Machine learning has become a key component of contemporary information systems. Unlike prior information systems explicitly programmed in formal languages, ML systems infer rules from data. This paper shows what this difference means for the critical analysis of socio-technical systems based on machine learning. To provide a foundation for future critical analysis of machine learning-based systems, we engage with how the term is framed and constructed in self-education resources. For this, we analyze machine learning tutorials, an important information source for (...) self-learners and a key tool for the formation of the practices of the machine learning community. Our analysis identifies canonical examples of machine learning as well as important misconceptions and problematic framings. Our results show that machine learning is presented as being universally applicable and that the application of machine learning without special expertise is actively encouraged. Explanations of machine learning algorithms are missing or strongly limited. Meanwhile, the importance of data is vastly understated. This has implications for the manifestation of social inequalities through machine learning-based systems. (shrink)

Am Beispiel musikalischer Vorlieben wird gezeigt, was eine Soziologie des Geschmacks leistet. Ausgehend von der klassischen Fragestellung der Musikästhetik, wie Urteile über Musik zu begründen seien, gelangt der Autor zu einer Definition des Musikgeschmacks, in der nicht nur die psychologischen Aspekte Berücksichtigung finden, sondern auch seine Funktion in sozialen Strategien thematisiert wird. Die zentralen, auf den Arbeiten von Pierre Bourdieu, Gerhard Schulze und US-amerikanischen Kultursoziologen basierenden Thesen werden am verfügbaren empirischen Material überprüft. Die Analysen laufen letztendlich auf die paradoxe Feststellung (...) hinaus, dass unter den aktuellen gesellschaftlichen Umständen gerade die Überschreitung von Geschmacksgrenzen, also ein breiter Geschmack, zur Grundlage der Reproduktion gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheiten wird. (shrink)

Andrea Cesalpino is an important figure in the history of science. He demonstrated that blood circulates into heart from veins and from the heart to arteries, paving the way to Harvey’s complete description of blood circulation. Moreover, he was the founder of botany as a systematic discipline, which he based, rather than on the observation of accidental similarities of plants, on the discovery of their vegetative-generative principle. In philosophy, he attempted to conciliate the immortality of the soul (i.e., the form (...) of the body) with the existence of a unique immaterial intellect, which is individuated and multiplied in the singular souls that participate to it. (shrink)

Intellectualism about knowledge-how is the view that knowing how to do something amounts to knowing a fact. The version of intellectualism defended by Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson holds that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-wh, i.e., knowledge-where, -when, -who, etc. It draws its major motivation from the uniformity between ascriptions of knowledge-how and ascriptions of knowledge-wh in English, being all infinitival embedded question constructions. My aim in this paper is to challenge intellectualism of this sort. I argue that the (...) linguistic motivation for the view is not preserved across languages and that it cannot be sustained from the perspective of other languages. I will show this by examining ascriptions of practical knowledge and knowledge-wh in Russian, Turkish and German. The cross-linguistic data further suggest that ‘know how’ is ambiguous in English. In the end, the cross-linguistic data will be used to question an argument for the propositionality of practical knowledge. (shrink)

I discuss the moral significance of artificial life within synthetic biology via a discussion of Douglas, Powell and Savulescu's paper 'Is the creation of artificial life morally significant’. I argue that the definitions of 'artificial life’ and of 'moral significance’ are too narrow. Douglas, Powell and Savulescu's definition of artificial life does not capture all core projects of synthetic biology or the ethical concerns that have been voiced, and their definition of moral significance fails to take into account the possibility (...) that creating artificial life is conditionally acceptable. Finally, I show how several important objections to synthetic biology are plausibly understood as arguing that creating artificial life in a wide sense is only conditionally acceptable. (shrink)

Counterexarnples have been presented in which an S fulfils 1——3 in uttering some x but has an additional intention which makes the example a case of not meaning something by x. In the example given by Strawson it is not only true of S that 1——3 but also that 4b—4f: 43 1S{BAUs(BA(Is(7TA}}}}}.

Gender inequalities in education – in terms of systematic variations in access to educational institutions, in competencies, school marks, and educational certificates along the axis of gender – have tremendously changed over the course of the 20 th century. Although this does not apply to all stages and areas of the educational career, it is particularly obvious looking at upper secondary education. Before the major boost of educational expansion in the 1960s, women’s participation in upper secondary general education, and their (...) chances to successfully finish this educational pathway, have been lower than men’s. However, towards the end of the 20 th century, women were outperforming men in many European countries and beyond. The international contributions to this book attempt to shed light on the mechanisms behind gender inequalities and the changes made to reduce this inequality. Topics explored by the contributors include gender in science education in the UK; women’s education in Luxembourg in the 19 th and 20 th century; the ‘gender gap’ debates and their rhetoric in the UK and Finland; sociological perspectives on the gender-equality discourse in Finland; changing gender differences in West Germany in the 20 th century; the interplay of subjective well-being and educational attainment in Switzerland; and a psychological perspective on gender identities, gender-related perceptions, students’ motivation, intelligence, personality, and the interaction between student and teacher gender. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Educational Research. _. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis article investigates the context of a side line in Leibniz's critique of Locke on maxims. In an enigmatic and little-explored remark, Leibniz objects that Locke has overlooked some legal maxims that fulfil the function of ‘constituting the law’. I propose to read this remark against the background of the divergence between conceptions of legal maxims in the common law tradition and conceptions of legal maxims in the Roman law tradition. In a few remarks, Locke seems to echo the common (...) law emphasis on customs and conventions expressed by legal maxims. According to such a conception, reason would mainly fulfil the function of subsuming particular norms under more general conventional norms. By contrast, Leibniz uses the Roman law idea that some ‘rules of law’ express demands of natural reason and, thereby, express principles constitutive of natural law. This is why he proposes to reform vague and confused ‘brocards’ used by jurists in order to identify sound maxims that provide a natural-law foundation for legal institutions. (shrink)

Debates on new technologies commonly seem to be irrational. In an even higher degree this might be true for the expectations that are evoked by recent biotechnologies. A typical constellation is like this: While A expresses fears concerning a new technology, those fears are taken up to be absurd by B. And while B criticizes that A?s scenarios lack a realistic basis, A complains about not being taken serious. Thus the conflicting parties accuse each other of behaving irrational or even (...) malicious. This article deals with this mutual suspicion of irrationality and provides an explanation focusing on structural reasons for conflicts of that kind. An explanation is reached on the basis of a model that describes the genesis of expectations regarding technological potentials. These expectations are concerned with the anticipation that a technology has the power to fundamentally change our life. Based on this model a different examination of discourses on technologies is possible: The existence of structurally different levels of communication about technology is demonstrated - plus that the levels themselves can stay undiscovered by the conflicting groups due to structural reasons. And as the levels in communication remain concealed the impression of a slippery slope of rationality prevails. nema. (shrink)

El kitsch no es solo una categoría que ha definido una de las posibles gramáticas estéticas de la modernidad, sino también una dimensión antropológica que ha tenido diferentes configuraciones en el curso de los procesos históricos. El ensayo ofrece una mirada histórico-crítica sobre las transformaciones que condujeron desde el kitsch de principios del siglo XX hasta el neokitsch contemporáneo: desde la génesis del kitsch hasta su afirmación como una de las manifestaciones más tangibles de la cultura de masas. Integrándose con (...) la estética posmoderna, el kitsch se transforma en neokitsch, una estética que utiliza el kitsch como su propia sintaxis en el complejo escenario de la estética contemporánea. /// -/- Kitsch is not just a category that has defined one of the possible aesthetic grammars of modernity, but also an anthropological dimension that has had different configurations in the course of historical processes. The essay offers a historical-critical look at the transformations that led from the early twentieth century kitsch to the contemporary neokitsch: from the genesis of kitsch to its affirmation as one of the most tangible manifestations of mass culture. Integrating with postmodern aesthetics, kitsch turns into neokitsch, an aesthetic that deliberately uses kitsch as its own syntax in the complex scenario of contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

There can be no justice that is not spatial. Against a recent tendency to despatialise law, matter, bodies and even space itself, this book insists on spatialising them, arguing that there can be neither law nor justice that are not articulated through and in space. Spatial Justice presents a new theory and a radical application of the material connection between space – in the geographical as well as sociological and philosophical sense – and the law – in the broadest sense (...) that includes written and oral law, but also embodied social and political norms. More specifically, it argues that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies – human, natural, non-organic, technological – to occupy a certain space at a certain time. Seen in this way, spatial justice is the most radical offspring of the spatial turn, since, as this book demonstrates, spatial justice can be found in the core of most contemporary legal and political issues – issues such as geopolitical conflicts, environmental issues, animality, colonisation, droning, the cyberspace and so on. In order to ague this, the book employs the _lawscape_, as the tautology between law and space, and the concept of _atmosphere_ in its geological, political, aesthetic, legal and biological dimension. Written by a leading theorist in the area, _Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere_ forges a new interdisciplinary understanding of space and law, while offering a fresh approach to current geopolitical, spatiolegal and ecological issues. (shrink)

Papers by Andreas Bartels, Ansgar Beckermann, Frédéric Bouchard, Thomas Breuer, Bruno Eckhardt, Bruce Glymour, Claus Kiefer, Roberta Millstein and Alexander Rosenberg.

Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular foundings has not captured the imagination of contemporary political thought. Most of the time, democratic theory and political science treat as the object of their inquiry normal politics, institutionalized power, and consolidated democracies. The aim of Andreas Kalyvas' study is to show why it is important for democratic theory to rethink the question of its beginnings. Is there a founding unique to democracies? (...) Can a democracy be democratically established? What are the implications of expanding democratic politics in light of the question of whether and how to address democracy's beginnings? Kalyvas addresses these questions and scrutinizes the possibility of democratic beginnings in terms of the category of the extraordinary, as he reconstructs it from the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt and their views on the creation of new political, symbolic, and constitutional orders. (shrink)

In 'Arbeit am Kanon', Italian musicologist Federico Celestini and German philosopher Andreas Dorschel discuss aesthetic issues in the work of composers Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Anton Webern, and Franz Schreker.

In ‘Vollkommenes hält sich fern’ (‘Perfection keeps itself aloof’) – the book title is drawn from a verse of American poet Kimberly Johnson (*1971) –, Philip Alperson and Andreas Dorschel discuss issues in the philosophy of music and general aesthetics related to the body, to practices and genres, values and education.

Is logic masculine? Is women's lack of interest in the "hard core" philosophical disciplines of formal logic and semantics symptomatic of an inadequacy linked to sex? Is the failure of women to excel in pure mathematics and mathematical science a function of their inability to think rationally? Andrea Nye undermines the assumptions that inform these questions, assumptions such as: logic is unitary, logic is independenet of concrete human relations, and logic transcends historical circumstances as well as gender. In a series (...) of studies of the logics of historical figures--Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Abelard, Ockham, and Frege--she traces the changing interrelationships between logical innovation and oppressive speech strategies, showing that logic is not transcendent truth but abstract forms of language spoken by men, whether Greek ruling citizens, or scientists. (shrink)

In this note, we show that the first-order logic IKω is sound with regard to the models obtained from continuum-valued Łukasiewicz-models for first-order languages by treating the quantifiers as infinitary strong disjunction/conjunction rather than infinitary weak disjunction/conjunction. Moreover, we show that these models cannot be used to provide a new consistency proof for the theory of truth IKTω obtained by expanding IKω with transparent truth, because the models are inconsistent with transparent truth. Finally, we show that whether or not this (...) inconsistency can be reproduced in the sequent calculus for IKTω depends on how vacuous quantification is treated. (shrink)

La circolazione dell’Arte della guerra di Machiavelli ha dato un fondamentale contributo allo sviluppo della cultura militare europea in volgare del Cinquecento. Questo saggio analizza alcuni specifici aspetti della ricezione di quest’opera nella produzione scrittoria militare del tempo e in particolare si concentra su quegli elementi di pensiero legati al tema delle “armi proprie” fortemente propagandato dal libro machiavelliano. A questo proposito, si è qui deliberatamente scelto di offrire l’esempio di due opere diverse per natura ideologica e altezza cronologica: l’una (...) risalente alla prima metà del Cinquecento, l’altra originatasi nell’ambito delle guerre di religione e della diaspora dei protestanti francesi in area elvetica. Si tratta, in effetti, di due libri che permettono di comprendere sfumature poco note del processo di riuso di certi concetti machiavelliani che all’epoca potevano essere considerati politicamente controversi. Al tempo stesso, le due opere sono capaci di far risaltare le difficoltà che emergono ogni volta che si prova ad applicare il moderno concetto di autore a testi nati in un contesto caratterizzato da un continuo riutilizzo e dalla rielaborazione di temi ed elementi ascrivibili a una lunga e articolata tradizione di scrittura militare che si sviluppò lungo il corso del secolo, la quale, tuttavia, aveva trovato un momento di passaggio cruciale nel contributo di Machiavelli. (shrink)

Andreas Christiansen,Bjørn Hallsson | : In many cases, the public want to restrict an activity or technology that they believe to be dangerous, but that scientific experts believe to be safe. There is thus a tension between respecting the preferences of the people and making policy based on our best scientific knowledge. Deciding how to make policy in the light of this tension requires an understanding of why citizens sometimes disagree with the experts on what is risky and what (...) is safe. In this paper, we examine two highly influential theories of how people form beliefs about risks: the theory that risk beliefs are errors caused by bounded rationality and the theory that such beliefs are part and parcel of people’s core value systems. We then discuss the implications of the psychological theories for questions regarding liberal-democratic decision making: Should policy be responsive to the preferences of citizens in the domain of risk regulation? What risk-regulation policies are legitimate? How should liberal-democratic deliberation be structured? | : Dans de nombreux cas, le public veut restreindre une activité ou une technologie qu’il croit être dangereuse, mais que les experts scientifiques considèrent être sécuritaire. Il y a alors une tension entre le respect des préférences des gens et des politiques fondées sur nos meilleures connaissances scientifiques. Décider comment élaborer une politique à la lumière de cette tension nécessite de comprendre pourquoi les citoyens sont parfois en désaccord avec les experts à propos de ce qui est risqué et ce qui est sûr. Dans cet article, nous examinons deux théories très influentes sur la façon dont les gens forment des croyances sur les risques : la théorie selon laquelle les croyances liées au risque sont des erreurs causées par la rationalité limitée et la théorie selon laquelle ces croyances font partie intégrante des systèmes de valeurs fonda-mentales des personnes. Nous discutons ensuite les implications des théories psychologiques pour les questions touchant la prise de décision libérale-démocratique : Les politiques devraient-elles être sensibles aux préférences des citoyens dans le domaine de la régulation des risques? Quelles politiques de régulation des risques sont légitimes? Comment la délibération libérale-démocratique devrait-elle être structurée? (shrink)

Art historian Andrea Liss examines the inherent difficulties and productive possibilities of using photographs to bear witness, initiating a critical dialogue about the ways the post-Auschwitz generation has employed these documents to ...

The indispensability argument comes in many different versions that all reduce to a general valid schema. Providing a sound IA amounts to providing a full interpretation of the schema according to which all its premises are true. Hence, arguing whether IA is sound results in wondering whether the schema admits such an interpretation. We discuss in full details all the parameters on which the specification of the general schema may depend. In doing this, we consider how different versions of IA (...) can be obtained, also through different specifications of the notion of indispensability. We then distinguish between schematic and genuine IA, and argue that no genuine sound IA is available or easily forthcoming. We then submit that this holds also in the particularly relevant case in which indispensability is conceived as explanatory indispensability. (shrink)

Andrea Sangiacomo offers a new understanding of Spinoza's moral philosophy, how his views significantly evolved over time, and how he himself struggled during his career to develop a theory that could speak to human beings as they actually are--imperfect, passionate, and often not very rational.