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1. Mitch Parsell & Cynthia Townley, Refereed Articles.
   In response to those who have argued the Internet is amoral at best, and an instrument for immorality at worst, we show that the net can provide a forum for genuine ethical engagement and distinctive forms of wrongdoing. Without deriving the moral value of the Internet from its interface with the non-virtual world and in contrast to presentations of the net as an anarchic utopia or as an unethical or amoral dystopia, we apply a substantive moral test to a selection (...) of online examples and ask can the net accommodate resistance to oppression that is necessary, though not sufficient, for justice? More precisely, we will ask whether Gandhian non-violent action is available to Cyberpunks? (shrink)

   Internet Ethics in Applied Ethics

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2. Mitch Parsell (2009). Quinean Social Skills: Empirical Evidence From Eye-Gaze Against Information Encapsulation. Biology and Philosophy 24 (1).
   Since social skills are highly significant to the evolutionary success of humans, we should expect these skills to be efficient and reliable. For many Evolutionary Psychologists efficiency entails encapsulation: the only way to get an efficient system is via information encapsulation. But encapsulation reduces reliability in opaque epistemic domains. And the social domain is darkly opaque: people lie and cheat, and deliberately hide their intentions and deceptions. Modest modularity [Currie and Sterelny (2000) Philos Q 50:145–160] attempts to combine efficiency and (...) reliability. Reliability is obtained by placing social skills in un-encapsulated central cognition; efficiency by having the social system sensitive to encapsulated socially tagged cues. In this paper, I argue that this approach fails. I focus on eye-gaze as a plausible example of a socially significant encapsulated cue. I demonstrate contra modest modularity that eye-gaze is subject to influence from central cognition. (shrink)

   Philosophy of Biology

   Philosophy of Psychology in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

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3. Mitch Parsell (2009). Steven M. Platek, Julian Paul Keenan and Todd K. Shackelford (Eds), Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience. Minds and Machines 19 (2).
   Evolutionary Biology in Philosophy of Biology

   Philosophy of Neuroscience in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

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4. Mitch Parsell (2008). Pernicious Virtual Communities: Identity, Polarisation and the Web 2. Ethics and Information Technology 10 (1).
   The importance of online social spaces is growing. New Web 2.0 resources allow the creation of social networks by any netizen with minimal technical skills. These communities can be extremely narrowly focussed. In this paper, I identify two potential costs of membership in narrowly focussed virtual communities. First, that narrowly focussed communities can polarise attitudes and prejudices leading to increased social cleavage and division. Second, that they can lead sick individuals to revel in their illness, deliberately indulging in their disease (...) and denying the edicts of the medical profession. I specifically examine illness communities centred on the now defunct Multiple Personality Disorder. I highlight these potential problems and point to some technologies that may help combat them. (shrink)

   Computer Ethics in Applied Ethics

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5. Mitch Parsell (2006). The Cognitive Cost of Extending an Evolutionary Mind Into the Environment. Cognitive Processing 7 (1): 3-10.
   Clark and Chalmers (1998) have argued that mental states can be extended outside an organism.

   Evolutionary Biology in Philosophy of Biology

   The Extended Mind in Philosophy of Mind

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6. Mitch Parsell (2005). Book Review. Minds and Machines 15 (3-4).
   No categories

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7. Mitch Parsell (2005). Context-Sensitive Inference, Modularity, and the Assumption of Formal Processing. Philosophical Psychology 18 (1):45-58.
   Performance on the Wason selection task varies with content. This has been taken to demonstrate that there are different cognitive modules for dealing with different conceptual domains. This implication is only legitimate if our underlying cognitive architecture is formal. A non-formal system can explain content-sensitive inference without appeal to independent inferential modules.

   Modularity in Cognitive Science in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

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8. Mitch Parsell (2005). Review of P.O. Haikonen's The Cognitive Approach to Conscious Machines. Psyche 11 (2).
   Haikonen (2003) is an attempt to explicate a platform for modelling consciousness. The book sets out the foundational concepts behind Haikonen’s work in the area and proposes a particular modelling environment. This is developed in three parts: part 1 offers a brief analysis of the state of play in cognitive modelling; part 2 an extended treatment of the phenomena to be explained; part 3 promises a synthesis of the two preceding discussions to provide the necessary background and detail for the (...) proposed modelling environment. This final part covers a broad range of technical details from the nature of the representational-computational economy instantiated, to the control of motor output, to the means of implementing emotions in artefacts. Haikonen proposes an environment based on a distributed representational economy, instantiated in a neural network architecture and trained using associative learning regimes, but which also has symbolic processing abilities to handle the critical task of generating inner language. (shrink)

   Cognitive Models of Consciousness in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

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9. Cynthia Townley & Mitch Parsell (2004). Technology and Academic Virtue: Student Plagiarism Through the Looking Glass. Ethics and Information Technology 6 (4).
   Plagiarism is the misuse of and failure to acknowledge source materials. This paper questions common responses to the apparent increase in plagiarism by students. Internet plagiarism occurs in a context – using the Internet as an information tool – where the relevant norms are far from obvious and models of virtue are difficult to identify and perhaps impossible to find. Ethical responses to the pervasiveness of Internet-enhanced plagiarism require a reorientation of perspective on both plagiarism and the Internet as a (...) knowledge tool. Technological strategies to “catch the cheats” send a “don’t get caught” message to students and direct the limited resources of academic institutions to a battle that cannot be won. More importantly, it is not the right battleground. Rather than characterising Internet-enabled plagiarism as a problem generated and solvable by emerging technologies, we argue that there is a more urgent need to build the background conditions that enable and sustain ethical relationships and academic virtues: to nurture an intellectual community. (shrink)

   Computer Ethics in Applied Ethics

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