Arising out of one of the annual conferences I organise as Director of the University’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (see http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/cappe/) -- ‘Interrogating Terror’ – and from my work on the editorial board of Critical Studies on Terrorism, this collection is published in the Routledge Critical Terrorism Studies series and brings together theoretical and empirical material to challenge the notion that ‘terrorism’ and/or ‘terror’ are transparent, given or limited to non-state agents. Instead, it seeks to expose the (...) political and discursive practices which underlie the use of these terms and which, in doing so, seek to shape our very conceptualisation of what is real. The book has two distinctive features. First, it is interdisciplinary, including contributions from philosophy, law, social policy, media studies, sociology and history. To that extent, the book may also be read as a concrete instantiation of the interdisciplinarity to which my colleagues and I are committed in our undergraduate teaching and our research practices. Second, its format is deliberately designed to foster critical and interdisciplinary engagement, by presenting readers with a series of examples of it. Each chapter is the subject of a commentary from one of the editors, to which each author in turn offers a brief reply. The book thus instantiates, in terms of both authorship and readership, a commitment to collaborative modes of inquiry, in the belief that attending to complex issues – and perhaps especially those bringing theoretical and practical issues together (see also 2009) -- is likely to require a collaborative approach. Dedicated to ‘What’s left of the Left’, the book at once marks a trajectory characterised by an increasing concern to combine academic scholarship and research with activist contributions and to understand how the language of ‘terror’ is coming to shape our political lives. (shrink)

In Winter 2017, the first author piloted a course in formal logic in which we aimed to (a) improve student engagement and mastery of the content, and (b) reduce maths anxiety and its negative effects on student outcomes, by adopting student oriented teaching including peer instruction and classroom flipping techniques. The course implemented a partially flipped approach, and incorporated group-work and peer learning elements, while retaining some of the traditional lecture format. By doing this, a wide variety of student (...) learning preferences could be provided for. (shrink)

While there are many issues to be raised in using lethal autonomous robotic weapons (beyond those of remotely operated drones), we argue that the most important question is: should the decision to take a human life be relinquished to a machine? This question is often overlooked in favor of technical questions of sensor capability, operational questions of chain of command, or legal questions of sovereign borders. We further argue that the answer must be ?no? and offer several reasons for banning (...) autonomous robots. (1) Such a robot treats a human as an object, instead of as a person with inherent dignity. (2) A machine can only mimic moral actions, it cannot be moral. (3) A machine run by a program has no human emotions, no feelings about the seriousness of killing a human. (4) Using such a robot would be a violation of military honor. We therefore conclude that the use of an autonomous robot in lethal operations should be banned. (shrink)

Contemporary metaphysicians have been drawn to a certain attractive picture of the structure of the world. This picture consists in classical mereology, the priority of parts over wholes, and the well-foundedness of metaphysical priority. In this short note, I show that this combination of theses entails superatomism, which is a significant strengthening of mereological atomism. This commitment has been missed in the literature due to certain sorts of models of mereology being overlooked. But the entailment is an important one: we (...) must either accept superatomism or reject one (or other) of the most widespread theses of contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

This article considers three recent attempts by David Armstrong, Ross Cameron, and Jonathan Schaffer to provide truthmakers for negative existential truths. It is argued that none of the proposed truthmakers are up to the task of making any negative existential truth true and, it will turn out, for the same reason.

Jordi Fernandez has recently offered an interesting account of introspective justification according to which the very states that (subjectively) justify one's first-order belief that p justify one's second order belief that one believes that p. I provide two objections to Fernandez's account.

It seems better to love virtue than vice, pleasure than pain, good than evil. Perhaps it's also better to love virtuous people than vicious people. But at the same time, it's repugnant to suggest that a mother should love her smarter, more athletic, better looking son than his dim, clumsy, ordinary brother. My task is to help sort out the conflicting intuitions about what we should love. In particular, I want to address a problem for the no-reasons view, the theory (...) that love cannot be rationally justified. Since it seems better to love good people rather than evil villains, it appears that there are indeed reasons for (or, at least, against) love. Is it coherent to talk this way and deny that love can be justified? I think so and will explain how. (shrink)

Is the procreation asymmetry intuitively supported? According to a recent article in this journal, an experimental study suggests the opposite. Dean Spears (2020) claims that nearly three-quarters of participants report that there is a reason to create a person just because that person’s life would be happy. In reply, I argue that various confounding factors render the study internally invalid. More generally, I show how one might come to adopt the procreation asymmetry for the wrong reasons by misinterpreting one’s intuitions.

This paper extends three decades of work arguing that researchers who discuss consciousness should not restrict themselves only to (adult) human minds, but should study (and attempt to model) many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, thereby contributing to our understanding of the space containing all of them. We need to study what they do or can do, how they can do it, and how the natural ones can be emulated in synthetic minds. That requires: (a) understanding sets of requirements (...) that are met by different sorts of minds, i.e. the niches that they occupy, (b) understanding the space of possible designs, and (c) understanding complex and varied relationships between requirements and designs. Attempts to model or explain any particular phenomenon, such as vision, emotion, learning, language use, or consciousness lead to muddle and confusion unless they are placed in that broader context. A methodology for making progress is summarised and a novel requirement proposed for a theory of how human minds work: the theory should support a single generic design for a learning, developing system that, in addition to meeting familiar requirements, should be capable of developing different and opposed philosophical viewpoints about consciousness, and the so-called hard problem. In other words, we need a common explanation for the mental machinations of mysterians, materialists, functionalists, identity theorists, and those who regard all such theories as attempting to answer incoherent questions. No designs proposed so far come close. (shrink)

Cognitive science is transforming our understanding of the mind. New discoveries are changing how we comprehend not just language, but thought itself. Yet, surprisingly little of the new learning has penetrated discussions and analysis of the most important social institution affecting our lives-the law. Drawing on work in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and literary theory, Steven L. Winter has created nothing less than a tour de force of interdisciplinary analysis. A Clearing in the Forest rests on the simple notion (...) that the better we understand the workings of the mind, the better we will understand all its products-especially law. Legal studies today focus on analytic skills and grand normative theories. But, to understand how real-world, legal actors reason and decide, we need a different set of tools. Cognitive science provides those tools, opening a window on the imaginative, yet orderly mental processes that animate thinking and decisionmaking among lawyers, judges, and lay persons alike. Recent findings about how humans actually categorize and reason make it possible to explain legal reasoning in new, more cogent, more productive ways. A Clearing in the Forest is a compelling meditation on both how the law works and what it all means. In uncovering the irrepressibly imaginative, creative quality of human reason, Winter shows how what we are learning about the mind changes not only our understanding of law, but ultimately of ourselves. He charts a unique course to understanding the world we inhabit, showing us the way to the clearing in the forest. (shrink)

Hume devised a third way between Hobbes and Locke that bolstered the former’s defense of stability and the latter’s defense of rebellion. This feat remains underappreciated. Hume’s third way rests on the idea of the public conscience, which, like Hobbes’s idea of the public conscience, derives from communication and consensus. The public conscience orients us toward the public interest, which, in Hume’s theory, is the authoritative standard by which individuals and government alike must abide. In this paper, I elaborate on (...) the moral psychological principles that underlie Hume’s concept of the public conscience, which is liable to both conservative liberal and progressive liberal interpretations. And I argue that Hume’s third way provides valuable insight into the logic of public political discourse in liberal societies. (shrink)

Patent landscaping is the process of finding patents related to a particular topic. It is important for companies, investors, governments, and academics seeking to gauge innovation and assess risk. However, there is no broadly recognized best approach to landscaping. Frequently, patent landscaping is a bespoke human-driven process that relies heavily on complex queries over bibliographic patent databases. In this paper, we present Automated Patent Landscaping, an approach that jointly leverages human domain expertise, heuristics based on patent metadata, and machine learning (...) to generate high-quality patent landscapes with minimal effort. In particular, this paper describes a flexible automated methodology to construct a patent landscape for a topic based on an initial seed set of patents. This approach takes human-selected seed patents that are representative of a topic, such as operating systems, and uses structure inherent in patent data such as references and class codes to “expand” the seed set to a set of “probably-related” patents and anti-seed “probably-unrelated” patents. The expanded set of patents is then pruned with a semi-supervised machine learning model trained on seed and anti-seed patents. This removes patents from the expanded set that are unrelated to the topic and ensures a comprehensive and accurate landscape. (shrink)

While working to build his aesthetic theory from the qualities of normal, healthy experience, John Dewey diagnoses a rarely recognized experiential ailment -- what might be called the anesthetic malady. This illness generally results when experience is deprived of meaning due to the poverty of the predominant forms of activity available in one's environment. In Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience lies an easily overlooked social/political approach that predates, by almost half a century, recent social theoretical concerns in phenomenology and everyday (...) aesthetics. Dewey takes notice of experience and prompts inquiry into sometimes obviously important, but often dismissed as irrelevant and mundane, paths. (shrink)

Truth is an ethical relation. Facts, whether descriptions of the physical world or of historical events, are necessarily mediated by our frames of reference. This contingency opens a space for disagreement that cannot be adjudicated by an absolute standard of truth. For those seeking power or profit, the temptation to exploit this state of undecidability is strong. When many question the institutions that broker meaning – science, the professions, the media – rumors, misinformation, deliberate distortions and falsehoods all proliferate. In (...) the digital age, the ‘made’ is swiftly supplanted by the made-up. The remedy for this predicament is not technological or factual, but ethical and social. The normative resources for this project lie in our everyday ethic of communication and in the ideal of democracy as shared authority. Whether we can address this predicament effectively is uncertain. But the nature of the problem is clear: It is not that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age, but rather that we are facing a crisis of democratic society as such. It is not so much that we lost sight of truth, as that we have lost sight of one another. (shrink)

We have evolved to become who we are, at least in part, due to our general drive to create new things and ideas. When seeking to improve our creations, ideas, or situations, we systematically overlook opportunities to perform subtractive changes. For example, when tasked with giving feedback on an academic paper, reviewers will tend to suggest additional explanations and analyses rather than delete existing ones. Here, we show that this addition bias is systematically reflected in English language statistics along several (...) distinct dimensions. First, we show that words associated with an increase in quantity or number (e.g., add, addition, more, most) are more frequent than words associated with a decrease in quantity or number (e.g., subtract, subtraction, less, least). Second, we show that in binomial expressions, addition-related words are mentioned first, that is, add and subtract rather than subtract and add. Third, we show that the distributional semantics of verbs of change, such as to improve and to transform, overlap more with the distributional semantics of add/increase than subtract/decrease, which suggests that change verbs are implicitly biased toward addition. Fourth, addition-related words have more positive connotations than subtraction-related words. Fifth, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art large language models, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-3), are also biased toward addition. We discuss the implications of our results for research on cognitive biases and decision-making. (shrink)

We discuss how the psycho-historical framework can be profitably applied to artistic production, facilitating a synthesis of perception-based and knowledge-based perspectives on realistic observational drawing. We note that artists' technical knowledge itself constitutes a major component of an artwork's historical context, and that links between artistic practice and psychological theory may yet yield conclusions in line with universalist perspectives.

Le Locataire ("The Tenant"), one of Polanski's lesser-known films, uses both an unreliable narrator and manipulates an unreliable audience to achieve its horror effect.

RCLIB is a 2-D graphical interface package available as an addition to the Poplog software development system. "RC" stands for "Relative Coordinates": all the graphical commands are relative to a frame of reference, which can be changed without altering the commands, making it easy to draw the same thing in different parts of a display, using different sizes or orientations, and possibly stretched or sheared.

Evolution produced many species whose members are pre-programmed with almost all the competences and knowledge they will ever need. Others appear to start with very little and learn what they need, but appearances can deceive. I conjecture that evolution produced powerful innate meta-knowledge about a class of environments containing 3- D structures and processes involving materials of many kinds. In humans and several other species these innate learning mechanisms seem initially to use exploration techniques to capture a variety of useful (...) generalisations after which there is a "phase transition" in which learnt generalisations are displaced by a new generative architecture that allows novel situations and problems to be dealt with by reasoning -- a pre-cursor to explicit mathematical theorem proving in topology, geometry, arithmetic, and kinematics. This process seems to occur in some non-human animals and in preverbal human toddlers, but is clearest in the switch from pattern-based to syntax-based language use. The discovery of non-linguistic toddler theorems has largely gone unnoticed, though Piaget investigated some of the phenomena, and creative problem solving in some other animals also provides clues. A later evolutionary development seems to have enabled humans to cope with domains that involve both regularities and exceptions, explaining "U-shaped" language learning. Only humans appear to be able to develop meta-meta-competences needed for teaching learnt "theorems" and their proofs. I'll sketch a speculative theory, present examples, and propose a research programme, reducing the 'G' in AGI, while promising increased power in return. (shrink)

Philosophy of Film: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge) provides a critical overview of the literature on eleven different issues in the philosophy of film, from "What is Film?" to "Can Film Do Philosophy?" It aims to provide an objective overview of the principal arguments on each side of the issues. The set of issues includes all of the most important topics as well as some that are less well represented in the discipline, such as whether the power of cinema derives from (...) its similarity to dreams. (shrink)

Bigotry distractions are strategic invocations of racism, transphobia, or negative stigma toward other marginalized groups to shape political discourse. Although the vast majority of Americans agree on large policy issues ranging from reducing air pollution to prosecuting corporate crime, bigotry distractions divert attention from areas of agreement toward divisive identity issues. This article explores how the nefarious targeting of identity groups through bigotry distractions may be the tallest barrier to health reform, and social change more broadly. The discussion extends the (...) literature on dog whistles, strategic racism, and scapegoating. (shrink)

In his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli offers an ambivalent portrayal of the revolt of the textile workers in late fourteenth-century Florence, known as the tumult of the Ciompi. On the face of it, Machiavelli's depiction of the insurgent workers is not exactly flattering. Yet this picture is undermined by a firebrand speech, which Machiavelli invents and attributes to an unnamed leader of the plebeian revolt. I interpret this speech as a radical and egalitarian vector of thought opened up by Machiavelli's text. (...) The revolutionary address reveals an untimely and not entirely self-conscious political radicalism, a plebeian politics that repudiates the logic of oligarchic privilege and is simultaneously not available for subsumption under the mantle of civic republicanism. (shrink)

It seems natural to think that there are aesthetic reasons for action and that an artist must be guided by such reasons as he or she begins work on the canvas or poem or symphony or marble. This latter supposition seems at odds, however, not only with classical inspiration theory but also with the views of one of the last century’s most important philosophers of art, R. G. Collingwood. We propose an account of acting for an aesthetic reason inspired by (...) G. E. M. Anscombe’s Intention, specifically by her concept of ‘practical knowledge’, which we believe can accommodate Collingwood’s reservations about the sort of knowledge of their ends, and of the means to those ends, which artists have as they engage in their creative activity. (shrink)

The careful historical and metaphilosophical attention recently bestowed upon analytic philosophy has revealed that traditional ways of defining it are inadequate. In the face of this inadequacy, contemporary authors have proposed new definitions that detach analytic philosophy from its turn of the twentieth century origins. I argue that this contemporary trend in defining analytic philosophy is misguided, and that it diminishes the likelihood of our coming to an accurate historical and metaphilosophical understanding of it. This is especially unsatisfactory since such (...) understanding is essential to finding an adequate remedy for the widely perceived ills of contemporary analytic philosophy. I suggest that a more fruitful approach to developing such understanding might begin with treating the unity of analytic philosophy as illusory. (shrink)

Dying serves so often within the narratives of Western popular culture, as an exercise in self-improvement both to the individual dying and to those looking on. It enlightens, ennobles and renders exceptional all those affected by it. Though mainstream cinema's “grammar of dying” is mired in similar myths, film has the potential to do dying differently: it can, instead, connect us, ethically, to the vulnerability of others. The aim of this article is to pursue this potential of film. Using the (...) mainstream grammar of dying as a starting point, I will consider how the moving image, and this ethical potential, is harnessed within two hybrid-media pieces about a loved-one's decline and death: George Saxon's art installation, “A Record of Undying” (2014) and photographer Briony Campbell's short film The Dad Project (2009). While these works will be located within the traditions and transformations of moving image practice, the primary concern here is with how such emotionally resonant pieces navigate our relation to, and responsibility for, our own and others' harsh realities. In this way, the question of ethics is grounded not in the solipsistic circuits of affective modes – whether as the catharsis or betterment of mainstream myths, or what Jane Stadler privileges as the ethical effects of empathy – but in something more inherently, more inevitably, political. (shrink)