Disagreements about scientific ontology have frequently been reconstructed as the result of a dispute between rival epistemic stances. In this paper, (i) we characterize some of these disagreements as deep disagreements. In addition, we show that deep disagreements about scientific ontology can arise not only from the adoption of different epistemic stances, but also between positions that fall within the same stance. The development of this point allows us, in turn, to establish a distinction between types of deep disagreement and (...) to explore the possibility that there are differences of degree between them. (shrink)

For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these three volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists (...) in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The neuroscience of morality is in its infancy, with the first brain imaging studies of moral development undertaken only in 2001. The contributors to volume 3 sample the best work in this very new field, discussing a variety of approaches, including functional imaging, lesion studies, abnormal psychology, and developmental neuroscience. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author of the original essay. Topics include the neural basis of moral emotions and moral judgments as well as comparisons of normal adult moral judgments with those made by children, adolescents, and people with psychopathy, brain damage, and autism. Contributors to Volume 3 Abigail Baird, William Casebeer, Cordelia Fine, Nathan Fox, Uta Frith, Jordan Grafman, Joshua Greene, Catherine Hynes, Fatima Azavedo Ignacio, Richard Joyce, Jerome Kagan, Leonard Katz, Kent Kiehl, Jeanette Kennett, Melanie Killen, Daniel Lapsley, Heidi Maibom, Victoria McGeer, John Mikhail, Jorge Moll, Shaun Nichols, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Adina Roskies, Jana Schaich Borg, Katrina Sifferd, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Michael Smith, Mark Timmons, Frederick de Vignemont, Paul Whalen, Roland Zahn. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against a criticism by Matthew Weiner to Grice’s thesis that cancellability is a necessary condition for conversational implicature. I argue that the purported counterexamples fail because the supposed failed cancellation in the cases Weiner presents is not meant as a cancellation but as a reinforcement of the implicature. I moreover point out that there are special situations in which the supposed cancellation may really work as a cancellation.

Many philosophers hold that generics (i.e., unquantified generalizations) are pervasive in communication and that when they are about social groups, this may offend and polarize people because generics gloss over variations between individuals. Generics about social groups might be particularly common on Twitter (X). This remains unexplored, however. Using machine learning (ML) techniques, we therefore developed an automatic classifier for social generics, applied it to 1.1 million tweets about people, and analyzed the tweets. While it is often suggested that generics (...) are ubiquitous in everyday communication, we found that most tweets (78%) about people contained no generics. However, tweets with generics received more “likes” and retweets. Furthermore, while recent psychological research may lead to the prediction that tweets with generics about political groups are more common than tweets with generics about ethnic groups, we found the opposite. However, consistent with recent claims that political animosity is less constrained by social norms than animosity against gender and ethnic groups, negative tweets with generics about political groups were significantly more prevalent and retweeted than negative tweets about ethnic groups. Our study provides the first ML-based insights into the use and impact of social generics on Twitter. (shrink)

For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these three volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists (...) in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The neuroscience of morality is in its infancy, with the first brain imaging studies of moral development undertaken only in 2001. The contributors to volume 3 sample the best work in this very new field, discussing a variety of approaches, including functional imaging, lesion studies, abnormal psychology, and developmental neuroscience. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author of the original essay. Topics include the neural basis of moral emotions and moral judgments as well as comparisons of normal adult moral judgments with those made by children, adolescents, and people with psychopathy, brain damage, and autism. Contributors to volume 3:_ _Abigail Baird, William Casebeer, Cordelia Fine, Nathan Fox, Uta Frith, Jordan Grafman, Joshua Greene, Catherine Hynes, Fatima Azavedo Ignacio, Richard Joyce, Jerome Kagan, Leonard Katz, Kent Kiehl, Jeanette Kennett, Melanie Killen, Daniel Lapsley, Heidi Maibom, Victoria McGeer, John Mikhail, Jorge Moll, Shaun Nichols, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Adina Roskies, Jana Schaich Borg, Katrina Sifferd, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Michael Smith, Mark Timmons, Frederick de Vignemont, Paul Whalen, Roland Zahn. (shrink)

In the paper, I present Christopher Gauker's critique of the view that we talk to each other as a way to make ourselves understood (the received view of linguistic communication) and his alternative theory. I show that both his critique and his alternative fail, and defend the received view of linguistic communication.

Kripke complained that counterpart theory makes modal claims be about counterparts and not about us, and that it is a misguided model of modality since we do not care about counterparts in the same way we care about ourselves. The first part of the complaint, I argue, has been met by Hazen and Lewis, while the second can be countered by observing that most of our modal concerns are about role‐fillers and that counterparts are well‐suited to such concerns. The role‐filler (...) analysis of modal concerns, however, does not seem to capture certain attitudes ‐ especially that of regret. Regret, however, I will argue, is not intrinsically modal and thus is no challenge to my general analysis of modal concerns. (shrink)

Tyler Burge has argued that one has an a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of what one takes to have been presented as true by an interlocutor. This thesis, however, is problematic, since the alleged a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of our seeming understanding of things presented as true to us, rests on the possibility of determining assertoric force on a purely intellectual basis. This thesis is not plausible and Burge's analogy (...) from memory does not support it. Two routes for defending Burge's thesis of the a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of what has been asserted can be identified: the Transcendental Route and the Intrinsic Rationality Route. David Lewis' account of linguistic convention would serve as a transcendental argument for the a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of what has been asserted, but flaws in Lewis' theory leave us deprived of any good transcendental argument for such an entitlement. The Intrinsic Rationality Route is in better standing, but we have yet to see an argument for why we should resort to that measure. (shrink)

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Volume 6, Issue 3, Page 401-406, August 2012.

This paper deals with two distinct topics; unwarranted questions and admittures. The traditional speech act analysis of questions needs revision, since among the felicity conditions of asking a question is believing that the question is warranted. Some questions are unwarranted according to my analysis. A question is unwarranted if the questioner is not standing in the right relation to the addressee, such that he can demand or expect a sincere answer. I use the idea of unwarranted questions to show how (...) conversational admittures can be generated. A conversational admitture is a non-intended admittance by the speaker of some state of affairs being believed by the speaker to be true. Under the assumption that the speaker is rational, the non-intended admittance is something that it is reasonable to credit the speaker with believing as an explanation of the speaker's unwillingness to be cooperative in a given conversation. In the last section I introduce what I call the Principle of Privacy, which tells us that we have a prima facie right to guard some of our thoughts, feelings, personal history, etc. I argue that the Principle of Privacy together with the ideas that there are unwarranted questions and conversational admittures, and the way unwarranted questions can be exploited to generate the latter, endows us with the right to lie in certain contexts. ; ; . (shrink)

John Searle has argued that the aim of strong AI of creating a thinking computer is misguided. Searle’s Chinese Room Argument purports to show that syntax does not suffice for semantics and that computer programs as such must fail to have intrinsic intentionality. But we are not mainly interested in the program itself but rather the implementation of the program in some material. It does not follow by necessity from the fact that computer programs are defined syntactically that the implementation (...) of them cannot suffice for semantics. Perhaps our world is a world in which any implementation of the right computer program will create a system with intrinsic intentionality, in which case Searle’s Chinese Room Scenario is empirically (nomically) impossible. But, indeed, perhaps our world is a world in which Searle’s Chinese Room Scenario is empirically (nomically) possible and that the silicon basis of modern day computers are one kind of material unsuited to give you intrinsic intentionality. The metaphysical question turns out to be a question of what kind of world we are in and I argue that in this respect we do not know our modal address. The Modal Address Argument does not ensure that strong AI will succeed, but it shows that Searle’s challenge on the research program of strong AI fails in its objectives. (shrink)

According to Steven Pinker and his associates the cooperative model of human communication fails, because evolutionary biology teaches us that most social relationships, including talk-exchange, involve combinations of cooperation and conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of the strategic speaker who uses indirect speech in order to be able to deny what he meant by a speech act (deniability of conversational implicatures) challenges the model. In reply I point out that interlocutors can aim at understanding each other (cooperation), while being in (...) conflict. Furthermore, Pinker’s strategic speaker relies on the Cooperative Principle when conveying a conversational implicature, and so non-cooperative behaviour (denial) only emerges as a response to a negative reaction from the audience. It is also doubtful in the cases Pinker presents whether a denial will successfully cancel the conversational implicature –change the audience’s interpretation of speaker’s meaning. I also argue that a strategic speaker might choose indirect speech due to the ignorability of conversational implicatures, in which case the strategic speaker can be highly cooperative. (shrink)

According to Steven Pinker and his associates the cooperative model of human communication fails, because evolutionary biology teaches us that most social relationships, including talk-exchange, involve combinations of cooperation and conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of the strategic speaker who uses indirect speech in order to be able to deny what he meant by a speech act (deniability of conversational implicatures) challenges the model. In reply I point out that interlocutors can aim at understanding each other (cooperation), while being in (...) conflict. Furthermore, Pinker’s strategic speaker relies on the Cooperative Principle when conveying a conversational implicature, and so non-cooperative behaviour (denial) only emerges as a response to a negative reaction from the audience. It is also doubtful in the cases Pinker presents whether a denial will successfully cancel the conversational implicature –change the audience’s interpretation of speaker’s meaning. I also argue that a strategic speaker might choose indirect speech due to the ignorability of conversational implicatures, in which case the strategic speaker can be highly cooperative. (shrink)

The Chomskian holds that the grammars that linguists produce are about human psycholinguistic structures, i.e. our mastery of a grammar, our linguistic competence. But if we encountered Martians whose psycholinguistic processes differed from ours, but who nevertheless produced sentences that are extensionally equivalent to the set of sentences in our English and shared our judgements on the grammaticality of various English sentences, then we would count them as being competent in English. A grammar of English is about what the Martians (...) and we share. In this note, I argue that a recent attack on the Martian Argument by Laurence fail to mitigate its force. (shrink)

According to Paul Grice, when we address someone, we intend to make ourselves understood, partly by the addressee’s recognition of that intention. Call this set of nested audience-directed intentions an M-intention. The standard Gricean analysis of speaker’s meaning goes as follows: “U meant something by uttering x” is true iff, for some audience A, U uttered x intending: (1) A to produce a particular response r (2) A to think (recognize) that U intends (1) (3) A to fulfill (1) on (...) the basis of his fulfillment of (2). (Grice 1969, p. 92) Call this analysis the M-schema, and to fulfill it, to M-intend. In the Gricean tradition there has been a debate as to the exact form of Mintentions (especially whether clause (3) is needed or should be left out of the analysis), but these are details that I will not address here. The phenomenon of talking to infants challenges the Gricean analysis of addressing others. We talk to infants, but such cases cannot be described as M-intending anything, since the speaker must realize that he will not be able to make himself understood in the required manner. The Gricean mechanism lacks an appropriate addressee. Some Griceans have argued that in cases of no appropriate addressee, the speaker is actually addressing himself (Schiffer 1972, p. 80; Avramides 1989, p. 66). This response might be tempting for soliloquy, but I will show that it is unsuited for the phenomenon of talking to infants. (shrink)

The Chomskian holds that the grammars that linguists produce are about human psycholinguistic structures, i.e. our mastery of a grammar, our linguistic competence. But if we encountered Martians whose psycho-linguistic processes differed from ours, but who nevertheless produced sentences that are extensionally equivalent to the set of sentences in our English and shared our judgements on the grammaticality of various English sentences, then we would count them as being competent in English. A grammar of English is about what the Martians (...) and we share. In this note, I argue that a recent attack on the Martian Argument by Laurence fails to mitigate its force. (shrink)

Paul Horwich’s Use Theory of Meaning (UTM) depends on his rejection of Paul Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning and his Univocality of Meaning Thesis, as he wishes to deflate the meaning-relation to usage. Horwich’s programme of deflating the meaning-relation (i.e. how words, sentences, etc., acquire meaning) to some basic regularity of usage cannot be carried through if the meaning-relation depends on the minds of users. Here, I first give a somewhat detailed account of the distinction between natural and (...) non-natural meaning in order to set the stage for Horwich’s critique of it. I then present Horwich’s critique of the distinction and show how that rejection accords with his overall view of meaning as use. Horwich’s rejection of the distinction between natural and non-natural meaning, I argue in the last section, is ill founded, and because UTM depends on this rejection, UTM is stillborn. (shrink)

John Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects has meet resistance. In this paper I bypass the traditional critiques of the distinction and instead concentrate on two specific counterexamples to the distinction: Killer yellow and the puzzle of multiple dispositions. One can accommodate these puzzles, I argue, by adopting Thomas Reid’s version of the primary/secondary quality distinction, where the distinction is founded upon conceptual grounds. The primary/secondary quality distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. A consequence of Reid’s primary/ (...) secondary quality distinction is that one must deny the original version of Molyneux’s question, while one must affirm an amended version of it. I show that these two answers to Molyneux’s question are not at odds with current empirical research. (shrink)

The abundance of literature on ethical concerns regarding artificial intelligence (AI) highlights the need to systematize, integrate, and categorize existing efforts through a systematic literature review. The article aims to investigate prevalent concerns, proposed solutions, and prominent ethical approaches within the field. Considering 309 articles from the beginning of the publications in this field up until December 2021, this systematic literature review clarifies what the ethical concerns regarding AI are, and it charts them into two groups: (i) ethical concerns that (...) arise from the design of AI and (ii) ethical concerns that arise from human–AI interactions. The analysis of the obtained sample highlights the most recurrent ethical concerns. Finally, it exposes the main proposals of the literature to handle the ethical concerns according to the main ethical approaches. It interprets the findings to lay the foundations for future research on the ethics of AI. (shrink)

Recommender Systems (RecSys) have been around since the early days of the Internet, helping users navigate the vast ocean of information and the increasingly available options that have been available for us ever since. The range of tasks for which one could use a RecSys is expanding as the technical capabilities grow, with the disruption of Machine Learning representing a tipping point in this domain, as in many others. However, the increase of the technical capabilities of AI-powered RecSys did not (...) come with a thorough consideration of their ethical implications and, despite being a well-established technical domain, the potential impacts of RecSys on their users are still under-assessed. This paper aims at filling this gap in regards to one of the main impacts of RecSys: personal autonomy. We first describe how technology can affect human values and a suitable methodology to identify these effects and mitigate potential harms: Value Sensitive Design (VSD). We use VSD to carry out a conceptual investigation of personal autonomy in the context of a generic RecSys and draw on a nuanced account of procedural autonomy to focus on two components: competence and authenticity. We provide the results of our inquiry as a value hierarchy and apply it to the design of a speculative RecSys as an example. (shrink)

Most research studying the corporate social performance –corporate financial performance link has utilized developed country samples. Also, this literature has generally focused on a wide variety of industries, ignoring the fact that certain sectors – such as controversial industries – have graver social and environmental issues. Hence, a gap exists in this tradition when it comes to emerging markets and controversial industries. This paper attempts to fill this void by providing preliminary evidence and insight on the matter. Based on an (...) exploration in six Latin American countries and five controversial industries, we find a negative bidirectional association between CSP and CFP. These results tend to contradict the mainstream conclusion of a positive bidirectional link, suggesting that institutional and market-level forces play a major role in shaping this relationship. (shrink)

Se revisan las prácticas fotográficas en los territorios asociados a la producción y sus consecuencias en el Chile contemporáneo, incluyendo cómo se hizo la selección y categorización del campo para construir un cuerpo de estudio con 28 casos. Con este se opera un análisis crítico, actualizándolo dentro de la discusión que ubica a la fotografía tensada entre la producción de «obra» y la de «documentos», y se recurre a las «poéticas de la fotografía del paisaje» propuestas por Santos Zunzunegui. Así (...) se hace evidente cómo la veladura del hecho estético sobre la fotografía deja ver, debajo de ella, el dolor irritante de la destrucción del paisaje, y los trabajos seleccionados devienen ora obras, ora documentos, para atraer la mirada y, al ser mirados, evidenciar el daño humano sobre el paisaje. (shrink)

I argue that there are different orders of mechanisms with different constitutive relevance and individuation conditions. In common first-order mechanistic explanations, constitutive relevance norms are captured by the matched-interlevel-experiments condition (Craver et al. (2021) Synthese 199:8807–8828). Regarding individuation, we say that any two mechanisms are of the same type when they have the same concrete components performing the same activities in the same arrangement. By contrast, in higher-order mechanistic explanations, we formulate the decompositions in terms of generalized basic components (GBCs). (...) These GBCs (e.g., logic gates) possess causal properties that are common to a set of physical systems. Mechanistic explanations formulated in terms of GBCs embody the epistemic value of horizontal integration, which aims to explain as many phenomena as possible with a minimal amount of abstract components (Wajnerman Paz (2017a) Philos Psychol 30:213–234). Two higher-order mechanisms are of the same type when they share all the same GBCs, and they are organized as performing the same activities with the same interactions. I use this notion of mechanistic order to enhance the mechanistic account of computation (MAC) and provide an account of the epistemic norms of computational explanation and the nature of medium-independent functional properties and mechanisms. Finally, I use these new conceptual tools to address four criticisms of the MAC. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo analizamos el tratamiento que hace Isidoro de Sevilla, la más ilustre figura de la cultura hispanovisigoda, que ejerció un notabilísimo influjo durante todo el medievo a lo largo y ancho de la cristiandad, del problema de la pobreza y la injusticia social. En los dos primeros epígrafes estudiamos sus consideraciones teóricas para entender y concebir el problema, y en el tercero nos detenemos en sus tres propuestas prácticas para afrontar –y, quizá, vencer– el mal que representan (...) la pobreza y la injusticia social: justicia, comunidad y, sobre todo, caridad. En un cuarto apartado recogemos las principales conclusiones y, como refuerzo y complemento a lo estudiado, ofrecemos al lector unos breves himnos de la liturgia hispana altomedieval –testigos del mismo espíritu que movió al obispo de Sevilla– que ahondan en la idea central de la propuesta isidoriana: que solo el aumento y ejercicio de la caridad, amor Dei et proximi, puede vencer el mal de la pobreza y la injusticia social, porque solo el amor vence siempre. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas holds that the actual content of our thought is not accessible for any creature, and that free will cannot be superseded. These theses are founded on the spiritual condition of our intelligence and will, which makes them directly invulnerable to any intervention on our body. On the other hand, he enthrones the will as the keeper of interiority: it precludes a full transparency that would make our free decision to communicate superfluous, and it exert an inalienable control over (...) the action through which we direct ourselves to the good. In this sense, Aquinas departs from reductionist accounts, which either refuse the existence of free will, suppressing the reason to protect its expression, or face the difficulty of explaining the meaning and justification of the rights that are claimed for free will. However, Thomas Aquinas admits the possibility of indirectly accessing our minds through the knowledge of brain states and of influencing our will through passions by means of alterations of our organisms. Although this possibility was not within the reach of the human being in his time, he considered it was within the reach of separated substances. The consideration of the limits of their perspicacity and control sheds light on the possibilities that neurotechnology can allow in the future. The existence of an unassailable stronghold that guarantees our interiority and free will legitimates our right to be respected but does not make their protection superfluous. (shrink)

Time and technology permeate the fabric of teamwork across a variety of settings to affect outcomes which have a wide range of consequences. However, there is a limited understanding about the interplay between these factors for teams, especially as applied to artificial intelligence (AI) technology. With the increasing integration of AI into human teams, we need to understand how environmental factors such as time scarcity interact with AI technology to affect team behaviors. To address this gap in the literature, we (...) investigated the interaction between the availability of intelligent technology and time scarcity in teams. Drawing from the theoretical perspective of computers are social actors and extant research on the use of heuristics and human–AI interaction, this study uses behavioral data from 56 teams who participated in a between-subjects 2 (intelligent assistant available × control/no intelligent assistant) × 2 (time scarcity × control/no time scarcity) lab experiment. Results show that teams working under time scarcity used the intelligent assistant more often and underperformed on a creative task compared to teams without the temporal constraints. Further, teams who had an intelligent assistant available to them had fewer interactions between members compared to teams who did not have the technology. Implications for research and applications are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, I present in a systematic way Aristotle’s understanding of movement (kinêsis) as efficient cause in the Generation of Animals. This aspect of movement is not disclosed in the approach to movement as an incomplete activity in contrast to energeia, which has been extensively discussed in the literature. I explain in which sense movement is the efficient cause of generation and how this movement is related to the other factors, in particular the source of movement, the seminal fluid, (...) pneuma, and the vital heat, as well as to the form and the soul. The role of movement as efficient cause of generation shows how, for Aristotle, form and soul are inseparable from matter and movement in nature. Explaining the role of movement as efficient cause of generation also helps to make sense of the multiplicity of factors involved in the efficient causality of generation. The key to articulating these factors with one another is the identity of form of the generative movement, which is specifically the same in the source, in the tools, and in the substance that is coming into being. (shrink)