We answer three questions: 1. Can we give a wholly mathematical explanation of a physical phenomenon? 2. Can we give a wholly mathematical explanation for a whole physical theory? 3. What is gained or lost in giving a wholly, or partially, mathematical explanation of a phenomenon or a scientific theory? To answer these questions we look at a project developed by Hajnal Andréka, Judit Madarász, István Németi and Gergely Székely. They, together with collaborators, present special relativity theory in a three-sorted (...) first-order formal language. (shrink)

We argue about a conceptual approach to quantum formalism. Starting from philosophical conjectures (Platonism, Idealism and Realism) as basic ontic elements (namely: math world, data world, and state of matter), we will analyze the quantum superposition principle. This analysis bring us to demonstrate that the basic assumptions affect in different ways:(a) the general problem of the information and computability about a system, (b) the nature of the math tool utilized and (c) the correspondent physical reality.

This article explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how ‘users of language perform their identities within uses of language’: How do personae using the microblogging service Twitter perform relational identities as they enact discourse fellowships? Addressing this question means understanding how personae enter into ambient affiliation. Such affiliation is ambient in the sense that social media users may not be interacting directly, but instead participating (...) in mass performances of hashtagging or contributing to iterations of Internet memes. This article will consider three key bonds using both a 100 million-word corpus of posts and a smaller specialized corpus collected by capturing the entire Twitter stream of a particular user. (shrink)

__Neurotechnology and Direct Brain Communication__ focuses on recent neuroscientific investigations of infant brains and of patients with disorders of consciousness, both of which are at the forefront of contemporary neuroscience. The prospective use of neurotechnology to access mental states in these subjects, including neuroimaging, brain simulation and brain computer interfaces, offers new opportunities for clinicians and researchers, but has also received specific attention from philosophical, scientific, ethical and legal points of view. This book offers the first systematic assessment of these (...) issues, investigating the tools neurotechnology offers to care for verbally non-communicative subjects and suggesting a multidisciplinary approach to the ethical and legal implications of ordinary and experimental practices. The book is divided into three parts: the first and second focus on the scientific and clinical implications of neurological tools for DOC patient and infant care. With reference to these developments, the third and final part presents the case for re-evaluating classical ethical and legal concepts, such as authority, informed consent and privacy. Neurotechnology and Direct Brain Communication will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of cognitive science, medical ethics, medical technology, and the philosophy of the mind. With implications for patient care, it will also be a useful resource for clinicians, medical centres and health practitioners. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a new term, adoptism, to characterize the unique form(s) of marginalization to which adopted persons are subjected. Adoptism shows up primarily as enforced gratitude, and this injunction to be grateful carries with it epistemic harms that have heretofore been overlooked because the dominant social narrative surrounding adoption is that it is an overwhelmingly positive practice. This dominant view stems largely from adoptive parents and the adoption industry, which is an institution, I argue, that is far (...) from child-centered and beneficent. Because those most impacted by being adopted, adopted persons, are conspicuously absent in discussions of adoption, there is a great potential for epistemic injustice. These injustices are magnified when adoptees attempt to provide testimony that challenges the prevailing social script surrounding adoption. Using my lived experience as a domestic adoptee, as well as the testimony of many other adopted persons, I uncover and examine the ways adoptees are harmed in our capacities as knowers. Finally, after dispelling the myths that adoptist ideology upholds, I suggest ways to redress the otherwise hidden injustices of adoption. (shrink)

This paper articulates a careful and detailed objection to the moral permissibility of postnatal abortion. Giubilini and Minerva claim that if being unable to nurture one’s newborn child without significant burdens to oneself, family or society, is a proper moral ground for the demand that the life of a fetus be terminated, then ‘after-birth abortion should be considered a permissible option for women who would be damaged by [rearing the child or] giving up their newborns for adoption.’ It will be (...) shown that the permissibility of postnatal abortion does not follow from the argument’s premises, in particular, the premise that the newborn is not a person in the morally relevant sense. (shrink)

At the heart of Youth Justice Conferencing, a form of restorative justice aimed at addressing youth crime, is the notion that young persons who have committed an offence should be ‘reintegrated’ into their communities (Braithwaite in Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989). This paper focuses on the role of parents as support persons, in particular the ‘crying mum’, an identity often leveraged by the Convenor when prompting the young person to express remorse to the circle. We explore (...) an Avouchment genre that we have observed whereby support persons vouch for the character of the young person. Our analysis considers the ways in which values are composed (as ideational categories are coupled with evaluative interpersonal ones) and unfold in discourse as invitations for participants to align. In Knight’s (2010) terms, when shared, couplings of ideation and evaluation engender bonds through which participants may commune. (shrink)

In this article, we describe an ontology aimed at the representation of the relevant entities and relations in the philosophical world. We will guide the reader through our modeling choices, so to highlight the ontology’s practical purpose: to enable an annotation of philosophical resources which is capable of supporting pedagogical navigation mechanisms. The ontology covers all the aspects of philosophy, thus including characterizations of entities such as people, events, documents, and ideas. In particular, here we will present a detailed exposition (...) of the entities belonging to the idea branch of the ontology, for they have a crucial role in the world of philosophy. Moreover, as an example of the type of applications made possible by the ontology we will introduce PhiloSurfical, a prototype tool we created to navigate contextually a classic work in twentieth century philosophy, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. We discuss the potential usage of such navigation mechanisms in educational and scholarly contexts, which aim to enhance the learning process through the serendipitous discovery of relevant resources. (shrink)

This paper illustrates the demand for recognition by peoples through an analysis of the partnerships between researchers and Inuit communities in Canada and Alaska. One of the great questions concerns work in the field, namely to identify the most appropriate forms of interaction between researcher and informant, to recognize the multiplicity of indigenous voices, to avoid inappropriate generalizations, and to approach generational disparity.

The pluralist sheds the more traditional ideas of truth and ontology. This is dangerous, because it threatens instability of the theory. To lend stability to his philosophy, the pluralist trades truth and ontology for rigour and other ‘fixtures’. Fixtures are the steady goal posts. They are the parts of a theory that stay fixed across a pair of theories, and allow us to make translations and comparisons. They can ultimately be moved, but we tend to keep them fixed temporarily. Apart (...) from considering rigour of proof as a fixture, I discuss fixed models, invariant notions and fixed information about objects across theories. There are other fixtures, but it is enough to start with these. (shrink)

We argue that in extensive decision problems (extensive games with a single player) with imperfect recall care must be taken in interpreting information sets and strategies. Alternative interpretations allow for different kinds of analysis. We address the following issues: 1. randomization at information sets; 2. consistent beliefs; 3. time consistency of optimal plans; 4. the multiselves approach to decision making. We illustrate our discussion through an example that we call the ‘‘paradox of the absentminded driver.’’ Journal of Economic Literature Classification (...) Numbers: C7, D0. 1997 Academic Press. (shrink)

This project provides a detailed examination and critique of current philosophical, linguistic, and cognitive accounts of first language acquisition. In particular, I focus on the concept of "innate" and how it is embraced, marginally utilized, or abandoned altogether in efforts to describe the way that a child comes to be a competent user of a language. A central question that naturally falls out of this general inquiry is therefore what exactly is supposed to be "innate," according to various theories? Philosophically, (...) the theory of innate ideas put forth to explain human learning has existed for centuries and hence, this thesis as it relates to language is discussed. The revival of nativism by linguists like Chomsky is thus a central theme of the first chapter. Universal Grammar and the various arguments for it are closely scrutinized, and I close this chapter with what I take to be the commitments of linguistic nativism, how its proponents conceive of "innate," and several possible objections to the arguments they put forth. Just as the theory of innate ideas has had its contesters throughout the history of philosophy, so too have linguists and cognitive scientists rejected Universal Grammar and other forms of linguistic nativism. Thus, the second chapter presents several of these alternative explanations of language acquisition. Namely, I divide the chapter into three sections, Usage-Based Linguistics, Emergentism, and Sociolinguistic Acquisition, as it is my suggestion that most of the anti-UG attacks are levied from one of these three fields. In discussing the details of each, two distinctions become of particular concern: first, a large part of the differing conceptions of "innate" seem to hinge on what is meant by "learning" and "acquiring," and therefore second, a fine line between UBL and Emergentism can be drawn, a relationship that is otherwise conflated in the literature. Because chapter two involves a brief account of the way in which connectionist simulations are often utilized to model or represent language acquisition, particularly from an Emergentist perspective, chapter three begins by examining this feature of Emergentism in more detail. Due to its explanatory power, ability to be effectively modeled, and the evidentiary support found in neuroscience, Emergentism would appear to be the most tenable position to maintain regarding language acquisition. This possibility seems further strengthened when we take into account the neuroscientific data often used to bolster anti-nativist claims. Nevertheless, reflecting on the overarching concern of the project, regarding what is really meant by "innate," it is shown that this attack on nativism might stand on shakier ground than was originally assumed. Finally, based on these considerations, a case is made for an intermediary position, a theory of "Minimally Innate Ideas.". (shrink)

This essay recounts the author’s journey with her father during his prolonged decline due to dementia. The experience pushed her to break out of the confines of conventional scholarly research in her academic field of architectural history to a multi-disciplinary consideration of nineteenth-century environmental, sensory and horticultural therapies for the mentally ill. During her father’s illness, she discovered the tangible therapeutic benefits of momentary engagements with his environment through his five senses and through the emotional filter of poetry. This reorientation (...) to sensory and poetic experience had a beneficial impact on the caretaker as well. (shrink)

Leandra Medine indicates that she wants the Man Repeller multi-author blog to ‘serve as an open forum for women to draw their own conclusions’ instead of making ‘any sort of feministic statement’. Medine renders feminism as amorphous and an individual choice but she has been widely lauded for offering a feminist engagement in fashion. Her practices and position, as I argue throughout this article, allow her to fashion feminism, including associating feminism with the man repeller style and replacing aspects of (...) second wave and rights-based feminisms with the purportedly more equitable and liberating website ethos of choice and equality feminism. Yet in replacing ‘feministic’ critiques with promises of stylish cultural change and clothing that reportedly repels men, Medine and other Man Repeller authors elide how systemic oppression functions. This ambivalent relationship to feminism, and dearth of intersectional advocacy, prompted a backlash in 2020. Critics interrogated Medine's facile statement about #BlackLivesMatter, the company's lack of diversity and the unsuccessful restructuring of the blog. As a means of analysing Man Repeller, I employ textual analysis, feminist and queer literature and media theory. I define fashioning feminism as a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thinking, including the negation of certain forms of feminism. I assert that attending to the fashioning of feminism can foreground central and developing feminist theories; the appeal, unstylishness and effacement of feminism; and the connection between style and politics. This includes readers’ interrogations of Man Repeller's politics, which are occurring along with contemporary examinations of racism. Since fashioning feminism is a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thought, engaging with its concepts and debates can further the critical study of feminism, nurture feminist conversations and advocate for social change. (shrink)

We report in this paper the result of three experiments on risk, ambiguity and time attitude. The first two differed by the population considered (students vs. general population) while the third one used a different protocol and concerned students and portfolio managers. We find quite a lot of heterogeneity at the individual level. Of principal interest was the elicitation of risk, time and ambiguity attitudes and the relationship among these (model free) measures. We find that on the student population, there (...) is essentially no correlation. A non negligible fraction of the population behaves in an extremely cautious manner in the risk and ambiguity domain. When we drop this population from the sample, the correlation between our measures is also non significant. We also raise three questions linked to measurement of ambiguity attitudes that come out from our data sets. (shrink)

In the past decade the central principles of western feminist theory have been dramatically challenged. many feminists have endorsed post-structuralism's rejection of essentialist theoretical categories, and have added a powerful gender dimension to contemporary critiques of modernity. Earlier 'women' have been radically undermined, and newer concerns with 'difference', 'identity', and 'power' have emerged. Destabilizing Theory explores these developments in a set of specially commissioned essays by feminist theorists. Does this change amount to a real shift within feminist theory, or will (...) feminism's links with an emancipatory modernism reinstate an older political agenda? Can we transcend the common counterposition of equality and difference, or is feminism condemned to argue within the terms of this binary opposition? (shrink)

In this paper I take up the question of the nature of the doxastic attitudes we entertain while inquiring into some matter. Relying on a distinction between two stages of open inquiry, I urge to acknowledge the existence of a distinctive attitude of cognitive inclination towards a proposition qua answer to the question one is inquiring into. I call this attitude “hypothesis”. Hypothesis, I argue, is a sui generis doxastic attitude which differs, both functionally and normatively, from suspended judgement, full (...) belief, credences, and acceptance. In closing, I point to the epistemological significance of hypothesis. More specifically, I contend that holding an attitude of hypothesis enables us to respond rationally to peer disagreement, and I suggest that such an attitude offers a suitable articulation of the view, originally put forward by Philip Kitcher, that cognitive diversity in inquiry has epistemic benefits. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an important, yet hitherto neglected, development within Husserl’s phenomenological formal ontology. The first sixteen paragraphs of Ideas 1 serve as the point of departure for my presentation. In these paragraphs, Husserl presents the category of “concretum”, or concrete individual, as the cornerstone of his whole formal-ontological framework. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss a revision of the account of the concrete individual Husserl develops in his Ideas 1 in 1918 in a (...) text that is now published as text 11 in Husserliana 41. I will also draw out some further implications from a text of the same year published as Appendix XVII of Husserliana 41. No adequate treatment of the 1918 account of “concrete individual” has been provided so far, however, and my paper aims at filling this gap in the scholarship. The relevance of the 1918 revision is phenomenological and philosophical, rather than just historical. In that text Husserl solves some ambiguities in the Ideas 1 treatment of concrete individuals, and, in doing so, he introduces an original distinction between two types of genera, self-individuating and other-individuating. He also provides elements to a phenomenological doctrine of the principle of individuation and takes a stance on the question of the individuation of essence. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that transparency of machine learning algorithms, just as explanation, can be defined at different levels of abstraction. We criticize recent attempts to identify the explanation of black box algorithms with making their decisions (post-hoc) interpretable, focusing our discussion on counterfactual explanations. These approaches to explanation simplify the real nature of the black boxes and risk misleading the public about the normative features of a model. We propose a new form of algorithmic transparency, that consists in (...) explaining algorithms as an intentional product, that serves a particular goal, or multiple goals (Daniel Dennet’s design stance) in a given domain of applicability, and that provides a measure of the extent to which such a goal is achieved, and evidence about the way that measure has been reached. We call such idea of algorithmic transparency “design publicity.” We argue that design publicity can be more easily linked with the justification of the use and of the design of the algorithm, and of each individual decision following from it. In comparison to post-hoc explanations of individual algorithmic decisions, design publicity meets a different demand (the demand for impersonal justification) of the explainee. Finally, we argue that when models that pursue justifiable goals (which may include fairness as avoidance of bias towards specific groups) to a justifiable degree are used consistently, the resulting decisions are all justified even if some of them are (unavoidably) based on incorrect predictions. For this argument, we rely on John Rawls’s idea of procedural justice applied to algorithms conceived as institutions. (shrink)

The widespread use of algorithms for prediction-based decisions urges us to consider the question of what it means for a given act or practice to be discriminatory. Building upon work by Kusner and colleagues in the field of machine learning, we propose a counterfactual condition as a necessary requirement on discrimination. To demonstrate the philosophical relevance of the proposed condition, we consider two prominent accounts of discrimination in the recent literature, by Lippert-Rasmussen and Hellman respectively, that do not logically imply (...) our condition and show that they face important objections. Specifically, Lippert-Rasmussen’s definition proves to be over-inclusive, as it classifies some acts or practices as discriminatory when they are not, whereas Hellman’s account turns out to lack explanatory power precisely insofar as it does not countenance a counterfactual condition on discrimination. By defending the necessity of our counterfactual condition, we set the conceptual limits for justified claims about the occurrence of discriminatory acts or practices in society, with immediate applications to the ethics of algorithmic decision-making. (shrink)

Trust and monitoring are traditionally antithetical concepts. Describing trust as a property of a relationship of reliance, we introduce a theory of trust and monitoring, which uses mathematical models based on two classes of functions, including _q_-exponentials, and relates the levels of trust to the costs of monitoring. As opposed to several accounts of trust that attempt to identify the special ingredient of reliance and trust relationships, our theory characterizes trust as a quantitative property of certain relations of reliance that (...) can be quantified and expressed as a scalar quantity. Our theory is applicable to both human–human and human–artificial agent interactions, as it is agnostic with respect to the concrete realization of trustworthiness properties, and is compatible with many views differing on which properties contribute to trust and trustworthiness. Finally, as our mathematical models make the quantitative features of trust measurable, they provide empirical studies on trust with a rigorous methodology for its measurement. (shrink)

Two literal quotations from Chrysippus’ On Possibles, preserved in Plutarch’s On the Contradictions of the Stoics, seem to contradict the Stoic thesis of the isotropy of the void. According to this thesis the void is an infinite undifferentiated expanse whose center is marked by, and coincides with, the position of the world. Since there is nothing else outside the world, the cohesive force that pervades it is sufficient on its own to guarantee the quasi–indestructibility of the trans–cyclical διακόσμησις and the (...) eternity of the οὐσία. Conversely, in these two quotations Chrysippus maintains that there is a central διαφορά equipped with causal force. This seems to imply the anisotropy of the void. Chrysippus’s view here is also at odds with another official Stoic thesis, i.e. that the incorporeal is causally inert. In this paper it will be argued that there is in fact no contradiction, because, in those two quotations, Chrysippus consciously develops a cosmological hypothesis in order to resolve a difficulty concerning the role of fire during the universal conflagration. Chrysippus’ solution to this difficulty belongs to modal logic and consists in distinguishing between the actual universe and the possible ones. (shrink)