The traditional Turing test appeals to an interrogator's judgement to determine whether or not their interlocutor is an intelligent agent. This paper argues that this kind of asymmetric experimental set-up is inappropriate for tracking a property such as intelligence because intelligence is grounded in part by symmetric relations of recognition between agents. In place, it proposes a reciprocal test which takes into account the judgments of both interrogators and competitors to determine if an agent is intelligent. This form of social (...) interaction better tracks both the evolution of natural intelligence and how the concept of intelligence is actually used within our society. This new test is defended against the criticisms that a proof of intelligence requires a demonstration of self-consciousness and that semantic externalism entails that a non-embodied Turing test is inadequate. (shrink)

According to widely accepted views in metasemantics, the outputs of chatbots and other artificial text generators should be meaningless. They aren’t produced with communicative intentions and the systems producing them are not following linguistic conventions. Nevertheless, chatbots have assumed roles in customer service and healthcare, they are spreading information and disinformation and, in some cases, it may be more rational to trust the outputs of bots than those of our fellow human beings. To account for the epistemic role of chatbots (...) in our society, we need to reconcile these observations. This paper argues that our engagement with chatbots should be understood as a form of prop-oriented make-believe; the outputs of chatbots are literally meaningless but fictionally meaningful. With the make-believe approach, we can understand how chatbots can provide us with knowledge of the world through quasi-testimony while preserving our metasemantic theories. This account also helps to connect the study of chatbots with the epistemology of scientific instruments. (shrink)

Ecofeminist political philosophy is an area of intellectual inquiry that examines the political status of that which we call “nature” using the insights, theoretical tools, and ethical commitments of ecological feminisms and other liberatory theories such as critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, environmental philosophy, and feminism. Ecofeminist political philosophy is concerned with questions regarding the possibilities opened by the recognition of agency and subjectivity for the more-than-human world; and it asks how we can respond politically to the more-than-human (...) world on mutual, dialogical terms. Such philosophy insists that a gendered and liberatory analysis is needed to adequately address the environmental dilemma of how to include nonhuman nature as co-interlocutor in the green public sphere. It also asks critical questions of “traditional” philosophies that exclude the more-than-human world from ethico-political consideration. These themes run throughout the work of three contemporary environmental feminist theorists who compellingly examine the entanglements between concepts and categories of gender, nature, and the political: specifically, the work of ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood, radical democratic theorist Catriona Sandilands, and feminist phenomenologist and philosopher of place Bonnie Mann. Karen Warren’s quilt metaphor shows how such ecofeminist political philosophy fits into the larger tapestry of ecofeminism. (shrink)

Val Plumwood has asserted that the appropriate stance toward the more-than-human world is not one of identification or unity, but of solidarity "in the political sense." But can the language of solidarity be extended or revised to articulate a particular kind of ethico-political relationship between humans and the more-than-human world? Can the term "political solidarity" be accurately and productively used to describe a relationship between humans and the more-than-human world in which humans and non-humans struggle together to alter ecosocially-oppressive states (...) of affairs? What else is at stake in this question? The work of Plumwood prompts ecofeminism to attend to these inquiries. In this essay, the work of Plumwood is brought together with that of feminist political philosopher Sally Scholz, who offers a non-environmental account of political solidarity. This essay shows how both theorists, despite disagreement over whether non-humans can be "in" solidarity with the more-than-human world, intend that the concept of solidarity do the same sort of ethico-political work in achieving mutuality without hegemonic over-identification with the oppressed by the privileged. Then, to examine how solidarity between humans and the more-than-human world works "in action," the essay ends with a brief consideration of the shared political life of human and non-human actors in the direct-action forest defense movement of the Pacific Northwest. (shrink)

None dispute that Aldo Leopold has made an invaluable contribution to environmental discourse. However, it is important for those involved in the field of environmental ethics to be aware that his works may unwittingly promote an attitude of domination toward the nonhuman world, due to his frequent and unregenerate hunting. Such an attitude runs counter to most strains of environmental ethics, but most notably ecofeminism. By examining Leopold through the lens of ecofeminism, I establish that the effect of such narrative (...) is to portray the natural world as an object available for exploitation, thereby casting it as the "other" referred to in feminist writings. Thus I conclude that Leopold's work, if accepted uncritically, may actually reinforce the very notions that have been revealed as damaging to the nature/culture relationship. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the ontological status of linguistic types. According to a widely held view, linguistic types are abstract objects that are instantiated or represented by tokens. The same types might be tokened by both speech, signing and text. This view has implications for how we consider what it is to know a language since knowledge of language is typically taken to be knowledge of linguistic types. We argue below that linguistic types are not abstract objects but (...) action-types and that these action-types are individuated by the capacities that they manifest. The picture that results from this view is that to know a language is to have the capacities required to perform these action-types. (shrink)

This article examines early critiques of ecofeminism, including those usefully articulated by pathfinding ecofeminist philosopher Victoria Davion, and argues that concerns over essentialist tendencies in ecofeminism are misplaced. The article holds that the term "ecofeminism" performs theoretically and politically useful work by allowing us to think of feminism and environmentalism together—the term ought not be jettisoned in favor of other terms such as, for example, environmental feminism. While taking this stance, this article nonetheless explores in depth the productive effects and (...) development of such critiques into the current era of ecofeminist writings and activisms, paying significant attention to the role Davion's ovial 1994 essay "Is Ecofeminism Feminist?" and the other works it inspired have played in indelibly altering ecofeminism for the better, producing a more nuanced theoretical stance regarding gender and ecological degradation and oppression that is now, more than three decades later, shedding important light on specific environmental problems and how such problems are, as all ecofeminisms argue, conceptually and materially connected to social oppressions. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between ecofeminism, food, and the philosophy of place. Using as example my own neighborhood in a racially integrated area of Philadelphia with a thriving local foods movement that nonetheless is nearly exclusively white and in which women are the invisible majority of purchasers, farmers, and preparers, the article examines what ecofeminism contributes to the discussion of racial, gendered, classed discrepancies regarding who does and does not participate in practices of locavorism and the local foods movement (...) more broadly. Ecofeminism, it is argued here, with its focus on the ways that race, class, gender, and place are ontologically entangled, helps to highlight the ways identity and society are made and re-made through our encounters with food. (shrink)

A familiar argument goes as follows: natural languages have infinitely many sentences, finite representation of infinite sets requires recursion; therefore any adequate account of linguistic competence will require some kind of recursive device. The first part of this paper argues that this argument is not convincing. The second part argues that it was not the original reason recursive devices were introduced into generative linguistics. The real basis for the use of recursive devices stems from a deeper philosophical concern; a grammar (...) that functions merely as a metalanguage would not be explanatorily adequate as it would merely push the problem of explaining linguistic competence back to another level. The paper traces this concern from Zellig Harris and Chomsky’s early work in generative linguistics and presents some implications. (shrink)

The method of linguistic palaeontology has a controversial status within archaeology. According to its defenders, it promises the ability to see into the social and material cultures of prehistoric societies and uncover facts about peoples beyond the reach of archaeology. Its critics see it as essentially flawed and unscientific. Using a particular case-study, the Indo-European homeland problem, this paper attempts to discern the kinds of inference which proponents of linguistic palaeontology make and whether they can be warranted. I conclude that, (...) while the case for linguistic palaeontology has often been overstated, so has the case against it. (shrink)

For billions of people, the internet has become a second home. It is where we meet friends and strangers, where we organise and learn, debate, deceive, and do business. In some respects, it is like the town square it was once claimed to be, while in others, it provides a strange new mode of interaction whose influence on us we are yet to understand. This collection of papers aims to give a short indication of some of the exciting philosophical work (...) being carried out at the moment that addresses the novel aspects of online communication. The topics range from the expressive functions of emoji to the oppressive powers of search engines. (shrink)

Generative linguistics is widely claimed to produce theories at the level of computation in the sense outlined by David Marr. Marr even used generative grammar as an example of a computational level theory. At this level, a theory specifi es a function for mapping one kind of information into another. How this function is computed is then specified at the algorithmic level before an account of how this is algorithm is realised by some physical system is presented at the implementation (...) level. This paper will argue that generative linguistics does not fit anywhere within this framework. We will then look at several ways researchers have attempted to modify either the framework of generative theory to reconcile the two approaches. Finally, it presents and discusses an alternative position, anti-realism about generative grammar. While this position has attracted some recent support, it also runs into some of the problems that earlier modifications faced. (shrink)

The position I defend in this paper is that both prisoners and ex-prisoners, at least within present U.S. society, experience a form of oppression that can be distinguished from that inflicted upon other structurally disadvantaged groups. As a result of these U.S. conditions, I also argue that those who have not been or are not currently incarcerated may possess some unearned advantages, similar to but also different from other forms of privilege, such as those based upon race, class, gender, sexuality, (...) and ability. In the first section, I investigate three definitions of oppression to articulate my thesis of prisoner oppression, using the work of Marilyn Frye, Kenneth Clatterbaugh, and Ann E. Cudd. In the second section, I respond to three objections against my thesis. I conclude in the third section with some thoughts on how the preceding arguments should affect the dominant discourse regarding prison reform and abolition. (shrink)

Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? We answer: it depends. To begin, we clear away some specious arguments surrounding this issue, to make room for the central question: What determines the reference of a name, and under what conditions do names shift reference? We’ll introduce Gareth Evans’s theory of reference, on which a name refers to the dominant source of information in that name’s “dossier,” and we then develop the theory’s notion of dominance. We conclude that whether Muslims’ (...) use of “Allah” co-refers with Christians’ use of “God” depends on how much weight is given to what type of information in the dossiers of these two names, and we offer a two-part test by which the reader can determine whether Muslim and Christian uses of the divine names co-refer: If Christianity were true and Islam false, might “Allah” still refer to God? And: If Islam were true and Christianity false, might “God” still refer to Allah? We explain the implications of your answers to those questions, and we close with a few reflections about what, in addition to reference, might be required for worship, and whether, from a Christian perspective, salvation turns on this issue. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo further delineate risk and resilience factors contributing to trajectories of mental health symptoms experienced by college students through the pandemic.Participantsn = 183 college students.MethodsLinear mixed models examined time effects on depression and anxiety. Propensity-matched subgroups exhibiting “increased” versus “low and stable” depression symptoms from before to after the pandemic-onset were compared on pre-pandemic demographic and psychological factors and COVID-related experiences and coping strategies.ResultsStudents experienced worsening of mental health symptoms throughout the pandemic, particularly during Fall 2020 compared with Fall 2019. (...) The propensity-matched subgroup exhibiting relative resilience reported less alcohol use prior to the pandemic, greater use of active coping strategies, and less of an impact on their college progress.ConclusionsResults point to several potential targets of screening and intervention to decrease residual impacts of the pandemic. (shrink)

Although extensive research has been devoted to public perceptions and acceptance of controversial energy innovations, the perspectives of people developing and implementing such technologies are relatively under-examined. Other industries, such as mining, and social researchers have adopted the term “social licence to operate” (SLO) to conceptualise community–industry relationships. Despite its potential applicability to carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technology, SLO has received very little attention in this context, specifically from an engineering and managerial perspective. The internationally contested nature of (...) CCS highlights the importance of examining how engineers and managers discuss and understand the term SLO. Given the central role of engineers and managers in developing CCS technology and contributing to the creation of the contexts in which people relate to it, knowledge of how they understand their connection to communities impacted by the technology is a key area requiring deve.. (shrink)

Throughout the long history of Classic Maya hieroglyphs, a logosyllabic writing system used from the late first millennium BCE through the mid-second millennium CE in southern Mesoamerica, the most commonly recorded phonetic value was the syllable u (/ʔu/). With over a dozen different u hieroglyphs, Classic Maya scribes had more options for recording /ʔu/ than any other syllable or logograph. Cognitive approaches to writing systems typically attribute graphemic variation (i.e., alternation between signs with equivalent linguistic value) to semantic differences like (...) animacy or to non-linguistic factors like identity. Distribution of Classic Maya u hieroglyphs, however, suggests that morphosyntactic context influenced which grapheme scribes wrote and when. This case suggests that scribal knowledge of Classic Maya hieroglyphs included ideas about writing's relationship to language. It also highlights the cognitive relevance of morphosyntax for a writing system's users as they differentiate among graphic signs with identical linguistic denotation. (shrink)

Virtue ethics seems to be a promising moral theory for understanding and interpreting the development and behavior of artificial moral agents. Virtuous artificial agents would blur traditional distinctions between different sorts of moral machines and could make a claim to membership in the moral community. Accordingly, we investigate the “machine question” by studying whether virtue or vice can be attributed to artificial intelligence; that is, are people willing to judge machines as possessing moral character? An experiment describes situations where either (...) human or AI agents engage in virtuous or vicious behavior and experiment participants then judge their level of virtue or vice. The scenarios represent different virtue ethics domains of truth, justice, fear, wealth, and honor. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that moral attributions are weakened for AIs compared to humans, and the reasoning and explanations for the attributions are varied and more complex. On “relational” views of membership in the moral community, virtuous machines would indeed be included, even if they are indeed weakened. Hence, while our moral relationships with artificial agents may be of the same types, they may yet remain substantively different than our relationships to human beings. (shrink)

Critical realist thought has theorised convincingly that epistemic relativism is constellationally embedded in ontological realism which in turn necessitates judgemental rationality. In social scie...

Background and AimsEnd-of-life discussions can be difficult for seriously ill adolescents and young adults. Researchers aimed to determine whether completing Voicing My CHOiCES —a research-informed advance care planning guide—increased communication with family, friends, or health care providers, and to evaluate the experience of those with whom VMC was shared.MethodsFamily, friends, or HCPs who the AYAs had shared their completed VMC with were administered structured interviews to assess their perception of the ACP discussion, changes in their relationship, conversation quality, and whether (...) the discussion prompted changes in care. Open-ended responses underwent thematic analysis.ResultsOne-month post-completion, 65.1% of AYA had shared VMC completion with a family member, 22.6% with a friend, and 8.9% with an HCP. Among a sample of respondents, family and friends reported a positive change in their relationship with the AYA. Participant descriptions of the experience fell into five themes: positive experience, difficult experience, appreciated a guide to facilitate discussion, provided relief, and created worry/anxiety. Only 1 HCP noted a treatment change. Family, friends, and HCP did not think the AYA would have discussed EoL preferences without completing VMC.ConclusionsVMC has potential to enhance communication about ACP between AYA and their family and friends, though less frequently with HCPs. Participants reported a positive change in their relationship with the AYA after discussing VMC, and described experiencing the conversation as favorable, even when also emotionally difficult. (shrink)

This paper suggests philosophical foundations for mixed methods research based on the philosophy of critical realism. In particular, it suggests that the critical realist idea of the primacy of ontology helps bridge the apparent paradigmatic gap between qualitative and quantitative research. It illustrates this foundational idea by showing why and how a multi-disciplinary team used a mixed methods approach to understand the significance of religion in prison through a multi-site study of religious conversion to Islam in prison and how this (...) gives a better account than a single method approach. The mixed method research design used in the project sets out a new way of mapping and understanding religious conversion and differences within a faith group that draws on the emancipatory potential of critical realist thought. (shrink)

Negotiation is a complex and dynamic decision process during which parties perceptions, preferences, and roles may change. Modelling such a process requires flexible and powerful tools. The use of rule-based formalism is therefore expanded from its traditional expert system type technique, to structuring and restructuring non-trivial processes like negotiation. Using rules we build a model of a negotiation problem. Some rules are used to infer positions and reactions of the parties, other rules are used to modify problem representation when such (...) a modification is necessary. We illustrate the approach with a contract negotiation case between two large companies. We also show how this approach could help one party to realize that negotiations are being carried on against their assumptions and expectations. (shrink)

Lieder and Griffiths rightly urge that computational cognitive models be constrained by resource usage, but they should go further. The brain's primary function is to regulate resource usage. As a consequence, resource usage should not simply select among algorithmic models of “aspects of cognition.” Rather, “aspects of cognition” should be understood as existing in the service of resource management.

Building on the insights of the late Roy Bhaskar and the late Roger Matthews, as well as some recent developments in ultra-realist criminology, this article introduces and delineates some core inte...

Background: Managing HIV treatment is a complex multi-dimensional task because of a combination of factors such as stigma and discrimination of some populations who frequently get infected with HIV. In addition, patient-provider encounters have become increasingly multicultural, making effective communication and provision of ethically sound care a challenge. Purpose: This article explores ethical issues that health service providers in the United States and Botswana encountered in their interaction with patients in HIV care. Research design: A descriptive qualitative design was used (...) to collect data from health service providers and patients using focused group discussions. This article is based on responses from health service providers only. Participants and context: This article is based on 11 focused group discussions with a total sample of 71 service providers in seven US sites and one Botswana site. Ethical considerations: Ethical review boards at all the study sites reviewed the study protocol and approved it. Ethical review boards of the study’s coordinating centers, Rutgers University and the University of California at San Francisco, also approved it. The study participants provided a written informed consent to participate. Findings: HIV service providers encountered ethical challenges in all the four Beauchamp and Childress’ biomedical ethics of respect for patients’ autonomy, beneficence, justice, and nonmaleficence. Discussion: The finding that HIV service providers encounter ethical challenges in their interaction with patients is supported by prior studies. The ethical challenges are particularly prominent in multicultural care and resource-constrained care environments. Conclusion: Provision of HIV care is fraught with ethical challenges that tend to pose different issues depending on a given care environment. It is important that strong partnerships are developed among key stakeholders in HIV care. In addition, health service providers need to be provided with resources so they can provide quality and ethically sound care. (shrink)

BackgroundThe pursuit of a cure for HIV is a high priority for researchers, funding agencies, governments and people living with HIV (PLWH). To date, over 250 biomedical studies worldwide are or have been related to discovering a safe, effective, and scalable HIV cure, most of which are early translational research and experimental medicine. As HIV cure research increases, it is critical to identify and address the ethical challenges posed by this research.MethodsWe conducted a scoping review of the growing HIV cure (...) research ethics literature, focusing on articles published in English peer-reviewed journals from 2013 to 2021. We extracted and summarized key developments in the ethics of HIV cure research. Twelve community advocates actively engaged in HIV cure research provided input on this summary and suggested areas warranting further ethical inquiry and foresight via email exchange and video conferencing.DiscussionDespite substantial scholarship related to the ethics of HIV cure research, additional attention should focus on emerging issues in six categories of ethical issues: (1) social value (ongoing and emerging biomedical research and scalability considerations); (2) scientific validity (study design issues, such as the use of analytical treatment interruptions and placebos); (3) fair selection of participants (equity and justice considerations); (4) favorable benefit/risk balance (early phase research, benefit-risk balance, risk perception, psychological risks, and pediatric research); (5) informed consent (attention to language, decision-making, informed consent processes and scientific uncertainty); and (6) respect for enrolled participants and community (perspectives of people living with HIV and affected communities and representation).ConclusionHIV cure research ethics has an unfinished agenda. Scientific research and bioethics should work in tandem to advance ethical HIV cure research. Because the science of HIV cure research will continue to rapidly advance, ethical considerations of the major themes we identified will need to be revisited and refined over time. (shrink)

Mallory Smith’s posthumously published book, Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life, is an insightful and moving account of one young woman’s experience living with a chronic, often invisible, illness.1 Mallory was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at age three and began writing in a journal when she was 15. According to those close to her, Mallory wrote consistently over the span of 10 years, until shortly before she died at age 25 from complications related to a (...) double lung transplant. Much of what Mallory included in her journal was too difficult for her to share with family and friends while she was alive, yet she hoped that her writing would one day “offer insight for people living with, or loving someone with, chronic illness.” (page x) As Mallory explained, “I want to create a piece so moving that people are in disbelief. And I want it to be like handing people a pair of glasses, giving them a way of seeing something they didn’t even realize they weren’t seeing.” (page 291) Shortly before Mallory died, she shared the password to her 2,500-page journal with her mother, along with instructions for how to select excerpts for what would become Salt in My Soul. (shrink)

Selfridge is a corporate administrator for the Resources Development Administration (RDA) Corporation. Selfridges's dastardly deeds on behalf of RDA shareholders would be denounced by a variety of ethical umpires, religious and secular. But maybe such denunciations are beside the point. The RDA unleashes torrential firepower on Hometree to gain access to unobtanium, a priceless mineral. This destruction of a culture for profits screams immorality. Selfridge accepts his prime directive to be the maximization of RDA profits by any means (...) necessary. “Their damn village happens to be resting on the richest unobtanium deposit within 200 klicks in any direction,” grumbles Selfridge, who wants the priceless rocks underneath Hometree. Philosophers generally think that a being has natural rights by virtue of possessing certain traits, such as consciousness, self‐awareness, creativity, willfulness, or rationality. Tragically, human beings can drift from their moral values, especially when they act as members of groups. (shrink)