The study of human-human communication and the development of computational models for human-agent communication have diverged significantly throughout the last decade. Yet, despite frequently made claims of “super-human performance” in, e.g., speech recognition or image processing, so far, no system is able to lead a half-decent coherent conversation with a human. In this paper, we argue that we must start to re-consider the hallmarks of cooperative communication and the core capabilities that we have developed for it, and which conversational agents (...) need to be equipped with: incremental joint co-construction and mentalizing. We base our argument on a vast body of work on human-human communication and its psychological processes that we reason to be relevant and necessary to take into account when modeling human-agent communication. We contrast those with current conceptualizations of human-agent interaction and formulate suggestions for the development of future systems. (shrink)

When young children learn to use language, they start to use their hands in co‐verbal gesturing. There are, however, considerable differences between children, and it is not completely understood what these individual differences are due to. We studied how children at 4 years of age employ speech and iconic gestures to convey meaning in different kinds of spatial event descriptions, and how this relates to their cognitive abilities. Focusing on spontaneous illustrations of actions, we applied a semantic feature (SF) analysis (...) to characterize combinations of speech and gesture meaning and related them to the child's visual‐spatial abilities or abstract/concrete reasoning abilities (measured using the standardized SON‐R test). Results show that children with higher cognitive abilities convey significantly more meaning via gesture and less solely via speech. These findings suggest that young children's use of cospeech representational gesturing is positively related to their mental representation and reasoning abilities. (shrink)

There are several conceptions of man in the history of philosophy. However, two considerable tendencies are recurring throughout modern history. A human being can be perceived as a complex mechanism or as a living organism. The response to the query has essential consequences in different areas. The article aims to provide a view of humankind that builds upon an organic conception of life, nature, and human beings, especially as elaborated by A. N. Whitehead and some of his followers. The article (...) also briefly examines the emergence and development of a mechanistic view. The historical overview exposes the close relationship between the worldview of a given era and the understanding of man. Finally, the article argues that the organic conceptions of life developed in the first half of the 20th century provide an essential alternative to mechanistic views and could help us to deal with several problems we are currently encountering. (shrink)

Die Frage nach der Technik ist eine Art der Heideggerschen Frage nach dem Sein, die die Fragen nach dem Menschen in der Moderne und nach der Zivilisation überhaupt impliziert. Im Rahmen der sogenannten "Seinsgeschichte" bildet sie eine Kreuzungsstelle, die von verschiedenen Linien gebildet wird, welche wiederum in ihrer Verschiedenheit zu berücksichtigen sind und nicht einfach textuell hermetisiert werden dürfen. Heidegger besorgt nicht zuletzt mit Hilfe der seinsgeschichtlichen Konstellation des Gestells seine Selbstinterpretation hinsichtlich der Haltung zum Nationalsozialismus. Verweigert wird die falsche (...) Alternative eines platt-realistischen oder biographischen Reduktionismus zum einen und des Jüngerschar-Minimalismus oder kalauernden dekonstruktivistischen Textdesigns zum andern. Genauso einseitig wie der absicherungsstrategische Jargon der Orthodoxie ist die positivistische Abschiebung Heideggers in die Ecke der "Begriffsdichtung". Tatsächlich besteht ein arbeitsteiliger Konsens zwischen beiden Seiten. Gegen diesen Konsens im Dissens opponiert vorliegender Text. (shrink)

In this paper I try to elucidate the differences between theoretical and practical endeavors in philosophy, and then to show that in a sense philosophy has to be theoretical, but— if it claims to be viable—it must be practical as well. First I consider the meaning of the terms theoretical, practical, abstract, and concrete. Then, with the help of Whitehead’s ideas on this topic, I briefly reflect on the method, aims and role of philosophy. I hold that a properly established (...) philosophical approach should have its roots in concrete experience and should include concrete applications. Thus, abstract ideas can be (and indeed often are) transformed into our daily life practices, being applied to solve real problems—personal, social, environmental, etc. The ideas are conveyed from the sphere of philosophy to that of ordinary life. In the next stage I demonstrate this principle using a concrete example, Whitehead’s philosophical system and how it can be fruitfully applied to the sphere of deep ecology. There are many other examples that could be mentioned, but giving a proper demonstration of this application principle requires more space and so I concentrate only on one of these examples. (shrink)

Stefan Collini challenges the common claim that universities need to show that they help to make money in order to justify getting more money.

An intro. to Didaktic (the heart of thinking about teaching/teacher educ in Germany) for English-speaking readers, drawing on a range of writings assoc. w/ this tradition. Throws light on assumptions, characteristics, & weaknesses of curriculum thought.

We all know that renewable energies are important for environmental reasons. However, recent developments should open our eyes to the fact that they are even more critical for sustainable development. In this commentary, we argue that societal benefits should be included in renewable energy decisions. Specifically, we discuss their contributions to freedom, peace, and democracy.

The idea of a higher level phenomenon having a downward causal influence on a lower level process or entity has taken a variety of forms. In order to discuss the relation between emergence and downward causation, the specific variety of the thesis of downward causation (DC) must be identified. Based on some ontological theses about inter-level relations, types of causation and the possibility of reduction, three versions of DC are distinguished. Of these, the `Strong' form of DC is held to (...) be in conflict with contemporary science; the `Medium' version of DC may for instance describe thoughts constraining neurophysiological states, while the `Weak' form of DC is physically acceptable but may not in practice be a feasible description of the mind/brain or the cell/molecule relation. All forms have their specific problems, but the Medium and the Weak version seems to be most promising. (shrink)

Some types of solar radiation management (SRM) research are ethically problematic because they expose persons, animals, and ecosystems to significant risks. In our earlier work, we argued for ethical norms for SRM research based on norms for biomedical research. Biomedical researchers may not conduct research on persons without their consent, but universal consent is impractical for SRM research. We argue that instead of requiring universal consent, ethical norms for SRM research require only political legitimacy in decision-making about global SRM trials. (...) Using Allen Buchanan & Robert Keohane's model of global political legitimacy, we examine several existing global institutions as possible analogues for a politically legitimate SRM decision-making body. (shrink)

Climate engineering (CE), the intentional modification of the climate in order to reduce the effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, is sometimes touted as a potential response to climate change. Increasing interest in the topic has led to proposals for empirical tests of hypothesized CE techniques, which raise serious ethical concerns. We propose three ethical guidelines for CE researchers, derived from the ethics literature on research with human and animal subjects, applicable in the event that CE research progresses beyond computer (...) modeling. The Principle of Respect requires that the scientific community secure the global public's consent, voiced through their governmental representatives, before beginning any empirical research. The Principle of Beneficence and Justice requires that researchers strive for a favorable risk–benefit ratio and a fair distribution of risks and anticipated benefits, all while protecting the basic rights of affected individuals. Finally, the Minimization Principle requires that researchers minimize the extent and intensity of each experiment by ensuring that no experiments last longer, cover a greater geographical extent, or have a greater impact on the climate, ecosystem, or human welfare than is necessary to test the specific hypotheses in question. Field experiments that might affect humans or ecosystems in significant ways should not proceed until a full discussion of the ethics of CE research occurs and appropriate institutions for regulating such experiments are established. (shrink)

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to help people understand black box algorithms, particularly of their outputs. But what are these explanations and when is one explanation better than another? The manipulationist definition of explanation from the philosophy of science offers good answers to these questions, holding that an explanation consists of a generalization that shows what happens in counterfactual cases. Furthermore, when it comes to explanatory depth this account holds that a generalization that has more abstract variables, is broader in (...) scope and/or more accurate is better. By applying these definitions and contrasting them with alternative definitions in the XAI literature I hope to help clarify what a good explanation is for AI. (shrink)

This imaginative and unusual book explores the moral sensibilities and cultural assumptions that were at the heart of political debate in Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. It focuses on the role of intellectuals as public moralists and suggests ways in which their more formal political theory rested upon habits of response and evaluation that were deeply embedded in wider social attitudes and aesthetic judgments. Collini examines the characteristic idioms and strategies of argument employed in periodical and polemical writing, and reconstructs (...) the sense of identity and of relation to an audience exhibited by social critics from John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold to J.M. Keynes and F.R. Leavis. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted in society, creating numerous opportunities but at the same time posing ethical challenges. Many of these are familiar, such as issues of fairness, responsibility and privacy, but are presented in a new and challenging guise due to our limited ability to steer and predict the outputs of AI systems. This chapter first introduces these ethical challenges, stressing that overviews of values are a good starting point but frequently fail to suffice due to the context (...) sensitivity of ethical challenges. Frequently, additional (ethical) values emerge for specific applications, as e.g. challenges with fraud detection are very different from those around language technologies. Second, methods to tackle these challenges are discussed. Main ethical theories (virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) are shown to provide a starting point, but often lack the details needed for actionable AI Ethics. Instead, mid-level philosophical theories coupled to design-approaches such as Design for Values, together with interdisciplinary working methods, offer the best way forwards. The chapter aims to show how these approaches can lead to an ethics of AI that is actionable and that can be proactively integrated in the design of AI systems. (shrink)

How do we get out knowledge of the natural numbers? Various philosophical accounts exist, but there has been comparatively little attention to psychological data on how the learning process actually takes place. I work through the psychological literature on number acquisition with the aim of characterising the acquisition stages in formal terms. In doing so, I argue that we need a combination of current neologicist accounts and accounts such as that of Parsons. In particular, I argue that we learn the (...) initial segment of the natural numbers on the basis of the Fregean definitions, but do not learn the natural number structure as a whole on the basis of Hume's principle. Therefore, we need to account for some of the consistency of our number concepts with the Dedekind-Peano axioms in other terms. (shrink)

I argue that difference-making should be a crucial element for evaluating the quality of evidence for mechanisms, especially with respect to the robustness of mechanisms, and that it should take central stage when it comes to the general role played by mechanisms in establishing causal claims in medicine. The difference- making of mechanisms should provide additional compelling reasons to accept the gist of Russo-Williamson thesis and include mechanisms in the protocols for Evidence- Based Medicine, as the EBM+ research group has (...) been advocating. (shrink)

The Approximate Number System (ANS) is a system that allows us to distinguish between collections based on the number of items, though only if the ratio between numbers is high enough. One of the questions that has been raised is what the representations involved in this system represent. I point to two important constraints for any account: (a) it doesn’t involve numbers, and (b) it can account for the approximate nature of the ANS. Furthermore, I argue that representations of pure (...) magnitude with vehicles that have an imprecision in the value of the unit of measurement (further clarified through a formal model from measurement theory) fit both these requirements. (shrink)

This article considers the prospects of inference to the best explanation as a method of confirming causal claims vis-à-vis the medical evidence of mechanisms. I show that IBE is actually descriptive of how scientists reason when choosing among hypotheses, that it is amenable to the balance/weight distinction, a pivotal pair of concepts in the philosophy of evidence, and that it can do justice to interesting features of the interplay between mechanistic and population level assessments.

In the past few decades, a growth in ethical consumerism has led brands to increasingly develop conscientiousness and depict ethical image at a corporate level. However, most of the research studying business ethics in the field of corporate brand management is either conceptual or has been empirically conducted in relation to goods/products contexts. This is surprising because corporate brands are more relevant in services contexts, because of the distinct nature of services and the key role that employees have in the (...) services sector. Accordingly, this article aims at empirically examining the effects of customer perceived ethicality in the context of corporate services brands. Based on data collected for eight service categories using a panel of 2179 customers, the hypothesized structural model is tested using path analysis. The results show that, in addition to a direct effect, customer perceived ethicality has a positive and indirect effect on customer loyalty, through the mediators of customer affective commitment and customer perceived quality. Further, employee empathy positively influences the impact of customer perceived ethicality on customer affective commitment, and customer loyalty positively impacts customer positive word-of-mouth. The first implication of these results is that corporate brand strategy needs to be aligned with human resources policies and practices if brands want to turn ethical strategies into employee behavior. Second, corporate brands should build more authentic communications grounded in their ethical beliefs and supported by evidence from actual employees. (shrink)

Users of sociotechnical systems often have no way to independently verify whether the system output which they use to make decisions is correct; they are epistemically dependent on the system. We argue that this leads to problems when the system is wrong, namely to bad decisions and violations of the norm of practical reasoning. To prevent this from occurring we suggest the implementation of defeaters: information that a system is unreliable in a specific case (undercutting defeat) or independent information that (...) the output is wrong (rebutting defeat). Practically, we suggest to design defeaters based on the different ways in which a system might produce erroneous outputs, and analyse this suggestion with a case study of the risk classification algorithm used by the Dutch tax agency. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an anti-Humean critique to Williamson and Russo’s approach to medical mechanisms. I focus on one of the specific claims made by Williamson and Russo, namely the claim that micro-structural ‘mechanisms’ provide evidence for the stability across populations of causal relationships ascertained at the (macro-) level of (test) populations. This claim is grounded in the epistemic account of causality developed by Williamson, an account which—while not relying exclusively on mechanistic evidence for justifying causal judgements—appeals nevertheless to (...) mechanisms, and rejects their anti-Humean interpretation in terms of capacities, powers, potencies, etc. By using (and expanding on) Cartwright’s basic critique against Humean mechanisms, I suggest that, in order to move beyond the level of plausibility, Williamson and Russo’s position is in need of a clarification as to the occurent reading of the components, functioning and interferences of mechanisms. Relatedly, as concerns Williamson’s epistemic account of causation, I argue that this account is in need of a more straightforward answer as to what truth-makers its causal claims should have. (shrink)

Money in the history of political thought, from ancient Greece to the Great Inflation of the 1970s In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, critical attention has shifted from the economy to the most fundamental feature of all market economies—money. Yet despite the centrality of political struggles over money, it remains difficult to articulate its democratic possibilities and limits. The Currency of Politics takes readers from ancient Greece to today to provide an intellectual history of money, drawing on the (...) insights of key political philosophers to show how money is not just a medium of exchange but also a central institution of political rule. Money appears to be beyond the reach of democratic politics, but this appearance—like so much about money—is deceptive. Even when the politics of money is impossible to ignore, its proper democratic role can be difficult to discern. Stefan Eich examines six crucial episodes of monetary crisis, recovering the neglected political theories of money in the thought of such figures as Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He shows how these layers of crisis have come to define the way we look at money, and argues that informed public debate about money requires a better appreciation of the diverse political struggles over its meaning. Recovering foundational ideas at the intersection of monetary rule and democratic politics, The Currency of Politics explains why only through greater awareness of the historical limits of monetary politics can we begin to articulate more democratic conceptions of money. (shrink)

ABSTRACT How do non-experts single out numbers for reference? Linnebo has argued that they do so using a criterion of identity based on the ordinal properties of numerals. Neo-logicists, on the other hand, claim that cardinal properties are the basis of individuation, when they invoke Hume’s Principle. I discuss empirical data from cognitive science and linguistics to answer how non-experts individuate numbers better in practice. I use those findings to develop an alternative account that mixes ordinal and cardinal properties to (...) provide a detailed answer to the question: how do we in fact semantically individuate numbers? (shrink)

The now classical idea that programmed cell death contributes to a plethora of developmental processes still has lost nothing of its impact. It is, therefore, important to establish effective three-dimensional reconstruction as well as simulation techniques to decipher the exact patterns and functions of such apoptotic events. The present study focuses on the question whether and how apoptosis promotes neurulation-associated processes in the spinal cord of Tupaia belangeri. Our 3D reconstructions demonstrate that at least two craniocaudal waves of apoptosis consecutively (...) pass through the dorsal spinal cord. The first wave appears to be involved in neural fold fusion and/or in selection processes among premigratory neural crest cells. The second one seems to assist in establishing the dorsal signaling center known as the roof plate. In the hindbrain, in contrast, apoptosis among premigratory neural crest cells progresses craniocaudally but discontinuously, in a segment-specific manner. Unlike apoptosis in the spinal cord, these segment-specific apoptotic events, however, precede later ones that seemingly support neural fold fusion and/or postfusion remodeling. Arguing with Whitehead that biological patterns and rhythms differ in that biological rhythms depend “upon the differences involved in each exhibition of the pattern” we show that 3D reconstruction and simulation techniques can contribute to distinguish between patterns and rhythms of apoptosis. By deciphering novel patterns and rhythms of developmental apoptosis, our reconstructions help to reconcile seemingly inconsistent earlier findings in chick and mouse embryos, and to create rules for computer simulations. (shrink)

Most accounts of our knowledge of the successor axiom claim that this is based on the procedure of adding one. While they usually don’t claim to provide an account of how children actually acquire this knowledge, one may well think that this is how they get that knowledge. I argue that when we look at children’s responses in interviews, the time when they learn the successor axiom and the intermediate learning stages they find themselves in, that there is an empirically (...) viable alternative. I argue that they could also learn it on the basis of a method that has to do with the structure of the numeral system. Specifically, that they (1) use the syntactic structure of the numeral system and (2) attend to the leftmost digits, the one with the highest place-value. Children can learn that this is a reliable method of forming larger numbers by combining two elements. First, a grasp of the syntactic structure of the numeral system. That way they know that the leftmost digit receives the highest value. Second, an interpretation of numerals as designating cardinal values, so that they also realise that increasing or adding digits on the lefthand side of a numeral produces a larger number. There are thus two, currently equally well-supported, ways in which children might learn that there are infinitely many natural numbers. (shrink)

Integrating the study of human diversity into the human evolutionary sciences requires substantial revision of traditional conceptions of a shared human nature. This process may be made more difficult by entrenched, 'folkbiological' modes of thought. Earlier work by the authors suggests that biologically naive subjects hold an implicit theory according to which some traits are expressions of an animal's inner nature while others are imposed by its environment. In this paper, we report further studies that extend and refine our account (...) of this aspect of folkbiology. We examine biologically naive subjects' judgments about whether traits of an animal are 'innate', 'in its DNA' or 'part of its nature'. Subjects do not understand these three descriptions to be equivalent. Both innate and in its DNA have the connotation that the trait is species-typical. This poses an obstacle to the assimilation of the biology of polymorphic and plastic traits by biologically naive audiences. Researchers themselves may not be immune to the continuing pull of folkbiological modes of thought. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on life-threatening medical conditions and argue that from the point of view of natural properties, induction(s), and participation in laws, at least some of the ill organisms dealt with in somatic medicine form natural kinds in the same sense in which the kinds in the exact sciences are thought of as natural. By way of comparing two ‘divisions of nature’, viz., a ‘classical’ exact science kind (gold) and a kind of disease (Graves disease), I show (...) that there is no justifiable ‘ontological gap’ between disease kinds and exact sciences kinds. We have instead a difference of degree. (shrink)

According to Hempel’s influential theory of explanation, explaining why some a is G consists in showing that the truth that a is G follows from a law-like generalization to the effect that all Fs are G together with the initial condition that a is F. While Hempel’s overall account is now widely considered to be deeply flawed, the idea that some generalizations play the explanatory role that the account predicts is still often endorsed by contemporary philosophers of science. This idea, (...) however, conflicts with widely shared views in metaphysics according to which the generalization that all Fs are G is partially explained by the fact that a is G. I discuss two solutions to this conflict that have been proposed recently, argue that they are unsatisfactory, and offer an alternative. (shrink)

Can concepts be acquired by testing hypotheses about these concepts? Fodor famously argued that this is not possible. Testing the correct hypothesis would require already possessing the concept. I argue that this does not generally hold for mathematical concepts. I discuss specific, empirically motivated, hypotheses for number concepts that can be tested without needing to possess the relevant number concepts. I also argue that one can test hypotheses about the identity conditions of other mathematical concepts, and then fix the application (...) conditions based on those hypotheses—under the assumption that the neo‐logicist view on abstraction principles is correct. (shrink)

Prospect Theory (PT) is widely regarded as the most promising descriptive model for decision making under uncertainty. Various tests have corroborated the validity of the characteristic fourfold pattern of risk attitudes implied by the combination of probability weighting and value transformation. But is it also safe to assume stable PT preferences at the individual level? This is not only an empirical but also a conceptual question. Measuring the stability of preferences in a multi-parameter decision model such as PT is far (...) more complex than evaluating single-parameter models such as Expected Utility Theory under the assumption of constant relative risk aversion. There exist considerable interdependencies among parameters such that allegedly diverging parameter combinations could in fact produce very similar preference structures. In this paper, we provide a theoretic framework for measuring the (temporal) stability of PT parameters. To illustrate our methodology, we further apply our approach to 86 subjects for whom we elicit PT parameters twice, with a time lag of 1 month. While documenting remarkable stability of parameter estimates at the aggregate level, we find that a third of the subjects show significant instability across sessions. (shrink)

For Aristotle, a just political community has to find similarity in difference and foster habits of reciprocity. Conventionally, speech and law have been seen to fulfill this role. This article reconstructs Aristotle’s conception of currency as a political institution of reciprocal justice. By placing Aristotle’s treatment of reciprocity in the context of the ancient politics of money, currency emerges not merely as a medium of economic exchange but also potentially as a bond of civic reciprocity, a measure of justice, and (...) an institution of ethical deliberation. Reconstructing this account of currency in analogy to law recovers the hopes Aristotle placed in currency as a necessary institution particular to the polis as a self-governing political community striving for justice. If currency was a foundational institution, it was also always insufficient, likely imperfect, and possibly tragic. Turned into a tool for the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, currency becomes unjust and a serious threat to any political community. Aristotelian currency can fail precisely because it contains an important moment of ethical deliberation. This political significance of currency challenges accounts of the ancient world as bifurcated between oikos and polis and encourages contemporary political theorists to think of money as a constitutional project that can play an important role in improving reciprocity across society. (shrink)