There has been an increased focus within the AI ethics literature on questions of power, reflected in the ideal of accountability supported by many Responsible AI guidelines. While this recent debate points towards the power asymmetry between those who shape AI systems and those affected by them, the literature lacks normative grounding and misses conceptual clarity on how these power dynamics take shape. In this paper, I develop a workable conceptualization of said power dynamics according to Cristiano Castelfranchi’s conceptual framework (...) of power and argue that end-users depend on a system’s developers and users, because end-users rely on these systems to satisfy their goals, constituting a power asymmetry between developers, users and end-users. I ground my analysis in the neo-republican moral wrong of domination, drawing attention to legitimacy concerns of the power-dependence relation following from the current lack of accountability mechanisms. I illustrate my claims on the basis of a risk-prediction machine learning system, and propose institutional and project-specific solutions to mitigate domination. (shrink)

This book offers an updated and comprehensive phenomenology of norms and normativity. It is the first volume that systematically tackles both the normativity of experiencing and various experiences of norms. Part I begins with a discussion of the methodological resources that phenomenology offers for the critique of epistemological, social and cultural norms. It argues that these resources are powerful and have largely been neglected in contemporary philosophy as well as social and human sciences. The second part deepens the discussion by (...) studying the existential and moral-philosophical foundations of practical normativity. It takes on the task of illuminating the origins of normativity and offers phenomenological alternatives to the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian approaches that dominate contemporary debates on the sources of normativity. The final part proceeds from practical normativity to the analysis of the guiding powers of values, perceptual norms, instincts and drives. These are different forms of intentionality that in various manners contribute to the constitution of human practices. By clarifying their divergences and their interrelations, the volume demonstrates that normativity is not one phenomenon but a complex set of various phenomena, with multiple origins and sources. Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on issues of normativity in phenomenology, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines the self-measurement and self-tracking practices of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Genevese pastor and pedagogical innovator, François-Marc-Louis Naville, who extensively used Benjamin Franklin’s tools of moral calculation and a lesser known tool, Marc-Antoine Jullien’s moral thermometer, to set a direction to his life and to monitor and improve his moral character. My contribution sheds light on how technologies of quantification molded notions of personal responsibility and character within an emerging utilitarian context. I situate Naville’s use of these tools within his (...) work as a pastor in a parish of the Republic of Geneva and within the Genevese and Swiss pedagogical reform movement of the early nineteenth century. I provide a detailed examination of how Naville used and adapted Franklin’s and Jullien’s tools of moral accounting for his own moral and religious purposes. Time, God’s most precious gift to man, served Naville as the ultimate measure of his moral worth. (shrink)

This collection of essays addresses recent and historical changes in the ways in which listening has been conceived as a cultural agency and act. It argues that listening, by emancipating from an essentially implied, passive-receiving, and subjected position, has become an explicit factor in culture and the object of proactive collective and individual politics.

We analyze the cognitive strategies underlying performance in the Number task, a Math game that requires both arithmetic fluency and mathematical creativity. In this game all elements in a set of numbers have to be used precisely once to create a target number with basic arithmetic operations. We argue that some instances of this game are NP complete, by showing its relation to the well-known Partition problem. We propose heuristics based on the distinction in forward and backward reasoning. The Number (...) Game is part of Math Garden, a popular online educational platform for practicing and monitoring math skills using innovations in computerized adaptive testing. These educational games generate enormous amounts of rich data on children's cognitive development. We found converging evidence for the use of forward proximity heuristics in the data of Math Garden, consisting of more than 20 million answers to 1,700 items. Item difficulties and the structure of correct answers were analyzed. (shrink)

In this paper, non-additivity of a set function is interpreted as a method to express relations between sets which are not modeled in a set theoretic way. Drawing upon a concept called “quasi-analysis” of the philosopher Rudolf Carnap, we introduce a transform for sets, functions, and set functions to formalize this idea. Any image-set under this transform can be interpreted as a class of (quasi-)components or (quasi-)properties representing the original set. We show that non-additive set functions can be represented as (...) signed σ-additive measures defined on sets of quasi-components. We then use this interpretation to justify the use of non-additive set functions in various applications like for instance multi criteria decision making and cooperative game theory. Additionally, we show exemplarily by means of independence, conditioning, and products how concepts from classical measure and probability theory can be transfered to the non-additive theory via the transform. (shrink)

Obesity is one of the most common health problems facing children and society today. Since 1960, the obesity rate among adults has risen to 34% in the United States, and morbid obesity is up six-fold. In 1980, only 14% of adult Americans were obese, but this figure had skyrocketed to 31% by 2000. Two out of three Americans today are overweight or obese, and one in 20 suffers from extreme obesity. In 2012, Reuters reported that obesity in America added $190 (...) billion to annual national health-care costs, passing smoking for the first time.Following closely on the heels of this epidemic is an explosion in the number of cases of diabetes, particularly... (shrink)

Objective: Clock variance is an important statistic in many clinical and developmental studies. Existing methods require a large number of trials for accurate clock variability assessment, which is problematic in studies using clinical or either young or aged participants. Furthermore, these existing methods often implicitly convolute clock and memory processes, making it difficult to disentangle whether the clock or memory system are driving the observed deviations. Here we assessed whether twenty repeated productions of a well-engrained interval (1 second), a task (...) that does not incorporate memory updating nor the processing of feedback, could provide an accurate assessment of clock variability. Method: Sixty-eight undergraduate students completed two tasks: a 1-second production task in which they were asked to produce a 1-second duration by ending a tone by a keypress, and a multi-duration reproduction task. Durations presented in the reproduction task were tones lasting 1.17, 1.4 and 1.68 seconds. No feedback was presented in either task, and the order of presentation was counterbalanced between participants. Results: The observed central tendency in the reproduction task was better explained by models including the measures of clock variability derived from the 1-second production task than by models without it. Three clock variability measures were calculated for each participant (standard deviation, root mean squared residuals (RMSR) from an estimated linear slope, and RMSR scaled by mean production duration). The model including the scaled RMSR was prefered over the alternative models, and no notable effects of the order of presentation were observed. These results suggest that (1) measures of variability should account for drift, (2) the presentation of another timing task before a 1-second production task did not influence the assessment of the clock variability, and (3) the observed variability adheres to the scalar property and predicts temporal performance, and is thus a usable index of clock variability. Conclusion: This study shows that just 20 repeated productions of 1 second provide a reliable index of clock variability. As administering this task is fast and easy, it could prove to be useful in a large variety of developmental and clinical populations. (shrink)

In June 1922 Rothstein, in his courageous and ingenious attack on Schwabe's generally accepted chronology of Catullus' poems, made these two surprising statements: The liaison with Lesbia began later than 57 B.C. All short poems are later than 57 B.C. To maintain the first statement Rothstein denied , against strong evidence, that poem 68 referred to Lesbia. To explain the second he assumed gratuitously that Catullus carelessly lost all his short poems written before 57 B.C., preserving only long ones, and (...) among these the datable poems 68 and 65+66. (shrink)

Recent developments in music as well as in the debate on present-day transformations of religion, call for a renewal of the question of ‘sacred music.’ This article poses the question, and suggests a direction in which theory could move in order to understand the ways in which the ancient idea of sacred music remains important for present-day music and for religious reflection. Starting from the observation that theological thinkers tend to have a preference for the music of Mozart, the question (...) is raised how they theoretically substantiate the theological privilege of a music like Mozart’s. As it turns out, the key figure relating music to the sacred is the figure of form, often exemplified by musical melody. The music theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who has had a significant influence on Jean-Luc Marion, is a case in point. However, as is shown with reference to the musical aesthetics of the early 19th century, this figure is also central to the diametrical opposites of sacred music, being the musically sublime and the ‘religion of music.’ This observation leads to the question how, on a theoretical level, one could distinguish between sacred music and its obverse. As is shown, Marion suggests a new way of understanding the possibility of sacred music, starting from the ideas of the gift and the ‘saturated phenomenon.’ Analysing a key passage from Etant donné, it is argued that the implied shift the from form to the gift does not entirely annul the undecidability of sacred music. But also, it is argues that is does indeed show the importance and challenge that the notion of sacred music implies for both theological-philosophical and musical reflection. (shrink)

To deal with potential conflicts between the triple-bottom-line expectations of investors and the performance of executives, firms can use incentives by integrating corporate social performance targets into executive compensation. No evidence yet exists that CSP targets in executive compensation actually lead to an improvement of CSP results. Using a panel data set of 400 firms for the years 2008–2012 leading to 1846 firm-year observations, the relationships between CSP targets and CSP results and CSP improvements are analyzed. The results show that (...) the level of CSP has no effect on the use of CSP targets, the use of CSP targets in general does not automatically lead to better CSP results, and the use of quantitative, hard CSP targets is an effective way to improve CSP results, especially to lower CSP weaknesses. (shrink)

The Victorian polymath William Stanley Jevons is generally and rightly venerated as one of the great innovators of economic theory and method in what came to be known as the 'marginalist revolution'. This book is an investigation into the cultural and intellectual resources that Jevons drew upon to revolutionize research methods in economics. Jevons's uniform approach to the sciences was based on a firm belief in the mechanical constitution of the universe and a firm conviction that all scientific knowledge was (...) limited and therefore hypothetical in character. Jevons's mechanical beliefs found their way into his early meteorological studies, his formal logic, and his economic pursuits. By using mechanical analogies as instruments of discovery, Jevons was able to bridge the divide between theory and statistics that had become more or less institutionalized in mid nineteenth-century Britain. (shrink)

New technologies are the source of uncertainties about the applicability of moral and morally connotated concepts. These uncertainties sometimes call for conceptual engineering, but it is not often recognized when this is the case. We take this to be a missed opportunity, as a recognition that different researchers are working on the same kind of project can help solve methodological questions that one is likely to encounter. In this paper, we present three case studies where philosophers of technology implicitly engage (...) in conceptual engineering (without naming it as such). We subsequently reflect on the case studies to find out how these illustrate conceptual engineering as an appropriate method to deal with pressing concerns in the philosophy of technology. We have two main goals. We first want to contribute to the literature on conceptual engineering by presenting concrete examples of conceptual engineering in the philosophy of technology. This is especially relevant, because the technologies that are designed based on the conceptual work done by philosophers of technology potentially have crucial moral and social implications. Secondly, we want to make explicit what choices are made when doing this conceptual work. Making explicit that some of the implicit assumptions are, in fact, debated in the literature allows for reflection on these questions. Ultimately, our hope is that conscious reflection leads to an improvement of the conceptual work done. (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the psychological relevance of a logical model for deductive reasoning. We propose a new way to analyze logical reasoning in a deductive version of the Mastermind game implemented within a popular Dutch online educational learning system (Math Garden). Our main goal is to derive predictions about the difficulty of Deductive Mastermind tasks. By means of a logical analysis we derive the number of steps needed for solving these tasks (a proxy for working memory load). Our (...) model is based on the analytic tableaux method, known from proof theory. We associate the difficulty of Deductive Mastermind game-items with the size of the corresponding logical trees obtained by the tableaux method. We derive empirical hypotheses from this model. A large group of students (over 37 thousand children, 5–12 years of age) played the Deductive Mastermind game, which gave empirical difficulty ratings of all 321 game-items. The results show that our logical approach predicts these item ratings well, which supports the psychological relevance of our model. (shrink)

This article discusses a peculiar Sā$$\dot {\text{n}}$$n˙khya-Yoga theory of transformation (pariṇāma) that the author of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra created by drawing upon Sarvāstivāda Buddhist theories of temporality. In developing his theory, Patañjali adaptively reused the wording in which the Sarvāstivāda theories were formulated, the specific objections against these theories, and their refutations to win the philosophical debate about temporality against Sarvāstivāda Buddhism. Patañjali’s approach towards the Sarvāstivāda Buddhist theories was possible, even though his system of Yoga is based on an ontology (...) that differs considerably from that of Sarvāstivāda Buddhism because both systems share the philosophical view that time is not a separate ontological entity in itself. Time is a concept deduced from change in the empirical world. This agreement results from the common philosophical orientation of Sarvāstivāda Buddhism and Yoga, which takes the phenomenon of experience as the basis of philosophical enquiry into the structure of the world. The intention that guided Patañjali’s adaptive reuse was twofold. On the one hand, he aimed at winning the debate with Sarvāstivāda Buddhism about how the problem of temporality can be solved. He thus integrated four mutually exclusive theories on temporality into a single theory of transformation of properties (dharma) involving a second-level and a third-level theory on the transformation of the temporal characteristic mark (lakṣaṇa) and on the transformation of states (avasthā), respectively. On the other hand, Patañjali intended to achieve philosophical clarification regarding the question of how exactly properties relate to their underlying substrate in the process of transformation of the three constituents or forces (guṇa) sattva, rajas and tamas of matter (pradhāna) that account for all phenomena of the world except pure consciousness (puruṣa). Patañjali’s theory of transformation is thus of central importance for his Sā$$\dot {\text{n}}$$n˙khya ontology, according to which the world consists of 25 categories or constituents (tattva), i.e., of primal matter (prakṛti) and its transformations and pure consciousness. (shrink)

Gender discrimination continues to be a problem in organizations. It is therefore important that organizations use performance evaluation methods that ensure equal opportunities for men and women. This article reports the results of an experiment to investigate whether and, if so, how the gender of the rater and that of the ratee moderate the relationship between the level of subjectivity in performance appraisals and organizational attractiveness. Participants in the experiment were 313 undergraduate students. We predicted, and indeed established, that as (...) the probability increases that employee performance is evaluated by a female manager, women expect more positive outcomes of subjective, but not objective evaluation processes. Our data did not support our expectation that as the probability of being evaluated by a female manager increases, men expect less positive outcomes of subjective evaluation processes. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of why women are over-represented in jobs with objective formula-based reward systems, such as piece-rate systems. They are also of interest to organizations that are looking for more ethical human resource management practices. (shrink)

Autumnal spring. Semiotic analysis in the context of the developments of the Parisian school. Both verbal and non-verbal exhortations are usually much more complex than we can ascertain in one quick overview. The semiotic ‘instrument’ as developed by the Parisian school is geared towards helping us readers to discover the hidden meaning of expressions and to pursue the levels of meaning of the object, which are not immediately obvious. In this article, which consists of two parts, we will gradually expound (...) and make operational the most important semiotic notions. In this context we will work in such a manner as to also elucidate the developments in semiotics of the Parisian school. In this first part of our article, we will expound the ‘classical’ semiotic approach, and its operational workings in analysis. As object of the analysis we have chosen the discourse ‘Not only the spring is disconsolate’ by pastor Monique de Bree. This discourse is analysed on the discursive level with its syntactic component and its semantic component . After this, the narrative syntax and semantics will be discussed, and finally the syntax and semantics of the level of depth. Characteristic for the initial period of this type of semiotics is that discursiveness was seen especially as a further addition to the deeper levels. The transition of the semiotic narrative level to the discursive level was seen as a concretisation of the elements of the surface and depth levels. In the recent development in Greimassian semiotics however, this classical notion of the generative trajectory is criticised. The discursive level has its own autonomy and semiotics has developed further within this context. These recent developments in semiotic meta-language and making it operational will be the focus of the second article. (shrink)