Persuasive Intelligence: On the Construction of Rhetor-Ethical Cognitive Machines

This work concerns the rhetorical and moral agency of machines, offering paths forward in machine ethics as well as problematizing the issue through the development and use of an interdisciplinary framework informed by rhetoric, philosophy of mind, media studies and historical narrative. I argue that cognitive machines of the past as well as those today, such as rapidly improving autonomous vehicles, are unable to make moral decisions themselves foremost because a moral agent must first be a rhetorical agent, capable of persuading and of being persuaded. I show that current machines, artificially intelligent or otherwise, and especially digital computers, are primarily concerned with control, whereas persuasive behavior requires an understanding of possibility. Further, this dissertation connects rhetorical agency and moral agency (what I call a rhetor-ethical constitution) by way of the Heraclitean notion of syllapsis ( grasping ), a mode of cognition that requires an agent to practice analysis and synthesis at once, cognizing the whole and its parts simultaneously. This argument does not, however, indicate that machines are devoid of ethical or rhetorical activity or future agency. To the contrary, the larger purpose of developing this theoretical framework is to provide avenues of research, exploration and experimentation in machine ethics and persuasion that have been overlooked or ignored thus far by adhering to restricted disciplinary programs; and, given the ontological nature of the ephemeral binary that drives digital computation, I show that at least in principle, computers share the syllaptic operating principle required for rhetor-ethical decisions and action

German Idealism, Analytic Philosophy, and Realism

Can one know mind-independent reality? There are two fundamental positions concerning this question: either 1) mind-independent existence causes us to know mind-independent existence, or 2) all knowledge is a construct of the human mind, and therefore mind-independent existence is unknowable. This question holds enormous significance as it establishes the source of truth as being either mind-independent or mind-dependent. It thereby sets the stage for the type of epistemic claims that can be properly defended. Of all the myriad formulations of idealism, Analytic Philosophers have consistently singled out German Idealism to either reject or misappropriate for its own ends. The most significant and provocative occurrences of this trend can be found in the writings of Moore, Russell, Strawson, Sellars, McDowell and Brandom. One objective of this text is to explicate the manner in which these Analytic Philosophers either reject or borrow from German Idealism. A second objective of this text is to answer the following question: what does it mean for Analytic Philosophy when its leading members, such as McDowell and Brandom, continue in the Sellarsian tradition of couching traditional Analytic concerns within the framework of German Idealism? Will it be found, in the final pages of the Analytic tradition, that its original rejection of German Idealism was only a hiccup that restored the Anglo/American traditions back to 18th century German thought? More bluntly still, will we find that only in becoming idealists can Analytic Philosophers have a future? My analysis of Analytic Philosophy\u27s relationship to German Idealism, as it concerns our ability to know mind-independent existence, culminates in two related claims. First, Kant and Hegel hold superior epistemic views to Moore, Russell, Strawson, Sellars, McDowell and Brandom, in that Kant and Hegel can demonstrate their objects of knowledge, while the above noted Analytic thinkers cannot. Second, Sellars, McDowell and Brandom have maneuvered themselves into a corner by borrowing (directly and indirectly) from Kant and Hegel: in order to make their core conceptual, linguistic, and epistemic claims internally consistent, they must proceed to a version of German Idealism and deny their respective versions of realism

Development of a theory for objective assignment of prior probabilities within the context of a decision

Two theories are being presented and advanced. While the philosophical theory of Philosophical processualism is general and aims at supporting the application of mathematics to guide action with precision, the computational theory of Decision Entropy is specific and aims at establishing a set of objective rules for assigning Bayesian priors, that are non-informative regarding the decision at hand. Besides, the concept of probability is being analyzed from a process-centered perspective, and three types of probability are being introduces: propensity, possibility, and credibility. The highlighted distinction is hoped to settle a number of long-standing disputes regarding the interpretation of probabilities. Also, three properties of objectivity, transparency, and defensibility are offered to characterize inductive systems. To evaluate defensibility, a set of seven theoretical principles are being offered including the principle of “unbiased evaluation,” which can be interpreted as the informativeness of priors for the case of Bayesian inductions. Philosophical processualism is an original philosophical perspective advanced as the foundation for an epistemic machinery called pragmatic mathematics; a system of linguistically manifested mental constructs aimed at guiding purposive actions with precision. Philosophical processualism relies upon a process-centered interpretation of causality, which sees an event as a constellation of changes made by a process in certain states of the world and/or the mind. By taking concept as the fundamental constituent of the purposive agents’ evaluation processes, the view presents its ontological account of concepts and elaborate on how concepts could look like, where they could be present, and how they could come to realization. Philosophical processualism opposes Platonism by asserting that every concept is the outcomes of cognitive processes unfolding in time and space and is not an abstract entity in the so-called third realm, to which mind can gain access through unknown metaphysical processes. Probability concept is being analyzed from a process-centered perspective, and it is being divided into three types of propensity, possibility, and credibility. Propensity values are relative repetitions of processual outcomes, as they have come to realization. Possibility values for the outputs of a more-to-less process are the relative contributions of inputs; i.e. the relative number of inputs associated to every output. Credibilities are imaginary relative weights assigned to (the parameters of) the processes, who are hypothesized to deliver the intended outcomes. Credibilities are only means to the end of assessing propensities and/or possibilities, whose exact values are unknown. Bayesian priors are prime examples of credibilities. While the imaginary nature of credibilities allows subjects to assign credibilies of their own preference, their assignment might not be justifiable to others. Alternatively, it is possible to establish a set of theoretical assignment rules on purely logical grounds, and to justify the designations based on their effects, or lack thereof, on the assessed propensities and/or possibilities. Due to their rule abidance, theoretically constructed credibilities may be described as objective, even though imaginary and only existing in subjects’ minds. The class of credibilities called non-informative are the ones, whose assignment are aimed at not informing (certain aspects of) the assessed propensities and/or possibilities. A set of properties including objectivity, transparency, and defensibility are defined to characterize an inductive assessment procedure. Objectivity is concluded to be the result of transparency and community acceptance. Although every communal rule is contractual by nature, its justification makes the procedures defensible, especially when a community is deciding whether to adopt it as the rule. A set of seven theoretical principles are proposed to evaluate the defensibility of an inductive system, namely (I) Evaluative Orientation, (II) Investigative Prioritization, (III) Explicative Sufficiency, (IV) Evaluative Inclusion, (V) Credibility Conception, (VI) Artifact-Reality Division, and (VII) Unbiased Evaluation. Decision Entropy Theory (DET) offers an original method for assessing credible outcomes of uncertain processes by incorporating Bayesian probabilities. Since DET is aimed at guiding purposive action with precision and through the use of mathematical measures, it falls under the category of pragmatic mathematics. DET aims at representing uncertainty in an objective and defensible way. The motivation to develop the theory is to account for the possibility of events occurring that are beyond our range of experience. The theory characterizes uncertainty in the context of making a decision; the case of maximum uncertainty corresponds to the maximum entropy for the possible outcomes of the decision. Therefore, the starting point for assessing probabilities, i.e., the non-informative prior probabilities of possibilities before information is included, depends on the decision at hand. Decision Entropy Theory is developed from the following principles that describe the case of no information or maximum uncertainty in making a decision between various alternatives. 1. If no information is available about the probabilities of decision outcomes, then a selected alternative is equally probable to be or not to be the preferred alternative. 2. If no information is available about the probabilities of decision outcomes, then the possible differences in preference between a selected alternative and the preferred alternative are equally probable. 3. If no information is available about the probabilities of decision outcomes, then the possibilities of learning with new information about the selected alternative compared to the preferred alternative are equally probable. To illustrate the theory, two examples from engineering are being worked out: (a) selecting the appropriate design wave height for offshore structures, and (b) assessing the value of test wells before committing to developing a hydrocarbon resource play. The examples highlight the following points: • The prior sample space depends on the decision, meaning that the importance of extreme uncertainty depends on its consequences to the decision and the availability of feasible decision alternatives to compensate for these consequences. • The prior sample space emphasizes the possibilities that distinguish two alternatives from one another. • The prior sample space can affect the final decision, even when substantive data are available to inform (update) this sample space. • It is unreasonable to assume that the probability distribution for the frequencies can be established based entirely on experience because that precludes the possibility of events beyond our experience. Such events can be particularly important where experience tends to be limited. • The value of information is enhanced when leaving open the possibilities for making excessive gains and losses. • It is possible to rationally balance between relying entirely on historical data versus not relying on them at all. Within this balance, direct information can be combined with information from analogous cases of the past to inform the decision.Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin

Negation and the Frege Point

This study aims to answer this question. What in the understanding of speakers, is the meaning of negating words and phrases in simple declarative sentences, where the speakers are social agents who engage with each other, and they use the declarative sentences to communicate information? A key constraint on answering this question is drawn from the Frege point. The gist of the Frege point is that the meaning of a declarative sentence does not change by virtue of the speaker judging it true, judging it false, or merely entertaining it. The constraint drawn from the Frege point is that this study must show how the meaning of a declarative sentence can be an object for the speaker’s evaluative regard. I answer this question in two stages. First, I use construals from the cognitive semantics of Langacker to expand Frege’s notion of the meaning (the sense) as mode of presentation. I propose that everyday speakers understand sentences with negation in terms of these construals. Second, I engage with the work of Arnauld, Husserl, Ryle, Sellars, Quine, and Dennett in order to develop a transparent account of the contents of speakers’ understanding. This creates a second key constraint on answering the question. In a thorough-going transparent account, ideas, concepts, thoughts, and acts of thinking cannot be taken as givens (Sellars’ term) to the immediate acquaintance of the mind, so they cannot be foundational in an account of what is in the speakers’ understanding of the meaning/sense; as they are in accounts from Arnauld and Husserl. For my method, I develop a toolkit of distinctions: prominently the distinction between the content of an idea and the idea as an entity; and a notation of square brackets to mark when from my third-person perspective I am conveying the content of a speaker’s understanding. The method is important for the task of discussing the content of a speaker’s understanding. Using this method, I argue that everyday speakers’ understanding of the construals, especially the construals for reference and predication, is based on the speakers’ understanding of other agents and their engagements with their surroundings. I show how negation fits into this account and how this account meets the constraint for a transparent approach and the constraint drawn from the Frege point

Cognition and Learning: The Implications of a Situated Connectionist Perspective for Theory and Practice in Education.

In this dissertation I attempt to construct a framework for an alternate theory of instruction, starting from the position that education has no theory of learning; instead, what passes for theories of learning are actually descriptions of the conditions under which knowledge is acquired. Descriptive theorizing does not serve education well because it is not likely, being a description of what is known told in terms of assumed categories, to be generative or adaptive. I question the naturalness of current assumptions about thought and learning by tracing the consolidation of the present discursive formation around a presumed unity of logic, language, and causality based on the forms of geometry. A crucial move in that consolidation was Descartes\u27 formulation of thought as essentially logical. As our culture deals with the contradictions inherent in this formulation, new disciplines of knowledge arise. Most interestingly for education, the new disciplines of cognitive science and artificial intelligence have pushed the idea that humans are computers, that we reason by calculation, to the breaking point. It has become increasingly obvious that humans cannot think according to the forms of logic and connectionist theories which propose alternate images of mind are gaining ascendance. The implications for education are large. I extensively explore the implications of connectionist modeling for a distinctively educational model of learning. These connectionist theories substitute a shifting and uncertain web of associations for the solid storage metaphor common to most educational theorizing and methods. The stability which can no longer be located in the sovereign self must instead be found in the world and in the socially-based practices that constitute both the world and the individual. Situated cognition, pragmatists, and poststructural sociologists are explored to understand the new constellation surrounding learning. A short exploratory study, based on the principles that emerged from the study, of an alternate way to teach categories is experimentally explored and found successful. This work was extended to a computer-based implementation which allowed theoretical ideas concerning time and activity to be explored. Includes a Macintosh disk

The Hermeneutics of Artificial Intelligence

The papers in the following volume are the outcome of a three-year long interdisciplinary research project. The project began with an in-person meeting hosted and funded by the Daimler und Benz Stiftung in Germany in March 2020 (the world was shutting down one nation at a time as we met). During the pandemic we continued to meet monthly online with support from Memorial University of Newfoundland. From the beginning it was the goal of the Working Group on Intelligence (WGI), as we called ourselves, to broaden and deepen the AI debate with a more nuanced understanding of intelligence than is common in cognitive and computer science discussions of AI. We wished to draw on the history of philosophy, ecology, and the philosophy of mind to establish that intelligence is meant in many senses, to use an Aristotelian expression. The clarification of these various meanings is essential to the discussion around the ethics of AI, especially the question concerning the possibility of strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence

A Hindu perspective on the pedagogic significance of the relationship structure

Observations show that antagonising and depressing relationships among individuals and communities are being experienced. In this regard, against the background of a cursory description of the Hindu life-view, the research examines a Hindu perspective on the pedagogic significance of the relationship structure by means of the phenomenological, exemplaric and historical methods. Since man is always in a situation in the world, which influences his being in the world, an attempt to analyse features of modern society in order to establish their effect on the actualisation of authentic Hindu relationships has been undertaken. Examples of these features are materialism; narcissism and hedonism; egalitarianism and globalism; technocracy; secularism and nihilism; violence and also pessimism. In order to properly understand the Hindu life-view and its relevance with regard to the child's authentic relationships, the relationship between the child and significant others, such as parents, family/relatives, other fellow human beings, educator/teacher, community, himself, objects and God, is presented from a Hindu perspective. An analysis of these relationships reveals that a pedagogic relationship structure can be identified. Relevant components of this structure, such as communication, understanding, trust, authority and religiosity are explained from a Hindu perspective. The thesis demonstrates that authentic (Hindu) relationships make it possible to determine sound education principles. In fact, it is demonstrated that authentic relationships and sound education principles are but two sides of the same coin. As such the vital role, which authentic relationship(s) plays with regard to the actualisation of education principles, is discussed from a Hindu perspective. In concluding the study, several recommendations are made. In the final analysis, it is suggested that poor and meaningless relationships can to a certain extent be seen as a response to disregard particular life-views and focus on the promotion of a global society. Sound relationships, on the other hand, can only be established and maintained by identifying norms and values in a world which has contradictory and confusing values. This means that adults and children ought to obey the demands of their life-view, especially because the relationship structure becomes pedagogically significant in terms of a particular life-view.Educational StudiesD. Ed. (Philosophy of Education

Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bodily Experientiality of Contemporary Ecological Science Fiction

Reading Mutant Narratives explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-than-human modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of "mutant narratives". Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction. The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied. As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of "embodied estrangement". Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, "performative enactivism", that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-than-human aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.Reading Mutant Narratives keskittyy ekologista kriisiä käsitteleviin "mutanttikertomuksiin" ja niille tyypilliseen kokemuksellisuuteen. Mutanttikertomukset ovat tieteisfiktiivisiä kertomuksia, joissa ihmiskeskeiset ja posthumanistiset piirteet yhdistyvät ja antavat lukijalle mahdollisuuksia ekologiseen ymmärrykseen. Esimerkkeinä mutanttikertomuksista tutkimus nostaa esiin kolmen yhdysvaltalaisen tieteiskirjailijan, Greg Bearin, Paolo Bacigalupin ja Jeff VanderMeerin, teoksia. Nämä teokset asettavat ihmisen osaksi ekologisia, evolutiivisia ja teknologisia vuorovaikutussuhteita, joissa myös ihmisruumiit ja ruumiillinen kokemus muuttavat muotoaan. Väitöskirja tutkii siis, kuinka tieteisfiktiiviset kertomukset ympäristöllisestä ja kokemuksellisesta muutoksesta voivat kehittää ruumiillista kokemusta. Kertomuksentutkimukseen ja empiiriseen lukijatutkimukseen tukeutuen tutkimus lähtee oletuksesta, että sopivissa olosuhteissa kirjallisuuden lukeminen voi edesauttaa kokemuksellisia muutoksia. Tutkimus tarkastelee tieteisfiktion lukemista eletyn ruumiillisen kokemuksen tasolla. Lukukokemuksen analyysissa otetaan huomioon sekä lukijan ruumiillinen, subjektiivinen ja historiallinen tilanne että luettujen teosten kytkeytyminen romaanikerronnan ja tieteisfiktion lajityypin perinteisiin. Suuri osa nykykirjallisuudesta esittää ruumiillisen kokemuksen luonnollisena ja kätkee oman kerronnallisen vaikutusvaltansa, mutta mutanttikertomusten kerronnalliset keinot saattavat outouttaa lukijoiden ruumiillista kokemusta suhteessa sekä elettyyn ympäristöön että kirjallisuuteen itseensä. Tieteisfiktion tutkimuksen käsitteistöä uudistaen väitöskirja kutsuu tällaista lukemisen dynamiikkaa "ruumiilliseksi vieraannuttamiseksi". Lukukokemuksen analyysien avulla tutkimus esittää, kuinka kirjallisuuden lukeminen ohjaa osaltaan lukijoiden tunne- ja havaintotottumusten muotoutumista. Se tuo yhteen ruumiillis-kognitiivisia ja posthumanistisia lähestymistapoja kirjallisuudentutkimukseen ja muotoilee "performatiivis-enaktiivisen" lähilukemisen metodin, joka auttaa sanallistamaan lukukokemuksen ruumiillisia, ympäristöllisiä ja ei-inhimilliseen kurovia puolia. Ruumiillisen kokemuksellisuuden syventäminen tämän metodin avulla tuo ekologisen tieteisfiktion tiiviimmin osaksi globaalin ympäristömuutoksen kokemuksellista tilannetta

Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is regarded as the founder of transcendental phenomenology, one of the major traditions to emerge in twentieth-century philosophy. In this book Andrea Staiti unearths and examines the deep theoretical links between Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophical debates of his time, showing how his thought developed in response to the conflicting demands of Neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, as well as Husserl's writings on the natural and human sciences that are not available in English translation, Staiti illuminates a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and enriches our understanding of Husserl's thought. His book will interest scholars and students of Husserl, phenomenology, and twentieth-century philosophy more generally