Marco Alves

Natural de Londres, Nick Couldry é Professor de Mídia, Comunicação e Teoria Social na London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), onde pesquisa mídia, tecnologia e poder. Graduou-se na Universidade de Cambridge e obteve seu doutorado na LSE, tornando-se uma referência internacional nos debates sobre tecnologia. Autor de obras como _ The Costs of Connection _ (com Ulises Mejias, 2019), _ The Space of the World _ (2024) e _ Data Grab _ (com Ulises Mejias, 2024), fundou, ao lado dos professores Mejías e Paola Ricaurte, a rede _ Tierra Común _, dedicada à produção de conhecimento e mobilização contra o colonialismo de dados. Reconhecido por articular análises complexas de forma acessível, participa ativamente de discussões sobre regulação de plataformas, inteligência artificial (IA) e justiça de dados. Nesta entrevista exclusiva para a _ A&S _, Couldry reflete sobre como a tecnologia molda o presente e desafia o futuro das democracias.

Among the many recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, we focus our attention on chatbots as artificial companions. We highlight two main issues related to this product. The first concerns the attribution of an “empathic capacity”, a characteristic that supposedly enables them to function as an intimate relational agent towards humans. We analyze the current limitations of their affective architecture and point out the ambiguities within the field of affective computing. The second issue, with a direct ethical import, arises as a consequence of the first. Once their limitations are made explicit, it is revealed that there is a misalignment between their highly anthropomorphic design, which exhibits a broad scope of action, and their actual capabilities to operate ethically and responsibly in intimate relationships. We finally argue that the characteristics of such devices encourage the projection of moral status and agency onto chatbots, which incur risks and harm to users. Keywords: Artificial intelligence. Affective computing. Artificial companions. Empathic capacity. Moral status.

Natural de Londres, Nick Couldry é Professor de Mídia, Comunicação e Teoria Social na London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), onde pesquisa mídia, tecnologia e poder. Graduou-se na Universidade de Cambridge e obteve seu doutorado na LSE, tornando-se uma referência internacional nos debates sobre tecnologia. Autor de obras como The Costs of Connection (com Ulises Mejias, 2019), The Space of the World (2024) e Data Grab (com Ulises Mejias, 2024), fundou, ao lado dos professores Mejías e Paola Ricaurte, a rede Tierra Común, dedicada à produção de conhecimento e mobilização contra o colonialismo de dados. Reconhecido por articular análises complexas de forma acessível, participa ativamente de discussões sobre regulação de plataformas, inteligência artificial (IA) e justiça de dados. Nesta entrevista exclusiva para a A&S, Couldry reflete sobre como a tecnologia molda o presente e desafia o futuro das democracias.

The view that perceptual experience has representational content, or the content view, has recently been criticized by the defenders of the so-called object view. Part of the dispute, I claim here, is based on a lack of grasp of the notion of content. There is, however, a core of substantial disagreement. Once the substantial core is revealed, I aim to: (1) reject the arguments raised against the content view by Campbell (2002), Travis (2004), and Brewer (2006); (2) criticize Brewer’s (2006, 2007, 2008, 2011) attempts to defend the object view; (3) refine Pautz’ (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) arguments against the object view, which mainly resort to the fact that it cannot account for the grounding role of hallucinatory experiences; (4) and finally adjudicate in favor of the content view and against the overestimation of the naïve intuition.

Jesse Prinz (2006, 2007) claimed that emotions are necessary and sufficient for moral judgments. First of all, I clarify what this claim amounts to. The view that he labels emotionism will then be critically assessed. Prinz marshals empirical findings to defend a series of increasingly strong theses about how emotions are essential for moral judgments. I argue that the empirical support upon which his arguments are based is not only insufficient, but it even suggests otherwise, if properly interpreted. My criticism is then extended to his sentimentalist theory, that accounts for how emotions are integrated into moral judgments. The central problem is that Prinz’s view fails to capture the rational aspect of moral evaluation. I make this failure explicit and defend that some version or other of neosentimentalism is a more promising route.

What is, after all, the famous method of Descartes? The brief and vague passages devoted to this subject in Descartes’ corpus have always puzzled his readers. In this paper, I investigate not only the two essays in which it is directly addressed (the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii, and the Discours de la Méthode), but also his scientific works and correspondence. I finally advocate an interpretation that makes the best sense of his overt comments as well as of his actual scientific practice. Contrary to widely accepted views, I argue that there are no substantial discontinuities in his understanding of his own method, or between his theory and practice. I claim, by contrast, that Descartes advocated a minimal method: a method that says little, but that, nonetheless, marks a revolutionary rupture with the existing forms of explanation.

The view that perceptual experience has representational content, or the content view, has recently been criticized by the defenders of the so-called object view. Part of the dispute, I claim here, is based on a lack of grasp of the notion of content. There is, however, a core of substantial disagreement. Once the substantial core is revealed, I aim to: (1) reject the arguments raised against the content view by Campbell (2002), Travis (2004), and Brewer (2006); (2) criticize Brewer’s (2006, 2007, 2008, 2011) attempts to defend the object view; (3) refine Pautz’ (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) arguments against the object view, which mainly resort to the fact that it cannot account for the grounding role of hallucinatory experiences; (4) and finally adjudicate in favor of the content view and against the overestimation of the naïve intuition.

Michael Tye proposed a way of understanding the content of hallucinatory experiences. Somewhat independently, Mark Johnston provided us with elements to think about the content of hallucination. In this paper, their views are compared and evaluated. Both their theories present intricate combinations of conjunctivist and disjunctivist strategies to account for perceptual content. An alternative view, which develops a radically disjunctivist account, is considered and rejected. Finally, the paper raises some metaphysical difficulties that seem to threaten any conjunctivist theory and to lead the debate to a dilemma: strong disjunctivists cannot explain the subjective indistinguishability between veridical and hallucinatory experiences, whereas conjunctivists cannot explain what veridical and hallucinatory experiences have in common. This dilemma is left here as an open challenge.

Partindo das reflexões de Michel Foucault no final dos anos 1970 e da noção desenvolvida mais recentemente de “governamentalidade algorítmica”, entendida como um novo regime de poder e saber baseado na coleta, mineração e cruzamento de grandes volumes de dados, o presente artigo pretende analisar criticamente as chamadas “cidades inteligentes”, nas quais a infraestrutura e os serviços são interligados de maneira supostamente mais racionalizada e eficiente, oferendo finalmente o sonhado bem-estar e a vida feliz. Essa utopia de organização social será associada a uma nova forma de racionalidade política e estratégia de governo por meio de algoritmos, que colocam importantes e inquietantes questões. Neste trabalho, ressaltaremos a capacidade que os algoritmos possuem de nos governar, no sentido de conduzir nossas condutas e estruturar o campo das ações possíveis. E o foco deste artigo recairá sobre a tensão entre liberdade e controle inscrita nessa nova governamentalidade, que tem por objeto mais imediato os dados, as relações e os ambientes.

The most prominent theories of perceptual content are incapable of accounting for the phenomenal particularity of perceptual experience. This difficulty, or so I argue, springs from the absence of a series of distinctions that end up turning the problem apparently unsolvable. After briefly examining the main shortcomings of representationalism and naïve realism, I advance a proposal of my own that aims to make the trivial fact of perceptually experiencing a particular object as such philosophically unproblematic. Though I am well aware of the sketchy and schematic way in which my proposal is advanced and the other alternatives are criticized, I hope this paper is still worth its ink at least insofar as it is capable of pointing to a novel and promising way out of old and resilient difficulties that have been haunting philosophers of perception. If not a fully developed theory, at least I deliver here a sketch that, or so I sell, is worth the bet.

This papers aims at clarifying some misunderstandings that seem to block an adequate account of de re thoughts within the Fregean framework. It is usually assumed that Fregean senses cannot be de re, or dependent upon objects. Contrary to this assumption, Gareth Evans and John McDowell have claimed that Fregean de re senses are not just possible, but in fact the most promising alternative for accounting for de re thoughts. The reasons blocking this alternative can be traced back to Russellian considerations that contaminated the interpretation of Frege. This contaminated understanding is first detected in Tyler Burge’s distinction between de dicto and de re, then connected to the motivations behind David Kaplan’s notion of character, and finally found in John Searle’s descriptivist account. The difficulty in understanding de re thoughts is, roughly speaking, a side effect of the misunderstanding of the boundaries separating internal and external elements of thoughts, as well as the distinction between mental content and means of representation.