AI systems play an increasingly important role in shaping and regulating the lives of millions of human beings across the world. Calls for greater _transparency_ from such systems have been widespread. However, there is considerable ambiguity concerning what “transparency” actually means, and therefore, what greater transparency might entail. While, according to some debates, transparency requires _seeing through_ the artefact or device, widespread calls for transparency imply _seeing into_ different aspects of AI systems. These two notions are in apparent tension with (...) each other, and they are present in two lively but largely disconnected debates. In this paper, we aim to further analyse what these calls for transparency entail, and in so doing, clarify the sorts of transparency that we should want from AI systems. We do so by offering a taxonomy that classifies different notions of transparency. After a careful exploration of the different varieties of transparency, we show how this taxonomy can help us to navigate various domains of human–technology interactions, and more usefully discuss the relationship between technological transparency and human agency. We conclude by arguing that all of these different notions of transparency should be taken into account when designing more ethically adequate AI systems. (shrink)

Extended cognition brings with it a particular phenomenology. It has been argued that when an artifact is integrated into an agent’s cognitive system, it becomes transparent in use to the cognizing subject. In this paper, I challenge some of the assumptions underlying how the transparency of artifacts is described in extended cognition theory. To this end, I offer two arguments. First, I make room for some forms of conscious thought and attention within extended cognitive routines, and I question the close (...) association drawn between attention and effort. Second, I vindicate the importance of paying careful attention to individual differences and the diverse ways in which bodies and technologies can be experienced. I end by offering some hints toward an alternative, and more accurate, account of the phenomenology of extended cognition. (shrink)

According to the Extended knowledge dilemma, first formulated by Clark (Synthese 192:3757–3775, 2015) and subsequently reformulated by Carter et al. (in: Carter, Clark, Kallestrup, Palermos, Pritchard (eds) Extended epistemology, Oxford Univer- sity Press, Oxford, pp 331–351, 2018a), an agent’s interaction with a device can either give rise to knowledge or extended cognition, but not both at the same time. The dilemma rests on two substantive commitments: first, that knowledge by a subject requires that the subject be aware to some extent (...) of some features of that knowledge’s sources and, second, that cognitive processes can only be extended if the subject is mostly unaware of the external object. The overwhelming response to the dilemma by proponents of extended knowledge has been to reconcile the demands of knowl- edge with the requirement that genuine extended cognition must lack any conscious encountering of the external artifact that features in the putative extended cognitive process. My approach, thus far unexplored, will be the opposite: I show how extended cognition can be made compatible with a wide range of agential attitudes, including an active form of epistemic hygiene. Consequently, I open the door for a new way of vindicating the possibility of extended knowledge, and call into question some assumptions that lie at the core of extended cognition theory. (shrink)

In this chapter, I propose a new framework for extended epistemology, based on a second-wave approach to extended cognition. The framework is inclusive, in that it takes into account the complex interplay between the diverse embodiments of extended knowers and the salient properties of technological artifacts, as well as the environment in which they are embedded. Thus it both emphasizes and exploits the complementary roles played by these different elements. Finally, I motivate and explain this framework by applying it to (...) a case of interaction with contemporary technologies. (shrink)

Drawing on the moving story of the last year of the life of her own treasured dog, Ody, she presents an in-depth exploration of the practical, medical, and moral issues that trouble pet owners confronted with the decline and death of their ...

Despite a growing literature on identity theory in the last two decades, much of its current use in archaeology is still driven toward locating and dating static categories such as 'Phoenician,' 'Christian' or 'native.' Previous studies have highlighted the various problems and challenges presented by identity, with the overall effect of deconstructing it to insignificance. As the humanities and social sciences turn to material culture, archaeology provides a unique perspective on the interaction between people and things over the long term. (...) This volume argues that identity is worth studying not despite its slippery nature, but because of it. Identity can be seen as an emergent property of living in a material world, an ongoing process of becoming which archaeologists are particularly well suited to study. The geographic and temporal scale of the papers included is purposefully broad to demonstrate the variety of ways in which archaeology is redefining identity. Research areas span from the Great Lakes to the Mediterranean, with case studies from the Mesolithic to the contemporary world by emerging voices in the field. The volume contains a critical review of theories of identity by the editors, as well as a response and afterword by A. Bernard Knapp"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. Yet what are we to make of a female gorilla in a German zoo who spent days mourning the death of her baby? Or a wild female elephant who cared for a younger one after she was injured by a rambunctious teenage male? Or a rat who refused to push a lever for food (...) when he saw that doing so caused another rat to be shocked? Aren’t these clear signs that animals have recognizable emotions and moral intelligence? With _Wild Justice_ Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce unequivocally answer yes. Marrying years of behavioral and cognitive research with compelling and moving anecdotes, Bekoff and Pierce reveal that animals exhibit a broad repertoire of moral behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity. Underlying these behaviors is a complex and nuanced range of emotions, backed by a high degree of intelligence and surprising behavioral flexibility. Animals, in short, are incredibly adept social beings, relying on rules of conduct to navigate intricate social networks that are essential to their survival. Ultimately, Bekoff and Pierce draw the astonishing conclusion that there is no moral gap between humans and other species: morality is an evolved trait that we unquestionably share with other social mammals. Sure to be controversial, _Wild Justice_ offers not just cutting-edge science, but a provocative call to rethink our relationship with—and our responsibilities toward—our fellow animals. (shrink)

This paper examines what it takes for a state of knowledge-how to be extended (i.e. partly constituted by entities external to the organism) within an anti-intellectualist approach to knowledge-how. I begin by examining an account of extended knowledge-how developed by Carter, J. Adam, and Boleslaw Czarnecki. 2016 [“Extended Knowledge-How.” Erkenntnis 81 (2): 259–273], and argue that it fails to properly distinguish between cognitive outsourcing and extended knowing-how. I then introduce a solution to this problem which rests on the distribution of (...) tasks between agent and non-biological entity. On closer inspection, I show that this solution is ultimately unsatisfactory, though its failure is instructive as it illuminates the important role played by an agent’s skilled interaction with an external entity. Drawing on key anti-intellectualist ideas, as well as on insight from cognitive psychology, I propose an account according to which what ultimately matters for extending knowledge-how is whether a hybrid ability is self-regulated. In closing, I illuminate the practical value of extended knowledge-how vis-à-vis cognitive outsourcing. (shrink)

BackgroundThe idea that individuals are responsible for their health has been the focus of debate in the theoretical literature and in its concrete application to healthcare policy in many countries. Controversies persist regarding the form, substance and fairness of allocating health responsibility to the individual, particularly in universal, need-based healthcare systems.ObjectiveTo examine how personal health responsibility has been framed and rationalised in Norwegian key policy documents on priority setting.MethodsDocuments issued or published by the Ministry of Health and Care Services between (...) 1987 and 2018 were thematically analysed. We developed a predefined conceptual framework that guided the analysis. The framework included: the subject and object of responsibility, the level of conceptual abstraction, temporality, normative justificatory arguments and objections to the application of personal health responsibility.ResultsAs an additional criterion, personal health responsibility has been interpreted as relevant if: the patient’s harmful behaviour is repeated after receiving treatment, and if the success of the treatment is conditional on the patient’s behavioural change. When discussed as a retrospective criterion, considerations of reciprocal fairness have been dominant. When discussed as a prospective criterion, the expected benefit of treatment justified its relevance.ConclusionPersonal health responsibility appears to challenge core values of equality, inclusion and solidarity in the Norwegian context and has been repeatedly rejected as a necessary criterion for priority setting. However, the responsibility criterion seems to have some relevance in particular priority setting decisions. (shrink)

This paper examines what it takes for a state of knowledge-how to be extended (i.e. partly constituted by entities external to the organism) within an anti-intellectualist approach to knowledge- how. I begin by examining an account of extended knowledge- how developed by Carter, J. Adam, and Boleslaw Czarnecki. 2016 [“Extended Knowledge-How.” Erkenntnis 81 (2): 259–273], and argue that it fails to properly distinguish between cognitive outsourcing and extended knowing-how. I then introduce a solution to this problem which rests on the (...) distribution of tasks between agent and non-biological entity. On closer inspection, I show that this solution is ultimately unsatisfactory, though its failure is instructive as it illuminates the important role played by an agent’s skilled interaction with an external entity. Drawing on key anti-intellectualist ideas, as well as on insight from cognitive psychology, I propose an account according to which what ultimately matters for extending knowledge-how is whether a hybrid ability is self-regulated. In closing, I illuminate the practical value of extended knowledge-how vis-à-vis cognitive outsourcing. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Wittgenstein's aim in the aspect-perception passages is to critically evaluate a specific hypothesis. The target hypothesis in these passages is the Gestalt psychologist Köhler's "isomorphism principle." According to this principle, there are neural correlates of conscious perceptual experience, and these neural correlates determine the content of our perceptual experiences. Wittgenstein's argument against the isomorphism principle comprises two steps. First, he diffuses the substantiveness of the principle by undermining an important assumption that underpins this principle, (...) namely, that there is a unitary concept of seeing. Next, Wittgenstein argues that some forms of aspect-perception involve recognitional capacities, the exercise of which is normatively constrained. The normative nature of aspect-perceiving plays a pivotal role in Wittgenstein's rejection of the isomorphism principle. Aside from the clear exegetical benefits gained from identifying the target hypothesis in the aspect-perception passages as the isomorphism principle, construing the remarks in the way suggested here is also philosophically interesting in its own right: it shows Wittgenstein engaging directly in the mind–body problem, construed as the problem of intentionality. (shrink)

The special issue’s editors introduce the rationale for the following articles, all of which take up aspects of the relations among the production of artworks, the behavior of audiences, and the state’s interest in assembling, regulating, and transforming what it knows as its people through the responses to art.

Lifestyle-induced diseases are becoming a burden on healthcare, actualizing the discussion on health responsibilities. Using data from the National Association for Heart and Lung Diseases ’s 2015 Health Survey, this study examined the public’s attitudes towards personal and social health responsibility in a Norwegian population. The questionnaires covered self-reported health and lifestyle, attitudes towards personal responsibility and the authorities’ responsibility for promoting health, resource-prioritisation and socio-demographic characteristics. Block-wise multiple linear regression assessed the association between attitudes towards health responsibilities and individual (...) lifestyle, political orientation and health condition. We found a moderate support for social responsibility across political views. Respondents reporting unhealthier eating habits, smokers and physically inactive were less supportive of health promotion policies. The idea that individuals are responsible for taking care of their health was widely accepted as an abstract ideal. Yet, only a third of the respondents agreed with introducing higher co-payments for treatment of ‘self-inflicted’ conditions and levels of support were patterned by health-related behaviour and left-right political orientation. Our study suggests that a significant support for social responsibility does not exclude a strong support for personal health responsibility. However, conditional access to healthcare based on personal lifestyle is still controversial. (shrink)

In this innovative book, Gloria Frost reconstructs and analyses Aquinas's theories on efficient causation and causal powers, focusing specifically on natural causal powers and efficient causation in nature. Frost presents each element of Aquinas's theories one by one, comparing them with other theories, as well as examining the philosophical and interpretive ambiguities in Aquinas's thought and proposing fresh solutions to conceptual difficulties. Her discussion includes explanations of Aquinas's technical scholastic terminology in jargon-free prose, as well as background on medieval (...) scientific views - including ordinary language explanations of the medieval physical theories which Aquinas assumed in formulating his views on causation and causal powers. The resulting volume is a rich exploration of a central philosophical topic in medieval philosophy and beyond, and will be valuable especially for scholars and advanced students working on Aquinas and on medieval natural philosophy. (shrink)

This book defines the relationship between the thought of Adam Smith and that of the ancients---Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics. Vivenza offers a complete survey of all Smith's writings with the aim of illustrating how classical arguments shaped opinions and scholarship in the eighteenth century.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Stressing the importance of understanding the grounds and the consequences of ethical or normative decision making, this collection of classic essays compiled by Pierce and VanDeVeer, examines disputes surrounding animals, ecosystems, the land, and their own proper place in the ongoing network of lives on this planet. A central question is "how can we live lives that are both personally satisfying but which are also ecologically sound and responsible?".

1966, the inaugural year of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was also the thirtieth anniversary of Lu Xun’s death. Quotations from and praise of China’s best known and preeminent modern writer were in abundance that year and an official commemorative event, reportedly attended by more than seventy thousand people, was held in Beijing. The anniversary date presented the Maoist state with a prime opportunity for boosting the cultural and intellectual authority of their doctrinal assertions by association with Lu Xun. In (...) asking what Lu Xun was in 1966, I seek to bring to view the thingness of his afterlife (or afterlives) under CCP rule. This paper discusses how the Maoist treatment of Lu Xun turned him into a political icon, to add aesthetic value to Mao Zedong Thought. Insofar as aesthetics turns on what can be felt, heard, seen, sensed, touched, or imagined, aestheticization is generally accompanied by a certain process of reification. I thus consider the concrete instances by which people came to experience Lu Xun—such as selected quotations from Lu Xun, Chairman Mao’s formulations about Lu Xun, and images of the writer in poster art—focusing in particular on the widely publicized speeches presented at the official commemoration of his death in October 1966. Since the 1980s, these 1966 commemorations have been routinely disparaged in China as an aberration. To take the Maoist version of Lu Xun seriously as the careful construction of an aesthetic object is to do more than elucidate its ideological abuse of Lu Xun. By engaging productively with the Maoist craving for an ideal revolutionary comportment, we may yet catch a glimpse of the kind of world it took for Lu Xun to make sense as a Maoist icon. Without this Maoist intensity of feeling, there would not have been the post-Maoist preoccupation with recovering or defending, as it were, Lu Xun’s true or real form (if such a phenomenologically pure act is even possible). (shrink)

The verb “to conjure” is a complex one, for it includes in its standard definition a great range of possible actions or operations, not all of them equivalent, or even compatible. In its most common usage, “to conjure” means to perform an act of magic or to invoke a supernatural force, by casting a spell, say, or performing a particular ritual or rite. But “to conjure” is also to influence, to beg, to command or constrain, to charm, to bewitch, to (...) move or convey, to imagine, to visualize, to call to mind, or to remember. —Rachael DeLue 2012, para 1.When we create with our Brown hands, feminine energy, and full spirits, we conjure. To exist, survive, and thrive in these bodies is a continuous act of conjuring. Our walks conjure. Our smiles conjure. Our tears conjure. Our laughs conjure. Our words conjure. Our artworks are conjurings. We, a Black/Filipina-American woman, a Dominican-American, and a Black-American woman, are guided by our solidarity with one another and all other Black and Brown female identifying persons whose raced and gendered subjectivities exist both inside and outside of colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy. We bring to life our colored imaginations and curiosities, and share them with the world. We are united by our need for safety, autonomy as beings, dissolution of trauma, and desire to ask, “What would happen if I…?” Imaginative, curious Women of Color founded the underground railroad, guided captured Africans and Tainos to the mountains, ignited the Civil Rights Movement, organized laborers and immigrants, birthed the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, conceived the #MeToo Movement, and so much more. Like our kindred counterparts, we have an unrelenting urge to examine, question, wonder, desire, speak to, lead, be curious, and “conjure.” As practicing artists and art educators, our critical arts-based practices are grounded in intersectional feminisms like Womanism, Black Feminist Theory, and Chicana Feminist Theory, which allow us to do these very things. (shrink)

In chapter 4 of Autonomous Knowledge: Radical Enhancement, Autonomy and the Future of Knowing (OUP, 2021), Carter takes on the question of whether there is an epistemic autonomy condition on know-how, e.g. one that might rule out cases of radical performance enhancement as genuine cases of know-how. In this paper, I examine Carter’s proposal and identify an asymmetry in the way his epistemic autonomy condition is applied to enhanced and non-enhanced instances of know-how. In particular, it seems that either an (...) autonomy condition is required for all forms of knowledge-how or it is not. If it is, then a potential worry is that young children do not manifest their know-how when doing things that we would normally be inclined to say they know how to do. If it is not, then young children do manifest some forms of non-enhanced know-how. While Carter chooses the second option, I argue that it is better to choose the first one, that is, to claim that all know-how needs to be epistemically autonomous along the lines he has described. I also show how this does not exclude young children from knowing how to do things. (shrink)

The aim of this commentary is to complement Haslanger’s view of cognition as a skill shaped by culture. I start by presenting an empirically oriented account of the process of enculturation based on the cognitive integration framework. I then illustrate the active role of material (and not just symbolic) culture in cognition by drawing on extended cognition theory. Finally, I argue that embedding Haslanger’s work within these two theories of cognition better serves the objectives of her project and, at the (...) same time, promotes a critical philosophy of cognitive science. (shrink)

El presente artículo, permite evidenciar la configuración de subjetividades de algunos adolescentes a partir de la visibilización del dolor, en tanto son portadores de una historia que los ha afectado, ya que han sido protagonistas directos de situaciones de violencia en escenarios que reclaman justicia social, tanto para sus familias como para la comunidad donde se movilizan. Palabras clave: aislamiento, cohesión familiar, desarraigo, dolor y subjetividad.

Focused on preparing educators to teach African American students, this straightforward and teacher-friendly text features a careful balance of published scholarship, a framework for culturally relevant and critical pedagogy, research-based case studies of model teachers, and tested culturally relevant practical strategies and actionable steps teachers can adopt. Its premise is that teachers who understand Black culture as an asset rather than a liability and utilize teaching techniques that have been shown to work can and do have specific positive impacts on (...) the educational experiences of African American children. (shrink)

The author argues for passing on a particular brand of feminism to next generations. The cultural archive to be passed on should be transnational, intersectional, interdisciplinary, relational and reflexive. In particular, the author focuses on processes and practices of racialization as they impact on and are practised within the discipline. In the current backlash against feminism and women’s studies in different parts of Europe, frequently divisionary tactics are deployed, by which women are pitted against each other, based on assumed immutable (...) differences which are conceived of as either ‘raciological’, ethnicized or as cultural, in such a way that ‘race’ enters again through the back door. The author argues that we need a European brand of feminism that is not complicit with the legacies of modernity, which continue to construct ‘race’. That is, we should be deeply concerned with thinking through the parameters of a viable anti-racist European women’s studies. By analysing various case studies, taken from the everyday Dutch reality at the beginning of this new millennium, the author shows the necessity and inescapability of the feminism she advocates. (shrink)

Language is both a biological and a cultural phenomenon. Our aim here is to discuss, in an evolutionary perspective, the articulation of these two aspects of language. For this, we draw on the general conceptual framework developed by Ruth Millikan (1984) while at the same time dissociating ourselves from her view of language.

This article enriches discussions about the metaphysics of normative facts with conceptual resources from social ontology that metaethics has neglected so far: the resources of Haslanger’s critical realism as social constructionism. By pointing out the viability of understanding reasons as socially constructed facts, the article shows how normative facts can be understood as features of mind-independent reality that are, however, not features of the universe independently of social practices. The move into social ontology allows us to understand normative facts as (...) mind-independent in a more substantial sense than deflationists do, by stressing individual mind-independence, while denying collective mind-independence – the subsistence independently of established human cultures. The new position can fruitfully mediate between realism, error theory and constructivism. Finally, the metaphysical nuances provided by social ontology pave the way for novel approaches to normative change and progress – thereby indicating pathways to normative theorising that many traditional metaethical positions lack. (shrink)