Gender digital divide

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_digital_divide 

Gender digital divide is defined as gender biases coded into technology products, technology sector and digital skills education.

Background

Education systems are increasingly trying to ensure equitable, inclusive and high-quality digital skills education and training. Though digital skills open pathways to further learning and skills development, women and girls are still being left behind in digital skills education. Globally, digital skills gender gaps are growing, despite at least a decade of national and international efforts to close them. The economic and political interests of its indicators have also been questioned.

Digital skills gap

Women are less likely to know how to operate a smartphone, navigate the internet, use social media and understand how to safeguard information in digital mediums (abilities that underlie life and work tasks and are relevant to people of all ages) worldwide. There is a gap from the lowest skill proficiency levels, such as using apps on a mobile phone, to the most advanced skills like coding computer software to support the analysis of large data sets.

Women in numerous countries are 25% less likely than men to know how to leverage ICT for basic purposes, such as using simple arithmetic formulas in a spreadsheet. UNESCO estimates that men are around four times more likely than women to have advanced ICT skills such as the ability to programme computers. Across G20 countries 7% of ICT patents are generated by women, and the global average is at 2%. Recruiters for technology companies in Silicon Valley estimate that the applicant pool for technical jobs in artificial intelligence (AI) and data science is often less than 1% female. To highlight this difference, in 2009 there were 2.5 million college-educated women working in STEM compared to 6.7 million men. The total workforce at the time was 49% women and 51% men which highlights the evident gap.

While the gender gap in digital skills is evident across regional boundaries and income levels, it is more severe for women who are older, less educated, poor, or living in rural areas and developing countries. Making women much less likely to graduate in any field of STEM compared to their male counterpart. Digital skills gap intersects with issues of poverty and educational access.

Root causes

Women and girls may struggle to access public ICT facilities due to unsafe roads, limits on their freedom of movement, or because the facilities themselves are considered unsuitable for women.

Women may not have the financial independence needed to purchase digital technology or pay for internet connectivity. Digital access, even when available, may be controlled and monitored by men or limited to ‘walled gardens’ containing a limited selection of content, known as ‘pink content’ focused on women's appearances, dating, or their roles as wives or mothers. Fears concerning safety and harassment (both online and offline) also inhibit many women and girls from benefiting from or even wanting to use ICTs.

In many contexts, women and girls face concerns of physical violence if they own or borrow digital devices, which in some cases leads to their using the devices in secret, making them more vulnerable to online threats and making it difficult to gain digital skills.

The stereotype of technology as a male domain is common in many contexts and affect girls’ confidence in their digital skills from a young age. In OECD countries, 0.5% of girls aspire towards ICT-related careers at age 15, versus 5% of boys. This was not always the case. At the beginning of electronic computing following the Second World War, software programming in industrialized countries was considered ‘women’s work’. Managers of early technology firms allowed women well-suited for programming because of stereotypes characterizing them as meticulous and good at following step-by-step directions. Women, including many women of colour, flocked to jobs in the computer industry because it was seen as more meritocratic than other fields. As computers became integrated into people's daily life, it was noticed that programmers had influence. Consequently, women were pushed out and the field became more male-dominated.

Access divide versus skills divide

Due to the declining price of connectivity and hardware, skills deficits have exceeded barriers of access as the primary contributor to the gender digital divide. For years, the divide was assumed to be symptomatic of technical challenges. It was thought that women would catch up with men when the world had cheaper devices and lower connectivity prices, due to the limited purchasing power and financial independence of women compared with men. The cost of ICT access remains an issue and is surpassed by educational gaps. For example, the gender gap in internet penetration is around 17% in the Arab States and the Asia and Pacific region, whereas the gender gap in ICT skills is as high as 25% in some Asian and Middle Eastern countries. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the Internet penetration rate in 2019 was 33.8 percent for men and 22.6 percent for women. The Internet user gender gap was 20.7 percent in 2013 and up to 37 percent in 2019. The Internet user gender gap was 20.7 percent in 2013 and up to 37 percent in 2019. The Internet penetration rate in 2019 was 33.8 percent for men and 22.6 percent for women.

SSA has one of the widest mobile gender gaps in the world where over 74 million women are not connected. The gender gap in mobile ownership was 13 percent, a reduction from 14 percent in 2018; however, in low- and middle-income countries it remains substantial with fewer women than men accessing the Internet on a mobile device. Furthermore, women are less likely to use digital services or mobile Internet and tend to use different mobile services than men.

Many people have access to affordable devices and broadband networks, but do not have the requisite skills to take advantage of this technology to improve their lives. In Brazil, lack of skills (rather than cost of access) was found to be the primary reason low-income groups are not using the internet. In India, where lack of skills and lack of need for the internet were the primary limiting factors across all income groups.

Lack of understanding, interest or time is a bigger issue than affordability or availability as the reason for not using the internet. Even though skills deficits prevent both men and women from using digital technologies, they tend to be more severe for women. In a study conducted across 10 low- and middle-income countries, women were 1.6 times more likely than men to report lack of skills as a barrier to internet use. Women are also more likely to report that they do not see a reason to access and use ICT. Interest and perception of need are related to skills, as people who have little experience with or understanding of ICTs tend to underestimate their benefits and utility.

Relationship between digital skills and gender equality

In many societies, gender equality does not translate into gender equality in digital realms and digital professions. The persistence of growing digital skills gender gaps, even in countries that rank at the top of the World Economic Forum's global gender gap index (reflecting strong gender equality), demonstrates a need for interventions that cultivate the digital skills of women and girls.

For most countries, the primary barriers for women regarding access to digital technology are cost/unaffordability followed by illiteracy and lack of digital skills. For instance, in Africa 65.4 percent of people aged 15 and older are illiterate, compared to the global average rate of 86.4 percent.

Gender digital divide and COVID-19

Africa

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken by governments on social distancing and mobility restrictions have contributed to boosting the use of digital technology to bridge some of the physical access gaps. However, the rapid proliferation of digital tools and services stands in stark contrast to the many systemic and structural barriers to technology access and adoption that many people in rural Africa still face. Gender inequalities, intersecting with and compounded by other social differences such as class, race, age, (dis)ability, etc., shape the extent to which different rural women and men are able not only to access but also use and benefit from these new technologies and ways of delivering information and services.

Beside the potential of digital tools and applications, the COVID-19 crisis has evidenced the existing digital divide and especially the gender gap. It is estimated that 3.6 billion individuals are not connected to the Internet across the globe, including 900 million in Africa. Only 27 percent of women in Africa have access to the Internet and only 15 percent of them can afford to use it.

Gender-responsive digitalization in COVID-19 response

According to a study by FAO, gender-responsive digitalization in COVID-19 response and beyond could include:

• Improve the availability of sex-disaggregated data and gender-related statistics that capture digital gender gaps in rural areas to better inform policy and business decisions
• Promote an enabling environment that includes gender-responsive policies, strategies and initiatives
• Leverage digital solutions to deliver COVID-19 relief measures targeted to rural women and girls and facilitate their access to social protection services and alternative income-generation opportunities.
• Dedicate funds for digital acceleration to support women-led enterprises.
• Improve the national broadband coverage to ensure affordable, accessible and reliable infrastructure for inclusive digital transformation
• Invest in the protection of Internet users, especially illiterate and vulnerable ones, against frauds and abuses as cybercrime, including sexual harassment. According to UN Women, these crimes have reportedly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially toward women and girls.

Benefits of digital empowerment

Helping women and girls develop digital skills means stronger women, stronger families, stronger communities, stronger economies and better technology. Digital skills is recognized to be essential life skills required for full participation in society. The main benefits for acquiring digital skills are they:

• Facilitate entry into the labour market;
• Assist women's safety both online and offline;
• Enhance women's community and political engagement;
• Bring economic benefits to women and society;
• Empower women to help steer the future of technology and gender equality;
• Accelerate progress towards international goals.

Digitalization can potentially pave the way for improving the efficiency and functioning of food systems, which in turn can have positive impacts on the livelihoods of women and men farmers and agripreneurs, for example, through the creation of digital job opportunities for young women and men in rural areas.

Closing the digital skills gender gap

Guidelines for Digital Inclusion

Increasing girls’ and women's digital skills involves early, varied and sustained exposure to digital technologies. Interventions should not be limited to formal education settings, they should reflect a multifaceted approach, enabling women and girls to acquire skills in a variety of formal and informal contexts (at home, in school, in their communities and in the workplace). The digital divide cuts across age groups, therefore solutions need to assume a lifelong learning orientation. The technological changes adds impetus to the ‘across life’ perspective, as skills learned today will not necessarily be relevant in 5 or 10 years. Digital skills require regular updating, to prevent women and girls fall further behind.

Women and girls digital skills development are strengthened by:

1. Adopting sustained, varied and life-wide approaches;

1. Establishing incentives, targets and quotas;
2. Embedding ICT in formal education;
3. Supporting engaging experiences;
4. Emphasising meaningful use and tangible benefits;
5. Encouraging collaborative and peer learning;
6. Creating safe spaces and meet women where they are;
7. Examining exclusionary practices and language;
8. Recruiting and training gender-sensitive teachers;
9. Promoting role models and mentors;
10. Bringing parents on board;
11. Leveraging community connections and recruiting allies;
12. Supporting technology autonomy and women's digital rights.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there are seven success factors to empowering rural women through ICTs:

• Adapt content so that it is meaningful for them.
• Create a safe environment for them to share and learn.
• Be gender-sensitive.
• Provide them with access and tools for sharing
• Build partnerships.
• Provide the right blend of technologies.
• Ensure sustainability

The regulatory role of governments (at local, national, regional, and international levels) is crucial in addressing infrastructural barriers, harmonizing and making the regulatory environment inclusive and gender-responsive, and in protecting all stakeholders from fraud and crime.

Initiatives targeted at boosting women's representation in the technology industry are essential to closing the digital skills gender divide. Mentorship programs, networking chances, and scholarships for women seeking jobs in technology are examples of such initiatives. These efforts can help create more inclusive workplaces that respect diversity and promote creativity by boosting the presence of women in the technology industry.

• Mentorship programs can be especially beneficial in assisting women in the technology industry. These initiatives allow women to network with experienced professionals who can give advice and support as they advance in their jobs. According to research, mentoring programs can help increase women's confidence and feeling of connection in the workplace, which can improve job happiness and professional growth opportunities.
• Women in technology can benefit from networking chances as well. Women can benefit from networking by developing connections with other professionals in their industry, which can lead to new employment possibilities and collaborations. Networking can also assist women in staying current with the newest trends and technologies in their profession.
• Scholarships can also be a good method to help women who want to work in technology. Scholarships can assist in covering the costs of education and training, making it simpler for women to gain the skills and knowledge required to thrive in the technology industry. Scholarships can also help to increase gender variety in the technology industry by encouraging more women to enter the profession.

Overall, initiatives targeted at boosting women's representation in the technology industry are essential to closing the digital skills gender divide. We can build more inclusive and innovative environments that help everyone if we assist women in technology.

Female gendering of AI technologies

Main article: Female gendering of AI technologies

Men continue to dominate the technology space, and the disparity serves to perpetuate gender inequalities, as unrecognized bias is replicated and built into algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI).

Limited participation of women and girls in the technology sector can stem outward replicating existing gender biases and creating new ones. Women's participation in the technology sector is constrained by unequal digital skills education and training. Learning and confidence gaps that arise as early as primary school amplify as girls move through education, therefore by the time they reach higher education only a fraction pursue advanced-level studies in computer science and related information and communication technology (ICT) fields. Divides grow greater in the transition from education to work. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates that only 6% of professional software developers are women.

Technologies generated by male-dominated teams and companies often reflect gender biases. Establishing balance between men and women in the technology sector will help lay foundations for the creation of technology products that better reflect and ultimately accommodate the rich diversity of human societies. For instance AI, which is a branch of the technology sector that wields influence over people's lives. Today, AI curates information shown by internet search engines, determines medical treatments, makes loan decisions, ranks job applications, translates languages, places ads, recommends prison sentences, influences parole decisions, calibrates lobbying and campaigning efforts, intuits tastes and preferences, and decides who qualifies for insurance, among other tasks. Despite the growing influence of this technology, women make up just 12% of AI researchers. Closing the gender divide begins with establishing more inclusive and gender-equal digital skills education and training.

Digital assistants

Digital assistants encompass a range of internet-connected technologies that support users in various ways. When interacting with digital assistants, users are not restricted to a narrow range of input commands, but are encouraged to make queries using whichever inputs seem most appropriate or natural, whether they are typed or spoken. Digital assistants seek to enable and sustain more human-like interactions with technology. Digital assistants can include: voice assistants, chatbots, and virtual agents.

Feminization of voice assistants

Voice assistants have become central to technology platforms and, in many countries, to day-to-day life. Between 2008 and 2018, the frequency of voice-based internet search queries increased 35 times and account for close to one fifth of mobile internet searches (a figure that is projected to increase to 50% by 2020). Voice assistants now manage upwards of 1 billion tasks per month, from the mundane (changing a song) to the essential (contacting emergency services).

Today, most leading voice assistants are exclusively female or female by default, both in name and in sound of voice. Amazon has Alexa (named for the ancient library in Alexandria), Microsoft has Cortana (named for a synthetic intelligence in the video game Halo that projects itself as a sensuous unclothed woman), and Apple has Siri (coined by the Norwegian co-creator of the iPhone 4S and meaning ‘beautiful woman who leads you to victory’ in Norse). While Google's voice assistant is simply Google Assistant and sometimes referred to as Google Home, its voice is female.

The trend to feminize assistants occurs in a context in which there is a growing gender imbalance in technology companies, such that men commonly represent two thirds to three quarters of a firm's total workforce. Companies like Amazon and Apple have cited academic work demonstrating that people prefer a female voice to a male voice, justifying the decision to make voice assistants female. Further research shows that consumers strongly dislike voice assistants without clear gender markers. This puts away questions of gender bias, meaning that companies make a profit by attracting and pleasing customers. Research shows that customers want their digital assistants to sound like women, therefore digital assistants can make the most profit by sounding female.

Researchers who specialize in human–computer interaction have recognized that both men and women tend to characterize female voices as more helpful. The perception may have roots in traditional social norms around women as nurturers (mothers often take on – willingly or not – significantly more care than fathers) and other socially constructed gender biases that predate the digital era.

John Searle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle

 

John Rogers Searle
Searle at Christ Church, Oxford, 2005
Born	July 31, 1932 (age 90) Denver, Colorado, U.S.
Alma mater	University of Wisconsin–Madison Christ Church, Oxford
Spouse	Dagmar Searle
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic Direct realism
Thesis	Problems arising in the theory of meaning out of the notions of sense and reference (1959)
Academic advisors	Peter Strawson, Peter Geach, J.L. Austin
Doctoral students	Bence Nanay
Other notable students	William Hirstein
Main interests	Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Intentionality · Social reality
Notable ideas	Indirect speech acts Chinese room Biological naturalism Direction of fit

Influences
Signature

John Rogers Searle (/sɜːrl/; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies.

As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Searle was secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". He received all his university degrees, BA, MA, and DPhil, from the University of Oxford, where he held his first faculty positions. Later, at UC Berkeley, he became the first tenured professor to join the 1964–1965 Free Speech Movement. In the late 1980s, Searle challenged the restrictions of Berkeley's 1980 rent stabilization ordinance. Following what came to be known as the California Supreme Court's "Searle Decision" of 1990, Berkeley changed its rent control policy, leading to large rent increases between 1991 and 1994.

In 2000, Searle received the Jean Nicod Prize; in 2004, the National Humanities Medal; and in 2006, the Mind & Brain Prize. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2010. Searle's early work on speech acts, influenced by J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, helped establish his reputation. His notable concepts include the "Chinese room" argument against "strong" artificial intelligence.

Biography

John Searle speaking at Google, 2015

Searle's father, G.W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T Corporation; his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician.

Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and in his junior year became a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he obtained all his university degrees, BA, MA, and DPhil.

Searle was the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley; he had retired in 2014 but continued teaching until 2016. In June 2019, the emeritus title was revoked.

Politics

While an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Searle became the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". McCarthy at that time served as the junior senator from Wisconsin. In 1959, Searle began teaching at Berkeley, and he was the first tenured professor to join the 1964–65 Free Speech Movement. In 1969, while serving as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California, he supported the university in its dispute with students over the People's Park.

In The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971), Searle investigates the causes behind the campus protests of the era. In it he declares, "I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and...several radical polemicists... Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred --one might almost say terror-- of close analysis and dissection of argument." He asserts that "My wife was threatened that I (and other members of the administration) would be assassinated or violently attacked."

In the late 1980s, Searle, along with other landlords, petitioned Berkeley's rental board to raise the limits on how much he could charge tenants under the city's 1980 rent-stabilization ordinance. The rental board refused to consider Searle's petition and Searle filed suit, charging a violation of due process. In 1990, in what came to be known as the "Searle Decision", the California Supreme Court upheld Searle's argument in part and Berkeley changed its rent-control policy, leading to large rent-increases between 1991 and 1994. Searle was reported to see the issue as one of fundamental rights, being quoted as saying "The treatment of landlords in Berkeley is comparable to the treatment of blacks in the South... our rights have been massively violated and we are here to correct that injustice." The court described the debate as a "morass of political invective, ad hominem attack, and policy argument".

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Searle wrote an article arguing that the attacks were a particular event in a long-term struggle against forces that are intractably opposed to the United States, and signaled support for a more aggressive neoconservative interventionist foreign policy. He called for the realization that the United States is in a more-or-less permanent state of war with these forces. Moreover, a probable course of action would be to deny terrorists the use of foreign territory from which to stage their attacks. Finally, he alluded to the long-term nature of the conflict and blamed the attacks on the lack of American resolve to deal forcefully with America's enemies over the past several decades.

Sexual assault allegations

In March 2017, Searle became the subject of sexual assault allegations. The Los Angeles Times reported: "A new lawsuit alleges that university officials failed to properly respond to complaints that John Searle ... sexually assaulted his ... research associate last July and cut her pay when she rejected his advances." The case brought to light several earlier complaints against Searle, on which Berkeley allegedly had failed to act.

The lawsuit, filed in a California court on March 21, 2017, alleged sexual harassment, retaliation, wrongful termination and assault and battery and sought damages both from Searle and from the Regents of the University of California as his employers. It also claims that Jennifer Hudin, the director of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology, where the complainant had been employed as an assistant to Searle, has stated that Searle "has had sexual relationships with his students and others in the past in exchange for academic, monetary or other benefits". After news of the lawsuit became public, several previous allegations of sexual harassment and assault by Searle were also revealed.

On June 19, 2019, following campus disciplinary proceedings by Berkeley's Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD), University of California President Janet Napolitano approved a recommendation that Searle have his emeritus status revoked, after a determination that he had violated university policies against sexual harassment and retaliation between July and September 2016.

Awards and recognitions

Searle has five honorary-doctorate degrees from four countries and is an honorary visiting professor at Tsing Hua University and at East China Normal University.

In 2000, Searle received the Jean Nicod Prize; in 2004, the National Humanities Medal; and in 2006, the Mind & Brain Prize.

Philosophical work

Speech acts

Searle's early work, which did much to establish his reputation, was on speech acts. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues – including J.L. Austin (the "illocutionary act", from How To Do Things with Words), Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.C.J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules) – with his own thesis that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. He also drew on the work of Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), Hare and Stenius (the distinction, concerning meaning, between illocutionary force and propositional content), P.F. Strawson, John Rawls and William Alston, who maintained that sentence meaning consists in sets of regulative rules requiring the speaker to perform the illocutionary act indicated by the sentence and that such acts involve the utterance of a sentence which (a) indicates that one performs the act; (b) means what one says; and (c) addresses an audience in the vicinity.

In his 1969 book Speech Acts, Searle sets out to combine all these elements to give his account of illocutionary acts. There he provides an analysis of what he considers the prototypical illocutionary act of promising and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further illocutionary act types. Among concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the "illocutionary force" and the "propositional content" of an utterance. Searle does not precisely define the former as such, but rather introduces several possible illocutionary forces by example. According to Searle, the sentences...

1. Sam smokes habitually.
2. Does Sam smoke habitually?
3. Sam, smoke habitually!
4. Would that Sam smoked habitually!

... each indicate the same propositional content (Sam smoking habitually) but differ in the illocutionary force indicated (respectively, a statement, a question, a command and an expression of desire).

According to a later account, which Searle presents in Intentionality (1983) and which differs in important ways from the one suggested in Speech Acts, illocutionary acts are characterised by having "conditions of satisfaction", an idea adopted from Strawson's 1971 paper "Meaning and Truth", and a "direction of fit", an idea adopted from Austin and Elizabeth Anscombe. For example, the statement "John bought two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if it is true, i.e., John did buy two candy bars. By contrast, the command "John, buy two candy bars!" is satisfied if and only if John carries out the action of purchasing two candy bars. Searle refers to the first as having the "word-to-world" direction of fit, since the words are supposed to change to accurately represent the world, and the second as having the "world-to-word" direction of fit, since the world is supposed to change to match the words. There is also the double direction of fit, in which the relationship goes both ways, and the null or zero direction of fit, in which it goes neither way because the propositional content is presupposed, as in "I am sorry I ate John's candy bars."

In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985, with Daniel Vanderveken), Searle prominently uses the notion of the "illocutionary point".

Searle's speech-act theory has been challenged by several thinkers in various ways. Collections of articles referring to Searle's account are found in Burkhardt 1990 and Lepore / van Gulick 1991.

Intentionality and the background

In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Searle applies the principles of his account(s) of illocutionary acts to the investigation of intentionality, which is central to Searle's "Philosophy of Mind". (Searle is at pains to emphasize that 'intentionality', the capacity of mental states to be about worldly objects, is not to be confused with 'intensionality', the referential opacity of contexts that fail tests for 'extensionality'.)

For Searle, intentionality is exclusively mental, being the power of minds to represent or symbolize over, things, properties and states of affairs in the external world. Causal covariance, about-ness and the like are not enough: maps, for instance, only have a 'derived' intentionality, a mere after-image of the real thing.

Searle also introduces a technical term the Background, which, according to him, has been the source of much philosophical discussion ("though I have been arguing for this thesis for almost twenty years," Searle writes, "many people whose opinions I respect still disagree with me about it"). He calls Background the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have that are not themselves intentional states but that generate appropriate such states on demand.

Thus, when someone is asked to "cut the cake," they know to use a knife and when someone is asked to "cut the grass," they know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the request did not mention this. Beginning with the possibility of reversing these two, an endless series of sceptical, anti-real or science-fiction interpretations could be imagined. "I wish to say that there is a radical underdetermination of what is said by the literal meaning..." emphasizes Searle. The Background fills the gap, being the capacity always to have a suitable interpretation to hand. "I just take a huge metaphysics for granted," he says. Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the Background with the concept of the Network, one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense.

To give an example, two chess players might be engaged in a bitter struggle at the board, but they share all sorts of Background presuppositions: that they will take turns to move, that no one else will intervene, that they are both playing to the same rules, that the fire alarm will not go off, that the board will not suddenly disintegrate, that their opponent will not magically turn into a grapefruit, and so on indefinitely. As most of these possibilities will not have occurred to either player, Searle thinks the Background is itself unconscious as well as nonintentional. To have a Background is to have a set of brain structures that generate appropriate intentional states (if the fire alarm does go off, say). "Those brain structures enable me to activate the system of intentionality and to make it function, but the capacities realized in the brain structures do not themselves consist in intentional states."

It seems to Searle that Hume and Nietzsche were probably the first philosophers to appreciate, respectively, the centrality and radical contingency of the Background. "Nietzsche saw, with anxiety, that the Background does not have to be the way it is." Searle also thinks that a Background appears in the ideas of other modern thinkers: as the river-bed/substratum of Wittgenstein's On Certainty ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background, especially On Certainty") and Pierre Bourdieu's habitus.

In his debate with Jacques Derrida, Searle argued against Derrida's purported view that a statement can be disjoined from the original intentionality of its author, for example when no longer connected to the original author, while still being able to produce meaning. Searle maintained that even if one was to see a written statement with no knowledge of authorship it would still be impossible to escape the question of intentionality, because "a meaningful sentence is just a standing possibility of the (intentional) speech act". For Searle, ascribing intentionality to a statement was a basic requirement for attributing it any meaning at all.

In 2023 Pierre Jacob described Searle's view as "anti-intentionalist".

Consciousness

Building upon his views about intentionality, Searle presents a view concerning consciousness in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). He argues that, starting with behaviorism, an early but influential scientific view, succeeded by many later accounts that Searle also dismisses, much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. In Intentionality, he parodies several alternative theories of consciousness by replacing their accounts of intentionality with comparable accounts of the hand:

No one would think of saying, for example, "Having a hand is just being disposed to certain sorts of behavior such as grasping" (manual behaviorism), or "Hands can be defined entirely in terms of their causes and effects" (manual functionalism), or "For a system to have a hand is just for it to be in a certain computer state with the right sorts of inputs and outputs" (manual Turing machine functionalism), or "Saying that a system has hands is just adopting a certain stance toward it" (the manual stance) (p. 263).

Searle argues that philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that, on one hand, the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet, on the other hand, consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience.

Searle says simply that both are true: consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain. (A view which he suggests might be called biological naturalism.)

Ontological subjectivity

Searle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who he claims insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party, but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is "epistemically subjective", whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is "epistemically objective". In other words, the latter statement is evaluable, in fact, falsifiable, by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like "the summit is so many meters above sea level". No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena, including all conscious experiences, that are ontologically subjective, i.e., can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science". The pain itself, however, is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality". His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism, because it allows epistemically objective judgments like "That object is a pocket calculator" to pick out agent-relative features of objects, and such features are, on his terms, ontologically subjective, unlike, say, "That object is made mostly of plastic".

Artificial intelligence

See also: Chinese room and philosophy of artificial intelligence

A consequence of biological naturalism is that if humans want to create a conscious being, they will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict what he calls "Strong AI", defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.

In 1980, Searle presented the "Chinese room" argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI. A person is in a room with two slits, and they have a book and some scratch paper. This person does not know any Chinese. Someone outside the room slides some Chinese characters in through the first slit; the person in the room follows the instructions in the book, transcribing the characters as instructed onto the scratch paper, and slides the resulting sheet out by the second slit. To people outside the room, it appears that the room speaks Chinese – they have slid Chinese statements into one slit and got valid responses in English – yet the 'room' does not understand a word of Chinese. This suggests, according to Searle, that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English, because, as the thought experiment suggests, being able to 'translate' Chinese into English does not entail 'understanding' either Chinese or English: all that the person in the thought experiment, and hence a computer, is able to do is to execute certain syntactic manipulations. Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett in their book The Mind's I criticize Searle's view of AI, particularly the Chinese room argument.

Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's "Strong AI" is really just another name for functionalism and computationalism, and that these positions are the real targets of his critique. Functionalists argue that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain. It follows that anything that carries out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, if humans wrote a computer program that was conscious, they could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes.

Searle argues that this is impossible, since consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a simulation of digestion is built on the computer, it will not digest anything; no matter how well it simulates fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are observer-relative: observers pick out certain patterns in the world and consider them information processes, but information processes are not things-in-the-world themselves. Since they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they cannot have causal efficacy and thus cannot cause consciousness. There is no physical law, Searle insists, that can see the equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program.

Social reality

Searle extended his inquiries into observer-relative phenomena by trying to understand social reality. Searle begins by arguing collective intentionality (e.g., "we are going for a walk") is a distinct form of intentionality, not simply reducible to individual intentionality (e.g., "I am going for a walk with him and I think he thinks he is going for a walk with me and he thinks I think I am going for a walk with him and...")

In The Construction of Social Reality (1995), Searle addresses the mystery of how social constructs like "baseball" or "money" can exist in a world consisting only of physical particles in fields of force. Adapting an idea by Elizabeth Anscombe in "On Brute Facts", Searle distinguishes between brute facts, like the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, like the score of a baseball game. Aiming at an explanation of social phenomena in terms of Anscombe's notion, he argues that society can be explained in terms of institutional facts, and institutional facts arise out of collective intentionality through constitutive rules with the logical form "X counts as Y in C". Thus, for instance, filling out a ballot counts as a vote in a polling place, getting so many votes counts as a victory in an election, getting a victory counts as being elected president in the presidential race, etc.

Many sociologists, however, do not see Searle's contributions to social theory as very significant. Neil Gross, for example, argues that Searle's views on society are more or less a reconstitution of the sociologist Émile Durkheim's theories of social facts, social institutions, collective representations, and the like. Searle's ideas are thus open to the same criticisms as Durkheim's. Searle responded that Durkheim's work was worse than he had originally believed and, admitting he had not read much of Durkheim's work, said: "Because Durkheim's account seemed so impoverished I did not read any further in his work." Steven Lukes, however, responded to Searle's response to Gross and argued point by point against the allegations that Searle makes against Durkheim, essentially upholding Gross's argument that Searle's work bears a great resemblance to Durkheim's. Lukes attributes Searle's miscomprehension of Durkheim's work to the fact that Searle had never read Durkheim.

Searle–Lawson debate

Further information: Social ontology

In recent years, Searle's main interlocutor on issues of social ontology has been Tony Lawson. Although their accounts of social reality are similar, there are important differences. Lawson emphasizes the notion of social totality whereas Searle prefers to refer to institutional facts. Furthermore, Searle believes that emergence implies causal reduction whereas Lawson argues that social totalities cannot be completely explained by the causal powers of their components. Searle also places language at the foundation of the construction of social reality, while Lawson believes that community formation necessarily precedes the development of language and, therefore, there must be the possibility for non-linguistic social structure formation. The debate is ongoing and takes place additionally through regular meetings of the Centre for Social Ontology at the University of California, Berkeley and the Cambridge Social Ontology Group at the University of Cambridge.

Rationality

In Rationality in Action (2001), Searle argues that standard notions of rationality are badly flawed. According to what he calls the Classical Model, rationality is seen as something like a train track: a person moves onto it at one point with their beliefs and desires, and then the rules of rationality compel them all the way to a conclusion. Searle doubts that this picture of rationality holds generally.

Searle briefly critiques one particular set of these rules: those of mathematical decision theory. He points out that its axioms require that anyone who valued a quarter and their life would, at some odds, bet their life for a quarter. Searle insists he would never take such a bet and believes that this stance is perfectly rational.

Most of his attack is directed against the common conception of rationality, which he believes is badly flawed. First, he argues that reasons does not cause an individual to do anything, because having sufficient reason wills, but does not force, them to do that thing. Therefore, in any decision situation, people experience a gap between reasons and actions. For example, when a person decides to vote, they may determine that they care most about economic policy and that they prefer candidate Jones's economic policy, but they must also make an effort to actually cast a vote. Similarly, every time a smoker who feels guilty about their action lights a cigarette, they are aware that they are succumbing to their craving, and not merely acting automatically as they do when they exhale. This gap makes people think they have freedom of the will. Searle thinks that whether one really has free will or not is an open question, but considers its absence highly unappealing because it makes the feeling of freedom of will an epiphenomenon, which is highly unlikely from the evolutionary point of view given its biological cost. He also says, "All rational activity presupposes free will".

Further information: Fact-value distinction

Second, Searle believes that people can rationally do things that do not result from their own desires. It is widely believed that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", i.e., that facts about how the world is can never tell a person what they should do (Hume's Law). By contrast, insofar as a fact is understood to relate to an institution (marriage, promises, commitments, etc.), which is to be understood as a system of constitutive rules, then what one should do can be understood as following from the institutional fact of what one has done; institutional fact, then, can be understood as opposed to the "brute facts" related to Hume's Law. For example, Searle believes that the promise of doing something means that one must do it, because by making the promise one participates in the constitutive rules that arrange the system of promise-making itself; a "shouldness" is implicit in the mere factual action of promising. Furthermore, he believes that this provides a desire-independent reason for an action – if one orders a drink at a bar, there is an obligation to pay for it even if one has no desire to do so. This argument, which he first made in his paper, "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'" (1964), remains highly controversial, but Searle maintained that "the traditional metaphysical distinction between fact and value cannot be captured by the linguistic distinction between 'evaluative' and 'descriptive' because all such speech act notions are already normative".

Third, Searle argues that much of rational deliberation involves adjusting patterns of desires, which are often inconsistent, to decide between outcomes, not the other way around. While in the Classical Model one would start from viewing a desire to go to Paris as a greater factor than saving money, which would lead to calculating the cheapest way to get there, Searle would argue that people balance the desire of Paris against the desire to save money to determine which one they value more. Hence, he believes that rationality is not a system of rules, but more of an adverb. Certain behaviors are seen as rational, no matter what their source, and a system of rules derives from finding patterns in what is considered rational.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Cover of the first edition
Author	Daniel C. Dennett
Country	United States
Language	English
Subjects	Evolution ethics
Published	1995 (Simon & Schuster)
Media type	Print (hardcover · paperback)
Pages	586
ISBN	978-0-684-80290-9 (hardcover) 978-0-684-82471-0 (paperback)

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is a 1995 book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author looks at some of the repercussions of Darwinian theory. The crux of the argument is that, whether or not Darwin's theories are overturned, there is no going back from the dangerous idea that design (purpose or what something is for) might not need a designer. Dennett makes this case on the basis that natural selection is a blind process, which is nevertheless sufficiently powerful to explain the evolution of life. Darwin's discovery was that the generation of life worked algorithmically, that processes behind it work in such a way that given these processes the results that they tend toward must be so.

Dennett says, for example, that by claiming that minds cannot be reduced to purely algorithmic processes, many of his eminent contemporaries are claiming that miracles can occur. These assertions have generated a great deal of debate and discussion in the general public. The book was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award in non-fiction and the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

Background

Dennett's previous book was Consciousness Explained (1991). Dennett noted discomfort with Darwinism among not only lay people but also even academics and decided it was time to write a book dealing with the subject. Darwin's Dangerous Idea is not meant to be a work of science, but rather an interdisciplinary book; Dennett admits that he does not understand all of the scientific details himself. He goes into a moderate level of detail, but leaves it for the reader to go into greater depth if desired, providing references to this end.

In writing the book, Dennett wanted to "get thinkers in other disciplines to take evolutionary theory seriously, to show them how they have been underestimating it, and to show them why they have been listening to the wrong sirens". To do this he tells a story; one that is mainly original but includes some material from his previous work.

Dennett taught an undergraduate seminar at Tufts University on Darwin and philosophy, which included most of the ideas in the book. He also had the help of fellow staff and other academics, some of whom read drafts of the book. It is dedicated to W. V. O. Quine, "teacher and friend".

Synopsis

Part I: Starting in the Middle

"Starting in the Middle", Part I of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, gets its name from a quote by Willard Van Orman Quine: "Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle. Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distance objects, and our introduction to them and to everything comes midway in the cultural evolution of the race."

The first chapter "Tell Me Why" is named after a song.

Tell me why the stars do shine,

Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me why the sky's so blue.
Then I will tell you just why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine,
Because God made the ivy twine,
Because God made the sky so blue.

Because God made you, that's why I love you.

Before Charles Darwin, and still today, a majority of people see God as the ultimate cause of all design, or the ultimate answer to 'why?' questions. John Locke argued for the primacy of mind before matter, and David Hume, while exposing problems with Locke's view, could not see any alternative.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea makes extensive use of cranes as an analogy.

Darwin provided just such an alternative: evolution. Besides providing evidence of common descent, he introduced a mechanism to explain it: natural selection. According to Dennett, natural selection is a mindless, mechanical and algorithmic process—Darwin's dangerous idea. The third chapter introduces the concept of "skyhooks" and "cranes" (see below). He suggests that resistance to Darwinism is based on a desire for skyhooks, which do not really exist. According to Dennett, good reductionists explain apparent design without skyhooks; greedy reductionists try to explain it without cranes.

Chapter 4 looks at the tree of life, such as how it can be visualized and some crucial events in life's history. The next chapter concerns the possible and the actual, using the 'Library of Mendel' (the space of all logically possible genomes) as a conceptual aid.

In the last chapter of part I, Dennett treats human artifacts and culture as a branch of a unified Design Space. Descent or homology can be detected by shared design features that would be unlikely to appear independently. However, there are also "Forced Moves" or "Good Tricks" that will be discovered repeatedly, either by natural selection (see convergent evolution) or human investigation.

Part II: Darwinian Thinking in Biology

Tree diagram in Origin

The first chapter of part II, "Darwinian Thinking in Biology", asserts that life originated without any skyhooks, and the orderly world we know is the result of a blind and undirected shuffle through chaos.

The eighth chapter's message is conveyed by its title, "Biology is Engineering"; biology is the study of design, function, construction and operation. However, there are some important differences between biology and engineering. Related to the engineering concept of optimization, the next chapter deals with adaptationism, which Dennett endorses, calling Gould and Lewontin's "refutation" of it an illusion. Dennett thinks adaptationism is, in fact, the best way of uncovering constraints.

The tenth chapter, entitled "Bully for Brontosaurus", is an extended critique of Stephen Jay Gould, who Dennett feels has created a distorted view of evolution with his popular writings; his "self-styled revolutions" against adaptationism, gradualism and other orthodox Darwinism all being false alarms. The final chapter of part II dismisses directed mutation, the inheritance of acquired traits and Teilhard's "Omega Point", and insists that other controversies and hypotheses (like the unit of selection and Panspermia) have no dire consequences for orthodox Darwinism.

Part III: Mind, Meaning, Mathematics and Morality

The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, which appears at the beginning of chapter 16 "On the Origin of Morality".

"Mind, Meaning, Mathematics and Morality" is the name of Part III, which begins with a quote from Nietzsche. Chapter 12, "The Cranes of Culture", discusses cultural evolution. It asserts that the meme has a role to play in our understanding of culture, and that it allows humans, alone among animals, to "transcend" our selfish genes. "Losing Our Minds to Darwin" follows, a chapter about the evolution of brains, minds and language. Dennett criticizes Noam Chomsky's perceived resistance to the evolution of language, its modeling by artificial intelligence, and reverse engineering.

The evolution of meaning is then discussed, and Dennett uses a series of thought experiments to persuade the reader that meaning is the product of meaningless, algorithmic processes.

Von Kempelen's chess automaton, discussed in chapter 15.

Chapter 15 asserts that Gödel's Theorem does not make certain sorts of artificial intelligence impossible. Dennett extends his criticism to Roger Penrose. The subject then moves on to the origin and evolution of morality, beginning with Thomas Hobbes (who Dennett calls "the first sociobiologist") and Friedrich Nietzsche. He concludes that only an evolutionary analysis of ethics makes sense, though he cautions against some varieties of 'greedy ethical reductionism'. Before moving to the next chapter, he discusses some sociobiology controversies.

The penultimate chapter, entitled "Redesigning Morality", begins by asking if ethics can be 'naturalized'. Dennett does not believe there is much hope of discovering an algorithm for doing the right thing, but expresses optimism in our ability to design and redesign our approach to moral problems. In "The Future of an Idea", the book's last chapter, Dennett praises biodiversity, including cultural diversity. In closing, he uses Beauty and the Beast as an analogy; although Darwin's idea may seem dangerous, it is actually quite beautiful.

Central concepts

Design Space

Dennett believes there is little or no principled difference between the naturally generated products of evolution and the man-made artifacts of human creativity and culture. For this reason he indicates deliberately that the complex fruits of the tree of life are in a very meaningful sense "designed"—even though he does not believe evolution was guided by a higher intelligence.

Dennett supports using the notion of memes to better understand cultural evolution. He also believes even human creativity might operate by the Darwinian mechanism. This leads him to propose that the "space" describing biological "design" is connected with the space describing human culture and technology.

A precise mathematical definition of Design Space is not given in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Dennett acknowledges this and admits he is offering a philosophical idea rather than a scientific formulation.

Natural selection as an algorithm

Dennett describes natural selection as a substrate-neutral, mindless algorithm for moving through Design Space.

Universal acid

Dennett writes about the fantasy of a "universal acid" as a liquid that is so corrosive that it would eat through anything that it came into contact with, even a potential container. Such a powerful substance would transform everything it was applied to; leaving something very different in its wake. This is where Dennett draws parallels from the “universal acid” to Darwin's idea:

“it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.”

While there are people who would like to see Darwin's idea contained within the field of biology, Dennett asserts that this dangerous idea inevitably “leaks” out to transform other fields as well.

Skyhooks and cranes

Dennett uses the term "skyhook" to describe a source of design complexity that does not build on lower, simpler layers—in simple terms, a miracle.

In philosophical arguments concerning the reducibility (or otherwise) of the human mind, Dennett's concept pokes fun at the idea of intelligent design emanating from on high, either originating from one or more gods, or providing its own grounds in an absurd, Munchausen-like bootstrapping manner.

Dennett also accuses various competing neo-Darwinian ideas of making use of such supposedly unscientific skyhooks in explaining evolution, coming down particularly hard on the ideas of Stephen Jay Gould.

Dennett contrasts theories of complexity that require such miracles with those based on "cranes", structures that permit the construction of entities of greater complexity but are themselves founded solidly "on the ground" of physical science.

Reception

In The New York Review of Books, John Maynard Smith praised Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

It is therefore a pleasure to meet a philosopher who understands what Darwinism is about, and approves of it. Dennett goes well beyond biology. He sees Darwinism as a corrosive acid, capable of dissolving our earlier belief and forcing a reconsideration of much of sociology and philosophy. Although modestly written, this is not a modest book. Dennett argues that, if we understand Darwin's dangerous idea, we are forced to reject or modify much of our current intellectual baggage...

Writing in the same publication, Stephen Jay Gould criticised Darwin's Dangerous Idea for being an "influential but misguided ultra-Darwinian manifesto":

Daniel Dennett devotes the longest chapter in Darwin's Dangerous Idea to an excoriating caricature of my ideas, all in order to bolster his defense of Darwinian fundamentalism. If an argued case can be discerned at all amid the slurs and sneers, it would have to be described as an effort to claim that I have, thanks to some literary skill, tried to raise a few piddling, insignificant, and basically conventional ideas to "revolutionary" status, challenging what he takes to be the true Darwinian scripture. Since Dennett shows so little understanding of evolutionary theory beyond natural selection, his critique of my work amounts to little more than sniping at false targets of his own construction. He never deals with my ideas as such, but proceeds by hint, innuendo, false attribution, and error.

Gould was also a harsh critic of Dennett's idea of the "universal acid" of natural selection and of his subscription to the idea of memetics; Dennett responded, and the exchange between Dennett, Gould, and Robert Wright was printed in the New York Review of Books.

Biologist H. Allen Orr wrote a critical review emphasizing similar points in the Boston Review.

The book has also provoked a negative reaction from creationists; Frederick Crews writes that Darwin's Dangerous Idea "rivals Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker as the creationists' most cordially hated text."