This article compares the work, careers, and social values of French engineers employed in traditional and science-based industries. Based on field research and 129 interviews in a metal-working factory and an electronics firm, it first presents a critique of three influential approaches to technical workers: the theories of professionalization, proletarianization, and a "new working class." It then develops the central argu ment : that market situations—especially markets for technical skills—have greater explanatory power than usually recognized and that the evolving structure (...) of technical careers is a nationally distinctive product of society-specific educational and employment institutions. (shrink)

Propositionalism is the view that intentional attitudes, such as belief, are relations to propositions. Propositionalists argue that propositionalism follows from the intuitive validity of certain kinds of inferences involving attitude reports. Jubien (2001) argues powerfully against propositions and sketches some interesting positive proposals, based on Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment, about how to accommodate “propositional phenomena” without appeal to propositions. This paper argues that none of Jubien’s proposals succeeds in accommodating an important range of propositional phenomena, such as the (...) aforementioned validity of attitude-report inferences. It then shows that the notion of a predication act-type, which remains importantly Russellian in spirit, is sufficient to explain the range of propositional phenomena in question, in particular the validity of attitude-report inferences. The paper concludes with a discussion of whether predication act-types are really just propositions by another name. (shrink)

I claim that our desire to be special motivates us to suppose that if we were not God created, we must be self-created. I also claim that Stephen J Gould's claims about punctuated equilibrium, the absence of directional selection, and exaptations, when taken together, lead to kind of secular creationism. I introduce the notion of “adaptive effects” and argue that a focus on the actual physiological and psychological mechanisms that produce adaptations provides a way out of the exaptation dilemma.

Creations of the Mind presents sixteen original essays by theorists from a wide variety of disciplines who have a shared interest in the nature of artifacts and their implications for the human mind. All the papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics concerned with the metaphysics of artifacts, our concepts of artifacts and the categories that they represent, the emergence of an understanding of artifacts in infants' cognitive development, as well as the (...) evolution of artifacts and the use of tools by non-human animals. This volume will be a fascinating resource for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists, and the starting point for future research in the study of artifacts and their role in human understanding, development, and behaviour.Contributors: John R. Searle, Richard E. Grandy, Crawford L. Elder, Amie L. Thomasson, Jerrold Levinson, Barbara C. Malt, Steven A. Sloman, Dan Sperber, Hilary Kornblith, Paul Bloom, Bradford Z. Mahon, Alfonso Caramazza, Jean M. Mandler, Deborah Kelemen, Susan Carey, Frank C. Keil, Marissa L. Greif, Rebekkah S. Kerner, James L. Gould, Marc D. Hauser, Laurie R. Santos, Steven Mithen. (shrink)

Augustine tells us in the Confessions that his reading of Cicero's Hortensius at the age of nineteen aroused in him a burning ‘passion for the wisdom of eternal truth’. He was inspired ‘to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it, and embrace it firmly’. And thus he embarked on his arduous journey to the truth, which was at the same time a conversion to Catholic Christianity, and which culminated twelve years later (...) in his experience in the garden in Milan. (shrink)

In _Real Natures and Familiar Objects_ Crawford Elder defends, with qualifications, the ontology of common sense. He argues that we exist -- that no gloss is necessary for the statement "human beings exist" to show that it is true of the world as it really is -- and that we are surrounded by many of the medium-sized objects in which common sense believes. He argues further that these familiar medium-sized objects not only exist, but have essential properties, which we (...) are often able to determine by observation. The starting point of his argument is that ontology should operate under empirical load -- that is, it should give special weight to the objects and properties that we treat as real in our best predictions and explanations of what happens in the world. Elder calls this presumption "mildly controversial" because it entails that arguments are needed for certain widely assumed positions such as "mereological universalism". Elder begins by defending realism about essentialness. He then defends this view of familiar objects against causal exclusion arguments and worries about vagueness. Finally, he argues that many of the objects in which common sense believes really exist, including artifacts and biological devices shaped by natural selection, and that we too exist, as products of natural selection. (shrink)

This seminal work by political philosopher C.B. Macpherson was first published by the Clarendon Press in 1962, and remains of key importance to the study of liberal-democratic theory half-a-century later. In it, Macpherson argues that the chief difficulty of the notion of individualism that underpins classical liberalism lies in what he calls its "possessive quality" - "its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them." Under such a conception, (...) the essence of humanity becomes freedom from dependence on the wills of others; society is little more than a system of economic relations; and political society becomes a means of safeguarding private property and the system of economic relations rooted in property. As the New Statesman declared: "It is rare for a book to change the intellectual landscape. It is even more unusual for this to happen when the subject is one that has been thoroughly investigated by generations of historians.... Until the appearance of Professor Macpherson's book, it seemed unlikely that anything radically new could be said about so well-worn a topic. The unexpected has happened, and the shock waves are still being absorbed." A new introduction by Frank Cunningham puts the work in a twenty-first-century context. (shrink)

Most contemporary metaphysicians are sceptical about the reality of familiar objects such as dogs and trees, people and desks, cells and stars. They prefer an ontology of the spatially tiny or temporally tiny. Tiny microparticles 'dog-wise arranged' explain the appearance, they say, that there are dogs; microparticles obeying microphysics collectively cause anything that a baseball appears to cause; temporal stages collectively sustain the illusion of enduring objects that persist across changes. Crawford L. Elder argues that all such attempts to (...) 'explain away' familiar objects project downwards, onto the tiny entities, structures and features of familiar objects themselves. He contends that sceptical metaphysicians are thus employing shadows of familiar objects, while denying that the entities which cast those shadows really exist. He argues that the shadows are indeed really there, because their sources - familiar objects - are mind-independently real. (shrink)

By looking at the politics of classification within machine learning systems, this article demonstrates why the automated interpretation of images is an inherently social and political project. We begin by asking what work images do in computer vision systems, and what is meant by the claim that computers can “recognize” an image? Next, we look at the method for introducing images into computer systems and look at how taxonomies order the foundational concepts that will determine how a system interprets the (...) world. Then we turn to the question of labeling: how humans tell computers which words will relate to a given image. What is at stake in the way AI systems use these labels to classify humans, including by race, gender, emotions, ability, sexuality, and personality? Finally, we turn to the purposes that computer vision is meant to serve in our society—the judgments, choices, and consequences of providing computers with these capacities. Methodologically, we call this an archeology of datasets: studying the material layers of training images and labels, cataloguing the principles and values by which taxonomies are constructed, and analyzing how these taxonomies create the parameters of intelligibility for an AI system. By doing this, we can critically engage with the underlying politics and values of a system, and analyze which normative patterns of life are assumed, supported, and reproduced. (shrink)

There are growing discontinuities between the research practices of data science and established tools of research ethics regulation. Some of the core commitments of existing research ethics regulations, such as the distinction between research and practice, cannot be cleanly exported from biomedical research to data science research. Such discontinuities have led some data science practitioners and researchers to move toward rejecting ethics regulations outright. These shifts occur at the same time as a proposal for major revisions to the Common Rule—the (...) primary regulation governing human-subjects research in the USA—is under consideration for the first time in decades. We contextualize these revisions in long-running complaints about regulation of social science research and argue data science should be understood as continuous with social sciences in this regard. The proposed regulations are more flexible and scalable to the methods of non-biomedical research, yet problematically largely exclude data science methods from human-subjects regulation, particularly uses of public datasets. The ethical frameworks for Big Data research are highly contested and in flux, and the potential harms of data science research are unpredictable. We examine several contentious cases of research harms in data science, including the 2014 Facebook emotional contagion study and the 2016 use of geographical data techniques to identify the pseudonymous artist Banksy. To address disputes about application of human-subjects research ethics in data science, critical data studies should offer a historically nuanced theory of “data subjectivity” responsive to the epistemic methods, harms and benefits of data science and commerce. (shrink)

What is knowledge? How hard is it for a person to have knowledge? Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge confronts contemporary philosophical attempts to answer those classic questions, offering a theory of knowledge that is unique in conceiving of knowledge in a non-absolutist way.

What is it to suspend judgment about whether p? Much of the recent work on the nature and normative profile of suspending judgment aims to analyze it as a kind of doxastic attitude. On some of these accounts, suspending judgment about whether p partly consists in taking up a certain higher-order belief about one's deficient epistemic position with respect to whether p. On others, suspending judgment about whether p consists in taking up a sui generis attitude, one that takes the (...) question of whether p? as its content. In this paper, I defend an account on which suspending judgment about whether p is not a matter of taking up a doxastic attitude, but rather a way of intentionally omitting to judge whether p. I then close with a discussion of how an account like mine, which sees suspending judgment as fundamentally practical, rather than doxastic, can accommodate what appear to be distinctively epistemic reasons to suspend judgment. (shrink)

This paper explores how political theory may help us map algorithmic logics against different visions of the political. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s theories of agonistic pluralism, this paper depicts algorithms in public life in ten distinct scenes, in order to ask the question, what kinds of politics do they instantiate? Algorithms are working within highly contested online spaces of public discourse, such as YouTube and Facebook, where incompatible perspectives coexist. Yet algorithms are designed to produce clear “winners” from information contests, (...) often with little visibility or accountability for how those contests are designed. In isolation, many of these algorithms seem the opposite of agonistic: much of the complexity of search, ranking, and recommendation algorithms is nonnegotiable and kept far from view, inside an algorithmic “black box.” But what if we widen our perspective? This paper suggests agonistic pluralism as both a design ideal for engineers and a provocation to understand algorithms in a broader social context: rather than focusing on the calculations in isolation, we need to account for the spaces of contestation where they operate. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that disability is typically a bad thing for those who are disabled. Our purpose in this essay is to critique this view and defend a more nuanced picture of the relationship between disability and well-being. We first examine four interpretations of the above view and argue that it is false on each interpretation. We then ask whether disability is thereby a neutral trait. Our view is that most disabilities are neutral in one sense, though we cannot (...) make simple generalizations about disability's relationship to well-being in other important senses. After defending this view, we discuss its practical implications for selective abortion for disability, nondisabled people's interactions with disabled people, and the use of QALYs in health policy. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that friendship can normatively require us to have certain beliefs about our friends that epistemic norms would prohibit. On this view, we ought to exhibit some degree of doxastic partiality toward our friends, by having certain generally favorable beliefs and doxastic dispositions that concern our friends that we would not have concerning relevantly similar non-friends. Can friendship genuinely make these normative demands on our beliefs, in ways that would conflict with what we epistemically ought to believe? On (...) a widely influential evidentialist approach to thinking about epistemic norms, friendship cannot normatively require things of our beliefs, because friendship cannot generate reasons for belief. And this is due, in part, to the alleged fact that we are incapable of forming beliefs directly in response to, or on the basis of, non-epistemic reasons. In this paper, I argue that this evidentialist response to alleged cases of conflict between friendship and epistemic norms fails. Instead, I argue that friendship cannot generate reasons for belief due to an underappreciated feature of friendship: that being a good friend constitutively involves forming attitudes about one’s friends that are appropriately responsive to the features that one’s friends have that appear to warrant those attitudes. I argue that this feature of friendship helps explain why friendship cannot give us reasons to have beliefs that are doxastically partial. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He is a central figure of modern philosophy, and set the terms by which all subsequent thinkers have had to grapple. He argued that human perception structures natural laws, and that reason is the source of morality. His thought continues to hold a major influence in contemporary thought, especially in fields such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.

According to Russellianism (or Millianism), the two sentences ‘Ralph believes George Eliot is a novelist’ and ‘Ralph believes Mary Ann Evans is a novelist’ cannot diverge in truth-value, since they express the same proposition. The problem for the Russellian (or Millian) is that a puzzle of Kaplan’s seems to show that they can diverge in truth-value and that therefore, since the Russellian holds that they express the same proposition, the Russellian view is contradictory. I argue that the standard Russellian appeal (...) to “ways of thinking” or “propositional guises” is not necessary to solve the puzzle. Rather than this retrograde concession to Fregeanism, appeal should be made to second-order belief. The puzzle is solved, and the contradiction avoided, by maintaining that both sentences are indeed true in addition to the sentence ‘Ralph (mistakenly) believes that he does not believe Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot is a novelist’. (shrink)

Sean Crawford; Discussions: In Defence of Object-Dependent Thoughts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 98, Issue 1, 1 June 1998, Pages 201–210, ht.

Health Humanities draws upon the multiple and expanding fields of enquiry that link health and social care disciplines with the arts and humanities. It aims to encourage innovation and novel cross-disciplinary explorations of how the arts and humanities can inform and transform healthcare, health and wellbeing among researchers, practitioners and the public. It foregrounds a range of scholarship and innovative practice in this field. Through the development of critique and critical theory, it enables readers to question not only current practice (...) in medical and health humanities but also foundational assumptions of healthcare, health and wellbeing. Suitable for students and scholars working in this exciting interdisciplinary field, this book sets out the context for an emergent and innovative field. (shrink)

This paper argues that typical biological species are natural kinds, on a familiar realist understanding of natural kinds—classes of individuals across which certain properties cluster together, in virtue of the causal workings of the world. But the clustering is far from exceptionless. Virtually no properties, or property-combinations, characterize every last member of a typical species—unless they can also appear outside the species. This motivates some to hold that what ties together the members of a species is the ability to interbreed, (...) others that it is common descent. Yet others hold that species are scattered individuals,of which organisms are parts rather than members. But not one of these views absolves us of the need to posit a typical phenotypic profile. Vagueness is here to stay. Some seek to explain the vagueness by saying species are united by “homeostatic property clusters”; but this view collapses into the more familiar realist picture. (shrink)

The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it is misleading, as it is (...) founded in erroneous intensional misreadings of the logical positivists’—especially Carnap’s—extensional notions of translation and meaning, as well as misinterpretations of the positivists’ shift from the strong thesis of translation-physicalism to the weaker and more liberal notion of reduction-physicalism that occurred in the Unity of Science programme. After setting the historical record straight, the essay traces the first truly modern identity theory to Schlick’s pre-positivist views circa 1920 and goes on to explore its further development in Feigl, arguing that the fundamental difference between the Schlick-Feigl identity theory and the more familiar and influential Place-Smart-Armstrong identity theory has resurfaced in the deep and seemingly unbridgeable gulf in contemporary philosophy of consciousness between inflationary mentalism and deflationary physicalism. (shrink)

What is it for a _belief_ to wrong someone? Views that have largely shaped the recent literature on doxastic wronging maintain that beliefs that wrong do so in virtue of _what_ is believed. This paper offers some criticisms of these views, as well as a contractualist alternative. On the view I defend here, beliefs can wrong when they stem from inferences licensed by principles to which others would have sufficiently weighty objections. Doxastic wronging, on this account, is not (or is (...) not entirely) a matter of having beliefs with certain kinds of objectionable representational content, but rather a matter of our being unable to _morally justify_ our beliefs to others. (shrink)

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language is concerned with the years 1865 through Winter/Spring 1870-71. Four texts of Nietzsche's, "Vom Ursprung der Sprache", "Zur Teleologie", "Zu Schopenhauer", and "Anschauung Notes", are translated into English and interpreted from the perspective of Nietzsche's developing theory of language. An examination of the major influences of Schopenhauer, Kant, Eduard von Hartmann, and Frederick A. Lange are pursued. ;Theory, in this work, does not assume that it is possible to take a position of authority (...) or truth in the interpretation of texts, rather that interpretation of texts constitutes an attempt to uncover a discursive practice, to describe a discourse-object. The method used is Nietzsche's method of genealogy, which follows the formation of discourse, at once scattered, discontinuous, and regular and analyzes the process of rarefaction, consolidation and unification in that discourse. Genealogy is exegesis in Nietzsche's sense of it as rumination, as the slow, repetitive, gray activity of deciphering what is documented. Major genealogical nodes or elements of Nietzsche's beginning theory of language are used and reused in different contexts throughout the work, resulting in a cumulative effect which explores specific elements in Nietzsche's thinking about language. ;This work offers five major contributions to Nietzsche studies: a detailed introduction of the significant influence of Eduard von Hartmann upon Nietzsche's thinking; a comprehensive look at the influence of Lange's History of Materialism upon Nietzsche's beginning theory of language; a thorough analysis of "Zur Teleologie" and "Zu Schopenhauer" in the overall contexts of Nietzsche's thinking with regard to metaphysics and teleology; the gathering together and interpretation into a world view of the "Anschauung Notes"; and a close examination of Nietzsche's breaking away from Schopenhauer as it takes place before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. ;Nietzsche's primary contributions to a theory of language in these beginning years are three: the adoption of the role of the unconscious instincts in the origins and ongoing production of language; the assertion that unconscious thought processes are a precondition for conscious thought; an examination of the relationships of language to epistemology, which results in the recognition of the limits of language as an instrument of truth, but a realization of the inestimable value and force of its symbolic and figurative aspects, aspects necessitated by the very nature of language itself. (shrink)

Emotional experiences are often described in metaphoric language. A major question in linguistics and cognitive science is whether such metaphoric linguistic expressions reflect a deeper principle of cognition. Are abstract concepts structured by the embodied, sensorimotor domains that we use to describe them? This review presents the argument for conceptual metaphors of affect and summarizes recent findings from empirical studies. These findings show that, consistent with the conceptual metaphor account, the associations between affect and physical domains such as spatial position, (...) musical pitch, brightness, and size which are captured in linguistic metaphors also influence performance on attention, memory and judgment tasks. Despite this evidence, a number of concerns with metaphor as an account of affect representation are considered. (shrink)

Quine introduced a famous distinction between the ‘notional’ sense and the ‘relational’ sense of certain attitude verbs. The distinction is both intuitive and sound but is often conflated with another distinction Quine draws between ‘dyadic’ and ‘triadic’ (or higher degree) attitudes. I argue that this conflation is largely responsible for the mistaken view that Quine’s account of attitudes is undermined by the problem of the ‘exportation’ of singular terms within attitude contexts. Quine’s system is also supposed to suffer from the (...) problem of ‘suspended judgement with continued belief’. I argue that this criticism fails to take account of a crucial presupposition of Quine’s about the connection between thought and language. The aim of the paper is to defend the spirit of Quine’s account of attitudes by offering solutions to these two problems. (shrink)

The central dispute between evidentialists and pragmatists about reasons for belief concerns whether or not non-evidential considerations can be reasons for belief. In recent work, some pragmatists about reasons for belief have made their case for pragmatism by appealing, in part, to a broad range of cases in which facts about one’s relationships with significant others (friends, romantic partners, and the like) appear to give one non-evidential reasons to have beliefs skewed in their favor. This chapter explores whether and how (...) such relationships might provide non-evidential reasons for belief. After first making the case against the evidentialist’s claim that there cannot be non-evidential reasons for belief, this chapter turns to examine different accounts of how our personal relationships might ground reasons for doxastic partiality. These are accounts on which reasons for doxastic partiality are grounded in facts about what attitudes are partly constitutive of being a good significant other to someone, and accounts on which reasons for doxastic partiality are grounded in reasons, more broadly, to benefit one’s significant others. This chapter argues that our personal relationships do not provide non-evidential reasons for belief, even if the pragmatist is right that there can be non-evidential reasons for belief. (shrink)

Explores contemporary controversies in bioethics from a Hindu perspective. S. Cromwell Crawford breaks new ground in this provocative study of Hindu bioethics in a Western setting. He provides a new moral and philosophical perspective on fascinating and controversial bioethical issues that are routinely in the news: cloning, genetic engineering, the human genome project, reproductive technologies, the end of life, and many more. This Hindu perspective is particularly noteworthy because of India's own indigenous medical system, which is stronger than ever (...) and drawing continued interest from the West. The Hindu bioethics presented in this book are philosophically pluralistic and ethically contextual, giving them that conceptual flexibility which is often missing in Western religions, but which is demanded by the twenty-first century's complex moral problems. Comprehensive in scope and passionate in nature, Crawford's study is an important resource for analyses of practical ethics, bioethics, and health care. (shrink)

This paper opposes universal mereological composition (UMC). Sider defends it: unless UMC were true, he says, it could be indeterminate how many objects there are in the world. I argue that there is no general connection between how widely composition occurs and how many objects there are in the world. Sider fails to support UMC. I further argue that we should disbelieve in UMC objects. Existing objections against them say that they are radically unlike Aristotelian substances. True, but there is (...) a stronger objection. This is that they are characterized by no properties, and so fail to be like anything – even themselves. (shrink)

The body image with respect to physical disability has long been a woefully under-theorized area of scholarship. The literature that does attend to the body image in cases of physical abnormality or functional impairment regularly offer poorly articulated or problematic definitions of the concept, effectively undermining its historic analytic scope and depth. Here, I revisit the epistemic roots of the body image while also engaging the rich contemporary literature from a body studies perspective in order to situate the narratives of (...) amputees about the relationship between dismemberment, prosthetization, phantom limb syndrome, and body image. Stories about living with artificial, fleshy, phantomed, and residual limbs unquestionably reveal a number of peculiarities unique to amputees. However, they also offer a distinctively productive ingress into the analytic utility of a ‘re-visioned’ conceptualization of the body image more broadly speaking. Indeed, the body image can function as a robust investigative tool for exploring the intersubjective, processual, and relational features of embodiment and corporeality. (shrink)