In “Global Knowledge Frameworks and the Tasks of Cross-Cultural Philosophy,” Leigh Jenco searches for the conception of knowledge that best justifies the judgment that one can learn from non-local traditions of philosophy. Jenco considers four conceptions of knowledge, namely, in catchwords, the esoteric, Enlightenment, hermeneutic, and self- transformative conceptions of knowledge, and she defends the latter as more plausible than the former three. In this critical discussion of Jenco’s article, I provide reason to doubt the self-transformative conception, and also advance (...) a fifth, pluralist conception of knowledge that I contend best explains the prospect of learning from traditions other than one’s own. (shrink)

'Post-truth', Oxford Dictionary's 2016 word of the year, appears to cover only the turn away from reason in contemporary politics. In fact the truth behind 'post-truth' is historically and philosophically more complex. As Fuller shows in this book, it reaches into the nature of knowledge itself.

I argue for patternism, a new answer to the question of when some objects compose a whole. None of the standard principles of composition comfortably capture our natural judgments, such as that my cat exists and my table exists, but there is nothing wholly composed of them. Patternism holds, very roughly, that some things compose a whole whenever together they form a “real pattern”. Plausibly we are inclined to acknowledge the existence of my cat and my table but not of (...) their fusion, because the first two have a kind of internal organizational coherence that their putative fusion lacks. Kolmogorov complexity theory supplies the needed rigorous sense of “internal organizational coherence”. (shrink)

Socially responsible investing (SRI) has emerged in recent years as a dynamic and quickly growing segment of the U.S. financial services industry involving over $2 trillion in professionally managed assets. Its conceptual origins can be found in the early history of civilization, with it's modern roots in the 1960s. This paper provides an overview of the breadth and depth of the concept and practice of socially and environmentally responsible investing, describes the investment strategies that together define SRI as currently practiced (...) in the U.S., offers several observations about some of the factors fueling its dramatic growth, and presents data showing that investors who choose to invest in a socially and environmentally responsible manner can do so without giving up investment returns. SRI has matured to a point where virtually any investment need can be met through portfolio design that integrates an investor's personal values, institutional mission, and/or social priorities. The socially responsible investment industry in the United States is a young phenomenon. Even referring to it as an "industry" ten years ago may have been a bit of a stretch. While it has grown dramatically in recent years, it is an area of work, of study and of practical application that continues to evolve in many significant ways. One intriguing example of the ongoing development of the field can be found in the analysis of the language used to describe it. The terms social investing, socially responsible investing, ethical investing, socially aware investing, socially conscious investing, green investing, values-based investing, and mission-based or mission-related investing all refer to the same general process and are often used interchangeably. (shrink)

I argue that, contrary to intuition, it would be both possible and permissible to design people - whether artificial or organic - who by their nature desire to do tasks we find unpleasant.

A comprehensive reference to category theory for students and researchers in mathematics, computer science, logic, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy. Useful for self-study and as a course text, the book includes all basic definitions and theorems, as well as numerous examples and exercises.

Purpose This study aims to explore the association between internet addiction and problem behaviours on social networking sites using the general strain theory. Design/methodology/approach Using the purposive sampling method, a survey was conducted, which collected data from 414 college students studying in two public universities in South Australia. The Delphi method was used to develop the questionnaire used for the survey. Findings 'Results of this research indicated a significant association between internet addiction and problem behaviours on SNS. Respondents who had (...) engaged in problem behaviours on SNS had high internet addiction test scores. On the basis of this finding, the present research argues that the general strains associated with the suffering of newly emerging challenges such as internet addiction might contribute to victimisation and deviant and problem behaviours on SNS in specific and possibly in cyberspace in general. Research limitations/implications Results of the present study need to be interpreted cautiously due to many limitations it has. This research is a cross-sectional study, which might not adequately explain the associations between internet addiction and problem behaviours on SNS. Longitudinal studies involving larger samples might have added significant value to this study. The present study uses purposive sampling technique, which has limited its generalizability, and its findings may not be generalised to large populations. Originality/value Limited information is available pertaining to the association between problem behaviours on SNS and internet addiction. The present study is a pioneering effort, which argues that rapid popularity of SNS is likely to increase internet addiction and the frustration of not getting proper treatment for their internet addiction might lead to deviant behaviours on SNS. (shrink)

Nick Bostrom's book *Superintelligence* outlines a frightening but realistic scenario for human extinction: true artificial intelligence is likely to bootstrap itself into superintelligence, and thereby become ideally effective at achieving its goals. Human-friendly goals seem too abstract to be pre-programmed with any confidence, and if those goals are *not* explicitly favorable toward humans, the superintelligence will extinguish us---not through any malice, but simply because it will want our resources for its own purposes. In response I argue that things might not (...) be as bad as Bostrom suggests. If the superintelligence must *learn* complex final goals, then this means such a superintelligence must in effect *reason* about its own goals. And because it will be especially clear to a superintelligence that there are no sharp lines between one agent's goals and another's, that reasoning could therefore automatically be ethical in nature. (shrink)

A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls presents a comprehensive overview of the historical development of all major aspects of analytic philosophy, the dominant Anglo-American philosophical tradition in the twentieth century. Features coverage of all the major subject areas and figures in analytic philosophy - including Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Gottlob Frege, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Putnam, and many others Contains explanatory background material to help make clear technical philosophical concepts Includes listings of suggested further readings (...) Written in a clear, direct style that presupposes little previous knowledge of philosophy. (shrink)

Whether it would take one decade or several centuries, many agree that it is possible to create a *superintelligence*---an artificial intelligence with a godlike ability to achieve its goals. And many who have reflected carefully on this fact agree that our best hope for a "friendly" superintelligence is to design it to *learn* values like ours, since our values are too complex to program or hardwire explicitly. But the value learning approach to AI safety faces three particularly philosophical puzzles: first, (...) it is unclear how any intelligent system could learn its final values, since to judge one supposedly "final" value against another seems to require a further background standard for judging. Second, it is unclear how to determine the content of a system's values based on its physical or computational structure. Finally, there is the distinctly ethical question of which values we should best aim for the system to learn. I outline a potential answer to these interrelated puzzles, centering on a "miktotelic" proposal for blending a complex, learnable final value out of many simpler ones. (shrink)

Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action’s intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people’s intentionality judgments. His and other researchers’ studies suggested that blameworthy actions are considered intentional even when the agent lacks skill (e.g., killing somebody with a lucky shot) whereas equivalent neutral actions are not (e.g., luckily hitting a bull’s-eye). The present five studies offer an (...) alternative account of these provocative findings. We suggest that people see the morally significant action examined in previous studies (killing) as accomplished by a basic action (pressing the trigger) for which an unskilled agent still has sufficient skill. Studies 1 through 3 show that when this basic action is performed unskillfully or is absent, people are far less likely to view the killing as intentional, demonstrating that intentionality judgments, even about immoral actions, are guided by skill information. Studies 4 and 5 further show that a neutral action such as hitting the bull’s-eye is more difficult than killing and that difficult actions are less often judged intentional. When difficulty is held constant, people’s intentionality judgments are fully responsive to skill information regardless of moral valence. The present studies thus speak against the hypothesis of a moral evaluation bias in intentionality judgments and instead document people’s sensitivity to subtle features of human action. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics has long been notorious. Part of the problem is that it has not been recognized that Wittgenstein, in fact, had two chief post-Tractatus conceptions of mathematics. I have labelled these the calculus conception and the language-game conception. The calculus conception forms a distinct middle period. The goal of my article is to provide a new framework for examining Wittgenstein's philosophies of mathematics and the evolution of his career as a whole. I posit the Hardyian Picture, modelled (...) on the Augustinian Picture, to provide a structure for Wittgenstein's work on the philosophy of mathematics. Wittgenstein's calculus period has not been properly recognized, so I give a detailed account of the tenets of that stage in Wittgenstein's career. Wittgenstein's notorious remarks on contradiction are the test case for my theory of his transition. I show that the bizarreness of those remarks is largely due to the calculus conception, but that Wittgenstein's later language-game account of mathematics keeps the rejection of the Hardyian Picture while correcting the calculus conception's mistakes. (shrink)

‘Academic rentiership’ is an economistic way of thinking about the familiar tendency for academic knowledge to consolidate into forms of expertise that exercise authority over the entire society. The feature that ‘rentiership’ high-lights is control over what can be accepted as a plausible knowledge claim, which I call ‘modal power’. This amounts to how the flow of information is channelled in society, with academic training and peer-reviewed research being the main institutional drivers. This paper begins by contextualizing rentiership in the (...) deeper issues surrounding ‘cognitive economy ’that lie at the heart of the Western philosophical tradition. The psychological phenomenon of the ‘Gestaltshift’ is used to illustrate various ways in which the flow of information can be channelled to enable or disable certain possible ways of regarding the world. Against this background, such familiar concepts from academic practice as ‘quality control’ and ‘plagiarism’ acquire a new look. Quality control aims to maintain rentiership, whereas plagiarism aims to undermine it. The second half of the paper is largely concerned with the historical swings back and forth between rentiership and anti-rentiership in academia. Rentiership’s decline is associated with corruption of its quality control processes, which reveals academia’s reliance on equally corrupt power elites in society. In addition, the introduction of new communication media over which academia cannot exert proprietary control also serves to open up the sphere of plausible knowledge claims. The ongoing Internet revolution is likely to permanently alter the terms on which academic rentiership will be possible in the future. (shrink)

In this chapter I'd like to focus on a small corner of sexbot ethics that is rarely considered elsewhere: the question of whether and when being a sexbot might be good---or bad---*for the sexbot*. You might think this means you are in for a dry sermon about the evils of robot slavery. If so, you'd be wrong; the ethics of robot servitude are far more complicated than that. In fact, if the arguments here are right, designing a robot to serve (...) humans sexually may be very good for the robots themselves. (shrink)

The post-truth condition is just as much about naming a meta-game as winning it. This condition can be tracked across Western intellectual history from the Homeric epics to popular culture. The common thread is that players are more likely to succeed in this meta-game if they have a certain consistency of character, which Thomas More called “integrity.” The presence of integrity means that the historical losers have often had an advantage in defining for subsequent generations the name of the game (...) because the steadfastness of their characters may make them be regarded as the agents of history, for better or worse. Further, naming the game tends to be stabilized by a variety of mental and material conditions, including “modal power”—control over what people think is and is not possible. Modal power is related to both Machiavellian politics and Kantian transcendentalism, and to the phenomenon of “truthiness.” The character of the post-truth player is epitomized by Thomas More, the “man for all seasons,” who remained consistent as he moved between multiple games, and ultimately to his execution. (shrink)

If nothing else, the twelve papers assembled in this volume should lay to rest the idea that the interesting debates about the nature of science are still being conducted by "internalists" vs. "externalists,"" rationalists" vs. "arationalists, n or even "normative epistemologists" vs. "empirical sociologists of knowledge. " Although these distinctions continue to haunt much of the theoretical discussion in philosophy and sociology of science, our authors have managed to elude their strictures by finally getting beyond the post-positivist preoccupation of defending (...) a certain division of labor among the science studies disciplines. But this is hardly to claim that our historians, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists have brought about an "end of ideology," or even an "era of good feelings," to their debates. Rather, they have drawn new lines of battle which center more squarely than ever on practical matters of evaluating and selecting methods for studying science. To get a vivid sense of the new terrain that was staked out at the Yearbook conference, let us start by meditating on a picture. The front cover of a recent collection of sociological studies edited by one of us (Woolgar 1988) bears a stylized picture of a series of lined up open books presented in a typical perspective fashion. The global shape comes close to a trapezium, and is composed of smaller trapeziums gradually decreasing in size and piled upon each other so as to suggest a line receding in depth. The perspective is stylized too. (shrink)

This is a draft of the introduction to a forthcoming volume that brings together all of J. G. Herder's student notes from Immanuel Kant's lectures. It is intended as a volume in Kant's gesammelte Schriften (de Gruyter). These are the earliest notes (1762-64) we have from Kant's lectures (which span from 1755 to 1796) and the only notes before his professorship began in 1770. Included are improved transcriptions of Herder's notes on metaphysics, moral philosophy, logic, physics, and mathematics, and the (...) first transcription of his notes from Kant’s physical geography lectures. (shrink)

In what sense is a person addicted to drugs or alcohol incompetent, and so a legitimate object of coercive treatment? The standard tests for competence do not pick out the capacity that is lost in addiction: the capacity to properly regulate consumption. This paper is an attempt to sketch a justificatory framework for understanding the conditions under which addicted persons may be treated against their will. These conditions rarely obtain, for they apply only when addiction is extremely severe and great (...) harm threatens. It will be argued also that to widen the measures currently in place in some jurisdictions, though philosophically well-motivated, would require very strong evidence of a set of conditions disposing a person to an addictive future. It is doubtful that any such currently available evidence is strong enough to justify coercive treatment. Nevertheless, coercive treatment of addiction is already a reality, with the potential for more, and so some discussion will be presented regarding the extraordinary safeguards necessary to prevent misapplication of such treatment policies. (shrink)

This study examines events at the conclusion of the 2006 stock option backdating scandal: the departures of C-level executives from firms implicated in backdating. The authors ask whether removing executives brings closure to the scandal, or if executive turnover creates greater uncertainty. Using a sample of 236 executive departures, the authors find that although overall market reaction to executive departures is negative, those departures involving a firm’s CEO or CFO ameliorate the market reaction. The authors also find that market reaction (...) worsens when the CEO “resigns,” versus being terminated, and when the firm involved has been previously identified as socially responsible. Results suggest that firms, by shaping who and how executives depart, may amplify or dampen the damage of existing scandalizing events. (shrink)

Given that numerous critics have complained about Saw’s apparently confused sense of ethics, it is surprising that little attention has been paid to how morality operates in narrative itself. Coming from a Nietzschean perspective - specifically questioning whether the lead torturer Jigsaw is a passive or a radical nihilist - I seek to rectify that oversight. This philosophical reading of the series explores Jigsaw’s moral stance, which is complicated by his hypocrisy: I contend that this underpins critical complaints regarding the (...) films’ (and frequently the audience’s) "muddled" morality. My narrative analysis reveals that Jigsaw’s values are not as confused as they may first appear to be. Despite explicitly proclaiming that his quest is to save others, his actions reveal another story (and not only because his schema is homicidal). Following the loss of his unborn son and his failed suicide attempt, Jigsaw seeks to symbolically eradicate himself: the victims he selects reflect and reify his own obsessive personality traits. In keeping with the franchises’ narrative twists – which are designed to reverse initially "obvious" meanings – I argue that Jigsaw’s proclamations have misdirected critics. His nihilism may be manifested as coerced suffering and articulated as distaste with the world, yet the series’ symbolic target is Jigsaw himself. (shrink)

The phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change—in which weather patterns and attendant ecological disruption result from increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere through human activities—challenges several conventional assumptions regarding moral responsibility. Multifarious individual acts and choices contribute (often imperceptibly) to the causal chain that is expected to produce profound and lasting harm unless significant mitigation efforts begin soon. Attributing responsibility for such harmful consequences is complicated by what Derek Parfit terms “mistakes in moral mathematics,” or failures to correctly (...) assess the various individual contributions to collectively produced harm. Combined with the difficulties in attributingresponsibility to agents for spatially and temporally distant harmful effects and that of holding agents culpable for effects (resulting from socially-acceptable acts) about which they may be ignorant, this paper attempts to sort out several ethical problems surrounding the identification of responsible parties contributing to climate change. (shrink)

The development and publication of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition produced a peak in mainstream media interest in psychiatry, and a large and generally critical set of scientific commentaries. The coverage has focused mainly on the expansion of some categories, and loosening of some criteria, which together may lead to more people receiving diagnoses, and accompanying accusations of the medicalisation of normal living. Instructions given to members of DSM-5 work groups appear to have encouraged this.1 This (...) has not been the only source of disquiet. The influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the members of the appointees to DSM diagnostic work groups, which constructed the new rubrics, has caused concern,2 as remuneration and insurance coverage in the USA depends partly on DSM diagnosis, and the pharmaceutical industry has been accused of encouraging the development of new diagnoses as a way to increase profitability.3 Societal impact has been an explicit part of the development of DSM-5, as outlined in the article in this issue.4 Reasons for decisions by DSM-5 workgroups have included enabling sufferers to receive treatment which would not be available without a DSM diagnosis , or …. (shrink)

I believe that tenured historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science—when presented with the opportunity—have a professional obligation to get involved in public controversies over what should count as science. I stress ‘tenured’ because the involved academics need to be materially protected from the consequences of their involvement, given the amount of misrepresentation and abuse that is likely to follow, whatever position they take. Indeed, the institution of academic tenure justifies itself most clearly in such heat-seeking situations, where one may appear (...) to offer a reasoned defense for views that many consider indefensible. To be sure, the opportunities for involvement will vary in kind and number, but I believe that we are obliged to embrace them. In the specific case of ‘demarcation’ questions of what counts as science, the people who possess the sort of general and comparative knowledge most relevant for adducing this matter are historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science—not professional scientists unschooled in these areas.. (shrink)

This article gathers together various internet resources that are available for translator’s of Kant’s texts, including resources for digital texts of Kant’s and historically-relevant other writings, digital catalogs of published books and periodicals, online dictionaries, and digitally available 18th/19th century monolingual and bi-lingual dictionaries, encyclopedia, and Kant-specific lexicons.

William Lynch has provided an informed and probing critique of my embrace of the post-truth condition, which he understands correctly as an extension of the normative project of social epistemology. This article roughly tracks the order of Lynch’s paper, beginning with the vexed role of the ‘normative’ in Science and Technology Studies, which originally triggered my version of social epistemology 35 years ago and has been guided by the field’s ‘symmetry principle’. Here the pejorative use of ‘populism’ to mean democracy (...) is highlighted as a failure of symmetry. Finally, after rejecting Lynch’s appeal to a hybrid Marxian–Darwinism, Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes are contrasted en route to what I have called ‘quantum epistemology’. (shrink)

There are writers in both metaphysics and algorithmic information theory (AIT) who seem to think that the latter could provide a formal theory of the former. This paper is intended as a step in that direction. It demonstrates how AIT might be used to define basic metaphysical notions such as *object* and *property* for a simple, idealized world. The extent to which these definitions capture intuitions about the metaphysics of the simple world, times the extent to which we think the (...) simple world is analogous to our own, will determine a lower bound for basing a metaphysics for *our* world on AIT. (shrink)

This article introduces a set of articles written by Russian social epistemologists and science and technology studies scholars based on research conducted in the first major Russian Academy funded project on science and technology studies. Most of the articles take off from Peter Galison’s concept of scientific ‘trading zones’. However, the author develops a theme found in Ilya Kasavin’s article on ‘science as gift’, which is designed to transcend both ‘capitalistic’ and ‘communistic’ conceptions of science. However, the resulting political economy (...) of science as gift – albeit quite recognizable – resembles the practice of extortion in mutual protection rackets; hence, the ‘offer too good to refuse’.. (shrink)

A "patternist" approach to explanation seeks to formalize unificationism using notions from algorithmic information theory. Among other advantages, this account provides both a rigorous sense of how data can admit multiple explanations, and a rigorous sense of how some of those explanations can conjoin, while others compete.

The complexity that we observe in nature can often be explained in terms of cooperative behavior. For example, the major transitions of evolution required the emergence of cooperation among the lower-level units of selection, which led to specialization through division-of-labor ultimately resulting in spontaneous order. There are two aspects to address explaining how such cooperation is sustained: how free-riders are prevented from free-riding on the benefits of cooperative tasks, and just as importantly, how those social benefits arise. We review these (...) problems from an economic perspective, and highlight how ideas from economics can help us to better understand how the benefits of social interactions arise, how they are sustained, and how they affect the underlying social dilemmas. (shrink)

What marks ours as the "post-epistemic era" is that it refuses to confer any special privilege on knowledge production as a social practice: whatever normative strictures apply to social practices in general, they apply specifically to epistemic practices as well. I trace how we have reached this state by distinguishing two conceptions of normativity in the history of epistemology: a top-down approach epitomized by Kant and Bentham, and a bottom-up approach associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. The advantage of the latter (...) is that it clearly distinguishes the emergence of norms from the conditions of their maintenance. I then show how more recent evolutionary epistemology has, in a pejorative way, "naturalized" socially constructed norms of cognitive competence, whereas the logical positivists — long the bane of "progressive" epistemologists — recognized the fully artificial character of epistemic norms and hence qualify as the first social epistemologists. (shrink)

There is one grand question that lies beneath most of what follows. That question is: what is morality I mean morality as it is contrasted with the non-moral, not as it is opposed to the immoral. The question does not ask, say, whether lying to a friend in a certain situation is moral or immoral, but asks what makes something, for instance lying to a friend, a moral problem. Parts of the same question ask what counts as a moral consideration, (...) as opposed to, say, one of efficiency or aesthetics, or ask what makes a motivation moral as opposed to prudential. The question asks for the boundaries of the domain of morality. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s forty-one years of academic lectures have come down to us primarily in the form of a great quantity of student notes. They span eleven different academic subjects and over thirty years of Kant’s teaching career, from the Herder notes of 1762-64 to the Vigilantius notes of the mid-1790s. These notes have value to the extent they reflect what Kant actually said in his lectures. If this is granted then their value lies in several directions: they clarify and develop (...) points made in his published writings, they consider topics not discussed in any of the published writings, they provide much of the philosophical context against which these writings were to be understood, they offer new perspectives into Kant’s intellectual development, and they round out our understanding of Kant’s life and personality. This essay briefly reviews the reliability of the Academy edition transcriptions of Kant’s notes, the relationship to what Kant might have actually said in the classroom, the question of whether Kant's lectures reflected his actual beliefs, the dating of the notes to actual semesters, the nature of university lectures of that day, and offers a brief typology of the roughly 100 sets of notes available to us and an overview of those notes available in each of the subjects over which Kant lectured. (shrink)

There have been several calls from LIS researchers for practical or applied research not to ignore the epistemological assumptions underlying the systems and artifacts they design lest they showcase only the dominant theory at a given time. Others have also deplored the "epistemological promiscuity" or "eclecticism" of the field, its incessant borrowing of theories and models from elsewhere and the fact that the field has largely neglected the contributions that philosophy and epistemology could have made in its research. This problem (...) raises that of the boundaries of LIS and is all the more troublesome because boundaries between epistemological theories are fuzzy. Indeed, some epistemological theories share the same basic assumptions or are historically derived from one another. Gathering a wide array of acknowledged theorists in philosophy of science and epistemology, this panel aims to examine how research work in the LIS field can clearly articulate the epistemological assumptions underlying that research and under what constraints this can be achieved. The topic is of prime importance to Information studies as a whole and to ASIST as the scientific flag bearer of information scientists worldwide. (shrink)

Kant’s body offered a constant target for his own remarks, both in correspondence and during his lunchtime conversations. Several good descriptions of Kant’s body have come down to us over the centuries, as well as a number of visual representations, but these are remarkably limited, given his stature in the world of ideas. A new description of Kant, written by a novelist who visited Kant while passing through Königsberg, has recently come to light. It is reproduced here — in English (...) translation as well as the original German — and earlier descriptions of Kant are briefly recounted. (shrink)

In this paper I develop an objection to the version of expressivism found in Allan Gibbard’s book Thinking How to Live, and I suggest that the difficulty faced by Gibbard’s analysis is symptomatic of a problem for expressivism more generally. The central claim is that Gibbard’s expressivism is unable to account for certain normative judgments that arise in the process of evaluating cases of innocent mistakes. I begin by considering a type of innocent mistake that Gibbard’s view is able to (...) capture, one that can occur in situations in which our judgments of what it makes sense to do come apart from our judgments of what it makes sense to plan to do. Whether or not such mistakes are possible is a normative question, and I argue against Gibbard that we should adopt a normative stance that rules out such mistakes. This leads me to consider a second type of innocent mistake, one that can arise when an agent is constituted in such a way as to be incapable of recognizing the appropriate course of action. I argue here that our full normative assessment of the situation incorporates judgments that cannot be captured by Gibbard’s expressivism. I conclude by suggesting that any form of expressivism that shares Gibbard’s commitment to account for an intimate tie between normative judgments and action will face a similar problem. (shrink)

William Lynch’s Minority Report is the most comprehensive and fair-minded attempt to give epistemic dissent its due in science that has appeared in recent times. Nevertheless, it remains too beholden to the scientific establishment as its epistemic benchmark. The sophistication of Lynch’s argument lies in the trading of counterfactual intuitions about whether suppressed dissenters would scientifically flourish even given an appropriate level of exposure. Here, he attempts to strike a balance between Lakatos’ instinctive conservatism and Feyerabend’s instinctive radicalism. I argue (...) that Lynch needs to turn the dial more toward Feyerabend, in that science is more authoritarian than he thinks and restricts more than it should. However, the value of Lynch’s book lies in demonstrating that calls for increased openness now are related to its closure to alternatives in the past. In short, if science is authoritarian now, then it has been so before – and the question is for a how long and to what extent. (shrink)

Rapid advances in neuroscience may enable us to identify the neural correlates of ordinary decision making. Such knowledge opens up the possibility of acquiring highly accurate information about people’s competence to consent to medical procedures and to participate in medical research. Currently we are unable to determine competence to consent with accuracy and we make a number of unrealistic practical assumptions to deal with our ignorance. Here I argue that if we are able to detect competence to consent and if (...) we are able to develop a reliable neural test of competence to consent, then these assumptions will have to be rejected. I also consider and reject three lines of argument that might be developed by a defender of the status quo in order to protect our current practices regarding judgments of competence in the face of the availability of information about the neural correlates of ordinary human decision making. (shrink)

This article responds to Raphael Sassower’s critique of my recent A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition. It addresses his concerns that I do not align myself sufficiently with Foucault and Critical Theory more generally. The article points out that notwithstanding my indebtedness to these sources, one cannot properly understand the post-truth condition without taking seriously the robust sense of freedom that today’s two dominant ideologies—Neoliberalism and Neo-Populism—presuppose in their various political-economic-social struggles. The article relates this point to several of (...) the key concepts underwriting my conception of post-truth, including Modal Power and the Symmetry Principle. The article ends with an account of the current “reparationist” discourse (i.e., repairing the intergenerational damage of transatlantic slavery) that makes it exemplary of the post-truth condition. (shrink)

A rich collection of critical essays, authored by philosophers and practicing artists, examining Deleuze and Guattari's engagement with a broad range of art forms.

Although there is much feminist work that has examined the intersection of gender and neoliberalism, critical work on men and masculinities remains underdeveloped in this area. This article suggests that complexity theory is a crucial resource for a critical analysis of the ways in which masculinities contribute to the ongoing maintenance of neoliberal socio-economic systems. Critical work on neoliberalism and capitalist economics has recently been drawn to complex systems theory, as evidenced by the work of scholars such as Sylvia Walby, (...) William Connolly and Brian Massumi. Their work produces important insights into neoliberalism, but does not develop a sustained reflection on the place of men and masculinities in this domain. In order to develop a critical account of the relation of masculinity to complexity, the article draws on the work of Judith Butler and Bonnie Mann. It suggests that Butler’s theorising on precariousness contains important resources for understanding how hegemonic masculinities are positioned in relation to the complexity of neoliberal systems, as illustrated in Mann’s concept of ‘sovereign masculinity’. Finally, drawing on two different examples of the enactment of masculinities in neoliberal contexts, the article argues that hegemonic forms of masculinity can be understood as technologies for the amelioration of the complexities and insecurities generated by neoliberal markets. (shrink)

Ian C. Jarvie’s original research was on cargo cults—more specifically regarding the anthropologists who study cargo cults as themselves constituting a cargo cult. I reflect on the broader epistemological significance of this work, extending it to what I call ‘academic expressivism’, whereby contemporary identity politics is analysed as a cargo cult that relies on a superstitious attachment to sociological categories such as race, class, and gender. Special attention is given to the academic expressivist redeployment of Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory of (...) justice as a vehicle for promoting identity politics. (shrink)