A philosophical refashioning of the Language of Thought approach and the related computational theory of mind.

Among critics of corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is growing concern that CSR is largely ineffective as a corrective to the shortcomings of capitalism, namely, the negative effects of business on society and the undersupply of public goods. At the same time, researchers suggest that despite the shortcomings of CSR, it is possible to make it more effective in a stepwise manner. To explain the frequent failures of current CSR practices and to explore the possibilities of remedying them, I examine (...) the close relationship between CSR, the persistent expansion of capitalism, and the pressure that capitalism puts on companies to legitimize their business operations. My analysis shows that the failure of CSR to serve as a corrective to the problematic effects of capitalism is, in fact, an inevitable consequence of the problematic dynamics of the capitalist system. On this basis, I suggest that capitalism limits the possibilities of making CSR more effective, argue for change on the systemic level of capitalism, and explore the ways in which CSR research can contribute to this political endeavor. (shrink)

Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

(2001). Fruits, Apples, and Category Mistakes: On Sport, Games, and Play. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport: Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 151-159. doi: 10.1080/00948705.2001.9714610.

Research on Grand Challenges often neglects capitalism as a major source of many social and ecological problems, and/or as a barrier to their solution. To find sustainable solutions through our research, we need to make explicit and problematize this systems-level cause of Grand Challenges instead of only looking for solutions at the organizational level.

Contemporary society operates beyond safe boundaries of the Earth system. Returning to a safe operating space for humanity within Earth system boundaries is a question of justice. The relevance of the economy—and thus of business—for bringing society back to a safe and just operating space highlights the importance of business ethics research for understanding the role of business in Earth system justice. In this commentary, we explore the relevance of business ethics research for understanding the crucial role of business in (...) the dynamics of the Earth system. We do so by integrating the perspectives of business ethics and system-oriented sustainability science on the basis of the theory of metabolic rift, which explains how the dynamics of capitalism result in the destruction of the natural environment. On this basis, we argue that a mutually reinforcing relationship between perpetual economic growth and profit seeking behaviour of business, which we call the _loop of unsustainability_, continually deepens the metabolic rift and keeps business from effectively contributing to Earth system justice. This perspective allows us to formulate firm-level and system-level preconditions for attaining Earth system justice, and to sketch a research agenda that links business ethics scholarship with questions of Earth system justice. (shrink)

Under conditions of growing interconnectedness of the global economy, more and more stakeholders are exposed to risks and costs resulting from business activities that are neither regulated nor compensated for by means of national governance. The changing distribution of risks poses a threat to the legitimacy of business firms that normally derive their legitimacy from operating in compliance with the legal rules of democratic nation states. However, during the process of globalization, the regulatory power of nation states has been weakened (...) and many production processes have been shifted to states with weak regulatory frameworks where businesses operate outside the reach of the democratic nation state. As a result, business firms have to address the various legitimacy challenges of their operations directly and cannot rely upon the legitimacy of their regulatory environment. These developments challenge the dominant approach to corporate governance that regards shareholders as the only stakeholder group in need of special protection due to risks not covered by contracts and legal regulations. On the basis of these considerations, we argue for a democratization of corporate governance structures in order to compensate for the governance deficits in their regulatory environment and to cope with the changing allocation of risks and costs. By way of democratic involvement of various stakeholders, business firms may be able to mitigate the redistribution of individual risk and address the resulting legitimacy deficits even when operating under conditions of regulatory gaps and governance failure. (shrink)

Recently, proponents of Humean Supervenience have challenged the plausibility of the intuition that the laws of nature ‘govern’, or guide, the evolution of events in the universe. Certain influential thought experiments authored by John Carroll, Michael Tooley, and others, rely strongly on such intuitions. These thought experiments are generally regarded as playing a central role in the lawhood debate, suggesting that the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis view of the laws of nature, and the related doctrine of the Humean Supervenience of laws, are false. (...) In this paper, I take on these recent challenges, arguing that the intuition that the laws govern should be taken seriously. Still, I find the recent discussions insightful, in certain ways. Employing some ideas from one of the critics, I draw some non-standard conclusions about the significance of the thought experiments to the lawhood debate. (shrink)

Recent debate by feminist scholars in philosophy of sport has been focused on the status of women’s sport as a protected category. Positions have varied significantly, from no need for a protected category anymore—to allow women’s sport to flourish and to give them a fair opportunity, given that men’s sport still dominates, just as it has in the past.It will be argued that: i) the concept of a ‘protected category’ is tied logically to the concept of fair play and has (...) been defined and enforced through the rules in sport and generally requires some kind of certification for inclusion. These specific rules will be analyzed in detail. Having separate women’s events means that logically it must be possible to exclude, and exclusion is not a popular stance as many have argued that the onus is on inclusion from a human rights perspective. Thus, sport policy makers are truly in an intractable position. On the one hand, no qualifying athlete should have to ‘dope down’ (or ‘dope up’) to compete in the Olympic Games. On the other hand, women athletes have argued that sex equality in competitive sport is a legitimate goal and that separating athletes in competition by biological sex traits is the only way to achieve this goal. It seems criminal to ask athletes to ‘dope down’ to be able to compete in the Olympic Games, however, although a new auxiliary rule creating new sub-classification of women athletes with testosterone higher than the stipulated cut off seems logical on the face of it, these cases are statistically rare. It is concluded that the community of women athletes should have the most significant voice, as historically, the criteria for the women’s sport-protected category have been predominantly determined by men. That is not to say that men’s voices, or voices outside of the women’s sports community of practitioners, cannot be heard, but they should not be the deciding factor. (shrink)

This paper argues that Reason Responsiveness (RR) accounts of rationality, proposed for example by Benjamin Kiesewetter and Error Lord, fail to explain structural irrationality (i.e., the irrationality involved in holding incoherent attitudes). Proponents of RR hold that rationality consists in correctly responding to available reasons. Structural irrationality, they argue, is just a “by‐product” of incorrect reason‐responding. Applying this idea to cases of means–end incoherence, this paper shows that RR accounts must rely on a certain transmission principle. Roughly, this amounts to (...) the principle that necessarily, if (1) A has decisive available reason to intend to E and (2) A has decisive available reason to believe that intending to M is necessary for E‐ing, it follows that (3) A has decisive available reason to intend to M. By considering an example, this paper argues that even the most plausible version of this transmission principle does not hold true. It follows that one can correctly respond to one's available reasons while being means–end incoherent. (shrink)

Currie (2019) has introduced a novel account of creativity within the social epistemology of science. The account is intended to capture how conservatism can be detrimental to the health of inquiry within certain scientific communities, given the aims of research there. I argue that recent remarks by Rovelli (2018) put pressure on the applicability of the account. Altogether, it seems we do not yet well understand the relationship between creativity, conservatism, and the health of inquiry in science.

The topic of Women’s sport has engendered increasing scholarship across differing disciplines in recent years; however, in the philosophy of sport literature, it has not been as abundant as it migh...

The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way is an expose of certain theoretical problems in cognitive science, and in particular, problems that concern the Classical Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). The problems that Fodor worries plague CTM divide into two kinds, and both purport to show that the success of cognitive science will likely be limited to the modules. The first sort of problem concerns what Fodor has called “global properties”; features that a mental sentence has which depend on how the (...) sentence interacts with a larger plan (i.e., set of sentences), rather than the type identity of the sentence alone. The second problem concerns what many have called, “The Relevance Problem”: the problem of whether and how humans determine what is relevant in a computational manner. However, I argue that the problem that Fodor believes global properties pose for CTM is a non-problem, and that further, while the relevance problem is a serious research issue, it does not justify the grim view that cognitive science, and CTM in particular, will likely fail to explain cognition. (shrink)

Armstrong's combinatorialism, in his own words, is the following project: "My central metaphysical hypothesis is that all there is is the world of space and time. It is this world which is to supply the actual elements for the totality of combinations. So what is proposed is a Naturalistic form of a combinatorial theory."2 Armstrong calls his central hypothesis "Naturalism." He intends his well−known theory of universals to satisfy this thesis. He now attempts to give a naturalistic theory of modality.

The past decades have seen a rise in religious and secular responses to inequality that seek to offer those who are relatively wealthy an opportunity to personally engage with impoverished people and places. This article examines three cases of elite white South Africans who intentionally immersed themselves in poor urban environments. In dialogue with the anthropology of ethics, I argue that immersion was seen as an experimental tool for transforming the self and cultivating virtues of empathy and responsibility towards others. (...) In this way, immersion acted as a technology of the self, linking care of the self to care of others. Yet such experimentation was not without risk. Though imagined as a tool that could promote care of the self and care of others, immersion carries with it the potential to reinforce power divides and/or solicit negative moral judgment. (shrink)

Cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms represents a cultural-philosophical approach in which specific modes of objectification, the symbolic forms themselves, establish an independent truth. This truth does not consist in a purely analytical truth, but in the fact that we live along these symbolic forms in a specific stubbornness. When we use language, we live and experience language in its specific autonomy. The same applies to the other symbolic forms developed by Cassirer. Both before the cultural-philosophical phase of creation and within (...) the philosophy of symbolic forms, Cassirer refers to mathematics several times. An interesting tension arises as to whether Cassirer could have understood mathematics as a symbolic form in its own right. On the one hand, cultural-historical considerations in Cassirer’s work speak in favour of this; on the other hand, Cassirer embeds mathematics as a mere formal science in physics and thus in the philosophical form of science as a whole. The article explores this tension—mathematics as a symbolic form—and shows that only indications within the framework of the historical-hermeneutical treatment would speak in favour of such an interpretation. Furthermore, the article argues that a specific, cultural-historical semiotics can be considered for mathematics in Cassirer’s work. (shrink)

This article discusses madness and saintliness in Dostoevsky’s novels and investigates how the madman and the saint discern between good and evil. I first explore the metaphysical, spiritual, and moral universe of Dostoevsky’s characters by drawing on William Desmond’s philosophy of the between. Second, I argue that the madman’s misconstrual of reality can be grasped as an idolatrous, divisive, and parodic imitation of the good. Third, I reflect on disembodied discernment. In some cases, due to the weakness of the moral (...) agent, the good cannot be properly embodied in space and time, even if a person exhibits ethically sound discernment. Fourth, I look at examples of holy discernment and examine how, through love, the genuinely good person is able to transform idolatry into a universal and cosmic sacramentalism. (shrink)

According to Dummett's interpretation, one finds Wittgenstein denying the existence of a general linguistic action of “communicating something” at many places in the Investigations. In Wittgenstein's view, however, the author errs when (in philosophical contexts) he ignores the projective step and concludes from the meaningful applicability of the expression that he is speaking here of an “inner object of feeling” that should arouse the epistemological interest. The author proposes the middle passage of § 363, which is so important for Dummett's (...) interpretation: Wittgenstein certainly does not want to deny that linguistic actions do include speech acts of communicating something or informing. (shrink)

Photography has become a pervasive component of contemporary communication. Recent technological advances in creating and manipulating images have provided renewed impetus to decades-long debates on use of photographs in science. With increase in the potential for inappropriate image manipulation, fears about misrepresentation have heightened concern among journal editors and scholars about the 'accuracy' of published images. We discuss how science has responded to growing concerns surrounding falsification and inaccuracy of photography. We document progress in implementing a variety of complementary approaches (...) to addressing the problem. These include digital forensics, photo member checking and the implementation of codes of ethics to enhance the veracity of published photographs in science research. We conclude by acknowledging the irreducible conflict likely to remain between use of the photograph as a creative work of art and employment of this medium as a source of information in the progress of science. (shrink)

In the deviance literature, sexual assaults at work have not been given the sustained attention that harm to property or violation of production guidelines has received. This omission suggests that sexual harassment is considered normative and that when women fail to accommodate this reality, it is the survivor rather than the perpetrator who is considered deviant. This article reports on 64 cases of attempted or completed rape in a sample of heterosexual and lesbian women workers in a wide range of (...) occupations. Two atypical responses, quitting the job or filing a complaint as a result of a workplace sexual assault, highlight the process by which informal deviance defining occurs in everyday interactions at work. (shrink)

A background assumption of this paper is that the repertoire of inference schemes available to humanity is not fixed, but subject to change as new schemes are invented or refined and as old ones are obsolesced or abandoned. This is particularly visible in areas like health and environmental sciences, where enormous societal investment has been made in finding ways to reach more dependable conclusions. Computational modeling of argumentation, at least for the discourse in expert fields, will require the possibility of (...) modeling change in a stock of schemes that may be applied to generate conclusions from data. We examine Randomized Clinical Trial, an inference scheme established within medical science in the mid-20th Century, and show that its successful defense by means of practical reasoning allowed for its black-boxing as an inference scheme that generates (and warrants belief in) conclusions about the effects of medical treatments. Modeling the use of a scheme is well-understood; here we focus on modeling how the scheme comes to be established so that it is available for use. (shrink)

Focusing on Machery's claim that concepts play entirely different roles in philosophy and psychology, I explain how one well-known philosophical theory of concepts, Conceptual Atomism (CA), when properly understood, takes into account both kinds of roles.

Based on Greek mythology, the multiple relationships between singing and weaving, »Flechttanz« (»weaving dance«) and the structural similarities of forms of notation and principles of control in music and weaving are explored. It is found that the relationship between music (as a temporal art) and weaving (as a spatial art) goes far beyond that which the metaphor of »sound tissues« points at. Rather, the relationship between art forms and media expresses mythical and spiritual levels. The transformation of tissues in music (...) or, respectively, music in tissues, makes the creative potential of transposition productive. (shrink)

This article presents the case of an HIV-positive client who reported having sexual relations with an unknowing partner. The issue raised is whether the therapist was required to warn the unknowing partner, similar to the Tarasoff mandate that is imposed on therapists. The case is analyzed from an ethical framework similar to that presented by Beauchamp and Childress. Two opinions are presented, each leading to different conclusions about whether the therapist should inform the unknowing partner. It is concluded that although (...) such analysis is valuable in aiding the therapist in his or her decision-making process, no clear professional standard for the management of the problem is evident. (shrink)