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Anthropomorphising Machines and Computerising Minds: The Crosswiring of Languages between Artificial Intelligence and Brain & Cognitive SciencesMinds and Machines 34 (1): 1-9. 2024.The article discusses the process of “conceptual borrowing”, according to which, when a new discipline emerges, it develops its technical vocabulary also by appropriating terms from other neighbouring disciplines. The phenomenon is likened to Carl Schmitt’s observation that modern political concepts have theological roots. The authors argue that, through extensive conceptual borrowing, AI has ended up describing computers anthropomorphically, as computational brains with psychological properties…Read more
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The rational roles of experiences of utterance meaningsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.The perennial question of the nature of natural-language understanding has received renewed attention in recent years. Two kinds of natural-language understanding, in particular, have captivated the interest of philosophers: linguistic understanding and utterance understanding. While the literature is rife with discussions of linguistic understanding and utterance understanding, the question of how the two types of understanding explanatorily depend on each other has received relatively scant at…Read more
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Contextualizing French Multiculturalism and RacismTheory, Culture and Society 17 (1): 157-162. 2000.
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The logic of powerBarnes & Noble. 1970.
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On the Brussels-Washington Consensus About the Legal Definition of Artificial IntelligencePhilosophy and Technology 36 (4): 1-9. 2023.
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The Modal Future: A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and TalkCambridge University Press. 2021.
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The Politics of ApocalypseCommon Knowledge 29 (2): 141-172. 2023.This guest column examines the historical fate of Russia in its catastrophic confrontation with Ukraine and the West. The piece considers the negative self-definitions of Russia that have arisen in the aftermath of the communist utopia and its virtual transformation into an anti-world — a society whose purpose is to undermine and destroy. Emerging Russian cults of war, death, and apocalypticism are stressed, as are the paradoxes and inversions by which Russia, in attempting to become stronger, b…Read more
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Why have “revolutionary” tools found purchase in memory science?Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 4. 2023.The study of the neural basis of memory has advanced over the past decade. A key contributor to this memory “renaissance” has been new tools. On its face, this matches what might be described as a neuroscientific revolution stemming from the development of tools, where this revolution is largely independent of theory. In this paper, we challenge this tool revolution account by focusing on a problem that arises in applying it to this “renaissance”: it is centered around memory, but the tools were…Read more
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Spectres of Eternal Return: Benjamin and Deleuze Read LeibnizFilozofski Vestnik 42 (2). 2022.The late reflections of G.W. Leibniz on eternal return have often been dismissed as insignificant as regards his wider philosophy. This may be due to the prevalent championing of his optimistic views on the continual progress of humanity, which seem to contradict the notion of eternal return. Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze both put forward concepts of eternal return that form part of their respective critiques of historical progress, yet these have rarely been read in conjunction with their …Read more
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Kant and AnalysisKantian Journal 42 (3): 49-73. 2023.In the current dialogue between two authors with different views on analysis, philosophy, and the use of labels, the leading question is: How should one understand the expression ‘analytic philosophy’? Lewin argues that as there are no generally agreed tenets and methods of what is being called ‘analytic philosophy’, the name is to be replaced by a more specific one or abandoned. Williamson defends the use of this phrase, claiming that it is quite serviceable, as it relates to a broad tradition …Read more
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Creating a large language model of a philosopherMind and Language 39 (2): 237-259. 2024.Can large language models produce expert‐quality philosophical texts? To investigate this, we fine‐tuned GPT‐3 with the works of philosopher Daniel Dennett. To evaluate the model, we asked the real Dennett 10 philosophical questions and then posed the same questions to the language model, collecting four responses for each question without cherry‐picking. Experts on Dennett's work succeeded at distinguishing the Dennett‐generated and machine‐generated answers above chance but substantially short…Read more
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Perception is iconic, perceptual working memory is discursiveBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
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Vice Epistemology (edited book)Routledge. 2020.Some of the most problematic human behaviors involve vices of the mind such as arrogance, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, gullibility, and intellectual cowardice, as well as wishful or conspiratorial thinking. What sorts of things are epistemic vices? How do we detect and mitigate them? How and why do these vices prevent us from acquiring knowledge, and what is their role in sustaining patterns of ignorance? What is their relation to implicit or unconscious bias? How do epistemic vices and systems…Read more
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Degrees of ConsciousnessNoûs 57 (3): 553-575. 2023.Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what…Read more
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Fake News: A DefinitionInformal Logic 38 (1): 84-117. 2018.Despite being a new term, ‘fake news’ has evolved rapidly. This paper argues that it should be reserved for cases of deliberate presentation of false or misleading claims as news, where these are misleading by design. The phrase ‘by design’ here refers to systemic features of the design of the sources and channels by which fake news propagates and, thereby, manipulates the audience’s cognitive processes. This prospective definition is then tested: first, by contrasting fake news with other forms…Read more
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Educating for Virtuous Intellectual Character and Valuing TruthPhilosophies 8 (2): 29. 2023.This paper explores the thesis that the overarching goal of education is to cultivate virtuous intellectual character. It is shown how finally valuing the truth is central to this theory on account of how such valuing is pivotal to intellectual virtues. This feature of the proposal might be thought to be problematic for a number of reasons. For example, it could be argued that truth is not valuable, that insisting on valuing the truth in educational contexts could be politically dubious, or that…Read more
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Collective IntentionalityStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
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When is consensus knowledge based? Distinguishing shared knowledge from mere agreementSynthese 190 (7): 1293-1316. 2013.Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers is a contingent fact, and researchers may reach a consensus for all kinds of reasons, such as fighting a common foe or sharing a common bias. Scientific consensus, by itself, does not necessarily indicate the existence of shared knowledge among …Read more
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Why knowledge is the property of a community and possibly none of its membersPhilosophical Quarterly 65 (260): 417-441. 2015.Mainstream analytic epistemology regards knowledge as the property of individuals, rather than groups. Drawing on insights from the reality of knowledge production and dissemination in the sciences, I argue, from within the analytic framework, that this view is wrong. I defend the thesis of ‘knowledge-level justification communalism’, which states that at least some knowledge, typically knowledge obtained from expert testimony, is the property of a community and possibly none of its individ…Read more
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Group InquiryErkenntnis 87 (3): 1099-1123. 2022.Group agents can act, and they can have knowledge. How should we understand the species of collective action which aims at knowledge? In this paper, I present an account of group inquiry. This account faces two challenges: to make sense of how large-scale distributed activities might be a kind of group action, and to make sense of the kind of division of labour involved in collective inquiry. In the first part of the paper, I argue that existing accounts of group action face problems dealing wit…Read more
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Listening and Normative Entanglement: A Pragmatic Foundation for Conversational EthicsDissertation, Durham University. 2021.People care very much about being listened to. In everyday talk, we make moral-sounding judgements of people as listeners: praising a doctor who listens well even if she does not have a ready solution, or blaming a boss who does not listen even if the employee manages to get her situation addressed. In this sense, listening is a normative behaviour: that is, we ought to be good listeners. Whilst several disciplines have addressed the normative importance of interpersonal listening—particularly i…Read more
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Modelling collective beliefSynthese 73 (1): 185-204. 1987.What is it for a group to believe something? A summative account assumes that for a group to believe that p most members of the group must believe that p. Accounts of this type are commonly proposed in interpretation of everyday ascriptions of beliefs to groups. I argue that a nonsummative account corresponds better to our unexamined understanding of such ascriptions. In particular I propose what I refer to as the joint acceptance model of group belief. I argue that group beliefs according to th…Read more
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Calling a Spade a Spade: How to Unwrap a Genocidal Essence from the Kremlin Anti-Ukrainian RhetoricEidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 6 (4): 8-20. 2022.The sheer number and scale of the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian military in Ukraine since the beginning of their all-out invasion, has prompted many experts and politicians to define this brutality as a genocide and seek for the prosecution of perpetrators under international law. The lawyers are cautious in this regard, however, maintaining that crucial element of the criminal case – the clear-cut proof of a genocidal intent on the side of the Russian leadershi…Read more
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Deepfakes, Deep HarmsJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 22 (2). 2022.Deepfakes are algorithmically modified video and audio recordings that project one person’s appearance on to that of another, creating an apparent recording of an event that never took place. Many scholars and journalists have begun attending to the political risks of deepfake deception. Here we investigate other ways in which deepfakes have the potential to cause deeper harms than have been appreciated. First, we consider a form of objectification that occurs in deepfaked ‘frankenporn’ that dig…Read more
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Cognitive instincts versus cognitive gadgets: A fallacyMind and Language 34 (4): 540-550. 2019.The main thesis of Heyes' book is that all of the domain-specific learning mechanisms that make the human mind so different from the minds of other animals are culturally created and culturally acquired gadgets. The only innate differences are some motivational tweaks, enhanced capacities for associative learning, and enhanced executive function abilities. But Heyes' argument depends on contrasting cognitive gadgets with cognitive instincts, which are said to be innately specified. This ignores…Read more
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I motivate three claims: Firstly, attentional traits can be cognitive virtues and vices. Secondly, groups and collectives can possess attentional virtues and vices. Thirdly, attention has epistemic, moral, social, and political importance. An epistemology of attention is needed to better understand our social-epistemic landscape, including media, social media, search engines, political polarisation, and the aims of protest. I apply attentional normativity to undermine recent arguments for moral …Read more
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On a Condition of the Coherence of TextsSemiotica 2 (4). 1970.
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Deference Done BetterPhilosophical Perspectives 35 (1): 99-150. 2021.There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring…Read more
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ConceptsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.
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The Semantics of EntailmentIn Hugues Leblanc (ed.), Truth, Syntax, and Modality: Proceedings Of The Temple University Conference On Alternative Semantlcs, North-holland Publishing Company. pp. 199-243. 1973.
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The National Academy of Sciences of UkraineH. Skovoroda Institute of PhilosophyAssociate Professor
Areas of Interest
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