Recent scholarship in philosophy of science and technology has shown that scientific and technological decision making are laden with values, including values of a social, political, and/or ethical character. This paper examines the role of value judgments in the design of machine-learning systems generally and in recidivism-prediction algorithms specifically. Drawing on work on inductive and epistemic risk, the paper argues that ML systems are value laden in ways similar to human decision making, because the development and design of ML systems (...) requires human decisions that involve tradeoffs that reflect values. In many cases, these decisions have significant—and, in some cases, disparate—downstream impacts on human lives. After examining an influential court decision regarding the use of proprietary recidivism-prediction algorithms in criminal sentencing, Wisconsin v. Loomis, the paper provides three recommendations for the use of ML in penal systems. (shrink)

This is a translation of a work increasingly recognized as one of the most important & innovative contributions to the history of philosophy in recent times. Kohnke's account of the impact of the amorphous movement known as neo-Kantianism combines statistical analysis of the actual courses taught at German universities with broader speculation on the political & social tastes of the thinkers discussed. A major contribution to the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, Kohnke's book has profound implications for the way (...) in which the history of philosophy is pursued. Lewis White Beck, the dean of American scholars in this field, has provided a foreword to R. J. Hollingdale's lucid translation, & the whole is likely to have an impact well beyond specialists in nineteenth-century German thought. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to address the neglected but important problem of differentiating between epistemically beneficial and epistemically detrimental dissent. By “dissent,” we refer to the act of objecting to a particular conclusion, especially one that is widely held. While dissent in science can clearly be beneficial, there might be some instances of dissent that not only fail to contribute to scientific progress, but actually impede it. Potential examples of this include the tobacco industry’s funding of studies that (...) questioned the link between smoking and lung cancer, and the attempt by the petroleum industry and other groups to cast doubt upon the conclusion that human consumption of fossil fuels contributes to global climate change. The problem of distinguishing between good and bad dissent is important because of the growing tendency of some stakeholders to attempt to delay political action by ’manufacturing doubt’. Our discussion in this paper focuses on climate science. This field, in our view, is rife with instances of bad dissent. On the basis of our discussion of climate science, we articulate a set of sufficient conditions for epistemically problematic dissent in general, which we call “the inductive risk account of epistemically detrimental dissent.”. (shrink)

This paper examines the state of the field of “science and values”—particularly regarding the implications of the thesis of transient underdetermination for the ideal of value-free science, or what I call the “ideal of epistemic purity.” I do this by discussing some of the main arguments in the literature, both for and against the ideal. I examine a preliminary argument from transient underdetermination against the ideal of epistemic purity, and I discuss two different formulations of an objection to this argument—an (...) objection that requires the strict separation of the epistemic from the practical. A secondary aim of the paper is to suggest some future directions for the field, one of which is to replace the vocabulary of values that is often employed in the literature with a more precise one. (shrink)

Criticism plays an essential role in the growth of scientific knowledge. In some cases, however, criticism can have detrimental effects; for example, it can be used to ‘manufacture doubt’ for the purpose of impeding public policy making on issues such as tobacco consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Oreskes & Conway 2010). In this paper, we build on previous work by Biddle and Leuschner (2015) who argue that criticism that meets certain conditions can be epistemically detrimental. We extend and refine (...) their account by arguing that such criticism can be epistemically corrupting—it can create social conditions that are conducive to the development of epistemic vice by agents operating within them. (shrink)

Is modus ponens valid for the indicative conditional? McGee [1985] famously presents several alleged counterexamples to this inference rule. More recently, Kolodny and MacFarlane [2010] and Willer [2010] argue that modus ponens is unreliable in certain hypothetical contexts. However, none of these attacks undermines an informational conception of logic on which modus ponens is valid.

Since the early 1980s, private, for-profit corporations have become increasingly involved in all aspects of scientific research, especially of biomedical research. In this essay, I argue that there are dangerous epistemic consequences of this trend, which should be more thoroughly examined by social epistemologists. In support of this claim, I discuss a recent episode of pharmaceutical research involving the painkiller Vioxx. I argue that the research on Vioxx was epistemically problematic and that the primary cause of these inadequacies was faulty (...) institutional arrangements. More specifically, the research was organized in such a way as to allow short-term commercial interests to compromise epistemic integrity. Thus, the Vioxx case study, in conjunction with numerous case studies developed elsewhere, provides strong reasons for believing that the privatization of the biomedical sciences is epistemically worrisome, and it suggests that the primary response to this situation should be a social, or organizational, one. What kind of organizational response would be most beneficial? I briefly discuss two prominent social epistemological proposals for how scientific research should be organized - namely those of Philip Kitcher and Helen Longino - and I suggest that they are incapable of dealing with the phenomenon of privatization. I then draw upon the Vioxx episode in order to outline an alternative suggestion for reorganizing certain aspects of pharmaceutical research. (shrink)

Do logically valid arguments necessarily preserve truth? Certain inferences involving informational modal operators and indicative conditionals suggest that truth preservation and good deductive argument come apart. Given this split, I recommend an alternative to the standard truth preservation view of logic on which validity and good deductive argument coincide: logic is a descriptive science that is fundamentally concerned not with the preservation of truth, but with the preservation of structural features of information. Along the way, I defend modus ponens for (...) the indicative against an attack by Kolodny and MacFarlane, and I present a new proof system, Info, appropriate to this informational view. (shrink)

According to a popular closure principle for epistemic justification, if one is justified in believing each of the premises in set Φ and one comes to believe that ψ on the basis of competently deducing ψ from Φ—while retaining justified beliefs in the premises—then one is justified in believing that ψ. This principle is prima facie compelling; it seems to capture the sense in which competent deduction is an epistemically secure means to extend belief. However, even the single-premise version of (...) this closure principle is in conflict with certain seemingly good inferences involving the epistemic possibility modal ♢. According to other compelling principles concerning competent deduction and epistemic justification, one can competently infer ¬♢φ from ¬φ in deliberation even though there are cases in which one can justifiably believe ¬φ but would be unjustified in believing ¬♢φ. Thus, as we argue, philosophers must choose between unrestricted closure for justification and the validity of these other principles. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider a variant of the ancient Idle Argument involving so‐called “unconditionals” with interrogative antecedents. This new Idle Argument provides an ideal setting for probing the logic of these close relatives of if‐conditionals, which has been comparatively underexplored. In the course of refuting the argument, I argue that contrary to received wisdom, many unconditionals do not entail their main clauses, yet modus ponens is still unrestrictedly valid for this class of expressions. I make these lessons precise in (...) a formal system drawing on recent work in inquisitive semantics. My larger aim is to challenge standard truth preservation accounts of logic and deductive argumentation. (shrink)

A topic of growing importance within philosophy of science is the epistemic implications of the organization of research. This paper identifies a promising approach to social epistemology—nonideal systems design—and uses it to examine one important aspect of the organization of research, namely the system of patenting and licensing and its role in structuring the production and dissemination of knowledge. The primary justification of patenting in science and technology is consequentialist in nature. Patenting should incentivize research and thereby promote the development (...) of knowledge, which in turn facilitates social progress. Some have disputed this argument, maintaining that patenting actually inhibits knowledge production. In this paper, I make a stronger argument; in some areas of research in the US—in particular, research on GM seeds—patents and patent licenses can be, and are in fact being, used to prohibit some research. I discuss three potential solutions to this problem: voluntary agreements, eliminating patents, and a research exemption. I argue against eliminating patents, and I show that while voluntary agreements and a research exemption could be helpful, they do not sufficiently address the problems of access that are discussed here. More extensive changes in the organization of research are necessary. (shrink)

This article argues that the controversy over genetically modified crops is best understood not in terms of the supposed bias, dishonesty, irrationality, or ignorance on the part of proponents or critics, but rather in terms of differences in values. To do this, the article draws on and extends recent work of the role of values and interests in science, focusing particularly on inductive risk and epistemic risk, and it shows how the GMO debate can help to further our understanding of (...) the various epistemic risks that are present in science and how these risks might be managed. (shrink)

Many observers now acknowledge that there are serious problems with the way in which pharmaceutical research is currently practiced. These problems include the suppression of undesirable results, bias in the design of studies and in the interpretation of results, and neglect of diseases that afflict the poor in developing countries. These problems can be traced at least in part to the influence of commercial interests on research. In what follows, I will discuss some of the main deficiencies of current pharmaceutical (...) research, and I will argue that an important one is inadequate dissent. As many have argued, rigorous scientific research requires dissent, or what Robert Merton called “organized skepticism” (1942). .. (shrink)

Many philosophers argue that the emphasis on commercializing scientific research---and particularly on patenting the results of research---is both epistemically and socially detrimental, in part because it inhibits the flow of information. One of the most important of these criticisms is the ``tragedy of the anticommons'' thesis. Some have attempted to test this thesis empirically, and many have argued that these empirical tests effectively falsify the thesis. I argue that they neither falsify nor disconfirm the thesis because they do not actually (...) test it. Additionally, I argue that there is other evidence that actually supports the thesis. (shrink)

The phasalist solution to the puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay claims that being a statue is a phase sortal property of the piece of clay, just like being a child is a phase sortal property of a human being. Some philosophers reject this solution because it cannot account for cases where the statue seems to gain and lose parts that the piece of clay does not. I rebut this objection by arguing, contrary to the prevailing view, (...) that the piece of clay is not mereologically constant and might even be highly mereologically flexible. (shrink)

For epistemic subjects like us, updating our credences incurs epistemic costs. Expending our limited processing power and working memory to properly update our credences by some information can come at the cost of not responding to other available information. It is thus desirable to flesh out and compare alternative ways of taking information into account in light of cognitive shortcomings like our own. This paper is a preliminary attempt to do so. I argue that it is better, in a range (...) of circumstances and from the point of view of expected credal accuracy, for epistemic subjects like us not to update on available information that bears on propositions for which substantial evidence has been gathered than it is to update on information as it presents itself. In order to clarify the argument, and enable comparisons between information-response policies more generally, I develop a queue-theoretic model of learning for subjects with cognitive limitations. The model characterizes how policies for responding to information interact with a subject’s limitations to yield confidences. Finally, I discuss implications of the discussion for work on confidence, outright belief, and the relationship between those two states. The comparison of information-response policies helps to explain how some of the “biases” revealed by psychological research might be cognitively valuable, clarify views that take outright belief to be a kind of epistemic plan that resists reconsideration, and assuage certain “demandingness” worries for the hypothesis that we are credal reasoners. (shrink)

Helen Longino’s “contextual empiricism” is one of the most sophisticated recent attempts to defend a social theory of science. On this view, objectivity and epistemic acceptability require that research be produced within communities that approximate a Millian marketplace of ideas. I argue, however, that Longino’s embedding of her epistemology within the framework of Mill’s political liberalism implies a conception of individual epistemic agents that is incompatible with her view that scientific knowledge is necessarily social, and I begin to articulate an (...) alternative conception that is better suited to a truly social theory of science. †To contact the author, please write to: School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 685 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA 30332‐0345; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Forty-nine members of the Oxford public took part in a controlled free-recall experiment, the first 'minimal counterintuitiveness theory' study to control concept inferential potential and participant selective-attention timing. Recall of counterintuitive ideas was compared with recall of ideas expressing necessary epistemic incongruence, analytically true ideas, and ordinary control ideas. The items expressing necessary epistemic incongruence had better recall than other items. MCI items had a mnemonic advantage over intuitive templates for participants twenty-five years and younger after a one-week delay, but (...) MCI items did not have an advantage for older participants. There was no mnemonic advantage for immediate recall of MCI items in any age group. Analyses suggest this general failure to replicate previously found mnemonic advantages may have been due to restricting the items' inferential potential. (shrink)

The New World Order and Global Claim to Power after the End of the East-West Conflict On January 16, 1991 at the beginning of the Gulf War, the American ...

In this paper, I take up one of Wang Yangming’s most audacious philosophical claims, which is that an achievement that is entirely concerned with correcting one’s own inner states, called “establishing sincerity” (licheng 立誠) can help one to fully grasp (jin 盡) all ethically pertinent matters, including those that would seem to require some ability to know or track facts about the wider world (e.g., facts about people very different from ourselves, facts about the needs of plants and animals). Wang (...) makes a claim to this effect in some of his letters and recorded discussions. -/- I begin with a brief, historical reconstruction of what Wang means by “establishing sincerity” and then turn to two sets of controversies regarding his audacious claim. The first has to do with how we should understand the proposal that establishing sincerity helps or positions a person to fully grasp all ethically significant concerns. On the interpretation of Chen Lai 陳來, Wang doesn’t think that establishing sincerity is sufficient by itself to have this grasp, only that it lays a necessary psychological foundation for all attempts to do so, so that it leaves much more work to do. I largely agree with Chen’s reading but find it isn’t strong enough to capture what’s most important and controversial about Wang’s view. On my stronger reading, Wang doesn’t just think that establishing sincerity provides a necessary foundation for a complete grasp, he also thinks that it describes the most difficult and demanding step or part of the process – the other steps come much more naturally and easily. The second set of controversies has to do with whether we can preserve Wang’s core account of virtuous moral agency without his strong ethical nativism, according to which we have an inherent capacity and disposition to track what is ethically important or salient about people and things very much unlike ourselves. I consider some arguments and interpretations of Wang’s thought that might allow us to bypass his nativist presuppositions, and conclude that they do not succeed. Even if we cannot accept his ethical nativism, however, there is a range of important ethical norms for which Wang’s prescriptions are powerful and prudent. The result of this study, I hope, will be an account of Wang’s thought which better positions us to see what parts are (and are not) worth bringing to ongoing debates about the nature of ethics, moral knowledge, and moral virtue. (shrink)

This paper examines James Conant’s pragmatic theory of science – a theory that has been neglected by most commentators on the history of 20th-century philosophy of science – and it argues that this theory occupied an important place in Conant’s strategic thinking about the Cold War. Conant drew upon his wartime science policy work, the history of science, and Quine’s epistemological holism to argue that there is no strict distinction between science and technology, that there is no such thing as (...) “the scientific method,” and that theories are better interpreted as policies rather than creeds. An important consequence that he drew from these arguments is that science is both a thoroughly value-laden, and an intrinsically social, enterprise. These results led him to develop novel proposals for reorganizing scientific and technological research – proposals that he believed could help to win the Cold War. Interestingly, the Cold War had a different impact upon Conant’s thinking than it did upon many other theorists of science in postwar America. Instead of leading him to “the icy slopes of logic,” it led him to develop a socially- and politically-engaged theory that was explicitly in the service of the American Cold War effort. (shrink)

This paper explores the theological and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and Neuroscience research on the Christian’s notion of the human person. The paschal mystery of Christ is the intuitive foundation of Christian anthropology. In the intellectual history of the Christianity, Platonism and Aristotelianism have been employed to articulate the Christian philosophical anthropology. The Aristotelian systematization has endured to this era. Since the modern period of the Western intellectual history, Aristotelianism has been supplanted by the positive sciences as the (...) standard scientific and philosophical interpretative framework for many. This paper argues that there is need for a new Christian anthropology based on the interpretation of the paschal mystery of Christ that is consistent with contemporary science and philosophy, especially as informed by research in AI and neuroscience. Christian anthropology today ought to be fully aware of the theological and philosophical implications of AI and neuroscience research. This paper denotes this new Christian anthropology as neuro-theological Christian anthropology. (shrink)

A crucial tenet of virtue-based or expertise-based theorizing about politics is that there are ways to identify and select morally and epistemically excellent people to hold office. This paper considers historical challenges to this task that come from within Greek and Confucian thought and political practice. Because of how difficult it is to assess character in ordinary settings, we argue that it is even more difficult to design institutions that select for virtue at the much wider political scale. Specifically, we (...) argue that the vast majority of proposals that purport to select for virtue are either (a) unlikely to be effective, (b) not implementable at the scale of most current nations, or (c) have already been incorporated into most democratic states. Thus defenders of meritocratic institutions should take more seriously the practical barriers that will almost certainly arise when trying to implement these proposals at scale. Historical proponents of meritocratic values were well aware of concerns about the feasibility of their political ideals, and we should be too. (shrink)

Weakness of the Will gives an excellent historical survey of philosophers' puzzles about the possibility of deliberately taking the worse course. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, a selection of medieval philosophers, and more contemporary philosophers are explored to illustrate why and how they avoid discussing the problem.

We agree with Carruthers that evidence for metacognition in species lacking mindreading provides dramatic evidence in favor of the metacognition-is-prior account and against the mindreading-is-prior account. We discuss this existing evidence and explain why an evolutionary perspective favors the former account and poses serious problems for the latter account.

As recorded in the Analects, Kongzi (Confucius) held that using punishment to influence ordinary citizens will do little to develop a sense of shame (chi 恥) in them. This term is usually taken to refer to a sense of shame described here as “ autonomous,” understood as a predisposition to feel ashamed when one does something wrong because it seems wrong to oneself, and not because others regard it as wrong or shameful. Historically, Confucian philosophers have thought a great deal (...) about the habits and character traits necessary for someone to have a sense of shame that is truly autonomous. The article looks at their views on this matter and shows how they help to articulate the hypothesis that coercive punishments undermine or work at cross-purposes with the cultivation of an autonomous sense of shame. It then uses this analysis to explicate the proposal that governing people by cultivating a sense of shame is to be preferred to governing by threat of punishment. It concludes by weighing its merits as a view about effective governance, observing that its strength and plausibility depends on whether we take the threat of punishment to be direct or indirect. (shrink)

This book introduces social scientists to the difference that critical realism can make to theorizing and methodological problems within the contemporary social sciences. The chapters, which cover such topics as cultural studies, feminism, globalization, heterodox economics, education policy, the self, and the "underclass" debate, are arranged in four sections dealing with some of the major topics in contemporary social science: ethics, the consequences of the "linguistic turn", methodology and globalization.

In Logiques des Mondes, Paris, Seuil, 2006, Alain Badiou has produced a sequel to his magnum opus Being and Event. Whereas Being and Event primarily restricted itself to the relationship between ontology and the event, mathematics and poetry, the new book seriously extends and revises certain of its predecessor's. This article outlines some of the major doctrines, arguments, and motivations for the new work, as well as several points of possible difficulty.

his paper is an excerpt from a larger project that aims to open a new pathway into Spinoza's Ethics by formally reconstructing an initial fragment of this text. The semantic backbone of the project is a custom-made Spinozian model theory that lays out some of the formal prerequisites for more ne-grained investigations into Spinoza's fundamental ontology and modal metaphysics. We implement Spinoza's theory of attributes using many-sorted models with a rich system of identity that allows us to clarify the puzzling (...) status of such logical principles as the Substitution of Identicals and Transitivity of Identity in Spinoza's thought. The intensional structure of our Spinozian models also captures his proposal that states of a airs can be necessitated or excluded by the essences of particular things, an essence-relative modality that should be of interest to philosophers who have sought to rehabilitate the concept of essence in contemporary analytic metaphysics. (shrink)

When speaking or producing music, people rely in part on auditory feedback – the sounds associated with the performed action. Three experiments investigated the degree to which alterations of auditory feedback during music performances influence the experience of agency and the possible link between agency and the disruptive effect of AAF on production. Participants performed short novel melodies from memory on a keyboard. Auditory feedback during performances was manipulated with respect to its pitch contents and/or its synchrony with actions. Participants (...) rated their experience of agency after each trial. In all experiments, AAF reduced judgments of agency across conditions. Performance was most disrupted when AAF led to an ambiguous experience of agency, suggesting that there may be some causal relationship between agency and disruption. However, analyses revealed that these two effects were probably independent. A control experiment verified that performers can make veridical judgments of agency. (shrink)

Critical realists argue that the condition of possibility of the sciences is that they are based on a correct set of ontological assumptions or definitions. The task of philosophy is to underlabor for the sciences, by ensuring that the explanations developed are congruent with the ontological condition of possibility of the sciences. This requires critical realists to justify their claims about ontology and, to do this, they turn to ontological assumptions that are held to obtain in natural scientific knowledge and (...) social agents’ lay knowledge. A number of problems with this approach are discussed and a problem-solving alternative is advocated. (shrink)

That humans can categorize in different ways does not imply that there are qualitatively distinct underlying natural kinds or that the field of concepts splinters. Rather, it implies that the unitary goal of forming concepts is important enough that it receives redundant expression in cognition. Categorization science focuses on commonalities involved in concept learning. Eliminating makes this more difficult.