Chuanfei Chin

Singapore University of Social Sciences
  •  569
    Precarious work and its complicit network
    Journal of Contemporary Asia 49. 2019.
    How does precarious work entail social vulnerabilities and moral complicities? Theorists of precarity pose two challenges for analysing labour conditions in Asia. Their first challenge is to distinguish the new kinds of social vulnerability which constitute precarious work. The second is to assign moral responsibility in the social network that produces vulnerability in depoliticised and morally detached ways. In this article, the social and normative dimensions of precarious work are connected …Read more
  •  826
    How has multiplicity superseded impossibility in philosophical challenges to artificial consciousness? I assess a trajectory in recent debates on artificial consciousness, in which metaphysical and explanatory challenges to the possibility of building conscious machines lead to epistemological concerns about the multiplicity underlying ‘what it is like’ to be a conscious creature or be in a conscious state. First, I analyse earlier challenges which claim that phenomenal consciousness cannot aris…Read more
  •  461
    Subliming and subverting: an impasse on the contingency of scientific rationality
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 8 (2): 311-331. 2014.
    What is special about the philosophy of history when the history is about science? I shall focus on an impasse between two perspectives — one seeking an ideal of rationality to guide scientific practices, and one stressing the contingency of the practices. They disagree on what this contingency means for scientific norms. Their impasse underlies some fractious relations within History and Philosophy of Science. Since the late 1960s, this interdisciplinary field has been described, variously, as …Read more
  •  485
    Models as interpreters
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (2): 303-312. 2011.
    Most philosophical accounts of scientific models assume that models represent some aspect, or some theory, of reality. They also assume that interpretation plays only a supporting role. This paper challenges both assumptions. It proposes that models can be used in science to interpret reality. (a) I distinguish these interpretative models from representational ones. They find new meanings in a target system’s behaviour, rather than fit its parts together. They are built through idealisation, abs…Read more