The issue of representing access control requirements continues to demand significant attention. The focus of researchers has traditionally been on developing particular access control models and policy specification languages for particular applications. However, this approach has resulted in an unnecessary surfeit of models and languages. In contrast, we describe a general access control model and a logic-based specification language from which both existing and novel access control models may be derived as particular cases and from which several approaches can be (...) developed for domain-specific applications. We will argue that our general framework has a number of specific attractions and an implication of our work is to encourage a methodological shift from a study of the particulars of access control to its generalities. (shrink)

Digital media seem to be marked by process. The digital image itself is produced by software processes and the constant flux of code. Further this, interaction with digital systems involves a constant process by which a so-called 'user' comes into contact with various machinic occasions. It seems that in light of these processes it is impossible to maintain an aesthetic or media theory that pictures a self-contained and psychologised subject interacting with a static and inert object. How then can we (...) begin to think about digital aesthetics through a process philosophy rather than the traditional and reductive subject/object distinction found in so much aesthetic theory? This paper seeks to address this problem by enacting Alfred Whitehead's process philosophy, informed by Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers and Steve Shaviro and work it through several examples of recent manifestations of interactive media art, including work by Martin Wattenberg, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. I work Whitehead's process philosophy through these artworks to illustrate the performative nature of software processes and the manner in which these processes affect the aesthetics of interaction. I also use these works to illustrate a concept of interaction that privileges process and events rather than a concept that focuses upon an individual human user. In this paper I propose to view the 'user' as a set of occasions – as a particular condition that is produced by various user-initiated actions – rather than an enduring subject that is able to distance herself from the object of aesthetic contemplation. By doing this I move toward a theory in which user-occasions, machine-occasions and their interpenetration actualise the aesthetics of media art. Whitehead allows me to think outside of the binary oppositions that divide the world into knower/known or subject/object relationships. Throughout the argument I unpack Whiteheadian concepts such as actual entities, the unison of immediate becoming and, in general, the primacy of the event, bringing these concepts to bear on individual case studies of interactive media art. Whitehead's general thesis is that materiality and permanence are created by a continual process. Viewing the digital encounter through this theoretical framework I position the aesthetic experience of interaction as that which emerges from the fluctuations of process. The event of interaction is a necessarily hybrid process in which human occasions become supplemented by technology and the aesthetic event becomes innately coupled to the processes of the machine. In this paper I am not interested in any notion of consciousness or a psychologised human 'user', rather I am interested in a particular condition that takes place as user-initiated processes work with machine-initiated processes. This is because, for Whitehead, process comes before consciousness; it is the process of actual entities that prompt the consciousness into being. In this paper I thus propose interaction with digital systems as the commingling of contemporary actual occasions, shifting emphasis from a conscious human user and instead focusing on the process of the encounter that precedes this conscious experience. (shrink)

The most important and exciting recent development in the philosophy of science is its merging with the sociology of scientific knowledge. Here is the first text book to make this development available.

Social thinkers in all fields are faced with one unavoidable question: What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? This ambitious and groundbreaking book provides the first synthesis of historical, philosophical and sociological insights needed to address this question in a thoughtful and creative manner.

Despite Kant's belief in a universal causal determinism among phenomena and his rejection of any noumenal agency in brutes, he nevertheless rejected Descartes's hypothesis that brutes are machines. Explaining Kant's response to Descartes forms the basis for this discussion of the nature of consciousness and matter in Kant's system. Kant's numerous remarks on animal psychology-as found in his lecture notes and reflections on metaphysics and anthropology-suggest a theory of consciousness and self-consciousness at odds with that traditionally ascribed to him.

In the face of argument to the contrary, it is shown that there is defensible middle ground available for entity realism, between the extremes of scientific realism and empiricist antirealism. Cartwright's ([1983]) earlier argument for defensible middle ground between these extremes, which depended crucially on the viability of an underdeveloped distinction between inference to the best explanation (IBE) and inference to the most probable cause (IPC), is examined and its defects are identified. The relationship between IBE and IPC is clarified (...) and a revised version of Cartwright's argument for defensible middle ground, which is free of the identified defects, is presented. (shrink)

Standard epistemology takes it for granted that there is a special kind of value: epistemic value. This claim does not seem to sit well with act utilitarianism, however, since it holds that only welfare is of real value. I first develop a particularly utilitarian sense of “epistemic value”, according to which it is closely analogous to the nature of financial value. I then demonstrate the promise this approach has for two current puzzles in the intersection of epistemology and value theory: (...) first, the problem of why knowledge is better than mere true belief, and second, the relation between epistemic justification and responsibility. (shrink)

Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action’s intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people’s intentionality judgments. His and other researchers’ studies suggested that blameworthy actions are considered intentional even when the agent lacks skill (e.g., killing somebody with a lucky shot) whereas equivalent neutral actions are not (e.g., luckily hitting a bull’s-eye). The present five studies offer an (...) alternative account of these provocative findings. We suggest that people see the morally significant action examined in previous studies (killing) as accomplished by a basic action (pressing the trigger) for which an unskilled agent still has sufficient skill. Studies 1 through 3 show that when this basic action is performed unskillfully or is absent, people are far less likely to view the killing as intentional, demonstrating that intentionality judgments, even about immoral actions, are guided by skill information. Studies 4 and 5 further show that a neutral action such as hitting the bull’s-eye is more difficult than killing and that difficult actions are less often judged intentional. When difficulty is held constant, people’s intentionality judgments are fully responsive to skill information regardless of moral valence. The present studies thus speak against the hypothesis of a moral evaluation bias in intentionality judgments and instead document people’s sensitivity to subtle features of human action. (shrink)

This volume explores Science & Technology Studies (STS) and its role in redrawing disciplinary boundaries. For scholars/grad students in rhetoric of science, science studies, philosophy & comm, English, sociology & knowledge mgmt.

Whether it would take one decade or several centuries, many agree that it is possible to create a *superintelligence*---an artificial intelligence with a godlike ability to achieve its goals. And many who have reflected carefully on this fact agree that our best hope for a "friendly" superintelligence is to design it to *learn* values like ours, since our values are too complex to program or hardwire explicitly. But the value learning approach to AI safety faces three particularly philosophical puzzles: first, (...) it is unclear how any intelligent system could learn its final values, since to judge one supposedly "final" value against another seems to require a further background standard for judging. Second, it is unclear how to determine the content of a system's values based on its physical or computational structure. Finally, there is the distinctly ethical question of which values we should best aim for the system to learn. I outline a potential answer to these interrelated puzzles, centering on a "miktotelic" proposal for blending a complex, learnable final value out of many simpler ones. (shrink)

In distributing the costs associated with climate change, most scholars have focused exclusively upon mitigation burdens. Few consider the distribution of adaptation costs, which concern projects that seek to minimize harm from human-induced climate change.

This paper outlines the moral contours of human relationships with companion animals. The paper details three sources of duties to and regarding companion animals: (1) from the animal’s status as property, (2) from the animal’s position in relationships of care, love, and dependency, and (3) from the animal’s status as a sentient being with a good of its own. These three sources of duties supplement one another and not only differentiate relationships with companion animals from wild animals and other categories (...) of domestic animals such as livestock, but they also overlap to provide moral agents with additional reasons for preventing and avoiding harm to companion animals. The paper concludes that not only do owners and bystanders have direct and indirect duties to protect companion animals from harm, but also that these duties have the potential, in some circumstances, to clash with duties owed to the state and fellow citizens. (shrink)

The integral consciousness -- The internal universe -- The evolution of consciousness -- The within of things -- The systemic nature of evolution -- Stages of consciousness and culture -- The spiral of development -- Tribal consciousness -- Warrior consciousness -- Traditional consciousness -- Modernist consciousness -- Postmodern consciousness -- The spiral as a whole -- What is the real evidence for the spiral? -- The integral stage of consciousness -- Life conditions for integral consciousness -- The values of integral (...) consciousness -- Integral consciousness in the context of history -- Practicing the integral lifestylevalue metabolism -- Postintegral consciousness -- Integral politics -- The politics of the spiral -- Integral politics and global governance -- Is global governance an unrealistic fantasy? -- Is global governance too dangerouswhat are the safeguards? -- Global governance and integral consciousness cocreate each other -- Integral spirituality -- The development of spiritual traditions -- Public spirituality in the integral age -- Beauty, truth, and goodnessphilosophical spirituality -- The practice of beauty, truth, and goodness -- The revelation of evolution -- The founders of integral philosophy -- Ken Wilber in context -- The evolution of philosophy as a human endeavor -- Hegel, the first integral philosopher -- Bergson, the first post-darwinian integral philosopher -- Whitehead, spiritual philosopher for the ages -- Teilhard de Chardin, master of the internal universe -- Gebser, prophet of integral consciousness -- Developmental psychology and the mapping of the internal universe -- Habermas, architect of integral foundations -- Wilber, framer of integral philosophys twenty-first-century synthesis -- What I add to integral philosophy -- The integral reality frame -- Metaphysics and the evolution of reality frames -- The integral map of reality -- Integral philosophy and human spirituality -- Some critiques of the integral reality frame -- Structures of the human mind -- Lines of development recognized by psychologists -- Wilber's theory of the lines of development -- A critique of Wilber's theory of developmental lines -- An alternative theory of the structures of consciousness -- The self as a whole -- The directions of evolution -- Evolution and the idea of progress -- Unity, complexity, and consciousness -- Directions of evolution in the internal universe -- The dialectical quality of the master patterns of evolution -- Potential applications of a dialectical understanding of evolution. (shrink)

This paper lays the groundwork for normative-yet-naturalistic social epistemology. I start by presenting two scenarios for the history of epistemology since Kant, one in which social epistemology is the natural outcome and the other in which it represents a not entirely satisfactory break with classical theories of knowledge. Next I argue that the current trend toward naturalizing epistemology threatens to destroy the distinctiveness of the sociological approach by presuming that it complements standard psychological and historical approaches. I then try to (...) reassert, in Comtean fashion, the epistemologist's credentials in regulating knowledge production. Finally, I consider how social epistemology may have something exciting and relevant to say about contemporary debates in the theory of knowledge. (shrink)

This essay introduces a Focus section on “Neurohistory and History of Science” by distinguishing images of the brain as governor and as transducer: the former treat the brain as the executive control center of the body, the latter as an interface between the organism and reality at large. Most of the consternation expressed in the symposium about the advent of neurohistory derives from the brain-as-governor conception, which is rooted in a “biologistic” understanding of humanity that in recent years has become (...) bound up in various nefarious “neoliberal” political and economic agendas. However, given the sophisticated attitude that neurohistory’s leading champion, Daniel Smail, displays toward evolutionary theory’s potential impact on historical practice, he is perhaps better understood as part of the brain-as-transducer tradition. This tradition, largely suppressed in current representations of neuroscience, has a strong theological provenance, ultimately concerned with our becoming attuned to the divine frequency, not least by extending the powers of the human nervous system through technology. This essay sympathetically explores the implications of this perspective for historical practice. (shrink)

This book explores whether and how religious and secular worldviews and political ideologies held by scientists, citizens, decision-makers and politicians influence science as practiced and understood today. In this book, customized science is defined as a science built according to - or altered and fitted to - a particular group's specifications, that is, its needs, interests or values, its political ideology or worldview. It is science governed not merely by goals such as increased knowledge and explanatory power, but also by (...) goals such as economic growth, sustainable development, the equality of women or the end of religion. The contributions to this book discuss, with regard to particular worldviews and themes connected to the public role of science, whether science is increasingly becoming customized to fit the needs and interests of various groups in society, but also what the consequences of such a development may be both for science and society. (shrink)

Many research-intensive universities have moved into the business of promoting technology development that promises revenue, impact, and legitimacy. While the scholarship on academic capitalism has documented the general dynamics of this institutional shift, we know less about the ground-level challenges of research priority and scientific problem choice. This paper unites the practice tradition in science and technology studies with an organizational analysis of decision-making to compare how two university artificial intelligence labs manage ambiguities at the edge of scientific knowledge. One (...) lab focuses on garnering funding through commercialization schemes, while the other is oriented to federal science agencies. The ethnographic comparison identifies the mechanisms through which an industry-oriented lab can be highly adventurous yet produce a research program that is thin and erratic due to a priority placed on commercialization. However, the comparison does not yield an implicit nostalgia for federalized science; it reveals the mechanisms through which agency-oriented labs can pursue a thick and consistent research portfolio but in a strikingly myopic fashion. (shrink)

Whereas many constructivist and feminist approaches to the social study of technology share an antipathy to technological tietenninism, they offer an insufficiently radical critique of technolagy. Three main problems in "anti-essentialist" critiques of techno logical determinism are identified, all of which mean that such critiques remain committed to a form of essentialism. These characteristics recur in many recent feminist arguments about technology, illustrated by the example of reproductive technologies. To overcome weaknesses in political radicalism based on anti-essentialism, it is necessary (...) to move to a "past-essentialist" approach. The unwillingness to do so is shown to be based on unfounded objections to "excessive" relativism. (shrink)

This article addresses the relationship between understanding and believing from the cognitive perspective of information-processing. I promote, within the scope of the Critical Discourse Analysis agenda, the relevance of an account of belief-fixation sustained by a combination of argumentative and cognitive insights. To this end, I first argue that discursive strategies fulfilling legitimization purposes, such as evidentials, tap into the same cognitive mechanisms as arguments. I then proceed to examine the idea that the most effective arguments are the ones that (...) manage to obscure or make irrelevant counter-evidence and propose, from a cognitive pragmatic perspective, a formulation of rhetorical effectiveness as a constraint on information-selection taking place at the interpretation stage and decisively influencing the evaluation stage responsible for belief-fixation. (shrink)

Defining privacy is problematic because the condition of privacy appears simultaneously to require separation from others, and the possibility of choosing not to be separate. This latter feature expresses the inherent normative dimension of privacy: the capacity to control the perceptual and informational spaces surrounding one’s person. Clearly the features of separation and control as just described are in tension because one may easily enough choose to give up all barriers between oneself and the public space. How could the capacity (...) for privacy give rise to its absence? Yet both the separation and control features of privacy do seem indispensable to any sensible understanding of it. In this paper I set out an approach to defining privacy that keeps these features and avoids the tension between them. (shrink)

I believe that tenured historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science—when presented with the opportunity—have a professional obligation to get involved in public controversies over what should count as science. I stress ‘tenured’ because the involved academics need to be materially protected from the consequences of their involvement, given the amount of misrepresentation and abuse that is likely to follow, whatever position they take. Indeed, the institution of academic tenure justifies itself most clearly in such heat-seeking situations, where one may appear (...) to offer a reasoned defense for views that many consider indefensible. To be sure, the opportunities for involvement will vary in kind and number, but I believe that we are obliged to embrace them. In the specific case of ‘demarcation’ questions of what counts as science, the people who possess the sort of general and comparative knowledge most relevant for adducing this matter are historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science—not professional scientists unschooled in these areas.. (shrink)

Nearly thirty years after the first stirrings of the Kuhnian revolution, history and philosophy of science continues to galvanize methodological discussions in all corners of the academy except its own. Evidence for this domestic stagnation appears in Warren Schmaus's thoughtful review of Social Epistemology in which Schmaus takes for granted that history of science is the ultimate court of appeal for disputes between philosophers and sociologists. As against this, this essay argues that such disputes may be better treated by experimental (...) psychology. Humanistic methods typically (though not always) blind the historian to cognitive biases and limitations that make it difficult for philosophers and sociologists to mobilize historical research for settling their differences. It is also observed that the failure of philosophers to incorporate the methods and findings of experiemental psychology is symptomatic of an artificially restrictive understanding of the normative dimension of their enterprise. (shrink)

The ArgumentI argue that “social epistemology” can be usefully reformulated as a philosophy of science accounting, specifically one that fosters a critical form of instrumental rationality. I begin by observing that philosophical and sociological species of “science accountancy” can be compared along two dimensions; constructive versus deconstve; reflexive versus unreflexive. The social epistemologist proposes a constructive and reflixive accounting for science. This possibility has been obscured, probably because of the persuasiveness of the Frankfulrt School's portrayal of “critical” and “instrumental” rationalities (...) as polar opposites. In challenging this polarity, I present four “acciybtability conditions” that define pure critico-instrumental rationality. These conditions are most likely to be met during a period of“crisis” in the future direction of science. The bulk of the paper concerns case study of such a crisis that enables us to examine contrasting ways of meeting the four conditions. Ernst Mach and Max Planck debated“the end of science” in the first decade of this century, a time marked by both science's increasing involvement in the means of social reproduction and prowing concern that science pursued for its own sake was exhibiting diminishing margianl returns on investment. In analyzing Planck's victory, I conclude that its tegacy has been an ever-widenig gap between the“content” and“function” of scientific knowledge in society, as measured by the increasing numbers of jobs that are devoted to mediating the production and distribution of knowledge. (shrink)

Social persons routinely tell themselves and others richly elaborated autobiographical stories filled with details about deeds, plans, roles, motivations, values, and character. Saul, let us imagine, is someone who once sailed the world as a young adventurer, going from port to port and living a gypsy existence. In telling his new acquaintance, Jess, of his former exotic life, he shines a light on his present character and this may guide to some extent their interaction here and now. Perhaps Jess also (...) spent time at one of these port locations; perhaps their paths might even have crossed. They might be drawn into recounting some common events that indeed do establish a common link. Did they visit a certain famous landmark? Did they meet up at the same bars? And so on. When we open up to friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and close others through the stories we tell them, we do so by revealing bits of ourselves. (shrink)

In the twentieth century, philosophy came to be dominated by the English-speaking world, first Britain and then the United States. Accompanying this development was an unprecedented professionalization and specialization of the discipline, the consequences of which are surveyed and evaluated in this article. The most general result has been a decline in philosophy's normative mission, which roughly corresponds to the increasing pursuit of philosophy in isolation from public life and especially other forms of inquiry, including ultimately its own history. This (...) is how the author explains the increasing tendency, over the past quarter-century, for philosophy to embrace the role of "underlaborer" for the special sciences. Indicative of this attitude is the long-term popularity of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that fields reach maturity when they forget their past and focus on highly specialized problems. In conclusion, the author recalls the history of philosophy that, following Kuhn's advice, has caused us to forget, namely, the fate of Neo-Kantianism in the early twentieth century. Key Words: analytic philosophy • normative • positivism • pragmatism • professionalism • underlaborer. (shrink)

Bostrom and Ord’s reversal test has been appealed to by many philosophers to substantiate the charge that preferences for status quo options are motivated by status quo bias. I argue that their characterization of the reversal test needs to be modified, and that their description of the burden of proof it imposes needs to be clarified. I then argue that there is a way to meet that burden of proof which Bostrom and Ord fail to recognize. I also argue that (...) the range of circumstances in which the reversal test can be usefully applied is narrower than they recognize. (shrink)

A rise of academic capitalism over the past four decades has been well documented within many research-intensive universities. Largely missing, however, are in-depth studies of how particularly situated academic groups manage the uncertainties that come with intermittent and fickle commercial funding streams in their daily research practice and problem choice. To capture the strategies scientists adopt under these conditions, this article provides an ethnographically detailed (and true) story about how a single project in Artificial Intelligence grew over several years from (...) a peripheral idea to the very center of an academic lab’s commercial portfolio. The analysis theorizes an epistemic form—nimble knowledge production—and documents three of its lab-level features: 1) rapid prototyping to keep sunk costs low, 2) shared search for “real world problems” rather than “theoretical” ones, and 3) nimble commitment to research problem choice. While similar forms of academic knowledge transfer have been lauded as “mode 2,” “innovative,” or “hybrid” for initiating cross-institutional collaboration and pushing science beyond disciplinary silos, this case suggests it can rely on fleeting attention to problems resistant to a quick fix. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's recent death has unleashed a strikingly mixed judgment of his philosophical legacy, ranging from claims to originality to charges of charlatanry. What is clear, however, is Rorty's role in articulating a distinctive American voice in the history of philosophy. He achieved this not only through his own wide-ranging contributions but also by repositioning the pragmatists, especially William James and John Dewey, in the philosophical mainstream. Rorty did for the United States what Hegel and Heidegger had done for Germany—to (...) portray his nation as philosophy's final resting place. He was helped by postwar German philosophers like Jürgen Habermas who were happy to defer to their American conquerors. Rorty's philosophical method can be understood as a sublimation of America's world-historic self-understanding: a place suspicious of foreigners unless they are willing to blend into the "melting pot." In retrospect, the breadth and confidence of Rorty's writing will come to symbolize the moment when the United States, for better or worse, came to be the world's dominant philosophical power. Key Words: Rorty • pragmatism • logical positivism • analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The Sophists, and the Socratic response they provoked, are considered in order to elucidate issues raised by present-day skill-talk. These issues include: whether skills avoid questions of ends and truth; the existence of general skills, such as critical thinking; the importance of knowledge; skills and the personality; and some implications for teaching and philosophy.

On the ten year anniversary of 2Girls1Cup, this article examines the complex balance of shock, pleasure and disgust elicited by this viral video.

As Darrel Moellendorf observes in Mobilizing Hope, climate change and poverty are intertwined in various ways, including the facts that climate impacts threaten to exacerbate global poverty as well...