The anticipated social capabilities of robots may allow them to serve in authority roles as part of human-machine teams. To date, it is unclear if, and to what extent, human team members will comply with requests from their robotic teammates, and how such compliance compares to requests from human teammates. This research examined how the human-likeness and physical embodiment of a robot affect compliance to a robot's request to perseverate utilizing a novel task paradigm. Across a set of two studies, (...) participants performed a visual search task while receiving ambiguous performance feedback. Compliance was evaluated when the participant requested to stop the task and the coach urged the participant to keep practicing multiple times. In the first study, the coach was either physically co-located with the participant or located remotely via a live-video. Coach type varied in human-likeness and included either a real human, a Nao robot, or a modified Roomba robot. The second study expanded on the first by including a Baxter robot as a coach and replicated the findings in a different sample population with a strict chain of command culture. Results from both studies showed that participants comply with the requests of a robot for up to 11 min. Compliance is less than to a human and embodiment and human-likeness on had weak effects on compliance. (shrink)

The question of evil—its origins, its justification, its solution—has plagued humankind from the beginning. Every generation raises the question and struggles with the responses it is given. Questions about the nature of evil and how it is reconciled with the truth claims of Christianity are unavoidable; we need to be prepared to respond to such questions with great clarity and good faith. God and Evil compiles the best thinking on all angles on the question of evil, from some of the (...) finest scholars in religion, philosophy and apologetics, including Gregory E. Ganssle and Yena Lee Bruce Little Garry DeWeese R. Douglas Geivett James Spiegel Jill Graper Hernandez Win Corduan David Beck With additional chapters addressing "issues in dialogue" such as hell and human origins, and a now-famous debate between evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig and atheist philosopher Michael Tooley, God and Evil provides critical engagement with recent arguments against faith and offers grounds for renewed confidence in the God who is "acquainted with grief.". (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there are universals. I begin (Sect. 1) by proposing a sufficient condition for a thing’s being a universal. I then argue (Sect. 2) that some truths exist necessarily. Finally, I argue (Sects. 3 and 4) that these truths are structured entities having constituents that meet the proposed sufficient condition for being universals.

Consider the following claim: given the choice between saving a life and preventing any number of people from temporarily experiencing a mild headache, you should always save the life. Many moral theorists accept this claim. In doing so, they commit themselves to some form of ‘moral absolutism’: the view that there are some moral considerations that cannot be outweighed by any number of lesser moral considerations. In contexts of certainty, it is clear what moral absolutism requires of you. However, what (...) does it require of you when deciding under risk? What ought you to do when there is a chance that, say, you will not succeed in saving the life? In recent years, various critics have argued that moral absolutism cannot satisfactorily deal with risk and should, therefore, be abandoned. In this paper, we show that moral absolutism can answer its critics by drawing on—of all things—orthodox expected utility theory. (shrink)

Contains 1,001 entries that explore issues of philosophy, psychology, and the physiology of the brain, touching on topics such as sleep, bilingualism, criminology, language, and the workings of the nervous system, and includes biographies of major authorities on the workings of the mind.

David Lewis (1986) criticizes moderate views of composition on the grounds that a restriction on composition must be vague, and vague composition leads, via a precisificational theory of vagueness, to an absurd vagueness of existence. I show how to resist this argument. Unlike the usual resistance, however, I do not jettison precisificational views of vagueness. Instead, I blur the connection between composition and existence that Lewis assumes. On the resulting view, in troublesome cases of vague composition, there is an object, (...) which definitely exists, about which it is vague whether the relevant borderline parts compose it. (shrink)

Social media offers a platform for diffused stakeholders to interact with firms—alternatively praising, questioning, and chastising businesses for their CSR performance and seeking to engage in two-way dialogue. In 2014, 163,402 public messages were sent to Fortune 200 firms’ CSR-focused Twitter accounts, each of which was either shared, replied to, “liked,” or ignored by the targeted firm. This paper examines firm reactions to these messages, building a model of firm response to stakeholders that combines the notions of CSR communication and (...) stakeholder salience. Our findings show that firm response to a stakeholder on social media is positively and most significantly associated with what we refer to as the stakeholder’s connective power but negatively associated with the firm’s own connective power. To a lesser extent, firm response is positively associated with the stakeholder’s normative power but negatively associated with the firm’s own normative power. Firm response is also shown to be positively associated with stakeholder urgency in terms of both the originality of a stakeholder message and the expression of positive sentiment. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against the claim recently defended by Josh Weisberg that a certain version of the self-representational approach to phenomenal consciousness cannot avoid a set of problems that have plagued higher-order approaches. These problems arise specifically for theories that allow for higher-order misrepresentation or—in the domain of self-representational theories—self-misrepresentation. In response to Weisberg, I articulate a self-representational theory of phenomenal consciousness according to which it is contingently impossible for self-representations tokened in the context of a conscious mental (...) state to misrepresent their objects. This contingent infallibility allows the theory to both acknowledge the (logical) possibility of self-misrepresentation and avoid the problems of self-misrepresentation. Expanding further on Weisberg’s work, I consider and reveal the shortcomings of three other self-representational models—put forward by Kreigel, Van Gulick, and Gennaro—in order to show that each indicates the need for this sort of infallibility. I then argue that contingent infallibility is in principle acceptable on naturalistic grounds only if we attribute (1) a neo-Fregean kind of directly referring, indexical content to self-representational mental states and (2) a certain ontological structure to the complex conscious mental states of which these indexical self-representations are a part. In these sections I draw on ideas from the work of Perry and Kaplan to articulate the context-dependent semantic structure of inner-representational states. (shrink)

A comprehensive study of German materialism in the second half of the nineteenth century is long overdue. Among contemporary historians the mere passing references to Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Buchner as materialists and popularizers of science are hardly sufficient, for few individuals influenced public opinion in nineteenth-century Germany more than these men. Buchner, for example, revealed his awareness of the historical significance of his Kraft und Stoff in comments made in 1872, just seventeen years after its original appearance. (...) A philosophical book which has undergone twelve big German editions in the short span of seventeen years, which further has been issued in non-German countries and languages about fifteen to sixteen times in the same period, and whose appearance (although its author was entirely unknown up to then) has called forth an almost unprecedented storm in the press,... such a book can be nothing ordinary; the world-calling it enjoys at present must be justified through its wholly special characteristics or by the merits of its form and content. ' Vogt, Moleschott and Buchner explicitly held that their materialism was founded on natural science. But other materialists of the nineteenth century also laid claim to the scientific character of their own thought. It is likely that Marx and Engels would have permitted their brand of materialism to have been called scientific, provided, of course, that 'scientific' was understood in their dialectical meaning of the term. Socialism, Engels maintained, had become a science with Marx. (shrink)

We present several new studies focusing on “salience effects”—the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge to someone when an unrealized possibility of error has been made salient in a given conversational context. These studies suggest a complicated picture of epistemic universalism: there may be structural universals, universal epistemic parameters that influence epistemic intuitions, but that these parameters vary in such a way that epistemic intuitions, in either their strength or propositional content, can display patterns of genuine cross-cultural diversity.

This paper presents statistical default logic, an expansion of classical (i.e., Reiter) default logic that allows us to model common inference patterns found in standard inferential statistics, including hypothesis testing and the estimation of a populations mean, variance and proportions. The logic replaces classical defaults with ordered pairs consisting of a Reiter default in the first coordinate and a real number within the unit interval in the second coordinate. This real number represents an upper-bound limit on the probability of accepting (...) the consequent of an applied default and that consequent being false. A method for constructing extensions is then defined that preserves this upper bound on the probability of error under a (skeptical) non-monotonic consequence relation. (shrink)

"The author tells a history of the study of cancer-causing viruses from the early twentieth century to the development of an HPV vaccine for cervical cancer in 2006. He profiles the "cancer virus hunters" who made breakthroughs in tumor virology"--.

Commissurotomy surgery has lately attracted considerable philosophical attention. It has seemed to some that the surgical scalpel that bisects the brain bisects consciousness and the mind as well; and that the ordinary concept of a person is thereby most seriously threatened. I shall assess the extent of the threat, arguing that it is overestimated. The argument begins with section III; section II, which describes the operation and its effects, should be omitted by those already familiar with these facts.

_The Life of the Mind _presents an original and striking conception of the mind and its place in nature. In a spirited and rigorous attack on most of the orthodox positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, McCulloch connects three of the orthodoxy's central themes - externalism, phenomenology and the relation between science and common-sense psychology - in a defence of a throughly anti-Cartesian conception of mental life. McCulloch argues that the life of the mind will never be understood until we (...) properly understand the subject's essential embodiment and immersion in the world, until we give up the idea that intentionality and phenomenology must be understood separately. The product of over twenty years' thinking on these issues, McCulloch's book is a bold and significant contribution to philosophy. (shrink)

How strong is the argument for requiring public deliberation by very large publics—at national or even global levels—before moving forward with efforts to use gene editing on wild populations of plants or animals? Should there be a general moratorium on any such efforts until such broad public deliberation has been successfully carried out? This article works toward recommendations about the need for and general framing of broad public deliberation. It finds that broad public deliberation is highly desirable but not flatly (...) necessary before moving forward with any local cases of gene editing in the wild. It also finds that broad public deliberation would be most helpful in generating very general guidance and is unlikely to be appropriate for specific cases. Broad public deliberation is most helpful for cases that involve higher levels of uncertainty and moral ambiguity, but separating out a distinct class of cases for deliberation is not yet possible. (shrink)

... THIRD WORLD EPISTEMOLOGY L. Jonathan Cohen . Sir Karl Popper's striking hypothesis about a third world of objective knowledge deserves careful scrutiny ...

Environmental problems often outstrip the abilities of any single scientist to understand, much less address them. As a result, collaborations within, across, and beyond the environmental sciences are an increasingly important part of the environmental science landscape. Here, we explore an insufficiently recognized and particularly challenging barrier to collaborative environmental science: value pluralism, the presence of non-trivial differences in the values that collaborators bring to bear on project decisions. We argue that resolving the obstacles posed by value pluralism to collaborative (...) environmental science requires detecting and coordinating the underlying problematic value differences. We identify five ways that a team might coordinate their problematic value differences and argue that, whichever mode is adopted, it ought to be governed by participatory virtues, pragmatic resolve, and moral concern. Relying on our experiences with the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, as well as with other dialogical approaches that support team inquiry, we defend the claim that philosophical dialogue among collaborators can go a long way towards helping teams of environmental scientists and fellow travelers detect their problematic value differences. Where dialogical approaches fare less well is in helping teams coordinate these differences. We close by describing several principles for augmenting philosophical dialogue with other methods, and we list several of these methods in an appendix with brief descriptions and links for further learning. Overall, the article makes three main contributions to the research collaboration and values in science literatures: It deepens our understanding of problematic value pluralism in team science; It provides actionable guidance and methods for improving values-oriented philosophical dialogue interventions; and It demonstrates one way of doing engaged philosophy. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between common-sense psychology (CSP) and scientific psychology (SP) — which we could call the mind-mind problem. CSP has come under much attack recently, most of which is thought to be unjust or misguided. This paper's first section examines the many differences between the aims, interests, explananda, explanantia, methodology, conceptual frameworks, and relationships to the neurosciences, that divide CSP and SP. Each of the two is valid within its own territory, and there is no competition between (...) them — primarily because CSP is not, and has no interest in being, a scientific theory. In the second section some implications are drawn. First, neither CSP nor SP has the mind-body problem in its familiar form. Second, CSP, for excellent reasons, is not equipped to handle irrational or non-rational behaviour; there are some grounds for believing that this can and should be the task of SP. Third, philosophical psychology, or armchair theories of action, perception, etc., are doomed to failure. And, fourth, the realm of the psychological is so heterogeneous that no single model for either CSP or SP is likely to succeed. (shrink)

It is indeed a pleasure to introduce this collection of essays that honor one of the world's leading scholars in the field of utopian studies. I have known Lyman Tower Sargent since 1986, when upon moving to St. Louis I was delighted to discover that we lived a short distance away from each other. Our collaboration on a variety of projects has continued ever since then, most notably in the series Utopianism and Communitarianism, published by Syracuse University Press; as intellectual (...) advisers to the New York Public Library/Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition Utopia, which took place in 2000; in the two editions of The Utopia Reader ; in many years of joint "skills"... (shrink)

This volume examines the diversity of new scientific theories of religion, by outlining the logical and causal relationships between these enterprises.

This article examines a questioning strategy in trial crossexamination designed to control an evasive witness, and how that control functions through the interactive contours of verbal and visual conduct to index identity, construct multidimensional forms of participation and project intertextual relations. In the process of nailing down an answer, attorney and witness manipulate linguistic ideologies and project participations of power to calibrate the epistemological criteria for determining the legitimacy of legal realities. I demonstrate how indexical iconicities of trial dialogic form (...) emerge as a contested ritual of truth in the situated details of multimodal discursive practices. (shrink)

We examine the notion of conditionals and the role of conditionals in inductive logics and arguments. We identify three mistakes commonly made in the study of, or motivation for, non-classical logics. A nonmonotonic consequence relation based on evidential probability is formulated. With respect to this acceptance relation some rules of inference of System P are unsound, and we propose refinements that hold in our framework.

Most cases of plagiarism involve a power differential where not every person has the same ability to enter into a social contract. A social contract requires that each party understands the expectations or norms of the contract, has a voice in setting or changing the norms and has the ability to exit the contract. If those with less power want to gain power then they have to engage in activities bound by norms set by others with little or no ability (...) to exit and no voice. Even if one determines that it is an option to choose a role that requires academic writing, even at the earliest grades, then the social contract demands a shared norm of what constitutes correct behavior. This study reviewed the abstracts of articles indexed in Google Scholar from 1999–2019 through the lens of integrative social contract theory (ISCT) and found, in the case of plagiarism, an existing consensus of correct behavior does not exist. Recommendations for establishing a social contract conclude the article. (shrink)