Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats that of humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking (...) machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes toward these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models. (shrink)

How Do We Reimagine?We reimagine by combining activism with philosophy.... We have to see every crisis as both a danger and an opportunity. It's a danger because it does so much damage to our lives, to our institutions, to all that we have expected. But it's also an opportunity for us to become creative; to become the new kind of people that are needed at such a huge period of transition.—Boggs, "How Do We Reimagine?"this essay seeks to add to the (...) emerging dialogue about the incredibly rich and complex nature of Grace Lee Boggs's philosophic activism by exploring the connections and tensions between her philosophic activism and pragmatist feminism. As an Asian American immigrant with a PhD in philosophy, her... (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

This article aims to explore the attitudes and behaviors of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities related to their information privacy when using information technology. Six persons with IDD were recruited to participate to a series of 3 semistructured focus groups. Data were analyzed following a hybrid thematic analysis approach. Only 2 participants reported using IT every day. However, they all perceived IT use benefits, such as an increased autonomy. Participants demonstrated awareness of privacy concerns, but not in situations involving (...) the use of technology; their awareness is not transferred to the abstract context of IT use. Privacy breaches were revealed to be a major risk for persons with IDD, who did not seem to understand how their personal information was used. Most protection mechanisms and tools reported were those suggested and implemented by caregivers and close relatives who had a great influence on the participants’ attitudes and behaviors toward IT and privacy. Our findings suggest that when using IT, persons with IDD often experience the consequences of a trade-off between autonomy and privacy. Further research and action is needed to support persons with IDD to understand and balance the benefits of IT use and the inherent threats to information privacy. (shrink)

To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride oneself on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.melioration of most social problems today—problems like health care and environmental justice—requires a feminist pragmatist methodology1 because many of these problems are not only dynamically complex, but inherently wicked. That is, many of our social problems today are characterized by intense disagreement between fragmented stakeholders, multiple and often conflicting (...) objectives, as well as high levels of uncertainty, variability, and risk. While the burgeoning field of wicked problems implicitly relies on a .. (shrink)

The present study is the first to empirically test a hierarchical, positive-oriented model of self and its relationship to the second language (L2) achievement motivation, and compare it in three different cultural contexts of Japan, U.S. and Taiwan. Based on the L2 self model (Lake, 2016), three levels of constructs were developed: Global Self (i.e., Flourishing, Curiosity, and Hope); Positive L2 domain self (i.e., interested-in-L2 self, harmonious passion for L2 learning, and mastery L2 goal orientation); and L2 Motivational Variables (i.e., (...) reading, speaking and listening self-efficacy). A total of 667 students participated in this study, including 181 first-year college students in Japan, 159 high school students in Taiwan, and 327 college students in the U.S. All the participants were learning a L2 in school. Results showed that the measures of positive global self, L2 domain self, and L2 motivational self all had a stronger relationship within their respective levels, and progressively weaker relationships as level of generality/specificity became more distal. Furthermore, the relationships among measures varied in the differing cultural contexts with the Japan-based student participants relatively lower on all measures. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the attitudes and behaviors of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) related to their information privacy when using information technology (IT). Six persons with IDD were recruited to participate to a series of 3 semistructured focus groups. Data were analyzed following a hybrid thematic analysis approach. Only 2 participants reported using IT every day. However, they all perceived IT use benefits, such as an increased autonomy. Participants demonstrated awareness of privacy concerns, but not in (...) situations involving the use of technology; their awareness is not transferred to the abstract context of IT use. Privacy breaches were revealed to be a major risk for persons with IDD, who did not seem to understand how their personal information was used. Most protection mechanisms and tools reported were those suggested and implemented by caregivers and close relatives who had a great influence on the participants’ attitudes and behaviors toward IT and privacy. Our findings suggest that when using IT, persons with IDD often experience the consequences of a trade-off between autonomy and privacy. Further research and action is needed to support persons with IDD to understand and balance the benefits of IT use and the inherent threats to information privacy. (shrink)

Taking the possibility of visual argumentation seriously, this essay explores how refutation might proceed. We posit three ways in which images can refute and be refuted in a mixed-media environment: (1) dissection, in which an image is broken down discursively; (2) substitution, in which one image is replaced within a larger visual frame by a different image; and (3) transformation, in which an image is recontextualized in a new visual frame. These strategies are illustrated in an analysis of three American (...) documentary films on abortion. (shrink)

Big Data’s calculative ontology relies on and reproduces a form of hyperindividualism in which the ontological unit of analysis is the discrete data point, the meaning and identity of which inheres in itself, preceding, separate, and independent from its context or relation to any other data point. The practice of Big Data governed by an ontology of hyperindividualism is also constitutive of that ontology, naturalizing and diffusing it through practices of governance and, from there, throughout myriad dimensions of everyday life. (...) In this paper, I explicate Big Data’s ontology of hyperindividualism by contrasting it to a coconstitutive ontology that prioritizes relationality, context, and interdependence. I then situate the ontology of hyperindividualism in its genealogical context, drawing from Patrick Joyce’s history of liberalism and John Dewey’s pragmatist account of individualism, liberalism, and social action. True to its genealogical provenance, Big Data’s ontological politics of hyperindividualism reduces governance to the management of atomistic behavior, undermines the contribution of urban complexity as a resource for governance, erodes the potential for urban democracy, and eviscerates the possibility of collective resistance. (shrink)

Both scientists and children make important structural discoveries, yet their computational underpinnings are not well understood. Structure discovery has previously been formalized as probabilistic inference about the right structural form—where form could be a tree, ring, chain, grid, etc.. Although this approach can learn intuitive organizations, including a tree for animals and a ring for the color circle, it assumes a strong inductive bias that considers only these particular forms, and each form is explicitly provided as initial knowledge. Here we (...) introduce a new computational model of how organizing structure can be discovered, utilizing a broad hypothesis space with a preference for sparse connectivity. Given that the inductive bias is more general, the model's initial knowledge shows little qualitative resemblance to some of the discoveries it supports. As a consequence, the model can also learn complex structures for domains that lack intuitive description, as well as predict human property induction judgments without explicit structural forms. By allowing form to emerge from sparsity, our approach clarifies how both the richness and flexibility of human conceptual organization can coexist. (shrink)

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this question using a recent longitudinal dataset collected from a single child, consisting of egocentric visual data paired with text transcripts. We train both language-only and vision-and-language neural networks and analyze the (...) linguistic knowledge they acquire. In parallel with findings from Jeffrey Elman's seminal work, the neural networks form emergent clusters of words corresponding to syntactic (nouns, transitive and intransitive verbs) and semantic categories (e.g., animals and clothing), based solely on one child's linguistic input. The networks also acquire sensitivity to acceptability contrasts from linguistic phenomena, such as determiner-noun agreement and argument structure. We find that incorporating visual information produces an incremental gain in predicting words in context, especially for syntactic categories that are comparatively more easily grounded, such as nouns and verbs, but the underlying linguistic representations are not fundamentally altered. Our findings demonstrate which kinds of linguistic knowledge are learnable from a snapshot of a single child's real developmental experience. (shrink)

Liz JacksonEducation University of Hong KongNel Noddings is known around the world for her contributions to philosophy and philosophy of education. Her work on caring and relational ethics broke ne...

Traditional, theoretical pedagogical practices based in disciplinary expertise generally fail to prepare students for high-stakes, public problems. In contrast, “Wicked Problems of Sustainability” is an undergraduate course designed to provide students with the opportunity to redress complex, local problems through an experiential, community-engaged model. By implementing pedagogy developed through the integration of a feminist pragmatist framework with the literature on wicked problems, this course offers opportunities to impact real problems, develop skills, and foster virtues necessary for tackling public problems. Given (...) the value of this work, but also the difficulties, this article highlights the potential pitfalls of community work on wicked problems in addition to providing a series of recommendations for a pragmatic, community-based, experiential pedagogy in a “wicked” world. (shrink)

This Hypatia cluster aims to create space for sharing stories and tools designed to support situated, embodied, and dialogical philosophical activism. It emerges from a new generation of pragmatist feminists, illustrating how the field has evolved. These pieces locate pragmatist feminism in place- and issue-based philosophical activism. As an activist and pragmatically grounded philosophy, this approach values the embodied and relational nature of social change as well as the need to create multiple pathways of engagement situated in and across communities.

How should goods be distributed in our society? Some say equally, others say according to what people are responsible for. Both ideas seem plausible but neither tell the whole story. The author examines what draws us to these two ideas and looks at recent attempts by egalitarian thinkers to bring them together in a single distributive ideal.

Volume 52, Issue 9, August 2020, Page 931-936.

Efforts to promote gender equality often encourage changes to interpersonal interactions as a way of undermining gender hierarchy. Such programs are premised on the idea that the gender system can be “undone” when individuals behave in ways that challenge prevailing gender norms. However, scholars know little about whether and under what conditions real changes to the gender system can result from changed behaviors. We use the context of a gender sensitization program in the Democratic Republic of Congo to examine prospects (...) for transformative change at the interactional level of the gender system. Over nine months, we observed significant changes in men’s quotidian practices. Further, we identified a new commitment among many men to a more equal division of household labor. However, participants consistently undermined the transformative potential of these behavioral changes through their dedication to maintaining control over the objective, process, and meaning of change, resisting conceptions of equality that challenged the gender system. Because quotidian changes left gender hierarchy intact, they appear unlikely to destabilize the logics that legitimate women’s subordination. (shrink)

In view of scholarly work that has explored the socio-psycho significance of national performativity, the body and the “other,” this article critically analyses newspaper representations of the Canadian-born British tennis player Greg Rusedski. Drawing on Lacanian interpretations of the body, it illustrates how Rusedski’s media framing centered on a particular feature of his body—his “smile.” In doing so, we detail how Rusedski’s “post-imperial” Otherness—conceived as a form of “extimacy” (extimité)—complicated any clear delineation between “us” and “them,” positing instead a dialectical (...) understanding of the splits, voids and contradictions that underscore the national “us.”. (shrink)

We were encouraged by the broad enthusiasm for building machines that learn and think in more human-like ways. Many commentators saw our set of key ingredients as helpful, but there was disagreement regarding the origin and structure of those ingredients. Our response covers three main dimensions of this disagreement: nature versus nurture, coherent theories versus theory fragments, and symbolic versus sub-symbolic representations. These dimensions align with classic debates in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, although, rather than embracing these debates, we (...) emphasize ways of moving beyond them. Several commentators saw our set of key ingredients as incomplete and offered a wide range of additions. We agree that these additional ingredients are important in the long run and discuss prospects for incorporating them. Finally, we consider some of the ethical questions raised regarding the research program as a whole. (shrink)

Sport continues to be one of the primary means through which notions of Englishness and Britishness are constructed, contested, and resisted. The legacy of the role of sport in the colonial project of the British Empire, combined with more recent connections between sport and far right fascist/nationalist politics, has made the association between Britishness, Englishness, and ethnic identity(ies) particularly intriguing. In this paper, these intersections are explored through British media coverage of the Canadian‐born, British tennis player, Greg Rusedski. This coverage (...) is examined through the lens of ‘performativity,’ as articulated by Judith Butler. Through a critical application of Butler's ideas, the ways in which the media seek to recognise and normalise certain identities, while problematising and excluding others, can be more fully appreciated. Thus, it was within newspaper framings of Rusedski that hegemonic notions of White Englishness could be performed, maintained, and embedded. (shrink)

In his path-breaking study, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (1991), Stuart Macintyre makes a case for the distinctiveness of colonial liberalism and its local habitat, with liberals' insistence on the principle of political equality and the democratic right of self-government. Macintyre's three visionaries — Higinbotham, Pearson and Syme — were also leading crusaders against Chinese immigration, which peaked in Victoria in the 1850s, the decade in which self-government and manhood suffrage were introduced. The local habitat (...) wore a racial aspect. In this essay I suggest that it was precisely the democratic ideal of equality, espoused in the context of Chinese immigration and colonial nation-building, that led to the insistence on racial exclusion. Colonial liberals called for racial exclusion because of, not in spite of, their commitment to democracy. The apparent paradox of a policy of exclusion promoted in the name of equality was, I suggest, definitive of the project of colonial liberalism. (shrink)

The law of armed conflict prevents the coerced extraction of information from Prisoners of War (PoWs). We claim, however, that the letter of that law involves too broad a concept of coercion. On a natural reading, there is a sense in which any extraction of information—by any method—is coercive. We respect the notion that PoWs ought not be treated poorly, but we argue “coercion” should not be understood so broadly. With respect to its use in international law, we favor a (...) moralized notion of “coercion,” as opposed to a non-moralized one. We explain what this means, and argue why this is a better reading of the law. We think a moralized notion of coercion is more intuitive, is more in line with both actual practice and the intent of the framers of international law, and has practical benefits as well. (shrink)

This paper provides a case study of an unique initiative in corporate (SME) social responsibility which is too often overlooked in the academic study of “socialresponsibility of business in society” This case focuses on three specific points, 1) the role of an SME in social responsibility, 2) the role of a non-business trained entrepreneur and 3) the adaptation of social responsibility to a new and different socio-economic culture. This case presents the hypothesis that “a good socially responsible initiative provides an (...) excellent insurance policy for the health of a business venture in a new culture internationally. (shrink)

The question of bias in methodology and terminology is a problem that faces researchers east, west, north and south; however, it faces Third World intellectuals with special keenness. For although they write in a cultural environment that has its own specific conceptual and cultural paradigms, they nevertheless encounter a foreign paradigm which attempts to impose itself upon their society and upon their very imagination and thoughts. When the term “developmental psychology” for instance is used in the West Arab scholars also (...) say “developmental psychology”, when “applied psychology” is mentioned they hurry to use the same term etc. Why not establish a new science with its own mechanisms, methodologies and points of reference to deal with epistemological biases and open up the gate of ijtihad with respect to them? This collection of papers aims to discover some of the biases latent in our terminology, methodologies, research tools, and conceptual principles, and to propose alternative ones marked by a greater degree of independence and neutrality. This is not to belittle the human value of the West’s creative contributions but to emphasize the danger of making it the ultimate point of reference and then trying to continuously play “catch up” with it. (shrink)

Körper und Seele sind grundlegende Kategorien antiker Anthropologie. Speziell mit der spätantiken Diskussion der Thematik befasste sich 2004 eine Tagung in Konstanz. Der vorliegende Sammelband legt die Ergebnisse vor und enthält Beiträge zu christlichen, gnostischen und paganen Autoren.

a few months into the covid-19 pandemic, Marilyn Fischer and Judy Whipps were commiserating about an isolated future that seemed to stretch out with no end in sight. They came up with the idea of starting their own Scholars Circle, inspired by the November 2019 Feminist Pragmatist Colloquium in Rochester, New York. At that conference, participants could submit abstracts of work at any stage of development. Participants were grouped in small circles of three or four, with each person sharing their (...) work and giving feedback and suggestions to the others. Participants at that conference were uniformly enthusiastic about how this format enriched their thinking and gave them a sense of support and camaraderie. As one of... (shrink)

In this postformal co-autoethnographic research, the authors explore the changing landscape of American research universities from their respective locations as mid-career, post-tenure critical ped...