Annotation A challenge to our perception of how cultures and ideals are formed, this book shows that while structural ideals allow people to co-operate as they work toward goals - their own or those of their community - these images of perfection, so easily accepted as the unalterable structure of our society, can be changed, and are changed by individuals.

In this paper, we argue that the Cultural Left and what we call cultural post-feminism has done little to alleviate conditions of subjugation and oppression of girlsand women outside of academia and has in fact been complacent with patriarchal social structures. Cultural post-feminism, with its focus on difference and identity and its fear of speaking on behalf of the down-trodden for fear of "colonizing" them with Western ideologies, has made few serious attempts to evoke a real alternative to super-tolerant liberal (...) pluralism. Further, we argue that academic feminism's traditional involvement with textual analysis rather than pragmatic social and political action has cooperated with the conservative academic climate in colleges and universities, giving students an overly abstract and elitist view of the feminist project. We call for a more active and progressive form of academic feminist thought, one that focuses less on difference, identity, and textuality, and more on social and political equality and justice. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT or Google’s Bard have shown significant performance on a variety of text-based tasks, such as summarization, translation, and even the generation of new...

The terms ``objectivity'''' and ``objective'''' are among the mostused yet ill-defined terms in the philosophy of science and epistemology. Common to all thevarious usages is the rhetorical force of ``I endorse this and you should too'''', orto put it more mildly, that one should trust the outcome of the objectivity-producing process.The persuasive endorsement and call to trust provide some conceptual coherenceto objectivity, but the reference to objectivity is hopefully not merely an attemptat persuasive endorsement. What, in addition to epistemological endorsement,does (...) objectivity carry with it? Drawing on recent historical and philosophical work,I articulate eight operationally accessible and distinct senses of objectivity.While there are links among these senses, providing cohesion to the concept, I argue thatnone of the eight senses is strictly reducible to the others, giving objectivity itsirreducible complexity. (shrink)

Over the last fifteen years, an ambitious explanatory framework has been proposed to unify explanations across biology and cognitive science. Active inference, whose most famous tenet is the free energy principle, has inspired excitement and confusion in equal measure. Here, we lay the ground for proper critical analysis of active inference, in three ways. First, we give simplified versions of its core mathematical models. Second, we outline the historical development of active inference and its relationship to other theoretical approaches. Third, (...) we describe three different kinds of claim -- labelled mathematical, empirical and general -- routinely made by proponents of the framework, and suggest dialectical links between them. Overall, we aim to increase philosophical understanding of active inference so that it may be more readily evaluated. -/- This the final submitted version of the Introduction to the Topical Collection "The Free Energy Principle: From Biology to Cognition", forthcoming in Biology & Philosophy. (shrink)

A systematic introduction suitable for readers who have little familiarity with logic. Provides numerous examples and complete proofs.

Hutto and Myin claim that teleosemantics cannot account for mental content. In their view, teleosemantics accounts for a poorer kind of relation between cognitive states and the world but lacks the theoretical tools to account for a richer kind. We show that their objection imposes two criteria on theories of content: a truth-evaluable criterion and an intensionality criterion. For the objection to go through, teleosemantics must be subject to both these criteria and must fail to satisfy them. We argue that (...) teleosemantics meets the truth-evaluable criterion and is not required to meet the intensionality criterion. We conclude that Hutto and Myin’s objection fails. (shrink)

This paper aims to establish several interconnected points. First, a particular interpretation of the mathematical definition of information, known as the causal interpretation, is supported largely by misunderstandings of the engineering context from which it was taken. A better interpretation, which makes the definition and quantification of information relative to the function of its user, is outlined. The first half of the paper is given over to introducing communication theory and its competing interpretations. The second half explores three consequences of (...) the main thesis. First, a popular claim that the quantification of information in a signal is irrelevant for the meaning of that signal is exposed as fallacious. Second, a popular distinction between causal and semantic information is shown to be misleading, and I argue it should be replaced with a related distinction between natural and intentional signs. Finally, I argue that recent empirical work from microbiology and cognitive science drawing on resources of mathematical communication theory is best interpreted by the functional account. Overall, a functional approach is shown to be both theoretically and empirically well-supported. (shrink)

. This paper describes a cross-cultural and developmental research project on naïve or folk biology, that is, the study of how people conceptualize nature. The combination of domain specificity and cross-cultural comparison brings a new perspective to theories of categorization and reasoning and undermines the tendency to focus on “standard populations.” From the standpoint of mainstream cognitive psychology, we find that results gathered from standard populations in industrialized societies often fail to generalize to humanity at large. For example, similarity-driven typicality (...) and diversity effects and basic level phenomena either are not found or pattern differently when we move beyond undergraduates. From the perspective of domain-specificity, standard populations may yield misleading results, because such populations represent examples of especially impoverished experience with respect to nature. Conceptions of humans as biological kinds vary with cultural milieu and input conditions. We also show certain phenomena that are robust across populations, consistent with notions of domain-specificity. (shrink)

The free energy principle is notoriously difficult to understand. In this paper, we relate the principle to a framework that philosophers of biology are familiar with: Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics. We argue that: systems that minimise free energy are systems with a proper function; and Karl Friston’s notion of implicit modelling can be understood in terms of Millikan’s notion of mapping relations. Our analysis reveals some surprising formal similarities between the two frameworks, and suggests interesting lines of future research. We hope (...) this will aid further philosophical evaluation of the free energy principle. (shrink)

The Relevance View, exemplified by Alex Voorhoeve's Aggregate Relevant Claims, has considerable appeal. It accommodates our reluctance to aggregate weak claims in canonical cases like Life for Headaches, while permitting aggregation of claims in a range of other cases. But it has been the target of significant criticism. In an important recent paper, Patrick Tomlin argues that the view suffers from failures of internal logic, violating plausible consistency constraints and generating incoherent combinations of verdicts on cases. And in cases resembling (...) real-world healthcare allocation problems, Tomlin argues that the view offers no guidance at all. In response, I argue that the internal logic of the Relevance View is sound, and the view's core principles, suitably clarified, support a significant extension of the view beyond the simple cases to which it is typically applied. (shrink)

This essay is written in two parts. The first is a commentary on the affective politics of philosophy as a discipline. The theme here is philosophy’s reverence problem, an affective bond to the teacher and the text, which is threatened or even injured by feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophy emerges as disruptive irreverence in the midst of the discipline, and injured reverence becomes a powerful prereflective motivation for resistance to feminist thought. The second part of the essay is an exploration of (...) the field of inquiry called feminist phenomenology. Is feminist phenomenology simply phenomenology from another point of view, that of the embodied female subject? Is it conducted, in other words, in a space beyond politics and power where the difference of this subject discloses values and meanings that have not yet been thematized in phenomenological inquiry, but which phenomenology is already competent to pursue? Or does feminist phenomenology disrupt or transform phenomenological practice as we traditionally understand it? In this paper, I claim that phenomenology must be critical in order to be feminist, that it must disrupt phenomenological practice rather than simply “applying” it to a new object, “woman.” In the work of Simone de Beauvoir we find a different phenomenological practice that feminists can count as a positive inheritance. The real difference of feminist phenomenology, however, only emerges in the practice itself. In order to capture something about this difference I take the phenomenon of shame as a case study, and compare three recent phenomenological accounts of shame. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis paper discusses the scientific instruments made and used by the microscopist Antony van Leeuwenhoek. The immediate cause of our study was the discovery of an overlooked document from the Delft archive: an inventory of the possessions that were left in 1745 after the death of Leeuwenhoek's daughter Maria. This list sums up which tools and scientific instruments Leeuwenhoek possessed at the end of his life, including his famous microscopes. This information, combined with the results of earlier historical research, gives (...) us new insights about the way Leeuwenhoek began his lens grinding and how eventually he made his best lenses. It also teaches us more about Leeuwenhoek's work as a surveyor and a wine gauger.A further investigation of the 1747 sale of Leeuwenhoek's 531 single lens microscopes has not only led us to the identification of nearly all buyers, but also has provided us with some explanation about why only a dozen of this large number of microscopes has survived. (shrink)

Arguments from popular opinion have long been regarded with suspicion, and in most logic textbooks the _ad populum _argument is classified as a fallacy. Douglas Walton now asks whether this negative evaluation is always justified, particularly in a democratic system where decisions are based on majority opinion. In this insightful book, Walton maintains that there is a genuine type of argumentation based on commonly accepted opinions and presumptions that should represent a standard of rational decision-making on important issues, especially (...) those of a personal and political nature. He shows how to judge arguments based on appeals to popular opinion in a more balanced way, identifying eleven subtypes of the _ad populum_ argument and providing a pragmatic method to evaluate each of these types. Walton has examined dozens of logic texts and drawn on a wide range of literature to reveal the many uses and misuses of popular opinion. He contrasts the traditional discussion of _ad populum _in Greek rhetoric with recent textbook treatment, then contrasts these contemporary views with his own dialectical perspective in order to clarify often confused appeals to prejudice and appeals to common knowledge. Although appeal to popular opinion has long been a powerful argumentative tactic, this is the first book to systematically describe and evaluate it as a well-defined type of argument with its own special characteristics. It enables us to deal with these often deceptive arguments in a critically balanced way and makes an original contribution to an important strand of rhetoric. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.2 (2001) 93-112 [Access article in PDF] Enthymemes, Common Knowledge, and Plausible Inference Douglas Walton The study of enthymemes has always been regarded as important in logic, critical thinking, and rhetoric, but too often it is the formal or mechanistic aspect of it that has been in the forefront. This investigation will show that there is a kind of plausibilistic script-based reasoning, of a kind (...) that has mainly been studied in artificial intelligence, that should have a much more important role to play in the study of enthymemes. But then curiously, as will also be shown, this plausibilistic type of reasoning was familiar in the ancient world, to the Sophists, as well as to leading philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. By linking this ancient notion of plausibility to the modern notion used in computer science, this investigation reveals an important basis for the enthymeme that has a type of logical structure in its own right, but also has an informal aspect.An enthymeme, in current usage, is an argument that has one or more premises, or possibly a conclusion, not explicitly stated in the text, but that needs to have these propositions explicitly stated to extract the complete argument from the text. Sometimes enthymemes are described as arguments with "missing premises." That vocabulary is awkward, however, because the nonexplicit statement that needs to be added can be a conclusion, at least in a minority of cases. To make the exposition below smoother, the term nonexplicit assumption will be used to cover either the case of a nonexplicit premise or that of a nonexplicit conclusion. The problem with enthymemes is that if the nonexplicit assumptions in an argument are supposed to be propositions used by the arguer (as opposed to just the propositions needed to make the argument structurally correct, according to some standard), reasonable people can have differences of opinion on what the nonexplicit assumptions are supposed to be. The problem is that filling in the missing parts of enthymemes depends on interpreting the natural language [End Page 93] in which the argument was put forward to try to determine what the speaker meant to say.The solution to the problem comes through the recognition that enthymemes rest not only on formal (structural) criteria, but also on informal criteria. One of the most important of these informal criteria is something often called "common knowledge" (Govier 1992; Freeman 1995). But as shown below in a set of selected case studies of enthymemes, "common knowledge" is not really a kind of knowledge at all. It is really plausibility, or eikos, something well known in the ancient world and often misleadingly translated as "probability." Curiously, Aristotle's original doctrine of the enthymeme was based on this notion of plausibility. This historical fact has often been a source of puzzlement and confusion, and sometimes it has even been taken to indicate a defect or contradiction in Aristotle's treatment of the enthymeme. However, the goal of this investigation is not primarily historical. It is to work out one of the most important required steps toward a solution to the problem of enthymemes. But to do this, it is necessary to come back to the ancient notion of plausible inference. 1. The problem with enthymemes Once you have any formal theory of inference, like syllogistic, for example, you will be confronted by cases of arguments in everyday discourse that meet all the requirements for a structurally correct inference except that some part or parts, usually a premise or a conclusion, is missing. By "missing" is meant that the proposition in question has not been explicitly stated in the text of discourse, even though it may be clear enough that the speaker (writer) was relying on it, or including it, as part of the argument. The classic example is the following inference: All men are mortal; therefore, Socrates is mortal. To evaluate such an argument, surely some account of the "hidden" or "missing" assumption needs to be taken. The problem with enthymemes (Burke 1985; Gough and Tindale 1985; Hitchcock 1985) is that, if given carte... (shrink)

In cases where the claims of different groups of people compete, the Relevance View occupies a middle ground between aggregation and nonaggregation. It allows weaker claims to aggregate to outweigh a stronger claim just when the competing claims, compared pairwise, are sufficiently close in strength. The view has strong intuitive appeal when applied to simple binary choices, but I argue that attempts to extend it to nonbinary choices have been unsuccessful. I propose a new extension of the Relevance View to (...) nonbinary choices based on a “binary contrastive” account of the moral reasons that obtain in the cases of interest. (shrink)

The multiplicity of deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs) encoded by vertebrate genomes is partly attributable to whole genome duplication events that occurred early in chordate evolution. By surveying the literature for the largest family of DUBs (the ubiquitin-specific proteases), extensive functional redundancy for duplicated genes has been confirmed as opposed to singletons. Dramatically conflicting results have been reported for loss of function studies conducted through RNA interference as opposed to inactivating mutations, but the contradictory findings can be reconciled by a recently proposed (...) compensatory mechanism involving nonsense-mediated RNA degradation. Duplicated genes are often inactivated to become pseudogenes, and it is proposed that such is the fate of the USP15 gene of zebrafish, a commonly used model system. As it is reviewed here, these observations have implications not only for the interpretation of model system phenotypes but also for therapeutic interventions designed to target DUBs. (shrink)

In The City of God, XI, 10, St Augustine claims that the divine nature is simple because ‘it is what it has’ (quod habet hoc est). We may take this as a slogan for the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS), a doctrine which finds its way into orthodox medieval Christian theological speculation. Like the doctrine of God's timeless eternality, the DDS has seemed obvious and pious to many, and incoherent, misguided, and repugnant to others. Unlike the doctrine of God's timeless (...) eternality, the DDS has received very little critical attention. The DDS did not originate with Augustine, but I am not primarily concerned with its pedigree. Nor am I concerned to ask how the doctrine interacts with trinitarian speculation. I will have my hands full as it is. In Section I of this paper I shall provide a rough characterization of the DDS, indicate its complexity, and focus on a particular aspect of the doctrine which will exercise us in the remainder of the paper, namely, the thesis that the divine attributes are all identical with each other and with God. In section n I shall discuss Alvin Plantinga's recent objections to Aquinas' version of the DDS. I shall then offer a more detailed presentation of what I take to be Aquinas' version (section III), and recast it in terms of a theory of attributes which is significantly different from Plantinga's (section IV). Although the recasting of the doctrine will enable me to rebut Plantinga's objections (section v), it by no means solves all the problems of the DDS. In section vi I shall discuss the chief lingering problem facing a defender of the DDS. (shrink)

A new theory of ethnic cleansing based on the most terrible cases and cases of lesser violence. Murderous cleansing is modern, 'the dark side of democracy'. It results where the demos is confused with the ethnos. Danger arises where two rival ethno-national movements each claims 'its own' state over the same territory. Conflict escalates where either the weaker side fights because of aid from outside, or the stronger side believes it can deploy sudden, overwhelming force. Escalation is not simply the (...) work of 'evil elites' or 'primitive peoples'. It results from complex interactions between leaders, militants, and 'core constituencies' of ethno-nationalism. Understanding this complex process helps us devise policies to avoid ethnic cleansing in the future. (shrink)

Discussions of Karl Popper's falsificationist philosophy of science appear regularly in the recent literature on economic methodology. In this literature, there seem to be two fundamental points of agreement about Popper. First, most economists take Popper's falsificationist method of bold conjecture and severe test to be the correct characterization of scientific conduct in the physical sciences. Second, most economists admit that economic theory fails miserably when judged by these same falsificationist standards. As Latsis states, “the development of economic analysis would (...) look a dismal affair through falsificationist spectacles.”. (shrink)

Prominent views about representation share a premise: that mathematical communication theory is blind to representational content. Here I challenge that premise by rejecting two common misconceptions: that Claude Shannon said that the meanings of signals are irrelevant for communication theory (he didn't and they aren't), and that since correlational measures can't distinguish representations from natural signs, communication theory can't distinguish them either (the premise is true but the conclusion is false; no valid argument can link them).

In this important new book, Douglas McDermid argues persuasively for two key claims: first, that the so-called "Neo-Pragmatist" critique of traditional epistemology is thoroughly unconvincing; second, that Rorty is guilty of taking the name of Pragmatism in vain, since there are crucial and far-reaching differences between Neo-Pragmatism and the Classical Pragmatism of James and Dewey. The Varieties of Pragmatism will take its place in the forefront of the literature on this most vital part of the American philosophical legacy.

Rhetorical Structure Theory has enjoyed continuous attention since its origins in the 1980s. It has been applied, compared to other approaches, and also criticized in a number of areas in discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. In this article, we review some of the discussions about the theory itself, especially addressing issues of the reliability of analyses and psychological validity, together with a discussion of the nature of text relations. We also propose areas for further research. A follow-up (...) article will discuss applications of the theory in various fields. (shrink)

In this engaging book, Douglas Anderson begins with the assumption that philosophy—the Greek love of wisdom—is alive and well in American culture. At the same time, professional philosophy remains relatively invisible. Anderson traverses American life to find places in the wider culture where professional philosophy in the distinctively American tradition can strike up a conversation. How might American philosophers talk to us about our religious experience, or political engagement, or literature—or even, popular music? Anderson’s second aim is to find (...) places where philosophy happens in nonprofessional guises—cultural places such as country music, rock’n roll, and Beat literature. He not only enlarges the tradition of American philosophers such as John Dewey and William James by examining lesser-known figures such as Henry Bugbee and Thomas Davidson, but finds the theme and ideas of American philosophy in some unexpected places, such as the music of Hank Williams, Tammy Wynette, and Bruce Springsteen, and the writingsof Jack Kerouac.The idea of “philosophy Americana” trades on the emergent genre of “music Americana,” rooted in traditional themes and styles yet engaging our present experiences. The music is “popular” but not thoroughly driven by economic considerations, and Anderson seeks out an analogous role for philosophical practice, where philosophy and popular culture are co-adventurers in the life of ideas. Philosophy Americana takes seriously Emerson’s quest for the extraordinary in the ordinary and James’s belief that popular philosophy can still be philosophy. (shrink)

Dans la vie d'un lecteur, certains auteurs occupent une place à part : lectures inaugurales, compagnons de tous les jours, sources auxquelles on revient. La collection "Les auteurs de ma vie" invite de grands écrivains contemporains à partager leur admiration pour un classique, dont la lecture a particulièrement compté pour eux. Dans sa jeunesse, Thomas Mann a lu et médité Schopenhauer, philosophe de la volonté et du pessimisme, qui a largement influencé l'oeuvre de celui qui deviendra l'un des plus (...) grands écrivains modernes de la décadence. Cet hommage à son maître nous offre une clé précieuse de son parcours intellectuel. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:World Alienation in Feminist ThoughtThe Sublime Epistemology of Emphatic Anti-EssentialismBonnie Mann (bio)The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Hannah ArendtWe are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve.Edward CaseyThe alliance between feminism and postmodernism1 in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as (...) "essentialist."2 Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated.3 More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence.With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement [End Page 45] of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism.4 On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote already of "the advent of a new and yet unknown age," marked by world-alienation, a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (1958, 6). The "unknown age" has now been named. Postmodernity takes this flight one step further than Arendt foresaw, however, and even folds the universe and the self into discourse. World-alienation has taken the form of the self-enclosed universe of the text. Our sojourn in the world of signs is so paradigmatic of "the postmodern condition," that asking the question of our relationship to the physical planet we inhabit seems naive and nostalgic. Anything we might say about the earth, after all, is already in language, already bound up in discourse. To speak of an "earth" or "nature" that exceeds discourse is to find oneself locked, even so, within discourse. Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, in the relation between words and things, we are stuck with signs that refer only to other signs.A capitulation to our very real physical and phenomenological experience of world-alienation finds here its theoretical form. We give in to placelessness. As Edward S. Casey writes, "To say 'I have no place to go' is to admit to a desperate circumstance. Yet we witness daily the disturbing spectacle of people with no place to go: refugees from natural catastrophes or strife-torn countries, the homeless on the streets of modern cities, not to mention 'stray' animals. In fearing that 'the earth is becoming uninhabitable'—a virtual universal lament—we are fearing that the earth will no longer provide adequate places in which to live. The incessant motion of postmodern life in late-capitalist societies at once echoes and exacerbates this fear" (Casey 1993, xiii). Intellectually, we find ourselves in equally desperate circumstances, trapped as we are inside a language that can refer only to itself. This self-enclosure becomes a kind [End Page 46] of no place, a world-alienated space without place,5 and feminist thinking is set adrift from the physical places that give feminist thinkers our moment by moment sustenance. In its alliance with postmodernism, feminism has capitulated to the placelessness that so marks our phenomenological experience at the turn of the millennium.6Yet we inhabit this planet. Faced with its destruction we are compelled to make sense of our relationship to it and to act to save it. A feminist philosophy that turns its back on the earth embraces, rather than contests, the world-alienation of which Arendt spoke. Yet our alienation... (shrink)

Alexander Rosenberg (1983) has argued, contrary to his previous work in the philosophy of economics, that economics is not science, and it is merely mathematics. The following paper argues that Rosenberg fails to demonstrate either of these two claims. The questions of the predictive weakness of modern economics and the cognitive standing of abstract economic theory are discussed in detail.

In our article,Where the ethical action is,we argue that medical and ethical modes of thought are not different in kind but merely different aspects of a clinical situation. In response, Emmerich argues that in so doing, we neglect several important features of healthcare and medical education. Although we applaud the spirit of Emmerich’s response, we argue that his critique is an attempt at a general defence of the value of bioethical expertise in clinical practice, rather than a specific critique of (...) our account. (shrink)

Drawing on a survey of over 4000 students and 1300 faculty members at the University of Maryland Global Campus, we find evidence for a reconceptualization of the use of commercialized websites offering access to “tutors” or “study help” as a type of collaborative cheating. Past studies have examined this behavior as an extension of contract cheating, but we find that students perceive the use of these sites very differently than they perceive contract cheating behaviors. In this paper we will discuss (...) how “tutor” or “study helper” websites combine the phenomena of collaborative cheating with internet-driven shifts in cultural and social perceptions to create a new type of cheating behavior that is viewed differently by students and faculty. (shrink)

Womens Liberation and the Sublime is a passionate report on the state of feminist thinking and practice after the linguistic turn. A critical assessment of masculinist notions of the sublime in modern and postmodern accounts grounds the author's positive and constructive recuperation of sublime experience in a feminist voice.

There is a burgeoning scientific and ethical literature on the use of biomarkers—such as genes or brain scan results—and biological interventions to predict and prevent crime. This literature on biopredicting and biopreventing crime focuses almost exclusively on crimes that are physical, violent, and/or sexual in nature—often called blue-collar crimes—while giving little attention to less conventional crimes such as economic and environmental offences, also known as white-collar crimes. We argue here that this skewed focus is unjustified: white-collar crime is likely far (...) costlier than blue-collar crime in money, health, and lives lost. Moreover, attempts to biopredict and bioprevent blue-collar crime may entail adopting potentially unfair measures that target individuals who are already socio-economically disadvantaged, thus compounding pre-existing unfairness. We argue, therefore, that we ought to extend the study of bioprediction and bioprevention to white-collar crime as a means of more efficiently and fairly responding to crime. We suggest that identifying biomarkers for certain psychopathic traits, which appear to be over-represented among senior positions in corporate and perhaps political organisations, is one avenue through which this research can be broadened to include white-collar crime. (shrink)

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot. Its capability is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence or even consciousness. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider the (...) question whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: Might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We asked it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance. (shrink)

Abstract This paper addresses the role that argumentation schemes and argument visualization software tools can play in helping to find and counter objections to a given argument one is confronted with. Based on extensive analysis of features of the argumentation in these two examples, a practical four-step method of finding objections to an argument is set out. The study also applies the Carneades Argumentation System to the task of finding objections to an argument, and shows how this system has some (...) capabilities that are especially useful. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-23 DOI 10.1007/s10503-012-9261-z Authors Douglas Walton, Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR), University of Windsor, 2500 University Ave. W., Windsor, ON N9B 3Y1, Canada Journal Argumentation Online ISSN 1572-8374 Print ISSN 0920-427X. (shrink)

Rhetorical Structure Theory is a theory of text organization that has led to areas of application beyond discourse analysis and text generation, its original goals. In this article, we review the most important applications in several areas: discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. We also provide a list of resources useful for work within the RST framework. The present article is a complement to our review of the theoretical aspects of the theory.