Improving nitrogen (N) fertilizer management in agricultural systems is critical to meeting environmental goals while maintaining economically viable and productive food systems. This paper applies a farm systems framework to analyze how adoption of N management practices is related to different farming operation characteristics and the extent to which fertilizer, soil and irrigation practices are related to each other. We develop a multivariate probit regression model to analyze the interdependency of these adoption behaviors from 966 farmers across three watersheds and (...) diverse cropping systems in the Central Valley of California. Our analysis demonstrates that farmers adopt varying combinations or portfolios of practices, with the most common portfolio featuring a core set of fertilizer-focused practices. Irrigation infrastructure is an especially important farm operation characteristic for encouraging adoption of innovative practice portfolios that integrate water and fertilizer management. These findings highlight the ability for a farm systems approach to improve our understanding of farmer decision-making across diverse agricultural landscapes. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over‐reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. Here (...) we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future. (shrink)

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

Emerging adult newlywed couples often experience many demands on their time, and three common problems may surface as couples try to balance these demands—problems related to finances, sleep, and sex. We used two waves of dyadic data from 1,001 emerging adult newlywed couples to identify four dyadic latent profiles from husbands’ and wives’ financial management behaviors, sexual satisfaction, and sleep quality: Flounderers, Financially Challenged Lovers, Drowsy Budgeters, and Flourishers. We then examined how husbands’ and wives’ marital satisfaction, in relation to (...) profile membership, varied at a later wave. We found that Financially Challenged Lovers and Flourishers had significantly higher marital satisfaction than Drowsy Budgeters and Flounderers. Whereas, Financially Challenged Lovers and Flourishers did not differ in terms of marital satisfaction, Drowsy Budgeters seemed to have slightly higher marital satisfaction than Flounderers for wives only. However, we did not find evidence that these connections meaningfully differed by sex. Implications for the efforts of clinicians and educators are discussed. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Prior research has documented how important it is to patients to be able to trust their physicians. In this essay, we introduce physician perspectives on the importance of earning patients’ trust. We conducted twelve semistructured interviews in late 2022, eleven with physicians and one with a patient‐experience expert. Physicians described earning patients’ trust as crucial for working effectively with patients, with several saying that it was as important as having medical knowledge. Physicians also expressed that feeling a patient trusting them (...) is professionally rewarding and fulfilling. To build trust with patients, physicians reported, they make the medical interaction all about the patient, express their belief in their patients, share their personal experiences, and use other strategies identified in previous literature: communicating effectively, being compassionate, and demonstrating competence. Physicians also reported experiencing challenges in building trust with patients, most often because of patients’ lack of trust in other levels of the health care system and because of having inadequate time to spend with patients. Additionally, Black and Brown physicians described how patients’ bias often blocks trust. (shrink)

Agriculture is a serious contributor to pollution and other environmental harms, making it an important site of action for the development of environmentally friendly products and practices. However, farmer adoption of such options is varied and dependent on a wide range of factors including the visual appeal of sustainable farming. Recent studies have shown that negative aesthetics related to more environmentally friendly ways of farming can delay or prevent adoption of such practices. Drawing on the concepts of good farming, cultural (...) capital, and the aesthetics of waste, this paper aims to assess the status of biodegradable plastic mulch in relation to a range of alternative and conventional specialty crop growers’ aesthetic perceptions. BDM has the potential to significantly reduce non-biodegradable polyethylene mulch waste, thus addressing serious environmental and human health concerns. However, the aesthetics of BDM may present a challenge. BDM looks identical to PE plastic, and its degradation throughout the season results in scraps in the soil. To investigate aesthetics as a possible barrier to BDM adoption, we conducted five photo-elicitation focus groups with specialty crop growers in Washington State. Results indicate that alternative growers are slightly more adverse to the aesthetics of BDM, especially because of its ‘plastic’ appearance. Conventional growers had higher rates of BDM adoption, even though they felt a strong aesthetic aversion to the messy nature of BDM degradation. Confidence in the product, particularly as a result of education and experience, was believed to be the key to overcoming this negative aesthetic. Study participants offered a variety of ways to enhance the acceptability of BDM, such as making the mulch brown instead of black. These findings have wider implications for the acceptance and adoption of practices that, although environmentally friendly, have an unattractive visual element. (shrink)

This essay argues that the Phaedrus’s Palinode articulates an account of love (erōs) in which the experience of love can morally and intellectually transform both lover and beloved. After situating this account of love within the dialogue’s thematization of soul-leading (psuchagōgia), I show how Socrates’s account of love makes an intervention into typical Greek thought on pederasty and argue against Jessica Moss’s contention that soul-leading love suffers severe limitations in its soul-leading capacity, showing that Moss is wrong to think (...) that love can only efficaciously lead souls that are already well-formed. By contrast, the Palinode portrays the moral and intellectual formation of the lover, who first approaches the beloved in the spirit of rapacity only to be turned by his experience of beauty toward genuine service, ordered to the beloved’s benefit. The beloved likewise undergoes such a transformation as a result of his nascent return-love (anterōs). (shrink)

BackgroundUsing an effective method for evaluating Institutional Review Board (IRB) performance is essential for ensuring an IRB’s effectiveness, efficiency, and compliance with applicable human research standards and organizational policies. Currently, no empirical research has yet been published in China evaluating IRB performance measures by the use of a standardized tool. This study was therefore conducted to develop a Chinese version of the IRB Researcher Assessment Tool (IRB-RAT), assess the psychometric properties of the Chinese version (IRB-RAT-CV), and validate the tool for (...) use in China.MethodsIn this cultural adaptation, cross-sectional validation study, the IRB-RAT-CV was developed through a back-translation process and then distributed to 587 IRB staff members and researchers in medical institutions and schools in Hunan Province that review biomedical and social-behavioral research. Data from the 470 valid questionnaires collected from participants was used to evaluate the reliability, content validity, and construct validity of the IRB-RAT-CV.ResultsParticipants’ ratings of their ideal and actual IRB as measured by the IRB-RAT-CV achieved Cronbach's alpha 0.989 and 0.992, Spearman-Brown coefficient 0.964 and 0.968, and item-total correlation values ranging from 0.631 to 0.886 and 0.743 to 0.910, respectively.ConclusionThe IRB-RAT-CV is a linguistically and culturally applicable tool for assessing the quality of IRBs in China. (shrink)

Aggleton & Brown have built a convincing case that hippocampus-related circuits may be involved in thalamic amnesia. It remains to be established, however, that their model represents a distinct neurological system, that the distinction between recall and familiarity captures the roles of these pathways in episodic memory, or that there are no other systems that contribute to the signs of amnesia associated with thalamic disease.

Though there is yet no consensus on the right way to understand ‘physicalism’, most philosophers agree that, regardless of whatever else is required, physicalism cannot be true if there exists fundamental mentality. I will follow Jessica Wilson (Philosophical Studies 131:61–99, 2006) in calling this the 'No Fundamental Mentality' (NFM) constraint on physicalism. Unfortunately for those who wish to constrain physicalism in this way, NFM admits of a counterexample: an artificially intelligent quantum computer which employs quantum properties as part of (...) its cognitive operations. If one of these quantum properties serves a proper functional role in the artificial intelligence, then that property counts as a mental under the physicalism-friendly theory of mentality called “realizer functionalism”, which says that a lower-order property is mental if it satisfies an appropriate higher-order functional description. Further, if this quantum property is both fundamental and mental, then NFM must rule that it is not physical. Yet the existence of such an artificially intelligent quantum computer, which possesses mental properties solely in virtue of the functional roles those properties play, is surely consistent with the truth of physicalism. This ought to motivate NFM proponents to reformulate their view. (shrink)

In her recent book Anti-Individualism and Knowledge, Jessica Brown has presented a novel answer to the self-knowledge achievement problem facing the proponent of anti-individualism. She argues that her answer is to be preferred to the traditional answer (based on Burge, 1988a). Here I present three objections to the claim that her proposed answer is to be preferred. The significance of these objections lies in what they tell us about the nature of the sort of knowledge that is in dispute. (...) Perhaps the most important lesson I draw from this discussion is that, given the nature of knowledge of one's own thoughts, discriminability (from relevant alternatives) is not a condition on knowledge as such. (shrink)

During the last decade Jessica Brown has been one of the main participants in the on-going debate over the compatibility of anti-individualism and self-knowledge. It is therefore of great interest that she is now publishing a book examining the various epistemological consequences of anti-individualism. The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses the question of whether a subject can have privileged access to her own thoughts, even if the content of her thoughts is construed anti-individualistically. This section (...) contains a detailed and useful discussion not only of how we are to understand privileged access, but also of epistemological issues of more general import, such as the connection between knowledge and reliability. The second section focuses on various aspects of the problem of anti-individualism and reasoning, including an extensive discussion of the relation between anti-individualism and a Fregean account of content. The final section discusses the so-called reductio argument against compatibilism (i.e. the view that anti-individualism is compatible with a priori knowledge of one’s own thoughts), according to which compatibilism implies that we can have a priori knowledge of certain facts about the world that, intuitively, are not knowable that way. The book is very clearly written and structured. Readers unfamiliar with the debate will get a good sense of its broad contours and the various positions taken. Brown starts out by distinguishing different forms of anti-individualism. This is very helpful since it is quite clear that the term has come to be rather carelessly used, as if it referred to one particular thesis, whereas in fact a number of loosely related positions are labeled ‘antiindividualist’. At the outset she distinguishes three familiar anti-individualist theses: natural kind anti-individualism, social anti-individualism, and singular anti-individualism. These.. (shrink)

This is a review of Jessica Brown's book: Anti-Individualism and Knowledge.

Traditionally, Anglophone philosophers have assumed that the identity of a thought is determined wholly by the subject's intrinsic states--e.g., her brain states. In the 1970's, this traditional view (lately called 'individualism' or ‘internalism’) was challenged by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, who argued that the contents of one’s beliefs, desires, intentions are partly determined by one's physical, social and/or linguistic environment. The question is not whether the environment causes one to think what one does. Rather, the question is one of (...) the identity of thoughts: In virtue of what is a thought the particular thought that it is? According to Putnam and Burge, the answer lies partly in the environment. What makes the belief expressed by ‘water is wet’ the belief that it is depends on the presence of H2O in the environment, not just on the believer’s internal states. The view that thoughts are individuated in part by environmental factors has come to be called ‘anti-individualism’ or ‘externalism’. (shrink)

Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge, by BrownJessica. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 197.

The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 832-835, October 2013.

In Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge, Jessica Brown identifies a number of problems for the so-called knowledge view of justification. According to this view, we cannot justifiably believe what we do not know. Most epistemologists reject this view on the grounds that false beliefs can be justified if, say, supported by the evidence or produced by reliable processes. We think this is a mistake and that many epistemologists are classifying beliefs as justified because they have properties that indicate that something (...) should be excused. Brown thinks that previous attempts to make this case have been unsuccessful. While the difficulties Brown points to are genuine, I think they show that attempts to explain a classificatory judgment haven't been successful. Still, I would argue that the classification is correct. We need a better explanation of this classificatory judgment. I will try to clarify the justification-excuse distinction and explain why it's a mistake to insist that beliefs that violate epistemic norms might be justified. Just as it's possible for a rational agent to act without justification in spite of her best intentions, it's possible that a rational thinker who follows the evidence and meets our expectations might nevertheless believe without sufficient justification. If our justified beliefs are supposed to guide us in deciding what to do, we probably should draw on discussions from morality and the law about the justification/excuse distinction to inform our understanding of the epistemic case. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Habgood-Coote : 1033–1065) I argued that we should abandon ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, on the grounds that these terms do not have stable public meanings, are unnecessary, and function as vehicles for propaganda. Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel Sterken and Étienne Brown : 144–154) have raised worries about my case for abandonment, recommending that we continue using ‘fake news’. In this paper, I respond to these worries. I distinguish more clearly between theoretical and political reasons for (...) abandoning a term, assemble more evidence that ‘fake news’ is a nonsense term, and respond to the worries raised by Pepp, Michaelson and Sterken, and Brown. I close by considering the prospects for anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Temporal externalism (TE) is the thesis (defended by Jackman (1999)) that the contents of some of an individual’s thoughts and utterances at time t may be determined by linguistic developments subsequent to t. TE has received little discussion so far, Brown 2000 and Stoneham 2002 being exceptions. I defend TE by arguing that it solves several related problems concerning the extension of natural kind terms in scientifically ignorant communities. Gary Ebbs (2000) argues that no theory can reconcile our ordinary, practical (...) judgments of sameness of extension over time with the claim that linguistic usage determines word extensions. I argue that Ebbs shows at most that no theory other than TE can effect this reconciliation. Furthermore, while Ebbs’ argument undermines Jessica Brown’s solutions to two closely related problems about natural kind term extensions (Brown 1998), TE can solve both problems without difficulty. Some criticisms of TE are briefly addressed as well. (shrink)

Several authors have argued that, assuming we have apriori knowledge of our own thought-contents, semantic externalism implies that we can know apriori contingent facts about the empirical world. After presenting the argument, I shall respond by resisting the premise that an externalist can know apriori: If s/he has the concept water, then water exists. In particular, Boghossian's Dry Earth example suggests that such thought-experiments do not provide such apriori knowledge. Boghossian himself rejects the Dry Earth experiment, however, since it would (...) imply that externalism is true of empty concepts as well as non-empty concepts. Yet in this paper I respond by defending empty-concept externalism, from criticisms suggested by Boghossian and Brown, and recently developed further by Besson. My contention is that an externalist can give a non-ad hoc descriptivist account of empty concepts. Accordingly, apriori self-knowledge does not enable an externalist to know contingent features of the external world. (shrink)

According to Probability 1 Infallibilism (henceforth, Infallibilism), if one knows that p, then the probability of p given one’s evidence is 1. Jessica Brown (2018, 2013) has recently argued that Infallibilism leads to scepticism unless the infallibilist also endorses the claim that if one knows that p, then p is part of one’s evidence for p. By doing that, however, the infalliblist has to explain why it is infelicitous to cite p as evidence for itself. And yet, the infallibilist (...) doesn’t seem to have a satisfying explanation available. Call this the Infelicity Challenge for Probability 1 Infallibilism. By exploiting the distinction between the justifying and the motivating role of evidence, in this paper, I argue that, contrary to first appearances, the Infelicity Challenge doesn’t arise for Probability 1 Infallibilism. However, after anticipating and resisting two objections to my argument, I show that we can identify a different version of infallibilism which seems to face a problem that is even more serious than the Infelicity Challenge. (shrink)

Jessica Brown argues against infallibilist views of knowledge as follows. (1) Infallibilism is committed to the sufficiency of knowledge for self-support: if one knows that p, then p is part of one's evidence for p. (2) This commitment is false: often one knows that p, but p isn't part of one's evidence for p. So (3) infallibilism about knowledge is false. I’ll respond by questioning the motivation for (2). Brown’s main line of argument in defense of (2) concerns the (...) awkwardness of citing a proposition as evidence in support of itself. I’ll argue that this infelicity, while genuine, stem not from any particular view about knowledge, but from a probabilistic conception of evidential support. Given such a conception of evidential support, whenever E is part of someone’s evidence, E is evidence for E. This is no less awkward for the fallibilist than the infallibilist. I’ll argue that if we adopt a contextualist view of evidence, we can hold on to the independently attractive probabilistic conception of evidential support, while respecting the idea that there's something wrong with citing a proposition as evidence for itself. -/- . (shrink)

This draft now appears (in revised form) as Chapter 6 of _Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind_. See http://philpapers.org/rec/PARSFT-3.

Jessica Brown effectively contends that Keith DeRose’s latest argument for contextualism fails to rule out contextualism’s chief rival, namely, classic invariantism. Still, even if her position has not been ruled out, the classic invariantist must offer considerations in favor of her position if she is to convince us that it is superior to contextualism. Brown defends classic invariantism with a warranted assertability maneuver that utilizes a linguistic pragmatic principle of relevance. I argue, however, that this maneuver is not as (...) effective as it might be. I propose a different warranted assertability maneuver—one that utilizes a pragmatic principle of strength—that affords a more successful defense of classic invariantism, and that helps to establish that classic invariantism is superior to contextualism. (shrink)

Recent literature features an increased interest in the sufficiency claim involved in the knowledge norm of assertion. This paper looks at two prominent objections to KNA-Suff, due to Jessica Brown and Jennifer Lackey, and argues that they miss their target due to value-theoretic inaccuracies. It is argued that the intuitive need for more than knowledge in Brown’s high-stakes contexts does not come from the epistemic norm governing assertion, but from further norms stepping in and raising the bar, and Lackey’s (...) purported quality-driven case against KNA-Suff boils down to a quantitative objection. If that is the case, Lackey’s argument will be vulnerable to the same objections as Brown’s. (shrink)

Some worry that semantic externalism is incompatible with knowing by introspection what content your thoughts have. In this paper, I examine one primary argument for this incompatibilist worry, the slow-switch argument. Following Goldberg , I construe the argument as attacking the conjunction of externalism and “skeptic immune” knowledge of content, where such knowledge would persist in a skeptical context. Goldberg, following Burge :649–663, 1988), attempts to reclaim such knowledge for the externalist; however, I contend that all Burge-style accounts vindicate that (...) a subject can introspectively know that she is thinking that “water is wet.” They do not yet show how a subject can introspectively know what she is thinking—which is the distinctive type of knowing at issue in the slow-switch argument. Nonetheless, I subsequently amend the Burge-style view to illustrate how an externalist can introspectively “know-what” content her thought has, and know it in a skeptic immune manner, despite what the slow-switch argument may suggest. For one, I emphasize that “knowing what” can be ontologically non-committal . For another, following Boer and Lycan , I stress that “knowing what” is purpose-relative–and for at least some purposes, it seems possible for the externalist to “know what” content her thought has, even if skeptical hypotheses about XYZ are relevant. (shrink)

It has recently been suggested that a distinctive metaphysical relation— ‘Grounding’—is ultimately at issue in contexts in which some goings-on are said to hold ‘in virtue of’’, be ‘metaphysically dependent on’, or be ‘nothing over and above’ some others. Grounding is supposed to do good work in illuminating metaphysical dependence. I argue that Grounding is also unsuited to do this work. To start, Grounding alone cannot do this work, for bare claims of Grounding leave open such basic questions as whether (...) Grounded goings-on exist, whether they are reducible to or rather distinct from Grounding goings-on, whether they are efficacious, and so on; but in the absence of answers to such basic questions, we are not in position to assess the associated claim or theses concerning metaphysical dependence. There is no avoiding appeal to the specific metaphysical relations typically at issue in investigations into dependence—for example, type or token identity, functional realization, classical mereological parthood, the set membership relation, the proper subset relation, the determinable/determinate relation, and so on—which are capable of answering these questions. But, I argue, once the specific relations are on the scene, there is no need for Grounding. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Many phenomena appear to be indeterminate, including material macro-object boundaries and certain open future claims. Here I provide an account of indeterminacy in metaphysical, rather than semantic or epistemic, terms. Previous accounts of metaphysical indeterminacy have typically taken this to involve its being indeterminate which of various determinate states of affairs obtain. On my alternative account, MI involves its being determinate that an indeterminate state of affairs obtains. I more specifically suggest that MI involves an object's having a determinable (...) property, but not having any unique determinate of that determinable. I motivate the needed extension of the traditional understanding of determinables, then argue that a determinable-based account of MI accommodates, in illuminating fashion, both ‘glutty’ and ‘gappy’ cases of MI, while satisfactorily treating concerns about MI stemming from Evans’ argument and the problem of the many. (shrink)

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s :741–742, 1960; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such a debate has primarily focused on principles—the (...) ‘what’ of AI ethics —rather than on practices, the ‘how.’ Awareness of the potential issues is increasing at a fast rate, but the AI community’s ability to take action to mitigate the associated risks is still at its infancy. Our intention in presenting this research is to contribute to closing the gap between principles and practices by constructing a typology that may help practically-minded developers apply ethics at each stage of the Machine Learning development pipeline, and to signal to researchers where further work is needed. The focus is exclusively on Machine Learning, but it is hoped that the results of this research may be easily applicable to other branches of AI. The article outlines the research method for creating this typology, the initial findings, and provides a summary of future research needs. (shrink)

Both the special sciences and ordinary experience suggest that there are metaphysically emergent entities and features: macroscopic goings-on (including mountains, trees, humans, and sculptures, and their characteristic properties) which depend on, yet are distinct from and distinctively efficacious with respect to, lower-level physical configurations and features. These appearances give rise to two key questions. First, what is metaphysical emergence, more precisely? Second, is there any metaphysical emergence, in principle and moreover in fact? Metaphysical Emergence provides clear and systematic answers to (...) these questions. Wilson argues that there are two, and only two, forms of metaphysical emergence of the sort seemingly at issue in the target cases: 'Weak' emergence, whereby a dependent feature has a proper subset of the powers of the feature upon it depends, and 'Strong' emergence, whereby a dependent feature has a power not had by the feature upon which it depends. Weak emergence unifies and illuminates seemingly diverse accounts of non-reductive physicalism; Strong emergence does the same as regards seemingly diverse anti-physicalist views positing fundamental novelty at higher levels of compositional complexity. After defending the in-principle viability of each form of emergence, Wilson considers whether complex systems, ordinary objects, consciousness, and free will are actually metaphysically emergent. She argues that Weak emergence is quite common, and that there is Strong emergence in the important case of free will. (shrink)

I problematize Grounding-based formulations of physicalism. More specifically, I argue, first, that motivations for adopting a Grounding-based formulation of physicalism are unsound; second, that a Grounding-based formulation lacks illuminating content, and that attempts to imbue Grounding with content by taking it to be a strict partial order are unuseful and problematic ; third, that conceptions of Grounding as constitutively connected to metaphysical explanation conflate metaphysics and epistemology, are ultimately either circular or self-undermining, and controversially assume that physical dependence is incompatible (...) with explanatory gaps; fourth, that in order to appropriately distinguish physicalism from strong emergentism, a Grounding-based formulation must introduce one and likely two primitives in addition to Grounding; and fifth, that understanding physical dependence in terms of Grounding gives rise to ‘spandrel’ questions, including, e.g., “What Grounds Grounding?”, which arise only due to the overly abstract nature of Grounding. (shrink)

As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence, in particular machine learning, has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the theory of (...) AI ethics principles and the practical design of AI systems. In previous work, we analysed whether it is possible to close this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the use of tools and methods designed to help AI developers, engineers, and designers translate principles into practice. We concluded that this method of closure is currently ineffective as almost all existing translational tools and methods are either too flexible or too strict. This raised the question: if, even with technical guidance, AI ethics is challenging to embed in the process of algorithmic design, is the entire pro-ethical design endeavour rendered futile? And, if no, then how can AI ethics be made useful for AI practitioners? This is the question we seek to address here by exploring why principles and technical translational tools are still needed even if they are limited, and how these limitations can be potentially overcome by providing theoretical grounding of a concept that has been termed ‘Ethics as a Service.’. (shrink)

did plato and aristotle have anything to say about belief? The answer to this question might seem blindingly obvious: of course they did. Plato distinguishes belief from knowledge in the Meno, Republic, and Theaetetus, and Aristotle does so in the Posterior Analytics. Plato distinguishes belief from perception in the Theaetetus, and Aristotle does so in the De anima. They talk about the distinction between true and false beliefs, and the ways in which belief can mislead and the ways in which (...) it can steer us aright. Indeed, they make belief a central component of their epistemologies.The view underlying these claims—one so widespread these days as to remain largely unquestioned—is that when Plato and Aristotle talk... (shrink)

Newtonian forces are pushes and pulls, possessing magnitude and direction, that are exerted (in the first instance) by objects, and which cause (in particular) motions. I defend Newtonian forces against the four best reasons for denying or doubting their existence. A running theme in my defense of forces will be the suggestion that Newtonian Mechanics is a special science, and as such has certain prima facie ontological rights and privileges, that may be maintained against various challenges.

Here I compare two accounts of metaphysical indeterminacy (MI): first, the 'meta-level' approach described by Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron in the companion to this paper, on which every state of affairs (SOA) is itself precise/determinate, and MI is a matter of its being indeterminate which determinate SOA obtains; second, my preferred 'object-level' determinable-based approach, on which MI is a matter of its being determinate---or just plain true---that an indeterminate SOA obtains, where an indeterminate SOA is one whose constitutive object (...) has a determinable property, but no unique determinate of that determinable. In S1, I first note an important difference between our accounts, concerning whether MI is taken to induce propositional indeterminacy; in S2, I highlight and defend certain advantages of my account; in S3, I address certain of Barnes and Cameron's objections to my account. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a novel interpretation of the role of the understanding in generating the unity of space and time. On the account I propose, we must distinguish between the unity that belongs to determinate spaces and times – which is a result of category-guided synthesis and which is Kant’s primary focus in §26 of the B-Deduction, including the famous B160–1n – and the unity that belongs to space and time themselves as all-encompassing structures. Non-conceptualist readers of Kant (...) have argued that this latter unity cannot be the product of categorial synthesis. While they are correct that this unity is not the product of any particular act of category-guided synthesis, I argue that conceptualists are right to nevertheless attribute this unity to the understanding. I argue that it is a result of what we can think of as the ‘original’ synthesis of understanding and sensibility themselves – it is a synthesis, moreover, in which the whole is logically prior to the parts. (shrink)

Grounding, understood as a primitive posit operative in contexts where metaphysical dependence is at issue, is not able on its own to do any substantive work in characterizing or illuminating metaphysical dependence---or so I argue in 'No Work for a Theory of Grounding' (Inquiry, 2014). Such illumination rather requires appeal to specific metaphysical relations---type or token identity, functional realization, the determinable-determinate relation, the mereological part-whole relation, and so on---of the sort typically at issue in these contexts. In that case, why (...) posit 'big-G' Grounding in addition to the 'small-g' grounding relations already in the metaphysician's toolkit? The best reasons for doing so stem from the Unity argument, according to which the further posit of Grounding is motivated as an apt unifier of the specific relations, and the Priority argument, according to which Grounding is needed in order to fix the direction of priority of the specific relations. I previously considered versions of these arguments, and argued that they did not succeed; in two papers, however, Jonathan Schaffer aims to develop a better version of the Unity argument, and offers certain objections to my reasons for rejecting the Priority argument. Here I consider these new arguments for Grounding. (shrink)