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*Dear Colleagues,*
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This is an email to invite you to the next presentations in the WIP
series. The meeting will take place in lecture hall 3A (NIG,
Universitätsstraße 7, 3rd floor) at 17:00 and will last up to 18:30.
Pia-Zoe Hahne (University of Vienna):
"‘Trust the Machine?’: Conceptualising Trust in the Age of Generative
Artificial Intelligence"
To accept a new technology, we first need to trust it. With AI, there is
not just one specific kind of trust that we put in the system; instead,
it is a “multidimensional construct, including trust in functionality,
trust in reliability, and trust in data protection” (Wang, Lin & Shao,
2022, p. 340). However, trust in AI is often only conceptualised as an
epistemic trust (Alvaro, 2023; Ryan, 2020). These approaches to study
conceptual disruptions often remain abstract and disregard the
involvement of stakeholders. This is where a new approach in engaging
with conceptual disruptions comes in. Conceptual engineering is an
emerging approach in philosophy of technology. It stresses the
connection between empirical research and conceptual analysis (Löhr,
2023). Conceptual misalignment is relevant for AI as it describes a
scenario in which concepts seem applicable while hiding “an underlying
value misalignment” (Marchiori & Scharp, 2024, p. 2), resulting in
ethical problems. Trust is an ideal concept for conceptual engineering
as it forms the basis for other concepts and disruptions therefore have
farreaching consequences. Löhr (2023) and Marchiori & Sharp (2024)
specifically points out that studying these disruptions necessitates
empirical data, demonstrating a new turn in engaging with conceptual
disruptions. The intense disruptions influenced by AI present new
challenges by moving away from a purely epistemic view on trust in
technology as well as the far-reaching consequences on trust between
people and trust in institutions. I present a new approach to study
conceptual disruptions by moving beyond abstract conceptual analysis and
into practical uses of concepts and empirical data through conceptual
engineering.
Dominik Boll (VU University Amsterdam)
"Taking Responsibility: With or Without You?"
My topic in this talk is talking responsibility and its place in our
responsibility practices. The literature on responsibility has blossomed
and turned to ever finer specialisation in the last decades, and yet the
primary focus often remains on _ holding responsible_. Philosophers have
increasingly turned to theorising our responsibility _practices_—how
blaming and praising are _socialised_ phenomena, how holding responsible
is something we _do _between each other beyond blame as a mental
state—but there is still much focus on what the blamer does or is
licenced to do.
Few theorists focus on the perspective on the other side of
responsibility interactions. While there are large literatures on guilt,
apologies, or making amends, writers rarely take the general
first-personal perspective of the party responding to their own
infraction, investigating what it is for the agent to react to what they
have done, what they are required to do to deal with it, and what
precisely their response aims at. This presents an activity distinct
from holding oneself responsible (Bero 2020). Indeed, the need to
respond to our actions and their significance is an omnipresent aspect
of our moral lives. We hold others responsible for what they do, and we
take responsibility for what we do.
This is not, however, how taking responsibility is currently theorised.
Departing from Wolf (2001), philosophers have proposed different
accounts of taking responsibility (Enoch 2012; Sliwa 2024; Mason 2019).
They differ in their assumptions and goals but theorise something
similar—how we react to (some of) our own morally consequential
actions such as to accommodate its fallout for others. Notably, however,
taking responsibility is captured as something entirely internal to the
wrongdoer and not as an interpersonal practice parallel to holding
responsible. In this paper, I theorise this interpersonal phenomenon.
I first explicate two common threads in the literature on taking
responsibility. Taking responsibility is theorised as something which
the agent can do all by themselves, yet taking responsibility is
supposed to be essentially interpersonal. I argue that this presents a
tension and leaves a lacuna to theorise a broader account of taking
responsibility. I then advance two arguments to show that such an
account is needed for making sense of the full extent of our
responsibility practices. Lastly, I provide the contours of such an
account as an activity which achieves certain aims between its parties.
This embeds taking responsibility in the broader web of our
responsibility practices and resolves the tension. If my action has a
morally significant impact on you, I can only take responsibility with
you, not without you.
You can write to wip.philosophie(a)univie.ac.at if you have any questions
or would like to present for the Work-in-Progress series.
Best wishes and we hope to see many of you there!
The Organizing Team
Chiara Dankl, Martin Niederl, Yi-Jie Xia, Adrian Fleisch, Mark Basafa,
Sophie Veigl, Raphael Aybar, Nianzu Tu
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