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1192What do we want from Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)? – A stakeholder perspective on XAI and a conceptual model guiding interdisciplinary XAI researchArtificial Intelligence 296 (C): 103473. 2021.Previous research in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) suggests that a main aim of explainability approaches is to satisfy specific interests, goals, expectations, needs, and demands regarding artificial systems (we call these “stakeholders' desiderata”) in a variety of contexts. However, the literature on XAI is vast, spreads out across multiple largely disconnected disciplines, and it often remains unclear how explainability approaches are supposed to achieve the goal of satisfying sta…Read more
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521The Explanatory Merits of Reasons-First EpistemologyIn Christoph Demmerling & Dirk Schroder (eds.), Concepts in Thought, Action, and Emotion: New Essays, Routledge. pp. 75-91. 2020.I present an explanatory argument for the reasons-first view: It is superior to knowledge-first views in particular in that it can both explain the specific epistemic role of perception and account for the shape and extent of epistemic justification.
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486Where Reasons and Reasoning Come ApartNoûs 55 (4): 762-781. 2021.Proponents of the reasoning view analyze normative reasons as premises of good reasoning and explain the normativity of reasons by appeal to their role as premises of good reasoning. The aim of this paper is to cast doubt on the reasoning view by providing counterexamples to the proposed analysis of reasons, counterexamples in which premises of good reasoning towards φ‐ing are not reasons to φ.
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483Possessing epistemic reasons: the role of rational capacitiesPhilosophical Studies 176 (2): 483-501. 2019.In this paper, I defend a reasons-first view of epistemic justification, according to which the justification of our beliefs arises entirely in virtue of the epistemic reasons we possess. I remove three obstacles for this view, which result from its presupposition that epistemic reasons have to be possessed by the subject: the problem that reasons-first accounts of justification are necessarily circular; the problem that they cannot give special epistemic significance to perceptual experience; t…Read more
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280We argue that, to be trustworthy, Computa- tional Intelligence (CI) has to do what it is entrusted to do for permissible reasons and to be able to give rationalizing explanations of its behavior which are accurate and gras- pable. We support this claim by drawing par- allels with trustworthy human persons, and we show what difference this makes in a hypo- thetical CI hiring system. Finally, we point out two challenges for trustworthy CI and sketch a mech…Read more
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235How to Make Norms ClashAustralasian Philosophical Review 5 (1): 46-55. 2021.In this comment on Katherine Dormandy's paper «True Faith», I point out that the clash she describes between epistemic norms and faith-based norms of belief needs to be supplemented with a clear understanding of the pertinent norms of belief. I argue that conceiving of them as evaluative fails to explain the clash, and that understanding them as prescriptive is no better. I suggest an understanding of these norms along the lines of Ross’s (1930) prima facie duties, and show how this picture can …Read more
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150Pluralism About Practical Reasons and Reason ExplanationsPhilosophical Explorations (2): 1-18. 2021.This paper maintains that objectivism about practical reasons should be combined with pluralism both about the nature of practical reasons and about action explanations. We argue for an ‘expanding circle of practical reasons’, starting out from an open-minded monist objectivism. On this view, practical reasons are not limited to actual facts, but consist in states of affairs, possible facts that may or may not obtain. Going beyond such ‘that-ish’ reasons, we argue that goals are also bona fide p…Read more
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137From Responsibility to Reason-Giving Explainable Artificial IntelligencePhilosophy and Technology 35 (1): 1-30. 2022.We argue that explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), specifically reason-giving XAI, often constitutes the most suitable way of ensuring that someone can properly be held responsible for decisions that are based on the outputs of artificial intelligent (AI) systems. We first show that, to close moral responsibility gaps (Matthias 2004), often a human in the loop is needed who is directly responsible for particular AI-supported decisions. Second, we appeal to the epistemic condition on moral …Read more
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100New Trouble for “Reasons as Evidence”: Means That Don’t Justify the EndsEthics 127 (3): 708-718. 2017.In this article, I argue against Kearns and Star’s reasons-as-evidence view, which identifies normative reasons to ɸ with evidence that one ought to ɸ. I provide a new counterexample to their view, the student case, which involves an inference to the best explanation from means to end or, more generally, from a derivative to a more foundational “ought” proposition. It shows that evidence that one ought to act a certain way is not in all cases a reason so to act. I present a diagnosis of the prob…Read more
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99Teleology first: Goals before knowledge and beliefBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.Comparing knowledge with belief can go wrong in two dimensions: If the authors employ a wider notion of knowledge, then they do not compare like with like because they assume a narrow notion of belief. If they employ only a narrow notion of knowledge, then their claim is not supported by the evidence. Finally, we sketch a superior teleological view.
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96The author defends nonconceptualism, the claim that perceptual experience is nonconceptual and has nonconceptual content. Continuing the heated and complex debate surrounding this topic over the past two decades, she offers a sustained defense of a novel version of the view, Modest Nonconceptualism, and provides a systematic overview of some of the central controversies in the debate. An explication of the notion of nonconceptual content and a distinction between nonconceptualist views of differ…Read more
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95In this chapter, I clarify the notions of mental content and of concept. I present competing views on these notions and indicate my own position. I introduce content in terms of correctness conditions and distinguish several kinds of propositions, as well as non-propositional scenario content, with which perceptual content might be identified. I relate this discussion to a wide-spread commitment in philosophy of perception to respect the subject’s perceptual perspective in ascriptions of percept…Read more
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91The Argument from Animal and Infant PerceptionTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 29 (2): 97-110. 2010.I discuss an argument for non-conceptualism based on animal and infant per- ception. Crudely put, some animals and infants who possess no concepts nonetheless have perceptual states with non-conceptual content. Perceptual experiences of adult humans have the same kind of content as the experiences of animals and infants, so the content of the perceptual experiences of adult humans is also non-conceptual. I defend this argument against potential attacks from the conceptualist. I argue that there …Read more
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79A dilemma for epistemological disjunctivismIn Robert French & John R. Smythies (eds.), Direct versus Indirect Realism: A Neurophilosophical Debate on Consciousness, Elsevier. pp. 141-162. 2018.I argue that epistemological disjunctivism, as defended by Pritchard (2012) or McDowell (1982/2009), faces a dilemma. To avoid collapsing into the “highest common factor view” (McDowell 1982/2009, 80), it has to combined with a metaphysical brand of disjunctivism. This is so because the epistemological disjunctivist’s contention, that veridical perception provides the perceiver with reflectively accessible epistemic reasons that are superior to those provided by hallucination, is tenable only if…Read more
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69Does Perceptual Content Have to Be Objective? A Defence of NonconceptualismJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 46 (1): 201-214. 2015.In this paper, I discuss the conceptualist claim that we cannot speak of perceptual content unless we assume it is objective content. The conceptualist argues that only conceptual content can meet the requirement of being objective, so that the view that perceptual experience has nonconceptual content is not tenable. I start out by presenting the argument from objectivity as it can be found in McDowell. I then present the following objections: First, perceptual objectivity cannot be due to the p…Read more
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68Bare statistical evidence and the legitimacy of software-based judicial decisionsSynthese 201 (4): 1-27. 2023.Can the evidence provided by software systems meet the standard of proof for civil or criminal cases, and is it individualized evidence? Or, to the contrary, do software systems exclusively provide bare statistical evidence? In this paper, we argue that there are cases in which evidence in the form of probabilities computed by software systems is not bare statistical evidence, and is thus able to meet the standard of proof. First, based on the case of State v. Loomis, we investigate recidivism p…Read more
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58Facts about incoherence as non-evidential epistemic reasonsAsian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1): 1-22. 2023.This paper presents a counterexample to the principle that all epistemic reasons for doxastic attitudes towards p are provided by evidence concerning p. I begin by motivating and clarifying the principle and the associated picture of epistemic reasons, including the notion of evidence concerning a proposition, which comprises both first- and second-order evidence. I then introduce the counterexample from incoherent doxastic attitudes by presenting three example cases. In each case, the fact that…Read more
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56Wittgenstein and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Hans-Johann Glock (edited book)Routledge. 2022.This volume celebrates the work of Hans-Johann Glock, a philosopher renowned for both his exegesis of Wittgenstein and his many contributions to debates in contemporary philosophy. It brings together 16 new essays by up-and-coming and distinguished philosophers engaging with Glock’s work, and it concludes with a "Reflections and Replies" chapter in which Glock responds to his interlocutors. Glock’s distinctive philosophical voice features a rare combination of a Wittgenstein-inspired approach wi…Read more
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53I defend both conceptualists and nonconceptualists against an attack which has been leveled at them by critics such as Byrne (Perception and conceptual content In: Steup M, Sosa E (eds) Contemporary debates in epistemology. Blackwell, Malden, pp 231-250, 2005), Speaks (Philos Rev 114:359–398, 2005), and Crowther (Erkenntnis 65:5–276, 2006). They distinguish a ‘state’ reading and a ‘content’ reading of ‘(non)conceptual’ and argue that many arguments on either side support only the respective stat…Read more
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43Reasons, attenuators, and virtue: A novel account of pragmatic encroachmentAnalytic Philosophy 1-22. forthcoming.In this paper, I explicate pragmatic encroachment by appealing to pragmatic considerations attenuating, or weakening, epistemic reasons to believe. I call this the ‘Attenuators View’. I will show that this proposal is better than spelling out pragmatic encroachment in terms of reasons against believing – what I call the ‘Reasons View’. While both views do equally well when it comes to providing a plausible mechanism of how pragmatic encroachment works, the Attenuators View does a better job dist…Read more
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41In this chapter, I discuss arguments for the claim that a subject can both have an experience with a certain content and not be in possession of all the concepts needed to specify this content. If she does not possess all the relevant concepts, then she cannot exercise them. So, she can undergo such an experience without being required to exercise all the concepts needed to specify its content. The argument from memory experience goes back to Martin (Philos Rev 101:745763, 1992). Since we can ex…Read more
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40Objectivism and Causalism About Reasons for ActionIn Gunnar Schumann (ed.), Explanation in Action Theory and Historiography: Causal and Teleological Approaches, Routledge. pp. 124-145. 2019.This chapter explores whether a version of causalism about reasons for action can be saved by giving up Davidsonian psychologism and endorsing objectivism, so that the reasons for which we act are the normative reasons that cause our corresponding actions. We address two problems for ‘objecto-causalism’, actions for merely apparent normative reasons and actions performed in response to future normative reasons—in neither of these cases can the reason for which the agent acts cause her action. To…Read more
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37Correction to: Possessing epistemic reasons: the role of rational capacitiesPhilosophical Studies 176 (2): 503-503. 2019.In the original publication of the article, the last sentence in footnote 16 was incorrectly published as “Thanks to—for raising this issue.” The corrected sentence should read as “Thanks to Daniel Star for raising this issue.”
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33Religiöse Erfahrung: Inhalt, epistemische Signifikanz und ExpertiseIn Martin Breul & Klaus Viertbauer (eds.), Der Glaube und seine Gründe: Beiträge zur Religiösen Epistemologie. pp. 11-30. 2022.This article investigates whether religious experience can be conceived in such a way that the perceiver's religious expertise (via cognitive penetration or perceptual learning) contributes to the justificatory power of the experience. It also considers what kind of content religious experience would have to have to be able to justify standard types of religious beliefs. It argues that, against first impressions, religious expertise cannot supplement perceptual justification. At the same time, t…Read more
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33In this chapter, I rebut three incarnations of the epistemological objection put forth by McDowell (Mind and World, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994a) and Brewer (Perception and Reason, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999). According to them, only the assumption that perceptual experiences have conceptual content can account for the fact that perception plays a crucial role in justifying belief about the external world. I begin by providing some context to the objections, viz. by presenti…Read more
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31The argument from contradictory contents presented here is based directly on observations about the content of experience. It claims that experience content, if conceptual, allows for contradictions within one and the same content. There are at least two examples of this, the waterfall illusion and the visual experiences of some grapheme-color synesthetes. However, due to a Fregean principle of content individuation, no conceptual contents are contradictory. So experience content is nonconceptua…Read more
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28Comment on John Smythies, “The Metaphysical Foundations of Contemporary Neuroscience: A House Built on Sand”In Robert French & John R. Smythies (eds.), Direct versus Indirect Realism: A Neurophilosophical Debate on Consciousness, Elsevier. pp. 181-190. 2018.
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27In this chapter, I turn to the claim that we cannot speak of perceptual content unless we assume it is objective content. The conceptualist argues that only conceptual content can meet the requirement of being objective. I start out by presenting the objection from objectivity as it can be found in McDowell (Mind and world, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1994a). I then discuss the following replies: First, even if objective perceptual experience requires the perceiver to have an objective …Read more
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26I examine two arguments for nonconceptualism from the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. The idea is that only the assumption that experience content is nonconceptual does justice to the phenomenology of experience. In particular, if experience content is conceptual, we cannot account for its finely grained representational content. The problem is that visual color experience makes differences between shades of a color that are much more fine-grained than our conceptual repertoire al…Read more
Eva Schmidt
TU Dortmund
Universität des Saarlandes
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TU DortmundDepartment of Philosophy and Political ScienceProfessor
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Epistemic Normativity |
Perception |
Practical Reason |
Ethics of Artificial Intelligence |
Moral Reasoning and Motivation |
Epistemological Sources |
Intentionality |