Philosophies — Open Access Journal

The question of whether transgender athletes should be permitted to compete in accordance with their gender identity is an evolving debate. Most competitive sports have male and female categories. One of the primary challenges with this categorization system, however, is that some transgender athletes (and especially transgender women) may be prevented from competing in accordance with their gender identity. The reason for this restriction is because of the idea that transgender women have an unfair advantage over their cisgender counterparts; this is seen as a problem since sports are typically guided a principle called ‘the skill thesis’, which suggests that sports are supposed to determine who is most skillful by maintaining a fair starting point. In this paper, I argue that if the skill thesis ought to be maintained and there continues to exist no conclusive evidence in support of unfair advantages possessed by trans women, then we may want to re-consider the gender binary in sport. Rather than having male/female categories, it may make more sense to categorize athletes based other sport-specific factors (e.g., height, weight, etc.). This may help to maintain the skill thesis while at the same time removing potentially unfair and discriminatory barriers against transgender athletes. Full article

Three disciplines address the codified forms and rules of human thought and reasoning: logic, available since antiquity; dialectics as a process of logical reasoning; and semiotics which focuses on the epistemological properties of the extant domain. However, both the paradigmatic-historical model of knowledge and the logical-semiotic model of thought tend to incorrectly emphasize the separation and differences between the respective domains vs. their overlap and interactions. We propose a sublation of linguistic logics of objects and static forms by a dynamic logic of real physical-mental processes designated as the Logic in Reality (LIR). In our generalized logical theory, dialectics and semiotics are recovered from reductionist interpretations and reunited in a new synthetic paradigm centered on meaning and its communication. Our theory constitutes a meta-thesis composed of elements from science, logic and philosophy. We apply the theory to gain new insights into the structure and role of semiosis, information and communication and propose the concept of ‘ontolon’ to define the element of reasoning as a real dynamic process. It is part of a project within natural philosophy, which will address broader aspects of the dynamics of the growth of civilizations and their potential implications for the information society. Full article

This paper draws an earlier book (with Evans and Higgins) entitled Bad Call: Technology’s Attack on Referees and Umpires and How to Fix It (hereafter Bad Call) and its various precursor papers. These show why it is that current match officiating aids are unable to provide the kind of accuracy that is often claimed for them and that sports aficianados have been led to expect from them. Accuracy is improving all the time but the notion of perfect accuracy is a myth because, for example, lines drawn on sports fields and the edges of balls are not perfectly defined. The devices meant to report the exact position of a ball—for instance ‘in’ or ‘out’ at tennis—work with the mathematically perfect world of virtual reality, not the actuality of an imperfect physical world. Even if ball-trackers could overcome the sort of inaccuracies related to fast ball speeds and slow camera frame-rates the goal of complete accuracy will always be beyond reach. Here it is suggested that the purpose of technological aids to umpires and referees be looked at in a new way that takes the viewers into account. Full article

This paper discusses the concept of Rilkean memories, recently introduced by Mark Rowlands, to analyze the complex intermix of hardware and software related to the self of a robot. The Rilkean memory of an event is related to the trace of that episode left in the body of the individual. It transforms the act of remembering into behavioral and bodily dispositions, thus generating the peculiar behavioral style of the individual, which is at the basis of her autobiographical self. In the case of long-life operating robots, a similar process occurs: the software of the robot has to cope with the changes that happened in the body of the robot because of damaging events in its operational life. Thus, the robot, in compensating the damages of its body, acquires a particular behavioral style. The concept of Rilkean memory is essential in self-adapting robotics technologies where human intervention on a robot is not possible, and the robot must cope with its faults, and also in applications concerning green robotics. Full article

This paper assesses the epistemic challenges of giving nutrition advice to elite athletes in light of recent philosophical discussion concerning evidence-based practice. Our trust in experts largely depends on the assumption that their advice is based on reliable evidence. In many fields, the evaluation of the reliability of evidence is made on the basis of standards that originate from evidence-based medicine. I show that at the Olympic or professional level, implementing nutritional plans in real-world competitions requires contextualization of knowledge in a way that contravenes the tenets of evidence-based thinking. Nutrition experts need to be able to combine and apply evidence from multiple sources, including the previous successes and failures of particular athletes. I argue that in this sense, the practice of elite sport nutrition embodies casuistic reasoning. Full article

I present two conceptions of the human being and art: that of Renaud—the main fictional character of a short novel written by Vercors—and that of Albert Camus. Although these French resistance fighters experienced the same war, the same terrible events surprisingly lead them to opposite extremes: the first one to despair and the rejection of art perceived as an unbearable lie, the second one to hope and to artistic commitment. Analogical reasoning allows us to show both the similarities and the distinctions between these two men or, more precisely, between what they tell us about human beings and art. Thanks to this, it is easier to understand the essential role the artist plays and his duty towards humankind. Moreover, in the work of Albert Camus, we will see that revolt is—and must be—connected to love. Full article

We study some aspects of the emergence of lógos from xáos on a basal model of the universe using methods and techniques from algorithmic information and Ramsey theories. Thereby an intrinsic and unusual mixture of meaningful and spurious, emerging laws surfaces. The spurious, emergent laws abound, they can be found almost everywhere. In accord with the ancient Greek theogony one could say that lógos, the Gods and the laws of the universe, originate from “the void,” or from xáos, a picture which supports the unresolvable/irreducible lawless hypothesis. The analysis presented in this paper suggests that the “laws” discovered in science correspond merely to syntactical correlations, are local and not universal. Full article

Time is one of the greatest subjects of interest to the disciplines of both Science and Philosophy, being seen to have a greater importance in the workings of reality than other entities. In this paper, a phenomenological analysis of time based on the general workings of the emergent structure of consciousness will be done, and time will be shown to be no different than any other qualia. It will be shown that, like any other qualia, time is an emergent level of consciousness, manifesting all the properties of emergence: inheritance of qualities from the previous levels, top-down influence in levels received from the higher levels and top-down influence in levels impressed on the lower levels. Full article

This essay is intended to engage some of the controversies that have emerged in legal philosophy concerning the theory of linguistic meaning we should adopt with reference to the law. In particular, I will focus on two theories of linguistic meaning that have opposing positions both on the nature of meaning, and the consequences this might have for law and legal objectivity. The first can be called plain meaning view. The plain meaning theory claims that the meaning of legal terms is a settled thing, and it is the duty of legal officials, especially judges, to simply apply that meaning to a given case in hand. In modern American jurisprudence, the plain meaning theory is often associated with various originalist figures, most notably the late Antonin Scalia who called his iteration of the plain meaning theory “textualism.” For this reason, I will largely be focusing on Justice Scalia’s account. The second theory of linguistic meaning I will be examining can be called the indeterminate theory. The indeterminate theory holds that there is no set or foundational meaning to any semantic term in the law which can be objectively applied by legal practitioners. Full article

In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. We remain skeptical about solutions based on deep neural networks and cognitive robotics, which in our opinion do not fundamentally address the problem. We agree with the enactive approach to cognitive science that things appear as intrinsically meaningful for living beings because of their precarious existence as adaptive autopoietic individuals. But this approach inherits the problem of failing to account for how meaning as such could make a difference for an agent’s behavior. In a nutshell, if life and mind are identified with physically deterministic phenomena, then there is no conceptual room for meaning to play a role in its own right. We argue that this impotence of meaning can be addressed by revising the concept of nature such that the macroscopic scale of the living can be characterized by physical indeterminacy. We consider the implications of this revision of the mind-body relationship for synthetic approaches. Full article

I present two logical systems to show the “analogy of proportionality” common to several interpretations: modality (necessity and possibility), quantification, truth-functional relations, moral attitudes (deontic logic), states of knowledge (epistemic logic), and states of belief (doxastic logic). To display the two underlying analogical relations, I call upon the originally Scholastic convention, recently put to use again, of using squares, hexagons, and octagons “of opposition”. A combined epistemic–deontic logic happens to be found in the traditional “probabilist” theory of the “good conscience”, and I shall then briefly explain how this is so. Full article

Following a suggestion from G. Bateson, this article enquires into the consequence of the idea of embodiment in philosophy of mind, taking seriously the notion of an ecology of mind. In the first half of this article, after distinguishing between the biological and the systemic approaches to ecology, I focus on three characteristics of the systemic approach. First, that a system is an abstract object that is multiply embodied in a collection of physically distinct heterogeneous objects. Second, that there is a form of circular causality between the level of the elements and that of the system as a whole, as some characteristics of the elements partake in the explanation of how the system functions, while the requirement of the system explains why the elements have the characteristics that they do. The third is the ontological uncertainty that we sometimes find in ecology, where the same term is used to designate both a central component of the ecological system and the system as a whole. In the second half, beginning with a critique of the theory of mind approach, I look into the consequences of conceiving that mind is embodied in a collection of physically distinct heterogeneous objects that interact as elements of a system, rather than enclosed in an individual body. Full article

In this article, I assess an existing language acquisition architecture, which was deployed in linguistically unconstrained human–robot interaction, together with experimental design decisions with regard to their enactivist credentials. Despite initial scepticism with respect to enactivism’s applicability to the social domain, the introduction of the notion of participatory sense-making in the more recent enactive literature extends the framework’s reach to encompass this domain. With some exceptions, both our architecture and form of experimentation appear to be largely compatible with enactivist tenets. I analyse the architecture and design decisions along the five enactivist core themes of autonomy, embodiment, emergence, sense-making, and experience, and discuss the role of affect due to its central role within our acquisition experiments. In conclusion, I join some enactivists in demanding that interaction is taken seriously as an irreducible and independent subject of scientific investigation, and go further by hypothesising its potential value to machine learning. Full article

The human body is a remarkable example of the process of evolution which ultimately created a sentient being with cognitive, motor, and information-processing abilities. The body can also be thought of as an amazing feat of engineering, and specifically as an example of molecular nanotechnology, positioning trillions of cells throughout the body, and creating the billions of unique individuals that have existed since the beginning of humanity. On the other hand, from an engineering perspective, there are numerous limitations associated with the human body and the process of evolution to effect changes in the body is exceedingly slow. For example, our skeletal structure is only so strong, our body is subject to disease, and we are programmed by our DNA to age. Further, it took millions of years for Homo sapiens to evolve and hundreds of thousands of years for hominids to invent the most basic technology. To allow humans to go beyond the capabilities that evolution provided Homo sapiens, current research is leading to technologies that could significantly enhance the cognitive and motor abilities of humans and eventually create the conditions in which humans and technology could merge to form a cybernetic being. Much of this technology is being developed from three fronts: due to medical necessity, an interest within the military to create a cyborg soldier, and the desire among some people to self-enhance their body with technology. This article discusses the processes of biological evolution which led to the current anatomical, physiological, and cognitive capabilities of humans and concludes with a discussion of emerging technologies which are directed primarily at enhancing the cognitive functions performed by the brain. This article also discusses a timeframe in which the body will become increasingly equipped with technology directly controlled by the brain, then as a major paradigm shift in human evolution, humans will merge with the technology itself. Full article

The different kinds of knowledge which were connected in Natural Philosophy (NP) have been later separated. The real separation came when Physics took its individuality and developed specific mathematical models, such as dynamic systems. These models are not adapted to an integral study of living systems, by which we mean evolutionary multi-level, multi-agent, and multi-temporality self-organized systems, such as biological, social, or cognitive systems. For them, the physical models can only be applied to the local dynamic of each co-regulator agent, but not to the global dynamic intertwining these partial dynamics. To ‘revive’ NP, we present the Memory Evolutive Systems (MES) methodology which is based on a ‘dynamic’ Category Theory; it proposes an info-computational model for living systems. Among the main results: (i) a mathematical translation of the part–whole problem (using the categorical operation colimit) which shows how the different interpretations of the problem support diverging philosophical positions, from reductionism to emergentism and holism; (ii) an explanation of the emergence, over time, of structures and processes of increasing complexity order, through successive ‘complexification processes’. We conclude that MES provides an emergentist-reductionism model and we discuss the different meanings of the concept of emergence depending on the context and the observer, as well as its relations with anticipation and creativity. Full article

Locked and unlocked strategies are at the center of this article, as ways of shedding new light on the cognitive aspects of deep learning machines. The character and the role of these cognitive strategies, which are occurring both in humans and in computational machines, is indeed strictly related to the generation of cognitive outputs, which range from weak to strong level of knowledge creativity. I maintain that these differences lead to important consequences when we analyze computational AI programs, such as AlphaGo, which aim at performing various kinds of abductive hypothetical reasoning. In these cases, the programs are characterized by locked abductive strategies: they deal with weak (even if sometimes amazing) kinds of hypothetical creative reasoning, because they are limited in what I call eco-cognitive openness, which instead qualifies human cognizers who are performing higher kinds of abductive creative reasoning, where cognitive strategies are instead unlocked. Full article

Within a state-space approach endowed with a generalized potential function, mental states can be systematically characterized by their stability against perturbations. This approach yields three major classes of states: (1) asymptotically stable categorial states, (2) marginally stable non-categorial states and (3) unstable acategorial states. The particularly interesting case of states giving rise to exceptional experiences will be elucidated in detail. Their proper classification will be related to Metzinger’s account of self-model and world-model, and empirical support for this classification will be surveyed. Eventually, it will be outlined how Metzinger’s discussion of intentionality achieves pronounced significance within a dual-aspect framework of thinking. Full article

This article tries to shed light on the mystery of human culture. Human beings are the only extant species with cumulative, evolving cultures. Many animal species do have cultural traditions in the form of socially transmitted practices but they typically lack cumulative culture. Why is that? This discrepancy between humans and animals is even more puzzling if one realizes that culture seems highly advantageous. Thanks to their accumulated knowledge and techniques our early ancestors were able to leave their cradle in Africa and swarm out across the planet, thereby adjusting themselves to a whole range of new environments. Without culture this would have been impossible. So we may ask once again: if cumulative culture is so useful, why don’t other animals have it? In order to explain this mystery I won’t appeal to the major transitions in human evolution—like walking upright, crafting stone tools and controlling fire, etc.—because that would be question begging. Instead I try to unearth the mechanisms that caused those evolutionary turning points to occur in the first place. It seems that unlike other animals, humans are predisposed to efficiently acquire, store and transmit cultural information in such ways that our cultures can genuinely evolve. Full article

To explain the amazing morphological and biomechanical analogy between two distantly related vertebrates as are a dolphin and a shark, an explanation exclusively framed in terms of adaptation (i.e., in terms of the Darwinian survival of the fittest) is far from satisfactory. The same is true, of course, of any other comparison between structurally similar, but phylogenetically unrelated organisms. A purely evolutionary argument does not throw any light on how the developmental processes of their ancestors could eventually evolve in such a way as to eventually produce these peculiar phenotypes (the arrival of the fittest). How does Nature play with animal and plant form? To address the issue of the evolution of possible forms, we cannot ignore that these are products of development. This invites adopting the integrated perspective, currently known as evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo. Paths through the maze of living forms are not satisfactorily explained in terms of pure geometrical transformations or of the adaptive value of the phenotypes eventually produced. The emergence of form is largely dependent on the intrinsic evolvability of the developmental processes that translate the genotype into phenotypes. As a consequence, development makes analogous structures more likely to evolve than a pure adaptationist argument would ever suggest. Full article