Mark Theunissen

Contemporary AI confronts us with a puzzle: how can such impressive language models behave in such apparently irrational ways? Social scientists have long struggled with a similar puzzle when studying other cultures: how should we understand strange behavior—and is it ever appropriate to regard it as irrational? In this paper, we argue that pragmatic, pluralist approaches developed in the social sciences to address these issues are useful for understanding language models. Moreover, we contend these approaches help us grasp when it is appropriate to regard behavior as irrational and better explained in non-rational terms.

This paper extends the philosophy of technology’s growing focus on maintenance to include ethnological artifacts in museums. Ranging from material to non-material forms of maintenance, it explores their impacts on an artifact’s status and function. Using the repatriation of two Kogi masks as a case study, it identifies three types of maintenance regimes shaping both tangible and intangible aspects of the objects. The paper shows how museum maintenance practices are often contested, linked to issues of care, ownership, and representation, revealing deeper contradictions in the nature and purpose of such artifacts and their maintenance. Understanding these practices can broaden our thinking about ethnological artifacts, encourage critical reflection, and inspire change. The paper concludes by drawing parallels to technological artifacts, showing how their functions can also develop and shift through conflicts between maintenance practices.

This paper extends the philosophy of technology’s growing focus on maintenance to include ethnological artifacts in museums. Ranging from material to non-material forms of maintenance, it explores their impacts on an artifact’s status and function. Using the repatriation of two Kogi masks as a case study, it identifies three types of maintenance regimes shaping both tangible and intangible aspects of the objects. The paper shows how museum maintenance practices are often contested, linked to issues of care, ownership, and representation, revealing deeper contradictions in the nature and purpose of such artifacts and their maintenance. Understanding these practices can broaden our thinking about ethnological artifacts, encourage critical reflection, and inspire change. The paper concludes by drawing parallels to technological artifacts, showing how their functions can also develop and shift through conflicts between maintenance practices.

There is a current debate about if, and in what sense, machine learning systems used in the medical context need to be explainable. Those arguing in favor contend these systems require post hoc explanations for each individual decision to increase trust and ensure accurate diagnoses. Those arguing against suggest the high accuracy and reliability of the systems is sufficient for providing epistemic justified beliefs without the need for explaining each individual decision. But, as we show, both solutions have limitations—and it is unclear either address the epistemic worries of the medical professionals using these systems. We argue these systems do require an explanation, but an institutional explanation. These types of explanations provide the reasons why the medical professional should rely on the system in practice—that is, they focus on trying to address the epistemic concerns of those using the system in specific contexts and specific occasions. But ensuring that these institutional explanations are fit for purpose means ensuring the institutions designing and deploying these systems are transparent about the assumptions baked into the system. This requires coordination with experts and end-users concerning how it will function in the field, the metrics used to evaluate its accuracy, and the procedures for auditing the system to prevent biases and failures from going unaddressed. We contend this broader explanation is necessary for either post hoc explanations or accuracy scores to be epistemically meaningful to the medical professional, making it possible for them to rely on these systems as effective and useful tools in their practices.

On a superficial level, the works of Émile Durkheim and Peter Winch appear to have little in common. Although both aim to clarify the nature of the social and provide a methodological foundation for social inquiry, Durkheim is often portrayed to be a grand theory builder introducing a new metaphysics of the social while Winch is mostly portrayed as an anti-metaphysical quietist defending an ordinary language approach to social inquiry.This article argues that beyond these characterizations there are more than straightforward similarities between Durkheim and Winch in their respective attempts to redefine the aim and method of social inquiry, transforming it from a purely epistemological undertaking to an empirically informed conception of critique. Much of the perception of dissimilarity between the two thinkers hinges on their respective concepts of social reality.

This article takes up Winch’s exploration of a certain dialectic in philosophical accounts of social inquiry, the poles of which I refer to as the under-laborer and over-laborer conceptions of philosophy. I argue that these conceptions, shown in Risjord and Reed, respectively, are caught in a dialectic of treating philosophy’s roles as either modestly clarifying or broadly determining the claims of social science. A third conception of philosophy, the therapeutic conception, is exemplified by Read et al.’s “New Wittgensteinian” interpretation of Winch’s work as a way out of the dialectic. Discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the latter, I conclude that a stronger development of the therapeutic approach is needed to move past the dialectic