PROJECT WEB DIRECTORY
PAPERS ADDED IN THE YEAR 2006 (APPROXIMATELY)
PAPERS 2006 CONTENTS LIST
RETURN TO MAIN COGAFF INDEX FILE
This file is
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/06.html
Maintained by Aaron Sloman -- who does
not respond to Facebook requests.
It contains an index to files in the Cognition and Affect
Project's FTP/Web directory produced or published in the year
2006. Some of the papers published in this period were produced
earlier and are included in one of the lists for an earlier period
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/0-INDEX.html#contents
A list of PhD and MPhil theses was added in June 2003
This file Last updated: 31 Mar 2007; 13 Nov 2010; 7 Jul 2012
JUMP TO DETAILED LIST (After Contents)
Title: CoSy Papers and Presentations
Authors: Various
Title: Rules of inference, or suppressed premisses? (1964)
Authors: Aaron Sloman
Title: Designing Agents to Understand Infants. PhD thesis, 2006
Authors: Dean Petters
Title: Four Concepts of Freewill: Two of them incoherent
Author: Aaron Sloman
Title: Why Asimov's three laws of robotics are unethical
Title: Processing-based concept kinds for actor-agent communities
Author: Aaron Sloman
Authors: Manuela Viezzer, Niek Wijngaards and Masja Kempen
Filename:
rules-premisses.html (HTML)
Filename: rules-premisses.pdf (PDF)
Title: Rules of inference, or suppressed premisses? (1964)
Author:
Aaron Sloman
Date Installed:
31 Dec 2006
First published in Mind Volume LXXIII, Number 289 Pp. 84-96, 1964.
Abstract (actually the opening paragraph of the paper):
In ordinary discourse we often use or accept as valid, arguments of the form "P, so Q", or "P, therefore Q", or "Q, because P" where the validity of the inference from P to Q is not merely logical: the statement of the form "If P then Q" is not a logical truth, even if it is true. Inductive inferences and inferences made in the course of moral arguments provide illustrations of this. Philosophers, concerned about the justification for such reasoning, have recently debated whether the validity of these inferences depends on special rules of inference which are not merely logical rules, or on suppressed premisses which, when added to the explicit premisses, yield an argument in which the inference is logically, that is deductively, valid. In a contribution to MIND ("Rules of Inference in Moral Reasoning", July 1961), Nelson Pike describes such a debate concerning the nature of moral reasoning. Hare claims that certain moral arguments involve suppressed deductive premisses, whereas Toulmin analyses them in terms of special rules of inference, peculiar to the discourse of morality. Pike concludes that the main points so far made on either side of the dispute are "quite ineffective" (p. 391), and suggests that the problem itself is to blame, since the reasoning of the "ordinary moralist" is too rough and ready for fine logical distinctions to apply (pp. 398-399). In this paper an attempt will be made to take his discussion still further and explain in more detail why arguments in favour of either rules of inference or suppressed premisses must be ineffective. It appears that the root of the trouble has nothing to do with moral reasoning specifically, but arises out of a general temptation to apply to meaningful discourse a distinction which makes sense only in connection with purely formal calculi.
Filename: petters-pdf-2006.pdf
Title: Designing Agents to Understand Infants. PhD thesis, 2006
Author:
Dean Petters
Date Installed:
27 October 2006
Abstract:
This thesis attempts to understand infant behaviour by designing autonomous software agents to reproduce those behaviours in simulation. The infant behaviours that have been investigated are related to the phenomenon of infant attachment. Empirical studies of infant behaviour are abstracted and the function of the behaviours are assessed from an evolutionary perspective. The behaviours are then reformed as scenarios against which simulations can be evaluated. These studies include naturalistic observation of infants at home and exploring a park, and undergoing the Strange Situation Experiment.A number of information processing architectures have been constructed that reproduce the infant behaviours described in scenarios. These vary in complexity from a reactive architecture with no capacity to learn, to reactive architectures that can learn by reinforcement, and deliberative architectures that can reason by forming simple plans. Computational experiments undertaken with interacting infant and carer agents show the presence of interesting dynamic properties, such as positive feedback loops. These feedback loops may provide an explanation for the empirical finding that patterns of infant attachment response cluster into three categories. This thesis demonstrates how the methodology that it is uses in investigating attachment behaviour in infancy may be extended to many other infant and developmental behaviours.
Filename:
imageinterpretation.pdf (OCR version reformatted: 280 KB PDF)
Filename: image-interp-way-ahead.pdf (Scanned original pages: 10MB PDF)
Title: Image interpretation: The way ahead?
Invited talk,
originally published in
Physical and Biological Processing of ImagesAuthor: Aaron Sloman
(Proceedings of an international symposium organised by The Rank Prize Funds, London, Sept 1982.
Editors: O.J.Braddick and A.C. Sleigh.
Pages 380--401, Springer-Verlag
Some unsolved problems about vision are discussed in relation to the goal of understanding the space of possible mechanisms with the power of human vision. The following issues are addressed: What are the functions of vision? What needs to be represented? How should it be represented? What is a good global architecture for a human like visual system? How should the visual sub-system relate to the rest of an intelligent system? It is argued that there is much we do not understand about the representation of visible structures, the functions of a visual system and its relation to the rest of the human mind. Some tentative positive suggestions are made, but more questions are posed than answers.NOTE:
This paper is available in two formats as explained above. The OCR version probably has some errors that I have not corrected. But it is much smaller and easier to read than the scanned in images.
I had forgotten about this paper for many years, until I stumbled across a reference to it. This paper is a precursor to On designing a visual system: Towards a Gibsonian computational model of vision. (Published in 1989). The 1982 paper presents many of the ideas I later developed in the context of a more embracing theory of the architecture of human-like minds, in which there are concurrently active 'layers' of different kinds performing different tasks, some evolutionarily very old some newer, all sharing the same sensors and effectors (see also 'The mind as a control system'). I believe this is potentially a far more powerful and general theory than the currently much discussed 'dual-stream' or 'dual-pathway' theories of vision based on differences between dorsal and ventral visual pathways. But evaluating the ideas I have been developing requires a much broader multi-disciplinary perspective, which makes them hard for most people to take in.
Filename: misc/four-kinds-freewill.html
Title: Four Concepts of Freewill: Two of them incoherent
Author:
Aaron Sloman
Date Installed:
10 Jun 2006
Abstract:
There are at least four different notions of free will that drive philosophical and scientific discussions of the concept. Two of them make sense and are completely consistent with determinism. Two of them are incoherent, but worries about them cause people to argue that freewill is inconsistent with determinism. The coherent notions are the ordinary language notion used in giving or rejecting excuses for and explanations of action, and the more refined version of that used in law courts. The incoherent notions of freewill are the theological notion and the romantic notion.
Filename: misc/asimov-three-laws.html
Title: Why Asimov's three laws of robotics are unethical
Author:
Aaron Sloman
Date Installed:
9 Jun 2006
Abstract:
Every now and again I get asked for views on Asimov's laws of robotics. Here are some questions and my answers.
To Appear in Proceedings of Workshop on Context Representation and Reasoning (CRR 2006) at ECAI 2006Authors: Manuela Viezzer, Niek Wijngaards and Masja Kempen
Abstract:
Several high level methodological debates among AI researchers, linguists, psychologists and philosophers, appear to be endless, e.g. about the need for and nature of representations, about the role of symbolic processes, about embodiment, about situatedness, about whether symbol-grounding is needed, and about whether a robot needs any knowledge at birth or can start simply with a powerful learning mechanism. Consideration of the variety of capabilities and development patterns on the precocial-altricial spectrum in biological organisms will help us to see these debates in a new light.
See also the School of Computer Science Web page.
This file is maintained by
Aaron Sloman, and designed to be
lynx-friendly,
and
viewable with any browser.
Email A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk