Machine learning platforms have emerged as a new promissory technology that some argue will revolutionize work practices across a broad range of professions, including medical care. During the past few years, IBM has been testing its Watson for Oncology platform at several oncology departments around the world. Published reports, news stories, as well as our own empirical research show that in some cases, the levels of concordance over recommended treatment protocols between the platform and human oncologists have been quite low. (...) Other studies supported by IBM claim concordance rates as high as 96%. We use the Watson for Oncology case to examine the practice of using concordance levels between tumor boards and a machine learning decision-support system as a form of evidence. We address a challenge related to the epistemic authority between oncologists on tumor boards and the Watson Oncology platform by arguing that the use of concordance levels as a form of evidence of quality or trustworthiness is problematic. Although the platform provides links to the literature from which it draws its conclusion, it obfuscates the scoring criteria that it uses to value some studies over others. In other words, the platform “black boxes” the values that are coded into its scoring system. (shrink)

Ten years ago, one of us proposed a dynamic hierarchical model of intentions that brought together philosophical work on intentions and empirical work on motor representations and motor control (Pacherie, 2008). The model distinguished among Distal intentions, Proximal intentions, and Motor intentions operating at different levels of action control (hence the name DPM model). This model specified the representational and functional profiles of each type of intention, as well their local and global dynamics, and the ways in which they interact. (...) A core insight of the model was that action control is the result of integrated, coordinated activity across these levels of intention. Since the proposal of the model, empirical and theoretical works in philosophy and cognitive science have emerged that would seem to support and expand on this central insight. In particular, an updated understanding of the nature of sensorimotor processing and motor representations, as well as of how the different levels of intention and control interface and interact, allows for the further specification and precisification of the original DPM model. (shrink)

Drawing on John Dewey and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book employs philosophy as a conceptual resource to develop new methodological and analytical tools for conducting in situ empirical investigations. Chapter one explores the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Dewey. Chapter two exposits Deweyan ideas of embodiment, the primacy of the aesthetic encounter, and aesthetically expressive meaning underdeveloped in Wittgenstein. Chapter three introduces the method of practical epistemological analysis and a model of situated epistemic relations to investigate the learning of body (...) techniques in dinghy sailing. The concluding chapter introduces a model of situated artistic relations to investigate the learning of artistic techniques of self-expression in the Swedish sloyd classroom. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Intensified and extensive data production and data storage are characteristics of contemporary western societies. Health data sharing is increasing with the growth of Information and Communication Technology platforms devoted to the collection of personal health and genomic data. However, the sensitive and personal nature of health data poses ethical challenges when data is disclosed and shared even if for scientific research purposes. With this in mind, the Science and Values Working Group of the COST Action CHIP ME ‘Citizen's Health through (...) public-private Initiatives: Public health, Market and Ethical perspectives’ identified six core values they considered to be essential for the ethical sharing of health data using ICT platforms. We believe that using this ethical framework will promote respectful scientific practices in order to maintain individuals’ trust in research. We use these values to analyse five ICT platforms and explore how emerging data sharing platforms are reconfiguring the data sharing experience from a range of perspectives. We discuss which types of values, rights and responsibilities they entail and enshrine within their philosophy or outlook on what it means to share personal health information. Through this discussion we address issues of the design and the development process of personal health data and patient-oriented infrastructures, as well as new forms of technologically-mediated empowerment. (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

For the last 15 years, companies have extensively increased their environmental disclosure relative to their environmental strategy in response to institutional pressures. Based on a computerized content analysis of the annual reports of the 55 largest French industrial companies, we describe environmental disclosure with respect to the different strategies implemented by companies over a period of 6 years. The results show that environmental disclosure becomes more and more technical and precise for all the companies. Environmental innovations are presented as a (...) means of increasing energy efficiency and of obtaining a competitive advantage in green market products. The environmental management system implemented by proactive companies allows them to improve their environmental performance. However, the results show that the economic situation significantly influences the way environmental issues are addressed. (shrink)

We attempt to resolve some details of Barsalou's theory. (1) The mechanism that guides selection of perceptual information may be the efferent control of activity. (2) Information about a world that is not accessible to the senses can be constructed in the process of semiotic mediation. (3) Introspection may not be a kind of perception; rather, semiotically mediated information processing might be necessary for the emergence of introspection.

The target article differentiates a new, syntactic component in verbal working memory. We suggest that several more components could be differentiated to make a model of working memory complete. Next, syntax is not always separable from the subject's verbal memory capacity as measured by standard working memory tasks. Finally, interference between different processes cannot be taken as evidence for the processes sharing the same resources. Interference might be a result of active mutual inhibition.

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit presents one of the most striking reflexions on human facticity, i.e. the fact that Dasein fundamentally exists in a world letting Dasein and world be co-extensive. By quoting two central personages in theology, Pascal and Augustine, Heidegger refers to a concept of love that is constitutive for Dasein’s facticity to truth and to knowledge. By investigating the claim that love is as good as absent from Sein und Zeit, the article intends to show that the (...) scanty references to love nevertheless have a central role in Heidegger’s early work and, furthermore, why Heidegger returns to it in his later thinking. Interesting in this regard is the connection between the theological concept of love and Heidegger’s concept of ‘world’. The article places Heidegger’s Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition in the realms of his Dasein analysis focussing on facticity. Taking its methodological cues from Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida, the article shows how the concepts of possibility and impotentiality (Ohnmacht) become essential in Heidegger via his reference to love. Lastly, the article examines to what extent Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit paraphrases the old angelology letting the Dasein concept become its secularisation. (shrink)

The Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben has achieved large international recognition since his first book in the homo sacer-project, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, was published in 1995. The project’s basic aim is to try and understand the fundamental relation between man and power, politics and theology, which Agamben gives the name biopolitics. Such a politics, Agamben writes in the introduction, is the very fundamental element of Western metaphysics, “because it occupies the threshold in which the articulation (...) between the living and logos is accomplished.” With relentless stringency scholars and researchers have analysed Agamben’s perhaps most famous concept, naked life, and related it to the history of religion, philosophy of law etc. The philosopher himself never thought that his term naked life would achieve such fame, as he said at a small conference at Iuav. However, what has been given less attention, if any, is the most obvious part in that concept: nudity. This holds the key, nonetheless, to understand Agamben’s thinking, because nudity is that very threshold holding together, as well as separating, life and logos, man and animal. Perhaps this is one of the reasons, if not needs, for Agamben writing a book with the telling title: Nudità. Centre in the present article is to discuss Agamben’s concept of nudity alongside that of naked life in thematizing the term shame which is central in this regard. Furthermore, the attempt to argue in favour of a conceptual use of the metaphor-naked life-shall also be unfolded. (shrink)

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access - for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language - to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. (...) the science of language use. The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995. Also available as Online Resource: benjamins.com/online/hop/. (shrink)

This article has a twofold scope: I want to suggest that the term “philosophical archaeology” is a methodologically significant concept which is relevant when working historically with the humanities—texts primarily. As a means for this the two most interesting philosophical archaeologists will play a key role: Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Furthermore, I want to discuss why philosophical archaeology is needed when working critically with what Jan Assmann so famously has defined as cultural memory scholarship. For this purpose Carlo Ginzburg’s (...) concept of, especially, the principle of reality will be discussed lastly where also the difference—or, perhaps, the alleged difference-between law and history, proof and fact will be debated. (shrink)

Elisabeth Porter's guide to the development of feminist thought on ethics & moral agency surveys feminist debates on the nature of feminist ethics, intimate relationships, professional ethics, politics, sexual politics, abortion and reproductive choices.

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

I argue that we can reconcile two seemingly incompatible traditions for thinking about concepts. On the one hand, many cognitive scientists assume that the systematic redeployment of representational abilities suffices for having concepts. On the other hand, a long philosophical tradition maintains that language is necessary for genuinely conceptual thought. I argue that on a theoretically useful and empirically plausible concept of 'concept', it is necessary and sufficient for conceptual thought that a thinker be able to entertain many of the (...) potential thoughts produced by recombining her representational abilities apart from a direct confrontation with the states of affairs being represented. Such representational abilities support a cognitive engagement with the world that is flexible, abstract, and active. (shrink)

The purpose of the research was to study Finnish people's attitudes towards biomedical research and whether the research sponsor makes a difference to those attitudes. A survey questionnaire was sent to a random sample of 25-64 years old. Respondents had a positive attitude towards biomedical research and there were only small variations by population group. When asked whether one's own clinical blood samples could be used in scientific biomedical research, 84 per cent of the respondents would allow it. The most (...) important reasons for giving routinely collected samples to a biobank were altruistic. Attitudes were strongly dependent on the sponsor of the research. Domestic research was looked at more positively than international research. Whether research was made by a public or private actor had less impact. The results suggest that people want to be research participants to help such research of their own free will, and to choose whom they help. This has an impact on the way participants are informed, on the criteria used by ethics committees and other research regulators, and also on transparency and access to research results. (shrink)

Introduction Marina Sbisà University of Trieste 1. Pragmatics and philosophy It is well known that pragmatics – like many branches of the social and even ...

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ”framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ”complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically (...) powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force. (shrink)

After a long period of neglect, the phenomenology of action has recently regained its place in the agenda of philosophers and scientists alike. The recent explosion of interest in the topic highlights its complexity. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework allowing for a more precise characterization of the many facets of the phenomenology of agency, of how they are related and of their possible sources. The key assumption guiding this attempt is that the processes through (...) which the phenomenology of action is generated and the processes involved in the specification and control of action are strongly interconnected. I argue in favor of a three-tiered dynamic model of intention, link it to an expanded version of the internal model theory of action control and specification, and use this theoretical framework to guide an analysis of the contents, possible sources and temporal course of complementary aspects of the phenomenology of action. (shrink)

Can machines be conscious and what would be the ethical implications? This article gives an overview of current robotics approaches toward machine consciousness and considers factors that hamper an understanding of machine consciousness. After addressing the epistemological question of how we would know whether a machine is conscious and discussing potential advantages of potential future machine consciousness, it outlines the role of consciousness for ascribing moral status. As machine consciousness would most probably differ considerably from human consciousness, several complex questions (...) must be addressed, including what forms of machine consciousness would be morally relevant forms of consciousness, and what the ethical implications of morally relevant forms of machine consciousness would be. While admittedly part of this reflection is speculative in nature, it clearly underlines the need for a detailed conceptual analysis of the concept of artificial consciousness and stresses the imperative to avoid building machines with morally relevant forms of consciousness. The article ends with some suggestions for potential future regulation of machine consciousness. (shrink)

Does thought precede language, or the other way around? How does having a language affect our thoughts? Who has a language, and who can think? These questions have traditionally been addressed by philosophers, especially by rationalists concerned to identify the essential difference between humans and other animals. More recently, theorists in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology have been asking these questions in more empirically grounded ways. At its best, this confluence of philosophy and science promises to blend the (...) respective strengths of each discipline, bringing abstract theory to bear on reality in a principled and focused way. At its worst, it risks degenerating into a war of words, with each side employing key expressions in its own idiosyncratic way – or worse, contaminating empirical research with a priori dogmas inherited from outmoded philosophical worldviews. In Baboon Metaphysics (2007), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth offer an analysis of baboon cognition that promises to exemplify the very best interaction of philosophical theory and empirical research. They argue that baboons have a language of thought: a language-like representational medium, which supports the sophisticated cognitive abilities required to negotiate their complex social environment. This claim is intended to be surprising in its own right, and also to shed light on the evolution of spoken language. Because our own ancestors likely lived in a similarly complex social environment, Cheney and Seyfarth propose that the earliest humans also developed language first as a cognitive medium, and that spoken language evolved as a means to express those thoughts. There are two potential difficulties here. First, ‘Language of Thought’ (LOT) is a term of art, with much associated theoretical baggage and often comparatively little careful exposition. Thus, evaluating the claim requires getting clearer about just what LOT implies in this context.. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe that (...) Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally inclined toward one of two opposite extremes when it comes to metaphor. On the one hand, partisans of metaphor have tended to believe that metaphors do something different in kind from literal utterances; it is a ‘heresy’, they think, either to deny that what metaphors do is genuinely cognitive, or to assume that it can be translated into literal terms. On the other hand, analytic philosophers have typically denied just this: they tend to assume that if metaphors (...) express any genuine content at all, then that content can in principle be paraphrased into literal terms. They often conclude on this basis that metaphor is theoretically dispensable, and so that it poses no special challenges and affords no distinctive insights for the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

From antiquity, Galenic physicians extensively discussed the active powers of simple and compound drugs. In their views, simple drugs, that is, single ingredients, acted according to their material qualities and the properties of their substance. As for compound drugs, their efficacy resulted from the mutual interaction of their ingredients and their modes of preparation. In the late Renaissance, Galenic physicians and naturalists, such as Leonhart Fuchs and Pietro Andrea Mattioli, attempted to explain these pharmacological properties or “faculties” at the intersection (...) of medicine, botany, and natural philosophy. This chapter examines the case of the Italian physician and botanist Andrea Cesalpino. His pharmacological treatise De medicamentorum facultatibus [On the Faculties of Drugs, 1593] was particularly significant for its reception of ancient and medieval texts on drug properties, materia medica, and the role of the senses in the knowledge of bodies. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to characterize the rich interplay between automatic and cognitive control processes that we propose is the hallmark of skill, in contrast to habit, and what accounts for its flexibility. We argue that this interplay isn't entirely hierarchical and static, but rather heterarchical and dynamic. We further argue that it crucially depends on the acquisition of detailed and well-structured action representations and internal models, as well as the concomitant development of metacontrol processes that can be (...) used to shape and balance it. (shrink)