Putting others on a pedestal: Testimony, Admiration, and Due Respect
Seminar
Parents of children with disabilities often share their stories to attest to the positive impact parenting such a child has had on their lives. It is important to give due respect to such testimony, but what does due respect entail? Recently Chris Kaposy has argued in “Choosing Down Syndrome,” that…
Factfulness and Metalinguistic Agency in Humans and Language Models
Seminar
Language models (LMs) are known to suffer from a variety of infelicities of language such as hallucinations, inconsistencies, continuity and coherence problems, etc. Some of these difficulties suggest that LMs have no idea what they are saying when they “speak”. And yet LMs often also behave in…
Explanatory Realism
Lecture
The cement of the universe is not causation: it is explanatory dependence. Reality is a network of facts connected by a single, irreducible, mind-independent “because”. It is widely held that explanation is a sort, interest-sensitive practice that aims to provide information only about other things…