Two Concepts of Basic Equality

It has become somewhat a commonplace in recent political philosophy to remark that all plausible political theories must share at least one fundamental premise, ‘that all humans are one another's equals’. One single concept of ‘basic equality’, therefore, is cast as the common touchstone of all contemporary political thought. This paper argues that this claim is false. Virtually all do indeed say that all humans are ‘equals’ in some basic sense. However, this is not the same sense. There are not one but (at least) two concepts of basic equality, and they reflect not a grand unity within political philosophy but a deep and striking division. I call these concepts ‘Equal Worth’ and ‘Equal Authority’. The former means that each individual’s good is of equal moral worth. The latter means that no individual is under the natural authority of anyone else. Whilst these two predicates are not in themselves logically inconsistent, I demonstrate that they are inconsistent foundation stones for political theory. A theory that starts from Equal Worth will find it near impossible to justify Equal Authority. And a theory that starts from Equal Authority will find any fact about the true worth of things, including ourselves, irrelevant to justifying legitimate action. This helps us identify the origin of many of our deepest and seemingly intractable disagreements within political philosophy, and directs our attention to the need for a clear debate about the truth and/or relationship between the two concepts. In short, my call to arms can be summed up in the demand that political philosophers never again be allowed to claim ‘that all human beings are equals’ full stop. They must be clear in what dimension they claim that we are equals—Worth or Authority (or perhaps something else).     

The Choice Architect’s Trilemma

Critics have long dismissed paternalistic choice architecture as conceptually muddled at best and oxymoronic at worst. In this article, I argue that this criticism remains true despite recent replies to the contrary. Further, I suggest that a similar conceptual criticism also applies to non-paternalistic choice architecture. This is due to a three-way tension between the effectiveness, avoidability, and distinctiveness of each nudge. To illustrate this tension, I provide a novel explanation of the mechanics of nudging and a taxonomy of these interventions. I then argue that choice architects who defend the distinctiveness of nudging according to how it guides our behaviour via our unreflective intuitive reasoning encounter a trilemma because the distinctiveness of nudging hinges on interventions being both avoidable and effective. Choice architects cannot achieve this aim without harnessing both our automatic and reflective systems of thought in tandem. However, this diminishes the distinctive character of nudging by bringing it closer to other traditional policy interventions. This establishes the choice architect’s trilemma: a nudge is likely to be either ineffective, effective via some morally unacceptable means, or effective in a manner that is conceptually indistinct from other evidence-based policy interventions.     

Still a Hetero-Gendered World: A Content Analysis of Gender Stereotypes and Romantic Ideals in Chinese Boy Love Stories

Boy’s Love (BL) stories are a fictional fantasy textual story that describes a romantic relationship between men. Previous qualitative studies claimed that BL stories have depicted androgynous characters and egalitarian love relationships. The current study undertook a quantitative content analysis of 87 randomly sampled popular Chinese BL stories. Our coding system for coding both the masculinity and femininity of each main character in the selected BL stories was developed based on several previous studies. Gay male characters in BL stories were depicted as either similar to traditional masculine men (i.e., scoring high in masculinity and low in femininity) or similar to traditional feminine women (i.e., scoring high in femininity and low in masculinity). In the romantic relationships, BL stories typically paired a masculine character with a feminine character. In addition, heterosexual romantic ideals were prevalent in BL stories. Such an analysis challenges the previous analysis of BL stories. It suggests that heteronormative gender stereotypes exist in BL stories, even if these stories depict gay male characters and romantic relationships. These findings have important implications for understanding media effects in stereotypes toward gay men in contemporary Chinese society. It also encourages further research on alternative explanations for women’s motivation in reading and writing BL stories.     

Are Men Better Leaders? An Investigation of Head Coaches’ Gender and Individual Players’ Performance in Amateur and Professional Women’s Basketball

Male-dominated industries such as sport contain stereotypical and subjective notions of leadership ability (Burton et al. 2009; Fink 2008). These gender stereotypes often manifest themselves within varying levels of leadership, but specific to the sport industry, they are the most visible within the head coach role. Men hold the majority of head coach positions within the professional and amateur levels of sport, and these hiring practices can be based on gender-role stereotypes (Acosta and Carpenter 2014). In an attempt to challenge stereotypical gender based leadership preferences, leadership ability and performance should be objectively examined. Therefore, in the present investigation we aimed to examine the presence of gender stereotypes in the sport industry by determining whether the gender of a head coach for two women’s basketball leagues, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) and the National Intercollegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), impacted individual player performance. Data were collected for 1522 players for 19 WNBA seasons (1997–2015) and 4000 players for three seasons of NCAA Women’s Basketball (2013–2016). Results indicated that head coach gender does not appear to impact individual player performance in the WNBA or in the NCAA thereby providing objective evidence to challenge the traditional gender stereotypes found within the sports industry.     

Personality,socio-economic status and education: factors that contribute to the degree of structure in homeschooling

Homeschooling has been expanding in many countries in the western world, especially in the United States and in England. Studies have shown that there are different types of homeschooling, with different influences on the outcome of the educational process. However, the research to date has ignored the effects of parents’ personality and background on the practice of homeschooling, despite extensive evidence of the important role of these factors in shaping the educational orientation of parents. The present study focused on the impact of different aspects of parents’ personality and socioeconomic status on the type of homeschooling they chose. The findings indicated, among other things, that mother’s education correlated positively with more structured homeschooling, and family income and conscientiousness both correlated positively with more structure in daily routine and in homeschooling.     

Two Kinds of Consequential Implication

The first section of the paper establishes the minimal properties of so-called consequential implication and shows that they are satisfied by at least two different operators of decreasing strength (symbolized by \(\rightarrow \) and \(\Rightarrow \)). Only the former has been analyzed in recent literature, so the paper focuses essentially on the latter. Both operators may be axiomatized in systems which are shown to be translatable into standard systems of normal modal logic. The central result of the paper is that the minimal consequential system for \(\Rightarrow \), CI\(\Rightarrow \), is definitionally equivalent to the deontic system KD and is intertranslatable with the minimal consequential system for \(\rightarrow \), CI. The main drawback ot the weaker operator \(\Rightarrow \) is that it lacks unrestricted contraposition, but the final section of the paper argues that \(\Rightarrow \) has some properties which make it a valuable alternative to \(\rightarrow \), turning out especially plausible as a basis for the definition of operators representing synthetic (i.e. context-dependent) conditionals.     

Sequent Calculi for Semi-De Morgan and De Morgan Algebras

A contraction-free and cut-free sequent calculus \(\mathsf {G3SDM}\) for semi-De Morgan algebras, and a structural-rule-free and single-succedent sequent calculus \(\mathsf {G3DM}\) for De Morgan algebras are developed. The cut rule is admissible in both sequent calculi. Both calculi enjoy the decidability and Craig interpolation. The sequent calculi are applied to prove some embedding theorems: \(\mathsf {G3DM}\) is embedded into \(\mathsf {G3SDM}\) via Gödel–Gentzen translation. \(\mathsf {G3DM}\) is embedded into a sequent calculus for classical propositional logic. \(\mathsf {G3SDM}\) is embedded into the sequent calculus \(\mathsf {G3ip}\) for intuitionistic propositional logic.     

Optimality justifications: new foundations for foundation-oriented epistemology

In this paper a new conception of foundation-oriented epistemology is developed. The major challenge for foundation-oriented justifications consists in the problem of stopping the justificational regress without taking recourse to dogmatic assumptions or circular reasoning. Two alternative accounts that attempt to circumvent this problem, coherentism and externalism, are critically discussed and rejected as unsatisfactory. It is argued that optimality arguments are a new type of foundation-oriented justification that can stop the justificational regress. This is demonstrated on the basis of a novel result in the area of induction: the optimality of meta-induction. In the final section the method of optimality justification is generalized to deductive and abductive inferences.     

Empiricism without magic: transformational abstraction in deep convolutional neural networks

In artificial intelligence, recent research has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), which seem to exceed state-of-the-art performance in new domains weekly, especially on the sorts of very difficult perceptual discrimination tasks that skeptics thought would remain beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. However, it has proven difficult to explain why DCNNs perform so well. In philosophy of mind, empiricists have long suggested that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, often appealing to a faculty of abstraction. Rationalists have frequently complained, however, that empiricists never adequately explained how this faculty of abstraction actually works. In this paper, I tie these two questions together, to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. I argue that the architectural features that distinguish DCNNs from earlier neural networks allow them to implement a form of hierarchical processing that I call “transformational abstraction”. Transformational abstraction iteratively converts sensory-based representations of category exemplars into new formats that are increasingly tolerant to “nuisance variation” in input. Reflecting upon the way that DCNNs leverage a combination of linear and non-linear processing to efficiently accomplish this feat allows us to understand how the brain is capable of bi-directional travel between exemplars and abstractions, addressing longstanding problems in empiricist philosophy of mind. I end by considering the prospects for future research on DCNNs, arguing that rather than simply implementing 80s connectionism with more brute-force computation, transformational abstraction counts as a qualitatively distinct form of processing ripe with philosophical and psychological significance, because it is significantly better suited to depict the generic mechanism responsible for this important kind of psychological processing in the brain.