Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics stand to change many aspects of our lives, including our values. If trends continue as expected, many industries will undergo automation in the near future, calling into question whether we can still value the sense of identity and security our occupations once provided us with. Likewise, the advent of social robots driven by AI, appears to be shifting the meaning of numerous, long-standing values associated with interpersonal relationships, like friendship. Furthermore, powerful actors’ and institutions’ (...) increasing reliance on AI to make decisions that may affect how people live their lives may have a significant impact on privacy while also raising issues about algorithmic transparency and human control. In this paper, building and expanding on previous works, we will look at how the deployment of Artificial Intelligence technology may lead to changes in identity, security, and other crucial values (such as friendship, fairness, and privacy). We will discuss what challenges we may face in the process, while critically reflecting on whether such changes may be desirable. Finally, drawing on a series of considerations underlying virtue ethics, we will formulate a set of preliminary suggestions, which—we hope—can be used to more carefully guide the future roll out of AI technologies for human flourishing; that is, for social and moral good. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the study of the nature of the influence of elections on the risks of revolutionary destabilization. The authors study different approaches to estimating the probability of revolutionary events in an election year. Different types of revolutionary events are distinguished within the framework of the level of political violence. The primary reasons for the activation of the politically active part of the population, both in autocracies and in transitional political regimes, are identified, including the factionalization of (...) elites, the activation of "sleeping" institutions, the growth of political competence among individuals, the consolidation of the prodemocratic opposition and its institutionalization, electoral fraud and other manifestations of unfair political competition, greater emotional involvement of the population in political processes, and so on. The findings support the conclusion that elections promote peaceful revolutionary episodes and reduce the likelihood of armed uprisings. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that the influence of elections on the risks of revolutionary destabilization is considered in the regime context. The authors explore how elections affect violent or non-violent revolutionary actions in certain political regimes, according to Jack A. Goldstone's typology (full autocracies, partial autocracies, factional democracies, partial democracies and full democracies). The authors conclude that holding elections reduces the risks of armed revolutionary destabilization in all types of regimes, except for factional democracies. On the other hand, unarmed revolutionary action is more likely in an election year - in all regime types except full democracies. At the same time, holding elections primarily increases the risks of unarmed revolutionary uprisings in intermediate regimes / anocracies. However, even among anocracies, factional democracies stand out, where in the election year the risks of unarmed (as well as armed) revolutionary episodes increase significantly more than in partial autocracies and in partial non-factional democracies. At the same time, for consolidated democracies, holding elections is a factor that inhibits rather than provokes revolutionary destabilization. In full autocracies, the risk of unarmed revolutionary action increases in an election year, but not as much as in intermediate regimes. (shrink)

Drawing on current debates at the frontiers of economics, psychology, and political philosophy, this book explores the challenges that arise for liberal democracies from a confrontation between modern technologies and the bounds of human rationality. With the ongoing transition of democracy's underlying information economy into the digital space, threats of disinformation and runaway political polarization have been gaining prominence. Employing the economic approach informed by behavioral sciences' findings, the book's chief concern is how these challenges can be addressed while preserving (...) a commitment to democratic values and maximizing the epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making. The book has two key strands: it provides a systematic argument for building a behaviorally informed theory of democracy; and explores how scientific knowledge on quirks and bounds of human rationality can inform the design of resilient democratic institutions. Drawing these together, the book explores the centrality of the rationality assumption in the methodological debates surrounding behavioral sciences as exemplified by the dispute between neoclassical and behavioral economics; the role of rationality in democratic social choice; behaviorally informed paternalism as a response to the challenge of irrationality; and non-paternalistic avenues to increase the resilience of the democratic institutions towards political irrationality This book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in behavioral economics and sciences, political philosophy and the future of democracy. (shrink)

In contrast to Anglophone debates on personal identity initially formed by John Locke’s investigation of personal identity in the sense of personal continuity or persistence through time, the Continental tradition focuses on what constitutes ipseity in the sense of individuality or uniqueness of the human being “constituted” by its continuous transformation through changing experience. In this study, I claim that contemporary phenomenological research in France—especially the “phenomenology of the event” as represented by Henri Maldiney and Claude Romano—contributes to this Continental (...) discussion in a significant way: it formulates the conditions of personal uniqueness or distinctiveness with regard to other persons, conditions not to be found in Heidegger’s existential conception of selfhood in Being and Time. More precisely, Maldiney and Romano allow us to answer the principal questions of this study: In what does the personal uniqueness consist? What exactly individualizes the first-person selfhood disclosed in Dasein’s relation to death? In my three-stage analysis, I first deal with Heidegger’s conception of selfhood in Being and Time and its limits with respect to the question of personal uniqueness. Next, I analyse Maldiney’s conception of “eventful selfhood” in which he “completes” Heidegger’s conception of selfhood by describing Dasein’s openness to ontical, and yet fully authentic events. Finally, I develop the argumentation by presenting Romano’s even more radical conception of the “happening subjectivity”, which allows us to return to the second major feature of personal identity: personal persistence. Nonetheless, I conclude that the connection between personal uniqueness and persistence is not sufficiently examined in the phenomenology of the event, which opens the path towards another related inquiry into the following problem: What is the proper subjective dimension or the “underlying thing” in the background of personal persistence which somehow resists events? (shrink)

The present paper shows how statistical learning theory and machine learning models can be used to enhance understanding of AI-related epistemological issues regarding inductive reasoning and reliability of generalisations. Towards this aim, the paper proceeds as follows. First, it expounds Price’s dual image of representation in terms of the notions of e-representations and i-representations that constitute subject naturalism. For Price, this is not a strictly anti-representationalist position but rather a dualist one (e- and i-representations). Second, the paper links this debate (...) with machine learning in terms of statistical learning theory becoming more viable epistemological tool when it abandons the perspective of object naturalism. The paper then argues that machine learning grounds a form of knowing that can be understood in terms of e- and i-representation learning. Third, this synthesis shows a way of analysing inductive reasoning in terms of reliability of generalisations stemming from a structure of e- and i-representations. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, connecting Price’s dual view of representation with Deep Learning provides an epistemological way forward and even perhaps an approach to how knowing is possible. (shrink)

In the last few decades many formal systems of fuzzy logics have been developed. Since the main differences between fuzzy and classical logics lie at the propositional level, the fuzzy predicate logics have developed more slowly (compared to the propositional ones). In this text we aim to promote interest in fuzzy predicate logics by contributing to the model theory of fuzzy predicate logics. First, we generalize the completeness theorem, then we use it to get results on conservative extensions of theories (...) and on witnessed models. (shrink)

Consider a set of shuffled observations drawn from a fixed probability distribution over some instance domain. What enables learning of inductive generalizations which proceed from such a set of observations? The scenario is worthwhile because it epistemically characterizes most of machine learning. This kind of learning from observations is also inverse and ill-posed. What reduces the non-uniqueness of its result and, thus, its problematic epistemic justification, which stems from a one-to-many relation between the observations and many learnable generalizations? The paper (...) argues that this role belongs to any complexity regularization which satisfies Norton’s Material Theory of Induction (MTI) by localizing the inductive risk to facts in the given domain. A prime example of the localization is the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) about overparameterized neural networks. The explanation of MTI’s role in complexity regularization of neural networks is provided by analyzing the stability of Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM), an inductive rule that controls the learning process and leads to an inductive generalization on the given set of observations. In cases where ERM might become asymptotically unstable, making the justification of the generalization by uniform convergence unavailable, LTH and MTI can be used to define a local stability. A priori, overparameterized neural networks are such cases and the combination of LTH and MTI can block ERM’s trivialization caused by equalizing the strengths of its inductive support for risk minimization. We bring closer the investigation of generalization in artificial neural networks and the study of inductive inference and show the division of labor between MTI and the optimality justifications (developed by Gerhard Schurz) in machine learning. (shrink)

This monograph presents a general theory of weakly implicative logics, a family covering a vast number of non-classical logics studied in the literature, concentrating mainly on the abstract study of the relationship between logics and their algebraic semantics. It can also serve as an introduction to algebraic logic, both propositional and first-order, with special attention paid to the role of implication, lattice and residuated connectives, and generalized disjunctions. Based on their recent work, the authors develop a powerful uniform framework for (...) the study of non-classical logics. In a self-contained and didactic style, starting from very elementary notions, they build a general theory with a substantial number of abstract results. The theory is then applied to obtain numerous results for prominent families of logics and their algebraic counterparts, in particular for superintuitionistic, modal, substructural, fuzzy, and relevant logics. The book may be of interest to a wide audience, especially students and scholars in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, computer science, or related areas, looking for an introduction to a general theory of non-classical logics and their algebraic semantics. (shrink)

Current thinking suggests that dissociation could be a significant comorbid diagnosis in a proportion of schizophrenic patients with a history of trauma. This potentially may explain the term “schizophrenia” in its original definition by Bleuler, as influenced by his clinical experience and personal view. Additionally, recent findings suggest a partial overlap between dissociative symptoms and the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, which could be explained by inhibitory deficits. In this context, the process of dissociation could serve as an important conceptual framework (...) for understanding schizophrenia, which is supported by current neuroimaging studies and research of corollary discharges. These data indicate that the original conception of “split mind” may be relevant in an updated context. Finally, recent data suggest that the phenomenal aspects of dissociation and conscious disintegration could be related to underlying disruptions of connectivity patterns and neural integration. (shrink)

Uniform infinite bases are defined for the single-conclusion and multiple-conclusion admissible rules of the implication–negation fragments of intuitionistic logic and its consistent axiomatic extensions . A Kripke semantics characterization is given for the structurally complete implication–negation fragments of intermediate logics, and it is shown that the admissible rules of this fragment of form a PSPACE-complete set and have no finite basis.

The paper is devoted to Nikolay Lossky who was one of the leading Russian philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century. We demonstrate the interrelationship between three aspects of Lossky’s philosophy: realism in the theory of knowledge, hierarchical personalism, and supra-naturalistic concept of evolution. We pay attention to the contemporary relevance of Lossky, and we discuss and critique his ideas in light of those of other philosophers. Lossky acknowledges that the subject interacts with being itself and that knowledge (...) is not a shadow or copy of being. His ontology is based on intuitivism and epistemological optimism. Its main categories are God, as the super-systematic principle, and monads. In Lossky’s metaphysics, the idea of abstract ideal principles of being is quite harmoniously combined with personalism. Lossky’s ontology has strong ethical underpinnings. He considers that values are rooted in being and that the evolution of the world is directed by God towards the good. Lossky elaborates a supra-naturalistic concept of evolution. He extrapolates principles of teleological determination, which are fundamental to human existence, on the underlying levels of the world as a whole. Many trends of modern thought are in tune with Lossky’s philosophy, including a return to metaphysics, panpsychism, Platonism, and the desire to unite the religious worldview with new scientific discoveries. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 225 Seiten: 1-18.

Can one extend crisp Peano arithmetic PA by a possibly many-valued predicate Tr(x) saying "x is true" and satisfying the "dequotation schema" $\varphi \equiv \text{Tr}(\bar{\varphi})$ for all sentences φ? This problem is investigated in the frame of Lukasiewicz infinitely valued logic.

This paper is a contribution to Mathematical fuzzy logic, in particular to the algebraic study of t-norm based fuzzy logics. In the general framework of propositional core and Δ-core fuzzy logics we consider three properties of completeness with respect to any semantics of linearly ordered algebras. Useful algebraic characterizations of these completeness properties are obtained and their relations are studied. Moreover, we concentrate on five kinds of distinguished semantics for these logics–namely the class of algebras defined over the real unit (...) interval, the rational unit interval, the hyperreals , the strict hyperreals and finite chains, respectively–and we survey the known completeness methods and results for prominent logics. We also obtain new interesting relations between the real, rational and hyperreal semantics, and good characterizations for the completeness with respect to the semantics of finite chains. Finally, all completeness properties and distinguished semantics are also considered for the first-order versions of the logics where a number of new results are proved. (shrink)

There are some theoretical grounds to expect that general inflation can have an ambiguous effect on the likelihood of the outbreak of revolutionary actions: while high inflation has a positive effect on revolutionary activity, moderate inflation reduces the likelihood of revolution, whereas negative inflation values again increase revolutionary activity. At the same time, many researchers suggest to treat separately food inflation as a significant predictor of the unfolding of revolutionary processes, because food inflation is a much more sensitive macroeconomic indicator (...) that aggravates many social ills, such as poverty, protest sentiments, frustration, socio-economic shocks, etc. The authors, based on modern political science concepts and quantitative calculations, test the corresponding hypotheses. Using a rare event regression model and a set of control variables (the main factors of revolutions, according to modern political science research — GDP per capita, population, share of youth, urbanization, level of education, level of democracy) to obtain more reliable results, the authors come to the conclusion that the general level of inflation does not have a significant impact on the risks of revolutionary destabilization. On the other hand, food inflation does turn out to be a fairly reliable predictor of the beginning of the unfolding of revolutionary processes. Food inflation has a particularly strong impact on low-income groups, so it is powerful destabilizing factor in the least economically developed countries. Furthermore, regionally, food inflation may have the most powerful destabilizing effect in Africa (especially in African cities). (shrink)

The paper discusses various aspects of the concept of “cultural memory” coined by Jan Assmann and related both to the problem of determining the categories of culture that became the first objects of philosophical reflection in the era of the Axial Age and to the issues of the modern crisis of the ideology of globalism and multiculturalism. Using the example of some categories of an archaic myth that have not lost their cultural and social relevance at present, the variability of (...) the genesis of philosophy in various civilizations of the epoch of the “Axial Age” is demonstrated - both those in which it arises as an independent form of worldview and those where this process stops at the stage of a highly speculative myth. Special attention is paid to the cultural and social aspects of memory and recollection of the past as forms of spiritual “resistance” to external cultural influences and the preservation of religious and ethnic identity, which is equally relevant both during the genesis of philosophy and in modern post-industrial society during the crisis of globalist ideology and the philosophy of multiculturalism. (shrink)

A simple complete axiomatic system is presented for the many-valued propositional logic based on the conjunction interpreted as product, the coresponding implication (Goguen's implication) and the corresponding negation (Gödel's negation). Algebraic proof methods are used. The meaning for fuzzy logic (in the narrow sense) is shortly discussed.

Dave Ripley has recently argued against the plausibility of multiset consequence relations and of contraction-free approaches to paradox. For Ripley, who endorses a nontransitive theory, the best arguments that buttress transitivity also push for contraction—whence it is wiser for the substructural logician to go nontransitive from the start. One of Ripley’s allegations is especially insidious, since it assumes the form of a trivialisation result: it is shown that if a multiset consequence relation can be associated to a closure operator in (...) the expected way, then it necessarily contracts. We counter Ripley’s objection by presenting an approach to multiset consequence that escapes this trap. This approach is multiple-conclusioned in a heterodox way, for multiple succedents are given a conjunctive, rather than a disjunctive reading. Finally, we address a further objection by French and Ripley to the effect that the informational interpretation of sequents in linear logic does not motivate cut. (shrink)

This paper addresses the ontological status of the body in the context of bodily practices in body-oriented disciplines, such as sport training, dance, and physiotherapy. Following Descartes’, Huss...

In einem 1923 im Zionistischen Handbuch veröffentlichten Text entfaltet Hans Jonas Überlegungen über »Das jüdische Schulwesen in Palästina«, das damals unter britischem Mandat stand. Jonas beschreibt und diskutiert hierbei kritisch die Entwicklung bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt und formuliert seine Ideen zur Weiterentwicklung jüdischer Schuleinrichtungen.

In the article "The Epistemological Nature of Information Modeling" [Gnoseologicheskaia priroda informatsionnogo modelirovaniia], Voprosy filosofii, 1963, No. 10, Academician V. M. Glushkov examines two important methodological aspects of the modeling of natural objects and phenomena in the contemporary natural sciences. The first consists of the informational nature of the models created, and the second of their dynamism. The dynamic nature of today's models in the natural sciences means that it is not so much the material structure of the object that (...) is modeled as its behavior and functions in some sphere of natural phenomena. In this sense, the models under examination may also be termed functional, as distinct from the structural models pertaining to a static description of objects. (shrink)

An important task for every major philosopher is to offer us an understanding of the nature of mind. The essays in this volume discuss different aspects of the philosophical theories of mind put forward in the century and a half that followed Descartes' Meditations of 1641. These years, often referred to as the 'early-modern' period, are probably unparalleled for originality and diversity in conceiving the mind. The volume not only includes two essays on Descartes' own thinking, but there are also (...) examinations of what Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, the Cambridge Platonists, and others, have to say about the nature of mind. The aim of the volume is to represent some of the best contemporary research and reflection on mind in early-modern philosophy. The contributors, who teach at a range of universities in mainland Europe, Great Britain and North America, are Margaret Atherton, Miran BozoviÄ, Petr GlombìÄek, Boris Hennig, James Hill, Nicholas Jolley, Jan Palkoska, G. A. J. Rogers, and Anthony Savile. All the essays appear here for the first time. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the study of the rôle of disjunction inAlgebraic Logic. Several kinds of (generalized) disjunctions, usually defined using a suitable variant of the proof by cases property, were introduced and extensively studied in the literature mainly in the context of finitary logics. The goals of this paper are to extend these results to all logics, to systematize the multitude of notions of disjunction (both those already considered in the literature and those introduced in this paper), (...) and to show several interesting applications allowed by the presence of a suitable disjunction in a given logic. (shrink)

According to Peter Harrison's book The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science modern science came into existence as a result of the emphasis of Protestants on the literal sense of the Scripture, their refusal of the earlier symbolic or allegorical interpretation, and their efforts at fixing the meaning of the biblical text in which each passage was to be ascribed a single and unique meaning. This article tries to summarize the most significant critiques of Harrison's hypothesis and to (...) acknowledge their legitimacy. However, the alternative explanation of the emergence of modern science as a result of disputes over the biblical interpretation and the subsequent discovery of the ambiguous character of the ordinary verbal language is not fully satisfactory either. (shrink)

Na základě reflexe díla tří brněnských autorů (R. Těsnohlídek, J. Mahen a J. Tomeček) se text pokouší obhájit názor o kultivační roli přírodní prózy – v konfrontaci s kritickým pohledem J. Šmajse. Tato oblast umělecké tvorby představuje jednu z možností, jak čelit environmen­tálnímu žalu. Ten je jednou z významných charakteristik toho, jak lidé v současnosti vnímají stav světa a rizika pro budoucí existenční perspektivy.

This article is focused on the notions of health and illness, as they appear in the context of philosophical reflections on finitude and contingency of human existence. Criticizing Heidegger's approach to health and illness which is based on the Aristotelian concept of privation, the author tries to find an alternative to the privative concept of illness with the help of Schelling's treatise on human freedom which explicates Evil not as a privation of Good, but as a sort of illness that (...) has its own phenomenal positivity. Even Schelling's philosophical investigation of the nature of Evil, however, doesn't seem to provide a solid ground for a non-privative and non-normative approach to pathological phenomena. Only when Schelling's treatise on human freedom is de-contextualized and radicalized in a way suggested, for instance, by Deleuze in his Difference and Repetition, does it seem possible to elucidate pathological, and especially psychopathological phenomena, as they show themselves from themselves, and not from the perspective given by the normative ideal of health. (shrink)

What makes safety claims about general purpose AI systems such as large language models trustworthy? We show that rather than the capabilities of security tools such as alignment and red teaming procedures, it is security practices based on these tools that contributed to reconfiguring the image of AI safety and made the claims acceptable. After showing what causes the gap between the capabilities of security tools and the desired safety guarantees, we critically investigate how AI security practices attempt to fill (...) the gap and identify several shortcomings in diversity and participation. We found that these security practices are part of securitization processes aiming to support (commercial) development of general purpose AI systems whose trustworthiness can only be imperfectly tested instead of guaranteed. We conclude by offering several improvements to the current AI security practices. (shrink)

Many democratic countries have failed to stand up to the challenge presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that the collective response to the pandemic has been incapacitated by an ‘epistemic crisis’, (i.e., a breakdown in the social division of epistemic labor) that led to a failure of citizens’ beliefs to converge towards a shared perception of the situation. Neither a paucity of relevant expert knowledge nor democratic citizens’ irrationality is required for the crisis to emerge. In particular, I highlight (...) three obstacles capable of preventing relevant expert testimony from gaining democratic legitimacy necessary for an effective policy response: 1) the proper domain of expertise is uncertain; 2) regular citizens’ meta-expertise – (i.e., ability to discriminate among the putative experts based on their relative epistemic merit) – is not efficacious enough to trigger truth-convergence of the public opinion; 3) the prominent sources of third-party meta-expertise lack credibility due to their conflicts of interest. Since the first two problems appear irresolvable, I propose that the search for a path towards preclusion of future epistemic crises concentrates on upgrading the institutional fundament for meta-expertise provision. Social epistemology plays a vital role in this search, but its close cooperation with other disciplines is a must. (shrink)

As our epistemic ambitions grow, the common and scientific endeavours are becoming increasingly dependent on Machine Learning (ML). The field rests on a single experimental paradigm, which consists of splitting the available data into a training and testing set and using the latter to measure how well the trained ML model generalises to unseen samples. If the model reaches acceptable accuracy, an a posteriori contract comes into effect between humans and the model, supposedly allowing its deployment to target environments. Yet (...) the latter part of the contract depends on human inductive predictions or generalisations, which infer a uniformity between the trained ML model and the targets. The paper asks how we justify the contract between human and machine learning. It is argued that the justification becomes a pressing issue when we use ML to reach ‘elsewheres’ in space and time or deploy ML models in non-benign environments. The paper argues that the only viable version of the contract can be based on optimality (instead of on reliability which cannot be justified without circularity) and aligns this position with Schurz’s optimality justification. It is shown that when dealing with inaccessible/unstable ground-truths (‘elsewheres’ and non-benign targets), the optimality justification undergoes a slight change, which should reflect critically on our epistemic ambitions. Therefore, the study of ML robustness should involve not only heuristics that lead to acceptable accuracies on testing sets. The justification of human inductive predictions or generalisations about the uniformity between ML models and targets should be included as well. Without it, the assumptions about inductive risk minimisation in ML are not addressed in full. (shrink)