PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show how both the presentation and limitation of visual choices in massively multiplayer online role‐playing games (MMORPG) avatar creation interfaces tends to exclude or favor different real life social groups.Design/methodology/approachA novel method combining both quantitative and critical analysis of the syntagmatic‐paradigmatic structure of MMORPG avatar creation interfaces is used to inform the findings of this study.FindingsThis study concludes that as cultural interfaces, current fantasy themed MMORPGs remediate socially exclusive values both from fantasy literature (...) and from their own game lore. The socially exclusive values deal largely with extreme and immutable racial and sexual dimorphism.Research limitations/implicationsInterfaces which present users with color palettes and/or smooth slider‐based body modifiers do not lend themselves well to this method of analysis. In addition to this, only a handful of the popular MMORPGs are analyzed within the body of this work.Practical implicationsThis paper demonstrates that MMORPG players and designers need to be more aware about how they are constructing and embedding social values in their worlds. Avatars are critical conduits for online social dynamics and embedding socially exclusive values may transfer negative ideologies from old media to new.Originality/valueThis paper offers one of the earliest critiques of embedded values in avatar creation interfaces of MMORPGs. The paper aims to begin discussion on an overlooked area of now popular media that has not received any critical attention regarding its embedded messages of social inclusiveness or exclusiveness. (shrink)

Bioethics is the philosophical study of the ethical controversies brought about by advances in biology and medicine. Bioethicists are concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, philosophy, and theology. This book presents research in the expansive field of bioethics including biomedical ethics in obstetrics, ethical decision making in the health care system, the feasibility of using human oocytes for stem cell research, as well as mandatory circumcision in Sub-Saharan Africa to (...) prevent HIV and AIDS and environmental ethics to preserve the world for future generations. (shrink)

Biology, during the last decade in particular, is making substantial headway into our social theories of business and behavior. While the social sciences rush to keep up with the advancement of knowledge, we highlight the need for an ethics discussion to also keep pace. Although the implications to theory are important, our focus is on how new knowledge has the capacity to alter the formulation and practice of business policy, which we believe is potentially profound. Furthermore, the ethicality of (...) a set of issues can depend heavily on one’s perspective, and differing views may not always be compatible. With this in mind, we discuss the ways in which one area of emerging biological knowledge—behavioral genetics—invites a rethinking of the nuances of four long-standing topic areas of business ethics surrounding personnel selection; and we do so from two perspectives—that of the employer and of the job seeker. The four ethical topics are the static nature of genetic information that is out of an individual’s control, faking and lying during selection processes, privacy, and stigmatization of minority groups. (shrink)

Efforts to promote responsible conduct of research (RCR) should take into consideration how scientists already conceptualize the relationship between ethics and science. In this study, we investigated how scientists relate ethics and science by analyzing the values expressed in interviews with fifteen science faculty members at a large midwestern university. We identified the values the scientists appealed to when discussing research ethics, how explicitly they related their values to ethics, and the relationships between the values they appealed to. We found (...) that the scientists in our study appealed to epistemic and ethical values with about the same frequency, and much more often than any other type of value. We also found that they explicitly associated epistemic values with ethical values. Participants were more likely to describe epistemic and ethical values as supporting each other, rather than trading off with each other. This suggests that many scientists already have a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between ethics and science, which may be an important resource for RCR training interventions. (shrink)

In mining, manufacturing and industrial process industries, maintenance procedures are used as an aid to guide technicians through complex manual tasks. These procedures are not machine-readable, and cannot support reasoning in digitally integrated manufacturing systems. Procedure documents contain unstructured text and are stored in a variety of formats. The aim of this work is to query information held in real industrial maintenance procedures. To achieve this, we develop an ontology for maintenance procedures using the OWL 2 description language. We leverage (...) classes and object properties from the ISO 15926 Part 14 Upper Ontology and create a domain ontology. The key contribution of this paper is a demonstration of trade-offs required when modelling an existing engineering artifact, where an abstraction of its contents is given a-priori. We provide an ontologically rigorous abstraction of notions captured in procedure documentation to a set of classes, relations and axioms that allow reasoning over the contents. Validation of the ontology is performed via a series of competency questions based on queries relevant to technicians, engineers and schedulers in industry. The ontology is applied to real world maintenance procedures from two industrial organisations. (shrink)

Tyler Burge presents an original study of the most primitive ways in which individuals represent the physical world. By reflecting on the science of perception and related psychological and biological sciences, he gives an account of constitutive conditions for perceiving the physical world, and thus aims to locate origins of representational mind.

The author responds to a letter by D. Brendan Johnson in the July‐August 2023 issue of the Hastings Center Report concerning his and Joseph Clair's article “Love Your Patient as Yourself: On Reviving the Broken Heart of American Medical Ethics.”.

Representation and computation are the best tools we have for explaining intelligent behavior. In our program, we explore the space of representations present in the mind by constraining them to explain data at multiple levels of analysis, from behavioral patterns to neural activity. We argue that this integrated program assuages Brette's worries about the study of the neural code.

Research over the past three decades on the gender gap in STEM has consistently found an underrepresentation of females pursuing STEM degrees and careers. This is, at its foundation, an educational ethics issue. Schools at all levels, ranging all the way from middle school to graduate school, have a responsibility to prepare more females for careers in STEM. Experts have proposed a variety of fixes to encourage female students to study STEM, including increased funding, some of which have helped, and (...) yet the gap remains. This paper examines one such effort to address this education and ethics issue - voluntary programs outside of normal school hours that provide young female students’ opportunities for active participation and engagement in STEM. Are these enrichment programs actually increasing subsequent female participation rates? The authors use a correlational study in an attempt to determine whether there is a positive correlation between participation in a voluntary before school STEM program, and their subsequent enrollment in STEM courses in high school, and/or in college and career. The authors surveyed intermediate school students, and the results showed that although voluntary before-school programs may not increase female interest in STEM, they do help to maintain long-term interest by those who have already demonstrated an inclination toward STEM. This is a pilot study with a limited number of subjects from one geographical area. Future research should be conducted that focuses on a larger nationwide sample to determine if school enrichment programs indeed act as career influencers for female students. (shrink)

This essay situates “singularity” at the heart of the power dynamics operative in contemporary pedagogy and the system supporting it. More than merely academic learning, indeed, “school” here denotes not only the range of disciplinary authorities at work within the classroom and the educational system at large but also discursive obedience to knowledge. Supported by close readings of Arendt and Derrida, this paper thus argues that nothing less than the formation of identity is at stake in “school.” What are the (...) boundaries, limits, and conditions of possibility for a student’s invention of his or her own singularity within an institution and curriculum that, at the same time, demands obedience to authority? This paradoxical formation of identity within the constrictive demands of authority constitutes the primary task of thinking the “invention of singularity” at the heart of schooling in conjunction with democracy, language, vocation, and ideology. (shrink)

Despite the known positive effects of acute exercise on cognition, the effects of a competitive team sport match are unknown. In a randomized crossover design, 20 female and 17 male field hockey players completed a battery of cognitive tests prior to, at half-time, and immediately following a competitive match ; with effect sizes presented as raw ES from mixed effect models. Blood samples were collected prior to and following the match and control trial, and analyzed for adrenaline, noradrenaline, brain derived (...) neurotrophic factor, cathepsin B, and cortisol. The match improved response times for a simple perception task at full-time and response times on the complex executive function task improved at half-time. Working memory declined at full-time on the match. The change in working memory was negatively correlated with increases in cortisol, as was the change in simple perception response time and the change in noradrenaline concentration. This study is the first to highlight the effects a competitive hockey match can have on cognition. These findings have implications for performance optimization, as understanding the influence on specific cognitive domains across a match allows for the investigation into strategies to improve these aspects. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to show why pediatric suffering must be understood as a judgment or evaluation, rather than a mental state. To accomplish this task, first I analyze the various ways that the label of suffering is used in pediatric practice. Out of this analysis emerge what I call the twin poles of pediatric suffering. At one pole sits the belief that infants and children with severe cognitive impairment cannot suffer because they are nonverbal or lack subjective life (...) experience. At the other pole exists the idea that once child suffering reaches some threshold it is ethical to eliminate the sufferer. Concerningly, at both poles, any particular child vanishes from view. Second, in an attempt to identify a theory of suffering inclusive of children, I examine two prominent so-called experiential accounts of suffering. I find them both wanting on account of their absurd entailments and their flawed assumptions regarding the subjective experiences of people who cannot communicate expressively. Finally, I extend arguments found in Alastair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals to argue that child suffering can be understood only as a set of absences—absences of conditions such as love, warmth, and freedom from pain. An evaluation of these absences reveals the exquisite dependency of children. It also discloses why pediatric suffering is necessarily a social and political event. Unlike adults, children will never be either the authors or the mitigators of their own suffering. Rather, children must rely wholly on others in order to resist suffering, grow, and flourish. (shrink)

Foundations of Mind collects the essays which established Tyler Burge as a leading philosopher of mind. This second volume of his papers offers nineteen pieces published between 1975 and 2003, including the influential series that develops anti-individualism. Burge contributes three essay-length postscripts, a substantial new paper on consciousness, and an introduction which surveys his work in this area. The foundations that Burge reflects on are conditions in the individual or the wider world that determine the natures of mental kinds. (...) The conditions include causal, social, psychological conditions, and conditions of phenomenal consciousness. Some of these are basic conditions under which minds are possible. The book is essential reading for philosophers of mind, and should engage a wider public interested in basic philosophical issues. (shrink)

Skeptics about nonlinguistic mindreading often use an inferential rule of thumb—the principle of conservatism—to cast doubt on purported empirical evidence of mindreading abilities in nonlinguistic creatures. This principle, if warranted, would seem to count generally against explanatory hypotheses that posit nonlinguistic mindreading, instead favoring mere behavior-reading hypotheses. Using a test case from research with chimpanzees, I show that this principle is best understood as an appeal to parsimony; that, regardless of how one conceives of parsimony, the principle is unwarranted; and (...) that, once we put the principle aside, the prospects for nonlinguistic mindreading are brighter than traditionally thought. (shrink)

Challenging the dominant scholarly consensus that Nietzsche is simply an enemy of religion, Tyler Roberts examines the place of religion in Nietzsche's thought and Nietzsche's thought as a site of religion. Roberts argues that Nietzsche's conceptualization and cultivation of an affirmative self require that we interrogate the ambiguities that mark his criticisms of asceticism and mysticism. What emerges is a vision of Nietzsche's philosophy as the enactment of a spiritual quest informed by transfigured versions of religious tropes and practices. (...) Nietzsche criticizes the ascetic hatred of the body and this-worldly life, yet engages in rigorous practices of self-denial--he sees philosophy as such a practice--and affirms the need of imposing suffering on oneself in order to enhance the spirit. He dismisses the "intoxication" of mysticism, yet links mysticism, power, and creativity, and describes his own self-transcending experiences. The tensions in his relation to religion are closely related to that between negation and affirmation in his thinking in general. In Roberts's view, Nietzsche's transfigurations of religion offer resources for a postmodern religious imagination. Though as a "master of suspicion," Nietzsche, with Freud and Marx, is an integral part of modern antireligion, he has the power to take us beyond the flat, modern distinction between the secular and the religious--a distinction that, at the end of modernity, begs to be reexamined. (shrink)

this with seared tuna best). Cook over high heat in wok until 2/3 to 3/4 cooked but not done. Set aside.

Cognition Through Understanding presents a selection of Tyler Burge's essays that use epistemology to illumine powers of mind. The essays focus on epistemic warrants that differ from those warrants commonly discussed in epistemology--those for ordinary empirical beliefs and for logical and mathematical beliefs. The essays center on four types of cognition warranted through understanding--self-knowledge, interlocution, reasoning, and reflection. Burge argues that by reflecting on warrants for these types of cognition, one better understands cognitive powers that are distinctive of persons, (...) and of human beings. The collection presents three previously unpublished independent essays, in addition to substantial, retrospective commentary. The retrospective commentary invites the reader to make connections that were not fully in mind when the essays were written. (shrink)

If epistemology is roughly the study of knowledge, justification, warrant, and rationality, then religious epistemology is the study of how these epistemic concepts relate to religious belief and practice. This Element, while surveying various religious epistemologies, argues specifically for Plantingian religious epistemology. It makes the case for proper functionalism and Plantinga's AC models, while it also responds to debunking arguments informed by cognitive science of religion. It serves as a bridge between religious epistemology and natural theology.

While dissent is key to successful science, it is not always beneficial. By requiring scientists to respond to objections, epistemically detrimental dissent (EDD) consumes resources that could be better devoted to furthering scientific discovery. Moreover, bad-faith dissent can create a chilling effect on certain lines of inquiry and make settled controversies seem open to debate. Such dissent results in harm to scientific progress and the public policy that depends on this science. Biddle and Leuschner propose four criteria that draw on (...) inductive risk as a method for separating this EDD from beneficial dissent while de Melo-Martín and Intemann reject this approach for failing to capture paradigmatic instances of EDD. Against de Melo-Martín and Intemann’s objections, I propose the inductive risk account can be saved and strengthened through the following modifications: (1) removing the requirement that the four conditions of EDD be jointly satisfied, (2) requiring that each criterion be measured as a matter of degree rather than as a binary, and (3) requiring that the four criteria are measured holistically. These modifications not only mitigate the criticisms but produce five benefits over Biddle and Leuschner’s account, including: (1) capturing paradigmatic instances of EDD, (2) reflecting the degree to which an instance of EDD is problematic, (3) capturing the interactions between criteria, (4) avoiding legitimizing inappropriate dissent, and (5) reflecting changes to the epistemic standing of dissent. As such, I argue that the modified IndRA provides a powerful tool for identifying EDD and strengthening science. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett distinguishes real patterns from bogus patterns by appeal to compressibility. As information theorists have shown, data are compressible if and only if those data exhibit a pattern....

Tyler conducted a longitudinal study of 1,575 Chicago inhabitants to determine why people obey the law. His findings show that the law is obeyed primarily because people believe in respecting legitimate authority, not because they fear punishment. The author concludes that lawmakers and law enforcers would do much better to make legal systems worthy of respect than to try to instill fear of punishment.

This article presents a radical claim: American medical ethics is broken, and it needs love to be healed. Due to a unique set of cultural and economic pressures, American medical ethics has adopted a mechanistic mode of ethical reasoning epitomized by the doctrine of principlism. This mode of reasoning divorces clinicians from both their patients and themselves. This results in clinicians who can ace ethics questions on multiple‐choice tests but who fail either to recognize a patient's humanity or to navigate (...) the ethical quandaries into which they are frequently thrown. Drawing on personal experience as well as the philosophical work of Augustine of Hippo, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch, we propose a novel ethical approach grounded in a conception of neighbor love, specifically, the virtue of love understood as attention to a sufferer's humanity. We conclude with five practical recommendations for reimagining medical ethics education oriented around the virtue of love. (shrink)

According to structuralism, all natural properties are individuated by their roles in causal/nomological structures. According to quidditism, at least some natural properties are individuated in some other way. Because these theses deal with the identities of natural properties, this distinction cuts to the core of a serious metaphysical dispute: Are the intrinsic natures of all natural properties essentially causal/nomological in character? I'll argue that the answer is ‘no’, or at least that this answer is more plausible than many critics of (...) quidditism have recognized. In section 1, I distinguish between two versions of quidditism. Bare quidditism holds that worlds with distinct properties and isomorphic structures must be qualitatively identical in the following sense: inhabiting one world would be indistinguishable from inhabiting the other. In contrast, qualitative quidditism allows such worlds to have qualitative differences. In section 2, I discuss an epistemological position that allows us to bett... (shrink)

Argument for Epiphenomenalism [I]: (A) Mental event-tokens are identical with physical event-tokens. (B) The causal powers of a physical event are determined only by its physical properties; and (C) mental properties are not reducible to physical properties.

While there has been considerable interest in the nature of faith and trust in recent philosophical literature, relatively little has been said about what it is for faith or trust to be psychologically stronger or weaker. Drawing on recent accounts of propositional faith by Daniel Howard-Snyder and Lara Buchak, I argue that the strength of one’s faith can vary in two distinct dimensions. The first primarily involves the extent to which one’s confidence motivates one to take risks. The second involves (...) the resilience of the first dimension of strength to possible counterevidence. (shrink)

Introduced in 2007 by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the intervention ladder has become an influential tool in bioethics and public health policy for weighing the justification for interventions and for weighing considerations of intrusiveness and proportionality. However, while such considerations are critical, in its focus on these factors, the ladder overemphasises the role of personal responsibility and the importance of individual behaviour change in public health interventions. Through a study of vaccine hesitancy and vaccine mandates among healthcare workers, this (...) paper investigates how the ladder obscures systemic factors such as the social determinants of health. In overlooking these factors, potentially effective interventions are left off the table and the intervention ladder serves to divert attention away from key issues in public health. This paper, therefore, proposes a replacement for the intervention ladder—the intervention stairway. By broadening the intervention ladder to include systemic factors, the stairway ensures relevant interventions are not neglected merely due to the framing of the issue. Moreover, it more accurately captures factors influencing individual health as well as allocations of responsibility for improving these factors. (shrink)

This contribution aims at proposing a framework for articulating different kinds of “normativities” that are and can be attributed to “algorithmic systems.” The technical normativity manifests itself through the lineage of technical objects. The norm expresses a technical scheme’s becoming as it mutates through, but also resists, inventions. The genealogy of neural networks shall provide a powerful illustration of this dynamic by engaging with their concrete functioning as well as their unsuspected potentialities. The socio-technical normativity accounts for the manners in (...) which engineers, as actors folded into socio-technical networks, willingly or unwittingly, infuse technical objects with values materialized in the system. Surveillance systems’ design will serve here to instantiate the ongoing mediation through which algorithmic systems are endowed with specific capacities. The behavioral normativity is the normative activity, in which both organic and mechanical behaviors are actively participating, undoing the identification of machines with “norm following,” and organisms with “norminstitution”. This proposition productively accounts for the singularity of machine learning algorithms, explored here through the case of recommender systems. The paper will provide substantial discussions of the notions of “normative” by cutting across history and philosophy of science, legal, and critical theory, as well as “algorithmics,” and by confronting our studies led in engineering laboratories with critical algorithm studies. (shrink)

Cognition Through Understanding presents a selection of Tyler Burge's essays on cognition, thought, and language. The essays collected here use epistemology as a way of interpreting underlying powers of mind, and focus on four types of cognition that are warranted through understanding: self-knowledge, interlocution, reasoning, and reflection.

Tyler Burge presents a collection of his seminal essays on Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), who has a strong claim to be seen as the founder of modern analytic philosophy, and whose work remains at the centre of philosophical debate today. Truth, Thought, Reason gathers some of Burge's most influential work from the last twenty-five years, and also features important new material, including a substantial introduction and postscripts to four of the ten papers. It will be an essential resource for any (...) historian of modern philosophy, and for anyone working on philosophy of language, epistemology, or philosophical logic. (shrink)

Kalevi Kull’s target article importantly rejects the argument from biological aesthetics, that beauty is a product of natural selection. Instead, beauty is a reflection of the ongoing diversity of free semiotic choosing and fitting. From this view, biosemiotic aesthetics could become the semiotic branch par excellence, in its theorization of the origins of what has always been the central interest of general semiotics. The narrow argument about sexual selection is couched inside the broader ambition to establish a biological but nonreductive (...) definition and scope for aesthetics itself. One of the most important services biosemiotics can provide to the larger community is to bestow upon it some really unifying general principles applicable to all branches of semiotics, and the theory of biosemiotic aesthetics promises to do just this. General semiotics may later adopt some of Kull’s present theorization and apply it to the textual concerns which Kull prefers to consign to other specialists. (shrink)

One reason to posit governing laws is to explain the uniformity of nature. Explanatory power can be purchased by accepting new primitives, and scientists invoke laws in their explanations without providing any supporting metaphysics. For these reasons, one might suspect that we can treat laws as wholly unanalyzable primitives. (John Carroll’s *Laws of Nature* (1994) and Tim Maudlin’s *The Metaphysics Within Physics* (2007) offer recent defenses of primitivism about laws.) Whatever defects primitive laws might have, explanatory weakness should not be (...) one of them. However, in this essay I’ll argue that wholly primitive laws cannot explain the uniformity of nature. The basic argument is based on the following idea: though a primitive law that P makes P likely, the primitive status of the law provides no reason to think that P must describe (or otherwise give rise to) a natural regularity. After identifying the problem for primitive laws, I consider an extension of the objection to all theories of governing laws and suggest that it may be avoided by a version of the Dretske/Tooley/Armstrong theory according to which laws are relations between universals. (shrink)

This article traces the evolution of auricular confession from its origins in the spiritual diakresis in the early desert tradition and argues that through the Celtic churches of Northern Europe the practice is introduced into the Western Church culminating in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. By developing the desert tradition of diakresis it will be argued that the Celtic system triumphed because of its stronger psychological verisimilitude compared to the Southern Mediterranean traditions of public one-off penance.