The sex/gender distinction is a staple of feminist philosophy. In slogan form: sex is “natural,” while gender is the “social meaning” of sex. Considering the importance of the sex/gender distinction—which, here, I neither endorse nor reject—it’s interesting to ask if philosophers working on the metaphysics of sexuality might make use of an analogous distinction. In this paper, I argue that we ought to endorse the sexual orientation/identity distinction. In particular, I argue that the orientation/identity distinction is indispensable to normative explanations (...) regarding LGBTQIA+ oppression and resistance. As a case study, I consider the oppression involved in the gentrification of historic queer neighborhoods. (shrink)

We defend a functionalist approach to emotion that begins by focusing on emotions as central states with causal connections to behavior and to other cognitive states. The approach brackets the conscious experience of emotion, lists plausible features that emotions exhibit, and argues that alternative schemes are unpromising candidates. We conclude with the benefits of our approach: one can study emotions in animals; one can look in the brain for the implementation of specific features; and one ends up with an architecture (...) of the mind in which emotions are fully accommodated through their relations to the rest of cognition. Our article focuses on arguing for this general approach; as such, it is an essay in the philosophy of emotion rather than in the psychology or neuroscience of emotion. (shrink)

A theory of gender ought to be compatible with trans-inclusive definitions of gender identity terms, such as ‘woman’ and ‘man’. Appealing to this principle of trans-inclusion, Katharine Jenkins argues that we ought to endorse a dual social position and identity theory of gender. Here, I argue that Jenkins’s dual theory of gender fails to be trans-inclusive for the following reasons: it cannot generate a definition of ‘woman’ that extends to include all trans women, and it understands transgender gender identity through (...) a cisgender frame. (shrink)

Recent philosophical work on sexuality has focused primarily on sexual orientation. Yet, there’s another normatively significant phenomenon in the neighborhood: sexual identity. Here, I develop a cultural theory of queer and straight sexual identity. In particular, I argue that sexual identity is a matter of inclusion/exclusion in relation to queer and straight cultures, which are differentiated in terms of characteristic practices involving kinship and political resistance.

Here, I examine the epistemic relation between beliefs about the nature of sexual orientation (e.g., beliefs concerning whether orientation is dispositional) and beliefs about the taxonomy of orientation categories (e.g., beliefs concerning whether polyamorous is an orientation category). Current philosophical research gives epistemic priority to the former class of beliefs, such that beliefs about the taxonomy of orientation categories tend to be jettisoned or revised in cases of conflict with beliefs about the nature of sexual orientation. Yet, considering the influence (...) of ideology on beliefs about socially significant phenomena, I argue for an epistemic reversal. (shrink)

Our approach to emotion emphasized three key ingredients. We do not yet have a mature science of emotion, or even a consensus view—in this respect we are more hesitant than Sander, Grandjean, and Scherer or Luiz Pessoa. Relatedly, a science of emotion needs to be highly interdisciplinary, including ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. We recommend a functionalist view that brackets conscious experiences and that essentially treats emotions as latent variables inferred from a number of measures. But our version of functionalism (...) is not definitional or ontological. It is resolutely methodological, in good part because it is too early to attempt definitions. (shrink)

How ought we socially to categorize individuals with respect to sexual orientation? In this paper, I engage with philosophical work on the foundations of political solidarity as well as public health research on the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS in order to develop a categorization scheme conducive to the normatively important aims of LGBTQIA+ social movements.

This paper initiates analytic inquiry into the metaphysics of masculinity. I argue that individual masculinities (such as ‘clone masculinity’ and ‘incel masculinity’) are distinct homeostatic property cluster kinds related to gender structures via processes of adherence, failed-adherence, selective adherence, and/or reinterpretation with respect to male-coded social norms.

Recent years have seen a notable increase in the production of scientific expertise by large multidisciplinary groups. The issue we address is how reports may be written by such groups in spite of their size and of formidable obstacles: complexity of subject matter, uncertainty, and scientific disagreement. Our focus is on the International Panel on Climate Change, unquestionably the best-known case of such collective scientific expertise. What we show is that the organization of work within the IPCC aims to make (...) it possible to produce documents that are indeed expert reports. To do so, we first put forward the epistemic norms that apply to expert reports in general, that is, the properties that reports should have in order to be useful and to help decision-making. Section 2 claims that these properties are: intelligibility, relevance and accuracy. Based on this analysis, section 3 points to the difficulties of having IPCC reports indeed satisfying these norms. We then show how the organization of work within the IPCC aims at and to a large extent secures intelligibility, relevance and accuracy, with the result that IPCC reports can be relied on for decision-making. Section 4 focuses on the fundamentals of IPCC’s work organization--that is, division of labour within the IPCC--while section 5 investigates three frameworks that were introduced over the course of the functioning of the IPCC: the reviewing procedure of IPCC reports, the language that IPCC authors use to express uncertainty and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. Concluding remarks are offered in section 6. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds two seemingly opposed beliefs. One is that communities are often much better than individuals at dealing with certain situations or solving certain problems. The other is that crowds are usually, and some say always, at best as intelligent as their least intelligent members and at worst even less. Consistency would seem to be easily re-established by distinguishing between advanced, sophisticated social organizations which afford the supporting communities a high level of collective performance, and primitive, mob-like structures which (...) pull the group towards the lower end of the achievement scale. But this reconciliation meets with some objections. The most familiar ones concern the mixed record of elaborate social systems, which are said to occasionally or even, according to some accounts, systematically produce wrong decisions, poor assessments, disastrous plans, counterproductive measures, etc. A more recent set of objections rests on cases where ‘crowds’, i,e, groups not organized in a sophisticated way, produce good results, in fact, results which better those of most, or even all, members of the group. Such cases are collected in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds, which argues more generally in favor of an ‘order out of chaos’ view of collective thinking: whether sophisticated or simple, social organizations for the production of knowledge or problem-solving can benefit from the absence of certain individualistc constraints which are traditionally thought to foster excellence in cognitive tasks. This flavor of paradox is enhanced by Surowiecki’s choice of phrase: at the surface level, ‘wisdom of crowds’ conflicts with the well-entrenched cliché of the folly1 of crowds; but at a deeper level, Surowiecki seems to appeal to one frequent connotation of ‘wisdom’ which is precisely its paradoxical character. Whether Surowiecki actually intended to exploit this.. (shrink)

Categories We Live by: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories, by Ásta. Oxford: OUP, 2018. Pp. 160.

"Nietzsche - Sa vie et sa pensée" par Charles Andler. Charles Andler était un germaniste français (1866-1933).

In Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of artificial intelligence1, considerable importance is given to the matter of context –used here as a blanket term covering an immense and possibly heterogeneous phenomenon, which includes situation, background, circumstances, occasion and possibly more. Perhaps the best way to point to context in this most general sense is to proceed dialectically, and take as a first approximation context to be whatever is revealed as an obstacle whenever one attempts to account for mental dynamics on the formal (...) model of a combinatorial game over families of interchangeable, fixed, self-standing – context-free as it were– elements. Dreyfus has argued persuasively that the human mind always ‘operates’, if that is the right word, within a setting which permeates whatever it is it operates on. Dreyfus’s thought on these matters was shaped during the years when artificial intelligence (AI) was at the height of early hopes and initial successes. This was also a period during which what was to become known as ‘cognitive science’ was little more than a ray of light falling on psychology.. (shrink)

When scientists are at work, they are busy ‘naturalizing’ their domain. This applies, without qualification, to natural scientists. In the sciences of man (which I will understand in the broadest sense, as including the social sciences), the issue is moot. This raises a problem for cognitive scientists, a vast majority of whom think of themselves as natural scientists. Yet theirs, to a large extent, is a science of man. Cognitive scientists are, it would seem, in the business of naturalizing man, (...) and while this, to them, is unproblematic, it raises considerable difficulties to many, whether philosophers or social scientists of antinaturalist persuasion, or lay people wondering what the ultimate goals of cognitive science are and how far it should be expected to achieve these goals. Among his many duties, the philosopher of cognitive science, part of whose job is to clarify assumptions made, concepts used, methods deployed, at all levels of the field, and to try and situate the enterprise within the wider context, has the legitimate worry that misunderstandings, both within and outside cognitive science, might durably prevent the articulation of its viewpoint with those elaborated by the other sciences of man. The philosopher is thus intent on bringing forth an understanding of the enterprise of cognitive science, as free as possible of the ‘idols of the tribe’ (the field’s own self-aggrandizing prejudices) and of the ‘idols of the marketplace’ (the allegations of ‘tunnel vision’ and ‘reductionism’). (shrink)

The context-sensitivity of many cognitive processes is usually seen as an objective property which we should try to account for and to simulate in computational models. This rests on a mistaken view of inquiry as guided by principles alone. In ethics, exclusive reliance on principles is all but abandoned: the ability to deal with particular cases depends on something more. The same goes for the belief fixation processes involved in communication and other cognitive tasks. The paper defends a mixed model (...) of inquiry, which combines the traditional rationalist reliance on principles with a consideration for appropriateness in the case at hand. The key idea is that how one deals with context is a matter not of fact, but of judgment. The paper concludes with a characterization of some of the areas in which context is easily dealt with, and explains why areas in which it isn’t are not systematically shunned by people. # 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Scholars from various philosophical schools of thought, including cultural relativism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism, have recently critiqued rationalism in light of new developments in the cognitive sciences. Each of these new developments set into motion new inquiries in each school philosophical school of thought. Now, in Facets of Rationality, a distinguished team of scholars examines these new inquiries and bring rationality back into the mainstream of the social sciences. The unique feature of this book lies in its multidisciplinary exploration of rational (...) concerns and in discovering the integral meaning of rationality as viewed by the perspectives of different disciplines. As such, it will of considerable interest to those involved with the study and teaching of philosophy, theoretical psychology, cognitive science, political theory, and linguistics. (shrink)

Dilthey et son école, par B. Groethuysen.--Husserl, sa critique du psychologisme et sa conception d'une logique pure, par V. Delbos.--La philosophie religieuse: Rudolf Eucken, par J. Benrubi.--Les grands courants de l'esthétique allemande contemporaine, par V. Basch.--Wilhelm Wundt et la psychologie expérimentale, par G. Dwelshauvers.--La socio-psychologie de m. Wundt, par H. Norero.--Simmel, par C. Bouglé.--La philosophie des sciences historiques, par C. Andler.

What role does mathematics play in cognitive science today, what role should mathematics play in cognitive science tomorrow? The cautious short answers are: to the factual question, a rather modest role, except in peripheral areas; to the normative question, a far greater role, as the periphery’s place is reevaluated and as both cognitive science and mathematics grow. This paper aims at providing more detailed, perhaps more contentious answers.

situation in the sciences of man and show it to be fallacious. On the view to be 6 rejected, the sciences of man are undergoing the first serious attempt in history to 7 thoroughly naturalize their subject matter and thus to put an end to their separate sta- 8 tus. Progress has (on this view) been quite considerable in the disciplines in charge 9 of the individual, while in the social sciences the outcome of the process is moot: 10 the (...) naturalistic social sciences are still in their infancy, and whether they will even- 11 tually engulf or at least profoundly transform the field of social science is unclear. 12 The dichotomous conception pits two camps against one another. On the one hand, 13.. (shrink)

La Revue du Mois (1910)Translated by Helene Erlichson‐Kloehn.