37.1197, FYI: MLAG Seminar, Online: David Spurrett, "Engines of Hostility: The Tower of Sabotage and Hack"

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1197. Tue Mar 24 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1197, FYI: MLAG Seminar, Online: David Spurrett, "Engines of Hostility: The Tower of Sabotage and Hack"

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Date: 23-Mar-2026
From: MLAG - Mind, Language and Action Group [mlag.porto at gmail.com]
Subject: MLAG Seminar, Online: David Spurrett, "Engines of Hostility: The Tower of Sabotage and Hack"


The Mind, Language and Action Group (MLAG), a research unit of the
Institute of Philosophy at the University of Porto, invites you to the
sixth talk of the new MLAG Seminar Series featuring presentations by
international researchers on topics of interest to the group. The
talk, given by David Spurrett (University of KwaZulu-Natal / UKZN) and
entitled "Engines of Hostility: The Tower of Sabotage and Hack", will
take place on March 26, 13:00-14:30 Western European Time (WET). The
meeting is online. MS TEAMS details: Meeting ID: 385 713 608 929 52;
Passcode: iM3SE2Pa.
The seminar is jointly organized by Sofia Miguens (MLAG-IF), Dan Zeman
(MLAG-IF), James Grayot (MLAG-IF), Rafael Antunes Padilha
(MLAG-IF|IFCH-UNICAMP), Samuel Lima (FLUP) and João Carlos Rocha Lima
(FLUP). Information about MLAG can be found here:
https://ifilosofia.up.pt/research-groups/mlag. To contact the
organisers, please send an email to mlag.porto at gmail.com.
All welcome!
ABSTRACT:
The topic of cognitive hostility is currently lively. The original
idea that the activities of agents could pollute the environments of
situated or scaffolded agents goes back to Sterelny’s review of
Clark’s Being There and Sterelny’s own Thought in a Hostile World.
Hostility makes agents less likely to act in their own interests, more
likely to act in ways that help the informational polluters. In those
early treatments the main source of hostility (camouflage,
manipulative parasitism, etc.) is natural selection. The idea that
scaffolding and technology could be instruments of hostility, produced
by planning and research and developments, has received less attention
until recently. I’m working on a book on the various forms of
hostility, and the different ways that scaffolded agents can be
vulnerable to it. (Working title: “Whose Mind is it Anyway?”) In the
final chapter of that book, I develop a framework for thinking about
both the sources and targets of hostility. It aims to distinguish
significantly different ways that hostility can be produced, and ways
that the selection processes of agents can be vulnerable to hostility.
The approach I take repurposes Dennett’s “Tower of Generate and Test”
and I call the result the “Tower of Sabotage and Hack”. In this talk I
argue that we need a general way to think about the sources and
targets of hostility, explain the Tower of Sabotage and Hack, and
illustrate it with select examples.
https://ifilosofia.up.pt/activities/session-4-mlag-seminars-2025-2026

Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language




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