)

Arbitrary communication systems can emerge from iconic beginnings through processes of conventionalisation via interaction. Here, we explore whether this process of conventionalisation occurs with continuous, auditory signals. We conducted an artificial signalling experiment. Participants either created signals for themselves, or for a partner in a communication game. We found no evidence that the speech-like signals in our experiment became less iconic or simpler through interaction. We hypothesise that the reason for our results is that when it is difficult to be (...) iconic initially because of the constraints of the modality, then iconicity needs to emerge to enable grounding before conventionalisation can occur. Further, pressures for discrimination, caused by the expanding meaning space in our study, may cause more complexity to emerge, again as a result of the restrictive signalling modality. Our findings have possible implications for the processes of conventionalisation possible in signed and spoken languages, as the spoken modality is more restrictive than the manual modality. (shrink)

Across the country, legal and health care professionals who understand that health outcomes are most influenced by social and environmental conditions have improved patient health by adopting the interdisciplinary MLP health care delivery model. However, the MLP field cannot advance population health, let alone long-term health equity, until it addresses the structural determinants of health inequity that are rooted in discrimination, segregation, and other forms of racial and ethnic subordination.