As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, one key challenge is ensuring that AI aligns with certain values. However, in the current diverse and democratic society, reaching a normative consensus is complex. This paper delves into the methodological aspect of how AI ethicists can effectively determine which values AI should uphold. After reviewing the most influential methodologies, we detail an intuitionist research agenda that offers guidelines for aligning AI applications with a limited set of reliable moral intuitions, each underlying a (...) refined cooperative view of AI. We discuss appropriate epistemic tools for collecting, filtering, and justifying moral intuitions with the aim of reducing cognitive and social biases. The proposed methodology facilitates a large collective participation in AI alignment, while ensuring the reliability of the considered moral judgments. (shrink)

Moral intuitions are generally understood as automatic strong responses to moral facts. In this paper, I offer a metacognitive account according to which the strength of moral intuitions denotes the level of confidence of a subject. Confidence is a metacognitive appraisal of the fluency with which a subject processes information from a morally salient stimulus. I show that this account is supported by some empirical evidence, explains the main features of moral intuition and is preferable to emotional or quasi-perceptual views (...) of moral intuition. (shrink)

Dual-process theories of the mind emphasize how reasoning is an interplay between intuitive and reflective thinking. This paper aims to understand how the two types of processing interact in the moral domain. According to a ‘default-interventionist’ model of moral reasoning intuition and reflection are conflicting cognitions: intuitive thinking would elicit heuristic and deontological responses, whereas reflection would favour utilitarian judgements. However, the evidence for the default interventionist view is inconclusive and challenged by a growing amount of counterevidence in recent years. (...) The recent empirical findings favour an interdependent rather than conflicting view of the two types of information processing in the moral domain. In this view, which I call dual-process reflective equilibrium, intuition and reflection cooperate in moral reasoning to reach a reflective goal, which is supposedly normative justification. In sum, on the one hand, the scope of moral intuitions extends to selecting relevant information and calling for reflection whenever a problem presents conflicting aspects; on the other hand, the purpose of moral reflection is to rationalize pre-reflective intuitions to provide articulated and accessible reasons. (shrink)

Ambivalence, i.e., the simultaneous holding of negative and positive evaluations toward the same object, is an empirically well-documented phenomenon and an important aspect of ordinary experience. However, it has not received sufficient philosophical attention. This essay accomplishes two aims: first, a comprehensive and empirically informed account of ambivalence is provided; second, the rationality of ambivalence in practical and nonpractical contexts is defended.

In recent years, the epistemic reliability of moral intuitions has been undermined by substantial empirical data reporting the influence of cognitive biases. This paper discusses and elaborates upon a promising strategy in response to the reliability challenge to moral intuitions. The argument considered appeals to the fact that moral intuitions come in different levels of strength and agents accept only strong intuitions, not vulnerable to bias under realistic circumstances. This essay aims to reconstruct the defense from the reliability challenge in (...) its most promising form and to evaluate the plausibility of the argument in light of the available empirical evidence. What will emerge from the discussion is that the vindication of moral intuitions fundamentally depends on two distinct premises: first, the hypothesis that agents accept moral intuitions proportionally to their level of confidence, and second, the hypothesis that intuitive confidence is epistemically reliable. Whereas there is consistent evidence for the first hypothesis, there is still no conclusive evidence for the second. (shrink)

The imminent deployment of autonomous vehicles requires algorithms capable of making moral decisions in relevant traffic situations. Some scholars in the ethics of autonomous vehicles hope to align such intelligent systems with human moral judgment. For this purpose, studies like the Moral Machine Experiment have collected data about human decision-making in trolley-like traffic dilemmas. This paper first argues that the trolley dilemma is an inadequate experimental paradigm for investigating traffic moral judgments because it does not include agents’ character-based considerations and (...) is incapable of facilitating the investigation of low-stakes mundane traffic scenarios. In light of the limitations of the trolley paradigm, this paper presents an alternative experimental framework that addresses these issues. The proposed solution combines the creation of mundane traffic moral scenarios using virtual reality and the Agent-Deed-Consequences (ADC) model of moral judgment as a moral-psychological framework. This paradigm shift potentially increases the ecological validity of future studies by providing more realism and incorporating character considerations into traffic actions. (shrink)

This paper discusses an influential view of moral intuition, according to which moral intuition is a kind of intellectual perception. The core claim of this quasi-perceptualist theory is that intuitions are like perceptual experiences in presenting propositions as true. In this work, it is argued that quasi-perceptualism is explanatorily superfluous in the moral domain: there is no need to postulate a sui generis quasi-perceptual mental state to account for moral intuition since rival theories can explain the salient mental features of (...) moral intuition. The essay is structured into three main sections. In a first one, I introduce the quasi-perceptualist view of moral intuition. In the second, I show that ordinary accounts can explain the salient psychological features of moral intuition without referring to intellectual perceptions. Finally, in the third section, I discuss whether moral intuitions have presentational phenomenology like perceptual experiences. (shrink)

Moral particularism, in its extreme version, is the theory that argues that there are no invariant context-independent moral reasons. It states also that moral knowledge is not constituted by principles and that these are useless or harmful in practice. In this paper, I intend to argue that this position takes context-sensitiveness of reasons too seriously and has to face many philosophical problems—mainly because its most important argument (the argument from holism of reasons) is not convincing but also because a pluralist (...) generalist account is preferable both from metaethical and normative points of view. (shrink)

Recently, in metaethics, several authors have taken into account the view according to which moral knowledge can be based on perceptual or quasi-perceptual experience. This kind of knowledge is defined as moral perception. This paper aims to introduce the recent debate about moral perception. Specifically, the possibility of moral perception will be discussed, and many different views of moral perception will be compared.

This dissertation is a contribution to the field of empirically informed metaethics, which combines the rigorous conceptual clarity of traditional metaethics with a careful review of empirical evidence. More specifically, this work stands at the intersection of moral psychology, moral epistemology, and philosophy of action. The study comprises six chapters on three distinct (although related) topics. Each chapter is structured as an independent paper and addresses a specific open question in the literature. The first part concerns the psychological features and (...) cognitive function of moral intuition. Chapter 1 (“Moral intuition, strength, and metacognition”) is focused on the concept of intuitive strength, which is one of the defining features of moral intuition. I provide a metacognitive account of intuitive strength and show why such a view is preferable to emotional or quasi-perceptual accounts. Then, in Chapter 2 (“Dual process reflective equilibrium”), I will discuss the interplay between intuition and reflection in moral reasoning. I will contend that the influential “default-interventionist” model of reasoning, theorized by Greene, is insufficiently supported by the evidence. In light of some recent studies, I outline an account of moral reasoning in which intuition and reflection are not in conflict but cooperate to reach a reflective goal. I call this model dual process reflective equilibrium. The aim of the first part is descriptive, i.e., it argues for an accurate understanding of moral intuition and reasoning in light of the available empirical evidence. In contrast, the second part addresses a normative question: is a subject epistemically justified in forming a belief on the basis of a moral intuition? Skeptics of moral intuition argue that accepting moral intuitions should be the exception rather than the rule to the extent that epistemically defective processes determine the content of moral intuitions. Chapter 3 (“Moral intuitionism and the reliability challenge”) introduces the recent empirical challenges to the reliability of moral intuitions and elaborates a promising strategy for defending intuitionism. In short, I consider whether subjects can track the reliability of their intuitions with their confidence. In Chapter 4 (“The argument from limited cognitive resources”), I evaluate a different strategy to defend moral intuitionism. Specifically, I develop an argument according to which accepting moral intuitions is legitimate because it is the most rational option that a subject has, given her limited resources. The third and final part of the dissertation concerns the role of moral intuitions in action. The influence of automatic processes on moral conduct raises different challenges to moral philosophy. The first challenge is to explain how a subject can be motivated by certain values without the mental effort of deliberation. Chapter 5 (“Caring, moral motivation, and automatic conduct”) tackles this issue. Chapter 6 (“Moral sensitivity as skillful automaticity”) aims to explain how moral agents can be sensitive to good reasons through automatic mental processes. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has witnessed a substantial opposition between two competing approaches to capturing the notion of non-accidentality in the analysis of knowledge: the explanationist and the modalist. According to the latest advocates of the former, S knows that p if and only if S believes that p because p is true. According to champions of the latter, S knows that p if and only if S's belief that p is true in a relevant set of possible worlds. Because Bogardus and (...) Perrin's explanationism promises to deliver a plausible analysis of knowledge without any need for modal notions, it is an elegant proposal with prima facie appeal. However, such version of explanationism ultimately does not live up to its promises: in this paper, I raise some objections to their explanationist analysis of knowledge while showing that modalism is in much better shape than they think. In particular, I argue that their explanationist condition generates the wrong results in Gettier cases and fake-barn cases. I also offer and defend a novel version of modalism: I introduce a refined safety condition which is shown to successfully handle the same Gettier cases that beset Bogardus and Perrin's version of explanationism. The paper concludes with a reassessment of the explanationist's initial ambition to provide an analysis of knowledge without modal notions. The upshot will be that even if the prospects for such analysis remain dim, our money should be on the modalist, not the explanationist. (shrink)

The notion of individualised evidence holds the key to solve the puzzle of statistical evidence, but there’s still no consensus on how exactly to define it. To make progress on the problem, epistemologists have proposed various accounts of individualised evidence in terms of causal or modal anti-luck conditions on knowledge like appropriate causation, sensitivity and safety. In this paper, I show that each of these fails as satisfactory anti-luck condition, and that such failure lends abductive support to the following conclusion: (...) once the familiar anti-luck intuition on knowledge is extended to individualised evidence, no single causal or modal anti-luck condition on knowledge can succeed as the right anti-luck condition on individualised evidence. This conclusion casts serious doubts on the fruitfulness of the move from anti-luck conditions on knowledge to anti-luck conditions on individualised evidence. I expand on these doubts and point out further aspects where epistemology and the law come apart: epistemic anti- luck conditions on knowledge do not adequately characterise the legal notion of individualised evidence. (shrink)

This paper illustrates cognitive modeling constructs designed to make learning by instruction more robust, including (1) flexible grounding of language to execution, (2) inference of implicit instruction knowledge, and (3) interactive clarification of instructions during both learning and execution.

Although developmental dyslexia (DD) is frequently associate to a phonological deficit, the underlying neurobiological cause remain undetermined. One prominent hypothesis suggests a specific deficit in magnocellular-dorsal (M-D) pathway. Here we investigated the visual M-D and parvocellular-ventral (P-V) pathway in dyslexic and in chronological age and IQ-matched normally reading children by measuring dynamic (frequency doubling illusion) and static stimuli sensibility, respectively. A specific deficit in M-D task was found. Importantly, the M-D deficit was selectively shown in poor phonological decoders. M-D deficit (...) appears to be frequent because 75% of poor pseudo-word readers were at least 1 SD below the mean of the controls. Finally, a replication study by using a new group of poor phonological decoders and reading level controls suggests a possible role of M-D deficit in DD. These results showed that a M-D deficit might impair the sub-lexical mechanisms that are critical for reading development. The possible link between these findings and the oscillatory “temporal sampling” framework is discussed. (shrink)

Previous accounts of cognitive skill acquisition have demonstrated how procedural knowledge can be obtained and transformed over time into skilled task performance. This article focuses on a complementary aspect of skill acquisition, namely the integration and reuse of previously known component skills. The article posits that, in addition to mechanisms that proceduralize knowledge into more efficient forms, skill acquisition requires tight integration of newly acquired knowledge and previously learned knowledge. Skill acquisition also benefits from reuse of existing knowledge across disparate (...) task domains, relying on indexicals to reference and share necessary information across knowledge components. To demonstrate these ideas, the article proposes a computational model of skill acquisition from instructions focused on integration and reuse, and applies this model to account for behavior across seven task domains. (shrink)

This article describes the path‐mapping theory of how humans integrate analogical mapping and general problem solving. The theory posits that humans represent analogs with declarative roles, map analogs by lower‐level retrieval of analogous role paths, and coordinate mappings with higher‐level organizational knowledge. Implemented in the ACT‐R cognitive architecture, the path‐mapping theory enables models of analogical mapping behavior to incorporate and interface with other problem‐solving knowledge. Path‐mapping models thus can include task‐specific skills such as encoding analogs or generating responses, and can (...) make behavioral predictions at the level of real‐world metrics such as latency or correctness. We show that the path‐mapping theory can successfully account for the major phenomena addressed by previous theories of analogy. We also describe a path‐mapping model that can account for subjects' incremental eye‐movement and typing behavior in a story‐mapping task. We discuss extensions and implications of this work to other areas of analogy and problem‐solving research. (shrink)

Beccaria’s penal philosophy hinges on the doctrinal paradigm of liberty through law. Inconceivable in the absence of laws and unattainable in the presence of arbitrary powers, liberty is profiled as the legal situation of the person who may act, within the sphere of what is not forbidden and not bound, without suffering illicit interference from private individuals or organs of the state. Thus, the form of law becomes an essential matter in the construction of the political space suitable for free (...) living. In the analysis proposed in this article, the notion of “political liberty”–which Beccaria takes from Montesquieu–is declined in relation to the legal order, criminal law and the social contract. (shrink)

The paper seeks to contribute to the discussion of Hume's theory of personal identity, by examining a conflict regarding the vivacity of the self in his writings about sympathy. Although the mechanism of sympathy supposes that self is the liveliest perception of thought, when we consider sympathy through the perspective of the ‘desire of company’, we find that self lacks vivacity and, without alterity, it would be in reality nothing. Our objective is to present the conflict and show that, far (...) from being a contradiction in Hume's thinking, it is consistent with how the philosopher conceives personal identity as a product of imagination, that is, a perception that, like any other, exists within the flow of perceptions. (shrink)

Copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of … Trent Reznor’s formula sounds so much more exciting and seductive than two millennia-old formula of representation and identity also known as A=A. Oversubscribed to central perspective, concerned with clarity and distinctness too content with the content of the image and strongly bonded with its apparatus, photography of the past century repeatedly failed to see the invisible, still acting as a copy of some ideal original, assuming (...) this role from painting. If the painting managed to free itself from representation, what can photography do? With new technologies of image production and dissemination, the pillars of the image of thought begin to crack, with identity and recognition losing the centre stage to difference and repetition. Through the emergence of the ability to photograph everywhere, automated camera and ubiquitous digital dissemination of images, photography is suddenly revealed as the medium of a copy, of uncountable recurrences of the same, and with all of its subjects and objects becoming simulacra, rendering only difference as real and originary. (shrink)

Copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of … Trent Reznor’s formula sounds so much more exciting and seductive than two millennia-old formula of representation and identity also known as A=A. Oversubscribed to central perspective, concerned with clarity and distinctness too content with the content of the image and strongly bonded with its apparatus, photography of the past century repeatedly failed to see the invisible, still acting as a copy of some ideal original, assuming (...) this role from painting. If the painting managed to free itself from representation, what can photography do? With new technologies of image production and dissemination, the pillars of the image of thought begin to crack, with identity and recognition losing the centre stage to difference and repetition. Through the emergence of the ability to photograph everywhere, automated camera and ubiquitous digital dissemination of images, photography is suddenly revealed as the medium of a copy, of uncountable recurrences of the same, and with all of its subjects and objects becoming simulacra, rendering only difference as real and originary. (shrink)

Despite the substantial appeal of the safety condition, Kelp (J Philos Res 34:21–31, 2009; Am Philos Q 53:27–37; Good Thinking. A Knowledge First Virtue Epistemology, Routledge, London, 2018) has raised a difficult challenge for safety-theoretic accounts of knowledge. By combining Gettier-style fake barn cases with epistemic Frankfurt cases, he concludes that no formulation of safety can be strong enough to predict ignorance in the former and weak enough to accommodate knowledge in the latter. In this note, my contribution is two-fold. (...) Firstly, I take up Kelp’s challenge and I show that, once properly understood, safety successfully rises to it. Secondly, I draw a more general lesson on the safety condition: a satisfactory solution to Kelp’s challenge calls for a revision of the standard formulation of safety, which must be indexed to both methods and environments. My conclusion will be that an environment-relative version of safety not only meets Kelp’s challenge, but it also advances our understanding of the safety condition on knowledge. (shrink)

National, European, and international institutions should implement social policies to help the persons with disabilities. Strategic sectors include education, training, and work, with the equal protection of the laws. In addition, this essay is focused on another crucial “sector" that is part of the primary law, which include tourism along with public transportation and non-discrimination. In conclusion, legislators, and public institutions, as well as transport companies must comply the principles of accessibility, equality, and social justice for the social inclusion of (...) persons with disabilities. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has put a strain on the health system, as well as the social, economic, and cultural ones at the Global level. After the pandemic, the risk is that the process of inclusion of persons with disabilities is grinding to a halt. But the chance is to find new ideas. This paper will define a brief but significant framework of principles that should be taken into consideration in order to support strategies of inclusion of people with disabilities in (...) the fields of health care and cultural life, especially through the research. (shrink)

Recent programs aimed at the independent living of persons with disabilities, allow them to be costumers of sectors in which they have never had full access in the past. The Lisbon Treaty has distinctly recognized the existence of a community tourist area within the primary law, and CRPD has defined the principles of accessibility and accessible tourism as tools for the inclusion. In addition, tourism and transportation stakeholders must guarantee non-discriminatory services; they must approach persons with disabilities as every other (...) customer, by taking in consideration their needs and rights, especially when it comes to their accessibility, assistance, and information. Companies of transportation must cooperate with DPOs in order to define disability-related training procedures. (shrink)

Tracciare una via verso Parmenide è quanto esplicitamente si propone la ri­cerca di Atwood Wilkinson: più esattamente un tentativo di « ascoltare di nuovo la sapienza dei nostri primi testi filosofici » (p. 7). Quella del poeta-filosofo di Elea, infatti, è opera della quale troppo spesso le letture metafisiche e analitiche di­menticano la peculiare collocazione tra la cultura orale della antica tradizione poetica e la allora relativamente recente pratica della scrittura: da quella tradi­zione...

Nel caso di riedizione di opera ormai classica, normalmente le ragioni che hanno spinto l’autore a riproporne o rivederne l’impianto sono proposte nella nuova prefazione o in introduzione: non è facile, invece, imbattersi – anche all’interno del corpo del testo vero e proprio - nella esplicita confessione del travaglio teorico all’origine del ripensamento, della rielaborazione e della revi­sione delle proprie posizioni interpretative. È quello che accade affrontando la lettura della recente t...

In "My Own Life," Hume writes:1 During my retreat in France, first at Reims, but chiefly at La Fleche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature. After passing three years very agreeably in that country, I came over to London in 1737. In the end of 1738, I published my Treatise, and immediately went down to my mother and my brother, who lived at his country house, and was employing himself very judiciously and successfully in the improvement of (...) his fortune. It is thus "chiefly" at La Flèche that Hume wrote one of the masterpieces of early modern philosophy. Hume's stay in France extended from July 1734 to August 1737. He spent a few weeks in Paris in the summer of 1734, hosted by Chevalier... (shrink)

Allen Newell (1973) once observed that psychology researchers were playing “twenty questions with nature,” carving up human cognition into hundreds of individual phenomena but shying away from the difficult task of integrating these phenomena with unifying theories. We argue that research on cognitive control has followed a similar path, and that the best approach toward unifying theories of cognitive control is that proposed by Newell, namely developing theories in computational cognitive architectures. Threaded cognition, a recent theory developed within the ACT-R (...) cognitive architecture, offers promise as a unifying theory of cognitive control that addresses multitasking phenomena for both laboratory and applied task domains. (shrink)

​This contributed volume gives access to semiotic researches adopting a quantitative stance. European semiotics is traditionally based on immanent methodologies: meaning is seen as an autonomous dimension of human existence, whose laws can be investigated via purely qualitative analytical and reflexive analysis. Today, researches crossing disciplinary boundaries reveal the limitations of such an homogeneous practice. In particular, two families of quantitative research strategies can be identified. On the one hand, researchers wish to naturalize meaning, by making semiotic results interact with (...) those coming from Neurophysiological and psychological sciences. On the other hand, statistical and computational tools are adopted to work on linguistic and multimedia corpora. The book acts to put the two approaches into dialogue. (shrink)

In Mossio & Taraborelli (2008) we challenged the assumption according to which the ecological and sensorimotor approaches are mere conceptual variations on the same enactive theme. We showed, on the contrary, that they endorse substantially different notions of an 'action-dependent perceptual invariant' and we submitted that this distinction has interesting theoretical and empirical implications. This dissimilarity between ecological and sensorimotor theories stems, in our view, from a more fundamental divergence on the nature of perceptual information. Since Gibson's work, the ecological (...) approach has adopted a fundamentally realist stance, according to which this information is 'picked up', 'revealed', 'encountered' and 'exploited' by the organism (as a range of affordances) but not 'constituted' by the activity of the organism. In contrast, sensorimotor approaches take an explicit interactivist position, which sees the perceiver's motor activity as a determinant of perceptual information itself. Pascal & O'Regan (2008) suggest that our analysis of the relationship between ecological, sensorimotor and enactive theories would benefit from a further distinction. The original enactive approach (Varela et al. 1991; Maturana, 2002; Thompson, 2007), they argue, should not be lumped together with contemporary sensorimotor approaches to perception: whereas sensorimotor theories endorse an externalist view of perception, according to which 'perception can only be understood as a form of interaction of the organism with the environment', the original enactive approach by Varela and collaborators would have strong 'idealist underpinnings'. (shrink)