Diversity is often announced as a solution to ethical problems in artificial intelligence (AI), but what exactly is meant by diversity and how it can solve those problems is seldom spelled out. This lack of clarity is one hurdle to motivating diversity in AI. Another hurdle is that while the most common perceptions about what diversity is are too weak to do the work set out for them, stronger notions of diversity are often defended on normative grounds that fail to (...) connect to the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. However, there is a long history of research in feminist philosophy of science and a recent body of work in social epistemology that taken together provide the foundation for a notion of diversity that is both strong enough to do the work demanded of it, and can be defended on epistemic grounds that connect with the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. We clarify and defend that notion here by introducing emergent expertise as a network phenomenon wherein groups of workers with expertise of different types can gain knowledge not available to any individual alone, as long as they have ways of communicating across types of expertise. We illustrate the connected epistemic and ethical benefits of designing technology with diverse groups of workers using the examples of an infamous racist soap dispenser, and the millimeter wave scanners used in US airport security. (shrink)

Au cours des années 1970, le développement de la vente directe à domicile a donné lieu à la formation de cercles de sociabilité entre femmes dans le cadre des réunions Tupperware. Ces rencontres ont contribué à diffuser par capillarité nombre d’idées et pratiques féministes. Elles n’ont pas été sans incidence sur le déroulement de certaines trajectoires de femmes des classes moyennes et populaires. Le partage d’expériences de la soumission féminine, conjugale, et la confrontation aux modèles de femmes professionnalisées, les démonstratrices, (...) ont ainsi parfois ouvert à la prise de conscience du sentiment de soi et permis d’accéder à une certaine autonomie. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I propose (...) a different picture of what friendship requires in the doxastic realm. I argue that contrary to what the encroachment strategy suggests, exemplary friends’ belief formation ought not be guided by a concern with accuracy or error avoidance, but instead by a need to avoid a “specific closure” – namely, a need to avoid concluding in their friends’ guilt. I propose that exemplary friendship often generates a defeasible, doxastic obligation to exemplify such a need, despite its inherent corrupting effects on exemplary friends’ epistemic faculties. (shrink)

This book argues that Augustine assimilated the Stoic theory of perception and mental language (lekta/dicibilia), and that this epistemology underlies his accounts of motivation, affectivity, therapy for the passions, and moral progress. Byers elucidates seminal passages which have long puzzled commentators, such as Confessions 8, City of God 9 and 14, Replies to Simplicianus 1, and obscure sections of the later ‘anti-Pelagian’ works. Tracking the Stoic terminology, Byers analyzes Augustine’s engagement with Cicero, Seneca, Ambrose, Jerome, Origen, and Philo of Alexandria, (...) demonstrating that Augustine appropriated Stoicism with greater sophistication than other religious writers. She also shows how he moved beyond the Stoics by enriching Stoic cognitivism with Platonic motivational theory, arguing that Augustine created a coherent synthesis. This newly discovered Augustinian moral psychology has elements that contemporary philosophers and psychologists have identified as important. (shrink)

Stoic work on ambiguity represents one of the most innovative, sophisticated and rigorous contributions to philosophy and the study of language in western antiquity. This book is both a comprehensive survey of the often difficult and scattered sources, and an attempt to locate Stoic material in the rich array of contexts, ancient and modern, which alone can guarantee full appreciation of its subtlety, scope and complexity. The comparisons and contrasts which this book constructs will intrigue not just classical scholars, and (...) philosophers, but also logicians, theoretical linguists, communication theorists and historians of grammar and of literary theory. The Stoics on Ambiguity is designed to be intelligible to readers with no Greek or Latin. (shrink)

This chapter explores the epistemic roles played by connectionist models of cognition, and offers a formal analysis of how connectionist models explain. It looks at how other types of computational models explain. Classical artificial intelligence (AI) programs explain using abductive reasoning, or inference to the best explanation; they begin with the phenomena to be explained, and devise rules that can produce the right outcome. The chapter also looks at several examples of connectionist models of cognition, observing what sorts of constraints (...) are used in their design, and how their results are evaluated. It argues that the point of implementing networks roughly analogous to neural structures is to discover and explores the generic mechanisms at work in the brain, not to deduce the precise activities of specific structures. The chapter explores a formal analysis of the explanations offered, which interprets connectionist models and the cognitive theories they represent as sharing membership in a type of mechanism. (shrink)

Human beings are epistemically interdependent. Much of what we know and much of what we need to know we glean from others. Being a gregarious bunch, we are prone to venturing opinions whether they are warranted or not. This makes information transfer a tricky business. What we want from others is not just information, but reliable information. When we seek information, we are in the position of enquirers not examiners. We ask someone whether p because we do not ourselves already (...) know whether p. So we cannot check our informant’s bona fides by seeing whether she is speaking the truth about p. We need grounds for trust. In What’s the Point of Knowledge? Michael Hannon maintains that this is the predicament that underlies the concept of knowledge. The we here is comprehensive. Evidently, every language has a word for knowledge. This, Hannon suggests, indicates that the concept of knowledge satisfies a universal human need. A goal, if not the goal, of epistemology is to identify that need and ascertain how it is satisfied. Following Craig, Hannon argues that the point of knowledge is to enable us to identify good – that is, suitably reliable – informants. Let us call this the information transfer view. (shrink)

Students of Stoic philosophy, especially of Stoic ethics, have a lot to swallow. Virtues and emotions are bodies; virtue is the only good, and constitutes happiness, while vice is the only evil; emotions are judgements ; all sins are equal; and everyone bar the sage is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Non-Stoics in antiquity seem for the most part to find these doctrines as bizarre as we do. Their own philosophical or ideological perspectives, and the criticisms of the Stoa (...) to which these gave rise, are no less open to criticism than are the paradoxes and puzzles under attack – but they may be, often are, better documented, less provocatively attention-begging, or simply more familiar. Even disputes within the Stoa can be obscured or distorted by modern prejudices. Posidonius rejected Chrysippus' theory of a unitary soul, one rational through and through, on the grounds that such a theory could not satisfactorily account for the genesis of bad – excessive and irrational – emotions, the πάθη . Posidonius' own Platonising, tripartite soul feels more familiar to us because the Republic tends to be a set text rather more often than do the fragments of Chrysippus' de anima; and the balance in Plato's favour is unlikely to change. When Posidonius wrote, on the other hand, the Chrysippean soul was school orthodoxy, and Platonism the latest thing in radical chic. (shrink)

In this article, I consider recent debates on the notion of procreative liberty, to argue that reproductive freedom can be understood as a form of positive freedom—that is, the freedom to make oneself according to various ethical and aesthetic principles or values. To make this argument, I draw on Michel Foucault’s later work on ethics. Both adopting and adapting Foucault’s notion of ethics as a practice of the self and of liberty, I argue that reproductive autonomy requires enactment to gain (...) meaning within the life contexts of prospective parents. Thus, I propose a shift away from the standard negative model of freedom that sees it solely as a matter of noninterference or nonimpedance, a view advocated by major commentators such as John Harris and John Robertson. Instead, reproduction should be understood as a deeply personal project of self-making that integrates both negative and positive freedom. (shrink)

Tetris provides a difficult, dynamic task environment within which some people are novices and others, after years of work and practice, become extreme experts. Here we study two core skills; namely, choosing the goal or objective function that will maximize performance and a feature-based analysis of the current game board to determine where to place the currently falling zoid so as to maximize the goal. In Study 1, we build cross-entropy reinforcement learning models to determine whether different goals result in (...) different feature weights. Two of these optimization strategies quickly rise to performance plateaus, whereas two others continue toward higher but more jagged heights. In Study 2, we compare the zoid placement decisions made by our best CERL models with those made by 67 human players. Across 370,131 human game episodes, two CERL models picked the same zoid placements as our lowest scoring human for 43% of the placements and as our three best scoring experts for 65% of the placements. Our findings suggest that people focus on maximizing points, not number of lines cleared or number of levels reached. They also show that goal choice influences the choice of zoid placements for CERLs and suggest that the same is true of humans. Tetris has a repetitive task structure that makes Tetris more tractable and more like a traditional experimental psychology paradigm than many more complex games or tasks. Hence, although complex, Tetris is not overwhelmingly complex and presents a right-sized challenge to cognitive theories, especially those of integrated cognitive systems. (shrink)

Manuscripts and notes by Michel Foucault on the visual arts recently deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale reveal a reliance on canonical oil paintings by the ‘old masters’; a respect for the primary sources in the history of European art; an understanding of the necessity of research in both literary and visual sources, particularly self-portraits; and a sense of the value that a certain philosophical milieu – beginning with Sade and Nietzsche and expanding to his near contemporaries, Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski (...) – could offer to an understanding of paintings. The essay argues that Pierre Klossowski’s monumental drawing La Nef des fous (1990) provides an essential key for understanding the place of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of the same title in History of Madness and the centrality of theories of similitude to Foucault’s thinking about visuality ca. 1960–74. The later significance of the figure of the artist for Foucault can be traced to these earlier writings on painting and madness. (shrink)

Relevance Theory is a cognitively oriented theory of pragmatics, i.e., a theory of language use. It builds on the seminal work of H.P. Grice1 to develop a pragmatic theory which is at once philosophically sensitive and empirically plausible (in both psychological and evolutionary terms). This entry reviews the central commitments and chief contributions of Relevance Theory, including its Gricean commitment to the centrality of intention-reading and inference in communication; the cognitively grounded notion of relevance which provides the mechanism for explaining (...) pragmatic interpretation as an intention-driven, inferential process; and several key applications of the theory (lexical pragmatics, metaphor and irony, procedural meaning). Relevance Theory is an important contribution to our understanding of the pragmatics of communication. (shrink)

The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

Sociality of science has long been the topic of investigation in science studies and the social constructivist approaches advanced within critical race theory and feminist epistemology. Helen Longino’s career has provided a number of canonical and crucial advances in philosophical understanding of the sociality of science, and recently, she has argued that it is the sociality of interaction within scientific groups that makes them knowledge producing. In this article, forthcoming in a volume dedicated to the work of Longino's career, we (...) use case studies in potato science research to offer a friendly but important amendment to Longino's recent analysis of the sociality of interaction. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how the demonstrative that may be used to notice an event in the world in such a way as to suggest it has highly unusual or transgressive properties and in so doing invite others to align with that implicit claim. Drawing on Freud’s notion of the uncanny, we examine instances of the transgressive that in circumstances in which participants at least entertain the possibility that they are experiencing anomalous or paranormal objects and entities. The analysis (...) outlines the basic features of the transgressive that and examines how it may be the vehicle for a range of delicate interpersonal activities. Throughout the article, we try to show the broader relevance of the analytic argument by reference to data from more mundane interactional settings and to other forms of discourse, including fiction, commentary and interview narrative. (shrink)

The need for psychological services to limited English proficient clients is increasing. Psychologists who provide clinical services to limited English proficient clients are frequently required to use the services of spoken language interpreters. Research has shown that the quality and consistency of interpretation services are often in question. Interpreters are generally not required to hold any certifications or to meet training requirements prior to providing interpretation services. This lack of oversight leaves the psychologist responsible for the quality of the interpretation (...) when adhering to the American Psychological Association’s 2010 Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. This article includes a discussion of the ethical and clinical issues inherent in providing psychological services through an interpreter, how those issues affect a psychologist’s adherence to the APA Ethics Code, and recommendations for meeting the ethical standards while providing sound clinical services through the use of spoken language interpreters. (shrink)

Le bonheur; le bonheur est là, à notre portée. Il suffit de nous y mettre immédiatement! Audacieuse, étonnante, renversante, la philosophie de Robert Misrahi nous embarque. Elle est à lire par gros temps, elle agit comme un remontant. Cette pensée solaire est un élan, une force, un souffle qui nous réveille. Elle ravive la liberté, chante le Désir, célèbre la réflexion, matériaux essentiels à la construction de notre joie et de notre bonheur. Cette introduction à la philosophie misrahienne est une (...) invitation à ce beau voyage. Simple, didactique et pratique, elle donne envie de vagabonder, de sillonner, d'explorer et peu à peu d'aller vers le grand large, vers l'œuvre entière. Elle est destinée à tous. Cher lecteur, hâte-toi, hâte-toi donc d'embarquer pour la joie et le bonheur!"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Why are young women less likely than young men to persist in academic science and engineering? Drawing on 57 in-depth interviews with PhD students and postdoctoral scholars in the United States, we describe how, in academic science and engineering, motherhood is constructed in opposition to professional legitimacy, and as a subject of fear, repudiation, and public controversy. We call this the “specter of motherhood.” This specter disadvantages young women and amplifies anticipatory concerns about combining an academic career with motherhood. By (...) specifying the content of cultural discourses about motherhood in academic workplaces and the processes by which these ideas circulate, produce disadvantage, and inform young, childless scientists and engineers’ career plans, our findings offer novel insight into mechanisms contributing to inequality in academic careers. (shrink)

The paper starts with reflections on Plato’s critique of the poets and the preference many express for Aristotle’s view of poetry. The second part of the paper takes a case study of analytic treatments of ancient philosophy, including the ancient philosopher poets, to examine the poetics of analytic philosophy, diagnosing a preference in Analytic philosophy for a clean non-poetic style of presentation, and then develops this in considering how well historians of philosophy in the Analytic tradition can accommodate the contributions (...) of philosophers who wrote in verse. The final part of the paper reviews the current enthusiasm for decoding Empedocles’ vague and poetic descriptions of the cosmic cycle into a precise scientific periodicity on the basis of the recently discovered Byzantine scholia on Aristotle. I argue that this enthusiasm speaks to a desire for definite and clear numerical values in place of poetic motifs of give and take, and that this mathematical and scientific poetic is comparable to the preferred poetic of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The time honoured philosophical issue of how to resolve the mind/body problem has taken a more scientific turn of late. Instead of discussing issues of the soul and emotion and person and their reduction to a physical form, we now ask ourselves how well-understood cognitive and social concepts fit into the growing and changing field of neuropsychology. One of the many projects that have come out of this new scientific endeavour is Zaidel’s (2005) inquiry into the neuropsychological bases of art.

In recent years, a number of US states have adopted laws that require pregnant women to have an ultrasound examination, and be shown images of their foetus, prior to undergoing a pregnancy termination. In this paper, I examine one of the basic presumptions of these laws: that seeing one’s foetus changes the ways in which one might act in regard to it, particularly in terms of the decision to terminate the pregnancy or not. I argue that mandatory ultrasound laws compel (...) women into a position of moral spectatorship and require them to recognise the foetus as a being for whom they are responsible, particularly through empathic responses to ultrasound images. The approach I propose extends the project of a bioethics of the image and highlights the need for a critical analysis of the political mobilization of empathy in discussions of abortion. (shrink)

Apollonius Dyscolus’ use of ambiguity in grammatical problem-solving has in recent years had the benefit of two scholarly studies. David Blank, in the course of his analysis of the Syntax as a whole , has described the broad functions which Apollonius assigns to ambiguity. Jean Lallot's 1988 paper, ‘Apollonius Dyscole et l'ambigüité linguistique: problemes et solutions’, is devoted exclusively to the treatment of linguistic ambiguity in Apollonius’ work. Yet it is to be feared that the flood of light thrown by (...) these scholars on what had been an unregarded corner of ancient grammar has shown up rather more than Apollonius would have cared to admit, both about the nature, and about the prospects for success, of the enterprise on which he was engaged. At the same time, certain structural features of ancient grammar, at least of the ancient grammar which Apollonius himself constructed, have come into sharper focus: features clear enough with the benefit of hindsight, but glimpsed, it appears, all too dimly by Apollonius himslf. It is now worryingly clear not only that ambiguity was ambiguous for Apollonius, but also that the ambiguity of ambiguity represented a genuine threat to the coherence and value of his work. In this paper I set out to justify both these claims. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s understanding of painting oriented him and his readers to an alternative history of art through a means or an approach well known to philosophers and literary critics, that of irony. A close reading of the first chapter of The Order of Things shows that Foucault rejected the traditional interpretations of art history generated by a focus on the intentions of the individual artist, the identification of the subjects portrayed, and the expectations of a genre, relying instead on a (...) synthesis of the approaches to painting given by Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan, which converged with his ironic approach. (shrink)

In this, the first half of Philoponus' analysis of book one of "Aristotle's Physics", the principal themes are metaphysical. Aristotle's opening chapter in the "Physics" is an abstract reflection on methodology for the investigation of nature, 'physics'. Aristotle suggests that one must proceed from things that are familiar but vague, and derive more precise but less obvious principles to constitute genuine knowledge. His controversial claim that this is to progress from the universal to the more particular occasions extensive apologetic exegesis, (...) typical of Philoponus' meticulous and somewhat pedantic method. Philoponus explains away the apparent conflict between the 'didactic method' (unavoidable in physics) and the strict demonstrative method described in the "Analytics". After 20 pages on chapter 1, Philoponus devotes the remaining 66 pages to Aristotle's objections to two major Presocratic thinkers, Parmenides and Melissus. Aristotle included these thinkers as an aside, because they were not engaged in physics, but in questioning the very basis of physics. Philoponus investigates Aristotle's claims about the relation between a science and its axioms, explores alternative ways of formalising Aristotle's refutation of Eleatic monism and provides a sustained critique of Aristotle's analysis of the Eleatics' purported mistakes about unity and being. (shrink)

Do you need to know the name of the god you're praying to? If you get the name wrong what happens to the prayer? What if the god has more than one name? Who gets to decide whether the name works (you or the god or neither)? What are names anyway? Are the names of the gods any different in how they work from any other names? Is there a way of fixing the reference without using the name so as (...) to avoid the problems of optional names? There is a type of formula used in prayer in ancient Greece which I call (in this paper) a "precautionary formula". The person praying uses expressions like "whether you want to be called [x] or [y]", and "if this is the name by which you would like to be called". I also include here the practice of adding definite descriptions that identify the god by means other than the name (e.g. their place of birth or residence, their deeds etc). In this paper I ask what these formulae were for, why so many occur in philosophical work, particularly Plato, and whether the puzzles about the names of the gods go back to the Presocratics. (shrink)

Dans cet article, il s’agira de questionner les affordances, autrement dit les « signes actanciels », les « valences » ou le « caractère de demande » d’objets numériques iconotextuels tels que l’échelle temporelle numérique dite ticker. Forme d’architexte, le ticker propose un modèle iconique et langagier qui simultanément incite à l’action tout en limitant ce champ d’action. La diversité d’affordances semble dépendre des potentialités intrinsèques à l’objet mais aussi de l’expérience de l’usager. Plus ce coefficient de diversité augmente, plus (...) la possibilité de dépasser le niveau injonctif de l’affordance augmente. En dépit des affordances prévues par les concepteurs et de leurs intentionnalités, les usagers « détournent » les fonctionnalités d’objets numériques en conservant le design initial mais en modifiant les éléments textuels qui l’accompagnent, créant ainsi une nouvelle catégorie, plus invisible, de produsage. (shrink)

Diodorus Siculus was notoriously inconsistent in his statements about the terminal date of his survey of history, the Bibliotheca Historica. In the ‘table of contents’ which he included in the general preface to the whole work, written apparently when he was preparing his manuscript for publication , he specifically names the year 60/59 as the last year of his narrative. Elsewhere, however, he not only gives a figure for the period of history encompassed by his work which would bring it (...) down to 46/5, but he also on several occasions expresses the intention of including within his narrative some account of Julius Caesar's activities in Gaul, which implies a terminal date later than c. 52 B.C. How can this discrepancy be explained? The most economical hypothesis would be that Diodorus set out at first to compose a work that should go down to 46/5, but at some later stage in the composition changed his mind, and set back his terminus to 60/59. His originally intended terminus was most likely the triple triumph of Julius Caesar, whom Diodorus clearly admired beyond all other contemporary leaders. The decision in favour of an earlier terminus will have been due either to simple fatigue or to disillusionment with the course followed by Caesar's heir after 44 b.c. and anxiety about the dangers of dealing with events of a too recent and controversial past. (shrink)

This survey gives an overview of a set of selected articles published between 2016 and 2017 in the major journals that cover the history of economic thought. In surveying the literature, we focus on three major aspects – the scope, the sources, and the methods – with reference to which we discuss the novelties that we find in the recent literature on the history of economic thought.