The Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) literature tends to focus on bias as a problem that requires ex post solutions (e.g. fairness metrics), rather than addressing the underlying social and technical conditions that (re)produce it. In this article, we propose a complementary strategy that uses genealogy as a constructive, epistemic critique to explain algorithmic bias in terms of the conditions that enable it. We focus on XAI feature attributions (Shapley values) and counterfactual approaches as potential tools to gauge these conditions (...) and offer two main contributions. One is constructive: we develop a theoretical framework to classify these approaches according to their relevance for bias as evidence of social disparities. We draw on Pearl’s ladder of causation (Causality: models, reasoning, and inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, Causality, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511803161) to order these XAI approaches concerning their ability to answer fairness-relevant questions and identify fairness-relevant solutions. The other contribution is critical: we evaluate these approaches in terms of their assumptions about the role of protected characteristics in discriminatory outcomes. We achieve this by building on Kohler-Hausmann’s (Northwest Univ Law Rev 113(5):1163–1227, 2019) constructivist theory of discrimination. We derive three recommendations for XAI practitioners to develop and AI policymakers to regulate tools that address algorithmic bias in its conditions and hence mitigate its future occurrence. (shrink)

I argue that legal punishment is morally wrong because it’s too morally risky. I first briefly explain how my argument differs from similar ones in the philosophical literature on legal punishment. Then I explain why legal punishment is morally risky, argue that it’s too morally risky, and discuss objections. In a nutshell, my argument goes as follows. Legal punishment is wrong because we can never sufficiently reduce the risk of doing wrong when we legally punish people. We can never sufficiently (...) reduce this risk because wrongful punishment is much worse than wrongful non-punishment and because punishment’s permissibility depends on the answers to a variety of difficult philosophical questions about which we’re fallible. (shrink)

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. My reading of the situation is that our inability to come up with an intelligible conception of the relation between mind and body is a sign of the inadequacy of our present concepts, and that some development is needed. Mind itself is a spatiotemporal pattern that molds the metastable dynamic patterns of the brain.

Ritual consciousness is an altered state of consciousness that transpires beyond the boundaries of the known and gives rise to a duration referred to as time out of time. This extraordinary duration encompasses three interrelated factors: digital as opposed to analogue conduct of time, tempo and communitas. Under specific formal conditions, these factors may emerge in the context of networked rituals and outside their traditional and earthbound religious or spiritual settings. In this article, the three factors are analysed in relation (...) to the author’s networked rites on the Waterwheel platform. The rites are designed to explore ritual consciousness and produce prototype morphic fields of compassion, which are aimed at counteracting the prevalent narrative of violence. There is an emphasis on communitas, a liminal and nonhierarchical communal state of oneness that could generate compassion. Based on researches in anthropology, biogenetic structuralism, cognitive neuroscience and morphic resonance, communitas is metaphorically envisioned as the communion of non-local brains within a networked mind and morphic field. The article postulates that the virtual and organic hybridity of the rites involve the participants’ body, brain and fields of the mind in the explorations of ritual consciousness. (shrink)

What is the significance of the Father in psychoanalysis today? This book constructs a much needed framework to allow psychoanalysts to consider the difficulties of a generation without a solid anchor in the Father. _The Dead Father: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry_ provides a necessary addition to decades of work on the role of the mother in development. The editors bring together world renowned scholars to discuss current observations in their fields, in terms of the Father’s changing but essential functions, both in (...) the lives of the individual and collective. Divided into four parts, chapters focus on: The Lost Father The Father Embodied The Father in Theory Father Culture. Exploring the role of the father in individual psychology, everyday interpersonal and social experience and cultural phenomena writ large, this book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, as well as psychologists, social workers and scholars in the humanities. (shrink)

How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words such as know harder for learners to acquire than words such as dog or jump? We suggest that the chief limiting factor in acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. This opening premise of our position, while controversial, is shared with some prior approaches. The present discussion moves forward (...) from there to a detailed proposal for how the mapping problem for the lexicon is solved, as well as a presentation of experimental findings that support this account. We describe an overlapping series of steps through which novices move in representing the lexical forms and phrase structures of the exposure language, a probabilistic multiple-cue learning process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The machinery is set in motion by word-to-world pairing, a procedure available to novices from the.. (shrink)

How do we talk about events we perceive? And how tight is the connection between linguistic and non-linguistic representations of events? To address these questions, we experimentally compared motion descriptions produced by children and adults in two typologically distinct languages, Greek and English. Our findings confirm a well-known asymmetry between the two languages, such that English speakers are overall more likely to include manner of motion information than Greek speakers. However, mention of manner of motion in Greek speakers' descriptions increases (...) significantly when manner is not inferable; by contrast, inferability of manner has no measurable effect on motion descriptions in English, where manner is already preferentially encoded. These results show that speakers actively monitor aspects of event structure, which do not find their way into linguistic descriptions. We conclude that, in regard to the differential encoding of path and manner, which has sometimes been offered as a prime example of the effects of language encoding on non-linguistic thought, surface linguistic encoding neither faithfully represents nor strongly constrains our mental representation of events. (shrink)

Responding to calls for more substantive studies into ethical and responsible lobbying, we analyze data collected over a 5-year period in Brussels to explore how individual lobbyists understand the ethical dimensions of their work. Mobilizing insights from the sociology of the professions, we expose an emerging lobbying professionalism and unpack practitioners’ understandings of what being a professional lobbyist entails, focusing in particular on their espoused values of transparency and honesty. While expectations to lobby more transparently and honestly stem from political (...) institutions, we find individual lobbyists—acting as conduits—attempt to disseminate these expectations by setting limits that incite their clients to embrace what policymakers consider professional lobbying practice. Our study contributes to corporate political activity (CPA) scholarship by providing a professions-based understanding of ethical and responsible approaches to lobbying. We provide new insights into contextual and individual-level factors behind the emergence of such approaches, and elucidate implications of lobbying professionalism for business and European Union (EU) governance. (shrink)

Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused by (...) social norms in a relevant sense. These cases draw attention to the normative aspects of the mechanisms of forgetting. This is an important but neglected aspect of cases of everyday forgetting, in particular of those characterized by a social dimension. By investigating some ways in which the psychology of social norms is causally relevant in the mechanisms of retrieval failure, I begin to fill this gap. (shrink)

An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we (...) witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved. (shrink)

This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes’s peculiar conception of what he calls “the Neutral” and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, I show (...) that Barthes’s Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone. (shrink)

Gleitman and Trueswell’s “The easy words” forms a pair with their earlier paper, “Hard words,” completing a circle in which the authors ask how “easy” words (e.g., concrete nouns) are learned. They take up the hypothesis of “cross‐situational learning,” and argue that accumulating observations actually hinders learning if the mechanism requires holding all exemplars in memory over time. They present an alternative hypothesis, “Propose but Verify,” wherein people use one‐trial learning to confirm or disconfirm their current hypothesis—a mechanism distinctly different (...) from cross‐situational learning. (shrink)

I argue that addiction is not a chronic, relapsing, neurobiological disease characterized by compulsive use of drugs or alcohol. Large-scale national survey data demonstrate that rates of substance dependence peak in adolescence and early adulthood and then decline steeply; addicts tend to “mature out” in their late twenties or early thirties. The exceptions are addicts who suffer from additional psychiatric disorders. I hypothesize that this difference in patterns of use and relapse between the general and psychiatric populations can be explained (...) by the purpose served by drugs and alcohol for patients. Drugs and alcohol alleviate the severe psychological distress typically experienced by patients with comorbid psychiatric disorders and associated problems. On this hypothesis, consumption is a chosen means to ends that are rational to desire: Use is not compulsive. The upshot of this explanation is that the orthodox view of addiction as a chronic, relapsing neurobiological disease is misguided. I delineate five folk psychological factors that together explain addiction as purposive action: strong and habitual desire; willpower; motivation; functional role; and decision and resolve. I conclude by drawing lessons for research and effective treatment. (shrink)

The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention (...) to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000). (shrink)

Deletions, duplications, insertions, inversions, and translocations, collectively called structural variations (SVs), affect more base pairs of the genome than any other sequence variant. The recent technological advancements in genome sequencing have enabled the discovery of tens of thousands of SVs per human genome. These SVs primarily affect non‐coding DNA sequences, but the difficulties in interpreting their impact limit our understanding of human disease etiology. The functional annotation of non‐coding DNA sequences and methodologies to characterize their three‐dimensional (3D) organization in the (...) nucleus have greatly expanded our understanding of the basic mechanisms underlying gene regulation, thereby improving the interpretation of SVs for their pathogenic impact. Here, we discuss the various mechanisms by which SVs can result in altered gene regulation and how these mechanisms can result in rare genetic disorders. Beyond changing gene expression, SVs can produce novel gene‐intergenic fusion transcripts at the SV breakpoints. (shrink)

The article proposes that the modern notion of the spiritual in art, which was theorized at the beginning of the twentieth century, although remains pivotal to the discourse of art and the spiritual, has radically shifted as a result of changing attitudes to the body–mind relations instigated by popular trends of contemporary spiritualities. This cultural tendency is demonstrated by the analysis of the networked art form of Moon Ribas, e.g., dance with earthquakes. Ribas performs a cyborg body and consciousness that, (...) as contended, could be holistically enhanced and develop a unique compassionate awareness. In addition, I reflect on two examples from my performative practice of Networked Rites that interplay with speculative metaphors, spiritual and shamanic techniques, networked aesthetic forms and technologies. The first invokes communitas as a collective, non-local, networked noetic field. The second utilizes a decision-making app as a mediating device between the body and mind for the making of a prototype cyborg noetic field instilled with auspicious resonance. The article mainly implies that spiritual art continues to evolve through technoetic aesthetics fusing emerging technologies, science and shamanic, spiritual insight. Current trends may develop into benevolent and experiential applications based on the interrelations of human and cyborg body and consciousness. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo principal investigar as ideias do senso comum de jovens brasileiros e franceses acerca das relações entre justiça e injustiça. Para tanto, utilizou-se o conceito de tematas. As tematas são concebidas como fatores organizadores de conjuntos temáticos de diferentes repres..

This edition contains quaestiones 1-5 of book III of the commentary on the Sentences, by Marsilius of Inghen (†1396), the founding rector and first doctor of theology of the University of Heidelberg. These questions are devoted to the Christology, Mariology, and Trinitology, and deal with the issue of the Incarnation of Christ, with quaestiones 1-3 considering it in relation to the individual Persons of the Trinity, and quaestiones 4-5 in relation to the Blessed Virgin Mary. In all questions, Marsilius advocates (...) the _via media_ of sound faith, even above any school traditions. (shrink)

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Soft’ presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while ‘hard’ presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, and (...) question–answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts. (shrink)

This paper examines a little studied type of perspective shift that I call protagonist projection, following Holton :625–628, 1997). PP is a way of describing the mental state of a protagonist that conveys, to some extent, her perspective. Similarly to its better known cousin free indirect discourse, the shift in perspective is achieved without an overt operator. Unlike FID, PP is not based on a presumed speech-act of a protagonist. Rather, it gives a linguistic form to pre-verbal perceptual content, sensations, (...) feelings or implicit beliefs. I propose to analyse PP in a bi-contextual framework, extending Eckardt’s approach to FID. Under the resulting analysis, FID and PP are two instances of a more general category of perspective shift. (shrink)

Theorems of arithmetic are used, perhaps essentially, to reach conclusions about the natural world. This applicability can be explained in a natural way by analogy with the applicability of statements of law to the world. ;In order to carry out an ontological argument for my thesis, I assume the existence of universals as a working hypothesis. I motivate a theory of laws according to which statements of law are singular statements about scientific properties. Such statements entail generalizations about instances of (...) those properties. My task, then, is to show that theorems of arithmetic, in application, are similar to statements of law in this respect. On the basis of my working hypothesis, I argue that there are inclining reasons to think that cardinal numbers are scientific properties whose instances occur in the natural world. The works of Mill, Frege and Benacerraf play central roles in these arguments. ;In general, I urge that there are no conclusive epistemological or ontological factors which preclude arithmetical truths from being laws of nature. Consequently, I think we can extend any semantic theory which is adequate for statements of law to theorems of arithmetic. This would apply even to a theory of predication which does not involve commitment to universals. So, to the degree that my argument succeeds with the working hypothesis, it also supports the unconditioned thesis that arithmetical truths are laws of nature. (shrink)

The financial sector has seen a transformation towards ‘sustainable’ finance particularly in Europe, driven also by unprecedented regulatory reforms. At the same time, many are sceptical about the real impact of these reforms, fearing that they are triggering a paradoxical financialisation of sustainability. Building on recent research on institutional logics and institutional fields formation, we examine changes in the EU regulatory dynamics as characterised by shifts in framing the relationship between sustainability and finance. Deploying a longitudinal approach, consisting of archival (...) data and semi-structured interviews, we explore the development of EU sustainable finance regulation as an extended, interactive and contested process. Specifically, we suggest that regulatory dynamics depend on the hybrid configuration of the social constituencies supporting sustainable finance reforms and on shifts in the overall prevalence of the financial logic in society. Our paper sheds light on the inherent contradictions and limitations of sustainable finance as a means for transformative sustainability reforms. (shrink)

Contents - Introduction; The Problem of Thomas Hobbes; Formalistic Views of Representation; 'Standing For' - Descriptive Representation; 'Standing For' - Symbolic Representation; Representing as 'Acting For' - The Analogies; The Mandate ...