In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Graduate Student Member Spotlights Blog for SBCS:Chera Jo WattsChera Jo WattsMy name is Chera Jo Watts, and I am a first-year doctoral student at the University of Georgia in the Department of Religion and Institute for African American Studies. I am a mother, writer, gardener, yoga practitioner, and artist striving toward what Darlene Clark Hines labels a "Black Studies Mindset." As a first-generation college graduate from a (...) poverty-class background, my degrees include a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, a Master of Arts in Religion, and a Graduate Certificate in African American Studies from the University of Georgia. My broad research interests include African American women's religion and literature, focusing primarily on Womanism, and bridging the gap between the Academy and the everyday. I assert that we have much to learn from our ancestors and from each other while living and operating in what Black Buddhist bell hooks labels an imperialist white supremacist capitalist cispatriarchy. These teachings facilitate personal and communal healing as we continuously dismantle white supremacy in the tangible ways we can from the spaces that we occupy. Also, I currently serve as the Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia.Within SBCS, I am a graduate student member, and I strongly encourage other graduate students to consider membership in this organization. This community consists of imaginative and generous scholars, and you could make numerous international connections within the field of religious studies (along with other disciplines). As the current Executive Associate for Digital Services, I currently support the Society in a professional role through web updates, monitoring email, and various tasks as instructed by the governing board.How do your research interests relate to the SBCS? What are you working on at the moment?I am currently learning from published Womanists-Buddhists, and SBCS has published several journal articles focused on this thread of Womanist thought and scholarship (especially see Volumes 34, 2014, and 36, 2016). I am grateful to be in conversation with these folks through their work.In May 2022, I finished my Master's Thesis (published in ProQuest) under the direction of Dr. Carolyn Jones Medine. My thesis focuses on Womanist Buddhist thought in the works of Alice Walker while paying special attention to her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and then tracing the importance of her Buddhist practice across other works, such as essays and poetry. My first peer-reviewed journal [End Page 273] article was also published in 2022. Reading between the Times: An Ongoing Womanist Buddhist Project may be accessed online through MDPI, and it was included as part of a Special Edition of the journal which focused on spirituality, identity, and resistance in African American literature. At the moment, I have a few journal articles in process which extend this work, and I expanded the analysis to include Black Buddhist bell hooks. For hooks, I am especially interested in her focus on living from a "love ethic," and I'm grateful for an upcoming panel presentation at the 2023 bell hooks Symposium hosted by Berea College this June. Finally, along with Dr. Carolyn Jones Medine, I am co-authoring an Oxford Bibliography entry for "Alice Walker," in which we acknowledge the importance of Walker's spiritual practices, including Buddhism, on her life and writings.Contact information: [email protected] | University of Georgia | Institute for African American Studies and Department of Religion. [End Page 274]Chera Jo WattsExecutive Associate for Digital ServicesCopyright © 2023 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

Abstract In the last fifteen years philosophers and linguists have turned their attention to slurs: derogatory expressions that target certain groups on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and so on. This interest is due to the fact that, on the one hand, slurs possess puzzling linguistic properties; on the other hand, the questions they pose are related to other crucial issues, such as the descriptivism/expressivism divide, the semantics/pragmatics divide and, generally speaking, the theory of meaning. Despite these (...) recent investigations about pejoratives, there is no widely accepted explanation of slurs:in my paper I consider the intuitions we have about slurs and I assess the difficulties that the main theories encounter in explaining how these terms work in order to identify the phenomena that a satisfactory account of slurs needs to explain. Then, I focus on the pragmatic theories that deal with the notions of conventional implicature and pragmatic presupposition: I assess the objections that have been raised and I propose two ways of defending the presuppositional account, taking into consideration the notion of cancellability. I will claim that the reason why most pragmatic strategies seem to fail to account for slurs is that they assume a rigid divide between conventional implicatures and presuppositions that should not be taken for granted. Reconsidering the relationship between these two notions gives a hint about how a pragmatic account of slurs should look like. Finally, I assess the problem of which presupposition slurs in fact trigger. (shrink)

Social responsibility is typically examined at the firm level, yet there are instances in which consumers’ social responsibility perceptions of the firm’s product brands differ from social responsibility perceptions with regard to the firm [i.e., corporate social responsibility ]. This article conceptualizes brand social responsibility and delineates it from CSR. Following the development of a BSR scale, this research demonstrates variations in consumers’ social responsibility perceptions across product brands even if they are owned by the same corporation and compete in (...) the same product category. BSR is distinct from CSR, and better predicts consumers’ responses to product brands compared to corporate level measures. Consistent with the conceptual distinction, this research demonstrates the unique contribution of BSR and CSR in predicting product brand and corporate outcomes, respectively. From a theoretical viewpoint, this research is one of the few to examine differences between product brand and CSR. From a managerial viewpoint, the consideration of social responsibility at the product brand level facilitates the assessment of social responsibility perceptions across brands in brand portfolios managed under a mixed-branding or house-of-brands strategy. (shrink)

Human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI) advocates for the integration of social aspects into AI explanations. Central to the HCXAI discourse is the Social Transparency (ST) framework, which aims to make the socio-organizational context of AI systems accessible to their users. In this work, we suggest extending the ST framework to address the risks of social misattributions in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in sensitive areas like mental health. In fact LLMs, which are remarkably capable of simulating roles and personas, may lead (...) to mismatches between designers' intentions and users' perceptions of social attributes, risking to promote emotional manipulation and dangerous behaviors, cases of epistemic injustice, and unwarranted trust. To address these issues, we propose enhancing the ST framework with a fifth 'W-question' to clarify the specific social attributions assigned to LLMs by its designers and users. This addition aims to bridge the gap between LLM capabilities and user perceptions, promoting the ethically responsible development and use of LLM-based technology. (shrink)

Nonostante la pervasività della nozione di servizio e le recenti proposte per una Scienza dei Servizi unificata, esistono ancora parecchie inconsistenze tra le varie definizioni di servizio in uso nelle diverse discipline (e spesso anche all'interno della stessa disciplina). In particolare, a dispetto del fatto che l'obiettivo generale di questa scienza dovrebbe essere di permettere a persone e calcolatori di interagire agevolmente con i servizi nella vita di tutti i giorni, molti approcci alla modellazione dei servizi in informatica (specialmente quelli (...) centrati sui servizi web) sembrano focalizzarsi principalmente sugli aspetti connessi al flusso dati, per cui i servizi sono considerati come scatole nere che trasformano un ingresso in un’uscita, e che interoperano tra loro secondo modalità predefinite. Questo modello a scatola nera ha sicuramente i suoi vantaggi ma, stando a quanto dicono Petrie e Bussler, sembra funzionare bene sono all'interno di contesti omogenei, i cosiddetti parchi di servizi, dove l'interoperabilità è tecnicamente possibile solo perché i contenuti e le modalità di erogazione di ogni servizio sono predefiniti e condivisi da tutti i soggetti coinvolti. (shrink)

We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology of testimony (...) and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)

Real engines of the artificial intelligence revolution, machine learning models, and algorithms are embedded nowadays in many services and products around us. As a society, we argue it is now necessary to transition into a phronetic paradigm focused on the ethical dilemmas stemming from the conception and application of AIs to define actionable recommendations as well as normative solutions. However, both academic research and society-driven initiatives are still quite far from clearly defining a solid program of study and intervention. In (...) this contribution, we will focus on selected ethical investigations around AI by proposing an incremental model of trust that can be applied to both human-human and human-AI interactions. Starting with a quick overview of the existing accounts of trust, with special attention to Taddeo’s concept of “e-trust,” we will discuss all the components of the proposed model and the reasons to trust in human-AI interactions in an example of relevance for business organizations. We end this contribution with an analysis of the epistemic and pragmatic reasons of trust in human-AI interactions and with a discussion of kinds of normativity in trustworthiness of AIs. (shrink)

Nonostante la pervasività della nozione di servizio e le recenti proposte per una Scienza dei Servizi unificata, esistono ancora parecchie inconsistenze tra le varie definizioni di servizio in uso nelle diverse discipline (e spesso anche all'interno della stessa disciplina). In particolare, a dispetto del fatto che l'obiettivo generale di questa scienza dovrebbe essere di permettere a persone e calcolatori di interagire agevolmente con i servizi nella vita di tutti i giorni, molti approcci alla modellazione dei servizi in informatica (specialmente quelli (...) centrati sui servizi web) sembrano focalizzarsi principalmente sugli aspetti connessi al flusso dati, per cui i servizi sono considerati come scatole nere che trasformano un ingresso in un’uscita, e che interoperano tra loro secondo modalità predefinite. Questo modello a scatola nera ha sicuramente i suoi vantaggi ma, stando a quanto dicono Petrie e Bussler, sembra funzionare bene sono all'interno di contesti omogenei, i cosiddetti parchi di servizi, dove l'interoperabilità è tecnicamente possibile solo perché i contenuti e le modalità di erogazione di ogni servizio sono predefiniti e condivisi da tutti i soggetti coinvolti. (shrink)

The case states that a male same-sex couple entered into a surrogacy arrangement with an unrelated surrogate using donor sperm and the surrogate’s eggs. M is the legal mother pursuant to s33 of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. Though the facts tell us that there was no legally binding arrangement, this is in fact the position of the law: under s1A Surrogacy Arrangements Act, no surrogacy arrangements can ever be binding on the parties. It is not clear whether (...) the donor sperm is from one of the same-sex couple or not. If it was donor sperm and not from either intended father, this is not an arrangement that would be recognised in law, as one of the men must be genetically related to the child in order for them to obtain legal parenthood via a parental order, under s54 HFEA 2008. They could apply to adopt the child, although they may fall foul of adoption legislation1 if any money has moved between them and M and they do not fall within an exemption.2 In any event, an adoption cannot be achieved in time for them to obtain legal parenthood in a crisis situation. In the absence of a biological connection and the resulting legal parenthood, in order to obtain parental responsibility for the child to allow them to make decisions about Baby T’s care, the men would need to apply for leave to apply for a child arrangements order pursuant to s10 Children Act 1989. However, in the …. (shrink)

What is the relation between language, communication, and values? In Slurs and Thick Terms, Bianca Cepollaro explores the ways in which certain pieces of evaluative language, such as slurs and so-called thick terms, not only reflect speakers’ moral perspectives, but also contribute to promote the speaker’s evaluative stance.

In this article, Bianca Thoilliez draws on pragmatist notions of fallibilism and pluralism to develop proposals for possible educational interventions to address the problem of “post-truth” conditions. Post-truth, she contends, is not only a political danger for liberal democracies, but it also poses a serious threat of extinction for our educational practices. With the help of some of Bruno Latour's and Danna Haraway's categories, and with the narrative intervention of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, Thoilliez attempts to (...) adapt both Charles Peirce's and William James's classic pragmatist ideas in order to experiment with new horizons of thought capable of overcoming the exhausted pedagogical divides of docility/indocility, conserve/discard, and optimism/pessimism that often seem woven into the definition of educational relationships, the establishment of curriculum content, and the orientation of pedagogical actions. As an alternative, she recommends building communitarian alliances of fallibilistic inquiry and promoting practices of pluralistic cultural provision as more useful educational ends-in-view that embody a down-to-earth pedagogy capable of reinstating trust, taking care of truths, looking for ways of keeping our lives together, and making education possible again. Thus, here Thoilliez proposes a pedagogy that neither fixes nor evades our troubles, but one that stays with them. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content, and the ways in which evaluative content is entailed or implicated (as the case may be) by the use of such terms.

O presente artigo objetiva demonstrar como o feminismo universal foi incapaz de contemplar as demandas sociais da mulher negra. Através de análises de autoras e avaliação de índices socioeconômicos verifica-se o impacto gerado pela invisibilização das exclusões enfrentadas por mulheres na abordagem Feminista Universal.

This chapter attempts to differentiate between types of monumental representations of Jerusalem, to locate them historically and to explore the reasons for their extraordinary density by deciphering the essentials of their function as mnemonic devices in the framework of medieval devotionalism. Conditioned by historical events such as the Crusades, Franciscan canonization of the Stations of the Cross and the Counter-Reformation, representation of Jerusalem gradually expanded from copies of Christ's tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to commemorate the Stations (...) of the Cross and other holy places in Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The holy landscapes are multimedia representations: they combine topography and architecture with life-size figural groups and wall painting to identify the holy places. Groups of such representations could form separate sites at a certain distance from settlements, or encompass a city with a network of reproduced loca sancta. (shrink)

In his recent article ‘Limits of trust in medical AI,’ Hatherley argues that, if we believe that the motivations that are usually recognised as relevant for interpersonal trust have to be applied to interactions between humans and medical artificial intelligence, then these systems do not appear to be the appropriate objects of trust. In this response, we argue that it is possible to discuss trust in medical artificial intelligence, if one refrains from simply assuming that trust describes human–human interactions. To (...) do so, we consider an account of trust that distinguishes trust from reliance in a way that is compatible with trusting non-human agents. In this account, to trust a medical AI is to rely on it with little monitoring and control of the elements that make it trustworthy. This attitude does not imply specific properties in the AI system that in fact only humans can have. This account of trust is applicable, in particular, to all cases where a physician relies on the medical AI predictions to support his or her decision making. (shrink)

Counterspeech is communication that tries to counteract potential harm brought about by other speech. Theoretical interest in counterspeech partly derives from a libertarian ideal – as captured in the claim that the solution to bad speech is more speech – and partly from a recognition that well-meaning attempts to counteract harm through speech can easily misfire or backfire. Here we survey recent work on the question of what makes counterspeech effective at remedying or preventing harm, in those cases where it (...) is effective, as well as work investigating when and why there is a duty to engage in counterspeech. We suggest that the most fruitful area for philosophical inquiry on this topic, currently, relates to the questions about efficacy. Specifically, we argue that there is a need for better frameworks for conceptualizing the efficacy of counterspeech. Philosophers have collaborative work to do, alongside social scientists, in developing these frameworks. (shrink)

While civic education may not always be explicitly included in school curriculums, it can still be imparted through various non-teaching practices and in different places. In this article, we will delve into three potential educational spaces -memorials, museums, and libraries- that are commonly found in Western democracies. We will explore the significance and scope of each of these spaces and discuss their respective ethical, political, and aesthetic responsibilities. Additionally, we will examine how they possess agency and can influence the educational (...) process, recognizing that even non-human entities, such as nature itself, can play an important role in shaping our understanding of civic education. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are quickly gaining ground in healthcare and clinical decision-making. However, it is still unclear in what way AI can or should support decision-making that is based on incapacitated patients’ values and goals of care, which often requires input from clinicians and loved ones. Although the use of algorithms to predict patients’ most likely preferred treatment has been discussed in the medical ethics literature, no example has been realised in clinical practice. This is due, arguably, to the (...) lack of a structured approach to the epistemological, ethical and pragmatic challenges arising from the design and use of such algorithms. The present paper offers a new perspective on the problem by suggesting that preference predicting AIs be viewed as sociotechnical systems with distinctive life-cycles. We explore how both known and novel challenges map onto the different stages of development, highlighting interdisciplinary strategies for their resolution. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) have now entered the realm of medical ethics. In a recent study, Balaset alexamined the performance of GPT-4, a commercially available LLM, assessing its performance in generating responses to diverse medical ethics cases. Their findings reveal that GPT-4 demonstrates an ability to identify and articulate complex medical ethical issues, although its proficiency in encoding the depth of real-world ethical dilemmas remains an avenue for improvement. Investigating the integration of LLMs into medical ethics decision-making appears to be (...) an interesting avenue of research. However, despite the promising trajectory of LLM technology in medicine, it is crucial to exercise caution and refrain from attributing their expertise to medical ethics. Our thesis follows an examination of the nature of expertise and the epistemic limitations that affect LLM technology. As a result, we propose two more fitting applications of LLMs in medical ethics: first, as tools for mining electronic health records or scientific literature, thereby supplementing evidence for resolving medical ethics cases, and second, as educational platforms to foster ethical reflection and critical thinking skills among students and residents. The integration of LLMs in medical ethics, while promising, requires careful consideration of their epistemic limitations. Consequently, a well-considered definition of their role in ethically sensitive decision-making is crucial. (shrink)

The philosophy of science of Patrick Suppes is centered on two important notions that are part of the title of his recent book (Suppes 2002): Representation and Invariance. Representation is important because when we embrace a theory we implicitly choose a way to represent the phenomenon we are studying. Invariance is important because, since invariants are the only things that are constant in a theory, in a way they give the “objective” meaning of that theory. Every scientific theory gives a (...) representation of a class of structures and studies the invariant properties holding in that class of structures. In Suppes’ view, the best way to define this class of structures is via axiomatization. This is because a class of structures is given by a definition, and this same definition establishes which are the properties that a single structure must possess in order to belong to the class. These properties correspond to the axioms of a logical theory. In Suppes’ view, the best way to characterize a scientific structure is by giving a representation theorem for its models and singling out the invariants in the structure. Thus, we can say that the philosophy of science of Patrick Suppes consists in the application of the axiomatic method to scientific disciplines. What I want to argue in this paper is that this application of the axiomatic method is also at the basis of a new approach that is being increasingly applied to the study of computer science and information systems, namely the approach of formal ontologies. The main task of an ontology is that of making explicit the conceptual structure underlying a certain domain. By “making explicit the conceptual structure” we mean singling out the most basic entities populating the domain and writing axioms expressing the main properties of these primitives and the relations holding among them. So, in both cases, the axiomatization is the main tool used to characterize the object of inquiry, being this object scientific theories (in Suppes’ approach), or information systems (for formal ontologies). In the following section I will present the view of Patrick Suppes on the philosophy of science and the axiomatic method, in section 3 I will survey the theoretical issues underlying the work that is being done in formal ontologies and in section 4 I will draw a comparison of these two approaches and explore similarities and differences between them. (shrink)

Primary goal of this paper is to show that counterfactual reasoning, as many other kinds of common sense reasoning, can be studied and analyzed through what we can call a cognitive approach, that represents knowledge as structured and partitioned into different domains, everyone of which has a specific theory, but can exchange data and information with some of the others. Along these lines, we are going to show that a kind of ``counterfactual attitude'' is pervasive in a lot of forms (...) of common sense reasoning, as in theories of action, beliefs/intentions ascription, cooperative and antagonistic situations, communication acts. The second purpose of the paper is to give a reading of counterfactual reasoning as a specific kind of contextual reasoning, this latter interpreted according to the theory of MultiContext Systems developed by Fausto Giunchiglia and his group. (shrink)

L’auteur s’interroge sur la transmission du traumatisme chez les descendants des survivants de génocide. Il insiste sur le gel des affects, l’adhésivité dans la concrétude à des traces du passé. Des pseudo-identifications agies peuvent être comprises grâce au travail dans le contre-transfert.

In our recent article ‘The Ethics of the Algorithmic Prediction of Goal of Care Preferences: From Theory to Practice’1, we aimed to ignite a critical discussion on why and how to design artificial intelligence (AI) systems assisting clinicians and next-of-kin by predicting goal of care preferences for incapacitated patients. Here, we would like to thank the commentators for their valuable responses to our work. We identified three core themes in their commentaries: (1) the risks of AI paternalism, (2) worries about (...) attacks to our humanity stemming from the use of AI and (3) the possibility of designing AI systems for more relevant use cases than the one we consider in our work. We shall focus on these themes, leaving aside some other interesting suggestions, given the limited space available for our response. Diaz Milian and Bhattacharyya discuss the risks of AI paternalism highlighting how the use of an AI to predict goal of care preferences may incentivise clinicians and surrogates to shift the burden of decision making to the machine.2 In particular, ‘[i]f the AI-generated response is given priority above the other agents’2 and the AI makes decisions autonomously, then ‘AI paternalism’ would emerge.2 Against this possibility, the authors suggest four safeguards to be implemented in the AI life-cycle.2 These are procedures that may improve the trustworthiness of the AI and human control over it.3 We agree that it is important …. (shrink)

In their article ‘Who is afraid of black box algorithms? On the epistemological and ethical basis of trust in medical AI’, Durán and Jongsma discuss the epistemic and ethical challenges raised by black box algorithms in medical practice. The opacity of black box algorithms is an obstacle to the trustworthiness of their outcomes. Moreover, the use of opaque algorithms is not normatively justified in medical practice. The authors introduce a formalism, called computational reliabilism, which allows generating justified beliefs on the (...) algorithm reliability and trustworthy outcomes of artificial intelligence systems by means of epistemic warrants, called reliability indicators. However, they remark the need for reliability indicators specific to black box algorithms and that justified knowledge is not sufficient to justify normatively the actions of the physicians using medical AI systems. Therefore, Durán and Jongsma advocate for a more transparent design and implementation of black box algorithms, providing a series of recommendations to mitigate the epistemic and ethical challenges behind their use in medical practice. In this response, I argue that a peculiar form of black box algorithm transparency, called design publicity, may efficiently implement these recommendations. Design publicity encodes epistemic, that is, reliability indicators, and ethical recommendations for black box algorithms by means of four subtypes of transparency. These target the values and goals, their translation into design requirements, the performance and consistency of the algorithm altogether. I discuss design publicity applying it to a use case focused on the automated classification of skin lesions from medical images. (shrink)

The high predictive accuracy of contemporary machine learning-based AI systems has led some scholars to argue that, in certain cases, we should grant them epistemic expertise and authority over humans. This approach suggests that humans would have the epistemic obligation of relying on the predictions of a highly accurate AI system. Contrary to this view, in this work we claim that it is not possible to endow AI systems with a genuine account of epistemic expertise. In fact, relying on accounts (...) of expertise and authority from virtue epistemology, we show that epistemic expertise requires a relation with understanding that AI systems do not satisfy and intellectual abilities that these systems do not manifest. However, recent developments of large language models make us argue that in the future AI systems may endowed with a form of epistemic authority. Further, following the Distributed Cognition theory and adapting an account by Croce on the virtues of collective epistemic agents to the case of human-AI interactions we show that, if an AI system is successfully appropriated by a human agent, a hybrid epistemic agent emerges, which can become both an epistemic expert and an authority. Consequently, we claim that the aforementioned hybrid agent is the appropriate object of a discourse around trust in AI and the epistemic obligations that stem from its epistemic superiority. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide arguments based on linguistic evidence that discard a truth-conditional analysis of slurs and pave the way for more promising approaches. We consider Hom and May’s version of TCA, according to which the derogatory content of slurs is part of their truth-conditional meaning such that, when slurs are embedded under semantic operators such as negation, there is no derogatory content that projects out of the embedding. In order to support this view, Hom and (...) May make two moves: they point to cases where it looks like projection does not occur and they try to explain away cases where projection seems to occur by appealing to a pragmatic phenomenon that they call ‘offense’. Pace Hom and May, we argue that the derogatory content of slurs does in fact project and, in advocating for our claim, we show that those cases where it looks like projection does not occur are in fact metalinguistic uses in which slurs are not really used, by relying on three linguistic tests ; and we refute Hom and May’s attempt to explain why speakers would entertain the supposedly wrong intuition that the derogatory content of slurs projects out of semantic embedding, by focusing on the case of slurs for fictional entities. We conclude that Hom and May’s strategies to support TCA ultimately fail. (shrink)

The last decade saw a growing interest for hate speech and the ways in which language reflects and perpetuates discrimination, with two main focuses of interest: a linguistic-oriented question about how slurs encode evaluation on the one hand, and a philosophical and psychological question about the effects elicited by slurs. In this paper, I show how the two questions are deeply related by illustrating how a certain linguistic analysis of derogatory epithets – the presuppositional one – can shed light on (...) non-linguistic issues, namely what effects the use of slurs produce, especially concerning discrimination. I present a presuppositional account of slurs (Section 2) and I show how such an analysis provides convincing explanations of other non-linguistic phenomena: in particular, I consider the ways in which slurs reflect and spread discrimination by illustrating how they work in conversation (Section 3). In Section 4, I argue that some features of slurs presented in Sections 2 and 3, namely the fact that they always target a category and the fact that the derogatory content that they convey is presented as not open to discussion, make slurs particularly dangerous tools. I conclude by briefly assessing the question as to how one should respond when exposed to the use of slurs. (shrink)

At a time of pedagogical exhaustion, this article wants to imagine ways to redeem education, to spare education from its unaccomplished promises, reinvent and renew its vows, and make it somehow work towards possible futures. But how can this be done when there is no longer the old inherited faith in a direction of history with an end, no ‘telos’ nor faith that educational institutions will inevitably move societies forwards? Is there any ‘after’ if the arrow of history points in (...) no direction? What can we collectively expect from education if we have no assurance that schooling can lead to anything better than what we are now, or that caring for truth will make people freer? In place of the modernist idea of progress, the alternative narrative that is being offered to school systems and teachers is what I will describe as the ‘innovation paradigm’. Within this framework what we are, what we have, and what is in place are presented as declining, inadequate, and unsatisfactory. This narrative has become so powerful that from a ‘pedagogical popular culture’ perspective it has turned into the mainstream way of thinking about our educational institutions, practices, and hopes. Would it not, however, be more pedagogically productive to speak of ‘variation’ instead of ‘innovation’? Might this be the potential path for redeeming education after progress? [Editorial note: this paper forms part of the suite of papers entitled ‘Education After Progress’.]. (shrink)

dolce, the first top-level ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. dolce is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-technical systems, manufacturing, financial transactions and cultural heritage. dolce clearly lists the ontological choices it is based upon, relies on philosophical principles, is richly formalized, and (...) is built according to well-established ontological methodologies, e.g. OntoClean. Because of these features, it has inspired most of the existing top-level ontologies and has been used to develop or improve standards and public domain resources. Being a foundational ontology, dolce is not directly concerned with domain knowledge. Its purpose is to provide the general categories and relations needed to give a coherent view of reality, to integrate domain knowledge, and to mediate across domains. In these 20 years dolce has shown that applied ontologies can be stable and that interoperability across reference and domain ontologies is a reality. This paper briefly introduces the ontology and shows how to use it on a few modeling cases. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to analyse the structure of written argumentative texts produced by pupils in grades 3, 5, 7 and 11 in relation to three different tasks: Group A — subjects are assigned a topic question consisting of a single statement (open question); Group B — subjects are given a topic question consisting of both a statement and its opposite (opposite opinions); Group C — subjects are given an initial and a final sentence of a text, which (...) they have to complete, and which refers to opposite opinions (oriented task). Six different types of text organization were evidenced on the basis of the argumentative moves presented in the texts, the linguistic indexes used to express the relationships between the moves, the presence or absence of counter-arguments and the type of argumentation or reasoning used. The organization of the texts range from a simple affirmation of a position (repitition of the proposition or its opposition without any support) to a use of data or reasons to support a position, to others still in which two positions are presented in the body of a unitary structure, developed ‘in parallel’ and interconnected regularly. Our analysis found a well-defined tendency corresponding to the age levels in the types of texts produced by the subjects. The texts produced by the younger group, the pupils in elementary school, contained a fairly simple structural organization, characterized by very few argumentations or a lack of explicitness of the essential moves and a juxtaposing of arguments. The older subjects, in particular those attending secondary school, were able to produce texts which were more complex with regard to the presence and the organization of the argumentative moves, and more coherent and cohesive with respect to their articulation of opinions and use of adequate linguistic indices to analyze t topic. As regards the different types of tasks, when the subjects were presented explicitly with two opposite opinions (though in different terms), they developed both positions in their responses, contrary to the situation in which they produced one position when only one of two opinions was presented. (shrink)

The Introduction to "Non-Derogatory Uses of Slurs", special issue of Grazer Philosophische Studien.

In this article I reflect on my experiences of using Facebook as a recruitment tool. Although there were many benefits associated with using this method of recruitment, there were also several unanticipated ethical dilemmas that arose. This article reflects on these dilemmas, locating them within some broader concerns around online research and privacy, and considers some potential avenues for avoiding similar issues in future research. It became apparent that these ethical issues were heightened for me as a doctoral researcher in (...) a process of identity transition. I consider how this state of ‘shifting’ identity heightened my experience of these ethical tensions, and brought to the fore questions around online identity management and ways of ‘doing’ identity online. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that transparency of machine learning algorithms, just as explanation, can be defined at different levels of abstraction. We criticize recent attempts to identify the explanation of black box algorithms with making their decisions (post-hoc) interpretable, focusing our discussion on counterfactual explanations. These approaches to explanation simplify the real nature of the black boxes and risk misleading the public about the normative features of a model. We propose a new form of algorithmic transparency, that consists in (...) explaining algorithms as an intentional product, that serves a particular goal, or multiple goals (Daniel Dennet’s design stance) in a given domain of applicability, and that provides a measure of the extent to which such a goal is achieved, and evidence about the way that measure has been reached. We call such idea of algorithmic transparency “design publicity.” We argue that design publicity can be more easily linked with the justification of the use and of the design of the algorithm, and of each individual decision following from it. In comparison to post-hoc explanations of individual algorithmic decisions, design publicity meets a different demand (the demand for impersonal justification) of the explainee. Finally, we argue that when models that pursue justifiable goals (which may include fairness as avoidance of bias towards specific groups) to a justifiable degree are used consistently, the resulting decisions are all justified even if some of them are (unavoidably) based on incorrect predictions. For this argument, we rely on John Rawls’s idea of procedural justice applied to algorithms conceived as institutions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFor Rorty, any attempt to articulate a theory of truth as such is of no interest. This implies that although it may be meaningful to differentiate the truths from the falsehoods, it is pointless to say what the property of goodness is in the things we believe are good to do. Rorty points out that our no longer understanding Philosophy – with the capital ‘P’–as the framing of normative notions would make room for a post-philosophical culture where the philosophers’ activity (...) would be closer to the practices of cultural critique with the self-imposed limitation of devoting themselves exclusively to advancing descriptions of how things relate to each other. This article aims to explore what would happen if this provocation were brought to the field of Pedagogy. Taking on this Rortyan theme, keeping hope on the potentially liberating and transformative power of education implies a hopeful attitude by which individuals involved in education processes express their love for the world as a commitment to a better future, as well as their belief in its possibilities. (shrink)

We investigate experimentally whether the perceived offensiveness of slurs survives when they are reported, by comparing Italian slurs and insults in base utterances (Y is an S), direct speech (X said: “Y is an S”), mixed quotation (X said that Y is “an S”), and indirect speech (X said that Y is an S). For all strategies, reporting decreases the perceived offensiveness without removing it. For slurs, but not insults, indirect speech is perceived as more offensive than direct speech. Our (...) hypothesis is that, because slurs constitute hate speech, speakers employ quotation marks to signal their dissociation from slur use. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 75-77.

Artificial intelligence has found its way into many areas of human life, serving a range of purposes. Sometimes AI tools are designed to help humans eliminate high-volume, tedious, routine tas...