"Avital Ronell's work studies the fading empire of cognition, modulating stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher instituted by Kant. Investigating ignorance, dumbfoundedness, and the limits of reason, Stupidity probes the pervasive practice of theory-bashing and related forms of paranoid aggression. A section on prolonged and debilitating illness pushes the text to an edge of a corporeal hermeneutics, "at the limits of what the body knows and tells.""--BOOK JACKET.

Knobe argues that people’s judgments of the moral status of a side-effect of action influence their assessment of whether the side-effect is intentional. We tested this hypothesis using vignettes akin to Knobe’s but involving economically or eudaimonistically (wellness-related) negative side-effects. Our results show that it is people’s sense of what agents deserve and not the moral status of side-effects that drives intuition.

It is argued that the focus within organization studies on wisdom is one-sided in the sense that it ignores stupidity, wisdom's little stepbrother. Too often it is simply taken for granted that an increase in wisdom will lead to a decrease in stupidity. The problem with this assumption is that it is philosophically uninformed. Stupidity and wisdom stand in a deeply paradoxical relationship, which has been studied by philosophers at least since the Stoics. Some recent contributions to (...) this endless debate will be highlighted in this paper. However, the overall aim of the paper is to show that organizations too are familiar with these philosophical paradoxes. (shrink)

Matthijs van Boxsel believes that no one is intelligent enough to understand their own stupidity. In The Encyclopædia of Stupidity he shows how stupidity manifests itself in all areas, in everyone, at all times, proposing that stupidity is the foundation of our civilization. In short sections with such titles as ‘The Blunderers’ Club’, ‘Fools in Hell’, ‘Genealogy of Idiots’, and ‘The Aesthetics of the Empty Gesture’, stupidity is analysed on the basis of fairy tales, cartoons, (...) triumphal arches, garden architecture, Baroque ceilings, jokes, flimsy excuses and science fiction. But Van Boxsel wants to do more than just assemble a ‘shadow cabinet’ of wisdom; he tries to fathom the logic of this opposite world. Where do understanding and intelligence begin and end? He examines mythic fools such as Cyclops and King Midas, cities such as Gotham, archetypes including the dumb blonde, and traditionally stupid animals such as the goose, the donkey and the headless chicken. Van Boxsel posits that stupidity is a condition for intelligence, that blunders stimulate progress, that failure is the basis for success. In this erudite and witty book he maintains that our culture is the product of a series of failed attempts to comprehend stupidity. (shrink)

Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" (...) a rubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity. (shrink)

Symbol Grounding Problem is commonly considered one of the central challenges in the philosophy of artificial intelligence as its resolution is deemed necessary for bridging the gap between simple data processing and understanding of meaning and language. SGP has been addressed on numerous occasions with varying results, all resolution attempts having been severely, but for the most part justifiably, restricted by the Zero Semantic Commitment Condition. A further condition that demands explanatory power in terms of machine-to-human communication is the Non- (...) class='Hi'>Stupidity Condition that demands an SG approach to be able to account for plausibility of higher-level language use and understanding, such as pragmatics. In this article, we undertake the endeavour of attempting to explain how merging certain early requirements for SG, such as embodiment, environmental interaction, and compliance with the Z-Condition with symbol emergence rather than direct attempts at symbol grounding can help emulate human language acquisition. Along with the presumption that mind and language are both symbolic and computational, we argue that some rather abstract aspects of language can be logically formalised and finally, that this melange of approaches can yield the explanatory power necessary to satisfy the Non-Stupidity Condition without breaking any previous conditions. (shrink)

The activity of thinking has been traditionally set against the risk of error and its concomitants: inconsistency, incoherence, the false. Philosophy pursues and protects the truth; such is its mission statement. But this is, for Deleuze, an inadequate conception that gives us the image of a thought so weak, so thin and impoverished, that everything happens as if from the outside. What, asks Deleuze, of stupidity? How are we to account for it transcendentally? In his attempt at an answer, (...) Deleuze draws directly from Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, though without clearly articulating either the form of Schelling’s concepts or presenting how exactly they are supposed to account transcendentally for stupidity. Further still, Deleuze seems implicitly to recapitulate—to the serious detriment of his conceptual schematic, as Derrida famously claimed in The Beast & the Sovereign—Schelling’s belief in a freedom that is solely human, and therefore the refusal of a capacity for stupidity to the animal as well. The present article intervenes here, reconstructing the Schellingian concepts necessary to an understanding of Deleuze’s theory, and sketching in conclusion the possibility of a revised account that need not stratify itself so straightforwardly along the human/animal divide. (shrink)

In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions. (...) New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein’s critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the ‘shock doctrine’. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent ‘state of shock’ has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities. Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available. (shrink)

As the title suggests, Breeur’s project is to discuss three key ideas: lies, stupidity, and imposture. The book is organized into two parts of two chapters each, followed by an appendix. The individual chapters and sub-sections are well-written and philosophically sophisticated. However, the reader will be disappointed if they expect a sustained analysis of the relations among the book’s titular ideas or a unified account of their role in the breakdown of respect for truth more broadly. Breeur’s approach is (...) more episodic, laying out valuable considerations and enticing formulations, but often breaking off before spelling out their full implications or connecting them to previous discussions in the book. His discussion clearly opens up these additional avenues of thought, but the task of going down them is left largely to the reader. This review briefly takes up each of Breeur’s themes: lies, stupidity, and imposture. (shrink)

In Paradise Lost, Satan’s first sight of Eve in Eden renders him “Stupidly good”: his state is one of admirable yet inarticulate responsiveness to reasons. Turning from fiction to real life, I argue that this is an important moral phenomenon, but one that has limits. The essay examines three questions about the relation between having a reason and saying what it is – between normativity and articulacy. Is it possible to have and respond to morally relevant reasons without being able (...) to articulate them? Can moral inarticulacy be good, and if so, what is the value of moral articulacy? And thirdly, can moral philosophy help us to be good? I argue that morality has an inarticulacy-accepting part, an articulacy-encouraging part, an articulacy-surpassing part and an articulacy-discouraging part. Along the way, an account is proposed of what it is to respond to the reasons that make up the substance of morality. (shrink)

This article advances a new analysis of stupidity as a distinctive form of cognitive failing. Section 1 outlines some problems in explicating this notion and suggests some desiderata. Section 2 sketches an existing model of stupidity, found in Kant and Flaubert, which serves as a foil for my own view. In section 3, I introduce my theory: I analyse stupidity as form of conceptual self-hampering, characterised by a specific aetiology and with a range of deleterious effects. In (...) section 4, I show how this proposal meets the desiderata and I clarify how it diverges from existing accounts. My position is close to a 'public health approach', in contrast to the virtue/vice framework employed by Engel or Mulligan. (shrink)

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Giorgio Agamben's account of the history of bio-politics in the Beast and the Sovereign. In this account, the ‘threshold of bio-political modernity’ is identified with the collapse of an allegedly immemorial distinction between life and the law. According to Derrida, however, this in-distinction between life and the law, which supposedly marks the historical emergence of the bio-political, is in fact an originary event. Agamben, therefore, announces a bio-political modernity that has always already existed. (...) In this essay, I argue that Derrida, in the Beast and the Sovereign, fails to grasp the significance of one of the principal figures employed in Agamben's theory of the bio-political, the ‘threshold’. This figure, which Agamben opposes, elsewhere in his writings, to the Derridean notion of difference/deferral, does not refer to either an historical beginning or something that has always already existed. Rather, the threshold is defined as a particular moment in which an originary phenomenon becomes a decisive historical norm. In his ‘history’ of the bio-political, therefore, Agamben identifies the modernity of the latter in terms of the historical normalization of an in-distinction between law and life that has always already occurred. (shrink)

In Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid , Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn draw on recent research to provide a thorough and illuminating discussion of the status of knowledge and truth in psychoanalysis and related disciplines. Adopting a Lacanian framework of reference, this book clarifies the status of knowledge in psychoanalysis and the implications of this for knowledge construction, acquisition and transmission across a variety of humanities and social sciences. The authors provide an original perspective on psychoanalytic epistemology and methodology, including discussion (...) of central questions such as that of the status of psychoanalysis as an art, science or religion. This provocative discussion of the dialectics of knowing and not knowing, and how they inform Freudian and Lacanian theory, will be welcomed by practicing Psychoanalysts and students of psychoanalytic studies, cultural studies, sociology and philosophy. (shrink)

The government claims that the important decisions it is now making are guided by principles that simply cannot be guiding them. Their decisions must in fact be guided by other considerations. Yet they prefer to peddle nonsense than to reveal their actual thinking (assuming there is some). Why? Why do politicians, who are experts in rhetoric and seek to win public favour, relentlessly and publicly indulge in shoddy reasoning?

Although it is commonly held that good sense is the most equally distributed of all things, it is just as commonly acknowledged that we humans excel at stupidity in its boundless varieties. The aim of these reflections is to make a start with a philosophical examination of stupidity, combining both literature, myth, and philosophy. Rather than propose a “theory” or “concept” of stupidity, this exploration charts the archipelago of stupidity in both its wisdom and folly.

The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others. That is the claim I shall defend below. It will probably strike you as bizarre at first sight. If I am against word processors, what do I propose: that we write in longhand, or use a mechanical typewriter? No. While there are things to be said in favor of these modes of text preparation I take it for granted that most readers of this (...) essay will do most of their writing using a computer, as I do. My claim is that there are much better ways of preparing text, using a computer, than the word processor. (shrink)

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference (...) between specific individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated. (shrink)

This article presents an analysis and evaluation of what I call the “I’m not stupid” argument. This argument has ancient roots, which lie in Aristotle’s famous description of the weak man’s and strong man’s arguments. An “I’m not stupid” argument is typically used in a context of accusation and defense, by a defendant who argues that they did not commit the act of which they have been accused. The analysis of this type of argument takes the shape of an argumentative (...) pattern, which displays a full-fledged representation of its argumentation structure. It is based on a collection of ten contemporary instances of the “I’m not stupid” argument. Although ten instances constitute a small collection, the wide variation in the argumentative elements that they express explicitly or leave implicit made it possible to identify five new key premises in comparison with previous analyses of the weak man’s and strong man’s arguments (Walton, Tindale and Gordon 2014 in _Argumentation_ 28:85–119, 2014; Walton 2019 in _Argumentation_ 33:45–74, 2019). These new premises show that the crucial point of an evaluation of this argument is the arguer's supposedly rational character in making a gain-loss calculation. They also show that we need empirical data to strengthen our analyses of argument schemes and argumentation structures. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that names are predicates when they occur in the appellation position of 'called'-predications. This includes not only proper names, but all names -- including quote-names of proper names and quote-names of other words or phrases. Thus in "You can call me Al", the proper name 'Al' is a predicate. And in "You can call me 'Al'," the quote-name of 'Al' -- namely ' 'Al' ' -- is also a predicate.

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference (...) between specific individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated. (shrink)

Thought under Threat reveals and combats the forces diminishing the power and role of critical thinking, whether in our individual lives or collectively. Thought under Threat is an attempt to understand the tendencies that threaten thinking from within. These tendencies have always existed. But today they are on the rise and frequently encouraged, even in our democracies. People “disagree” with science and distrust experts. Political leaders appeal to the hearts and guts of “the people,” rather than their critical faculties. (...) class='Hi'>Stupidity has become a right, if not a badge of honor; superstition is on the rise; and spite is a major political force. Thinking is considered “elitist.” To see those obstacles as vices of thought, Miguel de Beistegui argues, we need to understand stupidity not as a lack of intelligence or judgment, but as the tendency to raise false problems and trivial questions. Similarly, we need to see spite not as a moral vice, but as a poison that blurs and distorts our critical faculties. Finally, superstition is best described not as a set of false beliefs, but as a system that neutralizes one’s ability to think for oneself. For de Beistegui, thinking is intrinsically democratic and a necessary condition for the exercise of freedom. Thought under Threat shows how a training of thought itself can be used to ward off those vices, lead to productive deliberation, and, ultimately, create a thinking community. (shrink)

I show that it follows from both externalist and internalist theories that stupid people may be in a better position to know than smart ones. This untoward consequence results from taking our epistemic goal to be accepting as many truths as possible and rejecting as many falsehoods as possible, combined with a recognition that the standard for acceptability cannot be set too high, else scepticism will prevail. After showing how causal, reliabilist, and coherentist theories devalue intelligence, I suggest that knowledge, (...) as contemporary theories construe it, is not a particularly valuable cognitive achievement, and that we would do well to reopen epistemology to the study of cognitive excellences of all sorts. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes stupidity as a problem for epistemology. Its proper home belongs to virtue epistemology, as a specific epistemic vice, which has to be studied along the lines of both reliabilist virtue epistemology and of responsibilist virtue epistemology. The author distinguishes between two kinds of stupidity: stupidity proper and foolishness. The former is a defect in the competence of an agent, as well as in the performance of judgment, and it is generally studied as a failure (...) of rationality along intellectualist lines. The second is a failure to evaluate properly the nature of the epistemic goal, and is a form of epistemic indifference, which involves an insensitivity to epistemic values and norms. This chapter analyzes their varieties, and suggest that the boundaries between stupidity and foolishness are often less clear than it is suggested by the author’s taxonomy. (shrink)

This essay is an examination of stupid knowing, an attempt to catalog a particular species of knowing, and to understand when, how, and why the label "stupid" gets applied to marginalized groups of knowers. Heldke examines the ways the defining processes work and the conditions that make them possible, by considering one group of people who get defined as stupid: rural people. In part, the author intends her identification and categorization of stupid knowing to support the work of theorists of (...) resistance who have identified ways that those marginalized as stupid knowers use the cloak of their purported stupidity in the aid of their resistance. Heldke also hopes to add to the existing critique of the hierarchies of knowing an understanding of one particular way one form of knowledge is devalued: stupidification. Why are some forms of knowledge actually regarded as leaving one incapable of other forms of rational thought? (shrink)

Near the beginning of his huge bestseller How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi says, “Some of my most consequential steps toward being an antiracist have been the moments when I arrived at basic definitions. To be an antiracist is to set lucid definitions of racism/antiracism, racist/antiracist policies, racist/antiracist ideas, racist/antiracist people” (p. 17). Unfortunately, for those who wish to be antiracists, Kendi’s definitions are anything but lucid. In fact, they are quite murky. This is particularly the case with (...) respect to Kendi’s definitions of racist and antiracist. (shrink)

Das provokative und vielgelobte Buch Rorty's, des inzwischen international bekannten Ordinarius aus Princeton, stellt das gesamte Unternehmen der abendländischen Philosophie in Frage. Zentrales Thema von Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature sind Krise und Niedergang der analytischen Philosophy, wie wir sie seit Descartes, Locke und Kant kennen. Während Descartes und Locke die Seele als Auge modellierten, das die äußere Welt als inneres Bild wahrnimmt und vermittelt, verfeinerte Kant diese okulare Metapher durch Einführung des transzendentalen Subjekts. Gleichzeitig gab Kant der professionalen (...) Philosophie die Aufgabe, über die Legitimität intellektueller Anstrengungen zu richten. Legitimität aber kann nur gegründet sein in objektiven Kriterien und Regeln darüber, welche Repräsentationen der Welt als die wahren anzuerkennen sind. Nach Rorty führt dieser Ansatz die Philosophie unabdingbar auf den verhängnisvollen Weg der Reduktion auf Epistemologie. Die damit auftretenden erkenntnistheoretischen Probleme gilt es jedoch nicht zu lösen, sondern aufzulösen, zum Verschwinden zu bringen. Eine Besserung für die Sache der Philosophie sei zu erhoffen nur von einer historischen Kehrtwende zur Geschichte als Therapie. An dieser Stelle werden Wittgenstein, Heidegger und Dewey als Neuerer einer hermeneutisch orientierten philosophischen Pragmatik vorgestellt. Das Buch endet mit einer Skizze, wie das Unternehmen Philosophie in Zukunft menschlicher, dilettantischer, sozialer und damit insgesamt relevanter gestaltet werden kann. - Nicht so sehr Rorty's Verdikt über die Fruchtlosigkeit der analytischen Tradition - daß weite Teile der analytischen Philosophy in Sophisterei und Langeweile ausgeartet sind, ist bekannt - als vielmehr Rorty's Methode soll hier untersucht werden, sein Stil, seine professionellen Argumente als Beispiel einer ebenso zeitlosen wie vielgesichtigen Vorgehensweise in der abendländischen Philosophie, die Rorty neu orientieren will: Philosophie, der der Atem ausgeht über der Arbeit am Begriff, hat die Tendenz, eine Atempause in der Historie zu suchen oder das Philosophieren durch metaphilosophische Prolegomena zu einer zukünftigen neuen Metaphysik zu ersetzen. Rorty liefert beides: Kritik der Tradition und Versprechen einer besseren Zukunft. Allerdings sind seine de-konstruktiven Partien der professionellen Auseinandersetzung mit der analytischen Nachfolge Kants ungleich brillanter als sein Plädoyer für eine Symbiose von Gedanken des humanistischen neunzehnten Jahrhunderts mit Sokratischer Polypragmatik und Wittgensteinschen Therapien. (shrink)

Most commonplace moral failure is not conditioned by evil intentions or the conscious desire to harm or humiliate others. It is more banal and ubiquitous – a form of moral stupidity that gives rise to rationalization, self‐deception, failures of due moral consideration, and the evasion of responsibility. A kind of crude, perception‐distorting self‐absorption, moral stupidity is the cause of many moral missteps; moral development demands the development of self‐knowledge as a way out of moral stupidity. Only once (...) aware of the presence or absence of particular desires and beliefs can an agent have authority over them or exercise responsibility for their absence. But what is the connection between self‐knowledge and moral development? I argue that accounts (such as Kant's and Richard Moran's) which construe instances of self‐knowledge as like the verdicts of a judge cannot explain its potential role in moral development, and claim that it must be conceived of in a way that makes possible a process of self‐refinement and self‐regulation. Making use of Buddhist moral psychology, I argue that when self‐knowledge plays a role in moral development, it includes a quality of attention to one's experience best modeled as the work of the craftsperson, not as judge. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the significance of the politics of health as an ongoing interpretative event. The effectiveness of delivering prevention strategies is in negotiation with day-to-day arguments in the public sphere, not just by “experts” in peer-reviewed papers, but also in the everyday interpretations and discussions of available expertise on print and digital media platforms. In this paper I explore ae particular facet of these public debate over the politics of health: the deployment of the commonplace of (...) class='Hi'>stupidity. I argue that the growth of this commonplace within discussion is rooted in particular models of interpretation which limit self-understanding, by over-emphasising certain points of significance within the interpretative horizon over more banal aspects that are, nevertheless, influential on health interventions. (shrink)

Jeffrey Bishop’s The Anticipatory Corpse exposes a functional metaphysics at the root of contemporary medical practice that gives rise to inhumane medicine, especially at the end of life. His critique of medicine argues for alternative spaces and practices in which the communal significance of the body, its telos, can be restored and the meaning of a “good death” enriched. This essay develops an alternative epistemology of the body, drawing from Christian theological accounts of the communal or Eucharistic body and linking (...) liturgical practices to the cultivation of solidarity. It argues for an epistemology of the body that makes visible the invisible bodies at medicine’s margins and illumines the disparate worlds of health care globally. (shrink)

Endangered species are objects of intense scientific scrutiny and political conflict. This article focuses on the interplay among human-nonhuman relations, knowledge production, and the politics of endangerment. Advancing a historical ontology of endangerment, it highlights the role of transforming the nonhuman world in the coming to be of new objects of environmental knowledge. Such knowledge can provide the basis for credible claims of endangerment, facilitating mobilizations against the very human-nonhuman relations that produced it. An in-depth case study of the delta (...) smelt, an endangered species of fish caught in the center of California’s “water wars,” shows how changes in the instrumentalization of the nonhuman environment can produce new knowledge of nature that allows actors to make claims and form coalitions that would be otherwise inconceivable. Because its sole habitat is the hub of California’s water delivery system, efforts to save the species from extinction have reduced flows to farms and cities, fomenting conflict between environmentalists and water users. This article demonstrates that the taxonomic classification of the delta smelt as a species and evidence of its decline arose directly from the reengineering of California’s rivers for extractive ends. Ironically, the knowledge on which environmental advocates relied was a product of the instrumental relation to nature that they sought to transform. (shrink)

Here is a simplified fiction which is based on a real case at a Californian University. The Faculty of Humanities decided to try to increase the number of women on their staff. There were 13 women and 13 men who applied for positions in the Faculty. All the positions were directed towards the study of either time or space, in the departments of History or Geography. There were 13 applicants for the positions in History and 13 applicants for the positions (...) in Geography. Of the women applicants 8 applied for positions in History, and 5 for Geography, whereas 5 of the men applied for positions in History and 8 in Geography. (shrink)

Whenever we think of impostors, we tend to think of liars. Yet impostures cannot be phenomenologically reduced to lies. Every lie presupposes a distinction between true and false, and it operates through a negation of reality, presenting falsity as truth and vice versa. An imposture, on the other hand, seeks to erase the distinction between true and false altogether. An impostor constructs a fiction that aims at substituting reality. In this process, an entire network of lies is put to work (...) in order to attain the ontological status of the real. This results in a dynamic that deprives truths of their authority, while making untruths highly potent in terms of their capacity to produce effects. (shrink)

By drawing on the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler, the phenomena of mechanical (a.k.a. artificial, digital, or electronic) intelligence is explored in terms of its real significance as an ever-repeating threat of the reemergence of stupidity (as cowardice), which can be transformed into knowledge (pharmacological analysis of poisons and remedies) by practices of care, through the outlook of what researchers describe equivocally as “artificial stupidity”, which has been identified as a new direction in the future of computer science and (...) machine problem solving as well as a new difficulty to be overcome. I weave together of web of “artificial stupidity”, which denotes the mechanic (1), the human (2), or the global (3). With regards to machine intelligence, artificial stupidity refers to: 1a) Weak A.I. or a rhetorical inversion of designating contemporary practices of narrow task-based procedures by algorithms in opposition to “True A.I.”; 1b) the restriction or employment of constraints that weaken the effectiveness of A.I., which is to say a “dumbing-down” of A.I. by intentionally introducing mistakes by programmers for safety concerns and human interaction purposes; 1c) the failure of machines to perform designated tasks; 1d) a lack of a noetic capacity, which is a lack of moral and ethical discretion; 1e) a lack of causal reasoning (true intelligence) as opposed to statistical associative “curve fitting”; or 2) the phenomenon of increasing human “stupidity” or drive-based behaviors, which is considered as the degradation of human intelligence and/or “intelligent human behavior” through technics; and finally, 3) the global phenomenon of increasing entropy due to a black-box economy of closed systems and/or industry consolidation. (shrink)

Artificial Neural Networks have reached “grandmaster” and even “super-human” performance across a variety of games, from those involving perfect information, such as Go, to those involving imperfect information, such as “Starcraft”. Such technological developments from artificial intelligence (AI) labs have ushered concomitant applications across the world of business, where an “AI” brand-tag is quickly becoming ubiquitous. A corollary of such widespread commercial deployment is that when AI gets things wrong—an autonomous vehicle crashes, a chatbot exhibits “racist” behavior, automated credit-scoring processes (...) “discriminate” on gender, etc.—there are often significant financial, legal, and brand consequences, and the incident becomes major news. As Judea Pearl sees it, the underlying reason for such mistakes is that “... all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.” The key, as Pearl suggests, is to replace “reasoning by association” with “causal reasoning” —the ability to infer causes from observed phenomena. It is a point that was echoed by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis in a recent piece for theNew York Times: “we need to stop building computer systems that merely get better and better at detecting statistical patterns in data sets—often using an approach known as ‘Deep Learning’—and start building computer systems that from the moment of their assembly innately grasp three basic concepts: time, space, and causality.” In this paper, foregrounding what in 1949 Gilbert Ryle termed “a category mistake”, I will offer an alternative explanation for AI errors; it is not so much that AI machinery cannot “grasp” causality, but that AI machinery (qua computation) cannot understand anything at all. (shrink)

This article brings forth a new perspective concerning the relation between stupidity and thinking by proposing to conceptualise the state of non-thinking in two different ways, situated at the opposite ends of the spectrum of thinking. Two conceptualisations of stupidity are discussed, one critical which follows a French line of continental thinkers, and the other one which will be called educational or ascetic, following the work of Agamben. The critical approach is conceptualised in terms of seriality of thinking, (...) or thinking captured by an apparatus, whereas the ascetic-educational approach is discussed by tracing the links between studying and stupidity. Both accounts assume that stupidity as non-thinking is a condition for thinking, either placed before thinking emerges or as an after-thought. However, the political implications concerning the role of philosophy in the public realm are divergent: for the critical approach, the task of the philosopher is to criticise the world, whereas for the ascetic approach, the task is to work on one’s own self and hope that the world will be changed through thinking. The wider aim of this article is to contribute to the debate concerning the public role of the intellectual starting from the assumption that there is a duty to think publicly and then clarifying what this duty entails in relation to the self and the others. (shrink)

Writers like Attneave [I960], Fodor [I968], and Dennett [1978] have argued that explanations of a mental capacity can only avoid the emptiness of Moliere's dormative virtue by decomposing the capacity into a set of components which are more rudimentary. But What is wrong with smart homunculi? I argue that smart homunculi may explain token events, such as why I now see the page in front of me, but they do not explain what seeing is. It is the importance of the (...) latter explanatory problem which explains why homunculi must be so stupid. (shrink)