I will argue (contra Carruthers) that accepting natural language as the format of many of our thoughts should entail accepting a version of Whorfian relativism and that, rather than something to be avoided, evidence from bilingual cognition suggests that incorporating this idea into future research would yield further insights into the cognitive functions of natural language.

The examination of the notion of science from a sociological perspective has begun to transform the attitudes to science traditionally upheld by historians and philosophers.

'Post-truth', Oxford Dictionary's 2016 word of the year, appears to cover only the turn away from reason in contemporary politics. In fact the truth behind 'post-truth' is historically and philosophically more complex. As Fuller shows in this book, it reaches into the nature of knowledge itself.

I argue that, contrary to intuition, it would be both possible and permissible to design people - whether artificial or organic - who by their nature desire to do tasks we find unpleasant.

Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus’s account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. We argue that enactivist and 4E (...) accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus’s notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of “sense-making”. At the same time, however, we see improvisation also as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the heart of an improviser’s expertise, we propose, lies a form of “higher-level inner sense-making” that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus’s idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of a mindful improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of herself, in music or in life. (shrink)

Examining the origin and development of my views of social epistemology, I contrast my position with the position held by analytic social epistemologists. Analytic social epistemology (ASE) has failed to make significant progress owing, in part, to a minimal understanding of actual knowledge practices, a minimised role for philosophers in ongoing inquiry, and a focus on maintaining the status quo of epistemology as a field. As a way forward, I propose questions and future areas of inquiry for a post-ASE to (...) address. (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)

Drawing on several issues and methods in Western philosophy, from analytical philosophy to semiotics and hermeneutics, the author throws new light on the ancient Zhuangzi text. Engaging Daoism and contemporary Western philosophical logic, and drawing on new developments in our understanding of early Chinese culture, Coutinho challenges the interpretation of Zhuangzi as either a skeptic or a relativist, and instead seeks to explore his philosophy as emphasizing the ineradicable vagueness of language, thought and reality. This new interpretation of the Zhuangzi (...) offers an important development in the understanding of Daoist philosophy, describing a world in flux in which things themselves are vague and inconsistent, and tries to show us a Way (a Dao) to negotiate through the shadows of a "chaotic" world. (shrink)

I compare a ‘realist’ with a ‘social–relational’ perspective on our judgments of the moral status of artificial agents (AAs). I develop a realist position according to which the moral status of a being—particularly in relation to moral patiency attribution—is closely bound up with that being’s ability to experience states of conscious satisfaction or suffering (CSS). For a realist, both moral status and experiential capacity are objective properties of agents. A social relationist denies the existence of any such objective properties in (...) the case of either moral status or consciousness, suggesting that the determination of such properties rests solely upon social attribution or consensus. A wide variety of social interactions between us and various kinds of artificial agent will no doubt proliferate in future generations, and the social–relational view may well be right that the appearance of CSS features in such artificial beings will make moral role attribution socially prevalent in human–AA relations. But there is still the question of what actual CSS states a given AA is capable of undergoing, independently of the appearances. This is not just a matter of changes in the structure of social existence that seem inevitable as human–AA interaction becomes more prevalent. The social world is itself enabled and constrained by the physical world, and by the biological features of living social participants. Properties analogous to certain key features in biological CSS are what need to be present for nonbiological CSS. Working out the details of such features will be an objective scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Addictions are commonly accompanied by a sense of shame or self-stigmatization. Self-stigmatization results from public stigmatization in a process leading to the internalization of the social opprobrium attaching to the negative stereotypes associated with addiction. We offer an account of how this process works in terms of a range of looping effects, and this leads to our main claim that for a significant range of cases public stigma figures in the social construction of addiction. This rests on a social constructivist (...) account in which those affected by public stigmatization internalize its norms. Stigma figures as part-constituent of the dynamic process in which addiction is formed. Our thesis is partly theoretical, partly empirical, as we source our claims about the process of internalization from interviews with people in treatment for substance use problems. (shrink)

The link between corporate philanthropy and firm value has been controversial. On one hand, corporate philanthropy is often criticized as an agency cost because it may serve narrow managerial self-interests. On the other hand, corporate philanthropy may enhance firm value because it improves the relationships between firms and their stakeholders. In this study, we argue that this controversy is contingent upon whether corporate governance mechanisms can stimulate the financial benefit of corporate philanthropy. Based on a sample of U.S. firms from (...) 1996 to 2003, we find that CEO long-term pay positively moderates the relationship between corporate philanthropy and firm value while multiboard outside directors negatively moderate this relationship. Contrary to our expectations, we find that the relationship between corporate philanthropy and firm value enhances as CEO tenure increases. Our findings show that corporate governance plays an important moderating role in the relationship between corporate philanthropy and firm value. (shrink)

"The Knowledge Book" is a unique interdisciplinary reference work for students and researchers concerned with the nature of knowledge. It is the first work of its kind to be organized on the assumption that whatever else knowledge might be, it is intrinsically social. The book consists of 42 alphabetically arranged entries on key concepts at the intersection of philosophy and sociology - what used to be called "sociology of knowledge" but is now increasingly called "social epistemology". The entries include concepts (...) common to disciplines that in recent years have devoted more of their attention to knowledge: cultural studies, communication studies, information science, education, policy studies and business studies. Special attention is given to concepts from the emerging field of science and technology studies. Each entry presents a short, self-contained essay providing an overview of a concept and concludes with suggestions for further reading. All the entries are fully cross-referenced, allowing readers to both make connections and follow their own interests. (shrink)

We will analyze the concept of anonymity, along with cognate notions, and their relation to privacy, with a view to developing an understanding of how we control our identity in public and why such control is important in developing and maintaining our social selves. We will take anonymity to be representative of a suite of techniques of nonidentifiability that persons use to manage and protect their privacy. At the core of these techniques is the aim of being untrackable; this means (...) that others lack the information they would need either to intrude physically upon me or to discover some private facts about me. Anonymity often enough goes together with privacy, but not always. Consider a person walking down a foreign street. It is not a physically private situation but no one there knows who you are. On the other hand, when I cast a postal vote, this act is both private and anonymous. Privacy and anonymity seem to go together because of the way each protects something importantly personal, but their coming apart suggests a difference both in what they mean and in our purposes for securing them. A lot has been written about privacy, and deservedly so; there is reason to think anonymity, and its cognates, important as well. (shrink)

"Social epistemology" refers here to the work of analytic epistemologists and philosophers of science interested in providing an empirically adequate account of organized knowledge systems, with special emphasis on scientific inquiry. I critically survey the last ten years of this research. Unlike the pragmatist and Continental schools of philosophy, for which knowledge is "always already" social, progress in analytic social epistemology has been plagued by an oversharp distinction between individual and collective cognition; and a failure to query the ends of (...) science in addition to its means. Consequently, most analytic social epistemologists operate with a relatively weak sense of "normativity," one modelled more on taken-for-granted logical principles than legislated policy correctives. (shrink)

This reflection on the fiftieth anniversary of Philosophy and Rhetoric begins by recalling a debate on its pages about the origins of rhetoric, which queried the relationship between Plato and the Sophists. I argue that contrary to the shared assumption of the debate, the two sides differed less over what counts as good philosophical/rhetorical practice than over whether its access should be free or restricted. An implication of this proposed shift in interpretation is that Plato and the Sophists are both (...) reasonably seen as "post-truth" thinkers, concerned more with the mix of chance and skill in the construction of truth than with the truth as such. Focusing on Plato's hostility to playwrights, I argue that at... (shrink)

This article is the preface to the Russian translation of my Kuhn vs Popper. I use it as an opportunity to re-examine the difference between Kuhn and Popper on the nature of ‘revolutions’ in science. Kuhn is rightly seen as a ‘reluctant revolutionary’ and Popper a ‘permanent revolutionary’. In this respect, Kuhn sticks to the original medieval meaning of ‘revolution’ as restoration of a natural order, whereas Popper adopts the more modern meaning of ‘revolution’ that comes into fashion after the (...) French Revolution, which suggests a radical renewal. A key to understanding this difference in revolutionary mentalities lies in Kuhn’s and Popper’s respective treatment of the ‘Gestalt switch’ phenomenon. Kuhn sees the ambiguous Gestalt figure from the standpoint of the subject, and Popper from that of the experimenter. Behind this difference lies alternative interpretations of the significance of quantum mechanics for scientific epistemology, a preoccupation that Kuhn and Popper shared with the original Gestalt psychologists and is beginning engage the interest of social scientists. (shrink)

Animal agriculture predominantly involves farming social animals. At the same time, the nature of agriculture requires severely disrupting, eliminating, and controlling the relationships that matter to those animals, resulting in harm and unhappiness for them. These disruptions harm animals, both physically and psychologically. Stressed animals are also bad for farmers because stressed animals are less safe to handle, produce less, get sick more, and produce poorer quality meat. As a result, considerable efforts have gone into developing stress-reduction methods. Many of (...) these attempt to replicate behaviours or physiological responses that develop or constitute bonding between animals. In other words, humans try to mitigate or ameliorate the damage done by preventing and undermining intraspecies relationships. In doing so, the wrong of relational harms is compounded by an instrumentalisation of trust and care. The techniques used are emblematic of the welfarist approach to animal ethics. Using the example of gentle touching in the farming of cows for beef and dairy, the paper highlights two types of wrong. First, a wrong done in the form of relational harms, and second, a wrong done by instrumentalising relationships of care and trust. Relational harms are done to nonhuman animals, whilst instrumentalisation of care and trust indicates an insensitivity to morally salient features of the situation and a potential character flaw in the agents that carry it out. (shrink)

This article explores the proposition that the brain, normally seen as an organ of the human body, should be understood as a biologically based form of artificial intelligence, in the course of which the case is made for a new kind of ‘brain exceptionalism’. After noting that such a view was generally assumed by the founders of AI in the 1950s, the argument proceeds by drawing on the distinction between science—in this case neuroscience—adopting a ‘telescopic’ or a ‘microscopic’ orientation to (...) reality, depending on how it regards its characteristic investigative technologies. The paper concludes by recommending a ‘microscopic’ yet non-reductionist research agenda for neuroscience, in which the brain is seen as an underutilised organ whose energy efficiency is likely to outstrip that of the most powerful supercomputers for the foreseeable future. (shrink)

I reconstruct my own journey into the history of the human sciences, which I show to have been a process of discovering the metaphysical standing of the human. I begin with Alexandre Koyré’s encounter with Edmund Husserl in the 1930s, which I use to throw light on the legacy of Kant’s ‘anthropological’ understanding of the human, which dominated and limited 19th-century science. As I show, those who broke from Kant’s strictures and set the stage for the 20th-century revolutions in science (...) - from Hegel, to John McTaggart, to Max Weber - typically were pursuing crypto-theological questions about how a finite being can comprehend an infinite universe. This journey is about the ‘common measure’ of being human, which is what links Plato to Kuhn, but has been most consistently taken up by law. I suggest that in seeking this ‘measure of man’, we may discover that to be human is not necessarily to be Homo sapiens, which would suggest a radical reorientation of the history of the human sciences. (shrink)

The ‘critique of intellectuals’ refers to a genre of normative discourse that holds intellectuals accountable for the consequences of their ideas. A curious feature of the contemporary, especially American, variant of this genre is its focus on intellectuals who were aligned with such world-historic losers as Hitler and Stalin. Why are Cold War US intellectuals not held to a similar standard of scrutiny, even though they turn out to have been aligned with the world-historic winners? In addressing this general question, (...) some self-serving tendencies of intellectual history are observed, in particular the asymmetry between the ease with which intellectuals are credited with the good consequences of their ideas and the difficulty with which they are blamed for the bad consequences. This asymmetry is particularly noted in Richard Rorty, whose pragmatism treats past ideas as a legacy intended for the (American) reader’s benefit. As a corrective, I advocate, in Paul Ricoeur’s terms, a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ that treats intellectual life as fraught with danger, as our adoption of ideas always amounts to passing judgement over those who have borne them in the past. (shrink)

Whilst the concept of causal powers is central to much post-positivist social science in general, and to critical realism in particular, it has not been significantly developed by critical realists since the initial work of Harré and Madden and Bhaskar in the mid-1970s. To deepen our understanding of powers we need to start with a ‘package’ of related terms. In §1 of the paper I introduce this package, clear up some terminological ambiguity and inconsistency, and focus the discussion upon things, (...) properties and powers. The real problems begin when we try to figure out how things, properties and powers relate to one another. In §2 I introduce and evaluate three possible ontologies: an ontology where powers are primary; an ontology where properties are primary; and an ontology where neither properties, powers are primary, but all emerge to form a unity. The last ontology is defended. §3 deals with ambiguities surrounding three other terms that often crop up when discussing powers, namely, dispositional properties, transfactuals and processes. The net result is a far less ambiguous concept of powers, firmly anchored in an ontology of things, properties and powers as a unity. (shrink)

The post-truth condition is just as much about naming a meta-game as winning it. This condition can be tracked across Western intellectual history from the Homeric epics to popular culture. The common thread is that players are more likely to succeed in this meta-game if they have a certain consistency of character, which Thomas More called “integrity.” The presence of integrity means that the historical losers have often had an advantage in defining for subsequent generations the name of the game (...) because the steadfastness of their characters may make them be regarded as the agents of history, for better or worse. Further, naming the game tends to be stabilized by a variety of mental and material conditions, including “modal power”—control over what people think is and is not possible. Modal power is related to both Machiavellian politics and Kantian transcendentalism, and to the phenomenon of “truthiness.” The character of the post-truth player is epitomized by Thomas More, the “man for all seasons,” who remained consistent as he moved between multiple games, and ultimately to his execution. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Massimo Dell’Utri proposes the idea of an ‘epistemological compass’, which he alleges provides a common intuitive sense of objectivity, the existence of which defenders of ‘post-truth’ positions would perversely try to deny. I argue that Dell’Utri’s choice of a compass – metaphorical or otherwise – is unfortunate because it is a device that presupposes that what appears plain to the senses is directed by hidden forces emanating from distant sources, such as the stars. More generally, the post-truth condition is (...) not about the denial of facts as ordinarily understood. Rather, it is about the denial of a privileged context in terms of which the significance of the facts should be understood. In Dell’Utri’s terms, it implies a plurality of epistemological compasses, which in turn undermines the effectiveness of the metaphor. I have described this situation as a struggle over ‘the name of the game’. In terms of philosophical logic, it is about which metalanguage provides the semantics for expressions in the object language the people try to deploy to their advantage. (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)

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)

Marc Lewis argues that addiction is not a disease, it is instead a dysfunctional outcome of what plastic brains ordinarily do, given the adaptive processes of learning and development within environments where people are seeking happiness, or relief, or escape. They come to obsessively desire substances or activities that they believe will deliver happiness and so on, but this comes to corrupt the normal process of development when it escalates beyond a point of functionality. Such ‘deep learning’ emerges from consumptive (...) habits, or ‘motivated repetition’, and although addiction is bad, it ferments out of the ordinary stuff underpinning any neural habit. Lewis gives us a convincing story about the process that leads from ordinary controlled consumption through to quite heavy addictive consumption, but I claim that in some extreme cases the eventual state of deep learning tips over into clinically significant impairment and disorder. Addiction is an elastic concept, and although it develops through mild and moderate forms, the impairment we see in severe cases needs to be acknowledged. This impairment, I argue, consists in the chronic automatic consumption present in late stage addiction. In this condition, the desiring self largely drops out the picture, as the addicted individual begins to mindlessly consume. This impairment is clinically significant because the machinery of motivated rationality has become corrupted. To bolster this claim I compare what is going on in these extreme cases with what goes on in people who dissociate in cases of depersonalization disorder. (shrink)

Naturalism is normally taken to be an ideology, censuring non-naturalistic alternatives. But as many critics have pointed out, this ideological stance looks internally incoherent, since it is not obviously endorsed by naturalistic methods. Naturalists who have addressed this problem universally foreswear the normative component of naturalism by, in effect, giving up science’s exclusive claim to legitimacy. This option makes naturalism into an empty expression of personal preference that can carry no weight in the philosophical or political spheres. In response to (...) this dilemma, I argue that on a popular (but largely unarticulated) construal of naturalism as a commitment to inference to the best explanation, methodological naturalism can be both normative and internally coherent. (shrink)

This article gathers together various internet resources that are available for translator’s of Kant’s texts, including resources for digital texts of Kant’s and historically-relevant other writings, digital catalogs of published books and periodicals, online dictionaries, and digitally available 18th/19th century monolingual and bi-lingual dictionaries, encyclopedia, and Kant-specific lexicons.

Does the receipt of benefits from some common resource create an obligation to contribute toward its maintenance? If so, what is the basis of this obligation? I consider whether individual contributions to climate change can be impugned as wrongful free riding upon the stability of the planet's climate system, when persons enjoy its benefits but refuse to bear their share of its maintenance costs. Two main arguments will be advanced: the first urges further modification of H.L.A. Hart’s “principle of fairness” (...) as the basis for demanding that would-be free riders pay their fair share in the context of climate change, while the second claims that remedial action on climate change is better captured through collective action analysis than through harm principles that seek to connect individual actions to bad environmental outcomes. (shrink)

William Lynch has provided an informed and probing critique of my embrace of the post-truth condition, which he understands correctly as an extension of the normative project of social epistemology. This article roughly tracks the order of Lynch’s paper, beginning with the vexed role of the ‘normative’ in Science and Technology Studies, which originally triggered my version of social epistemology 35 years ago and has been guided by the field’s ‘symmetry principle’. Here the pejorative use of ‘populism’ to mean democracy (...) is highlighted as a failure of symmetry. Finally, after rejecting Lynch’s appeal to a hybrid Marxian–Darwinism, Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes are contrasted en route to what I have called ‘quantum epistemology’. (shrink)

In this paper I make more explicit a position that I have being advocating for more than two decades, though its full force does not seem to have been felt. I write in defence of the *commodification* rather than the simple *commercialisation* of knowledge. The two italicised terms are often spoken about in the same breath—and, to be sure, they are related to each other. But they are not the same. Commercialisation refers to the subjection of social life to the (...) price mechanism, something that Adam Smith believed happened spontaneously, if it was not impeded by churches and states. And while Smith’s celebration of commercial culture makes him the philosophical father of capitalism, he would probably not approve of capitalism’s long-term tendency to turn aggregated versions of these spontaneous exchanges into objects that are themselves subject to exchange relations, which is commodification. Nevertheless, it is precisely in this sense of ‘commodification’ that I defend the university as a producer of knowledge as a public good, both in terms of teaching and research. I place the shi from commercialisation to commodification in a larger historical context first clearly identified by Ernst Cassirer – namely, a shi in metaphysical consciousness that accompanied the treatment of substances as the bearers of functions, which is associated with the introduction of algebra as a unifying principle of mathematical reasoning in the early modern era, initially through Descartes, which then became the basis of the modern physical world-view. (shrink)