As artificially intelligent systems gain increasing capacity for decision-making and social interaction, they are rapidly entering ethically sensitive domains such as healthcare, military operations, and digital companionship.
In 1993, a famous New Yorker cartoon “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" joked about online anonymity and disguised identity as emblem of early web culture.
I argue that concepts are public goods: they are non-rival (my grasp and use of TABLE does not diminish yours) and (variably) non-excludable (I cannot prevent you from learning or using the concept FREEDOM).
Natural kinds have played a central role in philosophy, informing accounts of scientific explanation and the semantics of proper names (e.g. “Feynman”) and mass terms (e.g. “gold”).
Democratic legitimacy relies on public reason — the exchange of reasons that citizens and officials can reasonably accept — yet public reason is not static. How, and under what conditions, do public reasons change?