I desperately and truly wish that I'd made this up.  Alas, the Verge reports: "Economist James Surowiecki quickly reverse-engineered a possible explanation for the tariff pricing. He found you could recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports…

Here I want to complete my review of federal legal precedents for the Supreme Court’s sudden invocation of “injury in fact” language to understand judicial standing in its 1970 Data Processing decision (recall the earlier installments: first, second, third. The first one explains the issue; if you want to escape my rummaging through the archive,…

I want to take a break from judicial standing doctrine to note a recent and helpful paper by Emily Sullivan and Atoosa Kasirzadeh about explainable AI.  Explainable AI is a research agenda – there’s a lot of papers and techniques (for a current lit review, see here) – that is designed to get at a…

Last time, I set out the question of judicial standing and the abrupt switch by the Supreme Court in 1970 to the requirement that plaintiffs show an “injury in fact” to obtain standing.  Here I want to look at the historical development of that term. The earliest use of the phrase “injury in fact” in…

By Gordon Hull I’ve been using (part 1, part 2) a new paper by Fabian Offert, Paul Kim, and Qiaoyu Cai to think more about Derrida’s use of iterability as a way in to thinking about transformer-based large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.  Here I want to wind that up with some thoughts on Derrida…

By Gordon Hull Last time, I looked a new paper by Fabian Offert, Paul Kim, and Qiaoyu Cai and applied it to a reworking of some of my earlier remarks on Derrida’s use of iterability in transformer-based large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.  In particular, I tried to draw out some of the implications of…

By Gordon Hull Last time, I followed a paper by Maya Indira Ganesh that thinks about the construction of autonomy in autonomous vehicles. Ganesh points out that what happens isn’t so much the arrival of an autonomous vehicle but the displacement of human labor into a sociotechnical system and the production of the driver as…

By Gordon Hull The diversity of language has been a philosophical problem for a while.  Hobbes was willing to bite the bullet and declare that language was arbitrary, but he was an outlier.  One common tactic in the seventeenth-century was to try to resolve the complexity of linguistic origins with a reference to Biblical Hebrew. …

The MA Program at UNC Charlotte has a number of funded lines (in-state tuition plus $14k a year) for our two-year MA program in philosophy.  We're an eclectic, practically-oriented department that emphasizes working across disciplines and philosophical traditions.  If that sounds like you, or a student you know – get in touch!  We also have…

Just published in the Journal of Social Computing, as part of a special issue on the question of the sentience of AI systems.  The paper is here (open access); here's the abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has renewed debate about whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be conscious or sentient. This paper identifies…