It seems to me that we have at least two alternatives when we evaluate any decision. We can say that we should examine the decision against a set standard that we determine to be the rational standard, and any deviation can be explained by pointing to a bias. Or we can assume that all decisions
Of all the decisions made in the world today, if we consider them all the evaluations of if-then statements, human made decisions are a rare category. Most decisions now are made by non-biological entities, and probably have for quite some time. Sure, most of these decisions were programmed by people, so if we try to
The threshold we have set for ascribing agency to systems seems almost impossibly high. We have required that any system we call an agent has a soul, or at least that we have an attitude towards that system that an attitude towards a soul. So how do we treat the so-called artificial agents of
So, let’s go back to Wittgenstein’s quote. In the second part of the investigations, now called Philosophy of Psychology, a fragment, chapter iv section 22 he writes: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” In section 23 he continues: “Religion teaches
This is a part of a series running on innovation. Other pieces deal with the need for narrative in innovation policy and the pace of innovation. So. It has become fashionable to argue that the state has been maligned in the debate about innovation. In fact, some argue, the state is the source of all
Let’s assume that we have designed a good way of determining agency. How would we, then, determine the consequences of liability where we have established that there is agency? Here we encounter an interesting observation. It feels wholly unsatisfactory to assign agency and thus liability to a system that cannot recognize that it is being
The problem with determining agency is that it looks as if we are determining a quality in an actor in the moment. In fact, that is not what is happening. When Wittgenstein examines psychological states he notes that some of them have what he refers to as “Echte Dauer” – real duration – and some
A large part of Ginzburg’s essay concerns the nature and origin of narrative. Ginzburg’s hypothesis is as daring as it can be controversial. He writes: “Perhaps indeed the idea of a narrative, as opposed to spell or exorcism or invocation (Seppilli 1962), originated in a hunting society, from the experience of interpreting tracks. [...]The hunter
Ginzburg explores the role of traces in understanding the world, and usefully repeats the myth of the three sons of the King of Serendippo. The myth is originally found in several folk tales, and roughly goes like this, according to Ginzburg from a 1557 re-telling: the three princes of Serendippo meet a merchant and tells
The notion of agency is essential to understanding our society. If we cannot say who did something, or what it means to be the one actual acting in a specific case, then all of the language games of legal liability, contractual freedom and intellectual property – to name but a few subjects – falter and
Ginzburg discusses the gulf between natural sciences and their increasing abstraction and the concreted and detailed nature of the human sciences, almost always engaged in the individual case, about which natural science almost always remains silent. The “individuum est ineffabile”-imperative will simply not work in history, for example, where the individual case remains a node
Ginzburg V: Bertillonian word portraits in the age of tag clouds
Ginzburg dwells on the use of signs to identify individuals in his essay. His main example is the emergence of fingerprinting as a semiotic practice to identify and diversify crowds into individuals. But he also looks at how graphology grew out of the understanding of one’s characters – in writing – reflected one’s character –