16 found
Order:
  1. Personhood and AI: Why large language models don’t understand us.Jacob Browning - 2023 - AI and Society 39 (5):2499-2506.
    Recent artificial intelligence advances, especially those of large language models (LLMs), have increasingly shown glimpses of human-like intelligence. This has led to bold claims that these systems are no longer a mere “it” but now a “who,” a kind of person deserving respect. In this paper, I argue that this view depends on a Cartesian account of personhood, on which identifying someone as a person is based on their cognitive sophistication and ability to address common-sense reasoning problems. I contrast this (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  2. Meier, Reimarus and Kant on Animal Minds.Jacob Browning - 2021 - Kantian Review 26 (2):185-208.
    Close attention to Kant’s comments on animal minds has resulted in radically different readings of key passages in Kant. A major disputed text for understanding Kant on animals is his criticism of G. F. Meier’s view in the 1762 ‘False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures’. In this article, I argue that Kant’s criticism of Meier should be read as an intervention into an ongoing debate between Meier and H. S. Reimarus on animal minds. Specifically, while broadly aligning himself with (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  3.  61
    Putting explainable AI in context: institutional explanations for medical AI.Jacob Browning & Mark Theunissen - 2022 - Ethics and Information Technology 24 (2).
    There is a current debate about if, and in what sense, machine learning systems used in the medical context need to be explainable. Those arguing in favor contend these systems require post hoc explanations for each individual decision to increase trust and ensure accurate diagnoses. Those arguing against suggest the high accuracy and reliability of the systems is sufficient for providing epistemic justified beliefs without the need for explaining each individual decision. But, as we show, both solutions have limitations—and it (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  4.  45
    C.I. Lewis: Pragmatist or Reductionist?Jacob Browning - 2022 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (2):109-126.
    Despite its substantial influence, there is surprisingly little agreement about how to read C.I. Lewis’s Mind and the World Order. Lewis has historically been read as a reductionist attempting to g...
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  5. McDowell and the Contents of Intuition.Jacob Browning - 2019 - Dialectica 73 (1-2):83-104.
    In Mind and World, John McDowell provided an influential account of how perceptual experience makes knowledge of the world possible. He recommended a view he called “conceptualism”, according to which concepts are intimately involved in perception and there is no non‐conceptual content. In response to criticisms of this view (especially those from Charles Travis), McDowell has more recently proposed a revised account that distinguishes between two kinds of representation: the passive non‐propositional contents of perceptual experience – what he now calls (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  6.  66
    The Pittsburgh Kantians: Brandom, Conant, Haugeland, and McDowell on Kant.Jacob Browning - 2021 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis (1):1-32.
    Over the last thirty years, a group of philosophers associated with the University of Pittsburgh—Robert Brandom, James Conant, John Haugeland, and John McDowell—have developed a novel reading of Kant. Their interest turns on Kant’s problem of objective purport: how can my thoughts be about the world? This paper summarizes the shared reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction by these four philosophers and how it solves the problem of objective purport. But I also show these philosophers radically diverge in how they view (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  7.  49
    Getting it right: the limits of fine-tuning large language models.Jacob Browning - 2024 - Ethics and Information Technology 26 (2):1-9.
    The surge in interest in natural language processing in artificial intelligence has led to an explosion of new language models capable of engaging in plausible language use. But ensuring these language models produce honest, helpful, and inoffensive outputs has proved difficult. In this paper, I argue problems of inappropriate content in current, autoregressive language models—such as ChatGPT and Gemini—are inescapable; merely predicting the next word is incompatible with reliably providing appropriate outputs. The various fine-tuning methods, while helpful, cannot transform the (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. Language, Common Sense, and the Winograd Schema Challenge.Jacob Browning & Yann LeCun - forthcoming - Artificial Intelligence.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9.  90
    Why Twitter does not gamify communication.Jacob Browning & Zed Adams - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    1. Social media is an utterly transformative technology. In 1960, A. J. Liebling could truthfully quip, ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one’ (1960, 105). In 2023, this is...
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10.  52
    The history of qualia and C.I. Lewis’ role in it.Jacob Browning - 2023 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (1):173-193.
    In current histories, C.I. Lewis is credited for bringing the strict concept of qualia – concerned solely with sensory states – into contemporary philosophy. It is this strict notion which is then credited with bringing in worries about inverted spectra, philosophical zombies, and the idea that we can individuate the senses introspectively. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistaken reading of Lewis and the history of qualia. I argue that the strict notion of qualia stems from the (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. Science and Philosophy of Color in the Modern Age.Jacob Browning & Zed Adams - 2021 - In Anders Steinvall & Sarah Streets (eds.), Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age. Bloomsbury. pp. 21-38.
    The study of color expanded rapidly in the 20th century. With this expansion came fragmentation, as philosophers, physicists, physiologists, psychologists, and others explored the subject in vastly different ways. There are at least two ways in which the study of color became contentious. The first was with regard to the definitional question: what is color? The second was with the location question: are colors inside the head or out in the world? In this chapter, we summarize the most prominent answers (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12.  76
    Kant and the determinacy of intuition.Jacob Browning - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):65-79.
    A central issue in debates about Kant and nonconceptualism concerns the nature of intuition. There is sharp disagreement among Kant scholars about both whether, prior to conceptualization, mere intuition can be considered conscious and, if so, how determinate this consciousness is. In this article, I argue that Kant regards pre-synthesized intuition as conscious but indeterminate. To make this case, I contextualize Kant's position through the work of H.S. Reimarus, a predecessor of Kant who influenced his views on animals, infants, and (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13.  71
    Giving a Damn: Essays in Dialogue with John Haugeland.Zed Adams & Jacob Browning (eds.) - 2016 - Cambridge, MA: MIT Pres.
    In his work, the philosopher John Haugeland (1945–2010) proposed a radical expansion of philosophy's conceptual toolkit, calling for a wider range of resources for understanding the mind, the world, and how they relate. Haugeland argued that “giving a damn” is essential for having a mind—suggesting that traditional approaches to cognitive science mistakenly overlook the relevance of caring to the understanding of mindedness. Haugeland's determination to expand philosophy's array of concepts led him to write on a wide variety of subjects that (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14.  23
    Review of Carlos Montemayor’s The prospect of a humanitarian AI. [REVIEW]Jacob Browning - 2024 - AI and Society 39 (6):3061-3064.
  15.  21
    David Baumeister, Kant on the Human Animal: Anthropology, Ethics, Race Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022 Pp. 176 ISBN: 9780810144682 (hbk) $99.95 – ERRATUM. [REVIEW]Jacob Browning - 2022 - Kantian Review 27 (4):683-683.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16.  15
    David Baumeister, Kant on the Human Animal: Anthropology, Ethics, Race Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022 Pp. 176 ISBN: 9780810144682 (hbk) $99.95. [REVIEW]Jacob Browning - 2022 - Kantian Review 27 (4):667-670.