Smith argues that, unlike other forms of evidence, naked statistical evidence fails to satisfy normic support. This is his solution to the puzzles of statistical evidence in legal proof. This paper focuses on Smith’s claim that DNA evidence in cold-hit cases does not satisfy normic support. I argue that if this claim is correct, virtually no other form of evidence used at trial can satisfy normic support. This is troublesome. I discuss a few ways in which Smith can respond.

Suppose one hundred prisoners are in a yard under the supervision of a guard, and at some point, ninety-nine of them collectively kill the guard. If, after the fact, a prisoner is picked at random and tried, the probability of his guilt is 99%. But despite the high probability, the statistical chances, by themselves, seem insufficient to justify a conviction. The question is why. Two arguments are offered. The first, decision-theoretic argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics (...) in the prisoner scenario is unacceptable so long as the goal of expected utility maximization is combined with fairness constraints. The second, risk-based argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics in the prisoner scenario lets the risk of mistaken conviction surge potentially too high. The same, by contrast, cannot be said of convictions solely based on DNA evidence or eyewitness testimony. A noteworthy feature of the two arguments in the paper is that they are not confined to criminal trials and can in fact be extended to civil trials. (shrink)

Many oppose the use of profile evidence against defendants at trial, even when the statistical correlations are reliable and the jury is free from prejudice. The literature has struggled to justify this opposition. We argue that admitting profile evidence is objectionable because it violates what we call “equal protection”—that is, a right of innocent defendants not to be exposed to higher ex ante risks of mistaken conviction compared to other innocent defendants facing similar charges. We also show why admitting other (...) forms of evidence, such as eyewitness, trace, and motive evidence, does not violate equal protection. (shrink)

This book proposes a new interpretative key for reading and overcoming the binary of idealism and realism. It explores the way human consciousness unfolds through the relationship between the I and the world-a field of phenomenological investigation that cannot and must not remain closed within the limits of its own disciplinary boundaries. The book focuses on the question of realism in contemporary debates, ultimately dismantling prejudices and automatisms that one finds therein. It shows that at the root of the controversy (...) between realism and idealism there often lie equivocations of a semantic nature. By returning to the origins of modern phenomenology this study mines the Husserlian concept of transcendental idealism. Following this path, and neutralizing the extreme positions of an acritical idealism and a naïve realism, the book proposes a "transcendental realism": the horizon of a dynamic unity that embraces the process of cognition and that grounds the relation, and not the subordination, of subject and object. The close reading of this reciprocity offered here allows one to surpass the limits of the domain of knowing, leading one to fundamental questions about the ultimate sense of things and their origin. (shrink)

The literature on algorithmic fairness has examined exogenous sources of biases such as shortcomings in the data and structural injustices in society. It has also examined internal sources of bias as evidenced by a number of impossibility theorems showing that no algorithm can concurrently satisfy multiple criteria of fairness. This paper contributes to the literature stemming from the impossibility theorems by examining how informational richness affects the accuracy and fairness of predictive algorithms. With the aid of a computer simulation, we (...) show that informational richness is the engine that drives improvements in the performance of a predictive algorithm, in terms of both accuracy and fairness. The centrality of informational richness suggests that classification parity, a popular criterion of algorithmic fairness, should be given relatively little weight. But we caution that the centrality of informational richness should be taken with a grain of salt in light of practical limitations, in particular, the so-called bias-variance trade off. (shrink)

El texto de Martin Heidegger Was ist das - die Philosophie? es una de las obras claves para hacer una hermenéutica de su pensamiento. En ella se explica como lo que pretendía la filosofía en su origen no tiene un correlato con sus conquistas a lo largo de la tradición, que están más bien teñidas de un tinte racionalista que obvia los estados afectivos, tan necesarios para entender el pensar filosófico. De este modo, volvemos con Heidegger a remontarnos al inicio (...) de la filosofía, hasta Heráclito, para así poder establecer unas pautas que nos ayuden en nuestras disquisiciones dentro del filosofar. Para ello será necesario retomar el verdadero sentido griego de λὀγος tal y como fue planteado por Heráclito: como fluir y como lucha. (shrink)

Destacamos el balance ugarteano de la contribución histórica del modernismo hispanoamericano. El lugar que ocupa la llamada “generación de Darío” en la historia intelectual de América Latina es significativo por su papel determinante en la construcción de la figura del intelectual latinoamericano. La dinámica estatuida por la modernización continental a fines del siglo XIX y principios del XX promovió la autonomización del campo literario. Este hecho produjo una serie de modificaciones de la práctica de los intelectuales que operó como condición (...) de posibilidad de un discurso que acentuó las expectativas acerca de la eficacia histórico-política de la escritura científica, filosófica y literaria. Analizamos los tópicos en torno de los cuales se construyeron aquellas expectativas a la luz del balance que realizara el escritor argentino Manuel Ugarte en dos textos tardíos como El dolor de escribir (1933) y Escritores iberoamericanos de 1900 (1943). We emphasize the ugartean balance of the historic contribution of the Spanish-American modernism. The place that occupies the so called “Generation of Darío” in the intellectual history of Latin America is significant by its determining role in the building of the figure of the Latin-American intellectual. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the dynamic chartered by the continental modernization promoted the autonomization of the literary field. This fact produced a series of modifications of the practice of the intellectuals that operated as a condition of possibility of a speech that accentuated the expectations about the historical and political effectiveness of scientific, philosophical and literary writings. We analyze the topics around which those expectations were built in the light of the balance that was carried out by the argentine writer Manuel Ugarte in two late texts, The pain of writing (1933) and Latin American Writers of 1900 (1943). (shrink)

This paper analyzes some of the trends in one sector of the extensive corpus of critique of Hispano-American Modernism. It highlights their potential to articulate the aesthetic and political dimensions of the phenomenon. It outlines the interweaving of the relationship between diverse critical traditions from the most elementary level of contrast to the most complex level of complementarity. This display allows for establishing the relevance of an analysis that swivels between the text and its locus of enunciation, enabling a conversation (...) between the fields of literary critique and cultural studies. (shrink)

The epistemic, moral and political dimensions of Argentine anarchist writer Alberto Ghiraldo’s aesthetic discourse are examined here. This analysis is based upon his views of Jose Martí’s life and work as regards Ghiraldo’s attempt to edit the Cuban writer complete works ever since 1925. We hold Ghiraldo’s intent to give an epistemic and moralizing function to his writing tends to lose sight of the contingent forms of political articulation, and thus to dehistoricize practices on behalf benefit of the configuration of (...) an eschatological maximalism. (shrink)

Este artículo se centra en el gozo intelectual spinoziano. Después de un breve repaso de un libro de Jorge Wagensberg sobre la experiencia del gozo intelectual, aludo al fenómeno contrario: el pensamiento sombrío y el pesimismo. Después, remarco la defensa de Spinoza del gozo del conocimiento y su poder contra la tristeza y el pesimismo. Finalmente, analizo el peculiar gozo intelectual en Spinoza y conecto este gozo con la experiencia de eternidad y su expresión a través de categorías espaciales.

Abordamos la problemática de la elección institucional de estudios superiores en estudiantes de los Institutos de Educación Superior de la zona Este de la provincia de Mendoza a fin de conocer los aspectos que actúan en ella. Intentamos, además, identificar las representaciones sociales asociadas a dicha elección e indagar en sus causas. Procuramos dilucidar algunos interrogantes iniciales sobre los aspectos que explican la elección institucional, como los elementos del contexto, las representaciones de la formación en curso y los tópicos que (...) predominan en el imaginario sobre la educación superior de los estudiantes de los IES. Realizamos un diseño metodológico en el que convergen los abordajes cuantitativo y cualitativo. Para la recolección de la información empleamos encuestas y producciones biográfico-narrativas. A partir del análisis del discurso, analizamos e interpretamos aquellas narraciones. (shrink)

Many philosophers have pointed out that statistical evidence, or at least some forms of it, lack desirable epistemic or non-epistemic properties, and that this should make us wary of litigations in which the case against the defendant rests in whole or in part on statistical evidence. Others have responded that such broad reservations about statistical evidence are overly restrictive since appellate courts have expressed nuanced views about statistical evidence. In an effort to clarify and reconcile, I put forward an interpretive (...) analysis of why statistical evidence should raise concerns in some cases but not others. I argue that when there is a mismatch between the specificity of the evidence and the expected specificity of the accusation, statistical evidence—as any other kind of evidence—should be considered insufficient to sustain a conviction. I rely on different stylized court cases to illustrate the explanatory power of this analysis. (shrink)

We study ultraproducts of finite residue rings \ where \ is a non-principal ultrafilter. We find sufficient conditions of the ultrafilter \ to determine if the resulting ultraproduct \ has simple, NIP, \ but not simple nor NIP, or \ theory, noting that all these four cases occur.

In recent years, animal welfare has become an important element of sustainable production that has evolved along with the transformation of animal production systems. Consumer attitudes towards farm animal welfare are changing around the world, especially at emerging markets of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Survey-based research on consumer attitudes towards farm animal welfare has increased. However, the geographical coverage of studies on consumer attitudes and perceptions about farm animal welfare has mostly been limited to Europe, and North America. Until (...) now, Latin American consumers’ attitudes towards animal welfare have not been well studied. Despite the fact that Mexico, Chile and Brazil belong to the same region, there are marked differences between these countries in terms of their economical and geographical characteristics among other factors. Those differences potentially have an impact on consumer attitudes towards animal welfare and livestock production systems in general. Given the evidence from the literature review, it seems advisable that Latin American producers and food industry who engage in animal welfare-enhancing practices should clearly label their products with information on the type of husbandry system to reach those consumers who want to make an informed choice. Therefore, there are some aspects that need to be studied and cannot be worked separately in order to promote and understand consumer attitudes towards dairy and beef systems, such as geography, economic development, and politics. (shrink)

Herein we make a plea to machine ethicists for the inclusion of constraints on their theories consistent with empirical data on human moral cognition. As philosophers, we clearly lack widely accepted solutions to issues regarding the existence of free will, the nature of persons and firm conditions on moral agency/patienthood; all of which are indispensable concepts to be deployed by any machine able to make moral judgments. No agreement seems forthcoming on these matters, and we don’t hold out hope for (...) machines that can both always do the right thing (on some general ethic) and produce explanations for its behavior that would be understandable to a human confederate. Our tentative solution involves understanding the folk concepts associated with our moral intuitions regarding these matters, and how they might be dependent upon the nature of human cognitive architecture. It is in this spirit that we begin to explore the complexities inherent in human moral judgment via computational theories of the human cognitive architecture, rather than under the extreme constraints imposed by rational-actor models assumed throughout much of the literature on philosophical ethics. After discussing the various advantages and challenges of taking this particular perspective on the development of artificial moral agents, we computationally explore a case study of human intuitions about the self and causal responsibility. We hypothesize that a significant portion of the variance in reported intuitions for this case might be explained by appeal to an interplay between the human ability to mindread and to the way that knowledge is organized conceptually in the cognitive system. In the present paper, we build on a pre-existing computational model of mindreading (Bello et al. 2007) by adding constraints related to psychological distance (Trope and Liberman 2010), a well-established psychological theory of conceptual organization. Our initial results suggest that studies of folk concepts involved in moral intuitions lead us to an enriched understanding of cognitive architecture and a more systematic method for interpreting the data generated by such studies. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to analyze the way in which Edith Stein describes the human subject throughout her research, including her phenomenological phaseand the period of her Christian philosophy. In order to do this, I trace essential moments in Husserl’s philosophy, showing both Stein’s reliance upon Husserl andher originality. Both thinkers believe that an analysis of the human being can be carried out by examining consciousness and its lived experiences. Through suchan examination Stein arrives at the same conclusion (...) as Husserl, namely, that the human subject is formed of body, psyche, and spirit (Geist). Stein’s originalityconsists in a further development of the complexity of the human being. She maps this out, providing detailed analyses of the I, the soul, the spirit, and, ultimately,the person. She makes use of medieval philosophical anthropology, including that of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo. (shrink)

In the study of the soul between psychology and phenomenology in Edith Stein works it becomes clearer that it is only phenomenology that really comes to gripswith the question of psychic causality by correlating the two moments and it is therefore only phenomenology that can respond to Hume’s objections while yetremaining on his selfsame terrain. It is very important to distinguish between psychology and phenomenology and also to clarify the relationship between psyche and consciousness; there is thus reproposed the distinction (...) already made by Husserl, who stressed that when one sets out to look for the causes that determine psychic life, they must not be sought in life feelings (Lebensgefühle) but rather in the „modes” of a life force (Lebenskraft) that is announced in them. All this is indicated here within limits because psychology in itself is undoubtedly not a science of the spirit, though the psychic states, on the other hand, will not be validly understood unless and until one arrives, as is demonstrated in the essay under consideration, at the motivation and therefore the spiritual sphere. We would say that our body is animated by a psyche and further enlivened by the spirit. (shrink)

According to the principle of epistemic closure, knowledge is closed under known implication. The principle is intuitive but it is problematic in some cases. Suppose you know you have hands and you know that ‘I have hands’ implies ‘I am not a brain-in-a-vat’. Does it follow that you know you are not a brain-in-a-vat? It seems not; it should not be so easy to refute skepticism. In this and similar cases, we are confronted with a puzzle: epistemic closure is an (...) intuitive principle, but at times, it does not seem that we know by implication. In response to this puzzle, the literature has been mostly polarized between those who are willing to do away with epistemic closure and those who think we cannot live without it. But there is a third way. Here I formulate a restricted version of the principle of epistemic closure. In the standard version, the principle can range over any proposition; in the restricted version, it can only range over those propositions that are within the limits of a given epistemic inquiry and that do not constitute the underlying assumptions of the inquiry. If we adopt the restricted version, I argue, we can preserve the advantages associated with closure, while at the same time avoiding the puzzle I’ve described. My discussion also yields an insight into the nature of knowledge. I argue that knowledge is best understood as a topic-restricted notion, and that such a conception is a natural one given our limited cognitive resources. (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to explain the nature of evidential reasoning, the characteristic difficulties encountered, and the tools to address these difficulties. Our focus is on evidential reasoning in criminal cases. There is an extensive scholarly literature on these topics, and it is a secondary aim of the chapter to provide readers the means to find their way in historical and ongoing debates.

The Turing Test is claimed by many to be a way to test for the presence, in computers, of such ``deep'' phenomena as thought and consciousness. Unfortunately, attempts to build computational systems able to pass TT have devolved into shallow symbol manipulation designed to, by hook or by crook, trick. The human creators of such systems know all too well that they have merely tried to fool those people who interact with their systems into believing that these systems really have (...) minds. And the problem is fundamental: the structure of the TT is such as to cultivate tricksters. A better test is one that insists on a certain restrictive epistemic relation between an artificial agent A, its output o, and the human architect H of A – a relation which, roughly speaking, obtains when H cannot account for how A produced o. We call this test the ``Lovelace Test'' in honor of Lady Lovelace, who believed that only when computers originate things should they be believed to have minds. (shrink)

This note discusses three issues that Allen and Pardo believe to be especially problematic for a probabilistic interpretation of standards of proof: (1) the subjectivity of probability assignments; (2) the conjunction paradox; and (3) the non-comparative nature of probabilistic standards. I offer a reading of probabilistic standards that avoids these criticisms.

One of the most contentious problems of contemporary philosophy revolves around the relation between idealism and realism in phenomenology. Husserl’s early students were the first to raise the question about the relation, noting a change of perspective from his Logical Investigations to his subsequent works, including The Idea of Phenomenology and Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy. Adolf Reinach was one of these students, and as Husserl’s assistant, he exercised a great influence on his own student (...) Edith Stein. (shrink)

When the absence of an event causes some outcome, it is an instance of omissive causation. For instance, not eating lunch may cause you to be hungry. Recent psychological proposals concur that the mind represents causal relations, including omissive causal relations, through mental simulation, but they disagree on the form of that simulation. One theory states that people represent omissive causes as force vectors; another states that omissions are representations of contrasting counterfactual simulations; a third argues that people think about (...) omissions by representing sets of iconic possibilities – mental models – in a piecemeal fashion. In this paper, we tease apart the empirical predictions of the three theories and describe experiments that run counter to two of them. Experiments 1 and 2 show that reasoners can infer temporal relations from omissive causes – a pattern that contravenes the force theory. Experiment 3 asked participants to list the possibilities consistent with an omissive cause – it found that they tended to list particular privileged possibilities first, most often, and faster than alternative possibilities. The pattern is consistent with the model theory, but inconsistent with the contrast hypothesis. We marshal the evidence and explain why it helps to solve a long-standing debate about how the mind represents omissions. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 41-65, October 2021.

We undertake the comparison between Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory and Alexandr Bodganov's Tektology as two theories proposing a holistic interpretation of reality and claiming to solve problems which are unsolvable via conventional philosophic and scientific theories and methodologies. Basic misunderstandings by some Soviet authors regarding the nature of these theories — especially in the case of Tektology — are pointed out. The comparison is made in what concerns the general origins and purposes of the theories, their approaches to (...) the problem of organization, their treatment of mathematics and their understanding of the cybernetic concept of regulation.We contend that Tektologycontains — some 15 years earlier — all the basic concepts which will be later developed by the General Theory of Systems. As we shall see, Tektology is the ultimate expansion of any theory of systems. This fact is widely ignored in contemporary specialized literature. (shrink)