Hannah Arendt stated that certain periods of history must be confronted, not so much because great evil happened at that time but because passivity or fatalism encouraged continuing insensitivity and even acceptance of the institutions and political culture that produced the evil. The attraction of certain groups to neo-Nazi policies indicates the grounds for her concern. The earlier events continue to exercise a dangerous and powerful influence on the present. Such history is not safely in the past but ‘live’; in William Faulkner's words, it is not even past.

However, Arendt's demand might perhaps be taken to imply that for a laudable political purpose academic objectivity should be sacrificed. In addition, requiring historians to deliver narratives mortgaged to contemporary needs surely undermines their academic freedom. That freedom is essential for maintaining a critical distance, for the sake of the objectivity that only an appropriately value-free discipline can deliver. That objection needs to be addressed.

There are also those of a postmodernist stripe who deem objectivity impossible for the humanist discipline of history. Some postmodernists, affirming the value of a diversity of perspectives, appear to think each historical narrative is as good as, and no better than, the next.

This chapter addresses both issues. It defends a pragmatic approach to historical objectivity. It makes a case for the claim that confronting history can sometimes enhance the objectivity of the historical narrative. Such confronting may even be necessary on occasion for depth in historical interpretation, which is closely related to objectivity.

Whose History?

Is confronting our history not a task for professional historians? The discipline has made great progress during the last hundred years. While professionalisation can have the side-effect of generating a gap between historians and the public, the overall result is expansion of available knowledge and understanding of history.

The work of academic historians is essential to the task of confronting the past. But the task cannot be left to historians for several reasons.

This chapter aims to question the emergence of new ‘fact-checking’ epistemic authorities in the generation of deepfakes by presenting a novel outlook that relies on Wittgensteinian notions. This chapter discusses the related philosophical issues based on three assumptions. The first assumption explains that deepfakes are a subset of technological games that employ unprecedented rules. The second assumption considers the video as a possible indicator of truth rather than a necessary one. The third assumption postulates that a video exhibits depth and surface grammatical properties, which play an essential role in deepfake detection. Based on these assumptions, this chapter derives two conclusions. First, the immediate epistemological problem of deepfakes arises from our loss of autonomy regarding our justification for a digital video. Then, there is an ethical problem that accompanies the epistemological one, which indicates an inevitable shift of focus from deepfake regulation to regulation of regulating authorities.

Deepfakes in a Nutshell

Deepfake is an amalgamation of the concepts ‘deep learning’ and ‘fake’, and according to Nina Schick, it is defined as one of the synthetic media, that is ‘media (including images, audio, and video) that is either manipulated or wholly generated by AI’ (2021, 8). Nevertheless, deepfakes are derived from forged images. Apart from an agent's intentions, a deepfake is a deployment of different technological advancements to manipulate the given information in the video's content or context. Britt Paris and Joan Donovan differentiate between deepfakes and other kinds of image forgeries based on the technical merits and required expertise level (2019, 10). As the state-of-the-art technique deployed on image manipulation, many AI-powered deep-learning methods are developed to create deepfakes. One of the technological milestones − Generative Adversarial Nets (henceforth, GANs) − used in deepfakes emerged in 2014, coined by Ian J. Goodfellow and friends (see Goodfellow et al. 2015). However, a wider attention on deepfakes entered the scene around late 2017.

A well-cited 2019 report from Deeptrace unveils that there were 14,678 deepfakes online, and 96 per cent of them had pornographic content (Ajder et al. 2019). Besides pornography and other harmful uses, deepfakes are deployed to create artistic or historical performances, such as Microsoft's ‘The Next Rembrandt’ (news .microsoft . com 2017) and the ‘JFK Unsilenced’ (accenture.com n.d.) projects (see Floridi 2018 for a lengthy discussion).

In this chapter, I consider a Wittgensteinian response to recent arguments in favour of granting social robots rights. In particular, I propose that we adopt a Wittgensteinian approach to both the notion of evidence and to considerations of what it means to do the same thing as. I argue that a Wittgensteinian perspective of these tools can help to bring clarity to our thinking about social robots.

I consider two plausible categories of arguments for robot rights which I call the argument from empathy and the argument from performative equivalence. Bringing Wittgensteinian considerations to these arguments is illuminating as it calls into doubt conclusions that we might otherwise reach regarding how to categorize robots.

The Argument from Empathy

There is much evidence standing in support of the fact we have an empathetic emotional response to social robots when we engage with them: we feel stressed and emotionally upset when we witness them being ‘harmed’, we make moves to protect them, we anthropomorphize and are inclined to include them in human-like social practices. On the one hand this is a good thing, and something to be encouraged. It is through our emotional engagement with robots that we gain social benefits. It is only if we feel that robots are like friends, companions and entities to be trusted that they will be able to play a social role (Sweeney 2022). For example, it has been shown that introducing companion robots into a care home can bring many benefits for the residents, but the benefits only come if the residents see the robot as a social entity and not simply a device or tool (Sorell and Draper 2014; Pirhonen et al. 2019).

On the other hand, when people do have feelings towards social robots this raises ethical questions. Usually, when we have feelings for a being we have a duty to be kind towards it and a further duty to ensure that it is protected from harm from others. And it seems that we do have some such protective instinct towards social robots. Kate Darling reports undertaking a study in which she asked a group of participants to destroy a collection of small Pleo robot dinosaurs and they were not only extremely reluctant to do so, they showed signs of genuine distress at the prospect (Darling 2016).

It was a blustery July night in Galway, as if somehow November had finagled a new home on the calendar and banished summer for the remainder of 2017. Savoring the warmth of a banquet hall on the NUI-Galway campus, members of the Eugene O’Neill International Society and their guests gathered to dine; to honor Jessica Lange and Gabriel Byrne for their star turns in O’Neill's plays, particularly in Long Day's Journey into Night in 2016; and to enjoy President Michael D. Higgins's account of memorable evenings in the theatre viewing O’Neill's masterworks. Sitting with my wife, daughter and fellow banqueters—and having enjoyed speaking with President Higgins before—I recalled President Mary Robinson's learned remarks twenty-five years earlier at a convocation of Joyceans at Trinity College in Dublin. Irish presidents are expected to be well-read. And, much like a president's words, his or her reading matters.

Listening to President Higgins, my American friends and I felt more than a twinge of envy that our Irish colleagues could claim such a cultured man as their leader (fifteen months later, they reclaimed him when he won a second seven-year term). More than a published poet and theatregoer, Higgins is also a perceptive commentator on modern Irish literature, revising his 2012 remarks at a Dublin conference dedicated to Bernard Shaw's work to introduce the anthology Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland (2020).

As well as a more fine-grained historical analysis of the past, confronting our past requires addressing how we remember it. Remembering is an activity in the present oriented to the future. We cannot change the past, but we can change how we remember it.

Introduction

Today, politically charged issues of historical memory are widespread. Ethnic conflicts, intercommunal violence, colonial and civil wars stand out as historical situations of intense controversy and emotion. Several European states have passed laws criminalising denial of historical genocidal policies of Nazi and Communist regimes.

This chapter deals with a number of themes.

First, in addressing memory in its collective, social and public dimensions involving commemoration, silence or condemnation in relation to historical figures and events, we are not looking at historians’ work (Cubitt 2007; Cohen 1997). We (including historians) confront the past, not as historians, but as moral agents who must reckon with the impact of past events on our time. That impact affects our thinking, emotional attitudes, worldview and actions: it also shapes our sense of who we are historically, where we came from and where we are going.

Second, the dead are not answerable for how we remember them or what warrant for our actions we claim to find in their actions. Our relationship to the dead is complex. As rational moral agents, we must, in the matter of historical memory, be not so much critical of historical figures as self-critical with respect to our relationship to them.

Third, in relation to what is remembered, the core issue is why they are remembered in the particular way we remember them. At present, the trend is in the direction of expanding the list, particularly seeking to include groups traditionally excluded but whose exclusion is unacceptable today. The criterion for inclusion seems simple enough: they mattered in history, positively or negatively.

The Concept of Rules between Law and AI

The concept of rules is a family resemblance concept. An initial survey of how such a concept is used across various disciplines reveals ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing’ (Wittgenstein 2009: PI § 66–67). A particularly relevant set of such family resemblance relations characterizes the field of Law and that of Artificial Intelligence, where the concept of rules plays a foundational role. This chapter will look at how the existence of family resemblance relations pertaining to the concept of rules has built a bridge between those respective fields of Law and AI and how this has laid the groundwork for the intersection between legal rules on the one hand and computer rules on the other.

It is significant that the initial research in the domain of AI and Law was set in motion by the consideration that ‘[t]here is more than a superficial resemblance between laws and computer programs’ (Niblett 1980, 8). Undoubtedly, the material conditions for the exploration of such a resemblance have been set by the increasing availability of ever more sophisticated computational machines. Yet, the emergence of the conditions of intelligibility for a crossing of the concepts of legal rules and computer rules should be understood as part of a larger, significant historical development of the general concept of rules. As demonstrated by historian Lorraine Daston, since the beginning of the modern age, the concept of ‘rules-as-algorithms’ has progressively gained ground (Daston 2022). The combination of such an algorithmic understanding of rules and the availability of more powerful computational machines made it possible to overcome the perception of the computer as a mere ‘mechanized storehouse’ (Kelso 1946) to stock and retrieve legal texts. Propelled by the developments in AI, the challenge became that of harnessing ‘the cognitive potential of computers for legal reasoning’ (Buchanan and Headrick 1970, 43). Thus began the efforts aimed at developing formal languages and programs to represent, in the form of computer rules, ‘not just the texts of the law, but the meaning of such text’ (Sergot 1991), that is, ‘the legal norms which they contain’ (Niblett 1980).

Introduction

For a class of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, answers to the question of why – for some senses of ‘why’ – the system made a particular ‘decision’ are, as a matter of constitutive fact, unavailable. This discussion raises some issues that face Wittgenstein-inflected philosophers when thinking about this so-called Black Box problem. It offers reasons for thinking that Wittgensteinians should be intensely relaxed about such AI systems.

Black boxes

The black box problem arises because systems of the relevant kind are supposed to be ‘opaque’ to certain questions. I might ask, for example, why a system refused to give me a credit card (Bary n.d.), recommended a longer prison sentence, changed lanes on the motorway, offered good news about a cancer tumour (Gregory 2022), or determined a protein's shape (Trager 2022). Of course, if I were to query the system owners, I might, perhaps after some hesitancy, be answered: ‘Well, because our system determined that the target, you or your circumstances met (or failed to meet) criteria A, B and C’. The black box problem arises because, for a class of AI systems, this answer is false.

For the systems which do not interest us here – symbolic, procedural or GOFAI – this answer will be true. The input – the data about me and my circumstances – is an argument for the function here – which is calculated in this object here and so on. There is some value of a variable which, at some level of abstraction, is understood as the representation of some fact about you or your circumstances. Call these domain homogeneous systems. For such systems, someone can, in principle, run through the same inferential steps as the machine, with or without two kinds of pebble and a long enough toilet roll (Weizenbaum 1976, Ch 2). The result is rationally recoverable.

The AI systems which interest us here are convolutional neural networks with a primary discriminative (rather than generative) function. They are focused on finding a particular solution to a problem rather than modelling the data. Convolutional neural networks – ConvNets – are, we can say, domain heterogeneous. If someone asks why a certain result was forthcoming, we can describe how the system works, values of hyper-parameters, weights and activation biases, gradient descents, back-propagation algorithms and so.

Amongst philosophers generally, the orthodox account of Wittgenstein and Turing on the mind appears to be that both were philosophical behaviourists. Amongst theorists sympathetic to Wittgenstein, however, there is an alternative – in its own way orthodox – account, which denies that Wittgenstein was a behaviourist (in any damaging sense). Proponents of this alternative account typically interpret Wittgenstein as opposed to Turing and as hostile to artificial intelligence – in their view, Wittgenstein belongs with famous AI naysayers. In this chapter, I shall argue that both the orthodox and the alternative account are mistaken.

A preliminary question, however: Is it perhaps anachronistic to discuss Wittgenstein's views on AI – a field frequently (though mistakenly) held to begin only in the mid-1950s, some years after Wittgenstein's death? To counter this concern, I begin with Wittgenstein's 1930s remarks on machines and the public discussion of artificial intelligence in the 1940s in the UK.

Human Computers

In Turing's groundbreaking 1936 paper, ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, he set out the fundamental logical principles of the modern programmable general-purpose digital computer. Before Turing described his computing machines, however, we find Wittgenstein talking about ‘reading machines’ in his Blue Book lectures of 1933–34. Wittgenstein's usual example of a reading-machine is a pianola or player piano (Wittgenstein 1974: PG (henceforth PG), 69): he said that a pianola ‘translate[s] marks into sounds’ by ‘reading’ the pattern of perforations – which ‘we might call […] complex signs or sentences’ – in the piano roll (Wittgenstein 1972: PI (henceforth PI) §157; Wittgenstein 1965: BB (henceforth BB), 118, original emphasis). The pianola cannot do anything other than read; it cannot delete or modify the perforations on the pre-recorded roll. Nevertheless, a pianola can read ‘any pattern of perforations, of a particular kind, it is not built for one particular tune or set of tunes’, Wittgenstein said; in this sense, it is a general-purpose machine (BB, 118, original emphasis). Notably, reading machines may also include a lookup table: Wittgenstein remarked that ‘it is quite possible that there is a part of the mechanism which resembles a chart’ (in his example, the chart associates colour-words with colours) (PG, 190).

On June 17, 2022, Donald Trump addressed the “Road to Majority” conference in Nashville, Tennessee, organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition. In addition to the former president, other featured speakers included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, then GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel, televangelist and senior pastor at the First Baptist Church in Dallas Dr. Robert Jeffress, and radio show host Michael Medved. With the exception of Medved, whom a 2016 Politico article dubbed the only “vehemently anti-Donald Trump” host at Salem Media (Gold, “Michael Medved”), the roster of keynote speakers confirmed the pro- Trump tone of the meeting as reported on the Coalition's website: “Evangelical activists reinforce[d] Trump's dominance of the GOP” and gave the former president a “warm reception” ( June 21, 2022). In his remarks, Trump attacked the Select Committee on January 6, particularly its finding that he pressured Vice President Mike Pence either to return electors’ votes to the states or declare the 2020 presidential election invalid. As the Committee's hearings continued into the fall of 2022 and a flurry of indictments followed in 2023, other revelations caused defendant Trump—and much of the nation—even greater consternation.

On her June 6, 2019, show, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow characterized Donald Trump's visit to Ireland as “a careening circus of pratfall embarrassments.” Most of the wince-inducing mortifications surfaced in the president's meeting with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar the preceding day during which Trump's ignorance and hubris were on full display. But the trip also exhibited more than low comedy. In the context of American presidents’ appearances in Ireland—Joe Biden's trip to Ireland in 2023 marked the seventh such occurrence—Trump's stay was uniquely disturbing and ironic, especially so given Peter Keegan's vision in Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island of a tranquil and beautiful country transmogrified by the “bustle” of tourists populating expensive hotels and playing golf assisted by child caddies. Prior to his arrival in Shannon, members of fifty political, human rights and anti-racism organizations that formed the Stop Trump Ireland coalition organized to protest his visit. The coalition includes Friends of the Irish Environment, which collected 100,000 signatures for a petition decrying the methods used by the Trump International Golf Club in Doonbeg to prevent erosion.

Such disdain, even outrage, is not unprecedented, as not every American president has basked in the Céad Mile Fáilte (100,000 welcomes) extended to Presidents Kennedy and Obama from huge audiences in Dublin, or felt the “rousing enthusiasm” Bill Clinton, the first president to visit Northern Ireland while in office, enjoyed in Belfast (Mitchell, Making Peace, 26). Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in, respectively, 1970 and 1984, were greeted warmly in the homes of their ancestors but, as I have described, demonstrators in Dublin hurled eggs at Nixon while others burned his effigy at the American embassy. In an impromptu ceremony, eight graduates of Galway's University College set fire to their degrees, and three holders of an honorary doctorate of law degrees returned or “de-conferred” them, in response to Reagan's receipt of his honorary degree (Booth, “Reagan Booed”).

A growing number of Americans fear that Trumpism may ignite a civil war and, as I have mentioned, for some the war has already begun. This grim thesis became more plausible after the FBI's August 8, 2022 recovery of classified documents from Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club, which prompted many of his supporters to clamor for revenge. But they couldn't agree on what form the vengeance should take, or even what to call it. Apparently forgetting their disgust with the “Defund the Police” mantra heard during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, some congressional Republicans embarked upon a “Defund the FBI” crusade. Ever entrepreneurial when it comes to funding opportunities, Trump's “Save America” PAC sought to extract more money from donors by sending some more than 100 email solicitations in the days after the search featuring such taglines as “THEY BROKE INTO MY HOME” and “They’re coming after YOU” (Garcia, “Trump Supporters”). But in the contest over formulating indignant responses to the search of Mar-a-Lago, “civil war” seemed to garner the most attention, although in the dark corners of cyberspace sentiments like “Fuck a Civil War. Give them a REVOLUTION” attracted their share of support as well.

From the Mereological Fallacy to the Metonymical Trap

Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker (2023) famously introduced the so-called charge of ‘mereological fallacy’. This fallacy is not per se a reasoning fallacy but is more akin to an attribution mistake (an attribution mistake that can admittedly lead to fallacies of reasoning). In the context that is of particular interest to Bennett and Hacker's discussion, the ‘mereological fallacy’ is specifically related to neuroscience: to say, for example as part of a neuroscientific explanation, that the brain constructs hypotheses would be a paradigmatic instance of a mereological fallacy (ibid, 80). A brain is indeed nothing more than a part of a human being, and only of a whole human being does it make sense to say that it constructs hypotheses. Therefore, transferring the qualities and capacities of the whole (the human being) to the part (its brain) would not be a viable philosophical option. It would not be an option in particular because it is partly constitutive of the meaning of the attributed expression (‘to construct hypotheses’) that a range of behaviour be associated with it, a range of behaviour that a brain obviously lacks. This idea is Wittgensteinian through and through, and found in the oft-quoted passage of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2009: PI §103): ‘It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’. A brain does not – in any way, shape or form – behave like a living human being.

Returning to the more general diagnosis of mereological fallacy: although there are numerous instances of predicates that can equally and harmlessly be attributed indistinctly to a whole or to a part of that whole (the fallacy is not systematic) and even if mereological fallacies can apply in a variety of contexts (to borrow one of Hacker's examples (2013, 287) a clock indicates time, a capacity that its fusee or face could not be said to possess), we can say that such a diagnosis is particularly fruitful when it concerns the so-called psycho-logical predicates. These predicates relate to the mental life and the cognitive or psychological capacities of a person.

Part One: Dr. No and the Grim Reaper

As fans of Ian Fleming's redoubtable spy know, Dr. Julius No is James Bond's adversary in Doctor No (1958), a novel that when adapted as a film in 1962 launched the most enduring franchise in the history of Western cinema. Since then, and for the most part, films chronicling Bond's adventures— as well as novels by John Gardner, Anthony Horowitz, Sebastian Faulks and others after Fleming's untimely passing in 1964—have flourished, and such phrases as “shaken, not stirred” and “Bond girls” are now part of our vernacular. So, too, are the names of some of Fleming's villains, with “Dr. No” used to lampoon dour politicians hostile to socially progressive legislation. In Northern Ireland and America, the press has employed “Dr. No” as a nickname for Ian Paisley, the late fundamentalist minister and founder of Northern Ireland's DUP and Senator Mitch McConnell, also known as “The Grim Reaper” and “Darth Vader,” among other sobriquets. For the most part, McConnell seems amused by these inventions; only “Moscow Mitch,” a reference to his indifference to Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election, appears to annoy him because of its implication that he is an “asset” of the Kremlin (Hulse, “Moscow Mitch”). Both men's capacity for negativism, the most obvious reason for these names, motivates my juxtaposition of them with Fleming's arch-villain—and with each other.

Outlining the Sisyphean labors of brokering the Good Friday Agreement, George Mitchell in Making Peace suggests such a comparison when recounting Paisley's recalcitrance during nearly two years of negotiations (which were preceded by some six months of painstaking preparatory work). On occasion, this abrasiveness serves as a structuring motif in Mitchell's narrative. In a chapter entitled “No. No. No. No,” inspired by Paisley's outburst at the inaugural meeting of the parties tasked with negotiating the Agreement, Mitchell recalls the DUP leader's “blistering attack” on the British and Irish governments for foisting an American senator on the group.

How Did We Get Here? The decade of Irish history that opened with the passage of the British Parliament's 1912 Home Rule bill, devolving limited government powers to an Irish assembly in Dublin, was transformative. It closed in 1923 with the end of the civil war in the south, the new Irish Free State with dominion status within the British Empire (Commonwealth). It was so transformative that it is now common to refer to the events of that period as the Irish Revolution.

The drama arose from the crisis over Home Rule for the whole of Ireland, the formation in reaction to it of a unionist anti-Home Rule militia in Northern Ireland (Ulster) in 1913, and in reaction to that militia the forma-tion of a nationalist militia in the south, the illegal arming of each militia in 1914 and the threat of civil war between them. That fear was realised in the commencement of fighting in the 1916 Rising against British rule, and its continuation in the 1919–21 War of Independence, the Protestant vs. Catholic violence that overlapped with it and the 1922–23 civil war in the south.

The transformation was constitutional and political. From being a united Ireland in the UK ruled from Westminster, Ireland was partitioned, with the south achieving dominion status (de facto independence) within the British Empire, and the north-east receiving a devolved Home Rule form of government.

The goal of this book is to reflect on the events of that decade and their significance in relation to the 1968–98 violence in Northern Ireland, its impact on the Republic and future relations between unionists and nationalists.

In any state, its contemporary political identity depends on a certain interpretation of its history and in consequence is resistant to reinterpretation. Where the history in question involved significant violence, had major traumatic aspects, and its memory is coloured by group loyalties, resistance is greater.