Travis LaCroix
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travislacroix.bsky.social
Travis LaCroix
@travislacroix.bsky.social
95 followers 77 following 54 posts
Dr // Asst. Prof // Philosopher @ Durham University (UK)
(I am also a human being)

Language Origins // AI Ethics // Autism
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travislacroix.bsky.social
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).
July 22, 2025 at 10:42 AM
travislacroix.bsky.social
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.
July 22, 2025 at 10:42 AM
travislacroix.bsky.social
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.
July 22, 2025 at 10:42 AM
travislacroix.bsky.social
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).
July 22, 2025 at 10:42 AM
travislacroix.bsky.social
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"
June 15, 2025 at 4:47 PM
travislacroix.bsky.social
To try to fix the hot mess that is the field of value alignment, I give a new description of the problem based on the principal-agent problem from economics.

The value alignment problem is a class of problems, which is instantiated when we delegate tasks to AI systems.
Screen shot of a page of a book ("Artificial Intelligence and the Value Alignment Problem"), which reads: "The Value Alignment Problem (Structural Definition) A problem that arises from the dynamics of multi-agent interactions involving the delegation of tasks from one actor (a human principal) to another (an AI agent). This problem can arise whenever (a) The agent’s objective function is misaligned with the true objective of the principal(s); or, (b) There are informational asymmetries between the principal and the agent." The image contains two side-by-side diagrams illustrating principal-agent problems between humans and AI systems. Left diagram: A human ("Principal") delegates authority to an AI system ("Agent"), which in turn acts on behalf of the human. A double-headed arrow labeled "Misaligned objectives" runs between the Principal and Agent, indicating a lack of alignment in goals. Right diagram: The same Principal-Agent relationship is shown, but the double-headed arrow between them is labeled "Informational asymmetries," highlighting the issue of unequal access to information between the human and the AI system. Both diagrams use circular arrows to represent delegation of authority from the Principal to the Agent and action on behalf of the Principal by the Agent. Orange arrows and text emphasize the challenges in both scenarios.
May 5, 2025 at 5:07 PM
travislacroix.bsky.social
I agree with @abeba.bsky.social here; but, for better or worse, I am trying to fix the hot mess that is the field of value alignment! 😬
Screenshot of a page of a book ("Artificial Intelligence and the Value Alignment Problem"), which reads: "Thus, although there is no authoritative definition of the value alignment problem, a somewhat standard specification can be formulated as follows: The Value Alignment Problem (Standard Definition) The problem of ensuring that AI systems are aligned with the values of humanity. Whether explicitly stated or merely implied, this intuitive specification of the value alignment problem for artificial intelligence is relatively common in discussions on the topic. Moreover, the standard definition is superficially useful as an initial description of the problem. On the surface level, it seems relatively simple to understand. However, closer examination or analysis makes apparent that this conceptualisation underspecifies the problem; hence, this definition is of no conceptual use for practical work on mitigating value misalignment."
May 5, 2025 at 4:51 PM
travislacroix.bsky.social
Classic from the archives.
A three-panel meme featuring a scene from Donnie Darko. First panel: Donnie (played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and labelled in the image as "evolution") looks serious. Text [evolution]: "I made a new animal". Second panel: An older woman (his therapist) sits in a chair, looking skeptical. Text: "new animal or crab again?" Third panel: "crab again."
March 8, 2025 at 5:36 PM