Social structural explanation

Soon, Valerie

doi:10.1111/phc3.12782

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…According to Cudd, answering the question of how and why oppression endures over time is particularly informative to understanding how it can be overcome (Cudd, 2005, p. 25). Relatedly, what is known as “social structural explanation” (Haslanger, 2015, 2016, 2018; Soon, 2021) is characterized by an interest in the persistence of unjust social inequalities – a concern for how they are maintained more so than how they historically originated (Soon, 2021).…”

Section: What Is Operative Causation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Etiology of injustice: An introduction

Erck

2024

Philosophy Compass

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To formulate a plan of action for bringing about a decisive and reasonably stable end to an injustice, it is helpful to understand the factors and conditions that critically make the difference in causing that injustice. This intuitively seems correct regarding active and ongoing problems. But what precisely is involved in this kind of explanatory endeavor, and what is its role in practical efforts to confront existing wrongs? This paper offers an introduction to etiology of injustice, which is the study and explanation of the operative causation of injustices. Drawing on insights from the philosophy of social transformation, causation, and remedial justice, I sketch a conceptual framework for understanding and undertaking the task of etiology of injustice and outline the contours of the etiological tradition of thought.

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Section: What Is Operative Causation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Etiology of injustice: An introduction

Erck

2024

Philosophy Compass

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“…(Dretske 1988, 42). This distinction has been recently used to make sense of social structural explanations (Haslanger 2016, Soon 2021). In the present context, it allows to sort out alienation from clinical depersonalization by discerning the distinctively social dimension of the former.…”

Section: C)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Triggering causes explain what in a causal process caused C which caused E; structuring causes are designed to explain what “shaped or structured the process”—what made C to cause E rather than something else (Dretske 1988, 42). This distinction has been recently used to make sense of social structural explanations (Haslanger 2016; Soon 2021). In the present context, it allows to sort out alienation from clinical depersonalization by discerning the distinctively social dimension of the former.…”

Section: Alienation and Mental Ownershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

How can consciousness be false? Alienation, simulation, and mental ownership

Bianchin

2022

Philosophy & Social Criticism

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Alienation has been recently revived as a central concept in critical theory. Current debates, however, tend to focus on normative rather than on explanatory issues. In this paper, I confront the latter and advance an account of alienation that bears on the mechanisms that bring it about in order to locate alienation as a distinctive social and psychological fact and to dissolve a paradox it seems to involve. In particular, I argue that alienation can be explained as a disruption induced by social factors in the sense of mental ownership that comes with the first personal awareness of being a subject of attitudes, emotions, and actions, and outline how social factors can play a structuring causal role in the process that brings it about. In the first section, I introduce the theme and explain why it is important to focus on the mechanisms that underlie alienation. In the second section, I maintain that understanding how alienation works is crucial to make sense of false consciousness. In the third section, I consider the relevance of mental ownership to explaining alienation and discuss existing evidence about whether and how it can fail. In the final section, I argue that disturbances in the simulation routines that support social cognition might underpin alienation, and outline how social factors might play a structuring causal role in this connection.

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“…Many machine learning practitioners have advocated just that. Notwithstanding questions of essentialism and stereotyping-of whether these efforts risk fixing in place "foundational" ideas of dynamic identities and lives-work focused on representation alone cannot fully address the broader, structural aspects of AI (Soon 2021).…”

Section: "Whose Knowledge?" In the Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial Knowing Otherwise

Keyes,

Creel

2022

FPQ

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While feminist critiques of AI are increasingly common in the scholarly literature, they are by no means new. Alison Adam’s Artificial Knowing (1998) brought a feminist social and epistemological stance to the analysis of AI, critiquing the symbolic AI systems of her day and proposing constructive alternatives. In this paper, we seek to revisit and renew Adam’s arguments and methodology, exploring their resonances with current feminist concerns and their relevance to contemporary machine learning. Like Adam, we ask how new AI methods could be adapted for feminist purposes and what role new technologies might play in addressing concerns raised by feminist epistemologists and theorists about algorithmic systems. In particular, we highlight distributed and federated learning as providing partial solutions to the power-oriented concerns that have stymied efforts to make machine learning systems more representative and pluralist.

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Social structural explanation

Cited by 9 publications

References 50 publications

Etiology of injustice: An introduction

Etiology of injustice: An introduction

How can consciousness be false? Alienation, simulation, and mental ownership

Artificial Knowing Otherwise

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