Moral latitude is only ever a matter of coincidence on the most popular decision procedure in the literature on moral uncertainty. In all possible choice situations other than those in which two or more options happen to be tied for maximal expected choiceworthiness, Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness implies that only one possible option is uniquely appropriate. A better theory of appropriateness would be more sensitive to the decision maker’s credence in theories that endorse agent-centred prerogatives. In this paper, we will develop (...) and defend a modified version of this view that allows for agent-centred prerogatives and supererogation as part of its verdicts about appropriateness. (shrink)

A small consortium of philosophers has begun work on the implications of epistemic networks (Zollman 2008 and forthcoming; Grim 2006, 2007; Weisberg and Muldoon forthcoming), building on theoretical work in economics, computer science, and engineering (Bala and Goyal 1998, Kleinberg 2001; Amaral et. al., 2004) and on some experimental work in social psychology (Mason, Jones, and Goldstone, 2008). This paper outlines core philosophical results and extends those results to the specific question of thresholds. Epistemic maximization of certain types does show (...) clear threshold effects. Intriguingly, however, those effects appear to be importantly independent from more familiar threshold effects in networks. (shrink)

This paper explores themethodological consequences of AmericanPragmatism for the social sciences. It alsocriticises some rival perspectives onmethodology of social research, in particularfalsificationist, realist and someanti-naturalist views. It is argued thatAmerican Pragmatism shows striking affinitieswith the genealogical method of history and thereflexive turn in cultural anthropology. It isalso argued that Pragmatism forces us to thinkdifferently about the relationship betweentheory and empirical research.

Joe Horton argues that partial aggregation yields unacceptable verdicts in cases with risk and multiple decisions. I begin by showing that Horton’s challenge does not depend on risk, since exactly similar arguments apply to riskless cases. The underlying conflict Horton exposes is between partial aggregation and certain principles of diachronic choice. I then provide two arguments against these diachronic principles: they conflict with intuitions about parity, prerogatives, and cyclical preferences, and they rely on an odd assumption about diachronic choice. Finally, (...) I offer an explanation, on behalf of partial aggregation, for why these diachronic principles fail. (shrink)

Sartre's recollection, in Les Mots , of his first visit to the cinema is a multi-layered and ambivalent text through which Sartre proposes a number of interlocking arguments: concerning the contrast between the 'sacred' space of the theatre and the non-ceremonial space of the cinema, between the theatre as associated with paternal authority, and the cinema as associated with a clandestine bond with the mother. But the text also sets up a quasi-sociological account of the public Sartre encounters in the (...) cinema itself as revealing to him the truth of the social bond, a truth he expresses with the term 'adherence', and which he says he only rediscovered in his experience of being a prisoner in the Stalag in 1940. Rather than the basis of a sociological account of the social bond, which would seem at odds with Sartre's social philosophy, I read this as the expression of a desire for physical proximity. The space of the cinema thus develops a fantasy, and this is in continuity with the role of the cinema in the evolution traced in Les Mots , in which it is described as instigating a withdrawal into imaginary life and an indulgence in daydreaming. Through reference to Christian Metz and to Roland Barthes, whose essay 'En sortant du cinéma' is proposed as a parallel and a response to Sartre, I suggest that the 'true bond' of adherence which Sartre encounters is an unconscious rather than an epistemological truth. (shrink)

Concerns photography and time as duration, sequence, equability, past and present (illus.).

This paper addresses standard questions regarding comics and the arts (comics and fine arts, image and word combinations), then poses and addresses the neglected, but deeper and wider--thus philosophical--question, of how depictions, not just words, can have mental contents at all, including light, funny, scathing, comic ones.

Affective experience in nonhuman animals is of great interest for both theoretical and practical reasons. This paper highlights research by the psychologists Anthony Dickinson and Bernard Balleine which provides particularly good evidence of conscious affective experience in rats. This evidence is compelling because it implicates a sophisticated system for goal-directed action selection, and demonstrates a contrast between apparently conscious and unconscious evaluative representations with similar content. Meanwhile, the evidence provided by some well-known studies on pain in nonhuman animals is much (...) less convincing. This comparison may offer lessons for the future study of animal consciousness. (shrink)

Dynamic semantics violates numerous classical laws, including Non-Contradiction. Proponents of dynamic semantics have offered no explanation for this behavior, and some critics consider this result to be strong evidence against the tenability of the dynamic program. I defend and explain failures of Non-Contradiction by comparing dynamic semantics and classical, truth conditional semantics in terms of their idealizing assumptions. I demonstrate that dynamic semantics rejects context fixity, an idealizing assumption that truth-conditional semantics typically adopts. I then argue that any semantics which (...) rejects context fixity should, by the classical semanticist’s own lights, violate Non-Contradiction under certain circumstances. I then demonstrate that dynamic semantics violates Non-Contradiction in all and only those circumstances. I subsequently appeal to this insight to vindicate some of dynamic semantics’ more controversial predictions. I close by suggesting that discussion of idealizing assumptions, common in the sciences, is similarly crucial to fruitful discussion in natural language semantics. (shrink)

Media outlets, industry researchers, and policy-makers are today busily extolling new robotic advances that promise to transform agriculture, bringing us ever closer to self-farming farms. Yet such techno-optimist discourse ignores the cautionary lessons of past attempts to mechanize farms. Adapting the Social Construction of Technology framework, we trace the history of efforts to replace human labor with machine labor on fruit, nut, and vegetable farms in California between 1945 and 1980—a place and time during which a post-WWII culture of faith (...) in the beneficence of technoscience applications to agriculture reached an apex. The degree to which and forms whereby mechanization gains momentum hinges on whether, how, and among whom a technological frame for mimicking human capabilities and supplanting workers coalesces. These frames, we find, vary considerably across crops, reflecting complex interactions of biology, farmer and farm worker behavior, industry supply chains, agricultural research and development, financial flows, and beliefs about labor, race, gender, and immigration. To tease out these complex dynamics, we draw directly from archival evidence to follow the development of cultivation and harvest machines through four cases spanning a spectrum of outcomes—tomatoes, nuts, peaches, and lettuce. In comparing across these cases, we find that although agricultural engineers, scientists, and their boosters framed mechanization as a triumphal narrative of progress in ‘human vs. nature’ conflicts, this techno-optimist rhetoric camouflaged deeper ‘human vs. human’ conflicts, particularly among agribusiness, farmers, and farm workers. We conclude with several insights that this historical study brings to the study of agricultural automation today. (shrink)

Strategies for combating climate change which advocate for human population limitation have recently been understandably criticised on the grounds that they embody a form of 'climate colonialism': a moral wrong that involves disproportionally shifting the burdens of climate change onto developing, historically exploited nations (which have low per capita emissions but high fertility rates) in order to offset burdens in affluent nations (which have high per capita emissions but low fertility rates). This article argues that once the relevance of population (...) growth to climate change has been correctly understood as working in tandem with consumption levels, this objection fails as a general criticism. Moreover, even if population could be ignored as a variable, the climate colonialism charge would re-emerge in a different form, since, at present population sizes, it would be environmentally catastrophic for developing nations to reach production ambitions which see their per capita emissions massively increase. Even if emission reductions in affluent nations are (rightly) prioritised, there are good reasons to prevent enormous growth of emissions in developing nations. Those environmental risks become much greater given those nations' projected population increases in the coming century. The article then explores how the necessary radical environmental policies pertaining to fertility rates might be enacted in non-coercive ways, reducing the sting of the ‘climate colonialism’ charge. The article ends by considering some reasons to be moderately sceptical about such policies. (shrink)

Traditional wisdom dictates that statistical model outputs are estimates, not measurements. Despite this, statistical models are employed as measurement instruments in the social sciences. In this article, I scrutinize the use of a specific model—the logit model—for psychological measurement. Given the adoption of a criterion for measurement that I call comparability, I show that the logit model fails to yield measurements due to properties that follow from its fixed residual variance.

One prominent welfarist axiology, critical-level utilitarianism, says that individual lives must surpass a specified ‘critical level’ in order to make a positive contribution to the comparative status of a given population. In this article I develop a new dilemma for critical-level utilitarians. When comparatively evaluating populations composed of different species, critical-level utilitarians must decide whether the critical level is a universal threshold or whether the critical level is a species-relative threshold. I argue that both thresholds lead to a range of (...) axiological puzzles and objections as yet undiscussed within the literature, and therefore conclude that critical-level utilitarianism should not be taken as a morally plausible welfarist axiology. I show that certain competitive formulations of critical range utilitarianism are subject to the argument too, and that further attempts to relativise critical levels to a particular group or category of welfare bearer are unsustainable. (shrink)

Introduction to the Special Issue containing selected contributions to the conference "Formal Methods and Science in Philosophy IV", Inter-University Center, Dubrovnik, April 11-13, 2019.

Contemporary yoga is popularly represented in various media by a fit, white woman. Yoga Journal is a magazine recognized by many as an industry cornerstone and an institution in and of itself. It represents the distinctive face of yoga. By analyzing the visual and textual content of the Yoga Journal magazine covers, from its first issue in 1975 to issue 313, we describe the produced and consumed portrait of yoga. By focusing on the cover themes, together with the objects and (...) persons depicted, we recognize three phases of development that have contributed to the understanding of the changing image of yoga in the media. While, in the initial phase, yoga was represented as a mystical and mysterious spiritual discipline that originated in the Orientalized East, in the later phase, it was depicted first as a global and universal phenomenon and then as a mainstream everyday fitness regime. Yoga’s depiction in the last phase is compatible with the scholarly representation of contemporary yoga as posture and body centered, but not with its earlier depictions. We found that in its mature phase, the yoga body, which is criticized for its lack of inclusiveness, emerged to become omnipresent. We conclude that the newly formed face of yoga is problematic, both for its female readers, who are encouraged to conform to a unique body type, and also for the yoga community, which encounters an appearance-based restriction of access. (shrink)

We present and defend a Thomistic cosmological argument that runs independently of the principle of sufficient reason, sidestepping perhaps two of the most recurrent objections to cosmological reasoning: (a) the possibility of brute facts (i.e., that not everything needs an adequate explanation of its existence) and (b) the accusation of the composition fallacy. Drawing upon the work of Barry Miller, we show that any contingent entity like Thumper the rabbit, upon metaphysical analysis, is either a contradictory structure and therefore an (...) impossible existent or else points towards an extrinsic cause for the unity of its really distinct metaphysical parts (namely, its essence and its existence). This conclusion enables the inference that only an uncaused cause with no really distinct metaphysical parts can ultimately produce anything with really distinct metaphysical parts. We then suggest it is not implausible that this entity is God. (shrink)

Various philosophers have wanted to move from a (P.F.) “Strawsonian” understanding of the “practices of moral responsibility” to a non-skeptical result. I focus on a strategy moving from a “response-dependent” theory of responsibility. I aim to show that a key analogy associated with this strategy fails to support a compatibilist result. It seems clear that nothing could show that nothing we have been laughing at has really been funny. If “the funny” is similar to “the blameworthy”, then perhaps it would (...) follow that nothing could show that no one we have ever blamed has really been blameworthy. The comparison is interesting, but inconclusive: even if we grant that these properties are normatively similar, the latter has substantive empirical presuppositions, whereas the former does not. One important upshot: even if the standards operative in our practices cannot be mistaken, it could nevertheless be that no one has ever met these standards Ruling out this possibility seemingly requires re-engaging in all of the so-called "metaphysical" debates Strawsonians are keen to avoid. (shrink)

The historical context of the philosophical work of St. Thomas Aquinas, by D. Knowles.--Form and existence, by P. Geach.--Categories, by H. McCabe.--Analogy as a rule of meaning for religious language, by J. F. Ross.--Nominalism, by P. Geach.--St. Thomas' doctrine of necessary being, by P. Brown.--The proof ex motu for the existence of God; logical analysis of St. Thomas' arguments, by J. Salamucha.--Infinite causal regression, by P. Brown.--St. Thomas Aquinas and the language of total dependence, by J. N. Deck.--Divine foreknowledge and (...) human freedom, by A. Kenny.--Intellect and imagination in Aquinas, by A. Kenny.--The immortality of the soul, by H. McCabe.--Aquinas on intentionality, by P. Sheehan.--The scholastic theory of moral law in the modern world, by A. Donagan.--The first principle of practical reason, by G. G. Grisez. (shrink)

Central to Fischer and Ravizza's theory of moral responsibility is the concept of guidance control, which involves two conditions: (1) moderate reasons-responsiveness, and (2) mechanism ownership. We raise a worry for Fischer and Ravizza's account of (1). If an agent acts contrary to reasons which he could not recognize, this should lead us to conclude that he is not morally responsible for his behaviour; but according to Fischer and Ravizza's account, he satisfies the conditions for guidance control and is therefore (...) morally responsible. We consider ways in which the account of guidance control might be mended. (shrink)

According to Keith DeRose, the invariantist's attempt to account for the data which inspire contextualism fares no better, in the end, than the "desperate and lame" maneuvers of "the crazed theory of 'bachelor'", whereby S's being unmarried is not among the truth conditions of 'S is a bachelor', but merely an implicature generated by an assertion thereof. Here, I outline the invariantist account I have previously proposed. I then argue that the prospects for sophisticated invariantism — either as a general (...) approach, or in the specific form I have recommended — are not nearly as dim as DeRose suggests. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to state the single most powerful argument for use of a non-classical logic in quantum mechanics. In outline the argument is the following. The working logic of a science is the logic of the events and propositions to which probabilities are assigned. A probability should be assigned to every element of the algebra of events. In the case of quantum mechanics probabilities may be assigned to events but not, without restriction, to the conjunction of (...) two events. The conclusion is that the working logic of quantum mechanics is not classical. The nature of the logic that is appropriate for quantum mechanics is examined. (shrink)

This article is one of the first sociological explorations of power struggles between intellectuals where matters of life and death are literally at stake. It counters the prevailing tendency within sociology to study intellectuals within confined academic institutions where power struggles are limited to matters of symbolic and institutional recognition. This study explores the conflict between collaborationist and Resistance intellectuals at the end of the Second World War in France, and it focuses in particular on the purge of collaborationist intellectuals (...) which culminated in several high profile trials. This article shows that the arguments and meta-arguments put forward in these trials led to broader intellectual debates outside the courtroom. These debates not only centred on the notion of the writer’s responsibility, but also dealt with anxieties about the disintegrative forces of modern society. Whereas collaborationist intellectuals portrayed their writing as either separate from politics or rescuing a defunct or degenerate nation, Resistance intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre were keen to portray collaborators as outsiders, both socially and sexually, lacking in social integration and subservient to a strong external force. The Resistance intellectuals saw the notion of individual responsibility not as antithetical but as integral to the remaking of the French nation, and this concept would become the cornerstone of the reshaping of the intellectual landscape in the post-war era in France. (shrink)

What is it for a sound or gesture to have a meaning, and how does it come to have one? In this paper, a range of simulations are used to extend the tradition of theories of meaning as use. The authors work throughout with large spatialized arrays of sessile individuals in an environment of wandering food sources and predators. Individuals gain points by feeding and lose points when they are hit by a predator and are not hiding. They can also (...) make sounds heard by immediate neighbours in the array, and can respond to sounds from immediate neighbours. No inherent meaning for these sounds is built into the simulation; under what circumstances they are sent, if any, and what the response to them is, if any, vary initially with the strategies randomized across the array. These sounds do take on a specific function for communities of individuals, however, with any of three forms of strategy change: direct imitation of strategies of successful neighbours, a localized genetic algorithm in which strategies are ‘crossed’ with those of successful neighbours, and neural net training on the behaviour of successful neighbours. Starting from an array randomized across a large number of strategies, and using any of these modes of strategy change, communities of ‘communicators’ emerge. Within these evolving communities the sounds heard from immediate neighbours, initially arbitrary across the array, come to be used for very specific communicative functions. ‘Communicators’ make a particular sound on feeding and respond to that same sound from neighbours by opening their mouths; they make a different sound when hit with a predator and respond to that sound by hiding. Robustly and persistently, even in simple computer models of communities of self-interested agents, something suggestively like signalling emerges and spreads. Keywords: meaning, communication, genetic algorithms, neural networks. (shrink)

The Polymath Project is an online collaborative enterprise that was initiated in 2009, when Timothy Gowers asked whether and how groups could work together to solve mathematical problems that “do not naturally split up into a vast number of subtasks.” Gowers proposed to answer this question himself by actually trying to set up such a collaboration, based on interactions taking place in the comment-threads of a series of posts on a WordPress blog. Hence, the first project officially started in early (...) 2009, to be proclaimed successful only 6 weeks later (Gowers and Nielsen 2009). From its inception until April 2018, 15 more Polymath problems (and a handful of smaller or related ones) have been launched. These projects have attracted attention from different scholarly communities, including the philosophy of mathematical practices, from the perspective of which the Polymath Project can be seen as a vast repository of mathematics in action. This chapter continues previous work by its authors on the topic in question and topics related. More specifically, for the purposes of this volume, it is our aim to both summarize and expand upon these earlier contributions. The starting point is the above observation that in the past decade, the issue of “massively collaborative mathematics” (to be qualified below) has drawn quite some attention. However, does it also warrant intensive philosophical attention in particular? For, as exciting as these developments might be from mathematical and other points of view, the enhanced possibilities that have come with it do not per se give rise to any philosophical import. In Van Bendegem (2011), one of us has indeed tentatively argued for the philosophical relevance of these new dynamics of proof construction flowing from the wide availability and efficiency of Internet technology. We shall below briefly rehearse and update the argument given there. (shrink)

A survey of logical problems for the concept of omniscience.

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

In this paper, missing attribute values in incomplete data sets have three possible interpretations: lost values, attribute-concept values and ‘do not care’ conditions. For rule induction, we use characteristic sets and generalized maximal consistent blocks. Therefore, we apply six different approaches for data mining. As follows from our previous experiments, where we used an error rate evaluated by ten-fold cross validation as the main criterion of quality, no approach is universally the best. Thus, we decided to compare our six approaches (...) using complexity of rule sets induced from incomplete data sets. We show that the smallest rule sets are induced from incomplete data sets with attribute-concept values, while the most complicated rule sets are induced from data sets with lost values. The choice between interpretations of missing attribute values is more important than the choice between characteristic sets and generalized maximal consistent blocks. (shrink)

Institutionalism gives priority to structure over agency. Yet institutions have never developed and operated without the intervention of interested groups. This paper develops a conceptual framework for the role of agency in historical institutionalism. Based on recent contributions following the coalitional turn and drawing on insights from sociological institutionalism, it argues that agency plays a key role in the creation and maintenance of social coalitions that stabilize but also challenge institutions. Without such agency, no coalition can be created, maintained, or (...) changed. Similarly, without a supporting coalition, no contested institution can survive. Yet, due to collective action problems, such coalitional work is challenging. This coalitional perspective offers a robust role for agency in historical institutionalism, but it also explains why institutions remain stable despite agency. In addition, this paper forwards several portable propositions that allow for the identification of who is likely to develop agency and what these actors do. (shrink)

Talk of ‘robustness’ remains vague, despite the fact that it is clearly an important parameter in evaluating models in general and game-theoretic results in particular. Here we want to make it a bit less vague by offering a graphic measure for a particular kind of robustness— ‘matrix robustness’— using a three dimensional display of the universe of 2 x 2 game theory. In a display of this form, familiar games such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stag Hunt, Chicken and Deadlock appear (...) as volumes, making comparison easy regarding the extent of different game-theoretic effects. We illustrate such a comparison in robustness between the triumph of Tit for Tat in a spatialized environment (Grim 1995, Grim, Mar, and St. Denis 1998) and a spatialized modeling of the Contact Hypothesis regarding prejudice reduction (Grim, et. al 2005a, 2005b). The geometrical representation of relative robustness also offers a possibility for links between geometrical theorems and results regarding robustness in game theory. (shrink)

According to the Classical Pessimistic Induction (CPI), otherwise positive features like predictive and explanatory success actually cast doubt on theories that display them. After all, they negatively correlate with truth. From this historical track record, it is inferred that current best theories are probably not (even approximately) true. The CPI is often wielded against realists about science, but others like Hume (1757), Pareto (1935), and Hájek (2007) extend it to philosophical theories more generally. In this paper, I unveil a priori (...) refutations that defang the CPI in all its guises. To date, treatments of this topic typically assume the following: if the historical proportion of false theories increases, then it has increasingly negative bearing against realism. I show that this assumption is false. I identify three types of problems for the CPI, each attaching to some interpretation or other. The first problem is that the CPI violates a universal adequacy condition on the confirmation relation that restricts the relationship between entailment and disconfirmation. The second problem is that the induction’s target hypotheses preclude the track record from instantiating a list of epistemically significant properties that empirical information is supposed to afford. The third problem is that it is constitutively impossible for the CPI to have random samples; this implies that even the use of randomization procedures cannot help. In sum: my refutation is novel, accessible by pure reflection, and quite general. (shrink)

As companies increasingly communicate CSR initiatives through social media, viral message propagation has become a crucial prerequisite for CSR success. Evidence from two experimental studies, one based on a national representative online sample, shows that social media peers’ endorsement of a CSR message in terms of number of shares, likes and positive replies contributes to an individual’s intention to share it on the social network and thereby participate in message propagation, and that this process can be explained by normative influences (...) exerted by the social media community through the activation of injunctive and descriptive norms, as well as social identity motives. Findings further confirmed that the norm-activating effects of social media endorsement are moderated by the empowering qualities of the CSR message, the sharing source of the message by affecting CSR credibility, and the recipient’s interdependent self-construal. Corporate communication managers are advised to achieve a high degree of initial social media endorsement of their CSR message, for recipients of the message to perceive social pressure motivating message sharing with their social media peers. (shrink)

The well-known classification of legal procedure into “four feet” presents certain conceptual problems for the Indian legal tradition that various Smṛtikāras and commentators have attempted to resolve in different and sometimes contradictory ways. These difficulties arise because the four feet originally referred in Indian legal theory to four distinct, hierarchical legal domains rather than procedural means for reaching a verdict. The earliest attested discussion of the four feet, found in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, indicates that early legal theorists understood the greater legal (...) order as being comprised of four hierarchical domains and that these domains were ordered by the state as expressed in the original formulation of the four feet. Among the four legal domains, that of vyavahāra was developed by the state itself as a realm of public, transactional law meant to address disputes that could not be resolved in other legal forums. From this we can conclude that the origin of Indian jurisprudence lies with state efforts to formalize and enforce the laws of public transactions. The reinterpretation of the four feet by later jurists was motivated perhaps by resistance to one of the fundamental relationships expressed in the four feet, namely that royal authority possessed the greatest legal authority, independent of Brāhmaṇical law. (shrink)

An attractive feature of Neuroconstructivism, Vol. I: How the Brain Constructs Cognition is its emphasis on the active role of the individual in neural and behavioural development and the importance of the interplay with the environment. Certain aspects of development are omitted, however, such as specializations for the distinctive ecologies of infancy and childhood and the scaffolding-like features of behaviour seen during development. It was also a pity that so little credit was given to many scientists who have contributed to (...) just those aspects of development on which the authors focus. (shrink)

Le présent article indique les principales caractéristiques de la ritualité funéraire. Il montre, au-delà de ses formes d'organisation, ses enjeux. Retenue du mort, séparation du défunt et remaniement des places que les vivants occupent en rapport à la société des morts, constituent les dimensions principales d'une ritualité sans doute variable selon les cultures, mais aussi universelle. On peut décrire les pratiques des funérailles, les « expliquer » en montrant qu'elles ressortissent à des impératifs sociaux, ou les « comprendre » en (...) disant que l'être désolé trouve au travers de coutumes les moyens d'affirmer son attachement à l'être aimé et de nier symboliquement la perte qu'il subit. Mais il faut surtout comprendre que la ritualité funéraire, qui déborde des obsèques, oblige les sociétés au-delà de leurs capacités communicationnelles. Ce débordement est précisément l'affaire de toute culture et de son travail. En direction de l'incommunicable.This article describes the main characteristics of the funeral ritual. It shows beyond its forms of organization, its issues. Retention of death, separation and rearrangement of the deceased that the living spaces occupy in relation to the company of the dead, are the main dimensions of a ritual probably varies by crop, but also universal. We can describe the practices of funerals, "explain" by showing that they belong to social imperatives, or "understand" saying sorry be found through customs means to affirm its commitment to the loved and symbolically deny the loss sustained. But above all understand that the funeral ritual, which extends beyond the funeral, requires companies beyond their communication skills. This overflow is precisely the case of any culture and work. Towards the incommunicable. (shrink)

Public health care interventions—regarding vaccination, obesity, and HIV, for example—standardly take the form of information dissemination across a community. But information networks can vary importantly between different ethnic communities, as can levels of trust in information from different sources. We use data from the Greater Pittsburgh Random Household Health Survey to construct models of information networks for White and Black communities--models which reflect the degree of information contact between individuals, with degrees of trust in information from various sources correlated with (...) positions in that social network. With simple assumptions regarding belief change and social reinforcement, we use those modeled networks to build dynamic agent-based models of how information can be expected to flow and how beliefs can be expected to change across each community. With contrasting information from governmental and religious sources, the results show importantly different dynamic patterns of belief polarization within the two communities. (shrink)

Language agents are AI systems that combine large language models with other elements to facilitate interaction with an environment. They include LLM-based chatbots but can have a wide range of additional features to support learning, reasoning and decision-making. Goldstein and Kirk-Giannini. Citationm.s. [AI wellbeing] argue that some language agents have beliefs and desires, but it is not obvious that they are agents at all, since they select outputs by querying language models. This paper investigates agency and desires in language agents.

The purpose of this paper is to open for investigation a range of phenomena familiar from dynamical systems or chaos theory which appear in a simple fuzzy logic with the introduction of self-reference. Within that logic, self-referential sentences exhibit properties of fixed point attractors, fixed point repellers, and full chaos on the [0, 1] interval. Strange attractors and fractals appear in two dimensions in the graphing of pairs of mutually referential sentences and appear in three dimensions in the graphing of (...) mutually referential triples. (shrink)