I discuss a certain kind of emotionally charged negative reaction to defences of non-monogamous love, which I call collective-identity reactions. Expanding on work by Audrey Yap and Jonathan Ichikawa, who consider defensive reactions grounded in individual identity, I argue that collective-identity reactions are characteristically associated with claims about who we are, and motivated by a sense that the relevant we is in some way under threat. Looking into which we might be threatened by defences of non-monogamy, and why, reveals that this apparently personal subject matter is in fact entangled with global political issues like capitalism and American cultural imperialism. I conclude with some thoughts about ameliorative strategies for situations structurally similar to this one.

Transhumanists claim that futuristic technologies will permit you to live indefinitely as a nonbiological ‘posthuman’ with a radically improved quality of life. Philosophers have pointed out that whether some radically enhanced posthuman is really you depends on perplexing issues about the nature of personal identity. In this paper, I present an especially pressing version of the personal-identity challenge to transhumanism, based on the ideas of Derek Parfit. Parfit distinguishes two main views of personal identity, an intuitive, nonreductive view and a revisionary, reductive view. I argue that the standard rationale for wanting to become a posthuman makes sense only if the intuitive view is correct, but that the standard rationale for thinking that it is possible to become a posthuman makes sense only if the revisionary view is correct. Following this, I explain why the obvious responses are unsatisfactory or imply the need to rethink transhumanism in ways that make it much less radical and less appealing.

My thesis is that certain non-verbal paintings such as Picasso's Guernica make (simple) arguments. If this is correct and the arguments are reasonably good, it would indicate one way that non-literary art can be cognitively valuable, since argument can provide the justification needed for knowledge or understanding. The focus is on painting, but my findings seem applicable to comparable visual art forms (a sculpture is also considered). My approach largely consists of identifying pertinent features of viable literary cognitivism and then showing how they or close analogues can be applied to non-verbal painting. The two main features are the requirements, first, that the relevant knowledge is provided significantly in virtue of the distinctive essential feature of literary fictions, i.e., their fictionality, and second, that the knowledge stems primarily from the content of the work, not from what the auditor brings to the work. Some ways that literary fiction has been taken to be argumentative are explained, and striking similarities are found between argumentative literary fiction and argumentative painting. Potential objections are addressed, and I examine a proposed way to express, in a schematized format, both the power of an argumentative painting and its relatively simple associated propositional content.

For billions of people, the internet has become a second home. It is where we meet friends and strangers, where we organise and learn, debate, deceive, and do business. In some respects, it is like the town square it was once claimed to be, while in others, it provides a strange new mode of interaction whose influence on us we are yet to understand. This collection of papers aims to give a short indication of some of the exciting philosophical work being carried out at the moment that addresses the novel aspects of online communication. The topics range from the expressive functions of emoji to the oppressive powers of search engines.

Many online messages now contain emoji – these small images have quickly become an important means of communicating. Yet they have not yet been taken seriously in philosophy of language. In this exploratory paper, I attempt to remedy this neglect by analysing the communicative functions of emoji. I argue that emoji have at least three communicative functions. Firstly, they can serve a replicative function, in that they can play the same role as words and punctuation, thereby replicating the function of existing written communicative devices. Secondly, they can serve a compensatory function, in the sense that they can be used to make up for features of face-to-face conversation which are lost in written online conversation. Thirdly, they can serve supplementary functions, in that we can perform new communicative acts with emoji which we could not previously perform either in written or face-to-face communication.

Recent work in social epistemology has drawn attention to various problematic social epistemic phenomena that are common within online networks. Nguyen (2020) argues that it is important to distinguish epistemic bubbles from echo chambers. An epistemic bubble is an information structure that merely lacks information or sources that would be relevant or important to the user. An echo chamber is a structure in which dissenting opinions are, not necessarily absent, but actively undermined, for example by instilling attitudes of distrust towards their adherents. Because of this, echo chambers are thought to be especially difficult to escape. In contrast, according to Nguyen, it is relatively easy to shatter an epistemic bubble: one simply introduces the missing information. In this paper, I argue that it is more difficult to shatter an epistemic bubble than has been recognised in the literature. The reason for this is the relationship between epistemic bubbles and interpretative resources. Despite their epistemic drawbacks, it is comparatively easy to gain knowledge from sources inside one's epistemic bubble because agents within a bubble share common ground. In contrast, it can be very difficult to gain knowledge from sources outside of one's bubble because interlocutors on the outside are less likely to have the shared context needed to facilitate communicative success. I argue that this problem suggests a different way to understand the nature of epistemic bubbles and our prospects for escaping them.

This paper concerns sock puppetry, a practice which involves an individual communicating under multiple pseudonymous identities in a manner that makes it seem as though these personas are distinct conversational participants. I provide a definition of sock puppetry that is more narrow than other definitions, allowing it to be distinguished from related phenomena. I then analyse some of the ways in which sock puppetry can interfere with social tools we use for establishing trust within an online community, evaluating a speaker's credibility, and generally deciding who and what to believe.

How should we think about the ways search engines can go wrong? Following the publication of Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression (Noble, 2018), a view has emerged that racist, sexist, and other problematic results should be thought of as indicative of algorithmic bias. In this paper, I offer an alternative angle on these results, building on Noble's suggestion that search engines are complicit in a racial contract (Mills, 1997). I argue that racist and sexist results should be thought of as part of the workings of the social system of white ignorance. Along the way, I will argue that we should think about search engines not as sources of testimony, but as information-classification systems, and make a preliminary case for the importance of the social epistemology of technology.