Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.

What effect does witnessing other students cheat have on one's own cheating behavior? What roles do moral attitudes and neutralizing attitudes (justifications for behavior) play when deciding to cheat? The present research proposes a model of academic dishonesty which takes into account each of these variables. Findings from experimental (vignette) and survey methods determined that seeing others cheat increases cheating behavior by causing students to judge the behavior less morally reprehensible, not by making rationalization easier. Witnessing cheating also has unique (...) effects, controlling for other variables. (shrink)

Ethics research literature often uses Rest’s Four Component Model of ethical behavior as a framework to teach business and accounting ethics. Moral motivation, including resolve to have moral courage, is the third component of the model and is the least-tested component in ethics research. Using a quasi-experimental design with pretest and posttest measurements, we compare the effectiveness of several methods (traditional, exhortation, reflection, moral exemplar) for developing resolve to have moral courage in 211 accounting students during one semester. Results show (...) that traditional, reflection, moral exemplar methods increased resolve to have moral courage, and that the reflection and moral exemplar methods were more effective than the other methods. (shrink)

Ethics research literature often uses Rest’s Four Component Model of ethical behavior as a framework to teach business and accounting ethics. Moral motivation, including resolve to have moral courage, is the third component of the model and is the least-tested component in ethics research. Using a quasi-experimental design with pretest and posttest measurements, we compare the effectiveness of several methods (traditional, exhortation, reflection, moral exemplar) for developing resolve to have moral courage in 211 accounting students during one semester. Results show (...) that traditional, reflection, moral exemplar methods increased resolve to have moral courage, and that the reflection and moral exemplar methods were more effective than the other methods. (shrink)

"This book explores the ethical implications of using armed contractors, taking a consequentialist approach to this multidisciplinary debate. While privatization is not a new concept for the U.S. military, the public debate on military privatization is limited to legal, financial, and pragmatic concerns. Missing is a critical assessment of the ethical dimensions of military privatization in general; more specifically, in light of the increased reliance upon armed contractors, it must be asked whether it is morally permissible for governments to employ (...) them at all. To this end, this book explores four areas that highlight the ethical implications of using armed contractors: how armed contractors are distinct from soldiers and mercenaries; the commodification of force; the belligerent equality of combatants; and the impact of armed contractors on the professional military. While some take an absolutist position, wanting to bar the use of private military altogether, this book reveals how these absolutist arguments are problematic and highlights that there are circumstances where turning to private force may be the only option. Recognising that outsourcing force will continue, this book thus proposes some changes to account for the problems of commodification, belligerent equality, and the challenge to the military profession. This book will be of interest to students of private security, military studies, ethics, security studies and IR in general."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Aristotle's Politics is widely recognized as one of the classics of the history of political philosophy, and like every other such masterpiece, it is a work about which there is deep division.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its implementing regulations prohibit federally-funded educational institutions and healthcare centers from engaging in disparate impact discrimination “on the ground of race, color, or national origin” in all of their operations.

Professor Imwinkelried has boldly attempted to justify the admissibility of normative ethical expertise in the face of a legal evidentiary rule requiring a scientific basis for expert testimony. Because ethical testimony is inherently unscientific, Professor Imwinkelried prudently focuses his analysis on circumstances where evidentiary requirements are less strict; those involving the legislative rather than adjudicative function of courts and those in which substantive law overrides normally rigorous evidentiary requirements. While both proposals may have merit and are thoughtful and creative, Professor (...) Imwinkelried ultimately fails to provide sufficient doctrinal support or persuasive rationale for his arguments.Professor Imwinkelrieds argument for the admissibility of “expert” normative ethical testimony has two parts. The major proposition is that, when courts are engaged in legislative functions, they should be permitted to consider all sources of information. The assumption that apparently underlies this proposition is that nothing limits courts’ exercise of legislative powers. (shrink)

Professor Imwinkelried has boldly attempted to justify the admissibility of normative ethical expertise in the face of a legal evidentiary rule requiring a scientific basis for expert testimony. Because ethical testimony is inherently unscientific, Professor Imwinkelried prudently focuses his analysis on circumstances where evidentiary requirements are less strict; those involving the legislative rather than adjudicative function of courts and those in which substantive law overrides normally rigorous evidentiary requirements. While both proposals may have merit and are thoughtful and creative, Professor (...) Imwinkelried ultimately fails to provide sufficient doctrinal support or persuasive rationale for his arguments.Professor Imwinkelrieds argument for the admissibility of “expert” normative ethical testimony has two parts. The major proposition is that, when courts are engaged in legislative functions, they should be permitted to consider all sources of information. The assumption that apparently underlies this proposition is that nothing limits courts’ exercise of legislative powers. (shrink)

David Finkel’s opening paragraph in the book’s prologue grabs your attention and sets the tone for the rest of the ride:You could see it in his nervous eyes. You could see it in his shaking hands....

ABSTRACTCase summary, by James Cook :In the final issue of the 2015 volume of the Journal of Military Ethics, we published a case study entitled “Coining an Ethical Dilemma: The Impunity of Afghanistan’s Indigenous Security Forces”, written by Paul Lushenko. The study detailed two extra-judicial killings by Afghan National Police personnel in an area stabilized and overseen by a US-led Combined Task Force. To deter further EJKs following the first incident, the CTF’s commander reported the incidents up his chain of (...) command and used the limited tools at his disposal to influence local indigenous officials directly. Apparently, the ANP unit took no notice. In his commentary on the case study, Paul Robinson considered moral compromise in war more generally. Coalition troops in Afghanistan, for instance, have encountered not just EJKs but also sexual abuse of minors, killing of non-combatants, kidnapping, torture, and widespread corruption. What should the soldier on the... (shrink)

Moral theorists and game theorists are both interested in situations where rational agents are to constrain their future actions and co-operate with others instead of being free riders. These theorists have constructed a variety of hypothetical games which illuminate this problem of constraint. In this paper, I draw a distinction between like the Newcomb paradox and like Kavka's toxin puzzle, a prisoner's dilemma and Parfit's hitchhiker example. I then employ this distinction to argue that agents who subscribe to the orthodox (...) theory of rationality do significantly better in disposition games than those who subscribe to revisionist theories like David Gauthier's, while revisionist agents do marginally better in behaviour games. I argue that because of agents' ability to manipulate their own weakness of will, orthodox agents do better at all of these games than has previously been thought. And, by elucidating the distinction between behaviour games and disposition games, I uncover the virtues that underlie the success of each theory of rationality. (shrink)

In White Noise by Don DeLillo, two characters visit a famous barn, described as the “most photographed barn in America” alongside hordes of picture-taking tourists. One of them complains the barn has become a simulacrum, so that “no one sees” the actual barn anymore. This implies that there was once a real barn, which has been lost in the “virtual” image. This is in line with Plato’s concept of the simulacrum as a false or “corrupt” copy, which has lost all (...) connection with the “original.” Plotinus, however, offered a different definition: the simulacrum distorts reality in order to reveal the invisible, the Ideal. There is a real building which has been called “the most photographed barn in America”: the Thomas Moulton Barn in the Grand Teton National Park. The location—barn in the foreground, mountain range towering over it—forms a striking visual composition. But the site is not only famous because it is photogenic. Images of the barn in part evoke the heroic struggles of pioneers living on the frontier. They also draw on the tradition of the “American sublime.” Ralph Waldo Emerson defined the sublime as “the influx of the Divine mind into our mind.” He followed Plotinus in valuing art as a means of “revelation”—with the artist as a kind of prophet or “seer.” The photographers who collect at the Moulton Barn are themselves consciously working within this tradition, and turning themselves into do-it-yourself “artist-seers.” They are the creators, not the slaves of the simulacrum. (shrink)

This paper proposes a solution to David Miller's Minnesotan-Arizonan demonstration of the language dependence of truthlikeness (Miller 1974), along with Miller's first-order demonstration of the same (Miller 1978). It is assumed, with Peter Urbach, that the implication of these demonstrations is that the very notion of truthlikeness is intrinsically language dependent and thus non-objective. As such, truthlikeness cannot supply a basis for an objective account of scientific progress. I argue that, while Miller is correct in arguing that the number (...) of true atomic sentences of a false theory is language dependent, the number of known sentences (under certain straightforward assumptions) is conserved by translation; degree of knowledge, unlike truthlikeness, is thus a linguistically invariant notion. It is concluded that the objectivity of scientific progress must be grounded on the fact (noted in Cohen 1980) that knowledge, not mere truth, is the aim of science. (shrink)

An adequate moral theory must provide for cooperation and trust between moral agents, but a tension exists between cooperating and maximizing. This tension is prominent in utilitarianism and contractarianism . Various puzzles illustrate this tension, and both utilitarians and contractarians must solve these to present a coherent moral theory. These puzzles include new and resilient versions of classic objections to utilitarianism, such as the claims that utilitarian agents cannot be trusted to keep promises and cannot take rights seriously. They also (...) include the contractarian puzzle of why rational agents would cooperate by making and keeping impartial contracts. In solving these problems, utilitarians and contractarians alike must choose between traditional and revisionary maximizing theories. ;In light of these problems: David Gauthier urges contractarians to appeal to a revisionary theory of rationality, Donald Regan has developed a new variety of utilitarianism, and many other theorists still argue for the revisionary theory of rule utilitarianism. These people underestimate the potential of traditional theories. Although traditional theories like act utilitarianism look only to the future--while revisionary theories sometimes take prior acts such as promises, deliberations, and intentions to justify action--traditional theories are still able to solve these puzzles and furnish a satisfactory account of cooperation and trust. Surprisingly, even though these puzzles were developed as objections to the traditional theories and the revisionist theories were designed to deal with these puzzles, the traditional theories provide superior solutions. ;This defense of traditional theories has broad implications in philosophy and elsewhere, but I specifically discuss two significant implications for modern moral theory and two implications for applied ethics. I reject the criticism that act utilitarianism fails on its own terms and argue that it has previously unnoticed advantages over rule utilitarianism. I also reformulate Gauthier's moral theory using the traditional theory of rationality, thereby answering a major criticism of his theory. In addition, I apply my understanding of traditional maximizing theories to the utilitarian theory of rights and then to the strategic problems of nuclear deterrence and of threats in general. (shrink)

In The Paradox of Predictivism I tried to demonstrate that there is an intimate relationship between predictivism and epistemic pluralism. Here I respond to various published criticisms of some of the key points from Paradox from David Harker, Jarret Leplin, and Clark Glymour. Foci include my account of predictive novelty, the claim that predictivism has two roots, the prediction per se and predictive success, and my account of why Mendeleev’s predictions carried special weight in confirming the Periodic Law of (...) the Elements. (shrink)

David Miller has demonstrated to the satisfaction of a variety of philosophers that the accuracy of false quantitative theories is language dependent (cf. Miller 1975). This demonstration renders the accuracy-based mode of comparison for such theories obsolete. The purpose of this essay is to supply an alternate basis for theory comparison which in this paper is deemed the knowledge-based mode of quantitative theory comparison. It is argued that the status of a quantitative theory as knowledge depends primarily on the (...) soundness of the measurement procedure which produced the theory; such soundness is invariant, on my view, under Milleresque translations. This point is the basis for the linguistic invariance of knowledgelikeness. When the aim of science is not construed simply in terms of the truthlikeness or accuracy of theories, but in terms of the knowledge such theories embody, Miller's language dependence problem is overcome. One result of this analysis is that the possibility of objective scientific progress is restored, a possibility that Miller's analysis has prima facie defeated. (shrink)

Due to its considerable length, this article is being published in two parts. This first part briefly discusses the intriguing relationship between John Dewey and Albert Barnes, as well as the circumstances behind the creation of the Barnes Foundation and its innovative art-education programs. This is followed by examination of the prominent roles of aesthetic formalism and organic unity in Barnes's writings about the arts and their less technical, more contextual positioning in Dewey's aesthetics. To end Part (...) 1 of the article, a similar dynamic is revealed in Barnes's and Dewey's ultimately disparate understandings of the relationship between form and content in the arts.In its heyday during the first part of the... (shrink)

Due to its considerable length, this article has been published in two parts. Part 1, which appeared in the previous issue of the journal, discussed the intriguing relationship between John Dewey and Albert Barnes, as well as the circumstances behind the creation of the Barnes Foundation and its art education programs. Following this, it established both areas of convergence and divergence in Barnes’s and Dewey’s understandings of aesthetic formalism, organic unity, and form and content in the arts. (...) Part 2 now builds on these findings to explore important differences in their respective treatments of the significant sociocultural context of art. After returning briefly to the question of aesthetic formalism in... (shrink)

This carefully-researched book offers a dynamic and expansive Deweyan vision for the arts and education. This (re)vision acknowledges the influence on Dewey's aesthetics of art collector and educator Albert Barnes, while also exploring the various ways Dewey's writings on the arts, in moving beyond Barnes' "scientific aesthetic method," were an important resource for many innovative twentieth-century American artists, art movements, and arts-related educational institutions. Neither Barnes' influence on Dewey nor the features of Dewey's naturalistic aesthetics that made (...) his Art as Experience a favorite text of many artists and arts practitioners have been fully and adequately acknowledged in existing literature on Dewey's thinking about the arts and education. This book effectively remedies that situation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Confronting Aristotle's EthicsDavid DepewConfronting Aristotle's Ethics by Eugene Garver Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 290. $49.00, cloth.Readers of this journal are likely to be familiar with Eugene Garver's 1994 Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. The main claim advanced in that important book is that for Aristotle rhetoric is an art because it has internal norms and ends. From this, it follows that although (...) any red-blooded rhetor probably does aim at winning a case, advancing a political career, getting rich, and other external goals, what is artful in rhetorical craft (technikos), and hence expressive of the distinctive human capacity for human rationality, is timely argumentation that binds premises to actionable conclusions through displays of good character and apt emotional response. This ordered combination of ethos, pathos, and logos recruits, or if you will interpellates, an audience that is uniquely capable of judging cases, proposals, and performances reasonably. In this way Aristotle defends rhetoric as a genuine art—an intellectual virtue—against Plato's Gorgias.To arrive at this conclusion Garver draws more widely on other parts of the Aristotelian corpus than rhetorical scholars normally do. In particular, he contrasts external with internal ends by using Aristotle's metaphysical distinction between movements, processes, or behaviors (kineseis), of which the world is chock-full, and actualizations or realizations (energeiai) of capacities, which are more rare. Because rhetorical art, qua artful, is an actualization, Garver infers that it is a "practical art" and so brushes up closely against ethical-political praxis. [End Page 184]How closely? To be sure, they are not identical. Praxis actualizes our rational capacities by issuing in deeds done for their own sake rather than in an ordered series of acts whose intelligibility and worth are, in the end, measured by their outcomes or products, as in arts (poiesis) (46). For this reason a rhetor or a doctor can display artfulness by consciously misbehaving as well as by doing his or her job well, whereas willful misbehavior on the part of a moral agent automatically disbars him or her from possessing practical wisdom (phronesis) at all (46; see Nicomachean Ethics [NE] 1140b22–25). Accordingly, even though moral virtues and technical skills are both acquired by slowly internalizing norms that at first aim only at external ends (29) and are both matched to their distinctive ends through their internal rational norms, Aristotle makes it abundantly clear that "the arts, including rhetoric, do not bring the soul into a good condition" (10). They are not the wellspring or protector of the intrinsically good actions that are constituents of happiness. that role is assigned to moral virtues such as prudence, courage, liberality, and, when these are practiced in relation to others, justice and friendship.Confronting Aristotle's Ethics begins by reviewing the above account of rhetorical art in Garver's earlier book. Precisely because that account posits a greater affinity between ethical virtue and craft knowledge than most contemporary analyses of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Garver feels a need to spell out more carefully than usual why Aristotle thinks that the arts, even at their best, cannot yield the intrinsically good acts that the moral virtues do and why for Aristotle the habitual performance of just such acts is constitutive of happiness (eudaimonia). To answer these questions is the aim of the book.Garver reports that satisfactory answers are surprisingly rare even in otherwise sophisticated contemporary Aristotelian studies (5–7). Now and again he points to one reason why this might be so. Since at least the eighteenth century, Aristotle's ethical theory has been commended by sloughing off its original political integument. Even Hannah Arendt, a devotee of Aristotle's conception of the public life if ever there was one, says that public figures must leave happiness to the private lives of little people. this depoliticization of ethics has allowed contemporary commentators to evade Aristotle's burden of proof. As good readers of Aristotle they may try to distance themselves from people who think that there might be an art of happiness by which one can technically realize one's desires. (Your local Barnes and Noble will... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Confronting Aristotle's EthicsDavid DepewConfronting Aristotle's Ethics by Eugene Garver Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 290. $49.00, cloth.Readers of this journal are likely to be familiar with Eugene Garver's 1994 Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. The main claim advanced in that important book is that for Aristotle rhetoric is an art because it has internal norms and ends. From this, it follows that although (...) any red-blooded rhetor probably does aim at winning a case, advancing a political career, getting rich, and other external goals, what is artful in rhetorical craft (technikos), and hence expressive of the distinctive human capacity for human rationality, is timely argumentation that binds premises to actionable conclusions through displays of good character and apt emotional response. This ordered combination of ethos, pathos, and logos recruits, or if you will interpellates, an audience that is uniquely capable of judging cases, proposals, and performances reasonably. In this way Aristotle defends rhetoric as a genuine art—an intellectual virtue—against Plato's Gorgias.To arrive at this conclusion Garver draws more widely on other parts of the Aristotelian corpus than rhetorical scholars normally do. In particular, he contrasts external with internal ends by using Aristotle's metaphysical distinction between movements, processes, or behaviors (kineseis), of which the world is chock-full, and actualizations or realizations (energeiai) of capacities, which are more rare. Because rhetorical art, qua artful, is an actualization, Garver infers that it is a "practical art" and so brushes up closely against ethical-political praxis. [End Page 184]How closely? To be sure, they are not identical. Praxis actualizes our rational capacities by issuing in deeds done for their own sake rather than in an ordered series of acts whose intelligibility and worth are, in the end, measured by their outcomes or products, as in arts (poiesis) (46). For this reason a rhetor or a doctor can display artfulness by consciously misbehaving as well as by doing his or her job well, whereas willful misbehavior on the part of a moral agent automatically disbars him or her from possessing practical wisdom (phronesis) at all (46; see Nicomachean Ethics [NE] 1140b22–25). Accordingly, even though moral virtues and technical skills are both acquired by slowly internalizing norms that at first aim only at external ends (29) and are both matched to their distinctive ends through their internal rational norms, Aristotle makes it abundantly clear that "the arts, including rhetoric, do not bring the soul into a good condition" (10). They are not the wellspring or protector of the intrinsically good actions that are constituents of happiness. that role is assigned to moral virtues such as prudence, courage, liberality, and, when these are practiced in relation to others, justice and friendship.Confronting Aristotle's Ethics begins by reviewing the above account of rhetorical art in Garver's earlier book. Precisely because that account posits a greater affinity between ethical virtue and craft knowledge than most contemporary analyses of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Garver feels a need to spell out more carefully than usual why Aristotle thinks that the arts, even at their best, cannot yield the intrinsically good acts that the moral virtues do and why for Aristotle the habitual performance of just such acts is constitutive of happiness (eudaimonia). To answer these questions is the aim of the book.Garver reports that satisfactory answers are surprisingly rare even in otherwise sophisticated contemporary Aristotelian studies (5–7). Now and again he points to one reason why this might be so. Since at least the eighteenth century, Aristotle's ethical theory has been commended by sloughing off its original political integument. Even Hannah Arendt, a devotee of Aristotle's conception of the public life if ever there was one, says that public figures must leave happiness to the private lives of little people. this depoliticization of ethics has allowed contemporary commentators to evade Aristotle's burden of proof. As good readers of Aristotle they may try to distance themselves from people who think that there might be an art of happiness by which one can technically realize one's desires. (Your local Barnes and Noble will... (shrink)

In 1989, a literary landmark in New York City closed. Scribner’s Bookstore, 597 Fifth Avenue, stood at the epicentre of Manhattan’s retail district. The Scribner’s publishing company was then 153 years old. In the 1920s, driven by genius editor Max Perkins, Scribner’s published Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe. Scribner’s Magazine was The New Yorker of its day. The bookshop and publisher occupied a 10-storey Beaux-Arts building, designed by Ernest Flagg, which eventually won protection from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. (...) Medallions honoured printers Benjamin Franklin, William Caxton, Johann Gutenberg, and Aldus Manutius. The ‘Byzantine cathedral of books’ offered deeply informed personal service. But the paperback revolution gained momentum, bookshop chains like Barnes & Noble and Brentano’s adopted extreme discounting, and the no-discounting Scribner’s business model became unsustainable. Real estate developers swooped in. The bookshop’s ignominious end came when Italian clothier Benetton took over its space. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s “Outlines of Pyrrhonism.” by Benson MatesDavid K. GliddenBenson Mates. The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s “Outlines of Pyrrhonism.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. x + 335. Cloth, $55.00, Paper, $22.95.Benson Mates’s translation and commentary of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism appears nearly half a century after Mates first began his pioneering work on Sextus and Hellenistic philosophy. This publication coincides with another (...) new translation of the Outlines by Annas and Barnes, who provide only an abbreviated commentary (Cambridge University Press, 1994). After decades when the only available English translation was by Bury from the Loeb, there are now choices available which allow Sextus to be taught to different sorts of English readers.In comparing the two translations, this reader found the Annas and Barnes version more mellifluous. Mates is not as sweet. His style is plain-spoken, but this approach has merits when the arguments get going. The Annas and Barnes version uses footnotes for commentary, along with a brief introduction. Their notes cite parallel passages in other works by Sextus, provide brief guidance for interpretation when it is most needed, and connect the reader with a focused list of bibliographical references, inviting readers themselves to turn toward scholarly debates over certain controversial passages. Consequently, Annas and Barnes opens out to a wide audience of classicists, historians, students of literature, general readers interested in scepticism, as well as philosophers of whatever ideology. [End Page 460]The Mates edition is directed toward philosophers alone. It is much less oriented toward historical scholarship, preferring to read Sextus as a contemporary professional philosopher might. In this way, Mates will approach a passage from the Outlines in terms of a passage in Hume or Berkeley, even though, of course, these latter-day philosophers derived their views from reading Sextus. Mates employs philosophese with ease, constructing a version of Sextus from the professional philosopher’s interpretive stance, in the language of propositions and Fregean intensions. The audience Mates is writing for and the viewpoint he is writing from more or less correspond to the “analytical” faction of the American Philosophical Association. Postmodern Foucaultians, contextualist historians, and Hellenistic scholars might find this approach unhelpful, even irritating. But busy, mainstream American philosophers could find Mates’s approach sufficiently sympathetic to actually read some Sextus, in the way Chisholm once had done, finding a passage on the Cyrenaics in Sextus which led to the reinvention of “adverbial appears locutions” and which, in turn, played for decades in the epistemological arcades.Mates begins his edition with a systematic introduction to the Outlines and follows his translation with another hundred pages of narrative, reflecting primarily what Mates finds interesting about certain selected passages. Although, like Annas and Barnes, he provides parallel passages, ancient references, and highly abbreviated accounts of scholarly disputes, his own narrative line dominates both his introductory essay and his commentary. Mates writes in a somewhat chatty style prone to the blunt Cephalean confidence that comes with considerable experience and success as a professional philosopher. His narrative line is clear, connected, often compelling, as for instance when he argues that for Sextus “dogmatizing and believing turn out to be one and the same” (61).Fashion has returned to favor Pyrrhonism in the late twentieth century, just as the cycle had come around before, toward the end of the sixteenth century, sparking a philosophical renaissance. This time around the import may be different. Both Annas and Barnes as well as Mates find Sextus worth reading as serious philosophy. This is a considerable improvement in the fortuna of the Outlines. For decades Sextus was banned in American philosophy departments, as no philosopher at all. He was not taught, he was not read. One highly prominent American philosopher was expressly forbidden to write a dissertation on him, around the time Mates and Chisholm had the courage to publish on him. Sextus is now welcome in the Canon.If Sextus now is one of us, a serious philosopher, then the dogmatists (Stoics, Epicureans, Peripatetics, etc.) he ridiculed were merely failures. The game continues. So, Mates, Annas and Barnes can embrace Sextus as ours. His readers won’t... (shrink)

I observe Iris Murdoch's distinctive use of the word ‘flux’ in discussion of Sartre's Nausea and show that her usage is persuasive and revolutionary, first as Sartre exegesis, second as Heraclitus exegesis, and throughout as a contribution to the philosophy of language. Murdoch's usage of ‘flux’ frames a comparison of Sartre's Roquentin with other figures who have had similarly flowing experience but without nausea. Roquentin's plight is shown to be ‘a philosopher's plight’ precipitated by a defective theory of descriptive success. (...) I then show how the Heraclitean fragments would support Murdoch's treatment of flux and on close analysis contradict the established view exemplified in the work of Wittgenstein and Jonathan Barnes. Flux is not a variety of change, and the river image ‘cannot be analysed into non-metaphorical components without a loss of substance’. (shrink)

_Real Essentialism_ presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many, if not most, philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. _Real Essentialism_ reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essentialist metaphysics, defending the reality and knowability (...) of essence, the possibility of objective, immutable definition, and its relevance to contemporary scientific and metaphysical issues such as whether essence transcends physics and chemistry, the essence of life, the nature of biological species, and the nature of the person. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

This symposium provides five case studies of the ways that John Dewey's philosophy and practice were influenced by women or "weirdoes" (our choices include F. M. Alexander, Albert Barnes, Helen Bradford Thompson, Elsie Ripley Clapp, and Jane Addams) and presents some conclusions about the value of dialoging across difference for philosophers and other scholars.

As machine learning has gradually entered into ever more sectors of public and private life, there has been a growing demand for algorithmic explainability. How can we make the predictions of complex statistical models more intelligible to end users? A subdiscipline of computer science known as interpretable machine learning (IML) has emerged to address this urgent question. Numerous influential methods have been proposed, from local linear approximations to rule lists and counterfactuals. In this article, I highlight three conceptual challenges that (...) are largely overlooked by authors in this area. I argue that the vast majority of IML algorithms are plagued by (1) ambiguity with respect to their true target; (2) a disregard for error rates and severe testing; and (3) an emphasis on product over process. Each point is developed at length, drawing on relevant debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. Examples and counterexamples from IML are considered, demonstrating how failure to acknowledge these problems can result in counterintuitive and potentially misleading explanations. Without greater care for the conceptual foundations of IML, future work in this area is doomed to repeat the same mistakes. (shrink)

We examine two different descriptions of the behavioral functions of the hippocampal system. One emphasizes spatially organized behaviors, especially those using cognitive maps. The other emphasizes memory, particularly working memory, a short-term memory that requires iexible stimulus-response associations and is highly susceptible to interference. The predictive value of the spatial and memory descriptions were evaluated by testing rats with damage to the hippocampal system in a series of experiments, independently manipulating the spatial and memory characteristics of a behavioral task. No (...) dissociations were found when the spatial characteristics of the stimuli to be remembered were changed; lesions produced a similar deficit in both spatial and nonspatial test procedures, indicating that the hippocampus was similarly involved regardless of the spatial nature of the task. In contrast, a marked dissociation was found when the memory requirements were altered. Rats with lesions were able to perform accurately in tasks that could be solved exclusively on the basis of reference memory. They performed at chance levels and showed no signs of recovery even with extensive postoperative training in tasks that required working memory. In one experiment all the characteristics of the reference memory and working memory procedures were identical except the type of memory required. Consequently, the behavioral dissociation cannot be explained by differences in attention, motivation, response inhibition, or the type of stimuli to be remembered. As a result of these experiments we propose that the hippocampus is selectively involved in behaviors that require working memory, irrespective of the type of material that is to be processed by that memory. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealisedexplanation gamein which players collaborate to find the best explanation(s) for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal patterns of (...) variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a (conditionally) optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

DCPS is a connectionist production system interpreter that uses distributed representations. As a connectionist model it consists of many simple, richly interconnected neuron‐like computing units that cooperate to solve problems in parallel. One motivation for constructing DCPS was to demonstrate that connectionist models are capable of representing and using explicit rules. A second motivation was to show how “coarse coding” or “distributed representations” can be used to construct a working memory that requires far fewer units than the number of different (...) facts that can potentially be stored. The simulation we present is intended as a detailed demonstration of the feasibility of certain ideas and should not be viewed as a full implementation of production systems. Our current model only has a few of the many interesting emergent properties that we eventually hope to demonstrate: It is damage‐resistant, it performs matching and variable binding by massively parallel constraint satisfaction, and the capacity of its working memory is dependent on the similarity of the items being stored. (shrink)

The public forum has been connected to the functioning of democracy, expressive freedom, and the media's role in society. While the public forum's legal contours have been examined, the ethical foundation of the public forum has not. Relying on archival research, this article argues that ideas about the public forum can be traced to the pragmatism of Grenville Clark, who influenced ideas about the public forum through his work on the American Bar Association's Bill of Rights Committee.

"Nivison brings out the exciting variety within Confucian thought, as he interprets and elucidates key thinkers from over two thousand years, from Confucius himself, through Mencius and Xunzi, to such later Confucians as Wang Yangming, Dai Zhen, and Zhang Xuecheng."--Cover.

Contents:Acknowledgements Foreword (Lt. Ervin J. Rokke)Preface (Davis S. Alberts and Thomas Czerwinski)SETTING THE SCENEThe Simple and the Complex (Murray Gell-Mann)America in the World Today (Zbigniew Brzezinski)COMPLEXITY THEORY and NATIONAL SECURITY POLICYComplex Systems: The Role of Interactions (Robert Jervis)Many Damn Things Simultaneously: Complexity Theory and World Affairs (James N. Rosenau)Complexity, Chaos, and National Security Policy: Metaphors or Tools? (Alvin M. Saperstein)The Reaction to Chaos (Steven R. Mann)COMPLEXITY THEORY, STRATEGY, and OPERATIONSClausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Importance of Imagery (Alan D. Beyerchen)Complexity and Organization (...) Management (Robert R. Maxfield)Command and (Out of) Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory (John F. Schmitt)Complexity Theory and Air Power (Steven M. Rinaldi)Chaos Theory and U. S. Military Strategy: A "Leapfrog" Strategy for U.S. Defense Policy (Michael J. Mazarr)Contributors EditorsBibliography. (shrink)

This introduction to the basic forms of deductive inference as evaluated by methods of modern symbolic logic is de­signed for sophomore-junior-level stu­dents ready to specialize in the study of deductive logic. It can be used also for an introductory logic course. The inde­pendence of many sections allows the instructor utmost flexibility. The text consists of eight chapters, the first six of which are designed to intro­duce the student to basic topics of sen­tence and predicate logic. The last two chapters extend (...) the procedures of the first six to alethic modal logic, the logic of imperatives, and deontic logic. Throughout the text there is an attempt to relate symbolic techniques to issues in the philosophy of logic. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

The distinction between the essence of an object and its properties has been obscured in contemporary discussion of essentialism. Locke held that the properties of an object are exclusively those features that ‘flow’ from its essence. Here he follows the Aristotelian theory, leaving aside Locke’s own scepticism about the knowability of essence. I defend the need to distinguish sharply between essence and properties, arguing that essence must be given by form and that properties flow from form. I give a precise (...) definition of what the term of art ‘flow’ amounts to, and apply the distinction to various kinds of taxonomic issues. (shrink)

Clarke proposes a conception of philosophy that provides an alternative to the reductions of materialism and the search for normative principles. Philosophy's proper role is to describe similarities and differences among differing levels of language, specifically the familiar level of discourse within an ordinary language shared by all and the specialized discourses of social institutions such as science, law, and the arts. By constructing a logical framework in which these comparisons and contrasts can be made, philosophy performs the indispensable role (...) of promoting the integration of disparate elements of our culture. (shrink)