This book presents an interdisciplinary exploration of digital sovereignty in China, which are addressed mainly from political, legal and historical point of views. The text leverages a large number of native Chinese experts among the authors at a time when literature on China’s involvement in internet governance is more widespread in the so-called “West”. Numerous Chinese-language documents have been analysed in the making of this title and furthermore, literature conceptualising digital sovereignty is still limited to journal articles, making this one (...) of the earliest collective attempts at defining this concept in the form of a book. Such characteristics position this text as an innovative academic resource for students, researchers and practitioners in international relations (IR), law, history, media studies and philosophy. (shrink)

Objective of the study: To analyze the costs and profits of sugarcane production regarding the cultural practices of sugarcane suppliers. Methodology/approach: This study positions itself in this gap by comparatively analyzing 6 types of cultural practices: unraveling, windrowing, application of correctives, herbicides, insecticides and fertilizers, with the option of two systems Fixed rate (TF) and Variable rate (TV). Originality/Relevance: Brazil is a world reference in sugarcane production, with the State of São Paulo being the largest Brazilian producer. However, for sugarcane (...) suppliers to maintain this activity there is a need to reduce production costs and increase profitability/ha. However, there is a theoretical-practical gap in the financial assessment (costs and profits) of different cultural practices inherent to sugarcane production. Main results: The results demonstrated that the costs of cultural practices represent more than 30% of the total sugarcane production costs. The TF system proved to be more cost-efficient in the following operations: correctives, herbicides and insecticides. In the application of fertilizers, the TV system, in broadcast mode, had the best result. Finally, the profit/ton was R$1.70, demonstrating a very low profit margin/ha given the risk of the activity. Theoretical/methodological contributions: The sample for this research comprised 55 sugarcane suppliers from the State of São Paulo, whose data were obtained through a survey. The comparative analysis was based on the difference in costs of cultural practices and the estimation of the level of certainty (profit/costs), analyzed through the cumulative frequency carried out through the Monte Carlo Simulation (SMC). (shrink)

Generative AI technologies have the potential to be socially and politically transformative. In this paper, we focus on exploring the potential impacts that Generative AI could have on the functioning of our democracies and the nature of citizenship. We do so by drawing on accounts of deliberative democracy and the deliberative virtues associated with it, as well as the reciprocal impacts that social media and Generative AI will have on each other and the broader information landscape. Drawing on this background (...) theory, we outline some of the key positive and negative impacts that Generative AI is likely to have on democratic citizenship. The political significance of these impacts suggests the need for further regulation. (shrink)

This paper presents a version of neurophenomenology based on generative modelling techniques developed in computational neuroscience and biology. Our approach can be described as _computational phenomenology_ because it applies methods originally developed in computational modelling to provide a formal model of the descriptions of lived experience in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy (e.g., the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, etc.). The first section presents a brief review of the overall project to naturalize phenomenology. The second section presents and evaluates (...) philosophical objections to that project and situates our version of computational phenomenology with respect to these projects. The third section reviews the generative modelling framework. The final section presents our approach in detail. We conclude by discussing how our approach differs from previous attempts to use generative modelling to help understand consciousness. In summary, we describe a version of computational phenomenology which uses generative modelling to construct a computational model of the inferential or interpretive processes that best explain this or that kind of lived experience. (shrink)

It has been proposed that intentional actions are supplied by a generative system of the sort described by Chomsky for language. In this paper I aim to provide a closer analysis of this claim for the sake of conceptual clarification. To this end, I will first clarify what is involved in the thesis of a structural analogy between language and action, and then I will consider what kind of evidence there seems to be in favour of the thesis of a (...) neurobiological identity. On this basis, I will subsequently focus on two definitional issues. The first is whether, as the claim of a generative system for intentional action suggests, humans may perform an infinite number of possible actions. The second is whether, as the claim of a generative system for intentional action suggests, what is at issue is conscious planning of action and therefore controlled processing. (shrink)

Generative Emergence provides insight into the non-linear dynamics that lead to organizational emergence through the use of complexity sciences. The book explores how the model of Generative Emergence could be applied to enact emergence within and across organizations.

The ever increasing use of generative artificial intelligence raises significant questions about authorship and related issues such as credit and accountability. In this paper, I consider whether works produced by means of users inputting natural language prompts into Generative Adversarial Networks are works of authorship. I argue that they are not. This is not due to concerns about randomness or machine-assistance compromising human labor or intellectual vision, but instead due to the syntactical and compositional limitations of existing AI systems in (...) handling natural language prompts. This, I argue, gives rise to ‘authorship gaps’. (shrink)

The behavior of an organism, according to Merleau-Ponty, lays out a milieu through which significant phenomena of varying degrees of optimality elicit adjustment. This leads to the dialectical co-emergence of milieu and aptitude that is both the product and the condition of life. What is present as a norm soliciting optimization is species-specific, but it also depends on the needs of the organism and its prior experience. Although a rich entry point into biological phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s work does not adequately describe (...) milieu–aptitude development in interactions between organisms, but it can be assisted through employing Husserl’s three levels of analysis identified by Steinbock, extending all three modes into the biological world. In particular, generative analyses can address inter-organismal behavioral structures slighted in Merleau-Ponty’s work. Generative phenomenology is concerned with the cultural, historical, and intersubjective constitution of human experience and is generally thought to be solely of value in examining the structure of human phenomenality. However, the possibility of human generativity presupposes structures produced widely in the biological world. Ecological, embryogenic, and evolutionary development already depend on protocultural and historical processes creating and created through intercorporeal interaction. After developing the concept of biological generativity through a consideration of plant ecology, mammalian embryology, and insect mimicry, I conclude with implications for humans, who can participate in biological generativity not merely phenomenally, but phenomenologically. (shrink)

Philosophers interested in the theoretical consequences of predictive processing often assume that predictive processing is an inferentialist and representationalist theory of cognition. More specifically, they assume that predictive processing revolves around approximated Bayesian inferences drawn by inverting a generative model. Generative models, in turn, are said to be structural representations: representational vehicles that represent their targets by being structurally similar to them. Here, I challenge this assumption, claiming that, at present, it lacks an adequate justification. I examine the only argument (...) offered to establish that generative models are structural representations, and argue that it does not substantiate the desired conclusion. Having so done, I consider a number of alternative arguments aimed at showing that the relevant structural similarity obtains, and argue that all these arguments are unconvincing for a variety of reasons. I then conclude the paper by briefly highlighting three themes that might be relevant for further investigation on the matter. (shrink)

Discourses on Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation, in short RI, have revolved around but not elaborated on the notion of critique. In this article, generative critique is introduced to RI as a practice that sits in-between adversarial armchair critique and co-opted, uncritical service. How to position oneself and be positioned on this spectrum has puzzled humanities scholars and social scientists who engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, engineers, and other professionals. Recently, generative critique has been presented as a (...) solution to the puzzle in interdisciplinary collaborations on neuroscientific experiments. Generative critique seeks to create connections across disciplines that help remake seemingly stable objects in moments when taken-for-granted ways of seeing and approaching objects are unsettled. In order to translate generative critique from the neurosciences to RI, socio-technical integration research is proposed as a practice of generative critique in interdisciplinary RI collaborations. These collaborations aim to account for societal aspects in research and technology development. For this purpose, a variety of approaches have been developed, including STIR and video-reflexive ethnography. STIR and VRE resemble each other but diverge on affective, collaborative, and temporal dimensions. Their juxtaposition serves to develop suggestions for how STIR could be modified on these dimensions to better enact generative critique in interdisciplinary RI collaborations. In this way, the article contributes to ongoing discussions in RI and in the engaged programme in science and technology studies more broadly on the dynamics of positioning in collaborative work. (shrink)

The new wave of ‘foundation models’—general-purpose generative AI models, for production of text (e.g., ChatGPT) or images (e.g., MidJourney)—represent a dramatic advance in the state of the art for AI. But their use also introduces a range of new risks, which has prompted an ongoing conversation about possible regulatory mechanisms. Here we propose a specific principle that should be incorporated into legislation: that any organization developing a foundation model intended for public use must demonstrate a reliable detection mechanism for the (...) content it generates, as a condition of its public release. The detection mechanism should be made publicly available in a tool that allows users to query, for an arbitrary item of content, whether the item was generated (wholly or partly) by the model. In this paper, we argue that this requirement is technically feasible and would play an important role in reducing certain risks from new AI models in many domains. We also outline a number of options for the tool’s design, and summarize a number of points where further input from policymakers and researchers would be required. (shrink)

We present a generative distributional model for the unsupervised induction of natural language syntax which explicitly models constituent yields and contexts. Parameter search with EM produces higher quality analyses than previously exhibited by unsupervised systems, giving the best published unsupervised parsing results on the ATIS corpus. Experiments on Penn treebank sentences of comparable length show an even higher F1 of 71% on nontrivial brackets. We compare distributionally induced and actual part-of-speech tags as input data, and examine extensions to the basic (...) model. We discuss errors made by the system, compare the system to previous models, and discuss upper bounds, lower bounds, and stability for this task. (shrink)

Generative models have been proposed as a new type of non-representational scientific models recently. A generative model is characterized with the capacity of producing new models on the basis of the existing one. The current accounts do not explain sufficiently the mechanism of the generative capacity of a generative model. I attempt to accomplish this task in this paper. I outline two antecedent accounts of generative models. I point out that both types of generative models function to generate new homogenous (...) models in the sense that the latter is a straightforward derivative of the former, both of which share many similar features. Unfortunately, both accounts are implicit about the generative capacity of generative models. Using a case study, I articulate that a two-staged process of abstraction and idealization in modeling may contribute to the generative capacity of a scientific model. I also demonstrate that this two-staged process may go beyond the capacity of generating new homogenous models to generating new heterogeneous models. (shrink)

Generative AI appears to threaten argument creativity. Because of its capacity to generate coherent texts, individuals are likely to integrate its ideas, and not their own, into arguments, thereby reducing their creative contribution. This article argues that this view is mistaken—it rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of creativity. Within arguments, creative and critical thinking cannot be separated. Because creativity is enmeshed with skills such as analysis and evaluation, the use of generative AI in the construction of arguments, especially (...) in the role as universal audience, has the potential to heighten, not diminish argument creativity. (shrink)

Although Hurricane Katrina precipitated considerable reflection across various media, a practice crucial to our capacities to apprehend and interpret the disaster has not yet been analyzed as such. I call this practice generative assembly. I don’t mean the events of emergency and political gathering that took place in response to the massive storm and fatal, preventable levee failures—although I will propose connections between different forms of assembly. Instead I mean a kind of documentary practice. That practice, which can be undertaken (...) individually or in collaboration, and sometimes at anonymous remove, involves the work of assembling records and signifiers related to the disaster into particular kinds of media artifacts. Those artifacts— which take shape in formats as varied as comics, photobooks, paintings, films, exhibitions, and multithousand-item online archives—characteristically maintain the active appearance and interactive potential of selection and arrangement. In exhibiting such qualities, or so I will argue, these assembly-based artifacts support various articulable and often highly effective kinds of generativity. And thus, I will further suggest, these artifacts can constitute especially powerful means of intervening in prevailing conditions of representation and remembrance around events of environmental and social violence. Crucially, those material legacies of generative assembly can also fall short, fail, and deceive, and this is especially true of those assemblies that take digital forms. It is my contention, however, that we would be misguided if we thus entirely dismissed such assemblies or if we refused their potential for dissident reuse or generative reassembly. (shrink)

The proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) has led to an increased reliance on AI‐generated content for designing and deploying digital health interventions. While generative AI has the potential to facilitate and automate healthcare, there are concerns that AI‐generated content and AI‐generated health advice could trigger, perpetuate, or exacerbate prior traumatic experiences among vulnerable populations. In this discussion article, I examined how generative‐AI‐powered digital health interventions could trigger, perpetuate, or exacerbate emotional trauma among vulnerable populations who rely on digital (...) health interventions as complementary or alternative sources of seeking health services or information. I then proposed actionable strategies for mitigating AI‐generated trauma in the context of digital health interventions. The arguments raised in this article are expected to shift the focus of AI practitioners against prioritizing dominant narratives in AI algorithms into seriously considering the needs of vulnerable minority groups who are at the greatest risk for trauma but are often invisible in AI data sets, AI algorithms, and their resultant technologies. (shrink)

Generative linguistics is widely claimed to produce theories at the level of computation in the sense outlined by David Marr. Marr even used generative grammar as an example of a computational level theory. At this level, a theory specifi es a function for mapping one kind of information into another. How this function is computed is then specified at the algorithmic level before an account of how this is algorithm is realised by some physical system is presented at the implementation (...) level. This paper will argue that generative linguistics does not fit anywhere within this framework. We will then look at several ways researchers have attempted to modify either the framework of generative theory to reconcile the two approaches. Finally, it presents and discusses an alternative position, anti-realism about generative grammar. While this position has attracted some recent support, it also runs into some of the problems that earlier modifications faced. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of the psychology of constructive memory for philosophical theories of the metaphysics of memory and for a central question in the epistemology of memory. I first develop a general interpretation of the psychology of constructive memory. I then argue, on the basis of this interpretation, for an updated version of Martin and Deutscher's influential causal theory of memory. I conclude by sketching the implications of this updated theory for the question of memory 's status as (...) a generative epistemic source. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article deals with the recent interest shown by critical realists in the study of generative mechanisms in sociology and proposes stronger integration of hermeneutics into this theoretical approach. There are important differences between realism and hermeneutics. While realism strives to overcome the extremes of empiricism and interpretivism with a new version of naturalism, hermeneutics bases its explanations of society on research into meanings. The question is whether underlining these differences is useful for social theory. On the one hand, underestimating (...) hermeneutics makes it difficult for realists to recognize fully the role that processes of understanding play in generating social change. On the other hand, hermeneutical arguments in sociology idealistically identify being with interpreted being. The concept of generative hermeneutics is designed to help to build an alliance between realism and hermeneutics, since one-sided overemphasis on mechanistic logic devaluates the study of social interaction pursued by interpretative sociology. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) promises to revolutionize data-driven fields (Milmo 2023). Building on decades of large language modeling (LLM) (Toner 2023), GenAI can collect, harmonize...

Classical categorial grammars are the grammars introduced by Ajdukiewicz [1] and formalized by Bar-Hillel [2], Bar-Hillel et al. [3]. In [3] there is proved the weak equivalence of CCG’s and context-free grammars [6]. In this note we characterize the strong generative capacity of finite and rigid CCG’s, i.e. their capacity of structure generation. These results are more completely discussed in [4], [5].

Zero-shot learning is dedicated to solving the classification problem of unseen categories, while generalized zero-shot learning aims to classify the samples selected from both seen classes and unseen classes, in which “seen” and “unseen” classes indicate whether they can be used in the training process, and if so, they indicate seen classes, and vice versa. Nowadays, with the promotion of deep learning technology, the performance of zero-shot learning has been greatly improved. Generalized zero-shot learning is a challenging topic that has (...) promising prospects in many realistic scenarios. Although the zero-shot learning task has made gratifying progress, there is still a strong deviation between seen classes and unseen classes in the existing methods. Recent methods focus on learning a unified semantic-aligned visual representation to transfer knowledge between two domains, while ignoring the intrinsic characteristics of visual features which are discriminative enough to be classified by itself. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel model that uses the discriminative information of visual features to optimize the generative module, in which the generative module is a dual generation network framework composed of conditional VAE and improved WGAN. Specifically, the model uses the discrimination information of visual features, according to the relevant semantic embedding, synthesizes the visual features of unseen categories by using the learned generator, and then trains the final softmax classifier by using the generated visual features, thus realizing the recognition of unseen categories. In addition, this paper also analyzes the effect of the additional classifiers with different structures on the transmission of discriminative information. We have conducted a lot of experiments on six commonly used benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods for both traditional as well as generalized zero-shot learning. (shrink)

This article examines the transformative role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in education, exploring diverse disciplines such as engineering, medicine, programming, and information systems. GAI emerges as a revolutionary force, promising to fundamentally change educational practices. The PRISMA 2020 methodology (Page et al., 2021) was used to evaluate the relevant scientific literature. The systematic review identified research that applied specific criteria in the analysis of IAG in education. The selected papers covered a variety of disciplines, providing a comprehensive view of (...) the impact of IAG in education. The results show a diversity of approaches and institutional responses to IAG in education. From significant changes in teaching practices to the identification of specific opportunities in disciplines such as computer science and engineering, GAI stands out as a catalyst for transformation. The adaptation of tertiary education, the need for specific skills to work with GAI, and ethical responses emerge as key themes. It focuses on the need for a deeper and more consensual understanding of the role of GAI in education. Concrete research-supported opportunities are highlighted, but ethical limitations and concerns are also underscored. Collaboration, reflection, and adaptation to open educational practices are proposed as approaches to address the challenges and fully exploit the benefits of IAG in education. This comprehensive analysis contributes to understanding the current and future landscape of GAI in education, providing valuable guidelines for educators, institutions, and educational technology developers. (shrink)

The Bayesian brain hypothesis, predictive processing, and variational free energy minimisation are typically used to describe perceptual processes based on accurate generative models of the world. However, generative models need not be veridical representations of the environment. We suggest that they can be used to describe sensorimotor relationships relevant for behaviour rather than precise accounts of the world.

Generative AI programs can produce high-quality written and visual content that may be used for good or ill. We argue that a credit–blame asymmetry arises for assigning responsibility for these outputs and discuss urgent ethical and policy implications focused on large-scale language models.

This article seeks to disclose the sense(s) of translation by attending to it in the phenomenological key with Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry. I suggest that the text could be approached through the prism of generative phenomenology, and I investigate it from two different perspectives: xenological and Derridean. Both perspectives are employed toward the same objective: to demonstrate the theoretical relevance of Husserl’s text to the understanding of a complex social phenomenon such as translation. The emphasis on sociality, historicity, (...) and tradition, as these themes transpire in The Origin, brings about a new understanding of translation as a phenomenon of the liminal in-between, with its basic structure defined as the encounter with the alien. Derrida gives this emphasis much attention in his commentary on The Origin. In this commentary, he focuses on the constitution of a communal history, which is not possible without the iteration of the origin, the basic means of which is communication on the general level, while on the level of different socio-cultural worlds translation comes up as the most optimal mode for the encounter with the alien. The encounter takes place in the liminal in-between which points to repeatability as the original sense of translation inscribed in the acts of binding and approximation. (shrink)

Mesoudi et al.'s new synthesis for cultural evolution closely parallels the evolutionary synthesis of Neo-Darwinism. It too draws inspiration from population genetics, recruits other fields, and, unfortunately, also ignores development. Enculturation involves many serially acquired skills and dependencies that allow us to build a rich cumulative culture. The newer synthesis, evolutionary developmental biology, provides a key tool, generative entrenchment, to analyze them. (Published Online November 9 2006).

The generative entrenchment of an entity is a measure of how much of the generated structure or activity of a complex system depends upon the presence or activity of that entity. It is argued that entities with higher degrees of generative entrenchment are more conservative in evolutionary changes of such systems. A variety of models of complex structures incorporating the effects of generative entrenchment are presented and we demonstrate their relevance in analyzing and explaining a variety of developmental and evolutionary (...) phenomena, both on a macroscopic developmental and evolutionary scale, and using models and strategies pioneered by Kauffman, on the more microscopic scale appropriate to the analysis of the structure and behavior of gene control networks. The resulting picture suggests that generative entrenchment acts as a powerful and constructive developmental constraint on the course of evolutionary processes. Since virtually any system exhibits varying degrees of generative entrenchment among its parts and activities, these studies and results have in addition broad potential application for the analysis of generative structures in other areas. (shrink)

A probabilistic Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy of grammars is introduced and studied, with the aim of understanding the expressive power of generative models. We offer characterizations of the distributions definable at each level of the hierarchy, including probabilistic regular, context-free, (linear) indexed, context-sensitive, and unrestricted grammars, each corresponding to familiar probabilistic machine classes. Special attention is given to distributions on (unary notations for) positive integers. Unlike in the classical case where the "semi-linear" languages all collapse into the regular languages, using analytic tools (...) adapted from the classical setting we show there is no collapse in the probabilistic hierarchy: more distributions become definable at each level. We also address related issues such as closure under probabilistic conditioning. (shrink)

Im Zentrum des Beitrags stehen Konzeption und Analyse generativer Verantwortung. Dazu werden erstens Herausforderungen der Verantwortung für die Folgegeneration und ihre Blockaden beschrieben. Zweitens wird Generativität als Sorge und Verantwortung für die Nachkommen psychoanalytisch-sozialpsychologisch bestimmt. Drittens geht es um Aufklärungspotenziale psychoanalytischer Perspektiven. Normative Orientierungen der von vielen Seiten geforderten neuen Aufklärung im Anthropozän erlangen potenzielle Wirkmächtigkeit – so eine zentrale These – erst durch die systematische Analyse der Widerstände gegen generative Verantwortung. Die Möglichkeit der Aufklärung ergibt sich dabei nicht allein (...) aus individueller psychischer Arbeit, sondern auch aus entsprechender Selbstaufklärung der Gesellschaft über ihre Ausblendungen. (shrink)

Humanistic management and mindfulness practices can potentiate one another to foster an inclusive society. By moving beyond a limited instrumental understanding of mindfulness practice to a generative mindfulness that incorporates a recognition of the rich nature of the human mind, awareness of cultural practices, and deeply rooted ethical foundations, managers can create organizational cultures that honor the sacred in every human being. A set of interviews with noted consultants and researchers on mindfulness and leadership suggests convergence on this perspective, as (...) does the experience of a university administrator in developing an anti-racist agenda for a large U.S. university. This article is based on both the personal experience and scholarly research of its authors and suggests ways that humanistic management education can contribute to creating inclusive workplaces through incorporating generative mindfulness in executive development as well as undergraduate programs. (shrink)

In search of general generative principles I start from the postulate of a reality which comprises both materialistic and psychic aspects. This overall reality, described by others as the world of archetypes, is not directly accessible to sensory perception. Yet, by studying archetypical manifestations, it is possible to distinguish different structures or generative principles in it. Comparison of three models, which depict developmental processes in different disciplines, shows that they have the same basic structure. The effects of the archetypes involved (...) can be described as four general generative principles: 1st the principle of wholeness (connection and integration of conflicting opposites), 2nd the principle of complementation and compensation (periodic change of opposite influences); 3rd the enstructuring principle (relative stability or spatial aspect of a manifest structure), and 4th the principle of gesture (change or temporal aspect of that structure). (shrink)

Background:Policemen all over the world are tasked with the heavy work of maintaining social security. With the imbalance in mentality brought about by high population density and social transformation, the work of the Chinese police is particularly hard. As the window of demographic dividend is closing and the number of newborns is insufficient, China has started to adjust its established fertility policy to encourage a family to have two children. However, the results have not met the expectations of the policy (...) adjustment. It is generally believed that factors such as high work pressure, high parenting costs, and low levels of happiness may be the main reasons for low fertility intentions. Studying this typical population of police officers may explore the relationship between work stress, happiness, and reproductive concerns, and provide evidence of Chinese sample.Objectives:To explore the relations between job burnout, subjective well-being, and generativity concern in Chinese police officers.Methods:The study used a cross-sectional survey to collect data from 494 police officers from H city in China. The participants completed the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scale (FACESII), the Loyola Generativity Scale (LGS), and the Satisfaction with life scale (SWLS). Moderated mediation effect models assessed the association between job burnout, subjective well-being, and generativity concern.Results:Job burnout had a significant negative predictive effect on both subjective well-being and generativity concern, and subjective well-being played a mediating role between job burnout and generativity concern. In addition, family intimacy and adaptability had a significant negative moderating effect between subjective well-being and generativity concern. In a conclusion, there is a moderated mediating effect between job burnout and generativity concern.Conclusion:Subjective well-being played a mediating role between job burnout and generativity concern. (shrink)

Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...

With people’s concerns about the environment growing, the demand for organic food has increased. However, few studies have focused on organic dining intention. Therefore, this study examined generativity, which is defined as the direction and care for the growth of future generations through self-expanding forms, and its influence on attitude toward organic food, environment concern and dining intention. The moderating effect of age was also examined. A total of 418 responses were collected through a face-to-face survey from Shanghai respondents. PLS-SEM (...) was utilized to verify the model and test the relationships among the constructs. The results show that generativity directly influences environmental concerns, attitudes toward organic food and dining intentions. Furthermore, environmental concerns and attitudes toward organic food are mediating variables for generativity to affect dining intentions. The older the age group, the more likely it is for generativity to have a positive influence on attitude toward organic food and environmental concerns. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed in this study. (shrink)

This paper describes a generative theory of bugs. It claims that all bugs of a procedural skill can be derived by a highly constrained form of problem solving acting on incomplete procedures. These procedures are characterized by formal deletion operations that model incomplete learning and forgetting. The problem solver and the deletion operator have been constrained to make it impossible to derive “star‐bugs”—algorithms that are so absurd that expert diagnosticians agree that the alogorithm will never be observed as a bug. (...) Hence, the theory not only generates the observed bugs, it fails to generate star‐bugs.The theory has been tested on an extensive data base of bugs for multidigit subtraction that was collected with the aid of the diagnostic systems buggy and debuggy. In addition to predicting bug occurrence, by adoption of additional hypotheses, the theory also makes predictions about the frequency and stability of bugs, as well as the occurrence of certain latencies in processing time during testing. Arguments are given that the theory can be applied to domains other than subtraction and that it can be extended to provide a theory of procedural learning that accounts for bug acquisition. Lastly, particular care has been taken to make the theory principled so that it can not be tailored to fit any possible data. (shrink)

Since their public launch, a little over a year ago, large language models (LLMs) have inspired a flurry of analysis about what their implications might be for medical ethics, and for society more broadly. 1 Much of the recent debate has moved beyond categorical evaluations of the permissibility or impermissibility of LLM use in different general contexts (eg, at work or school), to more fine-grained discussions of the criteria that should govern their appropriate use in specific domains or towards certain (...) ends. 2 With each passing week, it seems more and more inevitable that LLMs will be a pervasive feature of many, if not most, of our lives. It would not be possible—and would not be desirable—to prohibit them across the board. We need to learn how to live with LLMs; to identify and mitigate the risks they pose to us, to our fellow creatures, and the... (shrink)

Mitte der fünfziger Jahre entsteht mit den Arbeiten der amerikanischen Linguisten Zellig S. Harris und Noam Chomsky die Theorie der generativen (Transformations-)Grammatiken a) Chomskys Grammatikmodell in den "Aspects" ... b) Entwicklung der Theorie ... nach 1965 ...

One of the most exciting debates in philosophy of imagination in recent years has been over the epistemic use of imagination where imagination epistemically contributes to justifying beliefs and acquiring knowledge. This paper defends “generationism about imagination” according to which imagination is a generative source, rather than a preservative source, of justification. In other words, imagination generates new justification above and beyond prior justification provided by other sources. After clarifying the generation/preservation distinction (Section 2), we present an argument for generationism (...) about imagination, which can be divided into two parts; the philosophical part and the empirical part. In the philosophical part of our argument (Section 3), we claim that generationism about imagination follows from what we call “INACCESSIBILITY”. According to INACCESSIBILITY, imagination is properly constrained by the imaginative constrainers (i.e., the prior representations that constrain the development of a scenario in imagination) to which non-imaginative belief-forming processes do not have access. In the empirical part of our argument (Section 4), we claim that INACCESSIBILITY is plausible in light of relevant studies and theories in the empirical literature, especially the literature on mental simulation (Section 4.1), core cognition (Section 4.2), and intuitive physics (Section 4.3). (shrink)