C Thi Nguyen
Biographic Data
| ID | 954206 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Thi Nguyen |
| GIVEN NAMES | C Thi |
| FAMILY NAME | Nguyen |
| SIGNATURE | NGUYEN C T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Utah |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8062-5446 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Elder Abuse as a Social Welfare Issue
Building a Better Aesthetic Hedonism
Aesthetic hedonism—the view that aesthetic value consists in pleasure—has faced serious objections in recent years, including James Shelley’s influential argument that it cannot account for the possibility of overvaluing an aesthetic object. Shouldn’t a hedonist aim for as much pleasure as possible? We propose an improved version of aesthetic hedonism that focuses on the whole of aesthetic life rather than isolated encounters with aesthetic objec…
Value Capture
Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle—or developing in that direction. The agent enters a social environment that presents simplified—typically quantified—versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter likes and retweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and grade point averages. We …
Hostile Epistemology
Hostile epistemology is the study of how environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in those vulnerabilities arise from the basic character of our epistemic lives. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources, perpetually forced to reasoning a rush. I focus on two sources of unavoidable vulnerability. First, we need to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to manage our limited time and at…
Games Unlike Life
This is an answer to Elisabeth Camp's and Elijah Millgram's probing articles about "Games and the Art of Agency" published in this symposium
Trust and Sincerity in Art
Our life with art is suffused with trust. We don’t just trust one another’s aesthetic testimony; we trust one another’s aesthetic actions. Audiences trust artists to have made it worth their while; artists trust audiences to put in the effort. Without trust, audiences would have little reason to put in the effort to understand difficult and unfamiliar art. I offer a theory of aesthetic trust, which highlights the importance of trust in aesthetic …
The Seductions of Clarity
The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic . In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator c…
Transparency is Surveillance
In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust , Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public t…
Games
Games are a unique art form. The game designer doesn't just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, they specify a form of agency. Games work in the medium of agency. And to play them, we take on alternate agencies and submerge ourselves in them. What can we learn about our own rationality and agency, from thinking about games? We learn that we have …
Moral Outrage Porn
We offer an account of the generic use of the term 'porn', as seen in recent usages such as 'food porn' and 'real estate porn'. We offer a definition adapted from earlier accounts of sexual pornography. On our account, a representation is used as generic pornwhen it is engaged with primarily for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content.We demonstrate the usefulness of …
Cognitive islands and runaway echo chambers
Games and the Art of Agency
Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in th…
Games and the Moral Transformation of Violence
This chapter explores a different avenue, which focuses on a unique capacity of games. It argues that games can be morally useful not simply as communicative vessels for moral ideas but as engines of moral conversion. The chapter focuses on the morality of actual actions performed by players toward other players—the moral status of attempts to beat, vanquish, or utterly humiliate competition. The motivational stance of striving play makes the mor…
Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles
Discussion of the phenomena of post-truth and fake news often implicates the closed epistemic networks of social media. The recent conversation has, however, blurred two distinct social epistemic phenomena. An epistemic bubble is a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been left out, perhaps accidentally. An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discr…
The Uses of Aesthetic Testimony
The current debate over aesthetic testimony typically focuses on cases of doxastic repetition — where, when an agent, on receiving aesthetic testimony that p, acquires the belief that p without qualification. I suggest that we broaden the set of cases under consideration. I consider a number of cases of action from testimony, including reconsidering a disliked album based on testimony, and choosing an artistic educational institution from testimo…
Philosophy of games
What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several different philosophical subdisciplines have attempted to answer these questions using very distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as something like a text, deploying theoretical frameworks from the study of narrative, fiction, and rhetoric to interrogate games for their representational content. Others have approached games as artworks a…
Transparency is Surveillance
In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust , Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public t…
The Uses of Aesthetic Testimony
The current debate over aesthetic testimony typically focuses on cases of doxastic repetition — where, when an agent, on receiving aesthetic testimony that p, acquires the belief that p without qualification. I suggest that we broaden the set of cases under consideration. I consider a number of cases of action from testimony, including reconsidering a disliked album based on testimony, and choosing an artistic educational institution from testimo…
Games and the Art of Agency
Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in th…
Cognitive islands and runaway echo chambers
Philosophy of games
What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several different philosophical subdisciplines have attempted to answer these questions using very distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as something like a text, deploying theoretical frameworks from the study of narrative, fiction, and rhetoric to interrogate games for their representational content. Others have approached games as artworks a…
The Uses of Aesthetic Testimony
The current debate over aesthetic testimony typically focuses on cases of doxastic repetition — where, when an agent, on receiving aesthetic testimony that p, acquires the belief that p without qualification. I suggest that we broaden the set of cases under consideration. I consider a number of cases of action from testimony, including reconsidering a disliked album based on testimony, and choosing an artistic educational institution from testimo…
Philosophy of games
What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several different philosophical subdisciplines have attempted to answer these questions using very distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as something like a text, deploying theoretical frameworks from the study of narrative, fiction, and rhetoric to interrogate games for their representational content. Others have approached games as artworks a…
Games and the Moral Transformation of Violence
This chapter explores a different avenue, which focuses on a unique capacity of games. It argues that games can be morally useful not simply as communicative vessels for moral ideas but as engines of moral conversion. The chapter focuses on the morality of actual actions performed by players toward other players—the moral status of attempts to beat, vanquish, or utterly humiliate competition. The motivational stance of striving play makes the mor…
Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles
Discussion of the phenomena of post-truth and fake news often implicates the closed epistemic networks of social media. The recent conversation has, however, blurred two distinct social epistemic phenomena. An epistemic bubble is a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been left out, perhaps accidentally. An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discr…
Games and the Art of Agency
Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in th…
Games
Games are a unique art form. The game designer doesn't just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, they specify a form of agency. Games work in the medium of agency. And to play them, we take on alternate agencies and submerge ourselves in them. What can we learn about our own rationality and agency, from thinking about games? We learn that we have …
Moral Outrage Porn
We offer an account of the generic use of the term 'porn', as seen in recent usages such as 'food porn' and 'real estate porn'. We offer a definition adapted from earlier accounts of sexual pornography. On our account, a representation is used as generic pornwhen it is engaged with primarily for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content.We demonstrate the usefulness of …
Cognitive islands and runaway echo chambers
Trust and Sincerity in Art
Our life with art is suffused with trust. We don’t just trust one another’s aesthetic testimony; we trust one another’s aesthetic actions. Audiences trust artists to have made it worth their while; artists trust audiences to put in the effort. Without trust, audiences would have little reason to put in the effort to understand difficult and unfamiliar art. I offer a theory of aesthetic trust, which highlights the importance of trust in aesthetic …
The Seductions of Clarity
The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic . In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator c…
Transparency is Surveillance
In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust , Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public t…
Hostile Epistemology
Hostile epistemology is the study of how environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in those vulnerabilities arise from the basic character of our epistemic lives. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources, perpetually forced to reasoning a rush. I focus on two sources of unavoidable vulnerability. First, we need to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to manage our limited time and at…
Games Unlike Life
This is an answer to Elisabeth Camp's and Elijah Millgram's probing articles about "Games and the Art of Agency" published in this symposium
Building a Better Aesthetic Hedonism
Aesthetic hedonism—the view that aesthetic value consists in pleasure—has faced serious objections in recent years, including James Shelley’s influential argument that it cannot account for the possibility of overvaluing an aesthetic object. Shouldn’t a hedonist aim for as much pleasure as possible? We propose an improved version of aesthetic hedonism that focuses on the whole of aesthetic life rather than isolated encounters with aesthetic objec…
Value Capture
Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle—or developing in that direction. The agent enters a social environment that presents simplified—typically quantified—versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter likes and retweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and grade point averages. We …
Elder Abuse as a Social Welfare Issue
Epistemology (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Digital Games and Media (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works)