DCPS is a connectionist production system interpreter that uses distributed representations. As a connectionist model it consists of many simple, richly interconnected neuron‐like computing units that cooperate to solve problems in parallel. One motivation for constructing DCPS was to demonstrate that connectionist models are capable of representing and using explicit rules. A second motivation was to show how “coarse coding” or “distributed representations” can be used to construct a working memory that requires far fewer units than the number of different (...) facts that can potentially be stored. The simulation we present is intended as a detailed demonstration of the feasibility of certain ideas and should not be viewed as a full implementation of production systems. Our current model only has a few of the many interesting emergent properties that we eventually hope to demonstrate: It is damage‐resistant, it performs matching and variable binding by massively parallel constraint satisfaction, and the capacity of its working memory is dependent on the similarity of the items being stored. (shrink)

Animals do a wide range of work in our society, but they are rarely recognized as workers or accorded any labour rights, and their working conditions are often oppressive and exploitative. Drawing on law, ethics, and labour studies, the essays in this volume explore the potential and dangers of animal labour.

How can pain complaints be elicited and analyzed so as to increase the empathic bond between patient and clinician? I will argue that though Wierzbicka’s approach to this question is useful—an exploration of certain abstract dimensions of pain’s meaning—it fails to examine key aspects that are the most useful and crucial for cultural analysis and for building empathic bonds between the clinician and patient. Not just a grammar of pain is needed; rather a biological philology of pain.

We model scientific theories as Bayesian networks. Nodes carry credences and function as abstract representations of propositions within the structure. Directed links carry conditional probabilities and represent connections between those propositions. Updating is Bayesian across the network as a whole. The impact of evidence at one point within a scientific theory can have a very different impact on the network than does evidence of the same strength at a different point. A Bayesian model allows us to envisage and analyze the (...) differential impact of evidence and credence change at different points within a single network and across different theoretical structures. (shrink)

Part I is about valuing fairness, II chiefly about not valuing it. Equally, I is about knowing fairness or taking yourself to know what it is, while II is chiefly about not knowing what it is: absolutely not knowing what it is, or not knowing what it is except when it is thought of in a narrow way. I want to know what all those states involve, e.g. whether knowing what fairness is involves valuing it, and most of all whether (...) those two aforesaid ways of not knowing what fairness is involve some knowably undesirable kind of ignorance; in that sense, incur a cognitive penal sanction. But I begin elsewhere. (shrink)

Take the mystery out of digital photography and join the fun! You don't need to be a professional photographer or a technology expert to take great digital photos! This down-to-basics guide makes it easy to choose the right camera, understand all its dials and controls, take good pictures, make them look even better with your computer, and print them or share them online for friends and family to enjoy. Do your homework — compare camera features to choose those you need (...) at the price you can afford Practice, practice, practice — learn to use camera settings, how to compose good shots, and how light affects a picture The darkroom is now digital — use free software to organize and edit your photos Learn to share — print your pictures at home or through a service, e-mail them to friends, set up an online photo album, or show them off in a digital picture frame Open the book and find: How to pick the camera that best fits your budget and needs Tips for taking great travel photos Accessories you might want for your camera How to get really good pictures of kids and pets Easy ways to get photos from your camera to your computer Tips and tricks for editing pictures on a computer Good reasons for putting your pictures online. (shrink)

This paper addresses the prob-lem of how to identify and evaluate argu-ments made in a nonverbal form. Such arguments may employ images, sounds, or a combination of these in a truly mul-timodal presentation. Here, we concen-trate on those which are classified as au-ditory, i.e. contain at least one premise or the conclusion in sound form. We pro-pose and test a solution whereby some el-ements of the Comprehensive Assess-ment Procedure for Natural Argumenta-tion (CAPNA) are modified to allow for the evaluation of (...) auditory arguments. The results of this approach are illus-trated with the help of a number of au-thentic examples. Résumé: Cet article aborde le problème de la façon d'identifier et d'évaluer les ar-guments présentés sous une forme non verbale. De tels arguments peuvent uti-liser des images, des sons ou une com-binaison de ceux-ci dans une présenta-tion véritablement multimodale. Ici, nous nous concentrons sur les arguments classés comme auditifs, c'est-à-dire qui contiennent au moins une prémisse ou la conclusion sous forme sonore. Nous pro-posons et testons une solution dans laquelle certains éléments de la procédure d'évaluation globale de l'argu-mentation naturelle (CAPNA) sont mod-ifiés pour permettre l'évaluation des ar-guments auditifs. Les résultats de cette approche sont illustrés à l’aide de nom-breux exemples authentiques. (shrink)

This paper addresses the prob-lem of how to identify and evaluate argu-ments made in a nonverbal form. Such arguments may employ images, sounds, or a combination of these in a truly mul-timodal presentation. Here, we concen-trate on those which are classified as au-ditory, i.e. contain at least one premise or the conclusion in sound form. We pro-pose and test a solution whereby some el-ements of the Comprehensive Assess-ment Procedure for Natural Argumenta-tion (CAPNA) are modified to allow for the evaluation of (...) auditory arguments. The results of this approach are illus-trated with the help of a number of au-thentic examples. Résumé: Cet article aborde le problème de la façon d'identifier et d'évaluer les ar-guments présentés sous une forme non verbale. De tels arguments peuvent uti-liser des images, des sons ou une com-binaison de ceux-ci dans une présenta-tion véritablement multimodale. Ici, nous nous concentrons sur les arguments classés comme auditifs, c'est-à-dire qui contiennent au moins une prémisse ou la conclusion sous forme sonore. Nous pro-posons et testons une solution dans laquelle certains éléments de la procédure d'évaluation globale de l'argu-mentation naturelle (CAPNA) sont mod-ifiés pour permettre l'évaluation des ar-guments auditifs. Les résultats de cette approche sont illustrés à l’aide de nom-breux exemples authentiques. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Educational Imperative: A Defense of Socratic and Aesthetic LearningMark StockerThe Educational Imperative: A Defense of Socratic and Aesthetic Learning, by Peter Abbs; x & 250 pp. Bristol, Pennsylvania: Taylor & Francis, 1994, $29.00 paper.O tempora! o mores! Peter Abbs begins by deploring “the cultural catastrophe” of British education in the mid-1990s. He states in his always lucid and accessible prose: “I want to come clean; I want (...) to place the general argument of the book in the current arena of public debate, and to do so without apology and without equivocation.” He bemoans today’s massive denial of spiritual energy, of intellectual enquiry, of aesthetic beauty and public virtue. In a better world, he says, education would serve, “willingly and lovingly... the transcendent ends” of culture and society. Abbs decisively rejects the “Cato” model where teachers are unquestioning skill-based technicians who employ [End Page 393] “managerial” language. Instead, he advocates a Socratic view, which is “to reaffirm that education should be primarily concerned with critical reflection, with personal development and with the sustained enquiry into the various forms of meaning.”Subsequent chapters apply this approach to the arts curriculum. Its failure to gain proper recognition and the absurd and continued conflation of Dance and Physical Education are indicted. Abbs convincingly attacks the notion of “self-expression” in art and language long upheld by educationalists. Its application at the expense of reason, abstract thinking, and the study of “the truly significant writers through the centuries” has in his view helped to trivialize and to marginalize the arts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in so-called “educational drama.” For three generations it has denied “the aesthetic field of drama, the symbolic field of its own form,” and has elevated one genre, improvisation, and made it the totality.Abbs is committed to reconciling “the creative energies of the individual and the creative energies of the culture.” Who would argue with that? And who could deny the value of critical reflection or indeed public virtue? He declares, rather ponderously: “The vested interests of Coca-Cola manufacturers or political missionaries have to be seen as too ‘recent and relevant’ to be allowed” to shape education. The Abbs academy requires “a formally protected place, an institutional space more like the theatre than Tesco [a supermarket chain], more like the cathedral than the Stock Exchange.” For all this patent seriousness and sincerity, here is an educationalist irrevocably and irreconcilably out of joint with the present. The austere modernism of Herbert Read profoundly influenced Abbs in his teens; he also admires F. R. Leavis, Richard Hoggart, and David Holbrook, whose writing at its most influential spans the 1930s and the 1960s. Abbs’s most recent source of inspiration is the art critic Peter Fuller, whose abiding legacy was a romantic nationalism that eloquently celebrated an “essentially symbolic and figurative” tradition in British art from J. M. W. Turner to Henry Moore.Modern Painters, which Fuller edited, could afford to eschew popular culture and its connections with “higher” arts. Fine for a periodical, but how could such a fastidious approach be applied to the classroom experience? Abbs describes an experiment that he performed on student-teachers at the University of Sussex to understand their aesthetic responses. Among the events and objects that the students were asked to consider were John Constable’s The Haywain, Richard Strauss’s The Four Last Songs, a visit to Claude Monet’s garden and a performance of Coriolanus. Abbs’s list does not, however, contain Pulp Fiction, a Courtney Love concert, or an S. E. Hinton novel. What place, if any, do the latter have in the arts curriculum? Must they be ruled out for being too “recent and relevant”? Can student responses to them be brought to bear on their comprehension of higher culture? Or is there a great and ultimately irreconcilable divide? Abbs never faces these issues and instead, in his fogyish [End Page 394] coda, denounces once more “the consumer society” which has “trivialized on an unprecedented scale” and has “tarnished whatever it has touched.”Mark StockerUniversity of Canterbury, New ZealandCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Mind body, not a pseudo-problem, by H. Feigl.--Is consciousness a brain process? by U. T. Place.--Sensations and brain processes, by J. J. C. Smart.--The nature of mind, by D. M. Armstrong.--Materialism as a scientific hypothesis, by U. T. Place.--Sensations and brain processes: a reply to J. J. C. Smart, by J. T. Stevenson.--Further remarks on sensations and brain processes, by J. J. C. Smart.--Smart on sensations, by K. Baier.--Brain processes and incorrigibility, by J. J. C. Smart.--Could mental states be brain (...) processes? by J. Shaffer.--The identity of mind and body, by J. Cornman.--Shaffer on the identity of mental states and brain processes, by R. Coburn.--Mental events and the brain, by J. Shaffer.--Comment: mental events and the brain, by P. Feyerabend.--Materialism and the mind-body problem, by P. Feyerabend.--Materialism, by J. J. C. Smart.--Scientific materialism and the identity theory, by N. Malcolm.--Professor Malcolm on scientific materialism and the identity theory, by E. Sosa.--Rejoinder to Mr. Sosa, by N. Malcolm.--Mind-body identity, privacy and categories, by R. Rorty.--Physicalism, by T. Nagel.--Mind-body identity, a side issue? by C. Taylor.--Illusions and identity, by J. M. Hinton.--Bibliography (p. [259]-261). (shrink)

Although hierarchical approaches are evidently important to reinforcement learning, most existing hierarchical RL models either do not involve automatically developing hierarchies (i.e., using pre-determined hierarchies; e.g., Dayan and Hinton 1993, Sutton 1995, Pre-cup et al 1998, Parr and Russell 1997, Dietterich 1997), or involve only domain-speci c processes. Models in the latter category rely on domain-speci c knowledge or procedures and are thus not generic or autonomous; for example, Lin (1993), Moore and Atkeson (1994), and Singh (1994). The problems (...) of such hierarchies include in exibility (because the characteristics of the domain can change over time) and lack of generality (because domain-speci c hierarchies most likely vary from domain to domain). This is true even when limited learning is used to ne tune mostly pre-determined hierarchies (e.g., Parr and Russell 1997, Dietterich 1997). (shrink)

Endowing artificial systems with explanatory capacities about the reasons guiding their decisions, represents a crucial challenge and research objective in the current fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Cognitive Science [Langley et al., 2017]. Current mainstream AI systems, in fact, despite the enormous progresses reached in specific tasks, mostly fail to provide a transparent account of the reasons determining their behavior (both in cases of a successful or unsuccessful output). This is due to the fact that the classical problem (...) of opacity in artificial neural networks (ANNs) explodes with the adoption of current Deep Learning techniques [LeCun, Bengio, Hinton, 2015]. In this paper we argue that the explanatory deficit of such techniques represents an important problem, that limits their adoption in the cognitive modelling and computational cognitive science arena. In particular we will show how the current attempts of providing explanations of the deep nets behaviour (see e.g. [Ritter et al. 2017] are not satisfactory. As a possibile way out to this problem, we present two different research strategies. The first strategy aims at dealing with the opacity problem by providing a more abstract interpretation of neural mechanisms and representations. This approach is adopted, for example, by the biologically inspired SPAUN architecture [Eliasmith et al., 2012] and by other proposals suggesting, for example, the interpretation of neural networks in terms of the Conceptual Spaces framework [Gärdenfors 2000, Lieto, Chella and Frixione, 2017]. All such proposals presuppose that the neural level of representation can be considered somehow irrelevant for attacking the problem of explanation [Lieto, Lebiere and Oltramari, 2017]. In our opinion, pursuing this research direction can still preserve the use of deep learning techniques in artificial cognitive models provided that novel and additional results in terms of “transparency” are obtained. The second strategy is somehow at odds with respect to the previous one and tries to address the explanatory issue by avoiding to directly solve the “opacity” problem. In this case, the idea is that one of resorting to pre-compiled plausible explanatory models of the word used in combination with deep-nets (see e.g. [Augello et al. 2017]). We argue that this research agenda, even if does not directly fits the explanatory needs of Computational Cognitive Science, can still be useful to provide results in the area of applied AI aiming at shedding light on the models of interaction between low level and high level tasks (e.g. between perceptual categorization and explanantion) in artificial systems. (shrink)

Interpretation of the classics in political theory seems to go in waves. For a while we had John Locke, the bourgeois thinker. Now we seem to be in a Locke-as-radical-democrat phase. Locke-the-bourgeois had problems of its own, but a radically democratic Locke -- not just the old Locke as liberal democrat but Locke as quasi-Leveller -- strains the interpretative imagination more than most; yet in recent years, several different kinds of argument have been advanced in support of it, both textual (...) and contextual. The most effective argument has proceeded by situating Locke in the context of radical Whig politics in the 1670s and '80s, the struggles over religious toleration and the royal succession, in particular the �Exclusion Crisis� of 1679-81. This contextual argument has been accompanied by various textual interpretations having to do with Locke's conceptions of property, consent, representation, the right of revolution and natural law. Among other things, these are supposed to show that while Locke had nothing explicit to say about the extent of the franchise, the weight of evidence suggests that he would have supported a fairly wide franchise, perhaps even something like the (almost) manhood suffrage advocated by the Levellers (at least according to some, and probably the most convincing, interpretations of their ideas). Most recently, in these pages, Martin Hughes, building on the work of James Tully and Richard Ashcraft in particular, has pushed the argument as far as it can probably go. His argument on taxation and suffrage has provided a motivation here for a wider exploration of Locke's views on representation, consent and the franchise. (shrink)

This study focuses on the spatialization and institutionalization of social networks of Russian women who migrated to Turkey via marriage in the last 30 years. Specifically, it investigates how and why their social networks have been changing at the local and transnational levels. We conducted in-depth interviews with 56 women between 2014−2021. Our extensive analysis indicates that despite their newly established status via marriages, the Russian women have weak ties with the locals regardless of the migration period, preferring mostly to (...) engage with other Russian women in Turkey. Even if the different migrant associations established by Russian migrants in Turkey do not actually aim this, they create an effect that increases the social distance with the host society and serves to strengthen the connection between the migrants. Also, unlike pioneer migrants, newer marriage migrants have established strong transnational ties with others living overseas, regardless of their gender or ethnic identity. Further, this study reveals that the migrant women's subjectivity, their spouses’ benefit-oriented negotiation styles, and the state's diaspora policy all shape the women's social networks at different levels. (shrink)