Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

Volume 52, Issue 6, June - July 2020, Page 586-592.

Some artificial intelligence systems can display algorithmic bias, i.e. they may produce outputs that unfairly discriminate against people based on their social identity. Much research on this topic focuses on algorithmic bias that disadvantages people based on their gender or racial identity. The related ethical problems are significant and well known. Algorithmic bias against other aspects of people’s social identity, for instance, their political orientation, remains largely unexplored. This paper argues that algorithmic bias against people’s political orientation can arise in (...) some of the same ways in which algorithmic gender and racial biases emerge. However, it differs importantly from them because there are strong social norms against gender and racial biases. This does not hold to the same extent for political biases. Political biases can thus more powerfully influence people, which increases the chances that these biases become embedded in algorithms and makes algorithmic political biases harder to detect and eradicate than gender and racial biases even though they all can produce similar harm. Since some algorithms can now also easily identify people’s political orientations against their will, these problems are exacerbated. Algorithmic political bias thus raises substantial and distinctive risks that the AI community should be aware of and examine. (shrink)

Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’. According to the account, confirmation (...) bias evolved because it helps us influence people and social structures so that they come to match our beliefs about them. This can result in significant developmental and epistemic benefits for us and other people, ensuring that over time we don’t become epistemically disconnected from social reality but can navigate it more easily. While that might not be the only evolved function of confirmation bias, it is an important one that has so far been neglected in the theorizing on the bias. (shrink)

R S Peters; Education and the Educated Man, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 4, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 5–20, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

When scientists or science reporters communicate research results to the public, this often involves ethical and epistemic risks. One such risk arises when scientific claims cause cognitive or behavioural changes in the audience that contribute to the self-fulfilment of these claims. I argue that the ethical and epistemic problems that such self-fulfilment effects may pose are much broader and more common than hitherto appreciated. Moreover, these problems are often due to a specific psychological phenomenon that has been neglected in the (...) research on science communication: many people tend to conform to ‘descriptive norms’, that is, norms capturing (perceptions of) what others commonly do, think, or feel. Because of this tendency, science communication may frequently produce significant social harm. I contend that scientists have a responsibility to assess the risk of this potential harm and consider adopting strategies to mitigate it. I introduce one such strategy and argue that its implementation is independently well motivated by the fact that it helps improve scientific accuracy. (shrink)

Introduction: education, philosophy and politics -- Writing the self: Wittgenstein, confession and pedagogy -- Nietzsche, nihilism and the critique of modernity: post-Nietzschean philosophy of education -- Heidegger, education and modernity -- Truth-telling as an educational practice of the self: Foucault and the ethics of subjectivity -- Neoliberal governmentality: Foucault on the birth of biopolitics -- Lyotard, nihilism and education -- Gilles Deleuze's 'societies of control': from disciplinary pedagogy to perpetual training -- Geophilosophy, education and the pedagogy of the concept - (...) Humanism, Derrida and the new humanities -- Politics and deconstruction: Derrida, neoliberalism and democracy -- Neopragmatism, ethnocentrism and the politics of the ethnos: Rorty's 'postmodernist bourgeois liberalism' -- Achieving America: postmodernism and Rorty's critique of the cultural left -- Deranging the investigations: Cavell on the philosophy of the child -- White philosophy in/of America. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (2001) 593-610 [Access article in PDF] The Desire to Know the Secrets of the World Edward Peters I. The letter to Ferdinand and Isabella that Christopher Columbus intended to serve as the preface to the Libro de las profecías began with a remarkable observation about his own career and the particular temperament it had shaped in him: From a very young (...) age I began to navigate the seas, and I have continued to do so until today. This art inclines those who follow it to desire to know the secrets of this world. 1Although Columbus was certainly not unlearned, there is an artlessness and directness about his remark that suggest that whatever Columbus may have meant by "the secrets of the world" and the desire of navigators to know them, he was probably not speaking reconditely or mystically. 2 [End Page 593]Nor was Columbus the only early sixteenth-century practical man who spoke this way. The letters of Hernán Cortés, hardly a philosopher or a navigator, pointed out to correspondents that it was "a universal condition of man to want to know," and that he was first of all desirous of knowledge "of the secrets of these parts"; that "many new secrets" had been learned from the discoveries; of a volcano, "I wished to know the secret of this, which seemed something of a miracle." 3If practical folk could speak thus at the turn of the sixteenth century, it is not surprising that in the course of that century their rulers should appropriate the language of secrets, including the secrets of distant places, and the desire to know them and in doing so to transform their realms into information-gathering states, using detailed questionaires to assemble and organize new data just as they assembled cabinets of curiosities, libraries, zoos, observatories, and botanical gardens. As J. H. Elliott put it: But curiosity also had its due place within a wider Christian framework. At the end of the century, José de Acosta, in his great Natural and Moral History of the Indies, likened men to ants in their refusal to let themselves be deterred, once they had set out on their quest for facts. "And the high and eternal wisdom of the Creator uses this natural curiosity of men to communicate the light of His holy gospel to peoples who still live in the darkness of their errors." This assumption, that all knowledge was subordinated to a higher purpose and fitted into a providential design, was crucial for the assimilation of the New World of America by sixteenth-century Christendom. 4Elliott's characterization of an honorific Christian intellectual curiosity represented a very small part of a very complex semantic universe that centered on the Latin term curiositas and its vernacular cognates, not all of whose meanings were neutral or honorific. Just three years before Acosta wrote there had, after all, appeared the first printed history of Doctor Faustus, another sixteenth-century practical man who was also interested in the secrets of the world. 5 And not [End Page 594] too many years after Acosta wrote, another practical being, Milton's Lucifer, also went forth boldly to seek new worlds. 6 Only in a restricted sense could the desire to know the secrets of the world be understood in the way that Columbus, Cortés, Philip II, and Acosta celebrated it. In many cases it had to be extricated from a semantic universe in which it had long been identified with less honorable motives and more dangerous or ephemeral objects.The most influential exploration of part of that semantic universe appeared in Hans Blumenberg's long essay entitled, "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity," first published as part of a larger work in 1966, later slightly revised and separately reprinted, and translated into English in 1983. 7 Blumenberg's particular understanding of the history of philosophy, however, and his narrow focus on the natural sciences as the arena of "theoretical" curiosity limited both his conceptualization and his argument. In... (shrink)

Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems currently used for decision-making are opaque, i.e., the internal factors that determine their decisions are not fully known to people due to the systems’ computational complexity. In response to this problem, several researchers have argued that human decision-making is equally opaque and since simplifying, reason-giving explanations (rather than exhaustive causal accounts) of a decision are typically viewed as sufficient in the human case, the same should hold for algorithmic decision-making. Here, I contend that this argument (...) overlooks that human decision-making is sometimes significantly more transparent and trustworthy than algorithmic decision-making. This is because when people explain their decisions by giving reasons for them, this frequently prompts those giving the reasons to govern or regulate themselves so as to think and act in ways that confirm their reason reports. AI explanation systems lack this self-regulative feature. Overlooking it when comparing algorithmic and human decision-making can result in underestimations of the transparency of human decision-making and in the development of explainable AI that may mislead people by activating generally warranted beliefs about the regulative dimension of reason-giving. (shrink)

Many scientists routinely generalize from study samples to larger populations. It is commonly assumed that this cognitive process of scientific induction is a voluntary inference in which researchers assess the generalizability of their data and then draw conclusions accordingly. We challenge this view and argue for a novel account. The account describes scientific induction as involving by default a generalization bias that operates automatically and frequently leads researchers to unintentionally generalize their findings without sufficient evidence. The result is unwarranted, overgeneralized (...) conclusions. We support this account of scientific induction by integrating a range of disparate findings from across the cognitive sciences that have until now not been connected to research on the nature of scientific induction. The view that scientific induction involves by default a generalization bias calls for a revision of the current thinking about scientific induction and highlights an overlooked cause of the replication crisis in the sciences. Commonly proposed interventions to tackle scientific overgeneralizations that may feed into this crisis need to be supplemented with cognitive debiasing strategies against generalization bias to most effectively improve science. (shrink)

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left-leaning individuals and moderates to (...) very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline. (shrink)

This paper, based on an invited Thesis Eleven presentation, provides a ‘map of technopolitics’ that springs from an investigation of the theoretical notion of technological convergence adopted by the US National Science Foundation, signaling a new paradigm of ‘nano-bio-info-cogno’ technologies. This integration at the nano-level is expected to drive the next wave of scientific research, technology and knowledge economy. The paper explores the concept of ‘technopolitics’ by investigating the links between Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism and Lyotard’s ‘technoscience’, reviewing the history of the (...) notion in the work of the Belgium philosopher Gilbert Hottois. The ‘deep convergence’ representing a new technoscientific synergy is the product of long-term trends of ‘bioinformational capitalism’ that harnesses the twin forces of information and genetic sciences that coalesce in the least mature ‘cognosciences’ in their application to education and research. The map of technopolitics systematically identifies the political relations between Big Tech and ‘new digital publics’ to reveal that the new paradigm is based on the supreme value of cognitive efficiency. There are a closely-knit cluster of concerns that frame a map of political issues about the fifth-generation technological impacts on human beings, their bodies and minds, and public institutions, not least the logic of the distribution and ownership of data, information and knowledge, and its effects on democracy. (shrink)

F.A. Hayek was an intellectual who, driven by state phobia and the fear of totalitarianism established the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947, with Karl Popper, Frank Knight, Ludwig von...

In an exciting study that bridges science and religion, physicists think about the connection between physics and faith and biologists discuss evolution, ethics, and the future. Complementing these viewpoints, theologians address these same issues from a religious standpoint. Chapter authors include Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of the laser, Charles Townes, along with Pope John Paul II.

The concept of civilization in the West recognizes the origins of the term in civitas and civilité as the development of civil society and, in particular, the expression of the history of sympathy,...

In this article, I respond to important questions raised by Gallagher and Jacobson in the field of cognitive science about face-to-face interactions in Heidegger’s account of ‘intersubjectivity’ in Being and Time. They have criticized his account for a lack of attention to primary intersubjectivity, or immediate, face-to-face interactions; he favours, they argue, embodied interactions via objects. I argue that the same assumption underlies their argument as did earlier critiques of a lack of an account of the body in Heidegger ; (...) namely that because the body is not explicitly discussed in Being and Time, embodiment, rather than stressing the immediacy of experience, is insufficiently acknowledged in his emphasis on ‘being-in-the-world’. Through placing Gallagher and Jacobson’s accounts of intersubjectivity and the body alongside Heidegger’s accounts of Mitsein and Leib, this article shows Heidegger’s radical position on the body as immersed in a holistic environment, and its reverberations on his account of intersubjectivity. I argue that Dasein’s embodied engagement in the world is always one of immediacy and that the body of the other is perceived as ‘tied into’ its context, as well. In so doing, I offer an Heideggerian account of ecstatic involvement which moves away from the distinction between primary and secondary intersubjectivity toward an immediate engagement with objects and people always already ‘tied into’ a context; an account that, through the concept of Fürsorge, includes shifts of attention between objects and people that allow for the ethical distinctions Gallagher and Jacobson are looking for. (shrink)

1. Michael A PetersBeijing Normal UniversityChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 and a ‘stable release’ on February 13, 2023. It belongs to OpenAI’s GPT-3 family (genera...

Most contemporary proponents of scientific realism advocate some form of selective realism. One of the most prominent variants is the working posits view, which claims that the essential propositions of a successful theory are those that are involved in the actual derivations of predictions. In this paper, I offer a systematic examination of this view, surveying no fewer than six competing interpretations of it. I argue, however, that none is satisfactory. A general reason to reject the working posits view is (...) that it focuses on individual successful derivations, as opposed to the empirical success of a theory as a whole. In response to this, I suggest an alternative positive view, which regards as essential those theoretical posits which “unify” a diverse or large collection of other posits. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 1, January 2020, Page 11-16.

It is well known that on the Internet, computer algorithms track our website browsing, clicks, and search history to infer our preferences, interests, and goals. The nature of this algorithmic tracking remains unclear, however. Does it involve what many cognitive scientists and philosophers call ‘mindreading’, i.e., an epistemic capacity to attribute mental states to people to predict, explain, or influence their actions? Here I argue that it does. This is because humans are in a particular way embedded in the process (...) of algorithmic tracking. Specifically, if we endorse common conditions for extended cognition, then human mindreading (by website operators and users) is often literally extended into, that is, partly realized by, not merely causally coupled to, computer systems performing algorithmic tracking. The view that human mindreading extends outside the body into computers in this way has significant ethical advantages. It points to new conceptual ways to reclaim our autonomy and privacy in the face of increasing risks of computational control and online manipulation. These benefits speak in favor of endorsing the notion of extended mindreading. (shrink)

For synergistic interactions between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, AI outputs often need to be explainable to people. Explainable AI (XAI) systems are commonly tested in human user studies. However, whether XAI researchers consider potential cultural differences in human explanatory needs remains unexplored. We highlight psychological research that found significant differences in human explanations between many people from Western, commonly individualist countries and people from non-Western, often collectivist countries. We argue that XAI research currently overlooks these variations and that (...) many popular XAI designs implicitly and problematically assume that Western explanatory needs are shared cross-culturally. Additionally, we systematically reviewed over 200 XAI user studies and found that most studies did not consider relevant cultural variations, sampled only Western populations, but drew conclusions about human-XAI interactions more generally. We also analyzed over 30 literature reviews of XAI studies. Most reviews did not mention cultural differences in explanatory needs or flag overly broad cross-cultural extrapolations of XAI user study results. Combined, our analyses provide evidence of a cultural bias toward Western populations in XAI research, highlighting an important knowledge gap regarding how culturally diverse users may respond to widely used XAI systems that future work can and should address. (shrink)

Viral modernity is a concept based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture, and the basic application to understanding the role of information and forms of bioinformation in the social world. The concept draws a close association between viral biology on the one hand, and information science on the other – it is an illustration and prime example of bioinformationalism that brings together two of the most powerful forces that now drive (...) cultural evolution. The concept of viral modernity applies to viral technologies, codes and ecosystems in information, publishing, education and emerging knowledge systems. This paper traces the relationship between epidemics, quarantine, and public health management and outlines elements of viral-digital philosophy based on the fusion of living and technological systems. We discuss Covid-19 as a ‘bioinformationalist’ response that represents historically unprecedented level of sharing information from the sequencing of the genome to testing for a vaccination. Finally, we look at the US response to Covid-19 through the lens of infodemics and post-truth. The paper is followed by three open reviews, which further refine its conclusions as they relate to philosophy and the notion of the virus as Pharmakon. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that to tackle social injustice, implicit biases and unjust social structures should be targeted equally because they sustain and ontologically overlap with each other. Here I develop this thought further by relating it to the hypothesis of extended cognition. I argue that if we accept common conditions for extended cognition then people’s implicit biases are often partly realized by and so extended into unjust social structures. This supports the view that we should counteract psychological and (...) social contributors to injustice equally. But it also has a significant downside. If unjust social structures are part of people’s minds then dismantling these structures becomes more difficult than it currently is, as this will then require us to overcome widely accepted ethical and legal barriers protecting people’s bodily and personal integrity. Thus, while there are good grounds to believe that people’s biases and unjust social structures ontologically overlap, there are also strong ethical reasons to reject this view. Metaphysical and ethical intuitions about implicit bias hence collide in an important way. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China;There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds– Gregory Bateson (1972, p. 492)While there are classical anteced...

This article explores the relationships between several notions: the `creative economy'; New Growth Theory and the primacy of ideas; academic entrepreneurship; and the new paradigm of cultural production. Broadly conceptualized, the creative economy links the primacy of ideas in both arts and sciences in a more embedded and social framework of entrepreneurship which positions education as central, since its institutions are the primary knowledge institutions that provide the conditions for the transmission and development of new ideas. Entrepreneurship develops within networks (...) that use new information and communication technologies. The role of the arts, humanities and social sciences becomes re-profiled as crucial in the generation of new ideas within the creative economy, moving discussion and analysis away from a single focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and the hard sciences such that the redesign of institutional/academic environments is necessary in order to capitalize on ideas and move from creativity to systems of innovation. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001712237; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 372-387.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 386-387.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

In my response to the comments of Charley Hardwick, Ann Pederson, and Greg Peterson, I continue the narrative, confessional mode of my writing in Dancing with the Sacred. First, I sketch some methodological decisions underlying my naturalistic, evolutionary, practical theology. I then respond to the encouraging suggestions of my commentators by further developing my ideas about naturalism, mystery, creativity as God, the place of ecological responsibility in my thinking, sin, and eschatology. I offer suggestions as to how I might widen (...) the practical applications of my theology beyond environmental and medical ethics to other areas of moral responsibility in relation to the creative process. I do all this with much appreciation for the care and careful critical reflection that my commentators have devoted to my thinking. (shrink)

By the late 1830s, John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey were discussing the re-introduction of monastic/religious life into the Church of England. Though Newman did not remain in the Church of England long enough to see the full flowering of this effort, his writings as an Anglican theologian reveal that he viewed the monastic/religious life as a central way in which a person could grow in holiness and also a means of fostering the holiness of the Church as a (...) whole. (shrink)