In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his eponymous test based on indistinguishability of verbal behavior as a replacement for the question "Can machines think?" Since then, two mutually contradictory but well-founded attitudes towards the Turing Test have arisen in the philosophical literature. On the one hand is the attitude that has become philosophical conventional wisdom, viz., that the Turing Test is hopelessly flawed as a sufficient condition for intelligence, while on the other hand is the overwhelming sense that were a machine (...) to pass a real live full-fledged Turing Test, it would be a sign of nothing but our orneriness to deny it the attribution of intelligence. The arguments against the sufficiency of the Turing Test for determining intelligence rely on showing that some extra conditions are logically necessary for intelligence beyond the behavioral properties exhibited by an agent under a Turing Test. Therefore, it cannot follow logically from passing a Turing Test that the agent is intelligent. I argue that these extra conditions can be revealed by the Turing Test, so long as we allow a very slight weakening of the criterion from one of logical proof to one of statistical proof under weak realizability assumptions. The argument depends on the notion of interactive proof developed in theoretical computer science, along with some simple physical facts that constrain the information capacity of agents. Crucially, the weakening is so slight as to make no conceivable difference from a practical standpoint. Thus, the Gordian knot between the two opposing views of the sufficiency of the Turing Test can be cut. (shrink)

In the dialectic of debates about the extension of life, one witnesses a predictably repeating pattern: one side appeals to a motley of variegated criteria for something’s qualifying as a living system, only to find an opposite side taking issue with the individual necessity or collective sufficiency of the proposed criteria. Some of these criteria tend to cluster with one another, while others do not: metabolism, growth and reproduction; self-organization and homeostasis; an ability to decrease internal entropy by the appropriation (...) of free energy; stimulus response suited to self-preservation and propagation; and adaptation. In competing approaches to the extension of life, these sundry criteria thus jockey for authority, with one group of theorists promoting some subset of them as essential for life, where the appeal to essence is as likely as not to be a simple modal sine qua non , and another denying that the nominated criteria are really necessary at all. The debate then stalls, because there seems to be no shared methodology for adjudicating such disputes. We may address this unhappy situation successfully by coming to appreciate that life is what we may call a core-dependent homonym. (shrink)

I argue that Sarah Sawyer's and Herman Cappelen's recent accounts of how speakers talk and think about the same concept or topic even when their understandings of that concept or topic substantially diverge risk multiplying our metasemantic categories unnecessarily and fail to prove explanatory. When we look more closely at our actual practices of samesaying, we find that speakers with seemingly incompatible formulations of a subject matter take one another to samesay when they are attempting to arrive at a correct (...) understanding of that subject matter. These speakers adopt what I call a prospective externalist perspective on the subject matter in question. I then argue that there are contexts where judgments of samesaying are more routinely defeated because speakers are taking up a perspective I call retrospective internalism. From this perspective, speakers are aiming to render maximally intelligible the linguistic behavior of other speakers that appear to them to deviate from their own. Whether or not we count speakers as samesaying with us will therefore depend on the kind of the perspective we adopt. Different perspectives, it will turn out, often yield different verdicts. On my perspective-based approach, there is no need to hypostatize or inflate our metasemantic taxonomies. (shrink)

This paper advocates explicitness about the type of entity to be considered as content- bearing in connectionist systems; it makes a positive proposal about how vehicles of content should be individuated; and it deploys that proposal to argue in favour of representation in connectionist systems. The proposal is that the vehicles of content in some connectionist systems are clusters in the state space of a hidden layer. Attributing content to such vehicles is required to vindicate the standard explanation for some (...) classificatory networks’ ability to generalise to novel samples their correct classification of the samples on which they were trained. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a novel analysis of Quine's indeterminacy puzzle and an unorthodox approach to its resolution. It is argued that the ultimate roots of indeterminacy lie not in behaviorism per se, but rather in Quine's commitment to a fundamental assumption about the nature of perceptual input, namely, the assumption that sensory information is strictly extensional. Calling this assumption the 'principle of input extensionalism' (PIE) I first demonstrate the fundamental role that it plays in generating Quine's argument for (...) the indeterminacy of translation. It is then argued that a tacit acceptance of PIE is prevalent among contemporary theories of cognition and representation, making Quine's puzzle a living challenge for cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. A standard way of responding to the challenge consists of the idea that the indeterminacy generated at the perceptual level is canceled out courtesy of the contribution of higher cognitive processes. However, I argue that such a top-down solution leaves much to be desired. As an alternative, I offer a bottom-up solution, which consists of a systematic rejection of PIE in favor of an intensional view of perceptual input rooted in contemporary action-based theories of perception, and in particular in the notion of perceptual invariants. (shrink)

Searle’s celebrated Chinese room thought experiment was devised as an attempted refutation of the view that appropriately programmed digital computers literally are the possessors of genuine mental states. A standard reply to Searle, known as the “robot reply” (which, I argue, reflects the dominant approach to the problem of content in contemporary philosophy of mind), consists of the claim that the problem he raises can be solved by supplementing the computational device with some “appropriate” environmental hookups. I argue that not (...) only does Searle himself casts doubt on the adequacy of this idea by applying to it a slightly revised version of his original argument, but that the weakness of this encoding-based approach to the problem of intentionality can also be exposed from a somewhat different angle. Capitalizing on the work of several authors and, in particular, on that of psychologist Mark Bickhard, I argue that the existence of symbol-world correspondence is not a property that the cognitive system itself can appreciate, from its own perspective, by interacting with the symbol and therefore, not a property that can constitute intrinsic content. The foundational crisis to which Searle alluded is, I conclude, very much alive. (shrink)

In this essay I offer a theory of the outward directedness of intentional states, namely, an account of what makes intentional states directed at their respective intentional objects. The theory is meant to be complementary to the canonical interactivist account of mental content in that the latter emphasizes the predicative, intensional, and internal aspects of representation whereas here I shall focus on its denotative, extensional, and external aspects. Thus, the aim is to establish that the two projects are not only (...) consistent but mutually supportive. Further, it is hoped that supplementing the interactivist conception of representation with a theory of intentional directedness along such lines will increase its overall appeal to critical readers. Based on the core idea that the directedness of a representation is a function of the manner in which it is constructed within, and contributes to the ongoing unfolding of a dynamical interactive loop connecting information to focused action, the theory is subsequently extended to cover many problem domains familiarly associated with representation and reference. (shrink)

The breadth-first search adopted by Bayesian researchers to map out the conceptual space and identify what the framework can do is beneficial for science and reflective of its collaborative and incremental nature. Theoretical pluralism among researchers facilitates refinement of models within various levels of analysis, which ultimately enables effective cross-talk between different levels of analysis.

It is widely assumed that common sense psychological explanations of human action are a species of causal explanation. I argue against this construal, drawing on Ramsey et al.'s paper, “Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk psychology”. I argue that if certain connec-tionist models are correct, then mental states cannot be identified with functionally discrete causes of behavior, and I respond to some recent attempts to deny this claim. However, I further contend that our common sense psychological practices are not (...) committed to the falsity of such connectionist models. The paper concludes that common sense psychology is not committed to the identification of mental states with functionally discrete causes of behavior, and hence that common sense psychology is not committed to the causal account of action explanation. (shrink)

I argue that Daniel Dennett's latest book, Consciousness Explained, presents a radically eliminativist view of conscious experience in which experience or, in Dennett's own words, actual phenomenology, becomes a merely intentional object of our own and others? judgments ?about? experience. This strategy of ?intentionalizing? consciousness dovetails nicely with Dennett's background model of brain function: cognitive pandemonium, but does not follow from it. Thus Dennett is driven to a series of independent attacks on the notion of conscious experience, many of which (...) depend upon verificationist premises. I do not directly dispute the appeal to verificationism (though many would, I am sure) but rather aim to show that the sort of verificationist arguments that Dennett employs are fundamentally similar to classical sceptical arguments. The philosophical status of such arguments remains perennially unclear, but none of them produce conviction in their ostensible conclusions. I argue that Dennett's verificationist strategy suffers the same fate. (shrink)

RésuméFred Dretske a développé, à titre de composante de sa théorie de la conscience, une théorie de I'introspection. Celle-ciprésente une plausibilityé indépendante, elle résiste à des objections qui affectent nombre d'autres théories et elle suggère des liens très féconds dans plusieurs domaines de la science cognitive. La version qu'en donne Dretske est restreinte à la connaissance introspective des états perceptuels. Mon objectif ici est d'étendre la théorie à tous les états mentaux. Le mécanisme qui est fondamental dans cette approche est (...) celui de la «conscience déplacée», c'est-à-dire le fait d'en venir à connaître quelque chose via l'expérience consciente que nous avons de quelque chose d'autre. Nous atteignons la connaissance introspective par l'application à notre propre expérience consciente du monde (et de nos corps) de la connaissance que nous avons de ce qui est de l'ordre du mental. (shrink)

Abstract I aim to examine two questions. First, whether ‘folk psychology’ is a kind of theory and, second, more seriously, how are we to understand the system of principles of folk psychology. As to the first, there is a confusion between ‘theory’ and ‘science’. Much of the debate ignores the differences between these, and I argue that whereas folk psychology cannot be called a science there are grounds for calling it a theory. On the more serious question of interpretation, I (...) review the general considerations against instrumentalism and argue that they do not apply to folk psychology. The instrumentalist construal of folk psychology is strengthened by the remarkable fact that folk psychology is guaranteed to be successfully applicable to almost any system that has evolved under natural selection. Thus one can maintain that folk psychology is in fact a codification of certain quite general principles of evolutionary theory, and thus is an ancient and brilliant instrument for explaining the behaviour of complex evolved systems. It is, however, an instrument whose ‘theoretical posits’ may have very little to do with the actual springs of action which operate at the level of the neuron or assemblies of neurons. (shrink)

Communication is a fundamentally interactive phenomenon. Evolutionary biology recognises this fact in its definition of communication, in which signals are those actions that cause reactions, and where both action and reaction are designed for that reason. Where only one or the other is designed then the behaviours are classed as either cues or coercion. Since mutually dependent behaviours are unlikely to emerge simultaneously, the symmetry inherent in these definitions gives rise to a prediction that communication will only emerge if cues (...) or coercive behaviours do so first. They will then be co-opted for communication. A range of case studies, from animal signalling, evolutionary robotics, comparative psychology, and evolutionary linguistics are used to test this prediction. The first three are found to be supportive. However in the Embodied Communication Game, a recent experimental approach to the emergence of communication between adult humans, communication emerges even when cues or coerced behaviours are not possible. This suggests that humans are exceptional in this regard. It is argued that the reason for this is the degree to which we are able and compelled to read and interpret the behaviour of others in intentional terms. (shrink)

In everyday speech we seem to refer to such things as abstract objects, moral properties, or propositional attitudes that have been the target of metaphysical and/or epistemological objections. Many philosophers, while endorsing scepticism about some of these entities, have not wished to charge ordinary speakers with fundamental error, or recommend that the discourse be revised or eliminated. To this end a number of non-revisionary antirealist strategies have been employed, including expressivism, reductionism and hermeneutic fictionalism. But each of these theories faces (...) forceful objections. In particular, we argue, proponents of these strategies face a dilemma: either concedes that their theory is revisionary, or adopt an implausible account of speaker-meaning whereby the content of certain types of utterance is opaque to their speakers. In this paper we introduce a new type of antirealist strategy, which is thoroughly non-revisionary, and leaves speaker-meaning transparent to speakers. We draw on work on pragmatics in the philosophy of language to develop a theory we call ‘pragmatic antirealism’. The pragmatic antirealist holds that while the sentences of the discourses in question have metaphysically contentious truth conditions, ordinary utterances of them are pragmatically modified in context in such a way that speakers do not incur commitment to those truth conditions. After setting out the theory, we show how it might be developed for both mathematical and ethical discourse, before responding to some likely objections. (shrink)

This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of one of science's most pervasive and flexible metaprinciples;optimalityis used to explain utility maximization in economics, least effort principles in physics, entropy in chemistry, and survival of the fittest in biology. Fermat's principle of least time involves both teleological and causal considerations, two distinct modes of explanation resting on poorly understood psychological primitives. The rationality heuristic in economics provides an example from social science of the potential biases arising from the extreme flexibility of (...) optimality considerations, including selective search for confirming vidence, ex post rationalization, and the confusion of prediction with explanation. Commentators are asked to reflect on the extent to which optimality is an organizing principle of nature, a set of relatively unconnected techniques of science, a normative principle for rational choice and social organization, a metaphysical way of looking at the world, or something else still. (shrink)

Conversational artificial agents and artificially intelligent voice assistants are becoming increasingly popular. Digital virtual assistants such as Siri, or conversational devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Home are permeating everyday life, and are designed to be more and more humanlike in their speech. This study investigates the effect this can have on one’s conformity with an AI assistant. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch’s already demonstrated the power and danger of conformity amongst people. In these classical experiments test persons were (...) asked to answer relatively simple questions, whilst others pretending to be participants tried to convince the test person to give wrong answers. These studies were later replicated with embodied robots, but these physical robots are still rare. In light of our increasing reliance on AI assistants, this study investigates to what extent an individual will conform to a disembodied virtual assistant. We also investigate if there is a difference between a group that interacts with an assistant that communicates through text, one that has a robotic voice and one that has a humanlike voice. The assistant attempts to subtly influence participants’ final responses in a general knowledge quiz, and we measure how often participants change their answer after having been given advice. Results show that participants conformed significantly more often to the assistant with a human voice than the one that communicated through text. (shrink)

Some philosophers hold that the neuroscience of action is, in practice or in principle, incapable of touching debates in action theory and moral psychology. The role of desires in action, the existence of basic actions, and the like are topics that must be sorted out by philosophers alone: at least at present, and perhaps by the very nature of the questions. This paper examines both philosophical and empirical arguments against the relevance of neuroscience to such questions and argues that neither (...) succeeds. In practice, there is already a stable body of findings from neuroanatomy and neurophysiology that warrants attention. And as a matter of principle, the ‘causal map’ of action production derivable from these findings requires the study of action theorists and moral psychologists because every such philosopher has commitments to the shape of this causal map: commitments that might be in conflict with reality. (shrink)

The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind. . ???aop.label???

In the present enterprise we take a look at the meaning of Autonomy, how the word has been employed and some of the consequences of its use in the sciences of the artificial. Could and should robots really be autonomous entities? Over and beyond this, we use concepts from the philosophy of mind to spur on enquiry into the very essence of human autonomy. We believe our initiative, as does Dennett's life-long research, sheds light upon the problems of robot design (...) with respect to their relation with humans. (shrink)

We discuss various implications of some radical anti-representationalist views of cognition and what they have to offer with regard to the naturalization of intentionality and the explanation of cognitive phenomena. Our focus is on recent arguments from proponents of enactive views of cognition to the effect that basic cognition is intentional but not representational and that cognition is co-extensive with life. We focus on lower rather than higher forms of cognition, namely the question regarding the intentional and representational nature of (...) cognition found in organisms simpler than human beings, because enactivists do not deny that more sophisticated cognitive phenomena are representational and involve content. After introducing the debate on the naturalization of intentionality, we briefly review different varieties of enactivism and introduce their central claims. In Sect. 4 we turn to radical enactivism in order to focus on the arguments for a thoroughly non-representational, enactive account of perception and basic cognition. In particular, we discuss three major issues: First, what is supposed to replace the representational analysis of perception in a radical-enactive explanation of perception? How does the enactive explanation of perception compare to the best scientific work on the neuroscience of perception? Second, what is—on an enactive account—the function of neural processing in the brain for the generation of perception if not to produce representations? This question is especially pressing since one implication of autopoietic enactivism is that even the simplest organisms, i.e. single-celled organisms, have cognitive capacities. Since they lack brains and nervous systems, enactivists must specify the unique contribution of the brain and nervous system in those animals who have them. In Sect. 5, we evaluate the advantages of an autopoietic–enactive approach to the naturalization of intentionality and end with a suggestion how cognition may relate to intentionality and representation. (shrink)

This paper critiques the view, widely held by philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists, that psychological explanation is a matter of ascribing propositional attitudes (such as beliefs and desires) towards language-like propositions in the mind, and that cognitive mental states consist in intentional attitudes towards propositions of a linguistic quasi-linguistic nature. On this view, thought is structured very much like a language. Denial that propositional attitude psychology is an adequate account of mind is therefore, on this view, is tantamount to (...) eliminative materialism, the denial that human beings are thinking beings. -/- I dispute this on the basis of recent work in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Mental models theory, on which thought is better understood as nonpropositional intentional psychology, accords better with the evidence and offers an alternative view to propositional attitude psychology -- one that means that the denial that that is propositional is not eliminative. However, I argue that propositional attitude psychology is a useful idealization, as classical mechanics is of relativity theory, strictly but not radically false, and useful for prediction and indeed, as long as its idealized character is born in mind, for explanation of behavior. (shrink)

The propositional attitudes are attitudes such as believing and desiring, taken toward propositions such as the proposition that snow flurries are expected, or that the Prime Minister likes poutine. Collectively, our views about the propositional attitudes make up much of folk psychology, our everyday theory of how the mind works.

Interpreting the world through a social lens is a central characteristic of human cognition. Humans ascribe intentions to the behaviors of other individuals and groups. Humans also make inferences about others’ emotional and mental states. This capacity for social attribution underlies many of the concepts at the core of legal and political systems. The developing scientific understanding of the neural mechanisms used in social attribution may alter many earlier suppositions. However, just as often, these new methods will lead back to (...) old conundrums. Cognitive neuroscience will not dispel the hard problems of social judgment. (shrink)

Discussion about the application of scientific knowledge in robotics in order to build people helpers is widespread. The issue herein addressed is philosophically poignant, that of robots that are “people”. It is currently popular to speak about robots and the image of Man. Behind this lurks the dialogical mind and the questions about the significance of an artificial version of it. Without intending to defend or refute the discourse in favour of ‘recreating’ Man, a lesser familiar question is brought forth: (...) “and what if we were capable of creating a very convincible replica of man (constructing a robot-person), what would the consequences of this be and would we be satisfied with such technology?” Thorny topic; it questions the entire knowledge foundation upon which strong AI/Robotics is positioned. The author argues for improved monitoring of technological progress and thus favours implementing weaker techniques. (shrink)

Algorithmic-level specifications carry part of the explanatory burden in most psychological theories. It is, thus, inappropriate to limit a comparison and evaluation of theories to the computational level. A rational analysis considers people's goal-directed and environmentally adaptive rationality; it is not normative. Adaptive rationality is by definition non-absolute; hence, neither deductive logic nor Bayesian probability theory has absolute normative status.

“Mad belief” (in analogy with Lewisian “mad pain”) would be a belief state with none of the causal role characteristic of belief—a state not caused or apt to have been caused by any of the sorts of events that usually cause belief and involving no disposition toward the usual behavioral or other manifestations of belief. On token-functionalist views of belief, mad belief in this sense is conceptually impossible. Cases of delusion—or at least some cases of delusion—might be cases of belief (...) gone half-mad, cases in which enough of the functional role characteristic of belief is absent that the subject is in an “in-between” state regarding the delusive content, such that it is neither quite right to say the subject determinately believes the delusive content nor quite right to say that she determinately fails to believe that content. Although Bortolotti (2010) briefly mentions such “sliding scale” approaches to the relationship of delusion and belief, she dismisses such approaches on rather thin grounds and then later makes some remarks that seem consonant with sliding scale approaches. (shrink)

The human adventure in education is one of imperfect expression, punctuated by moments of insight. Education cultivates these epiphanies and nurtures their possible continuation. But even without major or minor insights, education cultivates the appreciation of the good, the beautiful, and the true. An experimentalist's sensibility lies amid the humanist's grasp of the myriad ways of trying to understand our existence. To bridge discourse is to appreciate the languages of other cultures, which reveal the nuances of life and experience.

The paper examines the status of conscious presentation with regard to mental content and intentional states. I argue that conscious presentation of mental content should be viewed on the model of a secondary quality, as a subjectiveeffect of the microstructure of an underlying brain state. The brain state is in turn viewed as the instantiation of an abstract computational state, with the result that introspectively accessible content is interpreted as a presentation of the associated computational state realized by the brain. (...) However, if the relation between consciousness and representational content is construed in this manner, then conscious presentation does not provide an adequate foundation for the claim that human mental states areintrinsically intentional. On this model, I argue that functionalism is able to account for (non-intrinsic) intentionality, but not for consciousness, which has implications for the computational paradigm, as well as for Searle's Chinese room thought experiment. (shrink)

For any proposition P, it may sometimes occur that a person is not quite accurately describable as believing that P, nor quite accurately describable as failing to believe that P. Such a person, I will say, is in an "in-between state of belief." This paper argues for the prevalence of in-between states of believing and asserts the need for an account of belief that allows us intelligibly to talk about in-between believing. It is suggested that Bayesian and representationalist approaches are (...) inadequate to the task and that a Rylean dispositional account of belief might do the trick. (shrink)

This paper articulates what it would take to defend representationalism in the case of emotions – i.e. the claim that emotions attribute evaluative properties to target objects or events. We argue that representationalism faces a significant explanatory challenge that has not yet been adequately recognized. Proponents must establish that a representation relation linking emotions and value is explanatorily necessary. We use the case of perception to bring out the difficulties in meeting this explanatory challenge.

One of the most influential philosophical voices in the consciousness studies community is that of Daniel Dennett. Dennett's Consciousness Explained aimed to develop both a theory of consciousness and a powerful critique of the then mainstream view of the nature of consciousness, which Dennett called “The Cartesian Theater View”. This chapter focuses on Dennett's influential critique of the Cartesian Theater View, as well as his positive view on the nature of consciousness, called the “Multiple Drafts Model”. It also discusses Dennett's (...) views on the hard problem of consciousness. Dennett's contributions to consciousness studies are quite extensive. In addition to offering a critique of Cartesian Materialism and the Multiple Drafts Model, Dennett has attacked certain thought experiments, problems, and arguments that are commonly thought to lend support to the idea that consciousness is an irreducible feature of the world, going beyond the physical realm that science investigates. (shrink)

The raison d’être of this article is that many a spry-eyed analyst of the works in intelligent computing and robotics fail to see the essential concerning applications development, that of expressing their ultimate goal. Alternatively, they fail to state it suitably for the lesser-informed public eye. The author does not claim to be able to remedy this. Instead, the visionary investigation offered couples learning and computing with other related fields as part of a larger spectre to fully simulate people in (...) their embodied image. For the first time, the social roles attributed to the technical objects produced are questioned, and so with a humorous illustration. (shrink)

Humans come prepared to recognize two fundamental features of our surroundings: animate objects and agents. This recognition begins early in ontogeny and pervades our ecological and social space. This cognitive capacity reveals an important adaptation and sets the conditions for pervasive shared experiences. One feature of our species and our evolved cephalic substrates is that we are prepared to recognize self-propelled action in others. Our cultural evolution is knotted to an expanding sense of shared experiences.

This paper describes and defends in detail a novel account of belief, an account inspired by Ryle's dispositional characterization of belief, but emphasizing irreducibly phenomenal and cognitive dispositions as well as behavioral dispositions. Potential externalist and functionalist objections are considered, as well as concerns motivated by the inevitably ceteris paribus nature of the relevant dispositional attributions. It is argued that a dispositional account of belief is particularly well-suited to handle what might be called "in-between" cases of believing - cases in (...) which it is neither quite right to describe a person as having a particular belief nor quite right to describe her as lacking it. (shrink)

According to Fred Dretske’s semantic information theory, the process of becoming informed consists of two parts: the transfer of information via a channel, and the subsequent formation of a semantic structure, called ‘digitalisation’. Leaving out any one of the two parts renders the concept of becoming informed incomplete. Similarly, Peter Menzies and Huw Price’s agency-account of causation has a bipartite structure. The account posits that an event A is a cause of a distinct event B in cases where bringing about (...) the occurrence of A would be an effective means by which a free agent could bring about the occurrence of B. A major problem for this approach seems to be that the analysis contains two occurrences of ‘bringing about’, which might be taken for causal notions that would render the formula circular. However, applying two different interpretations to each of the occurrences yields a non-circular analysis of causation. These interpretations entail a conceptual structure of causation that is analogous to Dretske’s analysis of becoming informed. Building on this conceptual foundation, it can be shown that informational and causal views on events can be integrated into a combined account, according to which information channels and causal mechanisms are identical. Digitalisation and direct action are parts of causation by information, a concept that further binds becoming informed and causation to each other. Causation by information is relevant because it helps us make sense of the seeming contradiction of construing some events as actions, while at the same time allowing them to be effects of causes. (shrink)

In this article, I establish a theory of knowledge approach for evaluating the use of computers for educational purposes at the university. In so doing, I trace part of the history of the “enabling factor” of Artificial Intelligence in this sector, an important element that has been integrated into everyday learning environments. The result of my reflection is a dialogical structure, directly inspired by past technology assessment research, which illustrates the conceptual advancement of researchers in the field of learning technologies. (...) The notions covered have implications in future policy-related discourse with regards to education. (shrink)

People often sincerely assert or judge one thing (for example, that all the races are intellectually equal) while at the same time being disposed to act in a way evidently quite contrary to the espoused attitude (for example, in a way that seems to suggest an implicit assumption of the intellectual superiority of their own race). Such cases should be regarded as ‘in-between’ cases of believing, in which it's neither quite right to ascribe the belief in question nor quite right (...) to say that the person lacks the belief. (shrink)

Psychological attitudes towards service and personal robots are selectively examined from the vantage point of psychoanalysis. Significant case studies include the uncanny valley effect, brain-actuated robots evoking magic mental powers, parental attitudes towards robotic children, idealizations of robotic soldiers, persecutory fantasies involving robotic components and systems. Freudian theories of narcissism, animism, infantile complexes, ego ideal, and ideal ego are brought to bear on the interpretation of these various items. The horizons of Human-robot Interaction are found to afford new and fertile (...) grounds for psychoanalytic theorizing beyond strictly therapeutic contexts. (shrink)

This article compares the features of a logic of discovery for the "friends of discovery" and for Karl Popper. It argues that the account given by Popper is the same as that of the "friends of discovery." The comparison will unsystematically exhibit that Popper proposes such a logic and will submit that the epistemological significance of a logic of discovery is to be sought in a configuration of ideas and transactions deemed regulated by or mirroring rationality rather than in creative (...) processes as such. (shrink)