Philosophical accounts of moral responsibility are standardly framed by two platitudes. According to them, blame requires the presence of a moral defect in the agent and the absence of excuses. In this chapter, this kind of approach is challenged. It is argued that (a) people sometimes violate moral norms due to performance mistakes, (b) it often appears reasonable to hold them responsible for it, and (c) their mistakes cannot be traced to their moral qualities or to the (...) presence of excuses. In the end, the implications for discussions of moral responsibility are discussed. (shrink)

Most contemporary theories of action maintain that there are basic actions. A basic action is something that one does intentionally without doing anything else intentionally as means to that end. Most contemporary theories of action also maintain that there are non-basic actions that are mistakes in performance, where a mistake in performance is a case of mucking up what one meant to do, without the failure being the result of prevention or abnormal interference. But most contemporary theories (...) of action deny that there are basic mistakes in performance: stretches of activity that would be basic actions were they to succeed, but are in fact mistakes in performance. I argue that we have reason to think that there are basic mistakes in performance, and if there are, then we must give up a key commitment common to much contemporary action theory. The commitment is that every particular imperfect expression of the will is grounded in some particular perfect expression of the will. Giving up this commitment has important metaphysical consequences for how we think of the will as a power of agency, and implies that causal deviance perhaps isn’t the main problem that causal theorists of action ought to worry about. (shrink)

This paper is an analysis of the concept "Mistake in Performance," a phrase first coined by Miss Elizabeth Anscombe in her monograph On Intention. The author shows that examples of a mistake in performance are nothing but cases of ordinary mistakes of judgment. The only difference between the two is that in cases of mistake in performance the agent acts on the basis of an erroneous judgment, that is, he fails to do what he intended to (...) do. (shrink)

This paper discusses mistakes that occur in improvised musical performance. I first develop a couple of distinctions that are useful to understand the varied nature of such mistakes. Particularly, I think that it is important to distinguish mistakes that depend upon formal features of the music, and mistakes that are such in virtue of a failure of the performer’s intentions. Within this latter category, I argue that it is useful to distinguish between two different layers (...) of performance intentions. Subsequently, I discuss the idea that, in improvised performance, mistakes are not merely tolerated but are, in some sense, valuable, showing how the distinction I develop can shed some light on these issues. (shrink)

This is a draft of my chapter on Agency and Mistakes for the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency. In it, I focus on performance mistakes and distinguish them from other "derivative" mistakes that we make as agents. I argue that a proper understanding of these mistakes recommends a generalized fallibilism about human agency.

Belief in free will is widespread. The present research considered one reason why people may believe that actions are freely chosen rather than determined: they attribute randomness in behavior to free will. Experiment 1 found that participants who were prompted to perform a random sequence of actions experienced their behavior as more freely chosen than those who were prompted to perform a deterministic sequence. Likewise, Experiment 2 found that, all else equal, the behavior of animated agents was perceived to be (...) more freely chosen if it consisted of a random sequence of actions than if it consisted of a deterministic sequence; this was true even when the degree of randomness in agents’ behavior was largely a product of their environments. Together, these findings suggest that randomness in behavior—one’s own or another’s—can be mistaken for free will. (shrink)

There are many ways in which a musical performance can be “bad,” but here the focus is on two: those performances that make you laugh, and those that make you angry. These forms of musical badness, however, are not primarily compositional deficits, but either (a) that the performer simply cannot competently deliver the music to their audience, inducing laughter, or (b) that the performer exhibits some form of disrespect, provoking anger. Such laughter or anger stems from failure of the (...) expected relationship between a performer and their audience, that is, a social failure. After surveying a range of musical faults, the article examines the causes of laughter in general and in relation to some of examples of risible “bad” music. Similarly, the causes of social and moral anger in general are examined, and several cases of anger-inducing musical performances are presented. The article concludes with a consideration of the broader implications of these responses to “bad” music for theories of emotional expression in music, the relationship between aesthetic and moral judgments, and the centrality of musical performances as opposed to works in discussions of musical expression and value. (shrink)

This paper presents a broad-ranging critique of the traditional strong doctrine of divine simplicity which is attributed to Augustine and Aquinas. After showing two important arguments in favor of the doctrine to be unsuccessful, it argues that the doctrine itself, in this strong version, is problematic in three main ways. First, the doctrine involves extensive category mistakes. Second, it is difficult to reconcile with truths about God that are universally acknowledged, such as that God knows contingent truths and performs (...) actions which he is not necessitated by his nature to perform. Finally, it is difficult to reconcile with personal attributes of God which are important both for the Bible and for religious practice, such as the claims that God is responsive to human beings and that he loves them. This article contends that while there is a sense in which it is true that God is simple, the traditional strong doctrine of divine simplicity, attributed to Augustine and Aquinas, is a mistake from which theology needs to be liberated. (shrink)

Understanding the impact of robot errors in child-robot-interactions (CRI) is critical, as current technological systems are still limited and may randomly present a variety of mistakes during interactions with children. In this study we manipulate a task-based error of a NAO robot during a semi-autonomous computational thinking task implemented with the Cozmo robot. Data from 72 children aged 7–10 were analysed regarding their attitudes towards NAO (social trust, competency trust, liking, and perceived agency), their behaviour towards the robot (self-disclosure, (...) following recommendations), as well as their task performance. We did not find quantitative effects of the robot’s error on children’s self-reported attitudes, behaviour, or task performance. Age was also not significantly related to either social attitudes or behaviours towards NAO, although there were some age-related differences in task performance. Potential reasons behind the lack of statistical effects and limitations of the study with regards to the manipulation of robot errors are discussed and insights into the design of future CRI studies provided. (shrink)

Addresses the question of the relation of the work to its performances, and the interesting puzzles concerning arrangements, versions, variations, and mistakes. Explores the cultural and historical significance of performance in creating the identity of the musical work and contains a critical account of the present vogue for ‘authenticity’. The cult of authenticity makes the relation between sound and tone, and this is explored in Ch. 2.

The invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago has been called the worst mistake in human history. Alongside the social, political, and technological innovations that stemmed from it, there came a litany of drawbacks ranging from social inequality, a decline in human health, to the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Millennia after the invention of agriculture, another revolution—the digital revolution—is having a similar impact on humanity, albeit at a scale and speed measured in decades. Despite the tremendous (...) advances brought about by this revolution, there is today a rapidly expanding gulf within and between societies along technological lines; alarming effects on sociality and cognition due to a persistent online presence; and a concentration of power in the form of wealth and data within a handful of tech companies, the likes of which has never been seen before. While the effects of agriculture can now be discerned with thousands of years of hindsight, those of the digital revolution can be witnessed in real time. Is the digital revolution paving the way for a more equitable and stable world, or is it leading humanity down a road that will prove to be more detrimental the more ensconced in technology we become? (shrink)

In this paper, drawing on evidence internal to the Platonic dialogues (supplemented with some ancient testimonia), I answer the question, “How did Plato teach in the Academy?” My reconstruction of Plato’s pedagogy in the Academy is that there was a single person who read the dialogue aloud like a rhapsode (this is in contrast to the dramatic theatrical hypothesis, in which several speakers function as actors in the performance of a dialogue). After the rhapsodic reading, students were allowed to (...) ask that portions of the text to be re-read, to ask a question about the text, and were encouraged to enter into a broader conversation about the topic and themes brought out by the text. This later pedagogical method of interrogating and investigating a dialogue is of more importance than the mere reading of a dialogue. I contend that Plato’s experiences teaching were woven into some of the dialogues, and that Plato’s pedagogy reflects some of the ways that he taught in the Academy. I propose that excellent points made by students may have been written into revised forms of the dialogue. And not only good points, but also mistakes in reasoning may have been added into the dialogues. I suggest that the way certain dialogues are organized with “guest lecturers” and “tag-team” philosophical debates reflect Plato’s pedagogy in the Academy. Plato’s broadmindedness, his openness to various and opposing viewpoints, is also evident from both outside and inside of the dialogue. Lastly, drawing on the idea of Socratic mimēsis, I give a plausible curriculum for how Plato may have used the dialogues to teach them: he had his students “play” with them. Plato may have asked his students to enter into the roles of the characters in the dialogues to better understand them and the type of person they represent. Plato may have also asked students to take over from the position of the character in the dialogue and to suggest a better, truer account of things than what the characters said or did. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the relationship between correcting the deviations in the measurement of performance and achieving the objectives of control and the performance of the job at the Islamic University in the Gaza Strip. To achieve the objectives of the research, the researchers used the descriptive analytical approach to collect information. The questionnaire consisted of (20) statements distributed to three categories of employees of the Islamic University (senior management, faculty members, their assistants and members of the (...) administrative board). A random sample of 314 employees was selected and 276 responses were retrieved with a recovery rate of 88.1%. The Statistical Analysis Program (SPSS) was used to enter, process, and analyze the data. The results of the study showed a positive relationship between correcting deviations in performance measurement and achieving the control objectives represented by the functional performance in the Islamic University from the point of view of the members (senior management, faculty and their assistants, and the administrative board), where the relative weight of all the paragraphs was (74.25%). The study recommended the need to ensure that the actual performance of the planned performance is matched and decisions are taken to correct the serious deviations and take the necessary measures in terms of retraining and change in regulations, wages and bonuses and punishment of the culprit, neglect and negligence by mistake. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Ted Gioia associated the “aesthetics of imperfection” with improvised music. In an earlier article, I extended it to all musical performance. This article reconceives my discussion, offering more precise analyses: The aesthetics of imperfection is now argued to involve open, spontaneous response to contingencies of performance or production, reacting positively to idiosyncratic instruments; apparent failings in performance, and so on. Perfectionists, in contrast, prefer a planning model, not readily modified in face of contingencies. Imperfection is not (...) toleration of errors and imperfections, as Gioia assumes, but a positive aesthetic, as in Japanese wabi-sabi. Imperfections can become new styles or kinds of perfection—and so true imperfectionism is a constant striving for new contingencies to respond to. A subtler, more complex relation between composition and improvisation is proposed, in which both have broad and narrow senses. Composition involves works, usually desk produced and notated; or more generally, putting things together in an aesthetically rewarding form. Thus, improvisation is a compositional method. Improvisation and composition are interdependent; both involve structure and spontaneity. Imperfectionism is an aesthetics of performance—of compositions as well as improvisations. Improvisation is no risker, or prone to mistakes, than performance of compositions. (shrink)

Discussion of the behaviour of pregnant women and mothers, in academic literature, medical advice given to mothers, mainstream media and social media, assumes that a mother who fails to do something to benefit her child is liable for moral criticism unless she can provide sufficient countervailing considerations to justify her decision. I reconstruct the normally implicit reasoning that leads to this assumption and show that it is mistaken. First, I show that the discussion assumes that if any action might benefit (...) her child, the mother has a defeasible duty to perform that action. I suggest that this assumption is implicitly supported by two arguments but that each argument is unsound. The first argument conflates moral reasons and defeasible duties; the second misunderstands the scope of a defeasible duty to benefit. This argument has important practical and theoretical implications: practically, it provides a response to a highly damaging discourse on maternal behaviour; theoretically, it provides the framework for a clearer understanding of the scope and nature of defeasible duties to benefit. (shrink)

Introduction. The need for a transition to a new system of motivating state and municipal employees’ activities has been widely discussed in recent years. Moreover, some government bodies have taken certain actions in this direction. But in general, there have not been any significant changes. The authors of the article are convinced that the transition to more effective management is impossible without changing the civil servants’ remuneration system, which should motivate them to achieve significant results in the areas for which (...) they are responsible. The paper considers the conceptual approach of transferring the civil servants’ remuneration to a new system, shows the advantages of using performance indicators to stimulate the employees’ activities. The purpose of the article is to justify the reasonability of using performance indicators when remunerating state and municipal employees. Methods. Within the framework of the systems approach, the authors use structural and functional analysis, as well as general scientific methods: abstraction, comparison, description and explanation. Scientific novelty. The authors show possibilities of using the personnel performance indicators in the state and municipal service in order to increase their motivation for obtaining significant results in their work. Results. The authors analyze the conditions for successful implementing the key personnel performance indicators in the state and municipal service, describe the typical mistakes militating the effectiveness of the personnel performance indicators in public authorities. The authors develop some recommendations to improve the use of the personnel performance indicators in the system of state and municipal administration. Conclusions. The proper use of key performance indicators of state and municipal employees will significantly increase their motivation in order to achieve high efficiency in their work. At the same time, the personnel performance indicators must be balanced and matched taking into account the goals of the organization. (shrink)

Philosophic inquiry into the mental states of elite athletes during skilled motor performance continues to grow. In contrast to the bulk of these works that focus almost exclusively on skillful performance, this paper examines athletic motor behavior from a point of inexactness – or even failure – in athletic performance. Utilizing the works of Michael Polanyi, who believed that both ideas of achievement and failure were equally necessary to understand the behavior of living things and their physical (...) actions, I examine the notion of failure as a framework to scrutinize the cognitive processes occurring during the development and performance of skilled motor behavior. After reviewing Polanyi’s conceptions of personal knowing to locate the source of inaccuracy in human activity, I present Polanyi’s distinction between two kinds of mistakes and apply each to inaccurate sport performance. I then suggest that mistakes in sport should be re-conceptualized beyond their current negative connotations. Instead, conceptions of mistakes should also include respect for ‘man’s most distinguished act’ – that being the production of knowledge. From this expanded perspective, the value of inexact motor performance can be found in addition to notions of uncertainty and skill development in what Polanyi calls ‘metaphysical implication of a groping for reality’. In some final thoughts, I will suggest future implications of the value of the inexact on broader sport issues. (shrink)

The article deals with the issue of initial impossibility of performance of an obligation and the influence of such impossibility of performance on the validity of the legal transaction that establishes such an obligation. The legal doctrine convincingly demonstrates that for Roman lawyers the rule Impossitionbilium nulla obligatio est merely meant that nobody can be obliged to perform something that cannot be performed; however, it did not necessarily follow that a contract establishing such an obligation was void. Modern (...) civil codifications overlook another significant feature of the Roman law – the uncontested application of the principle Impossibilium nulla obligatio est only in case of stipulatio, whereas modern contract law has its origins in the Roman law of consensual contracts. (shrink)

The semantic blindness objection to contextualism challenges the view that there is no incompatibility between (i) denials of external-world knowledge in contexts where radical-deception scenarios are salient, and (ii) affirmations of external-world knowledge in contexts where such scenarios are not salient. Contextualism allegedly attributes a gross and implausible form of semantic incompetence in the use of the concept of knowledge to people who are otherwise quite competent in its use; this blindness supposedly consists in wrongly judging that there is genuine (...) conflict between claims of type (i) and type (ii). We distinguish two broad versions of contextualism: relativistic-content contextualism and categorical-content contextualism. We argue that although the semantic blindness objection evidently is applicable to the former, it does not apply to the latter. We describe a subtle form of conflict between claims of types (i) and (ii), which we call différance-based affirmatory conflict. We argue that people confronted with radical-deception scenarios are prone to experience a form of semantic myopia (as we call it): a failure to distinguish between différance-based affirmatory conflict and outright inconsistency. Attributing such semantic myopia to people who are otherwise competent with the concept of knowledge explains the bafflement about knowledge-claims that so often arises when radical-deception scenarios are made salient. Such myopia is not some crude form of semantic blindness at all; rather, it is an understandable mistake grounded in semantic competence itself: what we call a competence-based performance error. (shrink)

The article is based on research conducted at the actual radiology department. It presents a range of descriptions and analyses of concrete operations performed by radiologists during their daily professional routine. After careful ethnographic observations, phenomenological analysis is employed with a view to examining the enactive cognition in the radiologist’s “life-world”. The paper uses both ethnography and phenomenology in order to reveal the essential regularities and sedimentations of everyday radiological processes, and the “everyday background” of certain scientific-cognitive operations. The method (...) of research includes “enactive proofs”— observations and analysis of the externalization of a radiologist’s professional memory through the enaction of medical imaging and imageconsciousness. The findings of this research have much to offer to both philosophy and radiological praxis. While the observations strongly support the development of enactive phenomenology, critique of representationalism, primacy of inference in cognition, and shared intentions, they also provide insight into concrete operations in coping with radiology’s paraphernalia, habituality, the origin of mistakes, multilayered communication, and improving professional praxis. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary research area Cognitive Interaction Technology (CIT) aims to understand and support interactions between human users and other elements of socio-technical systems. Important reasons for the new interest in understanding CIT in sport psychology are the impressive development of cognitive robotics and advanced technologies such as virtual or augmented reality systems, cognitive glasses or neurotechnology settings. The present article outlines this area of research, addresses ethical issues, and presents an empirical study in the context of a new measurement and (...) assessment system for training in karate. Recent advances in the field of cognitive assistance systems enabled largely automatized assessments of individual mental representation structures for action sequences, such as choreographed movement patterns in dance or martial arts. Empirical investigations with karate practitioners of different skill levels demonstrate that advanced software-based survey and algorithmic analysis procedures based on cognitive models generate individualized performance predictions for a movement sequence from theKanku-dai kata(a pre-defined karate movement sequence), which correlated significantly not only with formal expertise (kyu/danrank) but also with the actual likelihood of mistakes in action execution. This information could prospectively be used to define individual training goals for deliberate practice and incorporated into cognitive interaction technology to provide appropriate feedback. We argue that the development of cognitive interaction systems for sport should explicitly take ethical issues into consideration and present a particular developed engineering approach. The potential benefits of such an assistance system for intermediate and advanced practitioners include more effective and flexible practice, as well as supportive effects, and more flexible training schedules. Furthermore, we argue that researchers from the field of sport psychology can benefit from advances in technological systems that enhance the understanding of mental and motor control in skilled voluntary action. (shrink)

In this paper I aim at discussing the aesthetic-normative conditions for the right understanding and the right evaluation of jazz. My main point is this: The aesthetics of jazz is an aesthetics of the successful performance, rather than an aesthetics of imperfection. The paper will be structured as follows. SectionI introduces the topic. SectionII presents the ›imperfection thesis‹, while III discusses some arguments against it. Sections IV and V investigate two related questions: the first is about the role of (...) the »mistake« in jazz; the second concerns the crucial topic of normativity. At this regard I will maintain that the ›imperfection thesis‹ does not work, especially because it misunderstands the specific normativity of jazz as improvisational art. Section VI is devoted to clarifying both in which sense the idea of a normativity of the successful performance is sound and why this idea is important for understanding jazz. Finally (VII) I defend this view against possible objections. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the implications of generative AI in future of creative work in the music industries through an ethnographic study of music technologists in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on visual ethnography methods, I explore how researchers, developers, as well as professional and aspiring artists, across sectors in Melbourne’s ecosystem, value the role of mistakes, glitches and uncertainty in the creative process with music technology. This stands in opposition to the controlled processes within generative AI models, based on (...) the management of uncertainty as an input value. Thus, I reframe the concept of creative uncertainty which emerges as a shaping force in the creative process, and in opposition to the controlled outputs of generative AI. Furthermore, this article shows the limitations and misalignment of dominant visions about the impact of generative AI, on creative workflows and practices, by highlighting the experiences, motivations and expectations of the research participants in this multi-sited ethnography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Work in Progress: Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome by Sean Alexander GurdThomas HabinekSean Alexander Gurd. Work in Progress: Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome. American Classical Studies 57. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xi + 167 pp. Cloth, $74.The New Critical approach to texts of Latin literature as well-formed artifacts comprehensible solely on their own terms has been in decline for (...) some time now. Cultural critics have illuminated the ways in which literary texts intersect with a broad range of practices and discourses; increasing attention has been paid to the cognitive, conceptual, and emotional aspects of poetry and prose; even diehard intertextualists find themselves wondering how to connect literary texts with other communicative systems. Most such work, however, has taken the form of interpretation. Debates have been concerned with the relative weight to be given to internal and external factors in assessing the meaning and significance of texts, but rarely have scholars stopped to ask what is meant by “text” in the context of Roman verbal production. Indeed, critics who insist on the boundlessness of interpretation are among those most committed to the boundedness of the objects to be interpreted.Sean Gurd’s new study reorients discussion of Latin literature by asking whether and when Roman readers and audiences came to regard a text as complete. His interest is still discursive, that is to say, he shies away from detailed discussion of the material practices evidenced in papyri and manuscripts, which in my view is a mistake. Nonetheless, his crisp, insightful examination of the way [End Page 340] multiple Roman (and Greek) authors represent the process of textual revision and completion should force reconsideration of widely shared assumptions about the boundedness and autonomy of the texts that constitute the interpreter’s object of inquiry. On Gurd’s account, the familiar Alexandrian and neoteric concern with formal completeness is just one of many models of textualization available to ancient authors. Like Enrica Sciarrino in her recent study of Cato the Elder (Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose. From Poetic Translation to Elite Transcription [Columbus, Ohio 2011]), Gurd manages to shake things up in part through the simple (and to this writer self-evident and long-overdue) move of including prose as well as poetry in the Latinist’s remit. Cicero and Pliny contribute as much to his account as do Horace and his Alexandrian predecessors.Equally important, if less successfully handled, is Gurd’s identification of different models of craftsmanship implicit in a preference for complete as opposed to revisable texts. Gurd suggests that an Aristotelian model, in which the craftsman has a telos or ideal in mind to which the object is expected to adhere, has been allowed to dominate discussion of texts at the expense of other models, identifiable in the writings of Isocrates, Plato, Quintilian, and others, that allow for revision, by the author or by others, as part of the creative process. I agree, but think the connection between the Aristotelian approach and the literary texts that embody it could have been developed in more detail, as might the philosophical underpinnings of alternative approaches to revision. At the same time, Gurd’s pursuit of the Aristotelian lead through other philosophical writings (Stoic, Epicurean, euphonist) is unpersuasive and a distraction from his main story, which is the diverse uses to which authors assign the process of revision, as discussed in four compelling chapters that form the substance of the book.The first of these chapters groups Isocrates, Plato, and Quintilian as promoters of textual revision as pedagogical strategy. For them, revision of a text is aimed at the improvement of the revising subject as much as the revised text. The ability to collaborate with others, especially apparent in Isocrates’ Panathenaicus, becomes predictive of political competence, while in the case of Plato’s Theaetetus and Euthydemus, revising a text is another means of revising the self. For Quintilian, revision, without entirely losing its Isocratean or Platonic aims, eventually produces a speaker who no longer needs to revise. The practice of criticizing and correcting, alone or with others, generates a substantive transformation of the student’s psyche... (shrink)

Philosophers of action tend to take for granted the concept of basic actions – actions that are done at will, or directly – as opposed to others that are performed in other ways. This concept does foundational work in action theory; many theorists, especially causalists, take part of their task to be showing that normal, complex actions necessarily stem from basic ones somehow. The case for the concept of basic actions is driven by a family of observations and a cluster (...) of closely related anti-infinite regress arguments. I review this case in the work of Arthur Danto, Donald Davidson, and Jennifer Hornsby – three of the most important developers of the concept – and find it lacking. I conclude by sketching the possibility of non-foundationalist action theory. (shrink)

Suppose someone is brought up as an orthodox Jew, and so only eats kosher, is very conservative sexually, etc. Suppose they then find out that this Judaism stuff is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the shrimp they could have eaten, all the sex!, this makes perfect sense. Not so, however, if someone finds out that moral realism is false, and they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people’s feeling, etc. Even if (...) this does make sense, there’s a strong disanalogy between the moral and the religious case. This asymmetry, on a realist picture of morality, calls for explanation. This chapter tries to explain it. The discussion engages some topics familiar from objections to Robust realism—the why-be-moral challenge, the status of de-dicto moral motivation, and whether and why we should care about the moral properties, robustly realistically understood. (shrink)

Each type of learning is proposed as being a three-stage process, composed of: (i) recognition of a perceptual situation and performance of an action corresponding thereto; (ii) observation of a deviation of the action result from an expected outcome; (iii) re-arrangement of the conceptual framework of reasoning to meaningfully assimilate the observed deviation. In order to evaluate a general, systemic significance of the concept of learning proposed hereby, the latter is assessed from perspectives that correspond to diverse levels of (...) organizational complexity of Nature. Thermodynamic concepts, constructivist and autopoietic frameworks of analysis of cognitive phenomena, and the aspects of social sciences are intertwined so as to support the all-encompassing meaning of the general pathways of learning proposed herein. Numerous ethical consequences, with a particular emphasis on educational approaches, are derived from accepting such a general nature of learning and development. Naturally implied dialectical form of evolution, according to which prosperous and favorable features of human creativity arise solely from problem-solving situations, is further discussed. (shrink)

Job performance and job stress are widely studied phenomena in occupational research. However, most of the literature on the relationship between work stress and job performance conceptualizes job stress as an antecedent of performance, in line with the stress-performance framework, and does not examine what happens to the well-being of the employees after the performance was appraised as poor. In the current theoretical paper, I argue that task underperformance is a source of stress (i.e., stressor) (...) for the employee, and as such can affect a wide range of employee outcomes. Task underperformance is conceptualized as comprised of two main types: acute/episodic underperformance such as a mistake or an accident (e.g., medical error, service failure), and chronic task underperformance such as not achieving the expected work products over time, with an interplay between these types. The source of the appraisal (objective, supervisor-rated, and self-rated underperformance) is also considered. Several disjoint literatures are then integrated in order to explain how underperformance is expected to result in subsequent decrements to employee well-being. At the chronic underperformance level, the following literatures are included: self-efficacy, negative effects of performance feedback, stress experienced when the basic need for competency is frustrated or when underperformance presents a threat to the self-image. At the acute/episodic level, affective and cognitive outcomes are explored and examples are drawn from several industries including service failures and medical errors. The interplay between the two types of underperformance, acute/episodic and chronic, is discussed, and then relevant moderators are offered. One notable moderator is the occupation-level consequences of error which likely affects most if not all outcomes. Finally, the discussion includes potential theoretical and practical implications for this conceptualization, as well as some methodological considerations for future research in this area. (shrink)

Philosophers of perception are familiar with the argument from illusion, at least since Hume formulated it to challenge a naïve form of realism. In this paper, I present an analogous argument but in the domain of action. It focuses on slips, a common kind of mistake. But, otherwise, it is structurally similar. The argument challenges some contemporary views about the nature of action inspired by Wittgenstein. The discussion shows how thinking about these common mistakes helps illuminate aspects of human (...) agency that tend to be overlooked whenever too much emphasis is placed on the rationality of human actions. (shrink)

The appealing idea that knowledge is best understood as a kind of achievement faces significant criticisms, among them Matthew Chrisman’s charge that the whole project rests on a kind of ontological category mistake. Chrisman argues that while knowledge and belief are states, the kind of normativity found in, for example, Sosa’s famous ‘Triple-A’ structure of assessment is only applicable to performances, end-directed events that unfold over time, and never to states. What is overlooked, both by Chrisman and those he criticizes, (...) is a whole range of projects, those like friendship, health, marriage, and sobriety, where the end is not distinct from our pursuit of it. I suggest that such ‘inner projects’ are in fact stative achievements and thus provide a different sort of model for thinking about knowledge as an achievement. Reconceiving the project along these lines also helps to solve another outstanding problem, the charge that being an achievement is not necessary for knowledge because some knowledge, especially testimonial knowledge, is come by with little or no effort. (shrink)

There is a long history, dating back to the 50s, which examines the manner in which team roles contribute to effective team performance. However, much of this work has been built on ad-hoc teams working together for short periods of time under conditions of minimal stress. Additionally, research has been conducted with little attention paid to the importance of temporal factors, despite repeated calls for the importance of considering time in team research (e.g., Mohammed, Hamilton, & Lim, 2009). To (...) begin to understand team roles and how temporal aspects may impact the types of team roles employed when teams are working in extreme mission critical environments, the current manuscript uses a data-driven, bottom-up approach. Specifically, we employ the use of retrospective historical data as our input and a historiometric approach (Simonton, 2003). Source documents consist primarily of autobiographies, memoires, biographies, and first-hand accounts of crew interaction during spaceflight. Critical incidents regarding team interaction were extracted from these source documents and independently coded for team roles by two trained raters. Results of the study speak to the importance of task and social roles within teams that are predominantly intact and operating in extreme environments where mistakes can be life threatening. Evidence for the following task (i.e., coordinator, boundary spanner, team leader, evaluator, critic, information provider, team player, and innovator) and social roles (i.e., team builder, nurturer, harmonizer, entertainer, jokester, and the negative roles of attention seeker and negativist) were found. While it is often task roles that receive the greatest attention, results point to the importance of not neglecting the socioemotional health of the team (and the corresponding roles). Results also indicated that while some roles were consistently enacted independent of temporal considerations (e.g., mission length), the degree to which others were enacted varied across missions of differing lengths. Additionally, based on the current sample we see the following trends: (1) increased enactment of the team builder role as mission duration increases, (2) prominence of the entertainer role, and (3) increased emphasis on the visionary/problem solver role on missions over two years. (shrink)

This is a draft of my chapter on Negligence for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook in Moral Psychology. It discusses philosophical, psychological, and legal approaches to the attribution of culpability in cases of negligent wrongdoing.

Is it ethical to perform a surgery whose purpose is to make a male look like a female or a female to appear male? Is it medically appropriate? Sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) violates basic medical and ethical principles and is therefore not ethically or medically appropriate. (1) SRS mutilates a healthy, non-diseased body. To perform surgery on a healthy body involves unnecessary risks; therefore, SRS violates the principle primum non nocere, “first, do no harm.” (2) Candidates for SRS may believe (...) that they are trapped in the bodies of the wrong sex and therefore desire or, more accurately, demand SRS; however, this belief is generated by a disordered perception of self. Such a fixed, irrational belief is appropriately described as a delusion. SRS, therefore, is a “category mistake”—it offers a surgical solution for psychological problems such as a failure to accept the goodness of one’s masculinity or femininity, lack of secure attachment relationships in childhood with same-sex peers or a parent, self-rejection, untreated gender identity disorder, addiction to masturbation and fantasy, poor body image, excessive anger, and severe psychopathology in a parent. (3) SRS does not accomplish what it claims to accomplish. It does not change a person’s sex; therefore, it provides no true benefit. (4) SRS is a “permanent,” effectively unchangeable, and often unsatisfying surgical attempt to change what may be only a temporary (i.e., psychotherapeutically changeable) psychological/psychiatric condition. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9.1 (Spring2009): 97–125. (shrink)

When people are performing a task, it is hard to know whether they are about to make a mistake. Klaproth, Halbrügge, Krol, Vernaleken, Zander, and Russwinkel address this by recording EEG signals while people are performing a flight control task, and show that by examining the EEG signal they can determine when people failed to notice particular stimuli, which could lead to better assistive tools.

Part of rethinking philosophy today, the author believes, is to rethink our logical concepts. The author questions the ontological existence of the proposition as the content of sentential utterances—written or spoken—as it was originally proposed by John Searle. While a performative is an utterance where the speaker not only utters a sentential or illocutionary content such as a statement, but also performs the illocutionary force such as the act of stating, the author reasserts John Austin’s constative as the general label (...) (genus) of specific utterances (species) that can be rendered true or false such as a statement, assertion, description, and prediction. In the remainder of the paper, the author tries to show that it is a category mistake for someone to assert a statement or to state an assertion. (shrink)

In contract law, common mistake or frustration are grounds for relieving the promisor from the obligation to perform. Conventional economic theory justifies relief by appealing to its effect on the promisee’s incentives, namely, her incentives to act efficiently to prevent the unfavorable occurrence or its associated losses. The Article challenges this justification. While relief may indeed generate efficient incentives under certain conditions, these are not the conditions in which it is in fact granted. Consequently, the cases in which the conventional (...) theory recommends that relief be provided and those in which it is actually awarded, are incompatible. Based upon this premise, the Article develops a new theory of the law of common mistake and frustration, bearing descriptive and prescriptive implications. Under the new theory, the purpose of relief is not to incentivize promisees, but rather to determine the legal consequences of non-contemplated events. Viewed in this light, the Article identifies a new set of efficiency rationales for the rule. Under specified conditions, relief allows contracting parties to (1) refrain from welfare-reducing trade in unquantifiable risk; (2) maintain control over the distribution of contractual gains; and (3) overcome disincentives to form efficient contracts. The Article analyzes the conditions under which these virtues are applicable, and finds that they generally correspond to those in which relief is actually awarded. (shrink)

Suppose you are at the gym trying to see some naked beauties by peeping through a hole in the wall. A policeman happens by, he asks you what you are doing, and you honestly tell him. He then arrests you for voyeurism. Are you guilty? We don’t know yet because there is one more fact to be considered: while you honestly thought that a locker room was on the other side of the wall, it was actually a squash court. Are (...) you guilty now? -/- Probably. You might argue that your scopophiliac ambition was impossible to satisfy given that you were peeping into a squash court, not a locker room. But this “Impossibility Defense” would fail because most jurisdictions follow the very influential Model Penal Code (MPC), which says that what is important about attempt is not the likelihood of success but rather what was going on in your head. You tried to peer into a locker room with the intention of seeing some nudity; that is enough for culpability. The fact that you were mistaken about the location does not exonerate you. -/- But now suppose that the particular jurisdiction you are in does not criminalize voyeurism. While most people think that voyeurism is just plain wrong, if not disgusting, the legislature just never got around to drafting a statute against it. Are you guilty now? The answer is no. But you might just be out of luck and convicted anyway. -/- The reason for this strange conclusion is that most jurisdictions have followed the Model Penal Code in yet another respect: along with the MPC’s “subjectivist” emphasis on what is in your head, they have followed the MPC’s lead in abolishing the Impossibility Defense entirely. As a result, people who believe that they are breaking laws when they really are not may still be subject to arrest, prosecution, and conviction respectively by police, prosecutors, and judges/juries merely if all three parties regard your conduct — especially your trying to violate a law that you mistakenly believed in — as morally reprehensible. The best, if not only, defense against this charge is the Impossibility Defense, but — again — most jurisdictions have decided to make this defense unavailable to defendants. -/- Depriving eligible defendants of the Impossibility Defense is unjust. It violates one of the most basic principles of criminal justice: the legality principle. The legality principle says that there cannot be just punishment without a crime, and there should not be a crime without an explicit law designating it as such. So you cannot be charged with, and convicted of, attempted voyeurism if voyeurism, reprehensible as it may be, was not explicitly prohibited at the time that you made the attempt. -/- If we believe in the legality principle, then we must restore the Impossibility Defense. Without the latter, too many defendants are being — and will continue to be — punished for attempts to perform acts that were not themselves illegal but which various parties in the criminal justice system (except the legislature) thought should be illegal based on their extralegal, moral prejudices. -/- In addition to the MPC, the principal obstacle to resurrecting the Impossibility Defense is a good deal of conceptual confusion that permeates relevant cases and scholarship. Too many courts and academics have conflated “factual impossibility” with “legal impossibility” and have fallaciously inferred “hybrid impossibility” from “hybrid mistakes” (that is, legal mistakes that derive from factual mistakes). One of the principal goals of this Article, then, is to clear up all of this confusion. I will explicate in the simplest possible terms (a) the difference between factual impossibility and legal impossibility, (b) why only legal impossibility qualifies as exculpatory, and (c) why hybrid impossibility simply does not exist. (shrink)

In this article, I perform an aesthetic analysis of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness, redescribing this intuition as the result of a creative activity affirming of the uniqueness and value of human engagements with the world rather than the result of an activity of self-knowing through which phenomenal awareness becomes aware of itself. During this analysis, I analogize the construction of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness to the construction of religious intuitions for sophisticated believers and the construction of aesthetic intuitions (...) for sophisticated aesthetes. I find accounts of the 'mistake' of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness by authors such as Dennett are overly reductive and simplistic, even though I agree that phenomenal consciousness is a created illusion rather than a natural kind. The intuition of phenomenal consciousness is a sophisticated formation which testifies to the commitment of certain naturalistically inclined theorists to the inestimable value of private experience. (shrink)

One debate in the experimental exploration of everyday judgments about free will is whether most people are compatibilists or incompatibilists. Some recent research suggests that many people who have incompatibilist intuitions are making a mistake; as such, they do not have genuine incompatibilist intuitions. Another worry is whether most people appropriately understand determinism or confuse it with similar, but different, notions such as fatalism. In five studies we demonstrate people distinguish determinism from fatalism. While people overall make this distinction, a (...) large percentage of people still judge that a person who is fated to perform an action is both free and morally responsible for that action. Those who thought that one freely performs and is morally responsible for a fated action had much stronger compatibilist judgments. These data suggest that a substantial percentage of people have “free will no matter what” intuitions. As a result, even though many people may appear to be compatibilist.. (shrink)

I argue that acknowledging Hume as a doxastic naturalist about belief in a deity allows an elegant, holistic reading of his Dialogues. It supports a reading in which Hume's spokesperson is Philo throughout, and enlightens many of the interpretive difficulties of the work. In arguing this, I perform a comprehensive survey of evidence for and against Philo as Hume's voice, bringing new evidence to bear against the interpretation of Hume as Cleanthes and against the amalgamation view while correcting several standard (...) mistakes. I ultimately isolate the interpretation of Philo's Reversal at the end of the Dialogues as of paramount importance, and show how my naturalistic interpretation makes this, and other notoriously difficult passages, unproblematic. (shrink)

Courts and commentators have struggled for years to identify rules to explain and justify certain widely-shared intuitions about impossibility attempts, and they have proposed rules variously based upon (1) what mistakes actors make, (2) what intentions actors possess, and (3) what conduct actors perform. None of the proposals fully succeeds, however, and none is able to explain the widely-shared intuition, which underlies Sandy Kadish's inventive hypothetical regarding Mr. Law and Mr. Fact, that some attempts based upon mistakes of (...) law are just as blameworthy as attempts based upon mistakes of fact. I propose an alternative rule that, I believe, not only explains where and why people possess widely-shared intuitions regarding impossibility attempts (including regarding Mr. Law and Mr. Fact), but also explains where and why people have conflicting intuitions. I argue that widely-shared intuitions of blameworthiness and non-blameworthiness regarding impossibility attempts are a function, respectively, of whether informed citizens of the jurisdiction that enacted the statutory offense that the defendant allegedly attempted to commit widely believe or disbelieve that he would have been a threat to interests that the statute seeks to protect - a determination, in turn, that is a function of whether they widely believe or disbelieve that he would have committed the offense under counterfactual circumstances that they fear could have obtained. (shrink)

We review the literature on how perceiving an AI making mistakes violates trust and how such violations might be repaired. In doing so, we discuss the role played by various forms of algorithmic transparency in the process of trust repair, including explanations of algorithms, uncertainty estimates, and performance metrics.

This paper builds upon previous work in which I argue that we should assess a provider's reasons for his or her objection before granting a conscientious exemption. For instance, if the medical professional's reasoned basis involves an empirical mistake, an accommodation is not warranted. This article poses and begins to address several deep questions about the workings of what I call a reason-giving view: What standard should we use to assess reasons? What policy should we adopt in order to evaluate (...) the reasons offered by medical practitioners in support of their objections? I argue for a reasonability standard to perform the essential function of assessing reasons, and I offer considerations in support of a policy establishing conscientious objector status in medicine. (shrink)

Most human actions are complex, but some of them are basic. Which are these? In this paper, I address this question by invoking slips, a common kind of mistake. The proposal is this: an action is basic if and only if it is not possible to slip in performing it. The argument discusses some well-established results from the psychology of language production in the context of a philosophical theory of action. In the end, the proposed criterion is applied to discuss (...) some well-known theories of basic actions. (shrink)

Delusional beliefs are typically pathological. Being pathological is clearly distinguished from being false or being irrational. Anna might falsely believe that his husband is having an affair but it might just be a simple mistake. Again, Sam might irrationally believe, without good evidence, that he is smarter than his colleagues, but it might just be a healthy self-deceptive belief. On the other hand, when a patient with brain damage caused by a car accident believes that his father was replaced by (...) an imposter or another patient with schizophrenia believes that “The Organization” painted the shops on a street in red and green to convey a message, these beliefs are not merely false or irrational. They are pathological. What makes delusions pathological? This paper explores the negative features because of which delusional beliefs are pathological. First, I critically examine the proposals according to which delusional beliefs are pathological because of (1) their strangeness, (2) their extreme irrationality, (3) their resistance to folk psychological explanations or (4) impaired responsibility-grounding capacities of people with them. I present some counterexamples as well as theoretical problems for these proposals. Then, I argue, following Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder, that delusional beliefs are pathological because they involve some sorts of harmful malfunctions. In other words, they have a significant negative impact on wellbeing (=harmful) and, in addition, some psychological mechanisms, directly or indirectly related to them, fail to perform the jobs for which they were selected in the past (=malfunctioning). An objection to the proposal is that delusional beliefs might not involve any malfunctions. For example, they might be playing psychological defence functions properly. Another objection is that a harmful malfunction is not sufficient for something to be pathological. For example, false beliefs might involve some malfunctions according to teleosemantics, a popular naturalist account of mental content, but harmful false beliefs do not have to be pathological. I examine those objections in detail and show that they should be rejected after all. (shrink)

Artificial Neural Networks have reached “grandmaster” and even “super-human” performance across a variety of games, from those involving perfect information, such as Go, to those involving imperfect information, such as “Starcraft”. Such technological developments from artificial intelligence (AI) labs have ushered concomitant applications across the world of business, where an “AI” brand-tag is quickly becoming ubiquitous. A corollary of such widespread commercial deployment is that when AI gets things wrong—an autonomous vehicle crashes, a chatbot exhibits “racist” behavior, automated credit-scoring (...) processes “discriminate” on gender, etc.—there are often significant financial, legal, and brand consequences, and the incident becomes major news. As Judea Pearl sees it, the underlying reason for such mistakes is that “... all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.” The key, as Pearl suggests, is to replace “reasoning by association” with “causal reasoning” —the ability to infer causes from observed phenomena. It is a point that was echoed by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis in a recent piece for theNew York Times: “we need to stop building computer systems that merely get better and better at detecting statistical patterns in data sets—often using an approach known as ‘Deep Learning’—and start building computer systems that from the moment of their assembly innately grasp three basic concepts: time, space, and causality.” In this paper, foregrounding what in 1949 Gilbert Ryle termed “a category mistake”, I will offer an alternative explanation for AI errors; it is not so much that AI machinery cannot “grasp” causality, but that AI machinery (qua computation) cannot understand anything at all. (shrink)

For many contemporary artists, failure has been an instrument of experimentation and self-expression, of investigation into existential questions and manifestation of utopian tensions. In this paper, I will discuss how some of the well-known strategies of experimental and avant-garde artistic practices with failure involve risky actions, challenging or impossible attempts, loss of control, and compulsive repetition of inconclusive acts. In those experimentations, the ideal model of an effective and successful action performance (in which a goal is defined through a (...) clear intention, a plan and a well-controlled execution) is willfully sabotaged in its stages. In this regard, a distinction between failure and mistake will be highlighted: if failure could be traced back to the tradition of heroic or tragic defeat in front of adverse odds, mistake on the contrary means doing something wrong that one is expected to control. While failure negatively reflects our tension toward autonomy, the focus on mistakes is the expression of rigidity and heightened risk aversion in contexts where maximal efficiency and self-optimization are expected. This paper will argue that equating the category of failure with that of mistake is not faithful to the motives underlying those artistic traditions. In this respect, artistic experimentations in the “aesthetic of failure” can also be viewed as a critical response toward a general mindset defined by the anxiety of control and obsessive mistake avoidance that seems typical of our current times. (shrink)

From unemployment to Brexit to climate change, capitalism is in trouble and ill-prepared to cope with the challenges of the coming decades. How did we get here? While contemporary economists and policymakers tend to ignore the political and social dimensions of capitalism, some of the great economists of the past - Adam Smith, Friedrich List, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi and Albert Hirschman - did not make the same mistake. Leveraging their insights, sociologists John L. Campbell and John (...) A. Hall trace the historical development of capitalism as a social, political, and economic system throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They draw comparisons across eras and around the globe to show that there is no inevitable logic of capitalism. Rather, capitalism's performance depends on the strength of nation-states, the social cohesion of capitalist societies, and the stability of the international system - three things that are in short supply today. (shrink)

Agency often consists in performing actions and engaging in activities that are successful. We pour glasses, catch objects, carry things, recite poems, and play instruments. It has therefore seemed tempting in recent philosophical thinking to conceptualise the relationship between our agentive abilities and our successes as follows: (Success) S is exercising their ability to ϕ only if S successfully ϕ-s. This paper argues that (Success) is false based on the observation that agency also often consists in making mistakes. We (...) bungle things. We spill water, we miss objects thrown at us, we drop things, misremember lines, and mess up songs. I argue that these mistakes, doings that fall short of being a φ-ing, can only be understood as subpar exercises of the ability to φ. Since this understanding is incompatible with (Success), the thesis should be given up. (shrink)