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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · 14d

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jul 22

I will post more summaries of the results of our search later, but the full article / data summary / analysis can be found (open access!) here:

doi.org/10.1007/s112...

First page of article "What do philosophers talk about when they talk about autism", published in Synthese. Information includes the title, doi
(10.1007/s11229-025-05116-1), year (2025), author names (Travis LaCroix, Alexis Amero, Benjamin Sidloski), recieved date (10 October 2024), accepted date (12 June 2025), copyright information (the authors, 2025), abstract ("Several anecdotal claims about the relationship between philosophical discourse and the subject of autism have been forwarded in recent years. This paper seeks to verify or debunk these descriptive claims by carefully examining the philosophical literature on autism. We conduct a comprehensive scoping review to answer the question, what do philosophers talk about when they talk about autism? This empirical work confirms that the philosophy of autism is underdeveloped as a subfield of philosophy. Moreover, the way that philosophers engage with autism is often unreflective and uncritical. As a result, much work in the discipline serves to perpetuate pathologising, dehumanising, and stigmatising misinformation about autistics and autistic behaviour. By highlighting the significant gaps in the philosophical literature on autism, this review aims to deepen our understanding of philosophical thought surrounding autism and contributes to ongoing dialogues pertaining to neurodiversity, madness, and disability rights more generally.") and keywords (Autism · Neurodiversity · The philosophy of autism · Scoping
literature review).

Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jul 22

Examining philosophical works mentioning autism across time, we found: (1) the number of articles has increased significantly in the last decade or two. (2) The rate of change is also trending upward in the last two decades. (3) The majority (> 50%) of the corpus was published in the last decade.

Line graph titled "publications per year." It shows that the number of publications mentioning autism in a given year is trending upward. Each year (1945-2023) is represented on the x-axis, with the number of articles on the y-axis. The maximum is 87 articles in 2021. A dashed line is fitted to the number of articles (blue line), which is steadily increasing in the last 40 years.

Line graph (describing rate of change) and line graph with area underneath filled (describing cumulative distribution), titled "number of publications per year (cumulative distribution)." It shows that the rate of publications mentioning autism in a given year is trending upward. Each year (1945-2023) is represented on the x-axis, with percent (cumulative distribution) on the left y-axis and the rate of change on the right y-axis.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jul 22

Normalising by articles per issue, we found that the leading publishers are fairly specialist: Neuroethics (0.8958 articles/issue); Rev. Phil. Psyc. (0.8400); Phenomenology and Cog. Sci. (0.7937); PPP (0.6610); Mind & Lang. (0.5114); American Journal of Bioethics (0.4087); and Phil. Psych. (0.4051).

Bar chart titled "Corpus Results (Normalised Inclusions)." It compares the number of included articles across various philosophy journals, normalised by number of issues. Each journal is represented on the x-axis, with the number of articles per issue on the y-axis. Blue bars indicate included articles. A dotted black line marks the average number of inclusions across journals. A few journals on the left (e.g., Neuroethics, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences) have relatively high counts, while many others on the right have low counts, mostly below the average inclusion line.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jul 22

We searched 67 "leading" philosophy journals for several relevant search terms and created a corpus using specific inclusion/exclusion criteria. The total corpus result in 1112 articles mentioning autism published between 1911 and the end of 2023.

A list titled “A.1 Devitt’s LGSCD-Index” showing 34 philosophy journals considered part of this index. Each entry includes the journal’s name, followed by its publisher or host platform in parentheses. Examples include American Philosophy Quarterly (JStor, Scholarly Publishing Collective), Analysis (Oxford Academic), Biology & Philosophy (Springer), Journal of Philosophy (JStor, Philosophy Documentation Center), Mind (Oxford Academic), Philosophical Studies (Springer), and Synthese (Springer). The list includes journals from major academic publishers such as Springer, Oxford Academic, Wiley, Cambridge Core, and others.

A continuation of a categorised list of philosophy journals, grouped under several headings:

A.2 Additional Devitt Journals (Not Indexed by Google): Includes journals like History of Philosophy Quarterly, Linguistics & Philosophy, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, and Philosophy and Public Affairs.

A.3 Top-20 Google Scholar Journals (Not Included in Leiter): Lists journals such as Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Psychology, and Studies in Philosophy and Education.

A.4 2022 Leiter Ranking (Not Included in LGSCSD-Index): Includes Analytic Philosophy, Ergo, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, and Thought.

A.5 de Brouin’s (2023) Meta-Analysis: Features journals like Dialectica, Episteme, Philosophia, Philosophical Issues, and Philosophy.

A.6 Wild Cards: Contains less generalist (more specialised) journals, such as American Journal of Bioethics, Bioethics, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, Hypatia, and Journal of Social Philosophy.

Each entry includes the journal title and its publisher or hosting platform in parentheses.

List of exclusion criteria for the literature review:

Code 00: Reference to a flute player
Code 01: Reference to search term outside the main text
Code 02: Invalid document type
Code 03: Non-English article
Code 04: Different sense of “autism”
Code 05: False positive
Code 06: No access

Venn diagram describing how many articles in the corpus were found using each search term. A large circle shows most article included the search term autis* (1099 of 1112). A smaller circle, mostly overlapping the autis* circle, shows 195 articles include the keyword asperg*. Smaller circles, completely overlapping autis* and partially overlapping asperg* and each other, show the number of articles that include the terms "pervasive developmental" (48), kanner* (40), and "childhood schizophrenia" (8).

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jul 22

Negative Claims:

(D6) But many philosophical engagements with autism still lack critical reflection—they rely on unexamined assumptions.
(D7) Even when well-meaning, philosophers often reinforce negative stereotypes about autism—framing it as defective, pathological, or less-than-human.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jul 22

Positive Claims:

(D4) There’s been a notable rise in philosophical work on autism over the past decade.
(D5) This newer work is also more nuanced and sympathetic to autistic perspectives.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jul 22

Limiting claims:

(D1) There’s surprisingly little philosophical engagement with autism.
(D2) What exists tends to focus narrowly on ethics, mind, psychology, or medicine.
(D3) So, If autism is (or should be) its own subfield in philosophy, it’s currently underdeveloped.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jul 22

We reviewed the (mainstream) philosophical literature on autism to analyse some common limiting, positive, and negative claims that have been forwarded in the past decade.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jul 22

What do philosophers talk about when they talk about autism?

Usually: not actually autism.

When they do talk about autism, they often spread harmful stereotypes. Our scoping literature review, now published (open access) in Synthese, analyses the “philosophy of autism” subfield.

rdcu.be/ewIAr

What do philosophers talk about when they talk about autism?

rdcu.be

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jun 15

I also expand on this under the framework of the (structural) value alignment problem in Chapter 9 of my book, which explores the possibility of "measuring degrees of alignment", relevant to the "objectives axis" of the alignment problem (as I describe it).

broadviewpress.com/product/arti...

Artificial Intelligence and the Value Alignment Problem - Broadview Press

Artificial Intelligence and the Value Alignment Problem -

broadviewpress.com

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jun 15

This paper builds on my prior work (also published in AI and Ethics), which explains how using moral dilemmas as validation mechanisms for "ethical AI", or as ethics benchmarks in AI, is a category mistake.

doi.org/10.1007/s436...

Moral dilemmas for moral machines - AI and Ethics

Autonomous systems are being developed and deployed in situations that may require some degree of ethical decision-making ability. As a result, research in machine ethics has proliferated in recent ye...

doi.org

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jun 15

In essence, while benchmarking is sometimes useful for technical aspects of AI (though actually often not [https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15366]), creating a definitive ethical benchmark for AI is basically impossible—at least without presupposing a metaethical stance.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jun 15

Basically, the term "ethics" is laden with philosophical baggage; what is considered "ethical" is often subjective / context-dependent, varying across cultures, individuals, and situations; so, there's no universally accepted set of moral principles that can be used to evaluate AI systems.

Screenshot of abstract of journal article, "Metaethical perspectives on 'benchmarking' AI Ethics", by Travis LaCroix and Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, published in AI Ethics. The abstract reads:

"Benchmarks are seen as the cornerstone for measuring technical progress in artificial intelligence (AI) research and have been developed for a variety of tasks ranging from question answering to emotion recognition. An increasingly prominent research area in AI is ethics, which currently has no set of benchmarks nor commonly accepted way for measuring the ‘ethicality’ of an AI system. In this paper, drawing upon research in moral philosophy and metaethics, we argue that it is impossible to develop such a benchmark. As such, alternative mechanisms are necessary for evaluating whether an AI system is ‘ethical’. This is especially pressing in light of the prevalence of applied, industrial AI research. We argue that it makes more sense to talk about ‘values’ (and ‘value alignment’) rather than ‘ethics’ when considering the possible actions of present and future AI systems. We further highlight that, because values are unambiguously relative, focusing on values forces us to consider explicitly what the values are and whose values they are. Shifting the emphasis from ethics to values therefore gives rise to several new ways of understanding how researchers might advance research programmes for robustly safe or beneficial AI."

Keywords include "Value alignment, AI ethics, Benchmarking, Unit testing, Metaethics, Moral dilemmas"

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jun 15

I didn't announce this when it happened, but my article, "Metaethical perspectives for 'Benchmarking' AI ethics", with @sashamtl.bsky.social, was published back in March in the AI and Ethics journal.

doi.org/10.1007/s436...

Metaethical perspectives on ‘benchmarking’ AI ethics - AI and Ethics

Benchmarks are seen as the cornerstone for measuring technical progress in artificial intelligence (AI) research and have been developed for a variety of tasks ranging from question answering to emoti...

doi.org

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jun 6

When people suggest that maybe AI can feel emotions, these are the emotions they are talking about.

cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · Jun 5

a friend of mine shared this ai-generated "emotion wheel" and unfortunately i have been laughing my ass off at it for like 15 minutes now. today i am feeling Fnliinneon

emotion wheel starting with "joy, fear, anger" in the center and then lapsing into gibberish

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jun 5

I plan on taking a deeper look in the next day or two at some of the wording of the bill, but what I have seen so far looks like it has far-reaching implications for individual privacy, which apply very broadly—much more than the narrow scope of being a bill for "Strong Borders".

Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jun 5

Very few people are discussing the privacy and surveillance implications of these provisions yet. (One exception, of course, is Michael Geist, who has published an initial analysis here: www.michaelgeist.ca/2025/06/priv...)

Privacy At Risk: Government Buries Lawful Access Provisions in New Border Bill - Michael Geist

The government yesterday introduced the Strong Border Act (Bill C-2), legislation that was promoted as establishing new border measure provisions presumably designed to address U.S. concerns regarding...

www.michaelgeist.ca

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jun 5

But buried in the 140-page, 16-part bill is a proposal for sweeping changes to the criminal code pertaining to "timely access to data and information". Importantly, the bill creates a new "information demand" for law enforcement that does not require court oversight.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · Jun 5

Currently diving deep into the recently-tabled Bill C-2. There is a lot going on here. The bill would allow officials to cancel, suspend or change immigration documents in the 'public interest'. Critics have quickly voiced worries about asylum-seekers and refugees.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · May 6

I am disappointed to report that the 2018 film, The Predator, does not treat neurodiversity or disability with any sensitivity or nuance.

Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · May 5

Anyway, all this forms the foundation for my book-length analysis of how to properly conceive of value alignment and misalignment so that these words are meaningful and useful. broadviewpress.com/product/arti...

Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · May 5

The structural definition captures McQuillan's point : it's impossible to separate the technical aspects of AI from the social contexts in which these models are created, trained, tested, and deployed.

The value alignment problem is neither technical nor normative; it is fundamentally social.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · May 5

Most importantly, a third axis is: relative principals. An instance of misalignment can arise when a (human) principal delegates a task to an (artificial) agent. So, the the principal is central to this definition and whether or not a system can be said to be adequately aligned.

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Travis LaCroix @travislacroix.bsky.social · May 5

The second axis of the value alignment problem specifies that a problem instance can arise when there are informational asymmetries between the (human) principal and the (artificial) agent. This isn’t captured by the standard description, but is similar to a notion of “inner alignment”.

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