Andrew was a desperately premature baby weighing under two pounds. He died after months of "heroic' efforts in an intensive care facility. The story of his short cruel institutionalised life is a case study in the limits and excesses of modern medicine. The night he told us our son Andrew was about to die the doctor who had taken charge of him six months before also told us we were "intellectually tight' that we had "no feelings only thoughts and words (...) and strategies'. We were "bad parents'. As the parents of a five-year-old daughter we knew the love a mother and father feels for children. Yet as Andrew's parents we were used to condemnation and insult. Andrew was a baby born 15 weeks prematurely weighing only 1lb 12oz and in a state of painful deterioration almost from the start. We wanted him to be allowed to die a natural death. Andrew's story is the story of what can happen when a baby becomes hopelessly entrapped in an intensive care unit where the machinery is more sophisticated than the code of law and ethics governing its use. The letter printed below was sent to the administrator and numerous personnel of the hospital that controlled the life and death of our son. The physician-in-chief of that hospital characterised it as a "carefully documented critique'. The letter appear here somewhat edited and abridged and the names of people and institutions have been changed all but our own. It is the personal record of what happened to our baby and to us. (shrink)

The past seven centuries of scholarly attention to and debate over the Roman de la Rose bear strong witness to the fact that the allegorical figure Faus Semblant presents us with an interpretive crux—one of many such in the poem—that we are not likely to resolve in the coming centuries. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a character who so embodies paradox—a profane friar who is openly honest about his intent to deceive—should be so difficult to pin down; (...) it is his singular talent, after all, to dissemble and confuse. The last century has seen a significant increase in criticism centered upon Faus Semblant that seeks to understand what he signifies within the larger allegory of the poem and how he relates to Jean de Meun's purported satire and antifraternalism. But this struggle to understand and explain the character began centuries earlier and, like him, has taken many forms. As early as the thirteenth century, the passage of Jean's poem in which Faus Semblant explains his craft and guile had begun to attract a diverse group of revisers: scribes, who added or deleted passages in order to shape a reading of the poem or avoid offending readers; remanieurs, such as Gui de Mori, who substantially rewrote the passage in efforts to reshape the poem into a more cohesive form; readers, whose marginal inscriptions and notae often accompany the passage; and illustrators , as images of Faus Semblant are frequently included in illuminated copies of Rose manuscripts. Even Jean himself seemed to feel the need to gloss and contain Faus Semblant, offering an apology and clarification in lines 15213–30. (shrink)

When Artificial Intelligence (AI) is applied in decision-making that affects people’s lives, it is now well established that the outcomes can be biased or discriminatory. The question of whether algorithms themselves can be among the sources of bias has been the subject of recent debate among Artificial Intelligence researchers, and scholars who study the social impact of technology. There has been a tendency to focus on examples, where the data set used to train the AI is biased, and denial on (...) the part of some researchers that algorithms can also be biased. Here we illustrate the point that algorithms themselves can be the source of bias with the example of collaborative filtering algorithms for recommendation and search. These algorithms are known to suffer from cold-start, popularity, and homogenizing biases, among others. While these are typically described as statistical biases rather than biases of moral import; in this paper we show that these statistical biases can lead directly to discriminatory outcomes. The intuitive idea is that data points on the margins of distributions of human data tend to correspond to marginalized people. The statistical biases described here have the effect of further marginalizing the already marginal. Biased algorithms for applications such as media recommendations can have significant impact on individuals’ and communities’ access to information and culturally-relevant resources. This source of bias warrants serious attention given the ubiquity of algorithmic decision-making. (shrink)

Mechanism schemata are one of the least understood parts of MDC’s account of mechanistic explanation. Relatedly, there is a common misconception that there is no place for abstraction in MDC mechanisms. These two problems can be remedied by looking more carefully at what MDC say both in their 2000 paper and elsewhere about schemata and abstraction, and by following up on a comment of Machamer’s indicating that Piaget was the inspiration for schemata. Darden’s work on mechanism discovery reveals an important (...) role for abstract mechanism schemata, not only as concise representations of known mechanisms, but also as hypotheses for how unknown mechanisms might work. Piaget’s schemata likewise both capture the developing child’s current state of knowledge, and serve as templates into which new experiences are fit. If we assume that mechanistic explanations should pick out real difference-makers, and that what makes a difference needn’t always be fine-grained details, we open up an explanatory role for abstract schemata to play. Schemata represent the coarser-grained features of mechanisms that are often among the most important difference-makers. In many contexts they might need to be supplemented with finer grained details in order to give an adequate explanation, but independent of those details, schemata remain explanatory in virtue of being part of the explanation. Detailed accounts of real difference-makers need not be seen as in competition with abstract models or generalizations. They can be combined in mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

William James presaged, and Alan Allport voiced criticisms of cause theories of executive attention for involving a homunculus who directs attention. I review discussions of this problem, and argue that existing philosophical denials of the problem depend on equivocations between different senses of “Cartesian error”. Another sort of denial tries to get around the problem by offering empirical evidence that such an executive attention director exists in prefrontal cortex. I argue that the evidence does not warrant the conclusion that an (...) executive director can be localized in prefrontal cortex unless dubious assumptions are made, and that computational models purporting to support these assumptions either beg the question, or fail to model executive attention in terms of cause theories. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson's Loop Case is particularly significant in normative ethics because it questions the validity of the intuitively plausible Doctrine of Double Effect, according to which there is a significant difference between harm that is intended and harm that is merely foreseen and not intended. Recently, Frances Kamm has argued that what she calls the Doctrine of Triple Effect, which draws a distinction between acting because-of and acting in-order-to, can account for our judgment about the Loop Case. In this (...) paper, I first argue that even if the distinction drawn by DTE can be sustained, it does not seem to apply to the Loop Case. Moreover, I question whether this distinction has any normative significance. The upshot is that I am skeptical that DTE can explain our judgment about the Loop Case. (shrink)

Upshot: Second-order cybernetics is an important field for the scientific enterprise but it has difficulty explaining itself to those outside the field and defining itself to those inside the field.

Kyle Stanford’s reformulation of the problem of underdetermination has the potential to highlight the epistemic obligations of scientists. Stanford, however, presents the phenomenon of unconceived alternatives as a problem for realists, despite critics’ insistence that we have contextual explanations for scientists’ failure to conceive of their successors’ theories. I propose that responsibilist epistemology and the concept of “role oughts,” as discussed by Lorraine Code and Richard Feldman, can pacify Stanford’s critics and reveal broader relevance of the “new induction.” The possibility (...) of unconceived alternatives pushes us to question our contemporary expectation for scientists to reason outside of their historical moment. (shrink)

Diversity is often announced as a solution to ethical problems in artificial intelligence (AI), but what exactly is meant by diversity and how it can solve those problems is seldom spelled out. This lack of clarity is one hurdle to motivating diversity in AI. Another hurdle is that while the most common perceptions about what diversity is are too weak to do the work set out for them, stronger notions of diversity are often defended on normative grounds that fail to (...) connect to the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. However, there is a long history of research in feminist philosophy of science and a recent body of work in social epistemology that taken together provide the foundation for a notion of diversity that is both strong enough to do the work demanded of it, and can be defended on epistemic grounds that connect with the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. We clarify and defend that notion here by introducing emergent expertise as a network phenomenon wherein groups of workers with expertise of different types can gain knowledge not available to any individual alone, as long as they have ways of communicating across types of expertise. We illustrate the connected epistemic and ethical benefits of designing technology with diverse groups of workers using the examples of an infamous racist soap dispenser, and the millimeter wave scanners used in US airport security. (shrink)

Recent extensions of mechanistic explanation into psychology suggest that cognitive models are only explanatory insofar as they map neatly onto, and serve as scaffolding for more detailed neural models. Filling in those neural details is what these accounts take the integration of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to mean, and they take this process to be seamless. Critics of this view have given up on cognitive models possibly explaining mechanistically in the course of arguing for cognitive models having explanatory value independent (...) of how well they align with neural mechanisms. We can have things both ways, however. The problem with seamless integration accounts is their seamlessness, not that they take cognitive models to be mechanistic. A non-componential view of mechanisms allows for cognitive and neural models that cross cut one another, and for cognitive models that don’t decompose into parts. I illustrate the inadequacy of seamless accounts of integration by contrasting how “filter” models of attention in psychology and of sodium channels in neuroscience developed; by questioning whether the mappings generated by neuroimaging subtraction studies achieve integration; and by reinterpreting the evidence for cognitive models of memory having been successfully integrated with neural models. I argue that the integrations we can realistically expect are more partial, patchy, and full of loose threads than the mosaic unity Craver describes. (shrink)

There is a vast literature within philosophy of mind that focuses on artificial intelligence, but hardly mentions methodological questions. There is also a growing body of work in philosophy of science about modeling methodology that hardly mentions examples from cognitive science. Here these discussions are connected. Insights developed in the philosophy of science literature about the importance of idealization provide a way of understanding the neural implausibility of connectionist networks. Insights from neurocognitive science illuminate how relevant similarities between models and (...) targets are picked out, how modeling inferences are justified, and the metaphysical status of models. (shrink)

Different conceptions on reality in physics and philosophy in the 20th century have been analyzed in the article. These approaches caused the necessity to study the multitude of the worlds. The author proved that multiworld interpretation of quantum mechanics and multitude of the worlds in the Goodman'€™s conception are opposite tendencies. Everett and his followers consider the quantum world as some universal reality whereas Goodman and his supporters do not believe in universal reality.

Berkeley holds that the essence of sensible objects is percipi. So, sensible objects cannot exist unperceived. Naturally, this has invited questions about the existence of sensible objects when unperceived by finite minds. This is sometimes called the Problem of Continuity. It is frequently said that Berkeley solves the problem by invoking God's ever-present perception to ensure that sensible objects maintain a continuous existence. Problems with this line of response have led some to a phenomenalist interpretation of Berkeley's claim. This paper (...) argues that neither of these are Berkeley's solution since he recognizes no such problem. The paper sketches a new interpretation of sensible objects that obviates the need for a "solution" by avoiding the "problem" in the first place. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrgang: 13 Heft: 2 Seiten: 207-222.

According to the Bible, ancient Israel's neighbors worshipped a wide variety of gods. In recent years, scholars have sought a better understanding of this early polytheistic milieu and its relation to Yahweh, the God of Israel. Drawing on ancient Ugaritic texts and looking closely at Ugaritic deities, Mark Smith examines the meaning of "divinity" in the ancient near East and considers how this concept applies to Yahweh.

Synchronicity has long been described as an ‘acausal’ connecting principle. However, the use of this descriptor is not only misleading, but also outright false on any seriously considered picture of synchronicity due to admissions of multiple types of causes. Furthermore, previous attempts to clarify the ‘acausal’ label have served only to further muddy the waters of discussion. A ‘multi-causal’ conception of synchronicity is proposed to ease and encourage future discussion in many disciplines.

In this article I seek to explain Hegel’s significance to contemporary meta-ethics, in particular to Kantian constructivism. I argue that in the master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit , Hegel shows that self-consciousness and intersubjectivity arise at the same time. This point, I argue, shows that there is no problem with taking other people’s reasons to motivate us since reflection on our aims is necessarily also reflection on the needs of those around us. I further explore Hegel’s contribution to (...) the debate about internal and external reasons. I end by arguing that we should understand reasons as historically constructed in the sense that who counts as an intrinsic bearer of value changes over time. I thus argue that the struggle for recognition is in fact the beginning of the long march toward the idea of recognition and the Kantian kingdom of ends. This march, however, is driven by the need to overcome injustice as it is instantiated at the beginning of history by the master’s absolute domination of the slave. (shrink)

This chapter explores the epistemic roles played by connectionist models of cognition, and offers a formal analysis of how connectionist models explain. It looks at how other types of computational models explain. Classical artificial intelligence (AI) programs explain using abductive reasoning, or inference to the best explanation; they begin with the phenomena to be explained, and devise rules that can produce the right outcome. The chapter also looks at several examples of connectionist models of cognition, observing what sorts of constraints (...) are used in their design, and how their results are evaluated. It argues that the point of implementing networks roughly analogous to neural structures is to discover and explores the generic mechanisms at work in the brain, not to deduce the precise activities of specific structures. The chapter explores a formal analysis of the explanations offered, which interprets connectionist models and the cognitive theories they represent as sharing membership in a type of mechanism. (shrink)

This paper is an adventure of ideas which draws on the 'magic—magician' metaphor of medieval India to define the current existential predicament of the world. The author sets an agenda for reprioritization for restoring the imbalance in the fragmented human consciousness. This, the paper suggests, can be done by a gradual return to the subjective causal source of all our problems. The waning of the Objective Age created by science-technology-industrialism has led to a 'mutilating assimilative im balance' in this world. (...) The author urges the readers to strive for a subjective metanoia to counteract the objective paranoia of our times. (shrink)