A cognitive architecture aimed at cumulative learning must provide the necessary information and control structures to allow agents to learn incrementally and autonomously from their experience. This involves managing an agent's goals as well as continuously relating sensory information to these in its perception-cognition information processing stack. The more varied the environment of a learning agent is, the more general and flexible must be these mechanisms to handle a wider variety of relevant patterns, tasks, and goal structures. While many researchers (...) agree that information at different levels of abstraction likely differs in its makeup and structure and processing mechanisms, agreement on the particulars of such differences is not generally shared in the research community. A dual processing architecture has been proposed as a model of cognitive processing, and they are often considered as responsible for low- and high-level information, respectively. We posit that cognition is not binary in this way and that knowledge at any level of abstraction involves what we refer to as neurosymbolic information, meaning that data at both high and low levels must contain both symbolic and subsymbolic information. Further, we argue that the main differentiating factor between the processing of high and low levels of data abstraction can be largely attributed to the nature of the involved attention mechanisms. We describe the key arguments behind this view and review relevant evidence from the literature. (shrink)

Range and Cotton (1995) showed that many of the articles reviewed in their study did not include a line specifying institutional review board-approved procurement of informed parental permission and child assent for child research. Range and Cotton stated that the absence of the line suggests a lack of sensitivity to permission/assent issues, implied that many authors of the articles did not obtain permission/assent, and said those who did but did not report it were camouflaging those who did not. In this (...) article, the logic of these points is refuted, the ethics of the Range and Cotton study are questioned, and its potential divisiveness is lamented. (shrink)

Key ethical issues arise in association with the conduct of stem cell research by research institutions in the United States. These ethical issues, summarized in detail, receive no adequate translation into federal laws or regulations, also described in this article. U.S. Federal policy takes a passive approach to these ethical issues, translating them simply into limitations on taxpayer funding, and foregoes scientific and ethical leadership while protecting intellectual property interests through a laissez faire approach to stem cell patents and licenses. (...) Those patents and licenses, far from being scientifically and ethically neutral in effect, virtually prohibit commercially sponsored research that could otherwise be a realistic alternative to the federal funding gap. The lack of federal funding and related data-sharing principles, combined with the effect of U.S. patent policy, the lack of key agency guidance, and the proliferation of divergent state laws arising from the lack of Federal leadership, significantly impede ethical stem cell research in the United States, without coherently supporting any consensus ethical vision. Research institutions must themselves implement steps, described in the article, to integrate addressing ethical review with the many legal compliance issues U.S. federal and state laws create. (shrink)

In this contribution we examine the various amoral types of reasoning that have long predominated in the history of tolerance. In doing this we also hope to show that these amoral notions of tolerance are always far removed from, and in conflict with, the idea of freedom of religion as a moral and political right. In conclusion we show that when the liberal notion of freedom as a personal and moral right predominates, then the notion of tolerance loses some of (...) its meaning. (shrink)

Au Moyen Âge, les rapports entre savoirs théorique et pratique dans la mesure des champs sont difficiles à appréhender. L’article examine d’une part l’évolution de la géométrie depuis les premiers traités de l’époque carolingienne jusqu’à l’apparition de la geometria practica, puis l’évolution de ce dernier genre, d’autre part la pratique effective des mesureurs telle qu’on la reconstitue à partir d’une documentation évasive. On observe que les techniques de mesure ne relèvent jamais de la géométrie savante, euclidienne ou pratique, malgré les (...) tentatives de quelques savants à partir du xiii e siècle. (shrink)

Government policy aims at a 'seamless web' of learning provision. This is exemplified in a local Learning and Skills Council supported by work on widening participation to higher education (HE) in another London sub-region. The emerging system described is comprehended as a whole from 'Foundation Learning' in compulsory schooling to post-compulsory 'Lifelong Learning' in further, higher and continuing education and training thereafter.

Lucas Swaine?s respectful manner of engaging with theocrats is at odds with the more heavy-handed arguments he gives to those who would reject his position. Furthermore, it is not clear that Swaine?s case can reach theocrats whose self-conceptions do not fit within the liberal idiom.

One feature of the individuals Nietzsche considers paradigms of greatness is that they are, in some capacity, rare —an exception to the majority.1 It would be difficult to overstate the frequency of this association in the texts. From as early as UM, Nietzsche repeatedly contrasts the “rarest and most valuable exemplars” with the pejorative “herd [Heerde]”, the “common [gemein]”, the “mediocre [mittelmässig]”, and the “rabble [Pöbel]”.2 This contrast becomes more explicit in Nietzsche’s mature period, where, for example, he writes plainly (...) that “what can be common has ever but little... (shrink)

This short essay analyzes an unusual typographical feature in the Epistle to the Reader that precedes Locke’s Essay. Specifically, it asks why there is a line prior to Christiaan Huygens’ name in the famous Underlaborer Passage. The paper provides a thorough look at the line’s longevity through early editions of the Essay and considers a number of possible explanations for the line’s presence. It is argued that the line may well have held some meaning for early readers; contemporary scholars should (...) be motivated to investigate the issue further. (shrink)

Lonergan’s written reflections on the notion of form span almost thirty years. Beginning with his 1930s manuscripts on the philosophy of history, Lonergan returned again and again to the problem of clarifying that metaphysical concept. His thought on the issue of form reached its mature stage in 1957 with the publication of Insight. This article first presents an account of the mature, Insight stage of Lonergan’s notion of form. It then shows how Lonergan arrived at that position from his interpretation (...) of Aristotle as set forth in Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. It concludes with some remarks in response to a criticism of Lonergan, commonly leveled by certain Thomist thinkers, according to which Lonergan’s effort to ground philosophy in self-appropriation rather than metaphysics condemns him to a subjectivist or idealist position. Such a critique, I argue, fails to take into account what Lonergan actually held. Indeed, the preference for a metaphysical point de départ is itself vulnerable to a reverse criticism on Lonergan’s part. (shrink)

We believe that the task goal in voluntary movements provides meaning to existing information sources in the environment and determines, in a dynamic way, the use and relative importance of these different sources. This task-centered meaning bridges the apparent controversy between what information is available in principle (i.e., specification), and what information is perceived.

Philosophy's only celebration of photography's 150th, the long-neglected philosophical job of clarification: drawing basic distinctions and defining basic conceptions, including photographic depiction, photographic detection, 'photograph of', 'documentary'. More than a lexicon, it explains why photography is important, by historically characterizing it through its uses for depiction, detection, reproduction, all of which have shaped the modern world. By consideration of it as 'mechanical', the paper explains photography's differences from practices with which it shares these functions. Happy birthday, photography.

Of silence, paradoxically, one can only speak. By virtue of the alliance that unites reason and language, the capacity to name and to address indeed obeys a certain desire to restrain excessive communication. Laughter, tears and silence are part of the expressive world: however, they attest to the impossible pitfall of words in the socializing function that we accord them. Of extreme sociality, of meaning that exceeds the bearable, the suitability and the commerce of ideas, the only thing that rises (...) to the surface of the perceptible is that emotional logic whose significations shatter every criterion of certitude and of truth on the real. Confronted with three forms of experience of the unspeakable, we ordinarily allow ourselves to lend credit to the spontaneity of the first two (laughter and tears), while the symbolic dimension of silence seems to derive from an invisible orchestration, from a rather simple calculation or from a more elaborate strategy. This difference in nature is essential, and no one would dream of equating what “can” not be said with what “should” not be said. Silence exists as a sort of constraint, interiorized at various levels of the personality, and thereby more social than psychological. Even the involuntary silence of the unknowing person can be codified: as a disciplined avowal or the politeness of the humble who neither tolerates nor imagines any escape from his embarrassment. If speech is born in the abandon of a burst of expressivity, in hilarity or in sobs, it expires in a law, no less severe than the one which endows phrases with semantic coherence. Such a rule thus manifests a universal character socially more affirmed than the multiple syntaxes that organize each linguistic patrimony. That muteness can also be subject to a particular form of apprenticeship shows how each process of socialization determines the price of the communicable and assigns a value to the unformulated. Without pretending to offer a strict typology of this phenomenon, I will distinguish five classes that are capable of comprising its collective aspects. (shrink)