This paper examines the figure of the hate-fighting digital vigilante as embodied through Aryan Queen, an online persona developed and depicted by self-proclaimed antifa member Talia Lavin in her book Culture Warlords. One chapter in the 2020 memoir relays Lavin’s pursuits to elicit and make known identifying information of Der Stürmer, an anonymous white supremacist online hater. I first locate Lavin’s undertaking in the porous policy landscape regulating online hate transnationally to make a case for its value as an entry (...) into the navigation of hate on Telegram, a platform that has become a popular enclave for hate, and one that remains otherwise impenetrable to state efforts at formal governance. I then introduce the digital vigilante as a cultural figure that has become increasingly distinguished from, but developed in relation to, the classical or analogue vigilante in academic literature, albeit with only limited attention paid to the seemingly boundless temporality that constitutes the virtual sphere. Attending to processes of temporalization, I argue, can well serve an analysis of the moral universe within which the digital vigilante operates, thereby enabling a critical engagement with the motivations, methods, and intentions of her justice pursuits online. With the support of anthropological theories of temporalization – namely, past presencing, un/doing futures, and affective justice – I show that justice pursuits by way of digital vigilantism for Lavin are entangled with an affective longing for revenge, and manifest a complex intermingling of open wounds from injustices that emerge from and produce entanglements of the past, present, and future. (shrink)

There are several argumentative strategies for advancing the thesis that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism. One prominent such strategy is to argue that agents who meet compatibilist conditions for moral responsibility can nevertheless be subject to responsibility-undermining manipulation. In this paper, I argue that incompatibilists advancing manipulation arguments against compatibilism have been shouldering an unnecessarily heavy dialectical burden. Traditional manipulation arguments present cases in which manipulated agents meet all compatibilist conditions for moral responsibility, but are (allegedly) not responsible (...) for their behavior. I argue, however, that incompatibilists can make do with the more modest (and harder to resist) claim that the manipulation in question is mitigating with respect to moral responsibility. The focus solely on whether a manipulated agent is or is not morally responsible has, I believe, masked the full force of manipulation-style arguments against compatibilism. Here, I aim to unveil their real power. (shrink)

This paper addresses weighting and partitioning in complex reinforcement learning tasks, with the aim of facilitating learning. The paper presents some ideas regarding weighting of multiple agents and extends them into partitioning an input/state space into multiple regions with di erential weighting in these regions, to exploit di erential characteristics of regions and di erential characteristics of agents to reduce the learning complexity of agents (and their function approximators) and thus to facilitate the learning overall. It analyzes, in reinforcement learning (...) tasks, di erent ways of partitioning a task and using agents selectively based on partitioning. Based on the analysis, some heuristic methods are described and experimentally tested. We nd that some o -line heuristic methods performed the best, signi cantly better than single-agent models. (shrink)

Teachers are often placed in a space of tensionbetween responding to students as persons andresponding to students through theirinstitutionally-defined roles. Particularlywith respect to eros, which has becomeincreasingly the subject of strictinstitutional legislation and regulation,teachers have little recourse to a language ofresponsibility outside an institutional frame. By studying the significance of communicativeambiguity for responsibility, this paperexplores what is ethically at stake forteachers in erotic forms of communication. Specifically, it is Levinas's own ambiguousunderstanding of the ethical significance oferos, and what we have (...) to learn from it, thatoffers a way of reading the place of eros inresponsibility. I conclude my discussion withsome thoughts on what a renewed understandingof responsibility might mean at the personaland institutional levels. (shrink)

This paper introduces a hybrid model that unifies connectionist, symbolic, and reinforcement learning into an integrated architecture for bottom-up skill learning in reactive sequential decision tasks. The model is designed for an agent to learn continuously from on-going experience in the world, without the use of preconceived concepts and knowledge. Both procedural skills and high-level knowledge are acquired through an agent’s experience interacting with the world. Computational experiments with the model in two domains are reported.

Dennett and Kinsbourne ([1992]) argue that metacontrast backward visual masking provides a clear illustration that ‘there is really only a verbal difference’ between two versions of the Cartesian Theater model of the mind. This alleged lack of a distinction is both the crucial premise of their main argument against the Cartesian Theater and a motivator for accepting their own Multiple Drafts model. I argue that metacontrast reveals a difference between the two versions of the Cartesian Theater that meets criteria found (...) in (Dennett and Kinsbourne [1992]) for determining such a difference. This difference undermines the soundness of their argument against the Cartesian Theater, and exerts pressure on Dennett and Kinsbourne to offer a more detailed articulation of their model. 1. Introduction2. Brief Explanation of Metacontrast Backward Visual Masking3. The Stalinesque and Orwellian Models of Metacontrast 3.1. Criteria for determining a difference4. A Difference That Makes a Difference 4.1. Skeptical hypothesis objection5. Other Objections and Replies 5.1. Straw person objection5.2. Corroborative issues objection6. Conclusion. (shrink)

Blair proposes that fluid intelligence, working memory, and executive function form a unitary construct: fluid cognition. Recently, our group has utilized a combined correlational–experimental cognitive neuroscience approach, which we argue is beneficial for investigating relationships among these individual differences in terms of neural mechanisms underlying them. Our data do not completely support Blair's strong position. (Published Online April 5 2006).

Schmitt recognized that research is needed to identify other factors associated with sex ratio and with sociosexuality that may explain cross-cultural variation in sexual behavior. One such factor may be the risk of sperm competition. Sperm competition theory may lead us to a more complete explanation of cultural variation in sexual behavior.

The phenomenon of globalization is widely recognized as the dominant rubric for describing life in the twenty-first century, yet fierce debates are currently being waged over its definition and beneficence to society. This essay offers a typology of four competing globalization theories— neoliberal, development, earthist, and postcolonial—that currently dominate globalization discourses and briefly sketches the constituencies, ideological underpinnings, and moral vision of each as background. It then critiques these theories using a set of normative criteria offered by the author. These (...) criteria are framed to answer the question "What constitutes the good life?" and are rooted in a feminist, Christian ethical analysis of globalization. They delineate a democratized understanding of power as the context of moral agency, define humanity's purpose as caring for the planet, and establish that human flourishing is evidenced by the social well-being of people. The paper concludes by suggesting some pathways of transformation that build on these criteria. (shrink)

Using data collected from people with at least one brother and one sister, and consistent with an evolutionary perspective, we find that older men and women (a) are more upset by a brother’s partner’s sexual infidelity than by her emotional infidelity and (b) are more upset by a sister’s partner’s emotional infidelity than by his sexual infidelity. There were no effects of participant sex or sex of in-law on upset over a sibling’s partner’s infidelities, but there was an effect of (...) participant sex on reports of upset over one’s own partner’s infidelities. The results suggest that the key variable among older participants is the sex of the sibling or, correspondingly, the sex of the sibling’s partner, as predicted from an evolutionary analysis of reproductive costs, and not the sex of the participant, as predicted from a socialization perspective. Discussion offers directions for future work on jealousy. (shrink)

Discourse topic is an intractable and inherently subjective notion making analysis problematic. This paper overcomes some of the problems by treating topic as a fuzzy concept and views discourse topics as sets of topic keywords. The study examines the identification of topic boundaries and topic keywords by informants and by four methods of analyzing topics — topical structure analysis, given-new progression, lexical analysis, and topic-based analysis. Comparing the findings from these four methods against those from the informants, it was found (...) that given-new progression is the most valid method for identifying topic boundaries, and topic-based analysis is the most valid for identifying topic keywords. There are also notable differences in the types of keywords identified and the bases for identifying keywords between the methods and the informants. (shrink)

Herodotus tells us in book vii, ch. 220, that the Pythian priestess gave the Spartans a warning couched in hexameters, of which the second line begins ἢ μγα στυ ρικυδς. To this text the admirable commentary of How and Wells takes exception in the following note: ‘The synizesis στυ ρικυδς is intolerable. Read δμ' ρικυδς, στυ being a gloss, H. Richards, Cl. Rev. xix. 345.’ Doubtless this union of vowels is harder than that of υω in ρινων or in γενων (...) and δυωδεκμηνον, accepted by Christ in his edition of Pindar . Let us grant that from the point of view of elegance it is even intolerable; the question still remains, should the line be altered? (shrink)

This book is the second volume of a critical edition of the writings of Thomas Reid, an edition that will include many of his manuscript remains as well as his previously published works. These volumes are intended to displace the heretofore standard 8th edition of Reid’s works edited by Sir William Hamilton. Hamilton’s edition is marred by his numerous, often intrusive, and obtuse footnotes. Reid’s spelling and punctuation were also sometimes “corrected” by Hamilton, so his edition does not present a (...) fully accurate version of the original editions whose publication was superintended by Reid. The type in the Hamilton edition is also archaic and very small, making reading the text excessively difficult. The present and subsequent volumes are intended to present canonical texts free of the flaws in the Hamilton text. This volume succeeds admirably in that project. (shrink)

A broad evolutionary perspective is essential to fully reverse figure and ground in the rationality debate. Humans' evolved psychological architecture was designed to produce inferences that were adaptive, not normatively logical. This perspective points to several predictable sources of errors in modern laboratory reasoning tasks, including inherent, systematic biases in information-processing systems explained by Error Management Theory.

The New England towns and villages that inspired the major figures of the Transcendentalism movement are presented by region in this travel guide that devotes a chapter to each town or village famous for its relationship to one or more of the Transcendentalists. Cambridge, where Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his powerful speeches is highlighted, as is Walden, where Henry David Thoreau spent two years attuning himself to the rhythms of nature. Other chapters retrace the paths of major writers and poets (...) of the period as well as the utopian communities of the time. This invaluable traveling companion offers street maps, historical illustrations, and narratives that create a vivid sense of New England in the 19th century. (shrink)

Nijhawan's theory rests on the assumption that transient signals compete with predictive signals to generate the visual percept. We describe experiments that show that this assumption is incorrect. Our results are consistent with an alternative theory that proposes that vision is instead postdictive, in that the perception of an event is influenced by occurrences after the event.

Following the publication of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, four aged Cardinals wrote to him asking him to clarify positions in the Exhortation they charged were causing confusion to the faithful. They even suggested he had changed some Catholic doctrines. This essay answers their questions, arguing that Francis has not changed any Catholic doctrine but has changed, in the sense that he has renewed, Catholic pastoral practice. It also argues that, while not changing any Catholic doctrines, he has reprioritized (...) some of them, especially the doctrines of the authority and inviolability of conscience and what he calls the “irregular situations” of cohabitation, same-sex unions, and divorce and remarriage without annulment. (shrink)

We discuss the evolutionary implications of connections drawn between the authors' learned “secondary modules” and the habit-formation system that appears to be ubiquitous among vertebrates. Prior to any subsequent coevolution with social learning, we suggest that aspects of general intelligence likely arose in tandem with mechanisms of adaptive motor control that rely on basal ganglia circuitry.