Entity alignment is the task of integrating heterogeneous knowledge among different knowledge graphs (KGs). KG is a popular way of storing facts about real-world entities. Unfortunately, a very limited number of the entities stored in different KGs are aligned. This paper presents an embedding-based entity alignment method that finds entity alignment by measuring the similarities between entity embeddings. Existing methods mainly focus on the relational structures and attributes information for the alignment process. Such methods fail while the entities have a (...) fewer number of attributes or when the relational structure could not capture the meaningful representation of the entities. To address this problem, we propose EASAE, an entity alignment method using summary and attribute embeddings. We exploit the entity summary information available in KGs for entities’ summary embedding. To learn the semantics of the entity summary, we employ bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). Our model learns the representations of entities by using relational triples, attribute triples and summary as well. We perform experiments on real-world datasets, and the results indicate that the proposed approach outperformed the state-of-the-art models for entity alignment. (shrink)

In this article I examine a recent development in online communication, the immersive virtual worlds of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). I argue that these environments provide a distinct form of online experience from the experience available through earlier generation forms of online communication such as newsgroups, chat rooms, email and instant messaging. The experience available to participants in MMORPGs is founded on shared activity, while the experience of earlier generation online communication is largely if not wholly dependent on (...) the communication itself. This difference, I argue, makes interaction in immersive virtual worlds such as MMORPGs relevantly similar to interaction in the physical world, and distinguishes both physical world and immersive virtual world interaction from other forms of online communication. I argue that to the extent that shared activity is a core element in the formation of friendships, friendships can form in immersive virtual worlds as they do in the physical world, and that this possibility was unavailable in earlier forms of online interaction. I do, however, note that earlier forms of online interaction are capable of sustaining friendships formed through either physical or immersive virtual world interaction. I conclude that we cannot any longer make a sharp distinction between the physical and the virtual world, as the characteristics of friendship are able to be developed in each. (shrink)

For much of the twentieth century, plant physiologists considered themselves in an ideal position to study and explain the functions and processes of plants. Much of that authority stemmed from plant physiologists’ long-standing commitment to experimental control and the integration of the physical sciences into biological practice. This article places plant physiology back in the center of the story of the recent life sciences. It shows the development of parallel experimental research programs into environmental as well as genetic effects on (...) growth and development in plant physiology and genetics, and notes that the pursuit of an experimental environment was celebrated as much as (and occasionally more than) a molecular vision of life throughout most of the twentieth century by much of the plant science community. Thus, this article concludes that the history of the recent life sciences needs new complementary narratives of plant physiology with genetics, new concepts with technological tools, and plant-sized scales with the molecular. The history of the ‘Age of Biology,’ as the plant scientists saw it, helps confront the issue first posed by Evelyn Fox Keller, namely that the history of genetics has overshadowed a larger history of experimental life science. My answer here is through a larger narrative of the rise of the complementary experimental sciences of genes and environments in the life sciences. (shrink)

As AI technologies are rolled out into healthcare, academia, human resources, law, and a multitude of other domains, they become de-facto arbiters of truth. But truth is highly contested, with many different definitions and approaches. This article discusses the struggle for truth in AI systems and the general responses to date. It then investigates the production of truth in InstructGPT, a large language model, highlighting how data harvesting, model architectures, and social feedback mechanisms weave together disparate understandings of veracity. It (...) conceptualizes this performance as an operationalization of truth, where distinct, often-conflicting claims are smoothly synthesized and confidently presented into truth-statements. We argue that these same logics and inconsistencies play out in Instruct’s successor, ChatGPT, reiterating truth as a non-trivial problem. We suggest that enriching sociality and thickening “reality” are two promising vectors for enhancing the truth-evaluating capacities of future language models. We conclude, however, by stepping back to consider AI truth-telling as a social practice: what kind of “truth” do we as listeners desire? (shrink)

This article examines the setting of the ages of criminal and participatory responsibility, noting that criminal responsibility is attributed significantly earlier than is participatory responsibility. I claim that the requirements for participatory responsibility are less onerous than those for criminal responsibility, and question the system that denies youth participatory responsibility. I suggest two methods of resolving this difficulty. First, lowering the voting age to enfranchise the capable youth who are currently excluded. Second, modeling criminal responsibility on the Australian doctrine of (...) doli incapax, which gives provisional immunity from the prosecution to youth between ten and fourteen years of age. (shrink)

Political exclusion on grounds of incapacity is the primary remaining source of exclusion from the franchise. It is appealed to by states and theorists alike to justify excluding young people and many people with cognitive disability from the franchise. Defenders of this exclusion claim that no wrong is done by this exclusion and that states gain some significant benefits from this restricting of the franchise. I have argued elsewhere that political exclusion as currently practiced in modern liberal democratic states in (...) fact causes significant harms, as it excludes some people who have the relevant capacity for political participation. Here, I argue that the exclusion of incapable actors prevents no significant harms to democratic outcomes, and that it confers no significant democratic benefits on the states practising this exclusion. As such, I argue that we ought to heavily modify and perhaps even abandon the capacity standard for political inclusion. (shrink)

As AI technologies are increasingly deployed in work, welfare, healthcare, and other domains, there is a growing realization not only of their power but of their problems. AI has the capacity to reinforce historical injustice, to amplify labor precarity, and to cement forms of racial and gendered inequality. An alternate set of values, paradigms, and priorities are urgently needed. How might we design and evaluate AI from an indigenous perspective? This article draws upon the five Tests developed by Māori scholar (...) Sir Hirini Moko Mead. This framework, informed by Māori knowledge and concepts, provides a method for assessing contentious issues and developing a Māori position. This paper takes up these tests, considers how each test might be applied to data-driven systems, and provides a number of concrete examples. This intervention challenges the priorities that currently underpin contemporary AI technologies but also offers a rubric for designing and evaluating AI according to an indigenous knowledge system. (shrink)

This paper argues that we should think of culture and identity as separate concepts, involving distinct objects of enquiry. Whilst identity based theories tend to tell fragmented stories about culture and become overly concerned with difference and particular subjectivities, this paper claims that cultures emerge from a process of internal negotiation which requires only coherence and not homogeneity. In other words, members of cultures need not share all their features in order to be genuine members.

Postmodernity authors have taken parts from Nietzche and Heidegger’s writings, leaving aside other parts not of their interest. So, their philosophical grounding explains itself the denying of history and their suspicion for science and technology. But, as Nietzche and Heidegger heirs, postmodernit..

Ontology is the philosophical discipline which aims to understand how things in the world are divided into categories and how these categories are related together. This is exactly what information scientists aim for in creating structured, automated representations, called 'ontologies,' for managing information in fields such as science, government, industry, and healthcare. Currently, these systems are designed in a variety of different ways, so they cannot share data with one another. They are often idiosyncratically structured, accessible only to those who (...) created them, and unable to serve as inputs for automated reasoning. This volume shows, in a nontechnical way and using examples from medicine and biology, how the rigorous application of theories and insights from philosophical ontology can improve the ontologies upon which information management depends. (shrink)

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

This article discusses the current epistemological status of the political blogosphere, in light both of the concerns raised by Alvin Goldman in his 2008 paper ?The Social Epistemology of Blogging? and the recent drastic changes in the structure of the blogosphere. I argue that the political blogosphere replicates epistemically beneficial functions of the mainstream media for the functioning of democracy, and defend this claim from objections to the blogosphere that have been levelled by Goldman and Richard Posner. I then provide (...) an expanded defence of the political blogosphere in response to these particular objections. (shrink)

In this article, I claim that at least some young people have the requisite capacity for political participation, and that the exclusion of these young people is in breach of the reasonable expectation that all capable citizens are included in democratic processes. I suggest implementing a capacity test for those under the current age of majority. I outline a system of capacity testing for the youth, distinguish this proposal from prior attempts to justify capacity testing and argue that a suitably (...) constrained capacity testing regime is not simply defensible, but superior to the current system, which arbitrarily excludes some capable members of society from participation. Finally, I explain why only this limited capacity testing regime is acceptable. (shrink)

Across-the-Board (ATB) movement from coordinate structures is usually subject to an identity requirement: the same element must be extracted from each conjunct. In this paper I show that there are cases in which the identity requirement appears not to be met, in that different answers can be felicitously given to a single ATB question. I show that the non-ATB readings are instances of sloppy identity of the argument of a functional wh, and are subject to grammatical restrictions.

This article begins with the assumption that criminal disenfranchisement is at least sometimes theoretically defensible, as a component of punishment. From this assumption, I argue that it is only legitimate in a constrained set of cases. These constraints include: implementing disenfranchisement only for serious crimes; tying disenfranchisement to both the electoral cycle and to the length of imprisonment imposed for an offence; and assessing a background condition of sufficient justice present within the state that wishes to disenfranchise. Once these constraints (...) are considered, I argue that there are very few instances in which disenfranchisement is defensible. To prove this, I examine both current disenfranchisement practices and the commonly present factors that undermine the constraints outlined above. (shrink)

Demonstrating Richard Rorty's breadth of scholarship and his influence on diverse issues across the social sciences and humanities, this comprehensive bibliography contains 1,165 citations. A unique reference work on neo-pragmatism, this bibliography is essential for anyone researching Rorty's work and its impact on philosophy, literature, the arts, religion, the social sciences, politics, and education.

Abstract:AI technologies mine past data to anticipate future events, and yet our world of environmental and political crisis ushers in unprecedented conditions. Mixing examples of operational environments (AI in the oil and gas industry) with insights from media, cultural, and environmental studies, this article explores this grappling with uncertainty. To manage uncertainty, companies strive to internalize the complexity and contingency of the real world, collecting more data, designing more accurate sensors, and developing more exhaustive models. And yet prediction is a (...) fraught exercise that struggles with correlation versus causation, the epistemological outside (the unknown), and the ontological outside (the open-endedness of the future). In addition, technology’s role in accelerating and intensifying the destructive logics of capital contributes to more volatile planetary conditions, undermining the stability and continuity that prediction requires. The article thus argues that, at a fundamental level, a highly fluid future will increasingly frustrate any meaningful degree of prediction. Keywords: prediction, knowledge, AI, machine learning, uncertainty, climate change. (shrink)

In Solo: A Star Wars Story, the debonair Lando Calrissian is clearly in love with the artificially intelligent droid L3‐37. There are lots of friendships between droids and humans in Star Wars. This chapter looks at the relationship between Lando and L3‐37 in Solo and argues that they exhibit all the hallmarks not just of friendship, but of love. A friendship between people who both seek to gain from the relationship is one of utility, while a friendship between people who (...) simply enjoy each other's company is one of pleasure. Droids are the kinds of beings that can be good friends, as is clearly supported throughout the Star Wars canon. One potential concern is that droids smarter than humans might take advantage of an inferior organic life form by having a sexual relationship with them. (shrink)

In 1904, Ellen Richards introduced “euthenics.” By 1912, Lewellys Barker, director of medicine and physician-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, would tell the _New York Times_ that the “task of eugenics” and the “task of euthenics” was the “Task for the Nation.” Alongside the emergence of hereditarian eugenics, where fate was firmly rooted in heredity, this article places euthenics into the same Progressive Era demands for the scientific management over environmental issues like life and labor, health and hygiene, sewage and sanitation. (...) I argue that euthenics not only heralded women as leaders in the quest for what Richards and eugenicists termed “racial improvement,” but also aimed to make reforms through environmental and educational changes rather than hereditary interventions. Seeking to recuperate the figure of Ellen Richards in the history of science, I place Richards and her euthenics more into the debate over eugenics rather than over the emergence of home economics. Building on the work of Donald Opitz, Staffan Bergwik, and Brigette Van Tiggelen, this article shows, first, how Richards’ career threads the needle between the home and the laboratory as sites of science making, not as separate spheres but as overlapping realms, and helps recover how domestic concerns shaped the focus of the life sciences. Second, this article shows how euthenics shaped eugenics by looking at the writings of American eugenicists Charles Davenport, Paul Popenoe, and David Starr Jordan. Third, the article describes how euthenics took root in new academic departments of domestic science, home economics, and departments child welfare and family life in the 1920 and 1930s, most notably the department of euthenics at the Kansas State Agricultural College from 1926 and the Institute of Euthenics at Vassar College after 1923. (shrink)

There are two primary purposes of this manuscript: (i) to evaluate the western buyers’ ethical issue in the setting of eastern and western economies, and (ii) to assess the ethical values of the employers and the government in their business dealing in the background of Bangladesh. Analyzing the present minimum wage (MW) policy of the garment global supply chain industry in Bangladesh and the extent to which the policy functions are two of the other purposes of this study. This study (...) is the mixed approached of exploratory, descriptive, and phenomenological qualitative research. Each of the exploratory, descriptive, and phenomenological qualitative research goals has identified and described in a systematic way to get the best outcome of the purposes set in this manuscript. This study shows that rule utilitarian ethics are being followed by the Western buyers in their business dealings in Western territories. The philosophy of rule utilitarianism holds moral principles, and this principle tends to place greater emphasis on ethical interests rather than economic gains. Unfortunately, Western buyers do not follow the rule utilitarianism in their business dealing in eastern countries. Thus, this study shows western business leaders/buyers are not ethically correct. The act utilitarian ethics, on the other hand, are being followed by the eastern buyers in their business dealing. The philosophy of act utilitarianism holds immoral principles, and this principle tends to place greater emphasis on economic gains rather than ethical interest. This philosophy permit firm’s unethical behavior such as an exploitation of MW on the ground that this practice increases its incomes and maximizes the owner’s interest. The employers and buyers unethically gain profit, keeping the workers in a disadvantaged situation, which contradicts John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Furthermore, the government has become an accomplice in exploiting and depriving the garment works of their entitlement and labor rights to appease the so-called investors. This study helps buyers, employers, government, and stakeholders to correct their unethical business deals. It also helps the policymakers to implement the MW policy for the betterment of garment global supply chain workers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New PragmatismRichard RumanaRichard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism, by David L. Hall; xii & 290 pp. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994, $49.50 cloth, $16.95 paper.David Hall has written a highly creative, original—and idiosyncratic—work on Rorty, with its idiosyncrasy another aspect that makes the book well worth reading. This does not mean that it is always satisfying, however, and since (...) Hall tries to find a blend of “exuberant praise and testy complaint” (p. 7), this review will adopt the same method.On the positive side, perhaps there is no better way to approach Rorty than by employing Rorty’s own method of reading philosophical and literary works: narrative recontextualization. Since Hall states, “Deductive and dialectical logics are irrelevant to (Rorty’s) thought” (p. 9), he had to find a means of avoiding the point/counterpoint strategy of direct argumentation so as to do justice to Rorty’s own conversational strategy of reading texts. Thus, Hall (compared, for example, to Konstantin Kolenda) is unique in his willingness “to follow Rorty through the looking glass” (a reference to Rorty’s discarding the traditional metaphor of the mind as a mirror) and to take seriously Rorty’s thinking as “beyond the philosophical pale” (p. 3). Hall makes a virtue of his strategy: “The best one can do is to judge the relative attractiveness of Rorty’s views by recourse to alternative visions” (p. 4). The breadth of Hall’s background in philosophy, both Eastern and Western, his fine ear for irony, and his acute sense of history make him an exemplary reader who can offer attractive alternate visions by which to examine Rorty’s own vision.The subtitle of the book (“Poet and Prophet of the New Pragmatism”) announces Hall’s underlying theme; he takes his cue from the pragmatic Deweyan aspect of Rorty’s work, with the phrase “new pragmatism” referring to Rorty’s reinterpretation of pragmatism along linguistic lines. Where the original emphasis of pragmatism was on ideas as habits through which experience could be guided for the satisfaction of desires in terms of either private or public goods, Rorty’s neopragmatism replaces ideas and experience with language and alternate vocabularies as the medium through which desires are fulfilled. With this emphasis on language comes Hall’s reading of Rorty as poet and prophet. The desire for self-creation is accomplished through poetry and literature. The desire for social tolerance is marked by Rorty’s commitment to a form of Utopian Democracy. Hall’s reading of Rorty is well grounded in the mutations of Pragmatism from Peirce to Davidson and from aesthetics to social theory.On the negative side, a number of Hall’s claims are open to objection, some of them are minor, some more substantive. Of the minor variety is a footnote for Chapter 2: “Rorty’s Ph.D. dissertation was on Whitehead and Aristotle”—whereas, in Rorty’s dissertation, The Concept of Potentiality (Yale, 1956), Whitehead appears only in the bibliography and is not mentioned in the text at all. [End Page 144]On more substantive issues, Hall’s contention in Chapter One, where he discusses Rorty’s historicism, is that Rorty is unable to free himself from the Kantian problematic of the autonomy of value; he remains, thus, an heir to the “aims of the Enlightenment” (p. 51). This seems to be a narrowly conceived interpretation. Admittedly, Rorty has recently said that he would now not define his thinking as “postmodern” since the term has become laden with excess baggage from other disciplines (although, he still accepts Lyotard’s definition, “distrust of metanarratives,” as pertinent to what he is doing). On the other hand, except for an acceptance of the secularization of the public realm, there seems to be little in his thinking that characterizes him as an “Enlightenment” figure, and Hall himself seems to concede this when he later refers to Rorty as a “Nihilist” (p. 170). Is it possible to be both a nihilist and committed to the Enlightenment? I find it even harder to follow Hall in his belief that Rorty’s nihilism “expresses itself directly in Rorty... (shrink)

Personal data is highly vulnerable to security exploits, spurring moves to lock it down through encryption, to cryptographically ‘cloud’ it. But personal data is also highly valuable to corporations and states, triggering moves to unlock its insights by relocating it in the cloud. We characterise this twinned condition as ‘clouded data’. Clouded data constructs a political and technological notion of privacy that operates through the intersection of corporate power, computational resources and the ability to obfuscate, gain insights from and valorise (...) a dependency between public and private. First, we survey prominent clouded data approaches, suggesting their particular affordances produce distinctive versions of privacy. Next, we perform two notional code-based experiments using synthetic datasets. In the field of health, we submit a patient’s blood pressure to a notional cloud-based diagnostics service; in education, we construct a student survey that enables aggregate reporting without individual identification. We argue that these technical affordances legitimate new political claims to capture and commodify personal data. The final section broadens the discussion to consider the political force of clouded data and its reconstitution of traditional notions such as the public and the private. (shrink)

Medical science conceives the human body as a system comprised of many subsystems at a variety of levels. At the highest level are bodily systems proper, such as the endocrine system, which are central to our understanding of human anatomy, and play a key role in diagnosis and in dynamic modeling as well as in medical pedagogy and computer visualization. But there is no explicit definition of what a bodily system is; such informality is acceptable in documentation created for human (...) beings, but falls short of what is needed for computer representations. Our analysis is intended as a first step towards filling this gap. (shrink)

Entre los diversos aportes teóricos que hicieron de Max Weber una de las figuras principales del pensamiento social del siglo XX, encontramos su sociología del derecho que tiene como tema el proceso de racionalización del derecho occidental. Max Weber estudió ese proceso como una racionalización de tipo formal que es acompañada, aún en su última etapa moderna, de tendencias contrarias que se dirigen hacia la materialización del derecho. A partir de estos trabajos de Weber se ha construido una crítica del (...) Estado social y una oposición a tomar los derechos sociales como derechos fundamentales, consistentes en afirmar que tal proyecto político conspira contra las notas de racionalidad del Estado de derecho por implicar la introducción de exigencias materiales de justicia que degradan la norma superior del ordenamiento jurídico, es decir, la Constitución. (shrink)

The mechanisms governing anterior‐posterior and dorsal‐ventral polarity in Drosophila melanogaster had previously been considered as independent processes. However, two papers(1,2) now reveal that both axes are initiated during oogenesis by the same pathway, and also clearly demonstrate that one is dependent on the other.

This study provides much-needed empirical study of workplace inclusion of underresourced employees of low socioeconomic status. Based upon a conservation of resources perspective, we have examined the centrality of resources as a key inclusion process for well-being outcomes for employees with insufficient resources. In the context of misuse of institutional power over operative workers within highly segmented and hierarchical work settings, this study validates the importance of economic inclusion for fostering workers’ well-being via fair employment practices. This study also offers (...) new knowledge of the integrative resource model of workplace inclusion research by validating workers’ personal resources of learning orientation as an internal condition for strengthening the positive effect of economic inclusion on well-being. (shrink)

This article descends into Plato’s representation of justice in The Republic, focusing on exploring a notion that has been fundamental to society since its inception. While justice was formed to ensure equality within a stratified society, it frequently results in inequity for particular sectors of society. This paradoxical element of justice makes it biased and sometimes fictitious for some groups of people. An unfortunate consequence of pursuing justice is that specific segments of society are regularly deprived. Therefore, this article discusses (...) the essence of social stratification in Plato’s concept of justice and how far this stratification does justice for each class. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#73-74; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2023 P 241-257. (shrink)

This study explores young people’s perceptions of their existential well-being during the transition after leaving care. We use the theoretical framework of ‘existential well-being,’ which is a relational approach. The study deploys participatory action research methodology and involves peer research with 74 young people leaving care aged 17–32 in Finland (2011–2012) and England (2016–2018). The data was gathered through semi-structured interviews and thematically analysed.We identified three inter-linking categories of existential well-being related to the basic issues of being a person: who (...) one is and where one belongs. Self-feeling involves the importance of how one feels about oneself and one’s physical and mental health and security. Self-realisation relates to one’s hopes and the means for making one’s own decisions in everyday life. Belonging concerns the confidence one expresses in one’s supportive social networks.The findings highlight that, alongside the practical issues of out-of-home care, attention should increasingly focus on young people's reflections on their own lives, and an ethics of care should be developed to better meet their needs. These findings argue for the need to further support young people’s psychosocial and mental health in child welfare policy and practice. (shrink)