Human–robot interactions are often affected by error situations that are caused by either the robot or the human. Therefore, robots would profit from the ability to recognize when error situations occur. We investigated the verbal and non-verbal social signals that humans show when error situations occur in human–robot interaction experiments. For that, we analyzed 201 videos of five human–robot interaction user studies with varying tasks from four independent projects. The analysis shows that there are two types of error situations: social (...) norm violations and technical failures. Social norm violations are situations in which the robot does not adhere to the underlying social script of the interaction. Technical failures are caused by technical shortcomings of the robot. The results of the video analysis show that the study participants use many head movements and very few gestures, but they often smile, when in an error situation with the robot. The results suggest that participants do not see the robot as a social interaction partner with comparable communication skills. Our findings have implications for builders and evaluators of human–robot interaction systems. The builders need to consider including modules for recognition and classification of head movements to the robot input channels. The evaluators need to make sure that the presence of an experimenter does not skew the results of their user studies. (shrink)

The distinction between telic and atelic predicates has been described in terms of the algebraic properties of their meaning since the early days of model-theoretic semantics. This perspective was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of types of actions that do or do not take time to be completed1 which was taken up and turned into a linguistic discussion of action-denoting predicates by Vendler (1957). The algebraic notion that seemed to be most conducive to express the Aristotelian distinction appeared to be the (...) mereological notion of a part, applied to the time at which these predicates hold: atelic predicates, like push a cart, have the subinterval property, that is, whenever they are true at a time interval, then they are true at any part of that interval; this does not hold for telic predicates, like eat an apple, cf. Bennett & Partee (1972), Taylor (1977), and Dowty (1979)2. Bach (1986) integrated these insights into a semantics based on events. (shrink)

Given the beginnings of the United States of America, its sympathy with the French revolution and its rationalist attitude towards the institutions of society, one would have expected that it would have been one of the first nations to adopt the new metric system that was introduced in France in 1800. But the history of the attempts to do so is decidedly mixed. American Congress authorized the use of the metric system in 1866. In 1959, American measurements were defined in (...) relation to the metric system. In 1968, the government ordered a study which was published three years later under the title “A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come”. The year 1975 then saw the Metric Conversion Act, leading to the establishment of the US Metric Board. Amended in 1988, it resulted in the Metric Program, an organization founded to support the various federal agencies, which are required since 1991 to file an annual report on their efforts to change to the metric system. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that an operational organism concept can help to overcome the structural deficiency of mathematical models in biology. In our opinion, the structural deficiency of mathematical models lies mainly in our inability to identify functionally relevant biological characters in biological systems, and not so much in a lack of adequate mathematical representations of biological processes. We argue that the problem of character identification in biological systems is linked to the question of a properly formulated organism concept. (...) Lastly, we demonstrate how a decomposition of an organism into independent characters in the context of a specific biological process--such as adaptation by means of natural selection--depends on the dynamical properties and invariance conditions of the equations that describe this process. (shrink)

This book represents an effort to understand very old questions about biological form, function, and the relationships between them. The essays collected here reflect the diversity of approaches in evolutionary developmental biology, including not only studies by prominent scientists whose research focuses on topics concerned with evolution and development, but also historically and conceptually oriented studies that place the scientific work within a larger framework and ask how it can be pushed further. Topics under discussion range from the use of (...) theoretical and empirical biomechanics to understand the evolution of plant form, to detailed studies of the evolution of development and the role of developmental constraints on phenotypic variation. The result is a rich and interdisciplinary volume that will begin a wider conversation about the shape of Evo Devo as it matures as a field. (shrink)

There are a number of well-known restrictions for the Dative Alternation (cf. Green (1974), Oehrle (1976), Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, & Goldberg (1989), Pinker (1989), Pesetsky (1992), Levin (1993). I will show that several of the low-level semantic restrictions are consequences of a more general one involving the incorporation of a manner component into the meaning of the verb. These restrictions can be explained by assuming two distinct representations of verbs participating in the Dative Alternation: The PO frame expresses movement of (...) an object t o a g o a l , the DO frame implies a change of possession. I will argue that these restrictions cannot be expressed in a syntactic representation of lexical meaning as in Pinker (1989) and Hale & Keyser (1993). (shrink)

(2) Peter wollte Potsdam nicht verlassen bevor das Projekt in ruhigem Fahrwasser war. There are other well-known examples of non-interpreted negation, viz. cases of so-called negative concord in Slavic and Romance languages, but also in dialects of German and English. But arguably, in those cases the “superfluous” negation has to be present for grammatical reasons, which is not the case here. I will show that the negation is in fact interpreted, and that, due to a complex interplay of semantic and (...) pragmatic factors, we do get truth conditions for the two sentences that are not quite identical, but very similar. (shrink)

to be published in the Proceedings of the 18. International Conference of Linguistics, Seoul, Korea.

Even though it is not very often admitted, partial functions do play a significant role in many practical applications of deduction systems. Kleene has already given a semantic account of partial functions using a three-valued logic decades ago, but there has not been a satisfactory mechanization. Recent years have seen a thorough investigation of the framework of many-valued truth-functional logics. However, strong Kleene logic, where quantification is restricted and therefore not truthfunctional, does not fit the framework directly. We solve this (...) problem by applying recent methods from sorted logics. This paper presents a tableau calculus that combines the proper treatment of partial functions with the efficiency of sorted calculi. (shrink)

Heidegger's central question, "What is the meaning of Being?", is intertwined with the concept of nothingness, as it has been since Pre-Socratic thought. I wish to articulate "nothingness" by restricting myself to three aspects of this concept given by Scheler: 1.) the meanings with which the word "nothing" is used, 2.) the moral implication belonging to the question of "nothing," and 3.) the concept of reality. It is the purpose of this selection of Schelerian thought to furnish some distinctions to (...) be made in Heidegger's central position. (shrink)

The chapter provides an overview of the interaction between quantification and information-structural properties, especially focus, givenness, and topic. While quantification affects truth conditions, information-structuring devices can have an effect on the interpretation of quantificational expressions. After a short introduction to the nature of quantification, the chapter covers the main areas where such effects have been identified, in particular in adverbial quantification, in generic clauses, in conditional sentences, and in sentences with nominal quantification, including intersective determiners and comparative determiners like most. (...) It reviews different theoretical proposals how this sensitivity to information-structural categories arises, in particular whether they are related to focus or givenness. It also discusses cases in which the quantifier itself is topical, given, or focused. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of Scottish PhilosophyManfred KuehnAlexander Broadie. A History of Scottish Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Pp. viii + 392. Cloth, $140.00.Alexander Broadie is well known to those who have an interest in Scottish Philosophy. His 1990 book, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy: A New Perspective on the Enlightenment (Barnes & Noble), attempted to show that there were two great periods in the history of Scottish culture, (...) the "circle of John Mair" around 1500 and the so-called "Scottish Enlightenment" of the last half of the eighteenth century. Broadie argued that one could "trace a line of philosophical influence from Mair's circle to the philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment."The present book has a much wider scope. It is an attempt to tell the entire story of Scottish philosophy from its beginnings to the 1960s. The book has twelve chapters, including a short Introduction (1–6) and an even shorter Conclusion (365–69). The first philosopher discussed is John Duns Scotus. The next five chapters are called "The Fifteenth Century," "The Circle of John Mair," "Humanism and After," and "Scotland Moves into the Age of Enlightenment," which deals with Gershom Carmichael, George Turnbull, and Francis Hutcheson. Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9, which constitute the bulk of the book, deal with David Hume, Adam Smith, and The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are treated relatively briefly under the titles "The Nineteenth Century: Ferrier to Seth" and "Realism and Idealism: Some Twentieth-century Narratives." The book has a fairly extensive bibliography and a very useful index.The summaries of the different philosophical positions are lucid, balanced, and fair. They provide very useful introductions to the thought of the philosophers discussed in the book. Someone interested in the background of Hume and Reid and looking for a first orientation could do a lot worse than consulting this book.I do have a problem with the way Broadie places the accents in his history. The two chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries take up only about one sixth of the book, yet they are among the most interesting—at least for me. They would have deserved a more detailed treatment. The discussion of the Middle Ages and Humanism is rather long. The same holds for the eighteenth century. The discussion of Hume in particular, whose philosophy has received much attention of late, could have been significantly shortened. Thomas Brown, Dugald Stewart's successor, who is not as well known, but was a brilliant philosophical mind, would have deserved a section of his own—or so I believe. Since he did discuss Mair and his circle extensively in his earlier publication, this part of the book could also have been abbreviated. Whether Duns Scotus belongs in a "history of Scottish philosophy" I do not know. In any case, it appears that the concerns of his earlier book on The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy exercise an undue influence on the new book.I would have liked to hear a little more about what makes a certain philosopher a Scottish philosopher and what makes Scottish philosophy Scottish. It may well be impossible to write a national history of philosophy in the strictest sense of the word. Philosophy, perhaps still more than Literature and Literary Criticism, knows no national boundaries. As Lewis White Beck once pointed out, any national history of philosophy encounters the problem of figures whose importance transcends the limits of the philosophical discussion in any one nation or language: "No history of English or German philosophy can be understood [End Page 124] without Descartes," Locke or Hume, for that matter. A national history of philosophy may therefore "appear at best episodic, at worst arbitrary. Why not write a history of philosophy mentioning only men whose names begin with the letter 'p'?"Broadie believes that these philosophers "responded to each other partly because they were close by and partly because they were so interested in each other's thinking" (5). This context justifies us or "makes it appropriate to speak of Scottish philosophy, parallel to the way in which writers speak of German philosophy" (6). This point goes both too far and not... (shrink)

Caenorhabditis elegans is a tiny worm that has become the focus of a large number of worldwide research projects examining its genetics, development, neuroscience, and behavior. Recently several groups of investigators have begun to tie together the behavior of the organism and the underlying genes, neural circuits, and molecular processes implemented in those circuits. Behavior is quintessentially organismal—it is the organism as a whole that moves and mates—but the explanations are devised at the molecular and neurocircuit levels, and tested in (...) populations using protocols that span many levels of aggregation. Following a brief review of the main relevant features of C. elegans, I describe some of these circuits, and then discuss two contrasting approaches in behavioral genetics and neural network analysis of the worm. Finally, I outline the rudiments of a “field and focus” explanation model using the two contrasting approaches. (shrink)

(1990). How to safeguard the military‐strategic balance in the disarmament process? World Futures: Vol. 29, The Future of European Integration, pp. 188-195.

Over de filosofie van Nietzsche in het kader van drie decennia Nietzsche studies in Puerto Rico.

For a number of years it has been recognized that the social dynamics of group interaction is an import factor in the origin of accidents and in the way how accidents or accident-prone situations are handled in aviation (cf. Helmreich 1997a, 1997b). Factors related to interpersonal communication have been implicated in up to 80% of all aviation accidents over the past 20 years. As a reaction to this, Crew Resource Management (CRM) has been developed with the goal of rating and (...) improving crew performance in aviation and in other fields in which professional groups interact in situations of high taskload and potential risk (cf. Helmreich ea. 1999). As far as this can be estimated at all, installing CRM techniques in the major American and European airlines has resulted in a definite improvement in the safety of commercial aviation. In spite of this success of CRM, practitioners in the field feel that, beyond the general social dynamics of group interaction, there might be potential problems relating to language and communication in such settings. (shrink)

David Lewis proposed to deal with the semantics of sentences that state what is possible for an individual in terms of possible individuals that are in ways the first individual might have been, so called counterparts of the individual. In this book, I defend counterpart semantics as an approach to the semantics of modality and natural language semantics in particular. Counterpart semantics has a rival, the standard Kripkean semantics that deals with the same sentences in terms of an accessibility relation (...) between possible worlds. While counterpart semantics appears to be more flexible and carries less metaphysical presuppositions (it does not presuppose that I myself exist in various possible worlds, e.g.), Kripkean semantics has some advantages of its own. Most importantly, it incorporates the core assumptions of what may be called standard possible-worlds semantics; i.e. the core assumptions of the most successful framework within linguistic semantics. Counterpart semantics, on the other hand, does not conform to these assumptions, or so I will argue. In this book I opt for a synthesis of these two approaches that allows to combine their advantages. In Chap.1 I introduce the basic idea of counterpart semantics. I defend counterparts against the charge, made by Kripke, that counterparts are irrelevant for the analysis of modality. In Chap. 2 I present the classical version of counterpart semantics, i.e. David Lewis's translation of the language of quantified modal logic into counterpart theory. I discuss some well-known problems and opt for a revision of that translation that is able to solve the problems. Lewis's translation indirectly defines semantical values for expressions of quantified modal logic. In Chap.3 I evaluate counterpart semantics with respect to basic features of possible-worlds semantics. I conclude that the semantical values indirectly assigned to sentences by Lewis's translation are not sets of possible worlds, and that they do not meet certain intuitive demands on notions of meaning and content. (The revisions proposed in Chap.2 do not change this.) In Chap.4 I discuss various versions of a combination of counterpart semantics with Kripkean semantics found in the literature. But I conclude that here, the benefits of the latter are achieved by forfeiting the advantages of the former. Chap.5 finally contains my own proposal how to combine the two approaches in a more satisfactory way. The core semantical notion is truth according to a maximal complete representation, where representations now play the role of worlds. It is an important feature of the counterpart relation that it is qualitative, i.e. a relation in which things stand in virtue how they are. In Chap.1 I point out why it is qualitative, and why it ought to be. In Chap.6 I show how to make the notion of a qualitative property or relation precise. Finally, in Chap.7 I show how to extend this and related notions to predicates and propositions. For counterpart semantics to work at all we have to assume that everything that can be said at all can in principle be expressed in a language with qualitative predicates only (and perhaps, additionally, names, treated directly referentially). In Chap.7 I show how this assumption allows to maintain that the representations of our semantics deserve their name. (shrink)

In the Fall of 2007, ten neuroscientists published a proposal for an interdisciplinary research initiative, the Decade of the Mind, that would focus on four.

From around the year 1900, the ideal of the equivalence of art (form) and nature (animated matter) was challenged when two concurring principles—homogeneous duration and heterogeneous moments—started to manifest themselves in the discrete attempts of artists to integrate being into art. As creative approaches to the perception and representation of nature, these diametrically opposed configurations find expression in the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, mainly between 1889 and 1907. The notion of living forms in permanent transition, informed by (...) evolutionary theory, found its social expression in a growing urban dynamism. Subsequently, the obsolete epistemological Apollonian principle of a central perspective in painting, based on a timeless, static Newtonian space, gave way to the Dionysian ontological principle—radically questioning the unity of being and form in the creative process. Initially, this change was particularly evident in the paintings of Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. While Monet envisions a homogeneous space of instantaneous time (the separate moment), Cézanne's distinctive Post-Impressionist dynamic representations of continuous becoming can be read as contemporary pictorial counterparts of the Bergsonian concepts of duration, memory, and vital force. Thus, Bergson's psycho-physiological principle of endurance, in which perceptions and memories of distinct physical phenomena interpenetrate multitudinously, gradually becomes a dominant feature in the works of numerous artists who inherit Monet's and, especially, Cézanne's aesthetic notions. (shrink)

Die postmoderne Philosophie ist nichts anderes als »das Nachleben des Nationalsozialismus in der Demokratie«. Weil der radikale Bruch mit dem Denken, das zu Auschwitz führte, ausblieb, weil vielmehr bereits in den sechziger Jahren gerade von links in vermeintlich tabubrecherischer Weise versucht wurde, die nationalsozialistische Philosophie für scheinbar »emanzipatorische« Projekte nutzbar zu machen, erscheint die deutsche Ideologie heute als links und progressiv. Diese neueste deutsche Ideologie ist nicht nur eine philosophische Strömung, sondern Ausdruck einer gesellschaftlichen Tendenz. Die postmoderne Übung, jede allgemeine (...) Begriffsbestimmung als »logozentrisch« und jede Betrachtung der Gesellschaft unter Vernunftkriterien als totalitär zu denunzieren, ist sowohl Reflex der objektiven Unbrauchbarkeit der Welt unter den Verhältnissen spätkapitalistischer Vergesellschaftung als auch der Versuch einer Sinnstiftung ebendieser Verhältnisse. In seinem Kult der Unmittelbarkeit schließlich sucht der Poststrukturalismus den Schulterschluß mit dem radikalen Islam und verrät jede Idee von Versöhnung. Mit Beiträgen von Manfred Dahlmann, Martin Dornis, Alex Gruber, Birte Hewera, Tjark Kunstreich, Philipp Lenhard, Niklaas Machunsky, Florian Ruttner und Gerhard Scheit. (shrink)