The Philosophy and Psychology of Commitment

The phenomenon of commitment is a cornerstone of human social life. Commitments make individuals’ behavior predictable, thereby facilitating the planning and coordination of joint actions involving multiple agents. Moreover, commitments make people willing to rely upon each other, and thereby contribute to sustaining characteristically human social institutions such as jobs, money, government and marriage. However, it is not well understood how people identify and assess the level of their own and others’ commitments. The Philosophy and Psychology of Commitment explores and explains the philosophical and cognitive intricacies of commitment. John Michael considers how commitments motivate us and their often implicit and tacit nature. To flesh out the philosophical framework of his argument he draws on experimental work with young children, adults and human-robot interaction within the context of joint action, considering the role of the emotions and whether very young children are sensitive to commitment. Providing an important account of the nature and operation of commitment, this book is essential reading for those working in philosophy of psychology, cognitive science, experimental philosophy, and social and developmental psychology. It will also be of interest to those working in emerging fields such as human-robot interaction and behavioural economics

Coding Scheme for Negative Utterances

This document contains an abbreviated version of a coding scheme employed for the pragmatic 2-coder analysis of negation types and their felicity. It was used for the coding of negative utterances originating from human-robot dialogues gathered in the experiments described in articles contained in the reference list. Some theoretical parts as well as sections on future work have been removed for space reasons. The complete scheme is contained in the author's thesis. The scheme was devised by the author who also acted as first coder. Additionally a second coder was employed, and those parts of the coding scheme handed to the latter as coding manual are marked as such.Downloa

Towards a Characterisation of Assets and Knowledge Created in Technological Agreements Some Evidence from the Automobile-Robotics Sector

This paper tries to bring new insights on the dynamics of inter-firm by focusing on cognitive and organisational dimensions. We consider the knowledge bases created inside the agreement and the characteristics of such knowledge bases (such as tacitness, level of generality, degree of centralisation...). The nature of assets for supporting this creation is also essential for the redeployability of knowledge created. We began by a brief review of some problems encountered by transactions cost economics and present some case studies of agreements between firms in the automobile and robotics sector. After having presented a taxonomy of knowledge and assets involved in such agreements, we bring some new discussion on the exploration/exploitation's dilemma. We argue finally that our taxonomy may be fruitful for a better understanding of the dynamic of firm boudaries by trying to go deeper into the "black box" of agreements.Inter-firm relations, automobile industry, technological agreements

Exploring Design Space For An Integrated Intelligent System

Understanding the trade-offs available in the design space of intelligent systems is a major unaddressed element in the study of Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we approach this problem in two ways. First, we discuss the development of our integrated robotic system in terms of its trajectory through design space. Second, we demonstrate the practical implications of architectural design decisions by using this system as an experimental platform for comparing behaviourally similar yet architecturally different systems. The results of this show that our system occupies a "sweet spot" in design space in terms of the cost of moving information between processing components

The sense of commitment in human-robot interaction

The sense of commitment is a fundamental building block of human social life. By generating and/or stabilizing expectations about contributions that individual agents will make to the goals of other agents or to shared goals, a sense of commitment can facilitate the planning and coordination of actions involving multiple agents. Moreover, it can also increase individual agents’ motivation to contribute to other agents’ goals or to shared goals, as well as their willingness to rely on other agents’ contributions. In this paper, we provide a starting point for designing robots that exhibit and/or elicit a sense of commitment. We identify several challenges that such a project would likely confront, and consider possibilities for meeting these challenges

Communicative Acts Performance of an Indonesian Child

This study attempts to describe the communicative acts of an Indonesian child by using the coding system of speech acts proposed by Ninio and Snow. The data are the subject\u27s spoken utterances which were recorded. The findings show that the subject performed (in frequency of occurrence order) Questions and Responses (33.96%), Directives and Responses (25.15%), Statements and Responses (19.49%), Markings and Responses (7.54%0), Evaluations (5.66%), Commitments and Responses (5.66%), Declarations and Responses (1.25%), and Speech Elicitations and Responses (1.25%). The Performances and Demands for Clarifications were not performed by the subject at all