The moral comparison of the three venues of deception—lying, falsely implicating, and nonverbal deception—is a central, ongoing debate in the ethics of deception. To date there has been no attempt to advance in the debate through experimental philosophy. Using methods of experimental economics, we devised a strategic game to test positions in the debate. Our article presents the experimental results and shows how philosophical analysis of the results allows drawing valid normative conclusions. Our conclusions testify against the dominant position in (...) the debate—that lying is morally worse than all non-lying deceptions. They offer prima facie support to the view that the venue of deception makes no moral difference. (shrink)

Bermúdez argues for rational framing effects based on normatively appropriate quasi-cyclical preferences. We suggest that this argument conflates preferences over specific outcomes with preferences over outcome aspects. Instead of implying quasi-cyclical preferences, framing affects decisions through standard economic trade-offs. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that framing can affect behavior through altering perceptions of particular outcome aspects when framing effects are not decomposable.

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in multiple agent contexts. We draw on the structural model account of actual causation (e.g., Halpern & Pearl, 2005) and its extension to responsibility judgments (Chockler & Halpern, 2004). We review the main (...) theoretical and empirical issues that arise from this literature and propose a novel model of intuitive judgments of responsibility. This model is a function of both pivotality (whether an agent made a difference to the outcome) and criticality (how important the agent is perceived to be for the outcome, before any actions are taken). The model explains empirical results from previous studies and is supported by a new experiment that manipulates both pivotality and criticality. We also discuss possible extensions of this model to deal with a broader range of causal situations. Overall, our approach emphasizes the close interrelations between causality, counterfactuals, and responsibility attributions. (shrink)

Significant advancements towards a future of big data genomic medicine, associated with large-scale public dataset repositories, intensify dilemmas of genomic privacy. To resolve dilemmas adequately, we need to understand the relative force of the competing considerations that make them up. Attitudes towards genomic privacy are complex and not well understood; understanding is further complicated by the vague claim of ‘genetic exceptionalism’. In this paper, we distinguish between consequentialist and non-consequentialist privacy interests: while the former are concerned with harms secondary to (...) exposure, the latter represent the interest in a private sphere for its own sake, as an essential component of human dignity. Empirical studies of attitudes towards genomic privacy have almost never targeted specifically this important dignitary component of the privacy interest. In this paper we first articulate the question of a non-consequentialist genomic privacy interest, and then present results of an empirical study that probed people’s attitudes towards that interest. This was done via comparison to other non-consequentialist privacy interests, which are more tangible and can be more easily assessed. Our results indicate that the non-consequentialist genomic privacy interest is rather weak. This insight can assist in adjudicating dilemmas involving genomic privacy. (shrink)

Por más evidente que sea su caducidad, cuesta muchísimo que cualquier disciplina científica admita nuevas metodologías, aunque con ello mejore su visión y alcance, y la economía es emblemática al respecto. Al final, le fue más fácil aceptar que se producían diferentes comportamientos en los niveles macroeconómicos en base al género, y dicha aceptación -con la tenacidad de las pioneras- se trasladó a las políticas de ajuste estructural, para acabar cubriendo el extenso campo de la macroeconomía. En este sentido, el (...) consumo no es una excepción: se trata de una variable de considerable valor explicativo que gana peso cuando de consumo agregado se trata ya que las diferencias de comportamiento generalizadas y sistemáticas influyen en la macroeconomía y ayudan a descubrir la vinculación del consumo agregado -y con género- con otros componentes del Producto Nacional como el ahorro y la inversión. (shrink)

The book you hold in your hands is the outcome of the "ISCS 2013: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Systems" held at the historical capital of Bohemia as a continuation of our series of symposia in the science of complex systems. Prague, one of the most beautiful European cities, has its own beautiful genius loci. Here, a great number of important discoveries were made and many important scientists spent fruitful and creative years to leave unforgettable traces. The perhaps most significant period (...) was the time of Rudolf II who was a great supporter of the art and the science and attracted a great number of prominent minds to Prague. This trend would continue. Tycho Brahe, Niels Henrik Abel, Johannes Kepler, Bernard Bolzano, August Cauchy Christian Doppler, Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein and many others followed developing fundamental mathematical and physical theories or expanding them. Thus in the beginning of the 17th century, Kepler formulated here the first two of his three laws of planetary motion on the basis of Tycho Brahe’s observations. In the 19th century, nowhere differentiable continuous functions (of a fractal character) were constructed here by Bolzano along with a treatise on infinite sets, titled “Paradoxes of Infinity” (1851). Weierstrass would later publish a similar function in 1872. In 1842, Doppler as a professor of mathematics at the Technical University of Prague here first lectured about a physical effect to bear his name later. And the epoch-making physicist Albert Einstein – while being a chaired professor of theoretical physics at the German University of Prague – arrived at the decisive steps of his later finished theory of general relativity during the years 1911–1912. In Prague, also many famous philosophers and writers accomplished their works; for instance, playwright arel ape coined the word "robot" in Prague (“robot” comes from the Czech word “robota” which means “forced labor”). (shrink)

Excellent compilation of incidents of irrationality in India with special reference to Tamil Nadu.

This paper explores structuralism as a way to model theories from scientific practice. As a case study I analyzed a theory about the dynamics of the basal ganglia, a part of the brain that is involved in Parkinson's disease. After introducing the case study I explore how to structurally represent qualitative assumptions about disease, intervention and dynamical systems in general. I further explicate the structure of the basal ganglia theory in detail, how it explains Parkinson's disease and how it implies (...) treatments. I close with a consideration of how a structuralist representation could be useful in practice to explore and develop theories with the aid of a computer. (shrink)

This section aims to summarize and conclude Part I in the form of a taxonomy of legitimate and illegitimate corporate moral responsibility attributions. I believe we can categorise four types of corporate moral responsibility attributions two of which are legitimate and two which are illegitimate with regard to our concept of moral agency and our moral intuition of fairness.

Recently, some philosophers have defended the idea that knowledge is an interest-relative notion. According to this thesis, whether an agent knows P may depend on the practical costs of her being wrong about P. This perspective marks a radical departure from traditional accounts that take knowledge to be a purely intellectual concept. I think there is much to say on behalf of the interest-relative notion. In this paper, I report on some new evidence which strongly suggests that ordinary people’s attributions (...) of knowledge are in fact sensitive to practical interests. This is noteworthy because recent experiments have been interpreted by many to support the opposite conclusion. I also argue that the new results support an invariantist but interest-relativist account of knowledge, a thesis known as Interest Relative Invariantism (IRI). I do not make the case here that IRI gives us the very best explanation of the results presented here. Any such attempt would require an in-depth survey of the last few decades of work in epistemology. I only want to argue here that IRI gives us a simple and elegant explanation of the new data, and that the same cannot be said about traditional contextualism, a leading competitor to IRI. (shrink)

Big Data evangelists often argue that algorithms make decision-making more informed and objective—a promise hotly contested by critics of these technologies. Yet, to date, most of the debate has focused on the instruments themselves, rather than on how they are used. This article addresses this lack by examining the actual practices surrounding algorithmic technologies. Specifically, drawing on multi-sited ethnographic data, I compare how algorithms are used and interpreted in two institutional contexts with markedly different characteristics: web journalism and criminal justice. (...) I find that there are surprising similarities in how web journalists and legal professionals use algorithms in their work. In both cases, I document a gap between the intended and actual effects of algorithms—a process I analyze as “decoupling.” Second, I identify a gamut of buffering strategies used by both web journalists and legal professionals to minimize the impact of algorithms in their daily work. Those include foot-dragging, gaming, and open critique. Of course, these similarities do not exhaust the differences between the two cases, which are explored in the discussion section. I conclude with a call for further ethnographic work on algorithms in practice as an important empirical check against the dominant rhetoric of algorithmic power. (shrink)

Two prevailing accounts of the structure of the mind have been provided, respectively, by the Dual System Theory and by the Massive Modularity Hypothesis. It has been claimed, however, that they cannot both be true at the same time, i.e., that they are incompatible and, thus, that one of them must be abandoned. I will offer some arguments to challenge this claim. I will show that a plausible understanding of each theory makes it possible for them both to be true (...) at the same time. Moreover, I will argue that by appealing to each other they can offer a more complete and detailed account of the architecture of the mind. (shrink)

Sometimes two expressions in a discourse can be about the same thing in a way that makes that very fact evident to the participants. Consider, for example, 'he' and 'John' in 'John went to the store and he bought some milk'. Let us call this 'de jure' coreference. Other times, coreference is 'de facto' as with 'Mark Twain' and 'Samuel Clemens' in a sincere use of 'Mark Twain is not Samuel Clemens'. Here, agents can understand the speech without knowing that (...) the names refer to the same person. After surveying many available linguistic and pragmatic tools (intentions to corefer, presuppositions, meanings, indexing, discourse referents, binding etc.) I conclude that we must posit a new semantic primitive to account for de jure coreference. (shrink)

We study the preservation under projective ccc forcing extensions of the property of L(ℝ) being a Solovay model. We prove that this property is preserved by every strongly-̰Σ₃¹ absolutely-ccc forcing extension, and that this is essentially the optimal preservation result, i.e., it does not hold for Σ₃¹ absolutely-ccc forcing notions. We extend these results to the higher projective classes of ccc posets, and to the class of all projective ccc posets, using definably-Mahlo cardinals. As a consequence we obtain an exact (...) equiconsistency result for generic absoluteness under projective absolutely-ccc forcing notions. (shrink)

A common theme in social science studies of algorithms is that they are profoundly opaque and function as “black boxes.” Scholars have developed several methodological approaches in order to address algorithmic opacity. Here I argue that we can explicitly enroll algorithms in ethnographic research, which can shed light on unexpected aspects of algorithmic systems—including their opacity. I delineate three meso-level strategies for algorithmic ethnography. The first, algorithmic refraction, examines the reconfigurations that take place when computational software, people, and institutions interact. (...) The second strategy, algorithmic comparison, relies on a similarity-and-difference approach to identify the instruments’ unique features. The third strategy, algorithmic triangulation, enrolls algorithms to help gather rich qualitative data. I conclude by discussing the implications of this toolkit for the study of algorithms and future of ethnographic fieldwork. (shrink)

This book is based on the outcome of the ""2012 Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Systems"" held at the island of Kos. The book consists of 12 selected papers of the symposium starting with a comprehensive overview and classification of complexity problems, continuing by chapters about complexity, its observation, modeling and its applications to solving various problems including real-life applications. More exactly, readers will have an encounter with the structural complexity of vortex flows, the use of chaotic dynamics within evolutionary algorithms, (...) complexity in synthetic biology. (shrink)

This chapter highlights the significance of Yi I 李珥 and his contribution to the development of Korean Neo-Confucianism. Yulgok was a “synthesizer” in his approach to the some fundamental issues and controversies that dominated the sixteenth century Joseon Neo-Confucianism. Some of most controversial issues that Yulgok dealt with were the relationship between “principle” or i/li 理 and “vital force” or gi/qi 氣, the famous “four-seven” debates, the problem of relating the “human mind” and the “dao-mind”, and the idea of understanding (...) the human in relation to the cosmos. Yulgok dealt each of these vital issues with his unique non-dualistic approach which synthesized the conceptual polarity that caused serious debates in the Korean Neo-Confucian circle. The concepts such as i/li and gi/qi, eum/yin and yang, the “human mind” and the “dao-mind,” for example, were understood by some leading Confucian scholars including Yi Hwang 李滉 structured dualistically. Yulgok thought that although these ideas appeared to be conceptually dualistic, they were, in fact, related to each other with an intrinsic ontological unity based on the same reality. However, Yulgok made a clear distinction between different manifestations of the same ontological substance. For example, Yulgok discussed about the mysterious relationship of i and gi: “The mystery of i and gi is difficult to see or to talk. The origin of i is one, the origin of gi is also one…. gi does not part from i, and i does not part from gi. This being the case, i and gi are one.” It is essential to understand Yulgok’s non-dualistic view of reality. For Yulgok, reality was profoundly relational. For him relation was not simply a connection or an external binding but it was fundamentally an intrinsic unity of beings or entities by stating that one cannot exist without the other. In this respect, Yulgok was a non-dualistic thinker who understood reality not in the framework of dichotomy but in the intrinsic unity of i and gi and the “four beginnigs” and the “seven feelings”, etc. Yulgok’s anthropology, ontology, and cosmology were based on his synthetic and comprehensive approach to the critical issues of Korean Neo-Confucianism. This chapter is a brief summary of Yulgok’s life and thoughts in relationship to each other to observe his intellectual development in light of his personal growth. (shrink)

Diana I. Pérez y Antoni Gomila, Social Cognition and the Second Person in Human Interaction, Routledge, Nueva York, 2022, 194pp., ISBN 978–0–367–67859–3 (hbk); ISBN 978–0–367–67857–9 (pbk); ISBN 978–1–003–13315–5 (ebk).

In this essay, I argue that pronatalism—a social bias in favor of gestational motherhood—and geneticism—a social bias in favor of genetic motherhood—are conceptually and operationally distinct social forces that influence some women's reproductive decision making. Each of these social forces shapes the reproductive landscape, relates differently to women's identities, and causes different social stigmatization and harm. Pronatalism and geneticism warrant feminist concern because they can compromise some women's reproductive autonomy and well-being. I suggest that combating pronatalism and geneticism will require (...) different sets of media, policy, education, and health care practice strategies. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose and defend a pair of necessary conditions on evidence-based knowledge which bear resemblance to the troubled sensitivity principles defended in the philosophical literature. We can think of the traditional principles as simple but inaccurate approximations of the new proposals. Insofar as the old principles are intuitive and used in scientific and philosophical contexts, but are plausibly false, there’s a real need to develop precise and correct formulations. These new renditions turned out to be more cautious, (...) so they won’t be able to do everything the old principled promised they could. For example, they respect closure for knowledge. But these sober formulations, or something like them, might be the best that we can do with respect to sensitivity. And there’s value in understanding the limits to these types of principles. (shrink)

In this manuscript, I claim that the search for justice implies a complete reconfiguration of public space and a (radical) transformation of our social relations. I will argue through a negative path, i.e. starting from the comprehension of the experience of injustice. I will focus on the case of epistemic injustice since it illustrates how the unjustified harm it produces is originated in the structure of social relations. To reach my goal, I will attempt to bring into dialogue two different (...) philosophical debates —that which deals with the notion of the public space and that which discusses epistemic injustice—. This will help me show that epistemology has a fundamental and profound political dimension which needs to be addressed to find better avenues to search for and reach (epistemic and otherwise) justice. My main contention is that the possibility of constructing a functional public space depends on recognizing the confrontational character of politics and on not trying to erase the differences that make up society, nor trying to undo them under the idea of a (rational) consensus. (shrink)

A prevailing assumption in contemporary epistemology is that there exists a conceptual connection between the notions of belief and rationality. In this paper I examine a weak notion of rationality, according to which it is not necessary to assume the existence of a uniquc set of norms of rationality in order to be able to assign beliefi to a subject. From this point of view, belief attribution only requires that we understand a subject's utterances and, to do this, we only (...) need assume that she is similar to us in some epistemic relevant issues. (shrink)

El amanecer del año 1994 nos sorprendió con la aparición pública del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. Más de dos décadas después empezamos a percibir la fuerza, dimensión e importancia que han tenido las mujeres -su voz, su lucha- no sólo en la organización del movimiento armado y civil que desde entonces sigue sin cesar; sino también en la articulación del pensamiento y la teoria en que sustentan y que sostiene su actuar. La política que se articula en las comunidades (...) zapatistas, en este sentido, ha reafirmado y cuestionado las luchas feministas del mundo y de América Latina. En particular, ha hecho visible lo prescindible que es la idea de las oposiciones, de las disyuntivas excluyentes. En vez de ello, ellas proponen pensar en dos nociones básicas: “todo está en par” y “el mundo parejo”. Como haré ver en este texto, estas dos cosas están a la base de su creación de una vida colectiva, de una política de lo común. Si esto es así y si pensamos que lo común es “la posibilidad de una política en femenino” entonces veremos que la zapatista es una subversión en femenino.The uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional surprised us all in the dawn of 1994. More than two decades later, we are starting to fully appreciate the force, dimension, and importance that women —their voices, their struggle—has had not only in the organization of the social and armed movement that is still very vigorous in Chiapas, but also in the theoretical and practical articulation of their thinking and acting. The politics that are currently in play in the Zapatista communities has reinforced and questioned the feminist struggles all over the world and in Latin America. In particular, it has made visible how thinking in terms of oppositions or exclusive dilemmas is and should be dispensable. We should rather start thinking in terms of “everything being in pair” and “an even world”. I will contend that these two notions support their construction of a collective life, of a politics of what is common. If this is true and if we think that what is common opens the possibility of politics in feminine, then it makes sense to think of the Zapatistassubversion as feminine. (shrink)