Mandevillian Intelligence: From Individual Vice to Collective Virtue

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive shortcomings, limitations and biases play a positive functional role in yielding various forms of collective cognitive success. When this idea is transposed to the epistemological domain, mandevillian intelligence emerges as the idea that individual forms of intellectual vice may, on occasion, support the epistemic performance of some form of multi-agent ensemble, such as a socio-epistemic system, a collective doxastic agent, or an epistemic group agent. As a specific form of collective intelligence, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to a number of debates in social epistemology, especially those that seek to understand how group (or collective) knowledge arises from the interactions between a collection of individual epistemic agents. Beyond this, however, mandevillian intelligence raises issues that are relevant to the research agendas of both virtue epistemology and applied epistemology. From a virtue epistemological perspective, mandevillian intelligence encourages us to adopt a relativistic conception of intellectual vice/virtue, enabling us to see how individual forms of intellectual vice may (sometimes) be relevant to collective forms of intellectual virtue. In addition, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to the nascent sub-discipline of applied epistemology. In particular, mandevillian intelligence forces us see the potential epistemic value of (e.g., technological) interventions that create, maintain or promote individual forms of intellectual vice

Group Formation Techniques in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: A Systematic Literature Review

Group formation is an essential process for group development lifecycle. It has been a growing concern to many researchers to be applied automatically in collaborative learning contexts. Forming a group is an atomic process that is affected by various factors. These factors differ depending on the group members characteristics, the context of the grouping process and the techniques used to form the group(s). This paper surveys the recently published work in group formation process providing a systematic literature review in which 30 relevant studies were analyzed. The findings of this review propose two taxonomies. The first one is for the attributes of group formation while the second is for the grouping techniques. Furthermore, we present the main findings and highlight the limitations of existing approaches in computer supported collaborative learning environment. We suggest some potential directions for future research with group formation process in both theoretical and practical aspects. In addition, We emphasize other improvements that may be inter-related with other computing areas such as cloud computing and mobility

The shades of social. A discussion of "The social origins of language", ed. Daniel Dor, Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis

Turning to the social dimension has been an influential trend in recent language evolution literature, as documented by e.g. Dunbar  et al. (ed. 2014), Scott-Phillips (2014), or Pina and Gontier (ed. 2014). The social origins of language , edited by Daniel Dor, Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, is of special interest, because rather than just being part of this trend, it aims to redefine the current discourse in language origins research, making it inclusive and “society first”. Collectively, the twenty four chapters of this volume make a powerful statement for a broad, incorporative, “everything counts” approach to language evolution. By demonstrating the relevance to language evolution research of a wide variety of social, cultural and cognitive factors, The social origins of language  is potentially – and hopefully – a game changing contribution to this field of study

COIN@AAMAS2015

COIN@AAMAS2015 is the nineteenth edition of the series and the fourteen papers included in these proceedings demonstrate the vitality of the community and will provide the grounds for a solid workshop program and what we expect will be a most enjoyable and enriching debate.Peer reviewe

Industry Clusters and Food Value Chains: Can the Literature on Local Collective Failure be used as a Guide for Assessing and Overcoming Value Chain Failure?

In this paper the literature on industry clusters as a response to local collective failure is reviewed as a way of enhancing knowledge about how failure of food value chains to perform efficiently can be analysed and overcome. The conclusion is that there is much in the local collective failure literature that assists in an understanding of, and is consistent with, the concepts of value chain failure, value chain externalities and value chain goods. Four potential areas for enhancing the analysis of value chains by accessing this literature are noted: defining the boundary between chain failure and local collective failure; improving joint action among parties interested in overcoming chain failure; augmenting the processes of knowledge creation and application in value chains; and improving the governance of value chains. The key point is that the ability of local collective or value chain partners to produce chain goods and internalise positive chain externalities depends directly on the nature and intent of the joint action by the partners: will they cooperate or not, and, if they do cooperate, how and to what extent will they do so? These issues of coordination of economic activity and the nature of the relationships between partners go to the heart of governance within both local communities and value chains

Reasoning about Dependence, Preference and Coalitional Power

This paper presents a logic of preference and functional dependence (LPFD) and its hybrid extension (HLPFD), both of whose sound and strongly complete axiomatization are provided. The decidability of LPFD is also proved. The application of LPFD and HLPFD to modelling cooperative games in strategic and coalitional forms is explored. The resulted framework provides a unified view on Nash equilibrium, Pareto optimality and the core. The philosophical relevance of these game-theoretical notions to discussions of collective agency is made explicit. Some key connections with other logics are also revealed, for example, the coalition logic, the logic functional dependence and the logic of ceteris paribus preference

Cultural affordances : scaffolding local worlds through shared intentionality and regimes of attention

Abstract: In this paper we outline a framework for the study of the mechanisms involved in the engagement of human agents with cultural affordances. Our aim is to better understand how culture and context interact with human biology to shape human behavior, cognition, and experience. We attempt to integrate several related approaches in the study of the embodied, cognitive, and affective substrates of sociality and culture and the sociocultural scaffolding of experience. The integrative framework we propose bridges cognitive and social sciences to provide (i) an expanded concept of ‘affordance’ that extends to sociocultural forms of life, and (ii) a multilevel account of the socioculturally scaffolded forms of affordance learning and the transmission of affordances in patterned sociocultural practices and regimes of shared attention. This framework provides an account of how cultural content and normative practices are built on a foundation of contentless basic mental processes that acquire content through immersive participation of the agent in social practices that regulate joint attention and shared intentionalit

What "Extended Me" knows

Arguments for the ‘extended mind’ seem to suggest the possibility of ‘extended knowers’—agents whose specifically epistemic virtues may depend on systems whose boundaries are not those of the brain or the biological organism. Recent discussions of this possibility invoke insights from virtue epistemology, according to which knowledge is the result of the application of some kind of cognitive skill or ability on the part of the agent. In this paper, I argue that there is a fundamental tension in these appeals to cognitive virtue. The tension centers on the presence of a tool or technology as an object of awareness, hence something apt for epistemically virtuous engagement on the part of the agent. I highlight a dilemma: the better something looks as a non-biological element of the machinery of mind, the worse it looks as a potential object of any specifically epistemic skill or ability on the part of the agent. The tension is resolved, I argue, by thinking about sub-personal forms of epistemic hygiene. I examine one such form (rooted in the vision of the ‘predictive brain’), and show how it sits neatly with the vision of the extended mind. I end by asking what we can still reasonably expect, given this more complex sub-personal story, by way of agent-level cognitive hygiene

INVESTIGATING AGENT AND TASK OPENNESS IN ADHOC TEAM FORMATION

When deciding which ad hoc team to join, agents are often required to consider rewards from accomplishing tasks as well as potential benefits from learning when working with others, when solving tasks. We argue that, in order to decide when to learn or when to solve task, agents have to consider the existing agents’ capabilities and tasks available in the environment, and thus agents have to consider agent and task openness—the rate of new, previously unknown agents (and tasks) that are introduced into the environment. We further assume that agents evolve their capabilities intrinsically through learning by observation or learning by doing when working in a team. Thus, an agent will need to consider which task to do or which team to join would provide the best situation for such learning to occur. In this thesis, we develop an auction-based multiagent simulation framework, a mechanism to simulate openness in our environment, and conduct comprehensive experiments to investigate the impact of agent and task openness. We propose several agent task selection strategies to leverage the environmental openness. Furthermore, we present a multiagent solution for agent-based collaborative human task assignment when finding suitable tasks for users in complex environments is made especially challenging by agent openness and task openness. Using an auction-based protocol to fairly assign tasks, software agents model uncertainty in the outcomes of bids caused by openness, then acquire tasks for people that maximize both the user’s utility gain and learning opportunities for human users (who improve their abilities to accomplish future tasks through learning by experience and by observing more capable humans). Experimental results demonstrate the effects of agent and task openness on collaborative task assignment, the benefits of reasoning about openness, and the value of non-myopically choosing tasks to help people improve their abilities for uncertain future tasks

The Problem of Mental Action

In mental action there is no motor output to be controlled and no sensory input vector that could be manipulated by bodily movement. It is therefore unclear whether this specific target phenomenon can be accommodated under the predictive processing framework at all, or if the concept of “active inference” can be adapted to this highly relevant explanatory domain. This contribution puts the phenomenon of mental action into explicit focus by introducing a set of novel conceptual instruments and developing a first positive model, concentrating on epistemic mental actions and epistemic self-control. Action initiation is a functionally adequate form of self-deception; mental actions are a specific form of predictive control of effective connectivity, accompanied and possibly even functionally mediated by a conscious “epistemic agent model”. The overall process is aimed at increasing the epistemic value of pre-existing states in the conscious self-model, without causally looping through sensory sheets or using the non-neural body as an instrument for active inference