The political writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the prophet of the postmodern, are presented here as both the missing dimension of his work and the key to understanding his position within contemporary debate.

Using the writings of slaves and former slaves, as well as commentaries on slavery, Between Slavery and Freedom explores the American slave experience to gain a better understanding of six moral and political concepts—oppression, paternalism, resistance, political obligation, citizenship, and forgiveness. The authors use analytical philosophy as well as other disciplines to gain insight into the thinking of a group of people prevented from participating in the social/political discourse of their times. Between Slavery and Freedom rejects the notion that philosophers (...) need not consider individual experience because philosophy is "impartial" and "universal." A philosopher should also take account of matters that are essentially perspectival, such as the slave experience. McGary and Lawson demonstrate the contribution of all human experience, including slave experiences, to the quest for human knowledge and understanding. (shrink)

The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in ‘social’ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being (...) materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of ‘just us’ – a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovators’ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics. (shrink)

This article probes the practical ethical implications of AI system design by reconsidering the important topic of bias in the datasets used to train autonomous intelligent systems. The discussion draws on recent work concerning behaviour-guiding technologies, and it adopts a cautious form of technological utopianism by assuming it is potentially beneficial for society at large if AI systems are designed to be comparatively free from the biases that characterise human behaviour. However, the argument presented here critiques the common well-intentioned requirement (...) that, in order to achieve this, all such datasets must be debiased prior to training. By focusing specifically on gender-bias in Neural Machine Translation systems, three automated strategies for the removal of bias are considered – downsampling, upsampling, and counterfactual augmentation – and it is shown that systems trained on datasets debiased using these approaches all achieve general translation performance that is much worse than a baseline system. In addition, most of them also achieve worse performance in relation to metrics that quantify the degree of gender bias in the system outputs. By contrast, it is shown that the technique of domain adaptation can be effectively deployed to debias existing NMT systems after they have been fully trained. This enables them to produce translations that are quantitatively far less biased when analysed using gender-based metrics, but which also achieve state-of-the-art general performance. It is hoped that the discussion presented here will reinvigorate ongoing debates about how and why bias can be most effectively reduced in state-of-the-art AI systems. (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

We propose a model of natural language inference which identifies valid inferences by their lexical and syntactic features, without full semantic interpretation. We extend past work in natural logic, which has focused on semantic containment and monotonicity, by incorporating both semantic exclusion and implicativity. Our model decomposes an inference problem into a sequence of atomic edits linking premise to hypothesis; predicts a lexical semantic relation for each edit; propagates these relations upward through a semantic composition tree according to properties of (...) intermediate nodes; and joins the resulting semantic relations across the edit sequence. A computational implementation of the model achieves 70% accuracy and 89% precision on the FraCaS test suite. Moreover, including this model as a component in an existing system yields significant performance gains on the Recognizing Textual Entailment challenge. (shrink)

This book provides an introduction to literacy pedagogy within today's new media environment.

This is an introduction to the Symposium on Nonparadigmatic Forms of Punishment. We explain what we mean by calling certain instances of punishment 'nonparadigmatic' and explain why nonparadigmatic punishments are of philosophical interest. We then introduce the contributions to the Special Issue and conclude by outlining directions that future research on nonparadigmatic punishment might take. We focus on three particular ways in which punishment might be nonparadigmatic: cases involving nonstandard punishing agents, those involving nonstandard subjects of punishment, and those involving (...) nonstandard means of punishment. (shrink)

This article examines the legal, economic, and ethical arguments supporting and opposing comparable worth. The co- authors advance opposing views on the wisdom of adopting comparable worth as a public policy, and those views are not reconciled within the limits of this essay.

Advance directives enable individuals to project their healthcare preferences into a period of anticipated incapacity. With advance directives, individuals can designate whom they would like to have make healthcare decisions for them, or give their healthcare provider advice on what to do, or both. Canada has an unusually wide variety of legislative approaches to advance directives. In what follows we describe and evaluate these, with the aim of pointing the way toward the ideally best legislation and policies on such directives.

Doping poses a threat to sport worldwide. Studies have revealed that, in addition to elite athletes, amateur and recreational sportsmen and sportswomen are making increasing use of performance-enhancing drugs. Worryingly this trend has been documented among young people. Anti-doping efforts seeking to deter elite athletes from doping through detection of the use of prohibited substances are costly and have not been completely effective either at the top-level or the amateur/recreational level. A thoughtful education program, inspired by honesty and respect, might (...) be more effective in shaping attitudes towards doping in young people and protecting their health. For these reasons, the Italian “Lotta al Doping” (Fight Against Doping) project sought to cause a cultural shift in young people by taking anti-doping seminars to high schools. In the 2017-2018 school year we reached more than 20,800 students from 157 high schools through 202 seminars. Before and after the seminars, we administrated anonymous, voluntarily completed surveys with a set of questions (items = 15), taken from the WADA-Play-True-Quiz. Upon completion of the 2-hour seminar, the majority of the answers given by the students resulted correct (13 out of 15 items, p<0.000001, McNemar) confirming the value of the initiative. This project stands out as promising in the doping prevention process at the youth and amateur levels. (shrink)

Mainstream theories of decision making conceptualise uncertainty in terms of a well-defined probability distribution or weighting function. Following Knight, radical Keynesians consider subjective expected utility (SEU) theory and its variants as a restricted theory of decision-making applicable to situations of risk and, hence, of limited relevance to the understanding of crucial economic decisions under conditions of fundamental uncertainty in which probabilities are ill-defined, possibly non-existent. The objective of this paper is to outline a radical Keynesian theory of decision-making under uncertainty, (...) arguing that Keynes's suggestion to a two-dimensional probability-credence framework provides the basis for determining the limitations of mainstream approaches and points the way forward to the construction of a more general encompassing theory relevant to psychologists and economists outside of the Keynesian tradition. (shrink)

In his classic paper, The Serpent Beguiled Me And I Did Eat, Gerald Dworkin makes the case that, without probable cause, the useof Proactive Law Enforcement Techniques (PALETs) is morally impermissible. Call this prohibition Dworkin’s Rule (DR). Here we argue that there are two reasonable exceptions to DR—the use of PALETs, without probable cause, is justifi ed when employed against High Level Government Officials (HLGOs) and High Level Business Officials (HLBOs). Moreover, these exceptions are consistent with Dworkin’s notion of Ideal (...) Criminal Sanctioning. Finally, if society were to endorse the use of PALETs on HLBOs, we might be able to dispose of the current bane of American business, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and let business get back to the business of business. (shrink)

Instead of presuming the ‘observer’ as given, we are (re)sensing the observer and are thereby offering an ‘open order cybernetics’ (OOC). We are first of all concerned about our acquisition and use of language as the precondition for any meaningful statement. This self-reflexive point of departure distinguishes our project from philosophers who are presuming ‘something’ (‘closure’, ‘selforganization’, ‘self ’, ‘auto-poiesis’, ‘senses’, ‘objects’, ‘subjects’, ‘language’, ‘nervous systems’ etc.) in the first place without being aware of their presumptions i.e. that they are (...) able to already talk meaningfully about ‘something’. We are undertaking a self-reflexive loop towards our already undertaken ‘meaningful’ actions, reflecting inside our concepts on our concepts, trying to find out how our concepts about ‘something’ have come into existence. We are reflecting on our concepts through this ongoing open investigation. We are sketching the ramifications of such a self-reflexive loop for epistemology as well as for the main research areas within cognitive science (i.e. language acquisition, perception, consciousness). We are also pointing towards virtual reality in combination with the arts as an awareness aid, helping us in our self-reflexive endeavours. (shrink)

Using the recommendations of the Commission on Freedom of the Press, we ask today's media consumers how they rate the performance of modern American journalism. We employ original survey data collected from journalism students at a major Midwest university, framing our findings in the context of the commission's 1947 recommendations. The result is presentation of contemporary opinions about the performance of American media in the context of journalism ideals articulated more than 60 years ago.