A Critique of Alfred R Mele’s Work on Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy

The book, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (1995), by Alfred R. Mele, deals primarily with two main concepts, “self-control” and “individual autonomy,” and the relationship between them. The book is divided into two parts: (1) a view of self-control, the self-controlled person, and behaviour manifesting self-control, and (2) a view of personal autonomy, the autonomous person, and autonomous behaviour. Mele (Ibid.) defines self-control as the opposite of the Aristotelian concept of akrasia, or the contrary of akrasia, which implies weakness of will, incontinence, or lack of self-control—the state of mind in which one acts against one’s better judgement. According to Mele, the concept of self-control can be approached from two perspectives: (a) how self-control affects human behaviour, and (b) how self-control-associated behavior can enhance our understanding of ‘personal autonomy’ and ‘autonomous behaviour’—personal autonomy requires self-control, and autonomous persons and autonomous behaviour are naturally found together. Therefore, I might say that self-control is essential to enhancing one’s autonomy. In part I, we find an account of self-control where Mele argues that even an ideally self-controlled person might lack autonomy. In part II, Mele gives an explicit account of autonomy and explains what must be added to self-control to achieve autonomy. This is the pivotal claim made by Mele (dismantling the intuitively connected notions of self-control and autonomy)

Logic, self-awareness and self-improvement: The metacognitive loop and the problem of brittleness

This essay describes a general approach to building perturbation-tolerant autonomous systems, based on the conviction that artificial agents should be able notice when something is amiss, assess the anomaly, and guide a solution into place. We call this basic strategy of self-guided learning the metacognitive loop; it involves the system monitoring, reasoning about, and, when necessary, altering its own decision-making components. In this essay, we (a) argue that equipping agents with a metacognitive loop can help to overcome the brittleness problem, (b) detail the metacognitive loop and its relation to our ongoing work on time-sensitive commonsense reasoning, (c) describe specific, implemented systems whose perturbation tolerance was improved by adding a metacognitive loop, and (d) outline both short-term and long-term research agendas

Assertion and Testimony

[The version of this paper published by Oxford online in 2019 was not copy-edited and has some sense-obscuring typos. I have posted a corrected (but not the final published) version on this site. The version published in print in 2020 has these corrections.] Which is more fundamental, assertion or testimony? Should we understand assertion as basic, treating testimony as what you get when you add an interpersonal addressee? Or should we understand testimony as basic, treating mere assertion -- assertion without testimony -- as what you get when you subtract that interpersonal relation? In this chapter, I’ll argue for the subtractive approach and for the more general thesis that its treatment of the interpersonal element in assertion makes understanding that interpersonal element the key to understanding how assertion expresses belief. My theory of belief-expression in assertion treats it as internalizing the transmission of belief in testimony. How we understand that internalizing move depends on how we conceptualize the interpersonal element in testimony. Since what I’ll call the Command Model does not give us the conceptual resources to make this move, we should adopt an alternative that I’ll call the Custodial Model, on which a testifier aims not to convince her addressee but to reason with him – to give him reasons to believe what she tells him grounded in her trustworthiness in thus attempting to influence him. The subtractive approach to assertion thus rests on a key distinction between the aims of reasoning and persuasion

Sounds of Waitakere: Using practitioner research to explore how Year 6 recorder players compose responses to visual representations of a natural environment

How might primary students utilise the stimulus of a painting in a collaborative composition drawing on a non-conventional sound palette of their own making? This practitioner research features 17 recorder players from a Year 6 class (10–11-year-olds) who attend a West Auckland primary school in New Zealand. These children were invited to experiment with the instrument to produce collectively an expanded ‘repertoire’ or ‘palette’ of sounds. In small groups, they then discussed a painting by an established New Zealand painter set in the Waitakere Ranges and attempted to formulate an interpretation in musical terms. On the basis of their interpretation, drawing on sounds from the collective palette (complemented with other sounds), they worked collaboratively to develop, refine and perform a structured composition named for their chosen painting. This case study is primarily descriptive (providing narrative accounts and rich vignettes of practice) and, secondarily, exploratory (description and analysis leading to the development of hypotheses). It has implications for a range of current educational issues, including curriculum integration and the place of composition and notation in the primary-school music programme

Mental states in communication

Abstract. This paper is concerned with the mental processes involved in intentional communication. I describe an agent's cognitive architecture as the set of cognitive dynamics (i.e., sequences of mental states with contents) she may entertain. I then describe intentional communication as one such specific dynamics, arguing against the prevailing view that communication consists in playing a role in a socially shared script. The cognitive capabilities needed for such dynamics are midreading (i.e., the ability to reason upon another individual's mental states), and communicative planning (i.e., the ability to dynamically represent and act in a communicative situation)

Linguistic Interventions and Transformative Communicative Disruption

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language

What is Reasoning?

Reasoning is a certain kind of attitude-revision. What kind? The aim of this paper is to introduce and defend a new answer to this question, based on the idea that reasoning is a goodness-fixing kind. Our central claim is that reasoning is a functional kind: it has a constitutive point or aim that fixes the standards for good reasoning. We claim, further, that this aim is to get fitting attitudes. We start by considering recent accounts of reasoning due to Ralph Wedgwood and John Broome, and argue that, while these accounts contain important insights, they are not satisfactory: Wedgwood’s rules out too much, and Broome’s too little. We then introduce and defend our alternative account, discuss some of its implications and attractions, and, finally, consider objections

Attributions as Behavior Explanations: Toward a New Theory

Attribution theory has played a major role in social-psychological research. Unfortunately, the term attribution is ambiguous. According to one meaning, forming an attribution is making a dispositional (trait) inference from behavior; according to another meaning, forming an attribution is giving an explanation (especially of behavior). The focus of this paper is on the latter phenomenon of behavior explanations. In particular, I discuss a new theory of explanation that provides an alternative to classic attribution theory as it dominates the textbooks and handbooks—which is typically as a version of Kelley’s (1967) model of attribution as covariation detection. I begin with a brief critique of this theory and, out of this critique, develop a list of requirements that an improved theory has to meet. I then introduce the new theory, report empirical data in its support, and apply it to a number of psychological phenomena. I finally conclude with an assessment of how much progress we have made in understanding behavior explanations and what has yet to be learned