Can Rats Reason?

Since at least the mid-1980s claims have been made for rationality in rats. For example, that rats are capable of inferential reasoning (Blaisdell, Sawa, Leising, & Waldmann, 2006; Bunsey & Eichenbaum, 1996), or that they can make adaptive decisions about future behavior (Foote & Crystal, 2007), or that they are capable of knowledge in propositional-like form (Dickinson, 1985). The stakes are rather high, because these capacities imply concept possession and on some views (e.g., Rödl, 2007; Savanah, 2012) rationality indicates self-consciousness. I evaluate the case for rat rationality by analyzing 5 key research paradigms: spatial navigation, metacognition, transitive inference, causal reasoning, and goal orientation. I conclude that the observed behaviors need not imply rationality by the subjects. Rather, the behavior can be accounted for by noncognitive processes such as hard-wired species typical predispositions or associative learning or (nonconceptual) affordance detection. These mechanisms do not necessarily require or implicate the capacity for rationality. As such there is as yet insufficient evidence that rats can reason. I end by proposing the ‘Staircase Test,’ an experiment designed to provide convincing evidence of rationality in rats

The Mode of Computing

The Turing Machine is the paradigmatic case of computing machines, but there are others, such as Artificial Neural Networks, Table Computing, Relational-Indeterminate Computing and diverse forms of analogical computing, each of which based on a particular underlying intuition of the phenomenon of computing. This variety can be captured in terms of system levels, re-interpreting and generalizing Newell's hierarchy, which includes the knowledge level at the top and the symbol level immediately below it. In this re-interpretation the knowledge level consists of human knowledge and the symbol level is generalized into a new level that here is called The Mode of Computing. Natural computing performed by the brains of humans and non-human animals with a developed enough neural system should be understood in terms of a hierarchy of system levels too. By analogy from standard computing machinery there must be a system level above the neural circuitry levels and directly below the knowledge level that is named here The mode of Natural Computing. A central question for Cognition is the characterization of this mode. The Mode of Computing provides a novel perspective on the phenomena of computing, interpreting, the representational and non-representational views of cognition, and consciousness.Comment: 35 pages, 8 figure

Law and norm: justice administration and the human sciences in early juvenile justice in Victoria

A recurring motif in law and legal studies literature is the relations between justice and legal administration on the one hand, and the social and human sciences on the other. Judicial and non-judicial systems of knowledge and practice are viewed as separate and distinct, as in some recent critique of the ‘New Penology’ that posit fundamental tensions between justice and welfare models of penality. Alternately, theorists have ‘de-centred’ law by focusing on the way in which problems form at the intersection of both legal and extra-legal institutions. This paper reviews the literature on the close interconnectedness of ‘welfare’ and ‘justice’ models of penal policy and ways of conceiving these relations in terms of a ‘complex’ involving justice administration and the conduct of the human sciences. It then attempts to demonstrate these relations, historically, in the ‘cross-talk’ of agencies involved in establishing the children’s court and the court clinic in Victoria. Finally, the paper argues that the specific effects of law in this particular jurisdiction were to mandate the social scientific instruments needed to construct and promote the notion of a ‘normal family’. This account may have implications for contemporary juvenile justice policy and images of family in the present

Optimal monetary policy in a hybrid New Keynesian model with a cost channel

This study shows that an expectations-based optimal policy rule has desirable properties in a standard macroeconomic model incorporating a cost channel for monetary disturbances and inflation rate expectations that are partly backward-looking. Specifically, optimal monetary policy under commitment is associated with a determinate REE that is stable under learning, whereas, under discretion, the central bank has to be sufficiently inflation averse for the equilibrium to have these properties.commitment; determinacy; discretion; expectations-based rule; least squares learning