World Futures, Volume 68, Issue 6, Page 456-459, August-September 2012.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Who Wrote This?: How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing by Naomi BaronLuke MunnBaron, Naomi. Who Wrote This?: How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing. Stanford University Press, 2023. 344pp.Who Wrote This? is Naomi Baron’s latest book exploring the emergence of AI language models and their potential implications for writing. A linguist, educator, and emeritus professor at American University, Baron should be (...) well placed to tease out the nuances of language, showcase the creativity of human literary canon across history, and deliver a set of findings and recommendations informed by deep experience. Indeed, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, there is a hunger for this kind of expertise and guidance both inside and outside academia, as the deluge of debates, panels, and forums in the past year have attested. This is the perfect storm, one that should be harnessed by a linguist with two decades of work on digital writing and reading into a powerful book. Instead, the reader must wade through a morass of truisms, historical anecdotes, and wiki-like summaries of research studies, interspersed with surface-level ponderings.The problems begin almost immediately with the structure of the book itself. While the book is ostensibly divided into chapters, each chapter is atomized into dozens of subsections, some no more than a paragraph or two in length. In this whirlwind tour, the reader is swiftly confronted with a jumble of quotes from journalists, jokes about language, historical events, a “laypersons AI roadmap,” and recent news stories, flitting from one to the next with barely a pause. The “AI Applications” section takes this same piecemeal approach, laying out the possible uses of artificial intelligence and then painstakingly stepping through each one. Each subsection features a few paragraphs that regurgitates material you might find, more cohesively and in-depth, in a Wikipedia article. The material on the history of artificial intelligence is handled simplistically and uncritically, skipping across a handful of heroic figures like Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Fei-Fei Li.While anecdotes and quotes abound, an argument is much harder to locate. On the one hand, Baron seems to uncritically echo the AI hype that has dominated news headlines in the past year. “We’ve come a long way,” she opines, “we have vacuum cleaning robots, drones, and self-driving [End Page 156] cars” (59). The reader learns that AI can generate poetry, correct grammar, play games, and beat masters (AlphaGo), and even identify cancer (machine learning for mammograms). These use-cases, and the ambitious claims that accompany them, are never really challenged in any sustained theoretical or methodological way. On the other hand, Baron seems to be highly conservative when it comes to the proper domain of “the human” and of writing in particular. “AI isn’t up for self-expression or thinking” (14) she says in passing, dismissing the recent revolutionary improvements in large language models that she’s just hyped up.The possibility of machinic intelligence and creativity, in fact, is a fascinating if messy one. Turing was not so interested in demonstrably “proving” that computers could be intelligent, but instead (and very much in line with his everyday navigation of British sexual norms) in developing something that could “pass” as human. Intelligence was not an acid-test, but a set of gestures that could be performed or pantomimed, emulated until they were “good enough” to deceive. N. Katherine Hayles has continued this trajectory in her work on “non-conscious cognition,” removing the barriers to what qualifies as intelligence and subsequently extending cognition down to unicellular organisms and plants. Within my own work on language models alongside colleagues (Munn et al. 2023; Magee, Munn, and Arora 2023), we highlight how models like GPT 3.5 achieve an approximation of natural speech. What is important is not the authenticity or actual intelligence of this feat, but that this “good enough” ability means that users treat language models as an interlocutor, a listener, a subject. This projection, even if misplaced, opens up this interaction and requires a conceptualization that is at least as attuned to memory, affect, and subjectivity as software interfaces and linear... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World ed. by Beatriz Ilari, Susan YoungAmy Christine BeegleBeatriz Ilari and Susan Young, eds., Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016)Historically, most studies of children’s musical learning have been informed by stage theories of developmental psychology and focused on school music or private instrumental lesson contexts. Over the past few decades, scholars have conducted research that (...) increasingly explores children’s involvement with music in contexts outside of formal learning settings, utilizing methods and models from ethnomusicology, sociology, social psychology, and/or cultural psychology. Nine individually authored chapters in the volume, Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World, edited by Beatriz Ilari and Susan Young, convey results, applications, and extensions of one such project that reaches beyond the conventional ethnographic music education study.The bulk of this collection contains findings and interpretations from a collaborative project called MyPlace, MyMusic, followed by several additional chapters that provide descriptions and narratives from subsequent related projects. The original project included fourteen scholars from the International Society of Music Education-Early Childhood Commission, who conducted in-home observations and interviews with parents and children in order to examine the nature of, influences on, and meaning of musical activities that took place in the homes of middle-class seven-year-olds in diverse locations, including Brazil, Denmark, [End Page 105] Greece, Israel, Kenya, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan, the U.K., and the United States.Importantly, the project’s designers attempted to avoid complications of transcultural developments by asking each researcher to select children whose families had not recently migrated to their country/locality. The seventeen participating children from twelve countries were also of the same ethnicity and lived in the same “locality” as each researcher in order to ease communication during in-home observations and interviews. Results shed light on issues of children’s family life, schooling, identity, gender, and social class.This project presents a unique contribution to the field of music education in a number of ways. First, most previous studies of music in the homes of children have centered around preschoolers, toddlers, and infants, whereas the present project focuses on seven-year-old children, whose age places them on the cusp of crossing from early to middle childhood. Second, most previous music education researchers have considered issues of social class, ethnicity, and race as independent variables, but the methodology for this project calls for observation and description of each child in his or her home first, followed by comparison of the “cases” to each other. Third, the researchers utilize a Wiki platform to share and collaboratively interpret data collected from home lives of children (photographs, video and audio recordings, texts, and pdf files) among researchers from different countries.The volume is organized into three major sections. Susan Young and Jèssica Pérez-Moreno set the scene in the first two chapters by describing the theoretical underpinnings and methodology for the MyPlace, MyMusic project. The second section of the book includes four chapters in which several individual researchers interpret the project’s data based upon the themes of children’s private musical worlds; belonging/identity/gendered meanings of children’s music making; perspectives and influences of parents; and the role of social class on children’s musical lives. The last three chapters of the book provide detailed descriptions of projects and extensions that developed after the MyPlace, MyMusic project.Following the introductory chapter, in which Ilari and Young explain the background, rationale, goals, and methods of the MyPlace, MyMusic project and provide a reader-friendly table that presents the cultural background and “sources of musical stimulation in the home” for each participating child,1 Susan Young outlines the theoretical and analytical frameworks for the project in the first chapter. Rather than viewing children’s learning as developing and socializing into adulthood, the project researchers were encouraged to look at children as being instead of becoming, as subjects, rather than objects of research, and as having opportunities for agency that are contextual. This theoretical framework stems from the field of Childhood Studies (as cultivated in Scandinavia [End Page 106] and... (shrink)

Technology’s impact on pedagogy has been profound, but while resources such as PowerPoint and class management software make teacher’s jobs easier it is not always clear that technology enhances student learning. This essay presents several web-based assignments that make use of current technology to enhance both student learning and appreciation for philosophical analysis. A web-page creation assignment is introduced that demonstrates how traditional textual analysis can be situated in a unique online context that facilitates greater student engagement and learning. (...) The essay also introduces two novel uses of wikis. A collaborative assignment involving Wikipedia is presented, while the second proposed use of the wiki allows instructors to “close the loop” connecting work done in and outside of class. The latter use of wikis allows instructors to gauge student reactions to a reading before class in order to maximize time spent in class discussing that reading. (shrink)

Probabilities in quantum theory are traditionally given by Born’s rule as the expectation values of projection operators. Here it is shown that Born’s rule is insufficient in universes so large that they contain identical multiple copies of observers, because one does not have definite projection operators to apply. Possible replacements for Born’s rule include using the expectation value of various operators that are not projection operators, or using vari-.

A simple proof is given that the probabilities of observations in a large universe are not given directly by Born’s rule as the expectation values of projection operators in a global quantum state of the entire universe. An alternative procedure is proposed for constructing an averaged density matrix for a random small region of the universe and then calculating observational probabilities indirectly by Born’s rule as conditional probabilities, conditioned upon the existence of an observation.

Quantum mechanics may be formulated as Sensible Quantum Mechanics (SQM) so that it contains nothing probabilistic except conscious perceptions. Sets of these perceptions can be deterministically realized with measures given by expectation values of positive-operator-valued awareness operators. Ratios of the measures for these sets of perceptions can be interpreted as frequency- type probabilities for many actually existing sets. These probabilities gener- ally cannot be given by the ordinary quantum “probabilities” for a single set of alternatives. Probabilism, or ascribing probabilities to (...) unconscious aspects of the world, may be seen to be an aesthemamorphic myth. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This is the intellectual book of the year, and it ought to become one of the great classics of intellectual history. In it James Franklin brilliantly describes the early development and application of the concept of probability, by which is meant not just the sort of probability associated with dice throwing (which he calls `factual probability'), but also what we often refer to as `likelihood" (and which is sometimes termed `logical probability'). That is, the book deals with the early history (...) of non-demonstrative ('inductive') reasoning, where some degree of likelihood can be established from the evidence, but not certainty (in other words, not logical entailment). Such reasoning is often treated cursorily in logic classes, but it is the reasoning we most often have to employ in the sciences, medicine, the law and everyday life. For example, the `big bang' theory is supported by some good arguments, good enough to justify a belief in it, but we cannot be certain that it is true. The same applies to my belief that I will not die by going for a drive in my car today - it is entirely likely that I will survive, but I cannot be certain. As such, non-- demonstrative reasoning is one of the most important areas of study there is. (shrink)

Armstrong (1983) poses two requirements that law-statements must satisfy in order to support the corresponding counterfactuals. He also argues that law-statements can not satisfy one of these requirements if they merely express regularities, although both requirements are satisfied if law-statements are interpreted as expressing relations between universals. I try to show that Armstrong’s argument can be raised against Armstrong’s own solution by adding three premisses to it: the inference thesis, the contingency thesis and a principle whose rationality I also argue (...) for. Finally, I offer a more reasonable alternative condition for nomic counterfactual supporting which is satisfied by law-statements if they are interpreted as expressing relations between universals, but not so if we interpret them as mere regularities. (shrink)

EI desarrollo de su teoría de las leyes como relaciones entre universales condujo a Armstrong a establecer un marco metafísico general mas complejo que el que sus anteriores trabajos presentaban. En este artículo se exponen los aspectos principales de la metafísica de particulares y universales exigida por la identificación original de Armstrong de las leyes con estados de cosas universales. Además, se presentan diversas dificultades que pueden hallarse en su propuesta, y algunas soluciones para las mismas. Los temas principales que (...) se discuten son las leyes con excepciones, las leyes con restriccionesespacio-temporales, las leyes probabilísticas y las leyes no ejemplificadas.The development of his theory of laws as relations between universals led Armstrong to set up a more complex general metaphysical framework than that advanced in his previous works. In this paper I present the main traits of the metaphysics of properties and particulars required by Armstrongsoriginal identification of laws with universal states of affairs. Besides, I advance some serious drawbacks that can be found in his proposal and I also offer some solutions to them. The main subjects to be discussed here will be laws with exceptions, laws with spatio-temporal limitations, probabilistic laws and uninstantiated laws. (shrink)

In this paper I deal with Armstrong's last theory of states of affairs and its relation to truthmakers for sentences and the problem of uní versáis. More specifically, I discuss his truthmaker principie, rejecting some of the objections that has been raised against it. However, I also try to show that Armstrong's answer to the problem of the negative existencial sentences in terms of totality states of affairs is mistaken. Finally, I rebut Oliver's slinghot argument against truthmakers and also discuss (...) Armstrong theory of states of affairs as truthmakers. /// Este artículo trata de la última teoría de los estados de cosas de Armstrong, así como de su relación con los hacedores de verdad de los enunciados y con el problema de los universales. En particular, se discute su principio del hacedor de verdad, y se rechazan algunas de las objeciones que se han presentado al mismo. Por otra parte, se intenta mostrar también que la respuesta de Armstrong al problema de los enunciados existenciales negativos en términos de estados de cosas de totalidad es errónea. Finalmente, también se objeta la versión de Oliver del argumento de la honda y se discute la teoría de los hacedores de verdad como los estados de cosas. (shrink)

In our profile of Daniel Dennett (pages 20 to 23, Review, April 17), we said he was born in Beirut. In fact, he was born in Boston. His father died in 1947, not 1948. He married in 1962, not 1963. The seminar at which Stephen Jay Gould was rigorously questioned by Dennett's students was Dennett's seminar at Tufts, not Gould's at Harvard. Dennett wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea before, not after, Gould called him a "Darwinian fundamentalist". Only one chapter in the (...) book, not four, is devoted to taking issue with Gould. The list of Dennett's books omitted Elbow Room , 1984, and The Intentional Stance, 1987. The marble sculpture, recollected by a friend, that Dennett was working on in 1963 was not a mother and child. It was a man reading a book. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical overview of Lewis’ theory of singular causation running from his origins to his last words on the issue . In sections 1 and 2, I characterize Lewis’ original theory of causation backed in terms of counterfactual dependence as opposed to regularity theories and also his two 1986a proposals of modification, prompted by cases of late preemption. In section 4, I examine the main problems of the 1986a proposals which lead Lewis to his last analysis of (...) causation in terms of influence . In section 5, I discuss the merits of Lewis last proposal as to the problems of late preemption and spurious causation. I also argue against Lewis’ idea that his theory of influence can deal with trumping preemption cases. Besides, a general and severe problem of the overall counterfactual conception of causality is highlighted: the status of backtracking counterfactuals. (shrink)

The Jarzynski equality equates the mean of the exponential of the negative of the work (per fixed temperature) done by a changing Hamiltonian on a system, initially in thermal equilibrium at that temperature, to the ratio of the final to the initial equilibrium partition functions of the system at that fixed temperature. It thus relates two thermal equilibrium quantum states.

This thesis consists of four essays on aesthetic cognitivism. Aesthetic cognitivism says that artworks can have significant cognitive value and that the arts constitute a significant body of understanding. This thesis formulates and defends aesthetic cognitivist positions on central debates in philosophical aesthetics and works towards a comprehensive aesthetic cognitivist account of our aesthetic practices. In essay one, ‘Aesthetic Communication’, I defend the view that the purpose of a central form of aesthetic communication is sharing an aesthetic understanding of the (...) distinctive aesthetic character and value of artworks (and inculcating this aesthetic understanding in others). I argue for this view by setting out a novel account of the nature of aesthetic communication and of the criteria of communicative success in aesthetics. In essay two, ‘Aesthetic Cognitivism and Aesthetic Normativity’, I set out an aesthetic cognitivist answer to three normative questions. Why appreciate artworks? What does appreciation aim at? Which artworks is there weightiest reason to appreciate? Aesthetic cognitivism says that there is weightiest reason to appreciate artworks that are aesthetically valuable in virtue of the rich perspectives they bear to their subject matters. It says that the appreciation of these artworks aims at the sensitive exploration of their distinctive aesthetic value (i.e., of the rich perspectives they bear). It says there is reason to appreciate these artworks because they are aesthetically valuable. In essay three, ‘The End of Pleasure in Aesthetics: Aesthetic Cognitivism Revived’, I argue for an aesthetic cognitivist account of what it is to be responsive to aesthetic value. I argue that aesthetic responsiveness consists in a motivationally self-sustaining cognitive exploration of the distinctive aesthetic value of an artwork. I contrast my account with a pleasure theoretic account. In essay four, ‘Artistic Honesty’, I describe how honesty serves as a standard that guides and governs the creative process and provide an account of the property we attribute to artworks when we judge them to be honest. I argue that for an artwork to be honest is for it to confront a truth that it is epistemically and/or emotionally difficult for us to confront (individually and as a community). (shrink)

p166 In February 1965, the United States escalated the war against South Vietnam radically, and also, on the side, began regular bombing of the North at a much lower level. That was a big public issue in the United States: Should we bomb North Vietnam? The bombing of the South was ignored. The same shows up in the internal planning, for which we now have an extremely rich record, not only from the Pentagon Papers, but from tons of declassified documents (...) that have been released in the last couple of years. It turns out again, one of the very few interesting revelations of the Pentagon Papers that there was no planning for the escalated bombing of the South. There was very meticulous planning about the bombing of the North carefully calibrated, when should we do it, and a lot of agonizing about it. The bombing of the South at triple the scale of the North is barely discussed. There are a few casual decisions here and there. The same shows up in McNamara's recent memoirs. He discusses at great length the bombing of the North. The bombing of the South he literally doesn't mention. He mentions what he did on January 21, 1965, a really important day: there was a big discussion about whether to bomb North Vietnam. He doesn't mention what we know from other documents, that on that same day, he authorized for the first time the use of jet planes to escalate the bombing of South Vietnam over and above the massive bombing that had been going on for years that's not even mentioned. (shrink)

It is usually assumed that the quantum state is sufficient for deducing all probabilities for a system. This may be true when there is a single observer, but it is not true in a universe large enough that there are many copies of an observer. Then the probability of an observation cannot be deduced simply from the quantum state (say as the expectation value of the projection operator for the observation, as in traditional quantum theory). One needs additional rules to (...) get the probabilities. What these rules are is not logically deducible from the quantum state, so the quantum state itself is insufficient for deducing observational probabilities. (shrink)

La filosofía política de Philip Pettit es uno de los mayores intentos contemporáneos por elaborar una completa teoría republicana acerca del buen gobierno. En la base de este republicanismo se encuentran dos supuestos, a los que, por lo demás, ha adherido, de distintas maneras, la tradición republic..

In terms of its impact on Britain, historians have long treated the American Revolution as the poor cousin of the French Revolution. Following E P Thompson's Marxist emphasis on the 1790s as the start of The making of the English working class (1963), scholars have devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to studying British popular politics and intellectual developments in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The American Revolution has traditionally attracted less attention outside American national historiography.

In (...) British history, the American war has been studied mostly as a problem of high politics. British historians have written many fine studies of the complex politics of the 1760s through to the war of 1775-83. While American historians have searched long and hard for long term social and economic causes of their revolution, British historians have tended to view the war as primarily a failure of politics. Ian Christie argued that 'the Revolution was a human tragedy, for which certain men were responsible, more particularly because, in Great Britain, the politicians who had the common sense and vision were out of power (owing to their own weakness and limitations) and those who were in power lacked the vision'. John Cannon has argued that Britain was little affected by the loss of America. Economic ties reconnected after 1783 and Britons moved on with their lives at the centre of an empire that was still strong in the West Indies and Canada, and expanding in the eastern hemisphere.

There have been some impressive studies of the impact of the American Revolution on British popular politics. H T Dickinson has written a number of influential studies of popular politics in the eighteenth century and edited an important volume of essays on _Britain and the American Revolution_ (1988). James E Bradley has analysed a wealth of empirical detail on Dissenting religion and political agitation during the American crisis. Eliga H Gould's _The persistence of empire: British political culture in the age of the American Revolution_ (2000) has provided an insightful study of the strength of loyalism. While of high quality, however, the quantity of such studies has long been dwarfed by the 1790s industry.

In recent years, however, scholars have begun to emphasise the importance of the period before the French Revolution. The impact of war on the development of state and society in the middle decades of the eighteenth century is now attracting attention. In _The British Isles and the War of American Independence_ (2000) Stephen Conway has detailed the significant impact the war had on state and society in Britain. In British history, according to Sarah Knott, 'where once the French Revolution, and its ricochets, was the fin-de-siècle story of transformation, now the years of the American war are the location of all manner of historical change.'. (shrink)