I consider recent strategies proposed by econometricians for extrapolating causal effects from experimental to target populations. I argue that these strategies fall prey to the extrapolator’s circle: they require so much knowledge about the target population that the causal effects to be extrapolated can be identified from information about the target alone. I then consider comparative process tracing as a potential remedy. Although specifically designed to evade the extrapolator’s circle, I argue that CPT is unlikely to facilitate extrapolation in typical (...) econometrics and evidence-based policy applications. To argue this, I offer a distinction between two kinds of extrapolation, attributive and predictive, the latter being prevalent in econometrics and evidence-based policy. I argue that CPT is not helpful for predictive extrapolation when using the kinds of evidence that econometricians and evidence-based policy researchers prefer. I suggest that econometricians may need to consider qualitative evidence to overcome this problem. (shrink)

In Simulation and Similarity, Michael Weisberg offers a similarity-based account of the model–world relation, which is the relation in virtue of which successful models are successful. Weisberg’s main idea is that models are similar to targets in virtue of sharing features. An important concern about Weisberg’s account is that it remains silent on what it means for models and targets to share features, and consequently on how feature-sharing contributes to models’ epistemic success. I consider three potential ways of concretizing the (...) concept of shared features: as identical, quantitatively sufficiently close, and sufficiently similar features. I argue that each of these concretizations faces significant challenges, leaving unclear how Weisberg’s account substantially contributes to elucidating the relation in virtue of which successful models are successful. Against this background, I outline a pluralistic revision and argue that this revision may not only help Weisberg's account evade several of the problems that I raise, but also offers a novel perspective on the model–world relation more generally. 1Introduction 2Weisberg’s Feature-Sharing Account 3What Is a Shared Feature? 3.1Identity 3.2Sufficient closeness 3.3Sufficient similarity 4Turning Weisberg’s Account ‘Upside Down’ 5Conclusion. (shrink)

This paper investigates how intuitions about scientific discovery using artificial intelligence can be used to improve our understanding of scientific discovery more generally. Traditional accounts of discovery have been agent-centred: they place emphasis on identifying a specific agent who is responsible for conducting all, or at least the important part, of a discovery process. We argue that these accounts experience difficulties capturing scientific discovery involving AI and that similar issues arise for human discovery. We propose an alternative, collective-centred view as (...) superior for understanding discovery, with and without AI. This view maintains that discovery is performed by a collective of agents and entities, each making contributions that differ in significance and character, and that attributing credit for discovery depends on various finer-grained properties of the contributions made. Detailing its conceptual resources, we argue that this view is considerably more compelling than its agent-centred alternative. Considering and responding to several theoretical and practical challenges, we point to concrete avenues for further developing the view we propose. (shrink)

Public participation in scientific research has gained prominence in many scientific fields, but the theory of participatory research is still limited. In this paper, we suggest that the divergence of values and goals between academic researchers and public participants in research is key to analyzing the different forms this research takes. We examine two existing characterizations of participatory research: one in terms of public participants' role in the research, the other in terms of the virtues of the research. In our (...) view, each of these captures an important feature of participatory research but is, on its own, limited in what features it takes into account. We introduce an expanded conception of norms of collaboration that extends to both academic researchers and public participants. We suggest that satisfying these norms requires consideration of the two groups' possibly divergent values and goals, and that a broad characterization of participatory research that starts from participants' values and goals can motivate both public participants’ role in the research and the virtues of the research. The resulting framework clarifies the similarities and differences among participatory projects and can help guide the responsible design of such projects. (shrink)

The central argument of this book is that the interrelated ideas of the educated person and a liberal education are in need of serious rethinking. The book contributes to this rethinking through an analysis of influential historical and contemporary treatments of liberal education, as well as scholarship in feminist theory and critical pedagogy. The book concludes by presenting a new ideal of the educated person and a reconceptualization of liberal education.

The difference between cause and effect seems obvious and crucial in ordinary life, yet missing from modern physics. Almost a century ago, Bertrand Russell called the law of causality 'a relic of a bygone age'. In this important collection 13 leading scholars revisit Russell's revolutionary conclusion, discussing one of the most significant and puzzling issues in contemporary thought.

Acceding to the demand that public policy should be based on “the best available evidence” can come at significant moral cost. Important policy questions cannot be addressed using “the best available evidence” as defined by the evidence-based policy paradigm; the paradigm can change the meaning of questions so that they can be addressed using the preferred kind of evidence; and important evidence that does not meet the standard defined by the paradigm can get ignored. We illustrate these problems in three (...) contexts of evidence-based policy. (shrink)

Proponents of evidence-based policy (EBP) call for public policy to be informed by high-quality evidence from randomized controlled trials. This methodological preference aims to promote several epistemic values, e.g. rigor, unbiasedness, precision, and the ability to obtain causal conclusions. I argue that there is a trade-off between these epistemic values and several non-epistemic, moral and political values. This is because the evidence afforded by preferred EBP methods is differentially useful for pursuing different moral and political values. I expand on how (...) this challenges ideals of value-freedom and -neutrality in EBP, and offer suggestions for how EBP methodology might be revised. (shrink)

This introduction to morality proposes that morality is looked at in five different ways: morality as law, morality as inner conviction, morality as personal growth, morality as love and morality as social transformation. No one of these ways is sufficient in itself to deal with the complex moral questions of today, but each is enriched by the others.

The prescription of practice guidelines for consent in neonatal care that are appropriate for all interventions faces substantial problems. Current practice varies widely. Consent in neonatal care is compromised by postnatal constraints on information sharing and decision-making. Empirical research shows marked individual and cultural variation in the degree to which parents want to contribute to decision-making on behalf of their infants. Conflict between the parents’ wishes and the infant’s best interests could arise if consent for a recommended intervention were refused, (...) and parental refusal of consent may have to be overridden. Consent to an appropriate package of care (such as special, intensive or palliative care) may be morally preferable to a universal requirement to seek consent for all individual interventions entailed by that package. (shrink)

Scientific models can be performative: they can causally affect the phenomena they are intended to represent. The existing literature offers two responses. The appraisal view emphasizes that performativity can sometimes be a good-making model attribute, e.g., when predictions steer the public’s behavior in desirable ways. The mitigation view seeks to endogenize agents’ behavioral response to model-issued forecasts to get rid of performativity instead. This paper argues that neither approach is fully compelling: the appraisal view encounters severe concerns about moral values (...) illegitimately encroaching on how modelers construct and use models, while the mitigation view fails to acknowledge that endogenization is itself a choice that involves substantive value-judgments relating to the desirability of certain social outcomes. (shrink)

Public policymakers and institutional decision-makers routinely face questions about whether interventions “work”: does universal basic income improve people’s welfare and stimulate entrepreneurial activity? Do gated alleyways reduce burglaries or merely shift the crime burden to neighbouring communities? What is the most cost-effective way to improve students’ reading abilities? These are empirical questions that seem best answered by looking at the world, rather than trusting speculations about what will be effective. Evidence-based policy (EBP) is a movement that concretizes this intuition. It (...) maintains that policy should be based on evidence of “what works.” Not any evidence will do, however. Following on the heels of its intellectual progenitor, evidence-based medicine (EBM), EBP insists on the use of high-quality evidence produced in accordance with rigorous methodological standards. Though intuitively compelling, EBP has attracted significant criticism from methodologists, political scientists, and philosophers. This chapter provides a critical overview of EBP through a philosophical lens, reviewing and discussing some of the most pressing challenges that EBP faces and outlining some proposals for improving it. I first provide a brief overview of EBP and distinguish a broader and narrower understanding of it. I then review existing lines of criticism of EBP, two of which are considered in detail. The first elaborates how EBP struggles with extrapolation, that is, the use of evidence from study populations to make inferences about the effects of policies on novel target populations. The second maintains that EBP’s methodological tenets are deeply entwined with moral and political values, which can threaten EBP’s promise to promote objectivity in policymaking. Finally, I make some proposals for how EBP could be improved going forward. (shrink)

The recent wave of generative AI (GAI) systems like Stable Diffusion that can produce images from human prompts raises controversial issues about creatorship, originality, creativity and copyright. This paper focuses on creatorship: who creates and should be credited with the outputs made with the help of GAI? Existing views on creatorship are mixed: some insist that GAI systems are mere tools, and human prompters are creators proper; others are more open to acknowledging more significant roles for GAI, but most conceive (...) of creatorship in an all-or-nothing fashion. We develop a novel view, called CCC (collective-centered creation), that improves on these existing positions. On CCC, GAI outputs are created by collectives in the first instance. Claims to creatorship come in degrees and depend on the nature and significance of individual contributions made by the various agents and entities involved, including users, GAI systems, developers, producers of training data and others. Importantly, CCC maintains that GAI systems can sometimes be part of a co-creating collective. We detail how CCC can advance existing debates and resolve controversies around creatorship involving GAI. (shrink)

Explores a provocative alternative vision of education based on an analysis of the feminist educational thought of Jane Roland Martin. Emergent thinking on gender, knowledge, and caring is highlighted, with particular attention to gender-sensitive education and cultural wealth and the implications they hold for the school curriculum.

This paper argues that an important type of experiment-target inference, extrapolating causal effects, requires models to be successful. Focusing on extrapolation in Evidence-Based Policy, it is ar...

The continental philosophy of non-classical logics is a relatively new field that seeks to determine whether any aspects of certain continental philosophers’ thinking can be characterized in terms of non-classical logics. Some of the main figures that have been examined so far are Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and François Laruelle. Although many of these studies are grounded in the writings of Graham Priest, who wrote some of the seminal texts in the field, Jc Beall’s work also features prominently (...) in a number of cases. After surveying this field and highlighting Beall’s influence within it, I claim that it can be substantially expanded by making further uses of Beall’s writings, especially ones that introduce non-classical logics in ways that are especially suitable for this particular field of study and also that discuss such topics as negation, subclassical logics, logical pluralism, and glutty futures. (shrink)

Two kinds of philosophical questions are raised by the current public debate about climate change; epistemic questions (Whom should I believe? Is climate science a genuine science?), and ethical questions (Who should bear the burden? Must I sacrifice if others do not?). Although the former have been central to this debate, professional philosophers have dealt almost exclusively with the latter. This book is the first to address both the epistemic and ethical questions raised by the climate change debate and examine (...) the relationship between them. (shrink)

Travel provides countless opportunities for wonder. The breadth of human experience enabled by traversing new territory includes curiosity, excitement, and surprise. However, achieving this breadth may well be better left unfulfilled. Gulliver’s interactions with the King of Brobdingnag in Book II of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) raise interesting questions regarding travel and its effects on the traveller. This essay argues that Gulliver’s Travels draws upon Locke’s insights into travel as an endeavour with the potential to be didactic, ultimately presenting a case (...) against the universal benefit of embarking on a voyage. Swift’s text offers little hope for the existence of the type of traveller who would be improved rather than corrupted by the experience, which suggests that wonders of travel ought to be avoided. This generates a counter-Enlightenment riposte to liberal assumptions concerning the possibility and likelihood of individual edification through pursuing the wonders of travel. (shrink)

Travel provides countless opportunities for wonder. The breadth of human experience enabled by traversing new territory includes curiosity, excitement, and surprise. However, achieving this breadth may well be better left unfulfilled. Gulliver’s interactions with the King of Brobdingnag in Book II of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) raise interesting questions regarding travel and its effects on the traveller. This essay argues that Gulliver’s Travels draws upon Locke’s insights into travel as an endeavour with the potential to be didactic, ultimately presenting a case (...) against the universal benefit of embarking on a voyage. Swift’s text offers little hope for the existence of the type of traveller who would be improved rather than corrupted by the experience, which suggests that wonders of travel ought to be avoided. This generates a counter-Enlightenment riposte to liberal assumptions concerning the possibility and likelihood of individual edification through pursuing the wonders of travel. (shrink)

The language theory of Mikhail Bakhtin does not fall neatly under any single rubric - 'dialogism,' 'marxism,' 'prosaics,' 'authorship' - because the philosophic foundation of his writing rests ambivalently between phenomenology and Marxism. The theoretical tension of these positions creates philosophical impasses in Bakhtin's work, which have been neglected or ignored partly because these impasses are themselves mirrored by the problems of antifoundationalist and materialist tendencies in literary scholarship. In Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism Michael Bernard-Donals examines various incarnations (...) of phenomenological and materialist theory - including the work of Jauss, Fish, Rorty, Althusser, and Pecheux - and places them beside Bakhtin's work, providing a contextualised study of Bakhtin, a critique of the problems of contemporary critics, and an original contribution to literary theory. (shrink)

Jean-Pierre Dupuy argues that our failure to prevent the looming climate catastrophe results from a faulty metaphysics of time: because we believe the present can proceed down one of the many branches that extend into the future, some of which bypass the catastrophe, we do not think it is absolutely urgent to take drastic action now. His solution to this problem of demotivation is “enlightened doomsaying” in “projected time”, which means that we affirm the coming catastrophe as something real in (...) the future rather than being a mere possibility; thus, we regard it seriously enough that we are motivated to take the needed actions to prevent it. One potential obstacle to this proposal is that it requires the forming of consensus and coordination with the powerful players who benefit from our current path and whose apparently near-total grip on this catastrophic future may itself discourage action. We then consider an alternative model based on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the present–future relation. Although it has the branching structure that Dupuy is wary of, it may not suffer from the same problem of demotivation on account of the way it conceives the complex structure of the present event. For this reason, the Deleuzian model may be more suited to motivating action in a world where the future must be fought for rather than unanimously agreed upon. (shrink)

To compare Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s phenomenal bodies, I first examine how for Merleau-Ponty phenomena appear on the basis of three levels of integration: 1) between the parts of the world, 2) between the parts of the body, and 3) between the body and its world. I contest that Deleuze’s attacks on phenomenology can be seen as constructive critiques rather than as being expressions of an anti-phenomenological position. By building from Deleuze’s definition of the phenomenon and from his more phenomenologically relevant (...) writings, we find that phenomena for him are given to the body under exactly the opposite conditions as for Merleau-Ponty, namely that 1) the world’s differences 2) appear to a disordered body that 3) comes into shocking affective contact with its surroundings. I argue that a Deleuzian theory of bodily-given phenomena is better suited than Merleau-Ponty’s model in the task of accounting for the intensity of phenomenal appearings. (shrink)

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote two 'logic' books: Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and The Logic of Sense. However, in neither of these books nor in any other works does Deleuze articulate in a formal way the features of the logic he employs. He certainly does not use classical logic. And the best options for the non-classical logic that he may be implementing are: fuzzy, intuitionist, and many-valued. These are applicable to his concepts of heterogeneous composition and becoming, affirmative (...) synthetic disjunction, and powers of the false. In The Logic of Gilles Deleuze. Volume 1: Basic Principles, Corry Shores examines the applicability of three non-classical logics to Deleuze's philosophy, by building from the philosophical and logical writings of Graham Priest, the world's leading proponent of dialetheism. Through so doing, Shores demonstrates how Deleuze's logic is best understood as a dialetheic, paraconsistent, many-valued logic. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Pandemics and plagues function rhetorically, by doing violence to the structures of discourse, sociality, hospitality, and mutual engagement that characterize ethical human interaction. They infect us, as rhetorical subjects, and reorient our capacity for engagement. The coronavirus's “novelty” renders it uncertain as to how long it will last or who will be infected next; the near-uniform response to it has been a forced distance of ourselves from others and a displacement from our itineraries and our locations. Through COVID-19 we (...) are learning that pandemic does violence to our sense of place, to how we think of respite, and has highlighted our sense of vulnerability in the midst of others. (shrink)

For the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, it is the presence of the other that obliges the human to speak. What makes the subject a subject is not only the other’s presence but the compulsion to speak, and that compulsion marks the subject as displaced, called into question. The other—the neighbor, the stranger—makes us responsible and marks the subject as always necessarily in relation, a relation that troubles the subject because while we are compelled to respond, that response inevitably fails to contain, (...) to name, that relation. In Levinas’s formulation, the altogether other—the divine—presents us with the paradigmatic case in which the subject is compelled or called by that which exceeds our capacity to understand .. (shrink)

Extrapolating causal effects from experiments to novel populations is a common practice in evidence-based-policy, development economics and other social science areas. Drawing on experimental evidence of policy effectiveness, analysts aim to predict the effects of policies in new populations, which might differ importantly from experimental populations. Existing approaches made progress in articulating the sorts of similarities one needs to assume to enable such inferences. It is also recognized, however, that many of these assumptions will remain surrounded by significant uncertainty in (...) practice. Unfortunately, the existing literature says little on how analysts may articulate and manage these uncertainties. This paper aims to make progress on these issues. First, it considers several existing ideas that bear on issues of uncertainty, elaborates the challenges they face, and extracts some useful rationales. Second, it outlines a novel approach, called the support graph approach, that builds on these rationales and allows analysts to articulate and manage uncertainty in extrapolation in a systematic and unified way. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Academic freedom is typically understood as a means of protecting faculty rights against the violence—physical or intellectual—of the state or of the institution’s administration. This article argues that academic freedom may be seen as a form of violence, insofar as it is potentially threatening to the methodological and institutional stasis of colleges and universities.

Extrapolating causal effects is becoming an increasingly important kind of inference in Evidence-Based Policy, development economics, and microeconometrics more generally. While several strategies have been proposed to aid with extrapolation, the existing methodological literature has left our understanding of what extrapolation consists of and what constitutes successful extrapolation underdeveloped. This paper addresses this lack in understanding by offering a novel account of successful extrapolation. Building on existing contributions pertaining to the challenges involved in extrapolation, this more nuanced and comprehensive account (...) seeks to provide tools that facilitate the scrutiny of specific extrapolative inferences and general strategies for extrapolation. Offering such resources is important especially in view of the increasing amounts of real-world decision-making in policy, development, and beyond that involve extrapolation. (shrink)