The paper is an attempt to analyse the benefits that remote work could bring in the development of the country. It is organized in three parts. In the first part it engages with the concept of public policy, how it is shaped and should be done to make visible problems that need to be addressed. The second part analysis the benefits of teleworking and potential models for city organization and population distribution to support country development. The last part analyses the (...) case of Albania to discover that remote work, demography, and country development are concepts not yet analyzed in connection for exploring the benefits they could bring. The paper concludes that government should invest in developing human resources in the field of digitalization, so that the number of employees who could telework and companies that could use that expertise is increased. In this way, companies and staff do not necessarily need to locate in the capital or big cities but could locate in medium size cities and periphery. This would contribute to the development of currently neglected areas and decrease living expenses in big cities, making thus more affordable the life for the low-income workers. In doing so, not only the living conditions will improve but the gap between centre and periphery will narrow down and lead to a better distribution of economic benefits across country. (shrink)

Palabras en memoria de Eduardo Bello pronunciadas en la sesión inaugural del V Congreso Internacional de la Sociedad Académica de Filosofía, celebrado del 2 al 4 de febrero de 2011 en La Laguna (Tenerife).

Suppose one hundred prisoners are in a yard under the supervision of a guard, and at some point, ninety-nine of them collectively kill the guard. If, after the fact, a prisoner is picked at random and tried, the probability of his guilt is 99%. But despite the high probability, the statistical chances, by themselves, seem insufficient to justify a conviction. The question is why. Two arguments are offered. The first, decision-theoretic argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics (...) in the prisoner scenario is unacceptable so long as the goal of expected utility maximization is combined with fairness constraints. The second, risk-based argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics in the prisoner scenario lets the risk of mistaken conviction surge potentially too high. The same, by contrast, cannot be said of convictions solely based on DNA evidence or eyewitness testimony. A noteworthy feature of the two arguments in the paper is that they are not confined to criminal trials and can in fact be extended to civil trials. (shrink)

Many oppose the use of profile evidence against defendants at trial, even when the statistical correlations are reliable and the jury is free from prejudice. The literature has struggled to justify this opposition. We argue that admitting profile evidence is objectionable because it violates what we call “equal protection”—that is, a right of innocent defendants not to be exposed to higher ex ante risks of mistaken conviction compared to other innocent defendants facing similar charges. We also show why admitting other (...) forms of evidence, such as eyewitness, trace, and motive evidence, does not violate equal protection. (shrink)

The literature on algorithmic fairness has examined exogenous sources of biases such as shortcomings in the data and structural injustices in society. It has also examined internal sources of bias as evidenced by a number of impossibility theorems showing that no algorithm can concurrently satisfy multiple criteria of fairness. This paper contributes to the literature stemming from the impossibility theorems by examining how informational richness affects the accuracy and fairness of predictive algorithms. With the aid of a computer simulation, we (...) show that informational richness is the engine that drives improvements in the performance of a predictive algorithm, in terms of both accuracy and fairness. The centrality of informational richness suggests that classification parity, a popular criterion of algorithmic fairness, should be given relatively little weight. But we caution that the centrality of informational richness should be taken with a grain of salt in light of practical limitations, in particular, the so-called bias-variance trade off. (shrink)

Smith argues that, unlike other forms of evidence, naked statistical evidence fails to satisfy normic support. This is his solution to the puzzles of statistical evidence in legal proof. This paper focuses on Smith’s claim that DNA evidence in cold-hit cases does not satisfy normic support. I argue that if this claim is correct, virtually no other form of evidence used at trial can satisfy normic support. This is troublesome. I discuss a few ways in which Smith can respond.

El objetivo propuesto en el siguiente trabajo es elucidar cómo desde la finitud de la existencia puede establecerse la problemática de la temporalidad dentro del entramado de pensamiento de Martin Heidegger. Para ello realizaremos un análisis de la conferencia de 1924 Der Begriff der Zeit, uno de los textos que allanan el camino a Sein und Zeit, en lugar de centrar la investigación en la considerada obra magna de Heidegger. Una reflexión acerca de este texto previo permitirá avanzar en el (...) análisis de la existencia al mostrar cómo el tiempo está arraigado en la existencia individual, no como un solipsismo, sino como apertura de posibilidades respecto del mundo (a la postre compartido con los otros). Una descripción fenomenológica de la muerte posibilitará la apertura al mundo, definiendo una temporalidad existencial que incluye no sólo al instante presente, sino también al pasado (concebido bajo la forma del «haber-sido») y al futuro. (shrink)

Many philosophers have pointed out that statistical evidence, or at least some forms of it, lack desirable epistemic or non-epistemic properties, and that this should make us wary of litigations in which the case against the defendant rests in whole or in part on statistical evidence. Others have responded that such broad reservations about statistical evidence are overly restrictive since appellate courts have expressed nuanced views about statistical evidence. In an effort to clarify and reconcile, I put forward an interpretive (...) analysis of why statistical evidence should raise concerns in some cases but not others. I argue that when there is a mismatch between the specificity of the evidence and the expected specificity of the accusation, statistical evidence—as any other kind of evidence—should be considered insufficient to sustain a conviction. I rely on different stylized court cases to illustrate the explanatory power of this analysis. (shrink)

When a suspect appears in front of a criminal court, there is a high probability that he will be found guilty. In the USA, statistics for recent years show that the conviction rate in federal courts is roughly 90%, and in Japan reaches as high a rate as 99%.

The essay offers a decolonial reading of the thought of Ọ̀rúnmìlà, the ancient legendary Yorùbá African messenger and interpreter of the spiritual tradition of Ifá with the aim to address the problem of hegemonic languages (such as English and French) and epistemic bias that have affected the Yorùbá intellectual tradition. The essay argues that reflection on the deep history of Yorùbá and the applied philosophy of Ọ̀rúnmìlà can better clarify the problem of language and epistemic injustices that European modernity has (...) generated in modern Africa. The essay therefore explores what could be described as the interaction of nature-culture in the Yorùbá African intellectual tradition that continues to be silenced and distorted by imposed hegemonic languages and cultures. Through a new reading of the thought of Ọ̀rúnmìlà within the context of Ifá, the essay highlights how the problem of language and epistemic injustices disrupts the continuity of inherited African philosophical and historical traditions in modern times. Ultimately, such reading aims at revealing the contribution of the Yorùbá intellectual tradition to the global philosophical and historical discourse. (shrink)

In recent years, animal welfare has become an important element of sustainable production that has evolved along with the transformation of animal production systems. Consumer attitudes towards farm animal welfare are changing around the world, especially at emerging markets of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Survey-based research on consumer attitudes towards farm animal welfare has increased. However, the geographical coverage of studies on consumer attitudes and perceptions about farm animal welfare has mostly been limited to Europe, and North America. Until (...) now, Latin American consumers’ attitudes towards animal welfare have not been well studied. Despite the fact that Mexico, Chile and Brazil belong to the same region, there are marked differences between these countries in terms of their economical and geographical characteristics among other factors. Those differences potentially have an impact on consumer attitudes towards animal welfare and livestock production systems in general. Given the evidence from the literature review, it seems advisable that Latin American producers and food industry who engage in animal welfare-enhancing practices should clearly label their products with information on the type of husbandry system to reach those consumers who want to make an informed choice. Therefore, there are some aspects that need to be studied and cannot be worked separately in order to promote and understand consumer attitudes towards dairy and beef systems, such as geography, economic development, and politics. (shrink)

According to the principle of epistemic closure, knowledge is closed under known implication. The principle is intuitive but it is problematic in some cases. Suppose you know you have hands and you know that ‘I have hands’ implies ‘I am not a brain-in-a-vat’. Does it follow that you know you are not a brain-in-a-vat? It seems not; it should not be so easy to refute skepticism. In this and similar cases, we are confronted with a puzzle: epistemic closure is an (...) intuitive principle, but at times, it does not seem that we know by implication. In response to this puzzle, the literature has been mostly polarized between those who are willing to do away with epistemic closure and those who think we cannot live without it. But there is a third way. Here I formulate a restricted version of the principle of epistemic closure. In the standard version, the principle can range over any proposition; in the restricted version, it can only range over those propositions that are within the limits of a given epistemic inquiry and that do not constitute the underlying assumptions of the inquiry. If we adopt the restricted version, I argue, we can preserve the advantages associated with closure, while at the same time avoiding the puzzle I’ve described. My discussion also yields an insight into the nature of knowledge. I argue that knowledge is best understood as a topic-restricted notion, and that such a conception is a natural one given our limited cognitive resources. (shrink)

Herein we make a plea to machine ethicists for the inclusion of constraints on their theories consistent with empirical data on human moral cognition. As philosophers, we clearly lack widely accepted solutions to issues regarding the existence of free will, the nature of persons and firm conditions on moral agency/patienthood; all of which are indispensable concepts to be deployed by any machine able to make moral judgments. No agreement seems forthcoming on these matters, and we don’t hold out hope for (...) machines that can both always do the right thing (on some general ethic) and produce explanations for its behavior that would be understandable to a human confederate. Our tentative solution involves understanding the folk concepts associated with our moral intuitions regarding these matters, and how they might be dependent upon the nature of human cognitive architecture. It is in this spirit that we begin to explore the complexities inherent in human moral judgment via computational theories of the human cognitive architecture, rather than under the extreme constraints imposed by rational-actor models assumed throughout much of the literature on philosophical ethics. After discussing the various advantages and challenges of taking this particular perspective on the development of artificial moral agents, we computationally explore a case study of human intuitions about the self and causal responsibility. We hypothesize that a significant portion of the variance in reported intuitions for this case might be explained by appeal to an interplay between the human ability to mindread and to the way that knowledge is organized conceptually in the cognitive system. In the present paper, we build on a pre-existing computational model of mindreading (Bello et al. 2007) by adding constraints related to psychological distance (Trope and Liberman 2010), a well-established psychological theory of conceptual organization. Our initial results suggest that studies of folk concepts involved in moral intuitions lead us to an enriched understanding of cognitive architecture and a more systematic method for interpreting the data generated by such studies. (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to explain the nature of evidential reasoning, the characteristic difficulties encountered, and the tools to address these difficulties. Our focus is on evidential reasoning in criminal cases. There is an extensive scholarly literature on these topics, and it is a secondary aim of the chapter to provide readers the means to find their way in historical and ongoing debates.

This note discusses three issues that Allen and Pardo believe to be especially problematic for a probabilistic interpretation of standards of proof: (1) the subjectivity of probability assignments; (2) the conjunction paradox; and (3) the non-comparative nature of probabilistic standards. I offer a reading of probabilistic standards that avoids these criticisms.

The goal of this article is to analyze the way in which Edith Stein describes the human subject throughout her research, including her phenomenological phaseand the period of her Christian philosophy. In order to do this, I trace essential moments in Husserl’s philosophy, showing both Stein’s reliance upon Husserl andher originality. Both thinkers believe that an analysis of the human being can be carried out by examining consciousness and its lived experiences. Through suchan examination Stein arrives at the same conclusion (...) as Husserl, namely, that the human subject is formed of body, psyche, and spirit (Geist). Stein’s originalityconsists in a further development of the complexity of the human being. She maps this out, providing detailed analyses of the I, the soul, the spirit, and, ultimately,the person. She makes use of medieval philosophical anthropology, including that of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo. (shrink)

People often reason about omissions. One line of research shows that people can distinguish between the semantics of omissive causes and omissive enabling conditions: for instance, not flunking out of college enabled you (but didn’t cause you) to graduate. Another line of work shows that people rely on the normative status of omissive events in inferring their causal role: if the outcome came about because the omission violated some norm, reasoners are more likely to select that omission as a cause. (...) We designed a novel paradigm that tests how norms interact with the semantics of omissive enabling conditions. The paradigm concerns the circuitry of a mechanical device that plays music. Two experiments used the paradigm to stipulate norms and present a distinct set of possibilities to participants. Participants chose which causal verb best described the operations of the machine. The studies revealed that participants’ responses are best predicted by their tendency to consider the semantics of omissive relations. In contrast, norms had little to no effect in participants’ responses. We conclude by marshaling the evidence and considering what role norms may play in people’s understanding of omissions. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 41-65, October 2021.

I comment on two analyses of the Simonshaven case: one by Prakken (2019), based on arguments, and the other by van Koppen and Mackor (2019), based on scenarios (or stories, narratives). I argue that both analyses lack a clear account of proof beyond a reasonable doubt because they lack a clear account of the notion of plausibility. To illustrate this point, I focus on the defense argument during the appeal trial and show that both analyses face difficulties in modeling key (...) features of this argument. (shrink)

Epistemic closure under known implication is the principle that knowledge of "p" and knowledge of "p implies q", together, imply knowledge of "q". This principle is intuitive, yet several putative counterexamples have been formulated against it. This paper addresses the question, why is epistemic closure both intuitive and prone to counterexamples? In particular, the paper examines whether probability theory can offer an answer to this question based on four strategies. The first probability-based strategy rests on the accumulation of risks. The (...) problem with this strategy is that risk accumulation cannot accommodate certain counterexamples to epistemic closure. The second strategy is based on the idea of evidential support, that is, a piece of evidence supports a proposition whenever it increases the probability of the proposition. This strategy makes progress and can accommodate certain putative counterexamples to closure. However, this strategy also gives rise to a number of counterintuitive results. Finally, there are two broadly probabilistic strategies, one based on the idea of resilient probability and the other on the idea of assumptions that are taken for granted. These strategies are promising but are prone to some of the shortcomings of the second strategy. All in all, I conclude that each strategy fails. Probability theory, then, is unlikely to offer the account we need. (shrink)

One of the most contentious problems of contemporary philosophy revolves around the relation between idealism and realism in phenomenology. Husserl’s early students were the first to raise the question about the relation, noting a change of perspective from his Logical Investigations to his subsequent works, including The Idea of Phenomenology and Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy. Adolf Reinach was one of these students, and as Husserl’s assistant, he exercised a great influence on his own student (...) Edith Stein. (shrink)

This book proposes a new interpretative key for reading and overcoming the binary of idealism and realism. It explores the way human consciousness unfolds through the relationship between the I and the world-a field of phenomenological investigation that cannot and must not remain closed within the limits of its own disciplinary boundaries. The book focuses on the question of realism in contemporary debates, ultimately dismantling prejudices and automatisms that one finds therein. It shows that at the root of the controversy (...) between realism and idealism there often lie equivocations of a semantic nature. By returning to the origins of modern phenomenology this study mines the Husserlian concept of transcendental idealism. Following this path, and neutralizing the extreme positions of an acritical idealism and a naïve realism, the book proposes a "transcendental realism": the horizon of a dynamic unity that embraces the process of cognition and that grounds the relation, and not the subordination, of subject and object. The close reading of this reciprocity offered here allows one to surpass the limits of the domain of knowing, leading one to fundamental questions about the ultimate sense of things and their origin. (shrink)

The issue of interpretation is one of the major themes in the study of law and legal practices. Nonetheless, while legal interpretation plays a crucial role in the study of law, scholars have yet to reach an agreement about its nature and status in the discipline. One of the most prolific legal philosophers who is deeply engaged in the discourse of this issue is Ronald Dworkin. This article will examine his views on law as an interpretation. The constructive interpretation model (...) that Dworkin develops has posed a serious challenge for analytical jurisprudence in general, and especially, for legal positivism. The challenge is substantive and methodological; substantive, in the sense that it seeks to radically criticize a sharp separation between law and morality as prevalent in legal positivism, and methodological in the sense that it seeks to put together the analysis of legal concepts with the interpretation of law as it is regarded from the perspective of particular legal cases. Through the concept of law as interpretation, Dworkin wishes to formulate his own understanding of law as a coherent system of legal principles. Keywords: Ronald Dworkin, constructive interpretation model, external and internal skepticism, theory of law, rights thesis, difficult cases. Abstrak: Persoalan interpretasi merupakan salah satu tema besar dalam studi hukum dan praktik hukum. Kendati demikian, sementara interpretasi hukum memainkan peran krusial dalam studi hukum, para pakar masih belum sepakat mengenai hakikat dan kedudukannya dalam disiplin ilmu tersebut. Salah seorang ahli filsafat hukum yang sangat produktif dan sangat serius menggeluti persoalan ini adalah Ronald Dworkin. Artikel ini akan mengkaji pandangan Dworkin tentang hukum sabagai sebuah interpretasi. Model interpretasi konstruktif yang dikembangkan oleh Dworkin merupakan tantangan yang sangat serius bagi yurisprudensi analitis pada umumnya, dan khususnya bagi positivisme hukum. Tantangan ini bersifat substantif dan metodologis. Bersifat substantif dalam arti bahwa Dworkin mengkritik secara radikal pemisahan yang begitu tajam antara hukum dan moralitas seperti lazim terjadi dalam positivisme hukum. Tantangan ini juga bersifat metodologis dalam arti bahwa tantangan tersebut berkehendak menyatukan analisis atas konsep hukum dengan interpretasi terhadapnya, dipandang dari perspektif kasus-kasus hukum partikular. Melalui konsep hukum sebagai interpretasi, Dworkin ingin memformulasikan pemahamannya tentang hukum sebagai sebuah sistem prinsip-prinsip hukum yang koheren. Kata-kata kunci: Ronald Dworkin, model interpretasi konstruktif, skeptisisme eksternal dan internal, teori hukum, tesis hak, kasus-kasus sulit. (shrink)