This paper investigates how intuitions about scientific discovery using artificial intelligence can be used to improve our understanding of scientific discovery more generally. Traditional accounts of discovery have been agent-centred: they place emphasis on identifying a specific agent who is responsible for conducting all, or at least the important part, of a discovery process. We argue that these accounts experience difficulties capturing scientific discovery involving AI and that similar issues arise for human discovery. We propose an alternative, collective-centred view as (...) superior for understanding discovery, with and without AI. This view maintains that discovery is performed by a collective of agents and entities, each making contributions that differ in significance and character, and that attributing credit for discovery depends on various finer-grained properties of the contributions made. Detailing its conceptual resources, we argue that this view is considerably more compelling than its agent-centred alternative. Considering and responding to several theoretical and practical challenges, we point to concrete avenues for further developing the view we propose. (shrink)

A great many important decisions we make in life depend on scientific information that we are not in a position to assess. So it seems we must defer to experts. By now there are a variety of criteria on offer by which non-experts can judge the trustworthiness of a scientist responsible for producing or promulgating this information. But science is, for the most part, a collective not an individual enterprise. This paper explores which of the criteria for judging the trustworthiness (...) of individual scientists can be amended for use in assessing the trustworthiness of scientific collectives. It also offers some new proposals specifically geared to assessing collective trustworthiness in science, notably, an analysis of where to apply the criteria (for example at the group or individual level) and additional criteria to assess group infrastructure and design. The paper ends with some practical suggestions for how to assist the non-expert in this task. (shrink)

Through network diagrams and sustained narrative, sociologist Randall Collins traces the development of philosophical thought from ancient Greece to modern ...

The question of “Are faces special?” has essentially referred to whether there are unique visual mechanisms for processing identity-related information in faces as compared to other objects. Faces provide unique information about expression, gaze direction, identity, and visual cues to speech. In the literature, however, the debate about whether “faces are special” has referred to the specific question of whether there are special visual processing mechanisms unique to faces, presumably deriving from the social importance of faces and developed either across (...) the course of evolution or the course of childhood. This article provides historical background to the question and presents key theoretical findings and key methodological findings. It reviews literature on an evolved face representation, including studies of newborns, face-deprived monkeys and twins; on configural behavioral processing in object experts; and on neural processing in object novices and object experts including single-unit recording, fMRI, ERPs, TMS, and neuropsychological studies. (shrink)

In the popular misconception fostered by blockbuster action movies and best-selling thrillers--not to mention conventional explanations by social scientists--violence is easy under certain conditions, like poverty, racial or ideological hatreds, or family pathologies. Randall Collins challenges this view in Violence, arguing that violent confrontation goes against human physiological hardwiring. It is the exception, not the rule--regardless of the underlying conditions or motivations. -/- Collins gives a comprehensive explanation of violence and its dynamics, drawing upon video footage, cutting-edge forensics, and (...) ethnography to examine violent situations up close as they actually happen--and his conclusions will surprise you. Violence comes neither easily nor automatically. Antagonists are by nature tense and fearful, and their confrontational anxieties put up a powerful emotional barrier against violence. Collins guides readers into the very real and disturbing worlds of human discord--from domestic abuse and schoolyard bullying to muggings, violent sports, and armed conflicts. He reveals how the fog of war pervades all violent encounters, limiting people mostly to bluster and bluff, and making violence, when it does occur, largely incompetent, often injuring someone other than its intended target. Collins shows how violence can be triggered only when pathways around this emotional barrier are presented. He explains why violence typically comes in the form of atrocities against the weak, ritualized exhibitions before audiences, or clandestine acts of terrorism and murder--and why a small number of individuals are competent at violence. (shrink)

The main thesis of this essay is that non-linguistic infantile cries towards the nondefinable constitute, for Simone Weil, the essence of the human. The author begins by surveying, for the first time, Weil’s depiction of the infant’s cry as a scream of an infinite desire towards nothing definite. In the second part, in which the author analyzes the infantile cry introduced in Weil’s later writings this desire, it will be presented as fundamental to being. The infantile cry expresses mutely a (...) desire for the indescribable good. Since it is cried from birth till death, its designation as infantile is revealed to indicate not one’s age but one’s nonlinguistic essence. While recent scholarship emphasized the importance of silence in Weil’s thought, no attention had been given to the significance of the ineffable to her philosophy. By studying the infant and infantile cry, this essay will show how the inarticulate desire towards the unattainable comprises the truth of being. (shrink)

This paper examines the politics behind algorithmic ordering in social media, focusing on the advertising logic behind them. This is explored through a practice I call rhythmedia – the way media companies render people, objects and their relations as rhythms and order them for economic purposes. As a case study I examine the way the Facebook Immune System algorithm orchestrates people’s mediated experience towards a desired rhythm while filtering out problematic rhythms. This anti-spam algorithm shows that it is important for (...) Facebook to understand people as rhythms and assemble a dynamic database from their mediated experiences, to convince advertisers that they know when and where people do things. People’s rhythms become a product that advertisers pay and bid for through Ad Auction to intervene in specific moments and shape people’s experience. Thus, the company can shape, manage, and filter specific rhythms to order sociality that brings more value. (shrink)

Previous research has suggested that in cultural production fields the concatenation of eminence explains success, defined as influence and innovation. We propose that individuals in fields as diverse as philosophy, literature, mathematics, painting, or architecture gain visibility by cumulating the eminence of others connected to them across and within generations. We draw on interaction ritual chain and social movement theories, and use evidence from the field of modernist architecture, to formulate a model of how networks of very strong ties generate (...) motivations and emotional enthusiasm, change reputations, and form collective movements that over time transform the structure of cultural fields. Because major aesthetic innovations break sharply with older styles, they need very strong group solidarity over a long period of time to propagate a new standard of practice. We propose mutual halo effects, i.e., the reciprocal reinforcement of upstream and downstream prestige on a given individual node, as the key factor accounting for success in a cultural production field. We discuss the relevance of these results for building a model of influence and innovation in cultural production fields in which networks—reshaped by shifting technological, political, and economic conditions—trigger new styles. (shrink)

The author recounts her experience as an Alzheimer's care-giver to her mother, stressing the value of her professional background in theater.

What is creativity? It is clearly something we know by seeing it manifested in a multitude of different ways and contexts. It could perhaps stand as an emblematic example of the limitations of a general explanative account. In this anthology the editors have orchestrated an exceptionally inspiring collection of essays that explore the vast examples of creative language used in Wittgenstein's philosophical practice and the creative potentiality of language overall. The anthology consists of eleven essays divided into introduction, overture, and (...) three parts containing three essays each. The collection offers a wide scope, ranging from styles of writing and aesthetic forms of expression to ethical reflections and... (shrink)

Elinor Mason draws on ethics and responsibility theory to present a pluralistic view of both wrongness and blameworthiness. Mason argues that our moral concepts, rightness and wrongness, must be connected to our responsibility concepts. But the connection is not simple. She identifies three different ways to be blameworthy, corresponding to different ways of acting wrongly. The paradigmatic way to be blameworthy is to act subjectively wrongly. Mason argues for an account of subjective obligation that is connected to the notion (...) of trying - to act rightly is try to do well by morality, to act wrongly (and to be blameworthy) is to fail to try hard enough. Trying involves understanding morality, those who do not grasp morality are in a different category. So agents might also be blameworthy for being oriented away from what really matters. In that case, agents are blameworthy in a different sense, the detached sense. Finally, we can become blameworthy by taking responsibility in cases where our agency is ambiguous. In the final section, Mason gives us an account of taking responsibility and agues that that is an important art of our responsibility practices. (shrink)

In Queer Social Philosophy, Randall Halle analyzes key texts in the tradition of German critical theory from the perspective of contemporary queer theory, exposing gender and sexuality restrictions that undermine those texts' claims of universal truth. Addressing such figures as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Habermas, Halle offers a unique contribution to contemporary debates about sexuality, civil society, and politics.

In this narrative of my life as a researcher, I have presented my understanding of research practice, basing it of course on a sample of size one--myself, nonetheless observed carefully for over four decades now. Therefore, the readers may take it as a trigger to clarify their own self-understanding as researchers. In my life’s journey as a researcher, I have followed my passions and charted new territory, sometimes inadvertently. Research has been for me a life-long journey of discovery--of who I (...) am, of the world around me, and the meaning of life. This has driven me beyond the boundaries of received tradition, often into uncharted territory. Over the years I have put together my own tool kit, sharpening my intellectual skills as needed for the problem at hand. The focus of my research has been myth and image in their cultural context. My research on the miniature paintings of India, and their organic links with certain texts and cultural modes of being, have transformed me in fundamental ways. I have come to regard my own experience of being a woman as central to my experience of the world. In the more recent years, I have been inquiring into the religion of the Mother Goddess. This has brought me to Orissa for fieldwork in a living tradition--that of the village goddess. I have reached so far in my journey of research by continuously expanding my intellectual boundaries as well as pushing the edges of my discipline into new frontiers. (shrink)

Taking the possibility of visual argumentation seriously, this essay explores how refutation might proceed. We posit three ways in which images can refute and be refuted in a mixed-media environment: (1) dissection, in which an image is broken down discursively; (2) substitution, in which one image is replaced within a larger visual frame by a different image; and (3) transformation, in which an image is recontextualized in a new visual frame. These strategies are illustrated in an analysis of three American (...) documentary films on abortion. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss various hard cases that an account of moral ignorance should be able to deal with: ancient slave holders, Susan Wolf’s JoJo, psychopaths such as Robert Harris, and finally, moral outliers. All these agents are ignorant, but it is not at all clear that they are blameless on account of their ignorance. I argue that the discussion of this issue in recent literature has missed the complexities of these cases by focusing on the question of epistemic (...) fault. It is not clear that all blameworthy morally ignorant agents have committed an epistemic fault. There are other important issues that pull us in various directions: moral capacity, bad will, and formative circumstances. I argue that bad will is what is crucial, and moral ignorance itself can be a form of bad will. I argue that we should distinguish between two sorts of bad will, and correspondingly, two sorts of blameworthiness. Ordinary blameworthiness, requires moral knowledge, and is based on akratic action. The other kind of blameworthiness, objective blameworthiness, applies when the agent is morally ignorant, and when this indicates bad will. Objective blameworthiness can be undermined by unfortunate formative circumstances. (shrink)

Guala raises important questions about the misinterpretation of experimental studies that have found that subjects engage in costly punishment. Instead of positing that punishment is the solution for social dilemmas, earlier research posited that when individuals facing a social dilemma agreed on their own rules and used graduated sanctions, they were more likely to have robust solutions over time.

This book aims to develop a sophisticated understanding of propaganda. It begins with a brief history of early Western propaganda, including Ancient Greek classical theories of rhetoric and the art of persuasion, and traces its development through the Christian era, the rise of the nation-state, World War I, Nazism, and Communism. The core of the book examines the ethical implications of various forms of persuasion, not only hate propaganda but also insidious elements of more generally acceptable communication such as advertising, (...) public relations, and government information, setting these in the context of freedom of expression. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion examines the art of persuasion but it also hopes to establish a "self-defense" resistance to propaganda. As Jacques Ellul warned in 1980, any new technology enters into an already existing class system and can be expected to develop in a way favourable to the dominant interests of that system. The merger of AOL and Time-Warner confirms the likelihood of corporate interests dominating the future of the Internet, but the Internet has also opened up new possibilities for a politically effective counter-culture, as was demonstrated at the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in late 1999 and numerous similar gatherings since. (shrink)

Human agency is typically thought of as intentional, purposeful, reflective and, in many cases, autonomous. This paper discusses human agency that is compromised in some of these respects, and actions that are actions only in a qualified sense. The object of study is the agency of the leading character, Jeff, in the film noir Out of the Past, and Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention is the primary source in analyzing Jeff’s behavior.Two excerpts from the film are presented and analyzed. The analysis of (...) the first excerpt reveals agency that is merely weakly intentional; that is lacking in purposiveness and which displays ambivalence. Anscombe’s example of the man pumping water helps us see that Jeff’s actions are only intentional under some, basic, descriptions; that there is no intention of the action. Jeff does not really know his way about and his actions are not sufficiently grounded in reason. This, it is argued, is largely because he is not the author of his own actions: he is thrown into a situation set up by someone else. He enters in medias res and feels forced to act although he has limited knowledge of the meaning or purpose of the full action in which he partakes. In Anscombian vocabulary, he lacks the first-person practical knowledge typical of intentional action.In the second episode, Jeff protects Kathie the femme fatale, even when knowing that she has killed a man, stolen money, lied to Jeff, and is trying to frame him for murder. It is argued, in dialogue with Anscombe and Stoutland, that this case may be understood in terms of a mental cause rather than as an intentional action: Jeff’s actions and neglect to act is motivated by his passion for Kathie, it blinds him from considering what is reasonable and right to do. (shrink)

Using explicit memory measures, Cowan predicts a new circumstance in which the central capacity limit of 4 chunks should obtain. Supporting results for such an experiment, using continuous old-new recognition, are described. With implicit memory measures, Cowan assumes that short-term repetition priming reflects the central capacity limit. I argue that this phenomenon instead reflects limits within individual perceptual processing modules.

The main focus of this book is the normative or ethical aspects of sustainability, including matters of justice in governance that is important to sustainability. The idea of sustainability is widely perceived as having a normative dimension, often referred to as equity, but the character of this normative dimension is seldom explored. The book aims to fill this gap in the literature of sustainability. It proposes a conceptualization of sustainability that is geared to clarifying its essential ethical structure. It frames (...) sustainability in terms of the capacity of natural systems to provide opportunities to live well, as well as the conduciveness of human practices and systems to preserving such opportunity into the distant future. It develops the idea of sustainability as an art of preserving opportunity to live well – an ethically and scientifically grounded political art of living well together without diminishing opportunity to live well in the future. (shrink)

Too many patients are injured in the course of care. Clinicians may mistakenly cause new harm to a patient or fail to take established steps to improve the presenting condition. Medical institutions within which they work may lack mechanisms to reduce errors or prevent them from harming patients. Many, perhaps even most, injuries are preventable, probably numbering in the hundreds of thousands a year for hospital care alone. Long ignored by medical practitioners and health-care payers and little appreciated by the (...) public, the problem of medical injury is finally receiving high-level policy attention. Much credit goes to the Institute of Medicine for its landmark report of November 1999, which marshaled the evidence about medical injuries and highlighted new approaches to systematic improvement of safety within systems of care. (shrink)

Too many patients are injured in the course of care. Clinicians may mistakenly cause new harm to a patient or fail to take established steps to improve the presenting condition. Medical institutions within which they work may lack mechanisms to reduce errors or prevent them from harming patients. Many, perhaps even most, injuries are preventable, probably numbering in the hundreds of thousands a year for hospital care alone. Long ignored by medical practitioners and health-care payers and little appreciated by the (...) public, the problem of medical injury is finally receiving high-level policy attention. Much credit goes to the Institute of Medicine for its landmark report of November 1999, which marshaled the evidence about medical injuries and highlighted new approaches to systematic improvement of safety within systems of care. (shrink)

Looks at issues such as, the intellectual outlook of Medieval Christendom, the Renaissance, the order of nature in the 17th and 18th centuries, and thought and aspiration in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Whole brain emulation aims to re-implement functions of a mind in another computational substrate with the precision needed to predict the natural development of active states in as much as the influence of random processes allows. Furthermore, brain emulation does not present a possible model of a function, but rather presents the actual implementation of that function, based on the details of the circuitry of a specific brain. We introduce a notation for the representations of mind state, mind transition functions (...) and transition update functions, for which elements and their relations must be quantified in accordance with measurements in the biological substrate. To discover the limits of significance in terms of the temporal and spatial resolution of measurements, we point out the importance of brain region and task specific constraints, as well as the importance of in-vivo measurements. We summarize further problems that need to be addressed. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to revive a tradition of educational thought that identifies good judgment as the highest aim of education. It identifies sharply opposed manifestations of this tradition in the works of Aristotle and Locke, and uses these as points of departure in defending and exploring the tradition. The defense rests on the claims that the basic aim of educational institutions should be to enable people to live well and that good judgment is essential to living well. (...) The relationships between good judgment and other widely discussed educational aims are addressed, including autonomy, fulfillment of potential, and acquisition of knowledge. Curricular and pedagogical aspects of the promotion of good judgment are addressed, and the paper concludes by identifying potential benefits as well as limitations associated with the conditions of epistemic dependence. (shrink)

Traces the impact of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on a diverse group of writers, abolitionists, and social reformers, including Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott, against a backdrop of growing tensions and transcendental idealism in 1860 America.

National governments in almost all developing countries have begun to decentralize policies and decision making related to development, public services, and the environment. Existing research on the subject has enhanced our understanding of the effects of decentralization and thereby has been an effective instrument in the advocacy of decentralization. But most analyses, especially where environmental resources are concerned, have been less attentive to the political coalitions that prompt decentralization and the role of property rights in facilitating the implementation of decentralized (...) decision making. By comparing decentralization in four cases in South Asia—Forest Councils in Kumaon in India, Joint Forest Management in India, the Parks and People Program in Nepal's Terai, and Community Forestry legislation in Nepal—this article provides answers to two questions: When do governments decentralize environmental decision making? and Which types of property rights must be devolved if decentralized decision making is to be effective? (shrink)

This paper argues that rural children’s prospects of achieving civic equality within the wider society are limited by the fact that the education they receive is not inclusive, that this is in some respects unjust, and that some partial remedies are available. The non-inclusiveness of rural education is characterized as a form of rural isolation, defined by physical and cultural distance from pathways of opportunity that are significant for civic equality, and by failures of mutually recognized mutual goodwill. Physical and (...) cultural distance are identified as aspects of an evolving geography of opportunity, in which college graduates are highly favored and high-status opportunities are concentrated in cities. (shrink)

What determines whether an action is right or wrong? Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader explores for students and researchers the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules. Most of the chapters focus on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism. Contributors, among them the leading philosophers in the discipline, suggest ways of assessing whether rule consequentialism could be a satisfactory moral theory. These essays, all of which are previously unpublished, provide students in (...) moral philosophy with essential material and ask key questions on just what the criteria for an adequate moral theory might be. (shrink)

This article explores an alternative logic of imprudence at work in Machiavelli's The Prince, a text seemingly defined by its prudence. Arguing that crucial engagements with The Prince by Eugene Garver and Robert Hariman operate as “prudent” readings, I note that the text offers durable resources for radical political and rhetorical imagination. Such resources are recoverable, however, only in and through an alternative, imprudent, reading strategy. Following the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I read The Prince—particularly in its aesthetic and rhetorical (...) articulation of “the people”—neither as a manual for princes or realpolitik but as both irreducible plurality and differential network, reflecting a political imagination at work in the text beyond modern calculation. Reading The Prince imprudently, I explore the necessary interconnection between rhetorical reading and political thinking—and the subsequent importance of understanding political theory as an aesthetic and textual practice. (shrink)

Aristotle regarded law and education as the two fundamental and deeply interdependent tools of political art, making the use of education by the statesman a topic of the first importance in his practical philosophy. The present work develops the first comprehensive treatment of this neglected topic, and assesses the importance of Aristotle's defense of public education for current debates about school choice and privatization, and educational equality.

In this paper I present a new argument for prospectivism: the view that, for a consequentialist, rightness depends on what is prospectively best rather than what would actually be best. Prospective bestness depends on the agent’s epistemic position, though exactly how that works is not straightforward. I clarify various possible versions of prospectivism, which differ in how far they go in relativizing to the agent’s limitations. My argument for prospectivism is an argument for moderately objective prospectivism, according to which the (...) right thing to do is what would make sense given reasonable beliefs, reasonable probability estimates and a reasonable understanding of value. My argument is an argument for this form of prospectivism over objectivism. Arguments about prospectivism and objectivism usually use an example with the following form: an agent has a choice between options, one she knows would be acceptable, while the other could either be catastrophic or very good. Objectivists argue that the right thing to do is what would in fact be best (though the agent cannot know which option that is) while prospectivists argue that the agent’s ignorance is relevant, and the right thing to do is to compromise. The question is how we should understand the underlying argument. It is not about action guidance. Moderately objective prospectivism is not action guiding, because an actual agent may not have access to reasonable beliefs, probability estimates and so on. Another common argument is that the objective notion is the primary one. I show that there are no good grounds for this claim. My argument uses the distinction between rightness and goodness to show that a consequentialist theory, that bases rightness on goodness, should take into account how much goodness is at stake. Crucially, potential losses as well as gains are relevant. So long as goodness, rather than rightness, is in the driving seat, we should not be ‘bestness fetishists’. As the name suggest, this would be an irrational privileging of the best option. This argument does not apply to pure deontology: a pure deontology does not use the notion of goodness at all, and so there is nothing to compromise with. If the agent does not know what is right, there is nothing further to say. I end by arguing against a recent strategy that aims to show that although objectivism is true (the right option is the best one), we should sometimes do what is wrong (i.e. what is prospectively best). I argue that in so far as this is correct it is simply prospectivism with awkward terminology. (shrink)