TOPOI-AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

A growing body of literature in the field of embodied situated cognition is drawing attention to the hostile ways in which our environments can be constructed, with detrimental effects on people's ability to flourish as environmentally situated beings. This paper contributes to this body of research, focusing on a specific area of concern. Specifically, I argue that a very particular problematic quasi-Cartesian picture of the human body, the human mind, what it means for these to function well, and the role of technology in promoting such functioning, animate our Western sociotechnical imagination. This picture, I show, shapes the sociotechnical niches we inhabit in an ableist manner, perniciously legislating which body-minds have access to a rich world of affordances and are seen as agential and valuable. Because the ableist quasi-Cartesian commitments animating our Western sociotechnical imagination are problematic and pervasive, I argue that exposing and reimagining these commitments should be a prime focal point of those working at the intersection of science, technology, and human values. I present insights from enactive 4E cognition and critical disability studies as fruitful resources for such much-needed reimagining. I also make the case, more provocatively but also more tentatively, that the ableist view of bodily and minded well- functioning animating our Cartesian Western sociotechnical imagination is not only damaging to embodied minds who deviate from the presumed norm, creating inaccessible worlds for some of us; it is in fact a threat to human and planetary flourishing at large.

In her account of science known as critical contextual empiricism (CCE), Helen Longino has famously argued that critical discursive interaction provides the very basis for the objectivity of science. While highly influential, CCE has also been criticized for being overly idealized, failing not only as a descriptive but also as a normative account of scientific institutions and practices. In this paper, we examine Longino's social account of science from the vantage point of a conception of argumentation as epistemic exchange. We show that CCE does not explicitly problematize some important aspects of scientific practices, in particular: the costs and risks involved in extensive critical discursive interaction; the imperative of responsible collective workload management in a scientific community; and the need for mechanisms of curation and filtering in any sufficiently large epistemic community. The argumentation as epistemic exchange model retains the core idea of CCE, namely the centrality of critical discursive interaction in science, but incorporates aspects of scientific practice neglected by CCE (costs and risks, workload management, curation). Our analysis thus adapts CCE to situations where scientists are 'busy people' who must contend with limited resources (of time, energy, funding etc.). To illustrate our proposal, we discuss practices of peer review as instances of epistemic exchange. While highlighting the intrinsic vulnerabilities of the peer review system, we also offer some recommendations on how to improve it.

Agent-based models (ABMs) are widely used to study the complex dynamics and emergent properties of systems with many interacting agents. This includes belief and opinion dynamics as are of relevance to understanding contexts as varied as online social media and the practice of science. This paper argues that such ABMs can capture rich argumentation scenarios in ways that have not been covered in research to date. To clarify the space of potential agent-based models of argument, we distinguish three interrelated notions of argument from the literature. First, arguments as reasons refer simply to the propositional content encoded in arguments. Second, arguments as syllogism describe premise-conclusion relationships that arise between such reasons when asserted as arguments. Third, arguments as dialectics refer to the deployment of reasons and syllogisms in discussions (be they polylogues or dialogues). We show how modelling each of these three notions of argument naturally involves a continuum of complexity. Specifically, we use the NormAN framework (introduced in Assaad et al. A Bayesian agent-based framework for argument exchange across networks. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.09254, 2023), which bases ABMs on the theory of Bayesian networks, as a point of reference and draw out its relationship to other modelling frameworks along each of these dimensions. This provides a novel organising scheme to aid model comparison and model choice, and clarifies ways in which these three notions of argument constrain one another. This shows also that NormAN's Bayesian framework not only captures familiar facets of argumentation, but also allows one to study how dialectical considerations influence population level diffusion of arguments (as we demonstrate with a small simulation study).

In cases where structural oppression conditions the broader public sphere, the democratic ideal of a receptive public may be threatened by at least two possible outcomes which appear to undermine its stated goal of increasing understanding of counterhegemonic ideas amongst mainstream, oppressive groups. Either (a) counterhegemonic ideas are defanged to make them sufficiently palatable to a new audience, or (b) counterhegemonic ideas are taken up intact, and as a result the extant networks of publics which depend on oppressive structures and hierarchies will be destroyed. As we will argue, in certain cases of colonialism such as the Straits Philosophical Society in colonial Singapore, the conditions which receptive publics are supposed to ameliorate: (i) the social costs of speech, (ii) inequality of epistemic labour, and (iii) the antagonism between groups, are not only an irreducible feature of counterhegemonic efforts, but are in fact increased in the attempt to maintain receptive publics. However, this may be more a feature than a bug: receptive publics need not be seen only as communicative intermediaries for oppressed groups, but as a possible dialectical step towards new modes of socio-material life.

Recent work on distributed cognition and self-narrative has emphasised how autobiographical memories and their narration are, rather than being stored and created by an individual, distributed across embodied organisms and their environment. This paper postulates a stronger form of distributed narration than has been accommodated in the literature so far, which I call narrative deference. This describes the phenomena whereby a person is significantly dependent upon another person for the narration of some significant aspect of their own autobiographical self-narrative. I suggest that a person is more likely to narratively defer where they suffer a mnemonic impairment regarding some significant adverse life experience like trauma, illness or injury. Following a recent turn in the literature towards investigating the harmful aspects of distributed cognition as well as its many advantageous features, this paper explores how the benefits of autobiographical self-narrative deference within close personal relationships are complexly related to its harms.

This paper develops a theoretical framework to better understand how implicit biases about social identity (e.g., gender, race, class, seniority, or institutional affiliation) may influence different stages of knowledge production. To do so, it makes use of hinge epistemology to describe how inter- (results of applications of mathematical rules) and extra-mathematical (e.g., stereotypes and prejudices) factors play a role in our mathematical practices and knowledge production. Accordingly, we will describe how these different factors confer or remove normative power from mathematical pieces in a broad economy of credibility. By doing so, we intend to unify two strands of hinge epistemology that have hitherto been separate: that of mathematical practices and that of testimonial justification. The upshot of this proposal is the development of a theoretical framework that enables more effective, appropriately informed measures to ameliorate both epistemic injustice in social contexts and epistemic harm within mathematics.

A truthmaker for a proposition P is exact if it contains nothing irrelevant to P. What are the exact truthmakers for necessitated propositions? This paper makes progress on this issue by showing how to extend Fine's truthmaker semantics for intuitionistic logic to an exact truthmaker semantics for intuitionistic modal logic. The project is of interest also to the classical logician: while all distinctively classical theorems may be true, they differ from the intuitionistic ones in how they are made true. This sheds new light on the status of the T and B axioms.

How can a collective pay attention virtuously? Imagine a group of scientists. It matters what topics they pay attention to, that is, which topics they draw to the foreground and take to be relevant, and which they leave in the background. It also matters which aspects of an investigated phenomenon they foreground, and which aspects they leave unnoticed in the background. If we want to understand not only how individuals pay attention of this kind virtuously, but also collectives, we first need a framework to understand virtuous collective agency. A result of this article will be that virtuous collective action depends on the collective being institutionalized. At the same time, we have to think of the constituents of the collective in terms of practical identities (as opposed to individuals). This is what enables us to understand how a collective can acquire the stability required for virtue, and how we don't end up with a summative account of group virtue, respectively. It will be argued that collectives only have the required stability in their actions when their commitments are habitualized in the form of institutionalized procedures. An Aristotelian understanding of virtue distinguishes between commitment, inclination, and action. Only when a subject's inclination is fully lined up with her commitment, do we arrive at the required stability (of character) for virtuous action. In the case of individuals, to build up an appropriate inclination consists in an inscribing of the commitment into the feelings and body of the subject. If a commitment is fully 'embodied' in this sense, it has formed the individual's inclination accordingly. How can one make sense of this in the case of collective subjects? This article tries to show that for collectives, the embodiment of commitment (the forming of the fitting inclinations) consists in creating policies, procedures, and rules that stabilize the acting according to the commitment, irrespective of the motivation of each individual involved in the collective. Hence, embodiment of commitment, in the case of collectives, is institutionalization. The article then explores what this requirement of institutionalization means for collective attention. The illustration will draw on a distinction between focused and open-minded attention. It will be shown that for either case - focused and open-minded - in order for a collective to pay attention virtuously, it needs to have its commitments institutionalized.

The use of memes has become increasingly widespread in political discourse. However, there is a dearth of philosophical discussion on memes and their impact on political discourse. This paper addresses this gap in the literature and bridges the divide between the empirical and philosophical work on memes by offering a functionalist account which allows for a more in-depth analysis of the role memes play in political discourse. We offer a taxonomy of the eight key characteristics of memes: 1. humor; 2. fostering in-group identity; 3. caricatures; 4. replicability; 5. context collapse; 6. hermeneutical resources; 7. low reputational cost; 8. signaling. On the positive side, the propensity memes have to foster in-group identity and to function as a hermeneutical tool for people to make sense of their own experiences are a boon especially to marginalized communities. On the flipside, the creation of an in-group/out-group dynamic can also be exploited by sinister political actors, especially since the low reputational cost of circulating memes allows for plausible deniability. We use the analysis in this paper to jumpstart a discussion of how we should understand memes and debate which norms should govern the novel speech act of posting a meme given its impact on political discourse. Based on our findings, we end with a call to adopt stricter norms for the act of posting a meme.