Systems change requires complex interventions. Cross-sector partnerships face the daunting task of addressing complex societal problems by aligning different backgrounds, values, ideas and resources. A major challenge for CSPs is how to link the type of partnership to the intervention needed to drive change. Intervention strategies are thereby increasingly based on Theories of Change. Applying ToCs is often a donor requirement, but it also reflects the ambition of a partnership to enhance its transformative potential. The current use of ToCs in (...) partnering efforts varies greatly. There is a tendency for a linear and relatively simple use of ToCs that does limited justice to the complexity of the problems partnerships aim to address. Since partnership dynamics are already complex and challenging themselves, confusion and disagreement over the appropriate application of ToCs is likely to hamper rather than enhance the transformative potential of partnerships. We develop a complexity alignment framework and a diagnostic tool that enables partnerships to better appreciate the complexity of the context in which they operate, allowing them to adjust their learning strategy. This paper applies recent insights into how to deal with complexity from both the evaluation and theory of change fields to studies investigating the transformative capacity of partnerships. This can serve as a check to define the challenges of partnering projects and can help delineate the societal sources and layers of complexity that cross-sector partnerships deal with such as failure, insufficient responsibility taking and collective action problems at four phases of partnering. (shrink)

Regenerative Medicine promises to develop treatments to regrow healthy tissues and cure the physical body. One of the emerging developments within this field is regenerative implants, such as jawbone or heart valve implants, that can be broken down by the body and are gradually replaced with living tissue. Yet challenges for embodiment are to be expected, given that the implants are designed to integrate deeply into the tissue of the living body, so that implant and body become one. In this (...) paper, we explore how regenerative implants may affect the embodied experience of implant recipients. To this end, we take a phenomenological approach. First, we explore what insights the existing phenomenological and empirical literature on embodiment offers regarding the experience of illness and of living with regular (non-regenerative) implants and organ transplants. Second, we apply these insights to better understand how future implant recipients might experience living with regenerative implants. Third, we conclude that concepts and considerations from the existing phenomenological literature do not sufficiently address what it might be like to live with an implantable technology that, over time, becomes one with the living body. We argue that the interwovenness and intimate relationship of people living with regenerative implants should be understood in terms of ‘entanglement’. Entanglement allows us to explore the complexities of human-technology relations, acknowledging the inseparability of humans and implantable technologies. Our theoretical foundations regarding the role of embodiment may be tested empirically once more people will be living with regenerative implants. (shrink)

This collection of images and essays originated at the acclaimed Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Cities and Eyes Sourcebook presents the diverse work of the Academy’s artists, philosophers, scholars, architects, and photographers as they explore the world’s cities, including Amsterdam, London, New York, Paris, and São Paulo. Presented in both English and Dutch, and accompanied by an index that includes suggestions for further reading, Cities and Eyes Sourcebook will illuminate the world’s greatest cities for a new audience of art lovers (...) and urbanites alike. (shrink)

Inspired by the work of Richard Abel, the authors conduct a N=1 study into the career path and disciplinary records of a Dutch immigration advocate. Their aim is to offer explanations as to why some lawyers seem so impervious to discipline. The authors analyse the case from three different angles: (1) characteristics of the disciplinary system (2) the social network of the advocate in question, including his professional network, and (3) the advocate?s personality. According to the authors, the key to (...) explaining non-compliance with ethical rules lies in the interaction between these three perspectives. In the case of the immigration lawyer a lack of professional socialization and the fact that he operated on his own, without substantial feedback or criticism from his social network were important explanatory factors. The article also offers a detailed insight into the effects of an accelerated disciplinary proceeding in which a local bar president ex officio assumes a new role. (shrink)

Despite widespread and worldwide efforts to eradicate vector-borne diseases such as malaria, these diseases continue to have an enormous negative impact on public health. For this reason, scientists are working on novel control strategies, such as gene drive technologies (GDTs). As GDT research advances, researchers are contemplating the potential next step of conducting field trials. An important point of discussion regarding these field trials relates to who should be informed, consulted, and involved in decision-making about their design and launch. It (...) is generally argued that community members have a particularly strong claim to be engaged, and yet, disagreement and lack of clarity exist about how this “community” should be defined and delineated. In this paper, we shed light on this “boundary problem”: the problem of determining how boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in (GDT) community engagement should be drawn. As our analysis demonstrates, the process of defining and delineating a community is itself normative. First, we explicate why it is important to define and delineate the community. Second, we demonstrate that different definitions of community are used and intermingled in the debate on GDTs, and argue in favor of distinguishing geographical, affected, cultural, and political communities. Finally, we propose initial guidance for deciding who should (not) be engaged in decision-making about GDT field trials, by arguing that the definition and delineation of the community should depend on the rationale for engagement and that the characteristics of the community itself can guide the effective design of community engagement strategies. (shrink)

The ministerial needs of Afrikaans-speaking university students in South Africa. This article is the result of an empirical study conducted in the student congregations of the Dutch Reformed Church, the Netherdutch Reformed Church of Africa and the Reformed Church in South Africa. The study has been done to answer the question: What are the miniserial needs of Afrikaans-speaking university students in South Africa? The research problem that necessitates this study is a lack of knowledge and understanding of the ministerial needs (...) of Afrikaans-speaking university student members of the Reformed student congregations in South Africa. Recent research on student ministry to support student ministers and congregations in the South African context is scant. The research question is formulated to determine the ministerial needs of university students and the implications those needs have for ministry to university students. The goal of the research is to identify the ministerial needs of university students in South Africa and to empower the student congregations to minister to these students more effectively. From the research, three primary ministry needs have been identified: (1) the need for faith formation; (2) the need for mentoring; and (3) the need for a faith community.Contribution: The contribution of this article is original empirical research on the ministerial needs of Afrikaans-speaking university students in South Africa. The research contributes to the current void in South African research on student ministry. (shrink)

The Dutch law states that a physician may perform euthanasia according to a written advance euthanasia directive when a patient is incompetent as long as all legal criteria of due care are met. This may also hold for patients with advanced dementia. We investigated the differing opinions of physicians and members of the general public on the acceptability of euthanasia in patients with advanced dementia.

Liao and Carbonell discuss the role of (supposed) racial differences and racism in two medical devices: pulse oximeters and spirometers. They show that what might seem like cases of mere bias, are...

According to Peter van Inwagen, visible inanimate objects do not, strictly speaking, exist. In defending this controversial thesis, he offers fresh insights on such topics as personal identity, commonsense belief, existence over time, the phenomenon of vagueness, and the relation between metaphysics and ordinary language.

Bas C. van Fraassen presents an original exploration of how we represent the world.

Este artículo sostiene que Platón constituye un interlocutor fructífero para la Teoría crítica. Desde un diálogo con Axel Honneth, argumentaremos primero que la metodología de crítica social desarrollada en la República posee elementos constructivo-racionales y reconstructivo-hermenéuticos. Luego, enfatizaremos dos conceptos prefigurados en dicha obra que, mediante Hegel, yacen en el trasfondo de la Teoría crítica, a saber: holismo y patología social. Ello nos permitirá articular, como conclusión, una “dialéctica de la justicia” que, en el sentido de Adorno & Horkheimer, recorre (...) la obra de Honneth. (shrink)

In _Modal Logic for Open Minds,_ Johan van Benthem provides an up-to-date introduction to the field of modal logic, outlining its major ideas and exploring the numerous ways in which various academic fields have adopted it. Van Benthem begins with the basic theories of modal logic, semantics, bisimulation, and axiomatics, and also covers more advanced topics, such as expressive power and computational complexity. The book then moves to a wide range of applications, including new developments in information flow, intelligent agency, (...) and games. Taken together, the chapters show modal logic at the crossroads of philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, computer science, and economics. Most of the chapters are followed by exercises, making this volume ideal for undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy, computer science, symbolic systems, cognitive science, and linguistics. (shrink)

The goal of the book is to present the latest research on the new challenges of data technologies. It will offer an overview of the social, ethical and legal problems posed by group profiling, big data and predictive analysis and of the different approaches and methods that can be used to address them. In doing so, it will help the reader to gain a better grasp of the ethical and legal conundrums posed by group profiling. The volume first maps the (...) current and emerging uses of new data technologies and clarifies the promises and dangers of group profiling in real life situations. It then balances this with an analysis of how far the current legal paradigm grants group rights to privacy and data protection, and discusses possible routes to addressing these problems. Finally, an afterword gathers the conclusions reached by the different authors and discuss future perspectives on regulating new data technologies. (shrink)

This book gathers together thirteen of Peter van Inwagen's essays on metaphysics, several of which have acquired the status of modern classics in their field. They range widely across such topics as Quine's philosophy of quantification, the ontology of fiction, the part-whole relation, the theory of 'temporal parts', and human knowledge of modal truths. In addition, van Inwagen considers the question as to whether the psychological continuity theory of personal identity is compatible with materialism, and defends the thesis that possible (...) states of affairs are abstract objects, in opposition to David Lewis's 'extreme modal realism'. A specially-written introduction completes the collection, which will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in metaphysics. (shrink)

We appreciate that the theme “ethics of ethics conferences” that we introduced in 2023 (Van der Graaf et al. 2023) was echoed by the previous and current presidents of the International Association...

In 1980, Jacques Derrida published La carte postale: De Socrate a Freud et au-del a. At the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the English translation, Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida revisits this seminal work in Derrida's oeuvre. Derrida himself described The Post Card in his preface as "the remainders of a destroyed correspondence," stretching from 1977 to 1979. A cryptic text, it is riddled with gaps, word plays, and a meandering analysis of the interface between philosophy and (...) psychoanalysis. The contributors who offered the fourteen essays gathered in Going Postcard were each provided with a deceptively simple task: to write a gloss to a fragment from the first part of The Post Card, "Envois." The result is a prismatic array of commentaries, excursions, and interpretations that take Derrida "to the letter." The different glosses on lemmas such as genre, erasure, telepathy, philately, and sperm transport The Post Card into the twenty-first century and offer a "correspondence," if fragmentary, with Derrida's work and the work to come. (shrink)

"Cet ouvrage a pour objectif de proposer une histoire de ce que, après Descartes, on a appelé le cogito, le "Je pense, donc je suis". Le parti-pris est que sa valeur ne tient pas seulement à ce qu'il a pu affirmer de l'ego, de la nature de la pensée et de l'existence, mais à ce qui s'est ensuite écrit et qui peut prendre la forme d'une critique. Chaque étude constitue un échantillon du travail sur le cogito ; elle le déplie (...) selon un aspect de la méthode philosophique ou de la diversité des traditions historiques de la philosophie. L'ouvrage devrait permettre de parcourir les réécritures du cogito, en conduisant à porter une attention renouvelée à la formule cartésienne et en la désenclavant, pour ainsi dire, de ses réécritures."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This is an extensively revised edition of Mr. Quine's introduction to abstract set theory and to various axiomatic systematizations of the subject. The treatment of ordinal numbers has been strengthened and much simplified, especially in the theory of transfinite recursions, by adding an axiom and reworking the proofs. Infinite cardinals are treated anew in clearer and fuller terms than before. Improvements have been made all through the book; in various instances a proof has been shortened, a theorem strengthened, a space-saving (...) lemma inserted, an obscurity clarified, an error corrected, a historical omission supplied, or a new event noted. (shrink)

Van Vugt, van der Velde, and collaborators show how cognitive architectures can implement verbal theories of psychiatric problems. They show how one theory of depressive rumination can be implemented in the ACT‐R cognitive architecture by changing the contents of its simulated memory. These manipulations of memory habits lead the model to show impairments in a sustained attention task‐‐a plausible impairment given that people who suffer from depression have concentration complaints.

Brouwer’s view on induction has relatively recently been characterised as one on which it is not only intuitive (as expected) but functional, by van Dalen. He claims that Brouwer’s ‘Ur-intuition’ also yields the recursor. Appealing to Husserl’s phenomenology, I offer an analysis of Brouwer’s view that supports this characterisation and claim, even if assigning the primary role to the iterator instead. Contrasts are drawn to accounts of induction by Poincaré, Heyting, and Kreisel. On the phenomenological side, the analysis provides an (...) alternative to that in Tieszen’s Mathematical Intuition, and confirms a view of Gödel on his Dialectica Interpretation. (shrink)

In an effort to inform the discussion surrounding existential risks from AI, we formulate Extinction-level Goodhart’s Law as “Virtually any goal specification, pursued to the extreme, will result in the extinction of humanity”, and we aim to understand which formal models are suitable for investigating this hypothesis. Note that we remain agnostic as to whether Extinction-level Goodhart’s Law holds or not. As our key contribution, we identify a set of conditions that are necessary for a model that aims to be (...) informative for evaluating specific arguments for Extinction-level Goodhart’s Law. Since each of the conditions seems to significantly contribute to the complexity of the resulting model, formally evaluating the hypothesis might be exceedingly difficult. This raises the possibility that whether the risk of extinction from artificial intelligence is real or not, the underlying dynamics might be invisible to current scientific methods. (shrink)

Cảm xúc là yếu tố cơ bản thúc đẩy con người đưa ra quyết định và xử lý thông tin. Sợ hãi là một trong những cảm xúc phổ biến nhất ảnh hưởng đến hành vi của nhà đầu tư cá nhân trên thị trường chứng khoán. Mặc dù nhiều nghiên cứu đã được thực hiện để khám phá tác động của nỗi sợ hãi đối với hiệu quả đầu tư và hành vi giao dịch của nhà đầu tư cá (...) nhân, nhưng vẫn còn rất ít thông tin về các yếu tố ảnh hưởng đến nỗi sợ hãi của nhà đầu tư cá nhân trong thời kỳ thị trường sụt giảm (hoặc những giai đoạn cực kỳ biến động). Vì thế, nghiên cứu này được thực hiện để tìm hiểu liệu các nguồn thông tin ảnh hưởng đến quyết định đầu tư của nhà đầu tư có ảnh hưởng đến sự sợ hãi của họ khi khủng hoảng xảy ra hay không. Nghiên cứu đã sử dụng phương pháp phân tích Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) trên bộ dữ liệu từ 1526 nhà đầu tư Trung Quốc và Việt Nam. Kết quả nghiên cứu chỉ ra rằng các nhà đầu tư tiếp cận các loại thông tin khác nhau khi đưa ra quyết định đầu tư sẽ ảnh hưởng đến tần suất phản ứng sợ hãi khác nhau. Cụ thể, các nhà đầu tư tham khảo thông tin từ chuyên gia hoặc tự phân tích khi đưa ra quyết định đầu tư ít bị đóng băng (biểu hiện của tâm lý sợ hãi) hơn trong thời kỳ thị trường sụt giảm. Ngược lại, những người đưa ra quyết định đầu tư dựa trên thông tin từ người quen hay bạn bè và trực giác sẽ bị đóng băng thường xuyên hơn. Kết quả nghiên cứu này giúp gợi ý nhà đầu tư cá nhân nên trang bị cho mình các kiến thức về tài chính cũng như tham khảo các ý kiến chuyên gia trên thị trường, hoặc những nguồn thông tin đáng tin cậy, khi đưa ra quyết định đầu tư. Bên cạnh đó, cơ quan quản lý thị trường cần có hoạt động phổ cập kiến thức về thị trường chứng khoán, hạn chế ảnh hưởng của các kênh thông tin không chính thống, và khuyến khích nhà đầu tư ít kinh nghiệm mua chứng chỉ quỹ của các quỹ đầu tư. (shrink)

I identify two versions of the scientific anti-realist’s selectionist explanation for the success of science: Bas van Fraassen’s original and K. Brad Wray’s newer interpretation. In Wray’s version, psycho-social factors internal to the scientific community – viz. scientists’ interests, goals, and preferences – explain the theory-selection practices that explain theory-success. I argue that, if Wray’s version were correct, then science should resemble art. In art, the artwork-selection practices that explain artwork-success appear faddish. They are prone to radical change over time. (...) Theory-selection practices that explain theory-success in science are however not faddish. They are mostly stable; that is, long-lived and consistent over time. This is because scientists (explicitly or implicitly) subscribe to what I will call the testability norm: scientific theories must make falsifiable claims about the external physical world. The testability norm and not psycho-sociology explains the theory-selection practices that explain theory-success in science. Contra Wray, scientific anti-realists can then maintain that the external physical world (as expressed in the testability norm) explains theory-success. (shrink)

Misinformation about the novel coronavirus is a pressing societal challenge. Across two studies, one preregistered, we assess the efficacy of two ‘prebunking’ interventions aimed at improving people’s ability to spot manipulation techniques commonly used in COVID-19 misinformation across three different languages. We find that Go Viral!, a novel five-minute browser game, increases the perceived manipulativeness of misinformation about COVID-19, improves people’s attitudinal certainty in their ability to spot misinformation and reduces self-reported willingness to share misinformation with others. The first two (...) effects remain significant for at least one week after gameplay. We also find that reading real-world infographics from UNESCO improves people’s ability and confidence in spotting COVID-19 misinformation. Limitations and implications for fake news interventions are discussed. (shrink)

Increasing attention is paid to ethical issues and values when designing and deploying artificial intelligence (AI). However, we do not know how those values are embedded in artificial artefacts or how relevant they are to the population exposed to and interacting with AI applications. Based on literature engaging with ethical principles and moral values in AI, we designed an original survey instrument, including 15 value components, to estimate the importance of these values to people in the general population. The article (...) is based on representative surveys conducted in Estonia, Germany, and Sweden (_n_ = 4501), which have varying experiences with implementing AI. The factor analysis showed four underlying dimensions of values embedded in the design and use of AI: (1) protection of personal interests to ensure social benefit, (2) general monitoring to ensure universal solidarity, (3) ensuring social diversity and social sustainability, and (4) efficiency. We found that value types can be ordered along the two dimensions of resources and change. The comparison between countries revealed that some dimensions, like social diversity and sustainability evaluations, are more universally valued among individuals, countries, and domains. Based on our analysis, we suggest a need and a framework for developing basic values in AI. (shrink)

Vers la fin, probablement, du vie siècle de notre ère, David a composé un Commentaire à l’Isagoge de Porphyre comprenant un proème substantiel, lui-même précédé de très longs Prolégomènes à la philosophie (soixante-dix-neuf pages dans les CAG). Contrairement aux leçons préliminaires d’Ammonius qui précédaient le Commentaire de celui-ci à l’Isagoge, les Prolégomènes de David semblent former un tout autonome, sans relation évidente avec le Commentaire qui suit. Cet article a pour but de montrer que David a pourtant tissé des liens (...) solides entre son exégèse de l’Isagoge et les Prolégomènes à la philosophie. Ces liens, principalement noués dans le proème du Commentaire, sont de nature diverse. La première partie de l’article montre ainsi que les Prolégomènes préfigurent le Commentaire sous l’aspect de plusieurs concepts : la philosophie comme connaissance de l’universel ; l’homonymie ; les cinq « voix » ; la notion de « pur concept ». Tandis que la deuxième partie montre que certains principes structurels et méthodologiques du Commentaire à l’Isagoge, en particulier les « méthodes dialectiques », refluent sur la forme des Prolégomènes. En étudiant ces liens – conceptuels, d’abord, méthodologiques, ensuite –, l’article apporte des éléments d’interprétation originaux sur les Prolégomènes de David, en soulignant le profit qu’on tire à les lire à la lumière du Commentaire qui suivra. Comme on le voit dans une troisième partie, on peut extraire de ces textes une véritable « théorie du prologue », qui autorise David à « découper » dans l’Isagoge un proème sur lequel il projette les fonctions rhétoriques du prologue élaborées dans son propre Commentaire. Par un phénomène de « prologues emboîtés », les Prolégomènes constituent donc bien un préalable au proème du Commentaire, d’abord, puis au Commentaire à l’Isagoge et, enfin, au texte de Porphyre lui-même, lequel est comme une source irriguant, au moyen de concepts et de méthodes, l’exégèse de David. (shrink)

Philosophy of science has undergone a naturalistic turn, moving away from traditional idealized concerns with the logical structure of scientific theories and toward focusing on real-world scientific practice, especially in domains such as modeling and experimentation. As part of this shift, recent work has explored how the project of philosophically understanding science as a natural phenomenon can be enriched by drawing from different fields and disciplines, including niche construction theory in evolutionary biology, on the one hand, and ecological and enactive (...) views in embodied cognitive science, on the other. But these insights have so far been explored in separation from each other, without clear indication of whether they can work together. Moreover, the focus on particular practices, however insightful, has tended to lack consideration of potential further implications for a naturalized understanding of science as a whole (i.e., above and beyond those particular practices). Motivated by these developments, here we sketch a broad-ranging view of science, scientific practice and scientific knowledge in terms of ecological-enactive co-construction. The view we propose situates science in the biological, evolutionary context of human embodied cognitive activity aimed at addressing the demands of life. This motivates reframing theory as practice, and reconceptualizing scientific knowledge in ecological terms, as relational and world-involving. Our view also brings to the forefront of attention the fundamental link between ideas about the nature of mind, of science and of nature itself, which we explore by outlining how our proposal differs from more conservative, and narrower, conceptions of “cognitive niche construction.”. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show the pervasive, though often implicit, role of arguments in negotiation dialogue. This holds even for negotiations that start from a difference of interest such as mere bargaining through offers and counteroffers. But it certainly holds for negotiations that try to settle a difference of opinion on policy issues. It will be demonstrated how a series of offers and counteroffers in a negotiation dialogue contains a reconstructible series of implicit persuasion dialogues. The paper (...) is a sequel to van Laar and Krabbe, in which we showed that for some differences of opinion it may be reasonable to shift from persuasion dialogue, aimed at a resolution of the difference on the merits, to negotiation dialogue, aimed at compromise, whereas in the present paper we show that such a shift need not amount to the abandonment of argumentation. Our main aim in this paper as well as in the previous one is to contribute to the theory of argumentation within the context of negotiation and compromise formation. (shrink)

Three philosophical perspectives on the relation between technology and society are distinguished and discussed: 1) technology as an autonomous force that determines society; 2) technology as a human construct that can be shaped by human values, and 3) a co-evolutionary perspective on technology and society where neither of them determines the other. The historical evolution of the three perspectives is discussed and it is argued that all three are still present in current debates about technological change and how it may (...) affect society. This is illustrated for the case of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is argued that each of the three perspectives contributes to the debate of AI but that the third has the strongest potential to uncover blind spots in the current debate. (shrink)

Reinhard Finster, Gerd van den Heuvel: "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz". Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. rowohlts monographien. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 1990. 158 S., br., 10,80 DM.

Gilead et al. present a rich account of abstraction. Though the account describes several elements which influence mental representation, it is worth also delineating how feelings, such as fluency and emotion, influence mental simulation. Additionally, though past experience can sometimes make simulations more accurate and worthwhile, many systematic prediction errors persist despite substantial experience.

Editors van Ditmarsch, Hendriks and Verbrugge of this special issue of topiCS on lying describe some recent trends in research on lying from a multidisciplinary perspective, including logic, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, and artificial intelligence. Furthermore, they outline the seven contributions to this special issue.

In this paper we investigate how inference to the best explanation (IBE) works in engineering science, focussing on the context of malfunction explanation. While IBE has gotten a lot of attention in the philosophy of science literature, few, if any, philosophical work has focussed on IBE in engineering science practice. We first show that IBE in engineering science has a similar structure as IBE in other scientific domains in the sense that in both settings IBE hinges on the weighing of (...) explanatory virtues. We then proceed to show that, due to the intimate connection between explanation and redesign in engineering science, there is a further engineering domain-specific virtue in terms of which engineering malfunction explanations are evaluated, viz. the virtue of redesign utility. This virtue entails that the explanatory information offered by a malfunction explanation should be instrumental in predicting counterfactual dependencies in redesigned systems. We illustrate and elaborate these points in terms of a number of engineering examples, focussing in particular on the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447. Our extension of analyses of IBE and explanation to engineering science practice offers new insights by identifying a new explanatory virtue in malfunction explanation: redesign utility. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that dominant conceptions of intelligence used in artificial intelligence (AI) are biased by normative assumptions that originate from the Global North, making it questionable if AI can be uncritically applied elsewhere without risking serious harm to vulnerable people. After the introduction in Sect. 1 we shortly present the history of IQ testing in Sect. 2, focusing on its multiple discriminatory biases. To determine how these biases came into existence, we define intelligence ontologically and underline its (...) constructed and culturally variable character. Turning to AI, specifically the Turing Test (TT), in Sect. 3, we critically examine its underlying intelligence conceptions. The test has been of central influence in AI research and remains an important point of orientation. We argue that both the test itself and how it is used in practice risk promoting a limited conception of intelligence which solely originated in the Global North. Hence, this conception should be critically assessed in relation to the different global contexts in which AI technologies are and will be used. In Sect. 4, we highlight how unequal power relations in AI research are a real threat, rather than just philosophical sophistry while considering the history of IQ testing and the TT’s practical biases. In the last section, we examine the limits of our account and identify fields for further investigation. Tracing colonial continuities in AI intelligence research, this paper points to a more diverse and historically aware approach to the design, development, and use of AI. (shrink)

Biology in the Critical Philosophy and the Opus postumum Hein van den Berg. Parts of Chap. 2 have been previously published in Hein van den Berg (2011), “ Kant's Conception of Proper Science.” Synthese 183 (1): 7–26. Parts of Chap.

Linguistic category learning has been shown to be highly sensitive to linear order, and depending on the task, differentially sensitive to the information provided by preceding category markers (premarkers, e.g., gendered articles) or succeeding category markers (postmarkers, e.g., gendered suffixes). Given that numerous systems for marking grammatical categories exist in natural languages, it follows that a better understanding of these findings can shed light on the factors underlying this diversity. In two discriminative learning simulations and an artificial language learning experiment, (...) we identify two factors that modulate linear order effects in linguistic category learning: category structure and the level of abstraction in a category hierarchy. Regarding category structure, we find that postmarking brings an advantage for learning category diagnostic stimulus dimensions, an effect not present when categories are non‐confusable. Regarding levels of abstraction, we find that premarking of super‐ordinate categories (e.g., noun class) facilitates learning of subordinate categories (e.g., nouns). We present detailed simulations using a plausible candidate mechanism for the observed effects, along with a comprehensive analysis of linear order effects within an expectation‐based account of learning. Our findings indicate that linguistic category learning is differentially guided by pre‐ and postmarking, and that the influence of each is modulated by the specific characteristics of a given category system. (shrink)

Contrary to economics or history, for example, there does not exist an organized field dedicated to the philosophy of political science. Given that the philosophical issues raised by political science research are just as pressing and vibrant as those raised in these more organized fields, fostering a field that labels itself Philosophy of Political Science (PoPS) is important. PoPS is advanced here as a fruitful meeting place where both philosophers and practicing political scientists contribute and discuss—with philosophical discussions that are (...) close to and informed by actual developments in political science, making philosophy of science continuous with the sciences in line with contemporary naturalist philosophy of science. The topics scrutinized in the different chapters of the Handbook will figure prominently in PoPS, as we lay out in this chapter. (shrink)

Justin Garson has recently argued that proper functions are proximal activities of traits selected by phylogenetic or ontogenetic selection processes, and that traits are dysfunctional only if they cannot perform their proper functions for constitutional reasons. We partially agree with Garson, but reject the view that functions are proximal activities, as well as his account of dysfunctions. Instead, we propose our own theory that biological functions are selected dispositions and that a trait is dysfunctional in virtue of not having the (...) dispositions for which it was selected. This account can explain both defects (or dysfunctions in Garson’s sense) and dysfunctions due to environmental factors. Moreover, it offers a neat way to explain the graduality of dysfunction. (shrink)

Studies the sensory bases of perception, mechanisms of language learning, and mental processes involved in identification, quantification, and other areas of scientific thought.