Mate Szabo

This paper describes the design and delivery of the stand-alone “Ethics and Governance” course at the University of Greenwich (United Kingdom), initiated as part of the novel MSc degree “Data Science and its Applications.” Grounded in intersectional feminist tradition, the aim of the course was to help students evaluate the broader societal and systemic implications of data-driven technologies. This is a necessary ability for data scientists since these technologies have been shown to embed and exacerbate existing social inequalities. Here, we describe our approach and the constitutive elements of the course—in particular, its interactive and discussion-based setup, the use of a diverse set of ethical and critical theories, the focus on power dynamics, and the emphasis on participatory approaches. We then offer some reflections on our experience on the first delivery of the course and ideas for future adjustments.

The conceptual confluence of Post’s and Turing’s analysis of combinatory processes, respectively of mechanical procedures, is the central topic in Davis and Sieg’s [14]. Where Turing argued convincingly for the adequacy of his notion of machine computation in 1936, Post viewed his identical notion in the same year as being tied to a working hypothesis in need of “continual verification”. Post gave novel and informative arguments for his thesis or, as he put it, generalization. He insisted, however, that ultimately a psychological analysis “of mental processes involved in combinatory mathematical processes” has to be given. In this way, he hoped to obtain a natural law and thus the basis for the claim that the undecidability and incompleteness theorems constitute “a fundamental discovery in the limitations of the mathematizing power of Homo Sapiens”. Our detailed analysis of (the background for) his work on the issues leads to an unambiguous answer to the question Did Post have Turing’s Thesis?: He did [not].

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of the legal implications which may be relevant to the ethical aspects of emerging technologies, to explore the existing situation in the area of legal regulation at EU level, and to formulate recommendations for the lawmakers.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis is based on the premise that the law is supposed to invoke moral principles. Speculative findings are formulated on the basis of analyzing specific emerging technologies; empirical findings are based on a research conducted in the whole legal corpus of the EU.FindingsIn the area of network‐based technologies the already existing and elaborated legal frameworks can be used in an extended manner; artificial intelligence‐based technologies call for alterations in several branches of law; while interface technologies show the difficulty and complexity of regulating interdisciplinary fields. The legal implications of emerging technologies have attracted only a minimal legislative attention in the competent bodies of the EU.Originality/valueThe paper provides a systemic approach towards transmitting ethical norms to the application of emerging technologies through legal regulation, and formulates detailed recommendations in various areas of such technologies.

In his famous paper, An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory, Alonzo Church identified the intuitive notion of effective calculability with the mathematically precise notion of recursiveness. This proposal, known as Church's Thesis, has been widely accepted. Only a few papers have been written against it. One of these is László Kalmár's An Argument Against the Plausibility of Church's Thesis from 1959. The aim of this paper is to present Kalmár's argument and to fill in missing details based on his general philosophical thoughts on mathematics.

Quine and Putnam's Indispensability Argument claims that we must be ontologically committed to mathematical objects, because of the indispensability of mathematics in our best scientific theories. Indispensability means that physical theories refer to and quantify over mathematical entities such as sets, numbers and functions. In his famous book 'Science Without Numbers' Hartry Field argues that this is not the case. We can "nominalize" our physical theories, that is we can reformulate them in such a way that 1) the new version preserves the attractivity of the theory, and 2) the nominalized theory does not contain quantifications over mathematical entities. I'm going to reconsider Field's nominalization procedure for a toy physic theory formulated in a first order language, in order to make a clear distinction between the following three steps: -the physical theory in terms of empirical observations. -the standard physical theory, which contains quantification over mathematical entities, as usual. -the nominalized version of the theory without any reference to mathematical entities. Having Field's nominalization procedure reconstructed, it will be clear that there is no difference between the original and the nominalized versions of the theory, at least, there is no difference from a formalist point of view. It is because the only difference would come from the different "meanings" of the variables over which the quantifications are running. The formalist philosophy of mathematics, however, denies that the variables have meanings at all. So, the formal systems as abstract mathematical entities are still included to physical theories; and this fact is highly enough for the structural platonist or immanent realist to apply the Quine-Putnam argument. Finally, therefore, I will suggest a completely different way for the objection to the Quine-Putnam argument.