Scientists confronted with multiple explanatory hypotheses as a result of their abductive inferences, generally want to reason further on the different hypotheses one by one. This paper presents a modal adaptive logic MLA s that enables us to model abduction in such a way that the different explanatory hypotheses can be derived individually. This modelling is illustrated with a case study on the different hypotheses on the origin of the Moon.

This paper is the result of the EMERGING ICT FOR CITIZEN VEILLANCE-workshop organized by the JRC, Ispra, Italy, March 2014. The aim of this paper is to explore how the subject participates in surveillance situations with a particular focus on how users experience everyday tracking technologies and practices. Its theoretical points of departure stem from Surveillance Studies in general and notions of participatory surveillance and empowering exhibitionism :199–215, 2004) in particular. We apply these theoretical notions on smartphones and its users (...) to investigate the combination of participation and surveillance. Empirically, the paper uses interviews held with urban nightlife visitors to uncover practices of smartphone use. This qualitative and explorative study contributes to the concept of participatory surveillance by discussing to what extent smartphone-users’ actions and motivations can be seen as forms of surveillance and how that influences these actors in a public space. We finish by setting out directions for studying mobile technologies of the self. (shrink)

In the literature on doxastic attitudes, the notion ‘belief’ is used in both a coarse-grained and a fine-grained manner. While the coarse-grained notion of ‘belief,’ as the doxastic attitude that expresses any form of assent to its content, is a useful technical concept, the fine-grained notion, which tries to capture the folk notion of ‘belief’ in contrast with other doxastic concepts such as ‘acceptance’ or ‘degrees of confidence,’ is utterly ambiguous. In order to dispel this ambiguity, I introduce first a (...) new framework for describing doxastic attitudes that does not rely on a specific fine-grained primitive notion of ‘belief.’ This framework distinguishes two different doxastic attitudes, i.e. the theoretical and the practical, and explains how various doxastic concepts such as ‘accepting,’ ‘having a degree of confidence’ and the folk notion of ‘belief’ all describe a particular interpretation of one or both of the distinguished doxastic attitudes. Next, by focusing on ongoing debates over the difference between ‘acceptance’ and ‘belief’ on the one hand and between ‘degrees of confidence’ and ‘(plain) belief’ on the other, I argue that much precision can be gained in philosophical analysis by taking a reductionist stance concerning any specific fine-grained and primitive notion of ‘belief.’. (shrink)

_Abduction of generalizations_ is the process in which explanatory hypotheses are formed for an observed, yet puzzling generalization such as ``pineapples taste sweet" or ``rainbows appear when the sun breaks through the rain". This phenomenon has received little attention in formal logic and philosophy of science. The current paper remedies this lacuna by first giving an overview of some general characteristics of this process, elaborating on its ubiquity in scientific and daily life reasoning. Second, the adaptive logic $\LAG$ is presented (...) to explicate this process formally. (shrink)

A partir de los Analectas, el texto más próximo al pensamiento originario de Confucio, y empleando los otros tres libros del canon clásico del confucianismo, el presente trabajo buscar analizar cuál es la importancia que los rituales, como fórmula paradigmática de las pautas sociales, tienen en la filosofía de Confucio, en relación con su sistema ético, político y cosmológico. Después, establece una semblanza de la estructura que tenían los rituales en la China confuciana. Finalmente, se contrapone la relación de la (...) Escuela confuciana con los rituales con la secularización de la democracia actual. (shrink)

Joint attention is an early-emerging and uniquely human capacity that lies at the foundation of many other capacities of humans, such as language and the understanding of other minds. In this article, I summarize what developmentalists and philosophers have come to find out about joint attention, and I end by stating that two problems or questions of joint attention require additional research: 1) the relation between joint attention and the skills for dyadic sharing or affect exchange in young infants, and (...) 2) the evolution of joint attention. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. As scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance, this literature review can offer much-needed common ground for the debate. We structure surveillance theory in three roughly chronological/thematic phases. The first two conceptualise surveillance through comprehensive theoretical frameworks which are elaborated in the third phase. The first phase, featuring Bentham and Foucault, offers architectural (...) theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through disciplining of the watched subjects. The second phase offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. The third phase of scholarship refines, combines or extends the main conceptual frameworks developed earlier. Surveillance theory branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance and resistance. With the datafication of society, surveillance combines the physical with the digital, government with corporate surveillance and top-down with self-surveillance. (shrink)

Current debates on collective intentionality focus on the cognitive capacities, attitudes, and mental states that enable individuals to take part in joint actions. It is typically assumed that collective intentionality is a capacity which is added to other, pre-existing, capacities of an individual and is exercised in cooperative activities like carrying a table or painting a house together. We call this the additive account because it portrays collective intentionality as a capacity that an individual possesses in addition to her capacity (...) for individual intentionality. We offer an alternative view according to which the primary entity to which collective intentionality has to be ascribed is not the human individual, but a “form of life.” As a feature of a form of life, collective intentionality is something more than the specific capacity exercised by an individual when she cooperates with others. Collective intentionality transforms all the capacities of the bearers of this specific form of life. We thus call our proposal the transformative account of collective intentionality. (shrink)

In this article, we postulate that belief understanding unfolds in two steps over ontogenetic time. We propose that belief understanding begins in interactive scenarios in which infants and toddlers respond directly and second-personally to the actions of a misinformed agent. This early understanding of beliefs is practical and grounded in the capacity for perspective-taking. Practical belief understanding guarantees effective interaction and communication with others who are acting on false assumptions. In a second step, children, at preschool age, acquire the capacity (...) to reflect on and arrive at third-personal judgments about a misinformed agent’s perspective. This capacity is theoretical and grounded in the ability to “confront” perspectives. It allows children to understand that beliefs can misrepresent the state of the world and to predict what (past, future, or hypothetical) actions follow from these beliefs. We conclude with ideas on how practical perspective-taking develops into theoretical perspective-confronting in early ontogeny. (shrink)

In this article, we critique the ways in which the people involved in the development and application of AI systems often visualize and talk about AI systems. Often, they visualize such systems as shiny humanoid robots or as free-floating electronic brains. Such images convey misleading messages; as if AI works independently of people and can reason in ways superior to people. Instead, we propose to visualize AI systems as parts of larger, sociotechnical systems. Here, we can learn, for example, from (...) cybernetics. Similarly, we propose that the people involved in the design and deployment of an algorithm would need to extend their conversations beyond the four boxes of the _Error Matrix_, for example, to critically discuss _false positives_ and _false negatives_. We present two thought experiments, with one practical example in each. We propose to understand, visualize, and talk about AI systems in relation to a larger, complex reality; this is the requirement of _requisite variety_. We also propose to enable people from diverse disciplines to collaborate around _boundary objects_, for example: a drawing of an AI system in its sociotechnical context; or an ‘extended’ Error Matrix. Such interventions can promote meaningful human control, transparency, and fairness in the design and deployment of AI systems. (shrink)

This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these (...) gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjectivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, whereas Heyes accuses other theories of being “mindblind,” we find her theory ironically other-blind and autistic in character. (shrink)

Nudge is a popular public policy tool that harnesses well-known biases in human judgement to subtly guide people’s decisions, often to improve their choices or to achieve some socially desirable outcome. Thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) methods new possibilities emerge of how and when our decisions can be nudged. On the one hand, algorithmically personalized nudges have the potential to vastly improve human daily lives. On the other hand, blindly outsourcing the development and implementation of nudges to (...) “black box” AI systems means that the ultimate reasons for why such nudges work, that is, the underlying human cognitive processes that they harness, will often be unknown. In this paper, we unpack this concern by considering a series of examples and case studies that demonstrate how AI systems can learn to harness biases in human judgment to reach a specified goal. Drawing on an analogy in a philosophical debate concerning the methodology of economics, we call for the need of an interdisciplinary oversight of AI systems that are tasked and deployed to nudge human behaviours. (shrink)

Problema: tradicionalmente se ha excluido de la esfera de consideración moral tanto al ambiente como a otros animales, aun cuando una relación positiva con ellos reporta beneficios para la salud de unas y otras criaturas y promueve el desarrollo de empatía y la emisión de conductas prosociales (Ngai, Yu, Chau, Lee y Wong, 2021). De hecho, en las últimas décadas se han observado casos de zoonosis, uso inadecuado de recursos, deterioro del ambiente y un aumento de casos registrados de abuso (...) animal. El abuso animal, fenómeno complejo y multideterminado, frecuentemente funciona como precursor o indicador de otras conductas calificadas como “antisociales”, violentas y no violentas. Respecto del rol que juega la empatía en la emisión o inhibición de conductas agresivas y de cuán generalizable es la empatía interespecie, existe evidencia contradictoria y se resaltan aquí tres fenómenos de interés: erosión empática, desensibilización progresiva a la violencia y fatiga por compasión. Objetivo: determinar si los niveles de empatía, la disposición a comportarse de manera abusiva contra otros animales y la conducta efectiva de abuso animal se relacionan con el contexto de formación preprofesional, el género autopercibido y la tenencia actual y/o previa de animales de compañía en estudiantes universitarios que cursan el tramo final de la Licenciatura en Psicología. Metodología: diseño ex post facto retrospectivo de grupo único (N = 241). Se aplicó un cuestionario autoadministrado que incluyó el Interpersonal Reactivity Index, la Animal Empathy Scale, la Animal Abuse Proclivity Scale y la cantidad y frecuencia de conductas efectivas de abuso animal. Contribución: se evidencia sobre el aporte del género autopercibido a la relación entre diversas medidas de empatía y el abuso hacia otros animales y se refuerza la tesis de la no generalizabilidad de la empatía interespecie. (shrink)

Two paradigms have guided emotion research over the past decades. The dual-system view embraces the long-held Western belief, espoused most prominently by decision-making and social cognition researchers, that emotion and reason are often at odds. The integrative view, which asserts that emotion and cognition work synergistically, has been less explored experimentally. However, the integrative view (a) may help explain several findings that are not easily accounted for by the dual-system approach, and (b) is better supported by a growing body of (...) evidence from human neuroanatomy that has often been overlooked by experimental neuroscience. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the ontogenetic development of an understanding of perception and of different subjects’ perspectives. We discuss the importance of alternating and explicating the different perspectives involved in joint object reference in hopes to get a better grip on what is actually meant by the metaphor of “putting oneself in someone else’s mental shoes” and on how such an ability might be acquired. Hegel’s (1820/2009, §260)principle of subjectivity states that no one can ever step outside of (...) her subjective perspective. Thinking about another’s thoughts or perspectives is not first of all a psychological process of getting into or reading someone else’s mind. Rather, it is the internalization of a possible symbolic action qua form, which, like speech, has commonly intelligible content (Hegel 1820/2009, §§110, 111). Our investigations show that an understanding of other persons and their subjective access to the world has its origin in experiences of joint attention and joint action. By jointly acting with others, even infants can acquire practical knowledge of others’ relations to objects. Only much later do children come to understand others’ thoughts that are not actualized in action. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Westworld functions as a role‐play experience that continually entices its guests with suggested but unrealized layers of meaning and significance in its immersive western landscape. Where traditional role‐play experiences deliver meaning through player and Game Master group interaction, Westworld provides its guests with violent escapism, sexual fantasy, and nostalgic indulgence. Within the series, the Westworld park presents itself as a combination of two aspects of tabletop role‐playing game: sandbox format and Live Action Role‐play (LARP). Within the (...) role‐play experience, the cultivation of motivation on the part of the Game Master entices players to undertake or follow particular narrative threads. Gameplay was designed to cultivate certain personality traits and instincts. Herein the game's rules, style and structures “influence a user's behavior without forcing the change” ‐ essentially enacting education through restriction. In the case of role‐play games, these restrictions are less over by the narrative nature of the game. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhen it comes to explaining life and living organisms, it is as insufficient to see in Descartes a proponent of radical mechanicism and in Kant a proponent of radical finalism, as it is to see in Bergson nothing other than an opponent of mechanicism. In fact in Creative Evolution Bergson “dreams” of a “mechanism of transformation” that should consist of a reform of mechanicism, the conditions of possibility of which are based not only on the progress of chemistry, but first (...) of all on the progress of mathematics, and more precisely of infinitesimal calculus, the only method able to objectively grasp movement. (shrink)

Part of the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies is the premise that the children born from in vitro fertilization are no different from their counterparts conceived spontaneously. However, interest in peri-conception health and new epigenetic understandings of biological plasticity has led to some questioning the presumed irrelevance of conception in vitro, and when doing so, describing IVF children as “apparently healthy.” Taking “apparently” and “healthy” seriously, this article explores how modes of attention—ways of naming and framing embryo potentiality—shape understandings of (...) health and normality. I contend that understanding the politics of potentiality, and how they may emerge in a postgenomic age, requires an unpacking of various modes of attention and framing. Ethnographic findings from South Africa’s fertility clinics and emerging literature on epigenetic variation in IVF conception demonstrate how, under a genetic mode of attention, IVF clinics views “abnormality” as fated, unviable, and discardable. Exploring the possibility of answering the postgenomic questions to IVF reveals structural challenges to knowing long-term health implications. Incipient attempts within the fertility clinic at managing these questions shows various strategic techniques, such as leveraging epigenetics to marketable ends and shifts to individual responsibility. (shrink)

This article argues that there is no such phenomenon as a Fourth Industrial Revolution. It derives a framework for the analysis of any industrial revolution from a careful historical account of the archetypal First Industrial Revolution. The suggested criteria for any socioeconomic transformation to be considered an industrial revolution are that it must encompass a technological revolution; a transformation of the labour process; a fundamental change in workplace relations; new forms of community and social relationships; and global socio-economic transformations. These (...) transformations indeed characterise the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions. The aggregate of technical innovations in the latter is carefully examined, because this is a crucial part of determining whether we can meaningfully claim that a Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway. The article demonstrates that we cannot. (shrink)

This study examined 4-year-olds’ problem-solving under different social conditions. Children had to use water in order to extract a buoyant object from a narrow tube. When faced with the problem ‘cold’ without cues, nearly all children were unsuccessful. But when a solution-suggesting video was pedagogically delivered prior to the task, most children succeeded. Showing children the same video in a non-pedagogical manner did not lift their performance above baseline and was less effective than framing it pedagogically. The findings support ideas (...) central to natural pedagogy, 148–153, 2009). They also challenge the Cultural Intelligence hypothesis, according to which only humans’ social, but not their physical, cognition differs qualitatively from that of great apes. A more radical, transformative variant of the Cultural Intelligence hypothesis is suggested according to which humans’ physical cognition is shaped by their social nature and must therefore be recognized as equally distinctive as their social cognition. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that exploring institutional racism also needs to examine interactions and communications between patients and providers. Exchange between bioethicists, social scientists, and life scientists should emphasize the biological effects—made evident through health disparities—of racism. I discuss this through examples of patient–provider communication in fertility clinics in South Africa and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to emphasize the issue of mistrust between patients and medical institutions. Health disparities and medical mistrust are interrelated problems of racism in healthcare provision.

The will is one of the three pillars of the trilogy of mind that has pervaded Western thought for millennia, the other two being affectivity and cognition (Hilgard 1980). In the past century, the concept of will was imperceptibly replaced by the cognitive-oriented behavioral qualifiers “voluntary,” “goal-directed,” “purposive,” and “executive” (Tranel et al. 1994), and has lost much of its heuristic merits, which are related to the notion of “human autonomy” (Lhermitte 1986). We view catatonia as the clinical expression of (...) impairment of the brain mechanisms that promote human will. Catatonia is to the brain systems engaged in will, as coma is to the reticular ascending systems that promote sleep and wakefulness (Plum 1991). (shrink)