Eva Schmidt (Dortmund): The Reasons of AI Systems

This paper connects the fields of philosophy of action and of explainable artificial intelligence (AI). We investigate whether it can ever be appropriate to explain the outputs of AI systems by appeal to practical reasons and reasoning of these systems. We argue that this can indeed be fitting. To this end, we first present an argument that starts from the premise that we use AI systems because they work so well for us and then defend our claim against four objections.

co-authored work with Kevin Baum, Maximilian Schlüter, Timo Speith

Zur Person:

Eva Schmidt is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at TU Dortmund. She works in epistemology, the philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. Her main interests are epistemic reasons and reasons for action; explainable artificial intelligence; and the epistemology and nature of perception. She is a member of the research project Explainable Intelligent Systems (EIS), which is supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, and of the DFG network 'Zukunft der Religionsphilosophie'. She is a PI and the Values Chair of the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, the PI of the project "Epistemic Dilemmas, Normative Conflicts, and Epistemic Normativity", and one of three PIs of the project "Naive Realism Under Pressure". Eva Schmidt studied philosophy and history at Saarland University and at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She received her PhD in 2011 for a thesis defending nonconceptualism about perceptual experience.