The usefulness of machine learning algorithms has led to their widespread adoption prior to the development of a conceptual framework for making sense of them. One common response to this situation is to say that machine learning suffers from a “black box problem.” That is, machine learning algorithms are “opaque” to human users, failing to be “interpretable” or “explicable” in terms that would render categorization procedures “understandable.” The purpose of this paper is to challenge the widespread agreement about the existence (...) and importance of a black box problem. The first section argues that “interpretability” and cognates lack precise meanings when applied to algorithms. This makes the concepts difficult to use when trying to solve the problems that have motivated the call for interpretability. Furthermore, since there is no adequate account of the concepts themselves, it is not possible to assess whether particular technical features supply formal definitions of those concepts. The second section argues that there are ways of being a responsible user of these algorithms that do not require interpretability. In many cases in which a black box problem is cited, interpretability is a means to a further end such as justification or non-discrimination. Since addressing these problems need not involve something that looks like an “interpretation” of an algorithm, the focus on interpretability artificially constrains the solution space by characterizing one possible solution as the problem itself. Where possible, discussion should be reformulated in terms of the ends of interpretability. (shrink)

Pandemics first and foremost hit those who are most vulnerable, and the COVID-19 pandemic is not different. Although the infection rate in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods is twice as it is in th...

The aim of the present research was to assess elite student-athletes’ perception of the dual career during the lockdown caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, compared with a group of elite student-athletes who could develop their dual career under normal conditions. A total of 150 elite athletes who were also undergraduate or postgraduate students self-completed the “Perceptions of dual career student-athletes ” questionnaire. From them, 78 did it during the mandatory lockdown period due to the state of emergency caused (...) by COVID-19 and 72 completed it in the previous year to Rio 2016 Olympic Games. The COVID-19 group was found to spend a significantly higher number of hours per week studying, while no significant differences were observed between groups in any training time variable. Student-athletes of the COVID-19 group showed better perception of whether their sport career could help them cope with their academic career and better general perception of remote learning and the use of tasks and videoconferencing as learning support tools. A lower percentage of athletes of the COVID-19 group than of the control group wished to continue with their sport career once they finished their studies. To conclude, student-athletes of the COVID-19 group show adaptations with regard to the organization of their studies and the importance they give to them and to the services provided by dual-career programs, compared with student-athletes from an ordinary pre-Olympic year. In general, student-athletes’ perception of the dual career is very positive. (shrink)

The United States’ ambitious Precision Medicine Initiative proposes to accelerate exponentially the adoption of precision medicine, an approach to health care that tailors disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention to individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle. It aims to achieve this by creating a cohort of volunteers for precision medicine research, accelerating biomedical research innovation, and adopting policies geared toward patients’ empowerment. As strategies to implement the PMI are formulated, critical consideration of the initiative's ethical and sociopolitical dimensions is needed. (...) Drawing on scholarship of nationalism and democracy, we discuss the PMI's construction of what we term “genomic citizenship”; the possible normative obligations arising therefrom; and the ethical, legal, and social challenges that will ensue. Although the PMI is a work in progress, discussion of the existing and emerging issues can facilitate the development of policies, structures, and procedures that can maximize the initiative's ability to produce equitable and socially sensitive outcomes. Our analysis can also be applied to other population-based, precision medicine research programs. (shrink)

El estudio de caso es probablemente hoy día el método de investigación más de moda y factible en ciencias sociales. Sin embargo, ha sido usado desde tiempo secular. Este ensayo trata de revelar una antigua y poco considerada tradición cual es la casuística moral o estudio de los casos de conciencia. De hecho, esta tendencia metodológica ad hoc podría ser considerada un antecedente fundacional del estudio de caso. También, se revela que, en el siglo XVII aconteció una de las primeras (...) e inevitables confrontaciones entre métodos de investigación, dentro de un fuerte debate ideológico, por parte de Blaise Pascal frente a miembros procasuistas de la Compañía de Jesús. (shrink)

La poesía homoerótica está en auge y, por ende, se está estudiando con mayor regularidad desde diversos espacios académicos. En el escenario centroamericano ha adquirido mayor atención. Los movimientos homoeróticos que se evidencian en la región con cuatro, a saber: la disruptiva, la del lenguaje figurado, la poesía de combate y la poesía amorosa. Sin embargo, no deja de ser un tabú y una forma mediática para expresarse o atacar a quienes sostienen este tipo de discurso. Este trabajo pretende analizar (...) las manifestaciones de la evasión de la realidad, como el autor utiliza los elementos simbólicos griegos para construir su identidad poética a través de los registros homoeróticos Cantos para mis muchachos (2017) de Alberto López Serrano. Para ello, se plantea un acercamiento a diversos discursos utilizados para comprender otras corrientes literarias que han sido utilizadas en este campo y que, por consiguiente, son aproximaciones que generarán nuevas discusiones. (shrink)

The public rejection of scientific claims is widely recognized by scientific and governmental institutions to be threatening to modern democratic societies. Intense conflict between science and the public over diverse health and environmental issues have invited speculation by concerned officials regarding both the source of and the solution to the problem of public resistance towards scientific and policy positions on such hot-button issues as global warming, genetically modified crops, environmental toxins, and nuclear waste disposal. The London Royal Society’s influential report (...) “Public Understanding of Science”, which spearheaded the now-thriving area of science... (shrink)

Through the use of culturally appropriate videos on precision medicine research (PMR) that were developed and tailored to five racial and ethnic groups of patients, and subsequent focus-group discu...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neuro-developmental condition, which requires a multi-disciplinary matrix of treatments, including functional, educational, and emotional interventions. The latter mode of treatment entails particular difficulties, inasmuch as the core deficits of this condition seem to challenge the very premises of traditional psychotherapy. Reciprocity, verbal, and symbolic expression and inter-subjective dynamics are often difficult to attain with clients diagnosed with ASD, and emotional treatment thus often turns out to be a frustrating process, which may well elicit questions (...) as to the efficacy of psychotherapeutic emotional interventions. These core challenges, described in the literature, become particularly acute in view of the increasing number of clients diagnosed on the autistic spectrum in recent years, and the growing need for qualified therapists who have trained for working specifically with this condition. It seems, therefore, that it is high time for systematic research into the lived experience of therapists working with these clients in order to attain a better clinical and theoretical understanding of the condition itself and broaden the range of effective interventions. This study, informed by a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach which guided both the collection of data and its subsequent analysis, aims to address these issues by exploring the particular challenges faced by therapists in this field, the questions that come up in the process, modes of personal and professional coping, and the insights elicited by the therapeutic encounter. The research consisted of in-depth interviews with 28 practicing therapists from a broad range of clinical orientations, including dance/movement, arts, music, and drama therapists, clinical psychologists, and clinical social workers. The essential themes that emerged from the participants’ responses and the analysis of the findings lend support to theoretical and developmental approaches, which focus on the primacy and the foundational role of the concrete body in inter-subjective relationships and in the therapeutic process, and indicate the potential efficacy of somatic and kinetic interventions. The clinical implications of this study are thus highly relevant to the training and support of therapists working with ASD, who should be encouraged to develop greater receptivity to non-verbal modes of interaction in the therapeutic process. (shrink)

Resemblances obtain not only between objects but between properties. Resemblances of the latter sort - in particular resemblances between quantitative properties - prove to be the downfall of a well-known theory of universals, namely the one presented by David Armstrong. This paper examines Armstrong's efforts to account for such resemblances within the framework of his theory and also explores several extensions of that theory. All of them fail.

In recent years, Cesar Chavez’s life and legacy have been subjected to increased scrutiny. The ensuing reevaluations of Chavez, wittingly or not, are matters of ethical, as well as historical and biographical, concern. This article has two aims. First, it reconstructs Chavez’s account of exemplarity and uses it to assess his legacy. Second, it provides an account of exemplarity situated within social practices. As I argue, exemplarity operates through social practices, rather than mystically as posited by a contagion model. The (...) end result is an ethically nuanced reassessment of Chavez and an account of exemplarity that includes its social dimension. (shrink)

While most of healthcare research and practice fully endorses evidence-based healthcare, a minority view borrows popular themes from philosophy of science like underdetermination and value-ladenness to question the legitimacy of the evidence-based movement’s philosophical underpinnings. While the feminist origins go unacknowledged, those critics adopt a feminist reading of the “gap argument” to challenge the perceived objectivism of evidence-based practice. From there, the critics seem to despair over the “subjective elements” that values introduce to clinical reasoning, demonstrating that they do not (...) subscribe to feminist science studies’ normative program——where contextual values can enable good science and justified decisions. In this paper, I investigate why it is that the critics of evidence-based medicine adopt feminist science’s characterization of the problem but resist the productive solutions offered by those same theorists. I suggest that the common feminist empiricist appeal to idealized epistemic communities is impractical for those working within the current biomedical context and instead offer an alternate stream of feminist research into the empirical content of values (found in the work of Elizabeth Anderson and Sharyn Clough) as a more helpful recourse for facilitating the important task of legitimate and justified clinical decision-making. I use a case study on clinical decision-making to illustrate the fruitfulness of the latter feminist empiricist framework. -/- See response by Sharyn Clough: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1aN See reply by Maya Goldenberg: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1oY. (shrink)

El presente trabajo busca puntuar algunas características y usos políticos de la noción de sentido común desde el pensamiento de Michel Foucault. A partir de una breve comparación con la perspectiva gramsciana del sentido común, se intenta especialmente atender a dos cuestiones: por un lado, qué estatuto epistémico se le da al conocimiento general presente en la vida cotidiana y, por otro, qué vínculo respecto a él se sostiene, o bien bajo la figura del “intelectual orgánico”, o bien el estilo (...) foucaulteano del “intelectual específico”. Desde allí, se intenta situar alcances y limitaciones de la noción desde una perspectiva foucaulteana. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende rastrear en dos de los últimos escritos de Judith Butler, Dispossession y Los sentidos del sujeto, su preocupación por la posibilidad de agencia crítica de los sujetos. Para ello, será necesario comprender que su concepción del sujeto no es la humanista; en cambio, propone un sujeto vulnerable y en relación de interdependencia con los demás. Las condiciones socioculturales que permiten emerger al sujeto butleriano no han de ser entendidas, por otra parte, como un constructivismo sino que, a (...) través de la senda de la deconstrucción, nos proponen pensar la libertad de los sujetos sin perder de vista la desposesión constitutiva y diferencialmente producida. (shrink)

El presente trabajo trata de hacer una defensa de una particular versión de positivismo jurídico excluyente como teoría que mejor describe el derecho y sus referencias a la moral. Aunque se reivindica la tesis de las fuentes como la tesis iuspositivista por excelencia, el quid de la defensa se asienta sobre un análisis de los diferentes tipos y conceptos de moral que se consideran relevantes a la hora de la identificación del derecho. La posibilidad del error en el descubrimiento de (...) la moral objetiva deja campo abierto para entender que el derecho no puede quedar determinado por otra cosa que no sean hechos sociales. (shrink)

Since the inception of large‐scale human genome research, there has been much caution about the risks of exacerbating a number of socially dangerous attitudes linked to human genetics. These attitudes are usually labeled with one of a family of genetic or genomic “isms” or “ations” such as “genetic essentialism,” “genetic determinism,” “genetic reductionism,” “geneticization,” “genetic stigmatization,” and “genetic discrimination.” The psychosocial processes these terms refer to are taken to exacerbate several ills that are similarly labeled, from medical racism and psychological (...) fatalism to economic exploitation and social exclusion. But as genomic information becomes more familiar in clinical and research settings as well as other life activities, do we need to continue to worry so much about this family of attitudes and their impact on existing problems?In genomics, the underlying anxiety has been that disclosure of genomic information will trigger a series of (seemingly unavoidable) negative responses that will affect individuals, their families, and their communities at large. The fundamental social challenges that hyperbolic genomic messaging, low genomic literacy, and “folk biology” help sustain remain to be addressed. If we hope to break the cycle of genomic isms and ations, we will have to get better at resisting overinterpretations of the relevance that genomics has for people’s future potentials, ancestral vulnerabilities, community memberships, and ethnic affiliations. (shrink)

The evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement is touted as a new paradigm in medical education and practice, a description that carries with it an enthusiasm for science that has not been seen since logical positivism flourished (circa 1920–1950). At the same time, the term ‘‘evidence-based medicine’’ has a ring of obviousness to it, as few physicians, one suspects, would claim that they do not attempt to base their clinical decision-making on available evidence. However, the apparent obviousness of EBM can and should (...) be challenged on the grounds of how ‘evidence’ has been problematised in the philosophy of science. EBM enthusiasm, it follows, ought to be tempered. The post-positivist, feminist, and phenomenological philosophies of science that are examined in this paper contest the seemingly unproblematic nature of evidence that underlies EBM by emphasizing different features of the social nature of science. The appeal to the authority of evidence that characterizes evidence-based practices does not increase objectivity but rather obscures the subjective elements that inescapably enter all forms of human inquiry. The seeming common sense of EBM only occurs because of its assumed removal from the social context of medical practice. In the current age where the institutional power of medicine is suspect, a model that represents biomedicine as politically disinterested or merely scientific should give pause. (shrink)

The standard counterexamples to David Lewis’s account of intrinsicality involve two sorts of properties: identity properties and necessary properties. Proponents of the account have attempted to deflect these counterexamples in a number of ways. This paper argues that none of these moves are legitimate. Furthermore, this paper argues that no account along the lines of Lewis’s can succeed, for an adequate account of intrinsicality must be sensitive to hyperintensional distinctions among properties.

In this article I argue that the Critical Kant endorses the claim that God creates the best possible world, and that this claim is best understood as committing him to the view that God creates an infinitely valuable world. Kant’s understudied Critical theory of the best possible world differs significantly from his better-known quasi-Leibnizian pre-Critical account insofar as it uses an axiological rather than ontological metric for the goodness of worlds. The axiological metric introduces unique challenges for a Kantian account (...) of the best possible world. These challenges are in turn resolved via an infinite value interpretation. (shrink)

Corporeality: Emergent consciousness within its spatial dimensions develops our understanding of what we can experience through our bodies in relation to the space around us. Rather than considering architecture as being about manifestation and mediation of fixed meanings, the book focuses instead on architectural space as a field that envelopes us incessantly, intimately, and affectively. We are in immediate contact with that space, and the way we relate to it determines how we are able to grasp the realities of the (...) social and material worlds around us. This enquiry considers architectural space and its impact on and relation to us from a range of disciplines and perspectives, leading from space to sense and to sensibility. The theatre becomes a central point of reference on this journey, allowing us to understand how space “works” by linking concrete spatial conditions to corresponding “forms of experience”. It allows showing how the ways we feel, think, and act emerge from within the rich texture of the pre-conscious and non-contemplative. That texture is induced and nourished by our bodily encounters with space. Offering a view of how immediate experience is generated in the body, this book enhances empirical research into the links between space, body, experience and consciousness. Maya Nanitchkova Öztürk is Associate Professor in Theory and Criticism of Architecture. Her academic interests and publications focus on space-body relationships and experience of space/place, as grounds for developing analytical methodologies and interdisciplinary links in discourse, and teaching. She works at Bilkent University (Ankara), Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design. She is on the editorial boards of ISI journal Space and Culture, and the web-journal Consciousness, Literature and the Arts. (shrink)

Wiggins and Wilbanks (2019) raise a number of interesting concerns vis-à-vis citizen science and research. However, one area of innovation in citizen science that has seen significant advancements...

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo el estudio de la presencia del CSIC en el Web. Los indicadores cibermétricos utilizados, se basan en la estima del volumen de contenidos de los diferentes subdominios institucionales del CSIC y la cuantificación de la naturaleza hipertextual de las páginas Web de dichos subdominios.….

En el devenir de las artes visuales en Colombia, la preocupación por los efectos de los fenómenos de la violencia ha sido recurrente. Lamirada de los artistas se ha valido de diferentes lenguajes expresivos y formas de traducción, con el interés de construir una estrecha relación entre la naturaleza de las obras y el acontecer de los propios fenómenos sociales.

Given a compact Polish space E and the hyperspace of its compact subsets , we consider Gδσ-ideals of compact subsets of E. Solecki has shown that any σ-ideal in a broad natural class of Gδ ideals can be represented via a compact subset of ; in this article we examine the behaviour of Gδ subsets of E with respect to the representing set. Given an ideal I in this class, we construct a representing set that recognises a compact subset of (...) E as being “small” precisely when it is in I, and recognises a Gδ subset of E as being “small” precisely when it is covered by countably many compact sets from I. (shrink)