The present narrative review seeks to unravel where we are now, and where we need to go to delineate the active ingredients in psychotherapy delivered by conversational agents (e.g., chatbots). While psychotherapy delivered by conversational agents has shown promising effectiveness for depression, anxiety, and psychological distress across several randomized controlled trials, little emphasis has been placed on the therapeutic processes in these interventions. The theoretical framework of this narrative review is grounded in prominent perspectives on the active ingredients (...) in psychotherapy. Based on search terms derived from various theoretical perspectives, we conducted a systematic literature search of four scientific databases and identified 17 studies. Across the selected studies, three themes emerged: relationship variables, emotional venting, and cognitive factors. While methodological issues compromise the epistemic value of this evidence base, core questions also remain to be answered. Such questions include, but are not limited to, whether humans can form affectionate bonds to inanimate beings and whether these kind of mental health treatments should be understood as psychotherapy or something else. Researchers should therefore be cautious when applying theories of psychotherapy in the realm of conversational agents. We conclude the paper by introducing recommendations for future research, which we hope will help instigate methodologically sound studies in this field. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and conversational agents, emphasizing their potential benefits while also highlighting the need for vigilant monitoring to prevent unethical applications. Design/methodology/approach As AI becomes more prevalent in academia and research, it is crucial to explore ways to ensure ethical usage of the technology and to identify potentially unethical usage. This manuscript uses a popular AI chatbot to write the introduction and parts of the body of (...) a manuscript discussing conversational agents, the ethical usage of chatbots and ethical concerns for academic researchers. Findings The authors reveal which sections were written entirely by the AI using a conversational agent. This serves as a cautionary tale highlighting the importance of ethical considerations for researchers and students when using AI and how educators must be prepared for the increasing prevalence of AI in the academy and industry. Measures to mitigate potential unethical use of this evolving technology are also discussed in the manuscript. Originality/value As conversational agents and chatbots increase in society, it is crucial to understand how they will impact the community and how we can live with technology instead of fighting against it. (shrink)

We have developed a broadcasting agent system, public opinion channel (POC) caster, which generates understandable conversational form from text-based documents. The POC caster circulates the opinions of community members by using conversational form in a broadcasting system on the Internet. We evaluated its transformation rules in two experiments. In experiment 1, we examined our transformation rules for conversational form in relation to sentence length. Twenty-four participants listened to two types of sentence (long sentences and short sentences) (...) with conversational form or with single speech. In experiment 2, we investigated the relationship between conversational form and the user’s knowledge level. Forty-two participants (21 with a high knowledge level and 21 with a low knowledge level) were selected for a knowledge task and listened to two kinds of sentence (sentences about a well-known topic or sentences about an unfamiliar topic). Our results indicate that the conversational form aided comprehension, especially for long sentences and when users had little knowledge about the topic. We explore possible explanations and implications of these results with regard to human cognition and text comprehension. (shrink)

The increase in the spread of conversational agents urgently requires to tackle the ethical issues linked to their design. In fact, developers frequently include in their products cues that trigger social biases in order to maximize the performance and the quality of human-machine interactions. The present paper discusses whether and to what extent it is ethically sound to intentionally trigger gender biases through the design of virtually embodied conversational agents. After outlining the complex dynamics involving social biases, social (...) robots, and design, we evaluate the ethics of integrating gender cues in conversational agents, analysing four different approaches to the problem. Finally, we suggest which approach in our opinion might have the best chances to reduce the negative effects of biases and discriminatory visions of gender dynamics. (shrink)

Conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) presents many opportunities in the psychotherapeutic landscape—such as therapeutic support for people with mental health problems and without access to care. The adoption of CAI poses many risks that need in-depth ethical scrutiny. The objective of this paper is to complement current research on the ethics of AI for mental health by proposing a holistic, ethical, and epistemic analysis of CAI adoption. First, we focus on the question of whether CAI is rather a tool or (...) an agent. This question serves as a framework for the subsequent ethical analysis of CAI focusing on topics of (self-) knowledge, (self-)understanding, and relationships. Second, we propose further conceptual and ethical analysis regarding human-AI interaction and argue that CAI cannot be considered as an equal partner in a conversation as is the case with a human therapist. Instead, CAI’s role in a conversation should be restricted to specific functions. (shrink)

Acceleration ethics addresses the tension between innovation and safety in artificial intelligence. The acceleration argument is that risks raised by innovation should be answered with still more innovating. This paper summarizes the theoretical position, and then shows how acceleration ethics works in a real case. To begin, the paper summarizes acceleration ethics as composed of five elements: innovation solves innovation problems, innovation is intrinsically valuable, the unknown is encouraging, governance is decentralized, ethics is embedded. Subsequently, the paper illustrates the acceleration (...) framework with a use-case, a generative artificial intelligence language tool developed by the Canadian telecommunications company Telus. While the purity of theoretical positions is blurred by real-world ambiguities, the Telus experience indicates that acceleration AI ethics is a way of maximizing social responsibility through innovation, as opposed to sacrificing social responsibility for innovation, or sacrificing innovation for social responsibility. (shrink)

This paper pursues a formal analogy between natural language dialogue and collaborative real-world action in general. The analogy depends on an analysis of two aspects of collaboration that figure crucially in language use. First, agents must be able to coordinate abstractly about future decisions which cannot be made on present information. Second, when agents finally take such decisions, they must again coordinate in order to interpret one anothers’ actions as collaborative. The contribution of this paper is a general representation of (...) collaborative plans and intentions, inspired by representations of deductions in logics of knowledge, action and time, which supports these two kinds of coordination. Such representations.. (shrink)

(Near-final version.) Accepted for publication in Artificial Intelligence Journal.

Conversational agents (CA) are thought to be promising for psychotherapy because they give the impression of being able to engage in conversations with human users. However, given the high risk for therapy patients who are already in a vulnerable situation, there is a need to investigate the extent to which CA are able to contribute to therapy goals and to discuss CA’s limitations, especially in complex cases. In this paper, we understand psychotherapy as a way of dealing with existential (...) situations and position CAs in the context of the therapeutic experience of patients. This experience is determined by the patient’s unique personal context and specific therapy goals. We suggest that psychotherapy is a fundamentally dialogical activity, because it crucially involves work on the self and one’s self-narrative. This brings us to our central question: is it possible for CAs to engage in a productive therapeutic dialogue, given their limitations as epistemic agents? We will discuss several of those limitations, show how these undermine the possibility of engaging in a therapeutic dialogue, and illustrate those limitations through discussions of the cases of grief and abuse. (shrink)

Large-scale language technologies are increasingly used in various forms of communication with humans across different contexts. One particular use case for these technologies is conversational agents, which output natural language text in response to prompts and queries. This mode of engagement raises a number of social and ethical questions. For example, what does it mean to align conversational agents with human norms or values? Which norms or values should they be aligned with? And how can this be accomplished? (...) In this paper, we propose a number of steps that help answer these questions. We start by developing a philosophical analysis of the building blocks of linguistic communication between conversational agents and human interlocutors. We then use this analysis to identify and formulate ideal norms of conversation that can govern successful linguistic communication between humans and conversational agents. Furthermore, we explore how these norms can be used to align conversational agents with human values across a range of different discursive domains. We conclude by discussing the practical implications of our proposal for the design of conversational agents that are aligned with these norms and values. (shrink)

Side A. Hill, Clint. A conversation with a former Secret Service agent. Cousy, B. Athletics & the killer instinct, pt. 1.-Side B. Cousy, B. Athletics & the killer instinct, pt. 2. Copeland, A. Music in America.

Building animated conversational agents requires developing a fine-grained analysis of the motions and meanings available to interlocutors in face-to-face conversation and implementing strategies for using these motions and meanings to communicate effectively. In this paper, we describe our research on signaling uncertainty on an animated face as an end-to-end case study of this process. We sketch our efforts to characterize people’s facial displays of uncertainty in face-to-face conversation in ways that allow us to simulate those behaviors in an animated (...) agent. Our work has led to new insights into the structure, timing, expressive content and communicative function of facial actions that we must take into account to explain our empirical findings and to build agents that reproduce people’s effective use of the face in managing the dynamics of conversation. (shrink)

In this book Michael McKenna advances a new theory of moral responsibility, one that builds upon the work of P.F. Strawson.

In this paper we study automated reasoning in the modal logic CPDLreg which is a combination of CPDL (Propositional Dynamic Logic with Converse) and REGc (Regular Grammar Logic with Converse). The logic CPDL is widely used in many areas, including program verification, theory of action and change, and knowledge representation. On the other hand, the logic REGc is applicable in reasoning about epistemic states and ontologies (via Description Logics). The modal logic CPDLreg can serve as a technical foundation for reasoning (...) about agency. Even very rich multi-agent logics can be embedded into CPDLreg via a suitable translation. Therefore, CPDLreg can serve as a test bed to implement and possibly verify new ideas without providing specific automated reasoning techniques for the logic in question. This process can to a large extent be automated. The idea of embedding various logics into CPDLreg is illustrated on a rather advanced logic TEAMLOGK designed to specify teamwork in multi-agent systems. Apart from defining informational and motivational attitudes of groups of agents, TEAMLOGK allows for grading agents' beliefs, goals and intentions. The current paper is a companion to our paper (Dunin-Kęplicz et al., 2010a). The main contribution are proofs of soundness and completeness of the tableau calculus for CPDLreg provided in (Dunin-Kęplicz et al., 2010a). (shrink)

In this paper, I present a challenge for Michael McKenna’s conversational theory of moral responsibility. On his view, to be a responsible agent is to be able to engage in a type of moral conversation. I argue that individuals with autism spectrum disorder present a considerable problem for the conversational theory because empirical evidence on the disorder seems to suggest that there are individuals in the world who meet all of the conditions for responsible agency that the (...) theory lays out but who are nevertheless not responsible agents. Attending to the moral psychology of such individuals will, I think, help shed light on an important gap in the conversational theory. (shrink)

Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) consider conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) as a new way of providing psychotherapy to patients. This is an important topic, and Sedlakova and Trachsel have...

The purpose of this study is to compile a selection of the various formalisms found in conversation theory to introduce readers to Pask's discursive algebra. In this way, the text demonstrates how concept sharing and concept formation by means of the interaction of two participants may be formalized. The approach taken in this study is to examine the formal notation system used by Pask and demonstrate how such formalisms may be used to represent concept sharing and concept formation through conversation. (...) The compilation of the discursive algebra using the framework provided by conversation theory could potentially be used as an auxiliary framework to study conversational interactions in multi-agent systems theory. (shrink)

Sedlakova and Traschel argue that conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) is more than a mere tool, but not quite an agent, as it “simulates having a therapeutic conversation [but] does not re...

Testimonial injustice occurs when hearers attribute speakers a credibility deficit because of an identity prejudice and consequently dismiss speakers’ testimonial assertions. Various philosophers explain testimonial injustice by appealing to interpersonal norms arising within testimonial exchanges. When conversational participants violate these interpersonal norms, they generate second-personal epistemic harms, harming speakers as epistemic agents. This focus on testimony, however, neglects how systematically misevaluating speakers’ knowledge affects conversational participants more generally. When hearers systematically misevaluate speakers’ conversational competence because of entrenched (...) assumptions about what speakers know, I call these conversational epistemic injustices. I argue the same epistemic harm in testimonial injustice arises for non-assertoric speech acts, generating conversational epistemic injustices. For across speech acts, deflated knowledge attributions create second-personal harms that prevent speakers from using their knowledge in linguistic exchanges, limiting their epistemic agency. These harms however are not reducible to linguistic harms, (e.g.,) silencing or discursive injustice. This article applies insight from how second-personal epistemic harm arises in testimonial exchanges to conversational exchanges more generally, demonstrating that epistemic injustices arise beyond testimonial exchanges and contexts of inquiry because deflated knowledge attributions undermine general conversational norms requiring participants assume each other’s conversational competence, generating conversational epistemic injustices. (shrink)

In this co-authored article, one contributor presents a case story from an interview with a social worker in Slovenia, while five others offer commentaries on ethical aspects of the case. The story comes from a practitioner working with a pregnant young woman, arranging for adoption following birth. The social worker respected the woman’s request to keep her identity secret, hence not registering her in the institutional records. However, whilst the social worker was on holiday, the baby was born and anonymity (...) was not maintained. Commentaries 1 and 2 evaluate the story through its form: as a narrative with a tempo and plot; and as a performance that creates its narrator as an agent with an ethical identity. Commentary 3 uses a normative moral philosophical framework (virtue ethics), while the final two commentaries take a more grounded approach. Commentary 4 views the social worker as using discretion to act in a space void of rules (there is no provision for anonymous birth), whereas Commentary 5 foregrounds the Slovenian code of ethics as a source of ethical standards unremarked upon by the social worker. The article ends with reflections on the value of exploring multiple perspectives and engaging in dialogue in developing ethical understandings and actions. (shrink)

How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled (...) from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards “factive” forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation. (shrink)

In Conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism is an accessible introduction to Karen Barad's agential realist philosophy. The authors take on a unique approach to involve the readers in in/formal conversations between Karen, postgraduates, and researchers at a research event held in 2017 at Cape Town, South Africa.

This paper outlines a first attempt to model the special constraints that arise in language processing in conversation, and to explore the implications such functional considerations may have on language typology and language change. In particular, we focus on processing pressures imposed by conversational turn-taking and their consequences for the cultural evolution of the structural properties of language. We present an agent-based model of cultural evolution where agents take turns at talk in conversation. When the start of planning (...) for the next turn is constrained by the position of the verb, the stable distribution of dominant word orders across languages evolves to match the actual distribution reasonably well. We suggest that the interface of cognition and interaction should be a more central part of the story of language evolution. (shrink)

This investigation joins recent research on problems with ambiguity in two fields, argumentation and computing. In argumentation, there is a concern with fallacies arising from ambiguity, including equivocation and amphiboly. In computing, the development of agent communication languages is based on conversation policies that make it possible to have information exchanges on the internet, as well as other forms of dialogue like persuasion and negotiation, in which ambiguity is a problem. Because it is not possible to sharply differentiate between (...) problems arising from ambiguity and those arising from vagueness, obscurity and indeterminacy, some study of the latter is included. The semantic web is based on what are called ontologies, or systems of classification of concepts, shown to be useful tools for dealing with these problems. (shrink)

The accusation of Jewish ancestry formulated against Ibn Rushd al-Ḥafīd when he was exiled to Lucena is analyzed taking into account similar accusations made against other Andalusis during the Almoravid and Almohad periods, as well as Muslim representations of the Jews in which these were often depicted as agents of foreign heresies. The influence of the context of suspicion and anxiety created by the forced conversion of the Jews in the early Almohad period in such accusations is also dealt with.

Despite the challenges associated with virtually mediated communication, remote collaboration is a defining characteristic of online multiplayer gaming communities. Inspired by the teamwork exhibited by players in first-person shooter games, this study investigated the verbal and behavioral coordination of four-player teams playing a cooperative online video game. The game, Desert Herding, involved teams consisting of three ground players and one drone operator tasked to locate, corral, and contain evasive robot agents scattered across a large desert environment. Ground players could move (...) throughout the environment, while the drone operator’s role was akin to that of a “spectator” with a bird’s-eye view, with access to veridical information of the locations of teammates and the to-be-corralled agents. Categorical recurrence quantification analysis was used to measure the communication dynamics of teams as they completed the task. Demands on coordination were manipulated by varying the ground players’ ability to observe the environment with the use of game “fog.” Results show that catRQA was sensitive to changes to task visibility, with reductions in task visibility reorganizing how participants conversed during the game to maintain team situation awareness. The results are discussed in the context of future work that can address how team coordination can be augmented with the inclusion of artificial agents, as synthetic teammates. (shrink)

The study of human-human communication and the development of computational models for human-agent communication have diverged significantly throughout the last decade. Yet, despite frequently made claims of “super-human performance” in, e.g., speech recognition or image processing, so far, no system is able to lead a half-decent coherent conversation with a human. In this paper, we argue that we must start to re-consider the hallmarks of cooperative communication and the core capabilities that we have developed for it, and which (...) class='Hi'>conversational agents need to be equipped with: incremental joint co-construction and mentalizing. We base our argument on a vast body of work on human-human communication and its psychological processes that we reason to be relevant and necessary to take into account when modeling human-agent communication. We contrast those with current conceptualizations of human-agent interaction and formulate suggestions for the development of future systems. (shrink)

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place: (2) speaker's meaning, where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner (...) possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced; and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, an actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor's goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of game we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deals with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions. (shrink)

Una larga tradición le atribuye a Sócrates la preocupación por transformar la vida de quienes dialogan con él; atribución que se opone a la imagen, rastreable en los Diálogos de Platón, de su fracaso al momento de influir en la vida de sus interlocutores más recalcitrantes. Para disminuir esta tensión y, con ello, disolver la impresión de dicho fracaso, se examinan elementos de la representación platónica del élenchos en favor de la idea de que Sócrates no busca convertir a los (...) demás. Al final, se añade una crítica al optimismo con que Pierre Hadot sí le adjudica la función de agente de conversión. (shrink)

The central problem of social theory is 'structure and agency'. How do the objective features of society influence human agents? Determinism is not the answer, nor is conditioning as currently conceptualised. It accentuates the way structure and culture shape the social context in which individuals operate, but it neglects our personal capacity to define what we care about most and to establish a modus vivendi expressive of our concerns. Through inner dialogue, 'the internal conversation', individuals reflect upon their social situation (...) in the light of current concerns and projects. On the basis of a series of unique, in-depth interviews, Archer identifies three distinctive forms of internal conversation. These govern agents' responses to social conditioning, their individual patterns of social mobility and whether or not they contribute to social stability or change. Thus the internal conversation is seen as being the missing link between society and the individual, structure and agency. (shrink)

In this paper, I engage with several of the intriguing theses Michael McKenna puts forward in his Conversation and Responsibility. For example, I examine McKenna’s claim that the fact that an agent is morally responsible for an action and the fact that an agent is appropriately held responsible explain each other. I go on to argue that despite the importance of the ability to hold people responsible, an agent’s being morally responsible for an action is explanatorily fundamental, (...) and in this sense responsibility is response-independent. I then explore some of the specific aspects of McKenna’s conversational theory before turning to his suggestion that the conversational nature of our responsibility practices gives us special kinds of reasons for accepting that agents are deserving of the harms of blame. Finally, I conclude by raising questions for his argument that the scope of blameworthy actions extends beyond that of impermissible actions. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on conversational thinking to demonstrate the value of public reasoning in building a decent world and true democracies. We shall take into account the views of selected scholars, especially John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, on law and democratic practice, to explain why post-colonial Africa is weighed down by sociopolitical hegemonies that have aversion to their opposition and eliminate room for strong institutions, rule of law and human rights. In light of conversational thinking, this (...) eliminates any chance for “creative struggle,” i.e. a philosophers struggle against the post-colonial imaginary/social agents to dethrone strong individuals and create strong institutions. In the absence of these indices which a conversational orientation may engender, it is difficult to transform bogus democracy into true democracy and thus to create a decent society. Post-colonial Africa mired in social regression, political crisis and economic stagnation urgently needs conversational tonics to overcome the ineffectiveness of bogus democracy. We postulate a thesis about three structural transformations forming what we call Democratic Transformational Programme. (shrink)

It is not unusual to consider linguistic communication as a type of action performed by an individual —the speaker— intended to influence the mental state of another individual —the addressee. It seems more unusual to reach an agreement on what should be the effect of such influence for the communication to be successful. According to the well-known Gricean view, the success of a communicative action depends precisely on the recognition by the addressee of the mental state of the speaker. In (...) this essay, we want to analyse these mental states; however our main concern is not with the mental states of the agents in an isolated communicative action, but the mental states of the agents in a broader linguistic action, namely, conversation. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is an account of legitimacy and participation whose purposes are to produce justifiable political outcomes and to involve the citizens in productive conversations with each other. This article argues for a greater reliance on the efforts of local conversational participants in the institutional construction process. Because of their epistemic advantages, local participants are usually the agents who are most optimally positioned to construct the deliberative institutions. As such, institutionalized deliberation ought not to be seen as an orderly (...) event that is capable of being planned out beforehand by philosophers, but rather as a complex process that flourishes when the conversation is developing—as much as is practicable—on its own. (shrink)

Conversational artificial agents and artificially intelligent voice assistants are becoming increasingly popular. Digital virtual assistants such as Siri, or conversational devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Home are permeating everyday life, and are designed to be more and more humanlike in their speech. This study investigates the effect this can have on one’s conformity with an AI assistant. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch’s already demonstrated the power and danger of conformity amongst people. In these classical experiments test (...) persons were asked to answer relatively simple questions, whilst others pretending to be participants tried to convince the test person to give wrong answers. These studies were later replicated with embodied robots, but these physical robots are still rare. In light of our increasing reliance on AI assistants, this study investigates to what extent an individual will conform to a disembodied virtual assistant. We also investigate if there is a difference between a group that interacts with an assistant that communicates through text, one that has a robotic voice and one that has a humanlike voice. The assistant attempts to subtly influence participants’ final responses in a general knowledge quiz, and we measure how often participants change their answer after having been given advice. Results show that participants conformed significantly more often to the assistant with a human voice than the one that communicated through text. (shrink)

First published in 1990, Charles Taylor’s essay ‘Comparison, History Truth’ is an extended reflection on some of the problems involved in interpreting other cultures and eras. This essay’s explicit focus is the work of historians and anthropologists. Taylor mentions students of religion in the same breath, but I infer that by this he means students of comparative religions or the history of religions. I suggest that for all its emphasis on conversation, Taylor’s depiction of the comparativist’s enterprise is ultimately one-sided, (...) depicting those who are interpreted as hermeneutic patients rather than hermeneutic agents. I raise some problems with the language of distortion employed throughout the essay. I identify a number of ways in which Taylor’s thought on cross-cultural understanding dovetails with that of Anthony Kwame Appiah in his recent book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. I conclude, however, that there is an important issue addressed by Taylor which Appiah neglects. This is the question of how western comparativists, who according to Taylor proceed from some belief the equal validity of all cultures, engage cultures that do not share this belief. (shrink)

Why does #RepealedThe8th matter for feminist legal studies? The answers seem obvious in one sense. Feminism has long constituted itself through the struggle for sexual and reproductive justice, and Irish feminism has contributed a significant ‘legal win’ with the landslide vote of approval for lifting abortion restrictions in the referendum on the 25th May 2018. That win comes at a global moment when populist legal engagement is doing significant damage in countries that regard themselves as world leaders, and beyond. #RepealedThe8th (...) offers Ireland, and the world, the actuality that the popular vote, and everything that contributes to it, could be something else. Repeal shows how legal tools like the vote may be made into an expression of care for reproductive lives. This expression is important in recognizing pregnant people as knowing agents who are best placed to decide, and in seeking to do justice to those who contribute to everyday reproductive life. But repeal, like the many who brought it into being, has multiple meanings. #RepealedThe8th matters because it is a moving process of socio-legal translation, which draws on a collective energy, ‘repeal energy’, to turn the travesty that was the Eighth Amendment and all it represents into a search for the rest of reproductive life. In opening up the meaning of the vote, much like feminists elsewhere have opened up the meaning of the strike, Irish feminists have turned public mourning over past mistreatment into a series of reproductive connections. This is not a strategy that can be rolled out. Figuring out #RepealedThe8th will take many tellings. Rather we need to give repeal, and repealers, room to breathe and rest. We need to feel our way through repeal’s production of legal change so that this success is not reduced to some generic transferable set of legal instructions. I begin by reflecting on repeal as a process of feminist socio-legal translation, which shows us how legal change comes about through the motivation of collective joy, the mourning of damaged and lost lives, the sharing of legal knowledge, and the claiming of the rest of reproductive life. (shrink)

In addition to ordinary conversations among relatively small numbers of individuals, human societies have public conversations. These are diffuse, ongoing discussions about various topics, which are largely sustained by journalistic activities. They are conversations about news – what is happening now – that members of various groups (such as the residents of a certain country, a certain town, or practitioners of a certain profession) need to know about in their capacity as members of those groups, and about how to react (...) to the news. Our topic in this chapter is a type of resistance to evidence that can arise at the level of these public conversations, rather than at the level of individual agents. We call it “relevance-based resistance to evidence”. A public conversation exhibits this kind of evidence resistance when it becomes overly focused on topics that members of the group that the conversation concerns do not in fact need to know about qua members of the group – topics which are, in a word, irrelevant. We argue that the risks of such relevance-based knowledge resistance are significantly amplified by certain structural features of online discourse. (shrink)

Using conversation analysis as its research method, this article investigates the interactional function of the particle ba in Mandarin Chinese conversation. It is argued that ba is frequently employed by its speakers to adjust deontic gradients in action sequences of directives in mundane conversation besides its function of adjusting epistemic gradients in certain action sequences. The present study claims that the agent and beneficiary of future action can only distinguish one category of directive actions from another, but each category (...) still constitutes several member actions which contrast with one another in terms of social power. The member actions of each category form a continuum, one end of which is the action with the highest level of social power and the other end of which is the action with the lowest level of social power. There exists a normative relation between each member action of a category and the speaker’s deontic status in the real world. The particle ba is a practice of minutely adjusting the speaker’s deontic stance from a higher position to a lower one. (shrink)

Current literature on resistance focuses on the elements of action and opposition as its main components. However, when we use the term resistance we are not necessarily referring exclusively to the active expression of opposition, but could also be referring to discussions about such events or to stimuli that may cause these acts. Thus resistance, for the purposes of this study, is perceived in terms of action, external conversation and stimuli, and it is argued that these external characteristics may be (...) further processed through deliberation and internal conversations about resistance. An exploratory empirical study revealed inner aspects of resistance, and examined whether internal conversations about resistance could actually be experienced by agents. This article further supports the argument that, as individuals produce internal conversations about resistance, they may end by following one of the suggested options: they may keep their internal conversations unspoken, or produce a course of action related to resistance (and identified as such), or they may produce external conversations about resistance, or they may end by producing resistance that is not recognisable (to others) as such. In all these cases, internal conversations about resistance are involved and it is therefore argued that the causal impact of resistance may derive from agential processes and powers as well as from action, stimuli or external conversations related to resistance. (shrink)

In this contribution, I focus on three key questions that arise when engaging with Ricœur’s lecture, “Suffering is Not Pain.” The first is the methodological issue concerning the philosopher’s role, particularly in taxonomizing. I will examine mental taxonomy, as well as taxonomy more broadly, before turning to pain and suffering more specifically. I then move to Ricœur’s characterization and contrast of suffering and pain throughout the lecture. Following this, I expand on Ricœur’s definition of suffering as a diminution of the (...) power to act by incorporating my own account of suffering as a significant disruption to agency. I explore how this expanded view can contribute to a deeper investigation of Ricœur’s agentive hypothesis of suffering within each of his three identified “moments” of suffering, thus enhancing our understanding of the specific agentive challenge that suffering represents. (shrink)

In this paper we study language use and language organisation by making use of Lewisean signalling games. Standard game theoretical approaches are contrasted with evolutionary ones to analyze conventional meaning and conversational interpretation strategies. It is argued that analyzing successful communication in terms of standard game theory requires agents to be very rational and fully informed. The main goal of the paper is to show that in terms of evolutionary game theory we can motivate the emergence and self-sustaining force (...) of (i) conventional meaning and (ii) some conversational interpretation strategies in terms of weaker and, perhaps, more plausible assumptions. (shrink)

In a similar way to what happens when a wave of electricity impacts the animal body and provokes a convulsive stir of muscles and nerves which can burn and ultimately paralyze the affected surface, some rough emotional experiences may lead us to sudden numbness. Keeping abreast with the most sophisticated phenomenological tools to account for an extremely damaging kind of psychological experience that can ultimately defeat the purpose of a sheer descriptive approach, this chapter does provide a descriptive analysis of (...) the kind of emotional shock that risks threatening the moral integrity of an agent. I shall zoom in my analysis on the typically acknowledged moment when disturbing information from a socially shared context outside ourselves comes suddenly to the fore of our attention, thus disrupting the focus even of the the most trivial perceptive input. I argue that in the longer run the outcome of such an experience may amount to a reconfiguration of the subject’s core values, daily routines and even her life-long expectations and projects. (shrink)

Christians have historically differed as to whether the wrongness of an act is to be located in the objective character of the act or in the intention of the agent. By blurring this distinction, Alain Epp Weaver fails to see the real principle of consistency that unites Augustine's analyses of warfare and lying. Likewise, by not appreciating the fact that Augustine analyzes the wrongness of the act in terms of intention whereas Yoder analyzes its wrongness in terms of its (...) objective character, Weaver proposes a conversation between two figures who lack the framework of shared assumptions that makes engagement in conversation possible. (shrink)

Humanity takes up space. Human beings, like many other species, also transform spaces. What is perhaps uniquely human is the disposition to qualitatively transform spaces into places that are charged with distinctive kinds of intergenerational significance. There is a profound, felt difference between a house as domestic space and a home as familial place or between the summit of a mountain one has climbed for the first time and the “same” rock pinnacle celebrated in ancestral narratives. Contemporary philosophical uses of (...) the word “place” often pivot on the distinction between “space” and “place” formalized by geographer-philosopher Yi-fu Tuan, who suggested that places incorporate the experiences and aspirations of a people over the course of their moral and aesthetic engagement with sites and locations. While spaces afford possibilities for different kinds of presence—physical, emotional, cognitive, dramatic, spiritual—places emerge as different ways of being present, fuse over time, and saturate a locale with distinctively collaborative patterns of significance. This approach to issues of place, however, is emblematic of what Edward S. Casey has argued are convictions about the primacy of absolute space and time that evolved along with the progressive dominance of the scientific imagination and modern imaginations of the universal. The recent reappearance of place in Western philosophy represents a turn away from abstract and a priori reasoning and back toward phenomenal experience and the primacy of embodied and emplaced intelligence. Places are enacted through the sustainably shared practices of mutually-responsive and mutually-vulnerable agents and are as numerous in kind as we are divergent in the patterns of values and intentions. The contributors to this volume draw on resources from Asian, European, and North American traditions of thought to engage in intercultural reflection on the significance of place in philosophy and of the place of philosophy itself in the cultural, social, economic, and political domains of contemporary life. The conversation of place that results explores the meaning of intercultural philosophy, the critical interplay of place and personal identity, the meaning of appropriate emplacement, the shared place of politics and religion, and the nature of the emotionally emplaced body. (shrink)

How did John’s Gospel draw and compel Augustine before and during the composition of Confessiones? Analyzing references to John in Augustine’s works from his embrace of Nicene Christianity to the writing of Confessiones, this paper finds a growing (and Johannine-based) emphasis on the importance of Christ’s humanity. Augustine strategically invokes two texts in Confessiones’ crucial seventh book: John 1:14, “the Word was made flesh,” and John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” This paper considers three features: (...) First, how the rhetorical device of anticipation (prolepsis) allows Augustine simultaneously to unify his developing Christological perspective and to build drama into his conversion narrative. Second, how the structure of Confessiones, which first works to understand divine transcendence and then seeks to relate that divine transcendence back to time, emphasizes the central role played by the Gospel of John in advancing Augustine’s conversion story. Third and finally, how invocations of John’s Gospel typify the way that, for the Augustine of Confessiones, reading scripture had become the means of achieving new spiritual self-comprehension. Texts from John were not mere receptors or reflectors of spiritual forces that moved Augustine toward conversion, but, rather, powerful agents of conversion in their own right. (shrink)