Millikan’s theory of content purports to rely heavily on the existence of isomorphisms between a system of representations and the things in the world which they represent — “the mapping requirement for being intentional signs” (Millikan 2004, p. 106). This paper asks whether those isomorphisms are doing any substantive explanatory work. Millikan’s isomorphism requirement is deployed for two main purposes. First, she claims that the existence of an isomorphism is the basic representing relation, with teleology playing a subsidiary role — (...) to account for misrepresentation (the possibility of error). Second, Millikan relies on an isomorphism requirement in order to guarantee that a system of representations displays a kind of productivity. This seemingly strong reliance on isomorphism has prompted the objection that isomorphism is too liberal to be the basic representing relation: there are isomorphisms between any system of putative representations and any set, of the same cardinality, of items putatively represented. This paper argues that all the work in fixing content is in fact done by the teleology. Deploying Millikan’s teleology-based conditions to ascribe contents will ensure that there is an isomorphism between representations and the things they represent, but the isomorphism ‘requirement’ is playing no substantive explanatory role in Millikan’s account of content determination. So an objection to her theory based on the liberality of isomorphism is misplaced. The second role for isomorphism is to account for productivity. If some kind of productivity is indeed necessary for representation, then functional isomorphism will again be too liberal a constraint to account for that feature. The paper suggests an alternative way of specifying the relation between a system of representations and that which they represent which is capable of playing an explanatory role in accounting for Millikan’s type of productivity. In short, the liberality of isomorphism is no objection to Millikan’s teleosemantics, since the isomorphism ‘requirement’ need play no independent substantive role in Millikan’s account of representation. (shrink)

Research design is fundamentally central to all scientific endeavors, at all levels and in all institutional settings. This book is a practical, short, simple, and authoritative examination of the concepts and issues in interpretive research design, looking across this approach's methods of generating and analyzing data. It is meant to set the stage for the more "how-to" volumes that will come later in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods, which will look at specific methods and the designs that they require. (...) It will, however, engage some very practical issues, such as ethical considerations and the structure of research proposals. Interpretive research design requires a high degree of flexibility, where the researcher is more likely to think of "hunches" to follow than formal hypotheses to test. Yanow and Schwartz-Shea address what research design is and why it is important, what interpretive research is and how it differs from quantitative and qualitative research in the positivist traditions, how to design interpretive research, and the sections of a research proposal and report. (shrink)

Fodor’s radical concept nativism flowed from his view that hypothesis testing is the only route to concept acquisition. Many have successfully objected to the overly-narrow restriction to learning by hypothesis testing. Existing representations can be connected to a new representational vehicle so as to constitute a sustaining mechanism for a new representation, without the new representation thereby being constituted by or structured out of the old. This paper argues that there is also a deeper objection. Connectionism shows that a more (...) fundamental assumption underpinning the debate can also be rejected: the assumption that the development of a new representation must be explained in content-involving terms if innateness is to be avoided. -/- Fodor has argued that connectionism offers no new resources to explain concept acquisition: unless it is merely an uninteresting claim about neural implementation, connectionism’s defining commitment to distributed representations reduces to the claim that some representations are structured out of others (which is the old, problematic research programme). Examination of examples of representational development in connectionist networks shows, however, that some such models explain the development of new representational capacities in non-representational terms. They illustrate the possibility of representational development that is not explicable-by-content. Connectionist representations can be distributed in an important sense, which is incompatible with the assumption of explanation-by-content: they can be distributed over non-representational resources that account for their development. Rejecting the assumption of explanation-by-content thereby opens up a more radical way of rejecting Fodor’s argument for radical concept nativism. (shrink)

The success of a piece of behaviour is often explained by its being caused by a true representation (similarly, failure falsity). In some simple organisms, success is just survival and reproduction. Scientists explain why a piece of behaviour helped the organism to survive and reproduce by adverting to the behaviour’s having been caused by a true representation. That usage should, if possible, be vindicated by an adequate naturalistic theory of content. Teleosemantics cannot do so, when it is applied to simple (...) representing systems (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Here it is argued that the teleosemantic approach to content should therefore be modified, not abandoned, at least for simple representing systems. The new ‘infotel-semantics’ adds an input condition to the output condition offered by teleosemantics, recognising that it is constitutive of content in a simple representing system that the tokening of a representation should correlate probabilistically with the obtaining of its specific evolutionary success condition. (shrink)

Who needs rules? -- Communities and rules -- Rules and responsibility -- Natural and positive laws -- History of law -- Systems of law -- Federal and state laws -- Criminal law -- Civil law -- Courts, lawyers, and judges -- Do laws change? -- Living with laws.

According to George Lucas, Star Wars is a morality play, a mythological tale of good and evil that's meant to teach timeless lessons about the moral life. This chapter shows how the moral framework of natural law ethics provides a philosophical foundation for the morality of the Force and helps illuminate Star Wars' moral themes.

Interpretive social science consists of researchers’ interpretations of actors’ interpretations. Bevir and Blakely’s anti-naturalist approach truncates this double hermeneutic, neglecting how researcher identity affects knowledge-making. Moreover, by disappearing methodology and treating methods as neutral tools, the authors miss the significance of methodological practice. In their treatment, an anti-naturalist philosophy is sufficient to produce high-quality interpretive research, even when the methods used are those of large-N statistics or other variables-based approaches. Unfortunately, then, the book is unlikely to create more space for (...) research alternatives to the naturalism that the authors seek to unseat. (shrink)

Self, Language, and World: Problems from Kant, Sellars, and Rosenberg Edited by James R. O'Shea and Eric M. Rubenstein Introduction KANT Willem deVries, Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy David Landy, The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept LANGUAGE AND MIND William G. Lycan, Rosenberg On Proper Names Douglas Long, Why Life is Necessary for Mind: The Significance of Animate Behavior Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Green, Lionspeak: Communication, Expression, and Meaning David Rosenthal, The Mind and Its Expression MIND (...) AND KNOWLEDGE Jeffrey Sicha, The Manifest Image: the Sensory and the Mental Bruce Aune, Rosenberg on Knowing Joseph C. Pitt, Sellarsian Antifoundationalism and Scientific Realism Matthew Chrisman, The Aim of Belief and the Goal of Truth: Reflections on Rosenberg James O’Shea, Conceptual Thinking and Nonconceptual Content: A Sellarsian Divide ONTOLOGY Anton Koch, Persons as Mirroring the World Eric M. Rubenstein, Form and Content, Substance and Stuff Ralf Stoecker, On Being a Realist About Death William G. Lycan, Biographical Remarks on Jay F. Rosenberg Scholarly Publications of Jay F. Rosenberg. (shrink)

Ender Wiggin spends much of Ender's Game playing games of one sort or another. These range from simple role‐playing games with his siblings (“buggers and astronauts”), to battleroom contests, to the strange free play Giant's Drink video game in which he must kill a giant and confront his deepest fears. This chapter examines the role that games play in Ender's development as both a military commander and as a human being. It considers a number of interrelated questions: What is a (...) game? Is it really appropriate to call Battle School activities “games,” given how serious they are? What is the relationship between a good game and the development of a good person?. (shrink)

. Book Reviews. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 261-286.

Miracle Max, it seems, is the only remaining miracle worker in all of Florin. Among other things, this means that he (unlike anyone else) can resurrect the recently dead, at least in certain circumstances. Max’s peculiar talents come with significant perks (for example, he can basically set his own prices!), but they also raise a number of ethical dilemmas that range from the merely amusing to the truly perplexing: -/- How much about Max’s “methods” does he need to reveal to (...) his patients? Is it really OK for Max to lie about Valerie’s being a witch, even though she really isn’t? Just how much of the “truth” does Max have to tell his patients? -/- Let’s suppose that Humperdinck had offered Max his old job back. Would it have been OK for Max to accept this offer? What about if Humperdinck wanted him to do experiments at “the Zoo”? -/- Is Max obligated to offer his services to everyone who needs them, such as the (mostly) dead Westley and friends? Or is he free to pick and choose? -/- In this chapter, I’ll consider how these questions might be addressed using concepts of medical ethics. As it turns out, Max’s dilemmas are not too different from the sorts of dilemmas that many medical professionals encounter in their daily lives, and exploring how Max could (or should) respond to them can help us figure out what we can do here in the “real” world. (shrink)

This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. -/- The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science (...) of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field’s periphery to its very centre, thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two objectives: (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. -/- A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In a previous article (O’Shea 2006) I provided a concise overview of the reception of Kant’s philosophy among analytic philosophers during the periods from the ‘early analytic’ reactions to Kant in Frege, Russell, Carnap and others, to the systematic Kant-inspired works in epistemology and metaphysics of C. I. Lewis and P. F. Strawson, in particular. In this chapter I use the recently reinvigorated work of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) in the second half of the twentieth century as the basis (...) for presenting some of the most familiar ‘analytic Kantian’ themes that continue to animate current debates. I also argue that the complex relationships between Sellars’ philosophy and Kant’s thought are often misunderstood. Overall the chapter examines Sellars’ analytic appropriations of Kant in three topic-areas of significant current philosophical debate: (1) conceptual analysis and the structure of human knowledge; (2) laws of nature, the causal modalities, and the pragmatic or relative a priori; and (3) the disputes concerning Kant and nonconceptual content. (shrink)

Animal welfare has a long history of disregard. While in recent decades the study of animal welfare has become a scientific discipline of its own, the difficulty of measuring animal welfare can still be vastly underestimated. There are three primary theories, or perspectives, on animal welfare - biological functioning, natural living and affective state. These come with their own diverse methods of measurement, each providing a limited perspective on an aspect of welfare. This paper describes a perspectival pluralist account of (...) animal welfare, in which all three theoretical perspectives and their multiple measures are necessary to understand this complex phenomenon and provide a full picture of animal welfare. This in turn will offer us a better understanding of perspectivism and pluralism itself. (shrink)

These comments, which include informal offhand asides made during delivery, derive from an ‘Author Meets Critics’ session on Robert Brandom’s book, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars’ (2015), held at Kent State University and published subsequently in Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy (2017).

If asked to explain why the Golds’ treatment of other colors in Red Rising is wrong, it is tempting to say something like “they are all human beings, and it is wrong to treat humans in this way!” In this essay, I’ll argue that this simple answer is considerably complicated by the fact that the different colors might not be members of the same biological species, and it is in fact unclear whether any of them are the same species as (...) current humans. Explaining why exactly this is so will lead us to an exploration the long-running debate in biology and philosophy over what exactly it means for two organisms to be “members of the same species.” I’ll begin by discussing the biological essentialism of Aristotle and his followers, who held that an individual organism’s species was determined by essence. One can easily imagine that the Golds might find this attractive, since it would suggest that their “superior” mental and physical capacities made them a different (and probably “higher”) species of humanity than the other colors. Unfortunately for Aristotle, this turns out to be inconsistent with Charles Darwin’s account of evolution by natural selection. This development has led many modern biologists and philosophers of biology to conceptualize species not as an abstract “form” that serves to classify organisms, but rather as a concrete collection of organisms relatively close to each other in space and time. In contrast to biological essentialism, this view of “species as concrete individual” might seem to support the Reds’ claim to the “same species” as the Gold, since they are both part of the same overarching society. Next, I’ll consider how we might tell where one species “ends” and another one “begins.” As it turns out, biologists have many ways of answering his question, each of which makes different judgments about the species of Red Rising’s characters. So, for example, the “Biological Species Concept” bases judgements about species membership on the ability to produce fertile offspring. This concept is far from perfect, however, for reasons that Red Rising makes clear: it doesn’t deal clearly with cases where reproduction is possible but very difficult (a Red and a Gold having a child) or for organisms that do not reproduce sexually (such as Pinks). I’ll then explore a few prominent alternatives to BSC, including both genetically and ecologically based species concepts, and consider their consequences for the society of Red Rising. I’ll conclude by advocating for a “pluralism” about species membership, and will suggest that the people of Red Rising (as well as in the real world) should beware of basing arguments for moral or political equality on the all-too-slippery notion of “shared humanity.” Instead, they should focus on the qualities that make the lives of the individuals (regardless of their species) worth caring about, such as their shared desires to avoid suffering and to lead fulfilling, meaningful lives. (shrink)

This article develops a civic republican approach to medical ethics. It outlines civic republican concerns about the domination that arises from subjection to an arbitrary power of interference, while suggesting republican remedies to such domination in healthcare. These include proposals for greater review, challenge and pre-authorisation of medical power. It extends this analysis by providing a civic republican account of assistive arbitrary power, showing how it can create similar problems within both formal and informal relationships of care, and offering strategies (...) for tackling it. Two important objections to civic republican medical ethics—that it overvalues independence and political participation in healthcare—are also considered and rebutted. (shrink)

"Ethical Explorations: Moral Dilemmas in a Universe of Possibilities" by Brendan Shea is an open access textbook that provides a comprehensive study of ethical philosophy. Shea makes it his task to chart the sprawling landscape of moral thought from ancient times to the present, employing a straightforward, easily accessible style. -/- In the book, each chapter addresses a distinct ethical theory. Shea discusses everything from Plato's allegorical Cave to contemporary issues in bioethics. The text features relatable narratives, (...) clear explanations of core concepts, thought-provoking questions, and handy glossaries to help readers grasp the subject matter. -/- Among the topics, you'll find the principles of utilitarianism through the adventures of a princess, an exploration of duty via a story about a golem, and a look at natural law theory through an engaging science-fiction tale. Contemporary themes also make an appearance, including discussions on Marxism, Nietzsche's radical ideas, Simone de Beauvoir's intersection of feminism and existentialism, and racial theories from W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King. -/- As an open access (CC-BY) textbook, "Ethical Explorations" is freely available to everyone, making the study of moral philosophy accessible to all. It's a tool that gives its readers the means to wrestle with ethical questions in an ever-changing world. (shrink)

One job for theories of mental representation is to distinguish between different kinds of mental representation: beliefs, desires, intentions, perceptual states, etc. What makes a mental state a belief that p rather than a desire that p or a visual representation that p? Functionalism is a leading approach for doing so: for individuating mental states. Functionalism is designed to allow that psychological states can be multiply realized. Mark Sprevak has argued that, for a functionalist account of psychological states to apply (...) to creatures that are organised in a very different way to humans (call them Martians), the way a psychological state is functionally individuated has to be relatively coarse-grained (Sprevak 2009). Psychological research might show that human beliefs are directly available to consciousness, that they are formed as the result of deliberate judgement, and so on, but theorists would be precluded from including these roles in their account of belief, if Sprevak is right. The argument for coarse-grained individuation fails if we distinguish functionalism about what it takes to be a psychological state in general from functionalism about a particular state type such as belief. Functionalism individuates a psychological state like believing that p partly by reference to its relations to other psychological states: desiring that p, perceiving that p, intending that p, etc. Functionalist motivations do indeed suggest that Martians with a functional organisation and physical substrate quite unlike humans could have psychological states, but not that they should have states with the interrelated collection of functional roles to count as beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Thus, theorists are not precluded from including functional relations to consciousness or deliberate judgement in their account of (human) belief, consistent with allowing that Martians would have their own collection of functionally interrelated psychological states. Sprevak’s coarse-grained functionalism implies an implausibly liberal form of extended cognition. The point about functional interrelations allows us to avoid that conclusion without jettisoning functionalism (as Sprevak suggests we should): records in a human notebook may not enter into the right interrelations with other human psychological states to count as beliefs; nor do they enter into any interrelations with Martian psychological states. Functionalism can therefore allow that Martians have psychological states while holding that few if any of the beliefs we humans have are, as a matter of fact, extended. (shrink)

In it he came fully to terms with the inadequacy of traditional democratic theory." This volume is part of a continuing series on the major works of Walter Lippmann.

Over the past decade, heightened attention has been placed on integrating literacy strategies into the social studies. The content literacy movement, as it has become known, began with the passing of No Child Left Behind and has continued with the newly implemented Common Core State Standards. In light of this movement, many states required the pre-service social studies teachers to take courses to teach them how to integrate content literacy into their field in spite of the fact that research has (...) shown that these types of courses can lead to heightened opposition. This study examines the process of change that pre-service social studies teachers experienced as they completed a content literacy course designed to model the principles of content literacy, provide opportunities to struggle with the application of content literacy, and support attempts at implementation. (shrink)

A most sensible exposition of Nietzsche's philosophy.

There has been little investigation to date of the way metacognition is involved in conceptual change. It has been recognised that analytic metacognition is important to the way older children acquire more sophisticated scientific and mathematical concepts at school. But there has been barely any examination of the role of metacognition in earlier stages of concept acquisition, at the ages that have been the major focus of the developmental psychology of concepts. The growing evidence that even young children have a (...) capacity for procedural metacognition raises the question of whether and how these abilities are involved in conceptual development. More specifically, are there developmental changes in metacognitive abilities that have a wholescale effect on the way children acquire new concepts and replace existing concepts? We show that there is already evidence of at least one plausible example of such a link and argue that these connections deserve to be investigated systematically. (shrink)

In recent years, the ethical impact of AI has been increasingly scrutinized, with public scandals emerging over biased outcomes, lack of transparency, and the misuse of data. This has led to a growing mistrust of AI and increased calls for mandated ethical audits of algorithms. Current proposals for ethical assessment of algorithms are either too high level to be put into practice without further guidance, or they focus on very specific and technical notions of fairness or transparency that do not (...) consider multiple stakeholders or the broader social context. In this article, we present an auditing framework to guide the ethical assessment of an algorithm. The audit instrument itself is comprised of three elements: a list of possible interests of stakeholders affected by the algorithm, an assessment of metrics that describe key ethically salient features of the algorithm, and a relevancy matrix that connects the assessed metrics to stakeholder interests. The proposed audit instrument yields an ethical evaluation of an algorithm that could be used by regulators and others interested in doing due diligence, while paying careful attention to the complex societal context within which the algorithm is deployed. (shrink)

Socialist republicans advocate public ownership and control of the means of production in order to achieve the republican goal of a society without endemic domination. While civic republicanism is often attacked for its conservatism, the relatively neglected radical history of the tradition shows how a republican form of socialism provides powerful conceptual resources to critique capitalism for leaving workers and citizens dominated. This analysis supports a programme of public ownership and economic democracy intended to reduce domination in the workplace and (...) wider society. I defend this socialist republicanism from both the Marxist objection that it overlooks the impersonal nature of domination under capitalism and the left-liberal objections that property-owning democracy or worker codetermination are sufficient to suppress dominating relationships. The resulting position identifies the need for more ambitious institutional grounds for republican liberty than is often supposed, while offering us a distinctive emancipatory justification for socialism. (shrink)

Adorno's Aesthetics of Critique examines Theodor Adorno's mode of critique from the perspective of his aesthetics. This has two purposes. The first purpose is to determine the effect of the primary importance Adorno places on aesthetics in his philosophy as a whole and to determine how this primacy influences the way in which he reads the philosophical tradition. The second purpose is to understand the role of aesthetics in critical thinking generally and to reinvigorate Adorno's understanding of the subjective and (...) objective dimensions of critique. The ultimate aim is to promote new interpretations of Adorno and to reassert his relevance for constructing effective modes of critical thinking. The book proceeds through four main chapters that focus on four different dimensions of Adorno's thought: knowledge, history, culture, and art. The first chapter uses Adorno's aesthetic theory to re-read his interpretation of Kant's subject-object dynamic. This grounds the second chapter, on history, which proceeds through an analysis of Adorno's reading of Hegel. The third chapter uses the philosophical grounding of the first two to explore how knowledge and history interact within society as fundamental dimensions of "culture." The scope and meaning of culture and its relevance for critique form the primary focus of this chapter. The fourth chapter turns to art to highlight the relationship between the critical and artistic dimensions of aesthetics in order to facilitate a dialogue between them. This serves the purpose of asserting and outlining the relevance of aesthetics for critical thought in the humanities and social sciences, which forms the crux of the book. (shrink)

The work of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars continues to have a significant impact on the contemporary philosophical scene. His writings have influenced major thinkers such as Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, and Dennett, and many of Sellars basic conceptions, such as the logical space of reasons, the myth of the given, and the manifest and scientific images, have become standard philosophical terms. Often, however, recent uses of these terms do not reflect the richness or the true sense of Sellars original ideas. (...) This book gets to the heart of Sellars philosophy and provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to his lifes work. The book is structured around what Sellars himself regarded as the philosophers overarching task: to achieve a coherent vision of reality that will finally overcome the continuing clashes between the world as common sense takes it to be and the world as science reveals it to be. It provides a clear analysis of Sellars groundbreaking philosophy of mind, his novel theory of consciousness, his defense of scientific realism, and his thoroughgoing naturalism with a normative turn. Providing a lively examination of Sellars work through the central problem of what it means to be a human being in a scientific world, this book will be a valuable resource for all students of philosophy. (shrink)

John King-Farlow's ‘The Positive McTaggart on Time’ brings out extremely important likenesses between ‘abstract’ metaphysicians and ‘concrete’ philosophers of science. These striking similarities illustrate a perennial human quest for Something More Basic than Time, a quest which characterizes not only mystics who rejoice in contradictions but hard-headed philosophers who submit to the rigours of logic. King-Farlow is largely concerned with the McTaggart of 1908 and his motivation for writing ‘The Unreality of Time’. I should like to explore further the surprising (...) bond between the Search for Something Deeper in the later McTaggart of The Nature of Existence and the writings on Time of Hans Reichenbach and Adolf Grünbaum. Reflection on this similarity should enable us better to evaluate the view that our vulgar, if practically useful, assertions about Time's Arrow must be reinterpreted by the wise in terms of chastened logical constructions out of statements about Something Deeper—logical constructions which are alleged, if chaste enough, to be eliminable. (shrink)

A review of deVries' and O'Shea's books, both titled "Wilfrid Sellars". By Jaroslav Peregrin.

We have various everyday measures for identifying the presence of consciousness, such as the capacity for verbal report and the intentional control of behavior. However, there are many contexts in which these measures are difficult to apply, and even when they can be applied one might have doubts as to their validity in determining the presence/absence of consciousness. Everyday measures for identifying consciousness are particularly problematic when it comes to ‘challenging cases’—human infants, people with brain damage, nonhuman animals, and AI (...) systems. There is a pressing need to identify measures of consciousness that can be applied to challenging cases. This paper explores one of the most promising strategies for identifying and validating such measures—the natural-kind strategy. The paper is in two broad parts. Part I introduces the natural-kind strategy, and contrasts it with other influential approaches in the field. Part II considers a number of objections to the approach, arguing that none succeeds. (shrink)

In this paper, we distinguish between different sorts of assessments of algorithmic systems, describe our process of assessing such systems for ethical risk, and share some key challenges and lessons for future algorithm assessments and audits. Given the distinctive nature and function of a third-party audit, and the uncertain and shifting regulatory landscape, we suggest that second-party assessments are currently the primary mechanisms for analyzing the social impacts of systems that incorporate artificial intelligence. We then discuss two kinds of as-sessments: (...) an ethical risk assessment and a narrower, technical algo-rithmic bias assessment. We explain how the two assessments depend on each other, highlight the importance of situating the algorithm within its particular socio-technical context, and discuss a number of lessons and challenges for algorithm assessments and, potentially, for algorithm audits. The discussion builds on our team’s experience of advising and conducting ethical risk assessments for clients across dif-ferent industries in the last four years. Our main goal is to reflect on the key factors that are potentially ethically relevant in the use of algo-rithms, and draw lessons for the nascent algorithm assessment and audit industry, in the hope of helping all parties minimize the risk of harm from their use. (shrink)

We report experimental results showing that participants are more likely to attribute knowledge in familiar Gettier cases when the would-be knowers are performing actions that are negative in some way (e.g. harmful, blameworthy, norm-violating) than when they are performing positive or neutral actions. Our experiments bring together important elements from the Gettier case literature in epistemology and the Knobe effect literature in experimental philosophy and reveal new insights into folk patterns of knowledge attribution.

An alarming number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued that mind extends beyond the brain and body. This book evaluates these arguments and suggests that, typically, it does not. A timely and relevant study that exposes the need to develop a more sophisticated theory of cognition, while pointing to a bold new direction in exploring the nature of cognition Articulates and defends the “mark of the cognitive”, a common sense theory used to distinguish between cognitive and non-cognitive processes Challenges (...) the current popularity of extended cognition theory through critical analysis and by pointing out fallacies and shortcoming in the literature Stimulates discussions that will advance debate about the nature of cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This article undertakes a republican analysis of power in the workplace and labour market in order to determine whether workers are dominated by employers. Civic republicans usually take domination to be subjection to an arbitrary power to interfere with choice. But when faced with labour disputes over what choices it is normal for workers to make for themselves, these accounts of domination struggle to determine whether employers possess the power to interfere. I propose an alternative capabilitarian conception of domination as (...) the arbitrary power to determine access to capabilities necessary for relationships of equality between citizens. This approach allows us to diagnose domination in the workplace and the labour market but does not capture unfreedom arising from the wider socio-structural position of workers. Thus, I supplement this capabilitarian account of the domination of workers with a structural account of dominating power, which reveals a richer set of conditions under which employers dominate workers. (shrink)