Some Varieties of Superparadox. The implications of dynamic contradiction, the characteristic form of breakdown of breakdown of sense to which self-reference is prone

The Problem of the Paradoxes came to the fore in philosophy and mathematics with the discovery of Russell's Paradox in 1901. It is the "forgotten" intellectual-scientific problem of the Twentieth Century, because for more than sixty years a pretence was maintained, by a consensus of logicians, that the problem had been "solved"

Clause-Type, Force, and Normative Judgment in the Semantics of Imperatives

I argue that imperatives express contents that are both cognitively and semantically related to, but nevertheless distinct from, modal propositions. Imperatives, on this analysis, semantically encode features of planning that are modally specified. Uttering an imperative amounts to tokening this feature in discourse, and thereby proffering it for adoption by the audience. This analysis deals smoothly with the problems afflicting Portner's Dynamic Pragmatic account and Kaufmann's Modal account. It also suggests an appealing reorientation of clause-type theorizing, in which the cognitive act of updating on a typed sentence plays a central role in theorizing about both its semantics and role in discourse

Belief and bounded rationality

Predictive accounts of belief ascription, either following the principle of charity or Dennett's intentional stance, have proved popular recently. However, such accounts require us first to treat agents as perfectly rational agents and then revise this assumption as appropriate. I argue that such downwards revision is no easy task and that several proposed accounts are not satisfactory. I propose a way of characterising agent's belief states which shares Dennett's approach but avoids treating agents as perfectly rational, and develop a formal account in terms of fan models

From coder to creator : responsibility issues in intelligent artifact design

Creation of autonomously acting, learning artifacts has reached a point where humans cannot any more be justly held responsible for the actions of certain types of machines. Such machines learn during operation, thus continuously changing their original behaviour in uncontrollable (by the initial manufacturer) ways. They act without effective supervision and have an epistemic advantage over humans, in that their extended sensory apparatus, their superior processing speed and perfect memory render it impossible for humans to supervise the machine\u27s decisions in real-time. We survey the techniques of artificial intelligence engineering, showing that there has been a shift in the role of the programmer of such machines from a coder (who has complete control over the program in the machine) to a mere creator of software organisms which evolve and develop by themselves. We then discuss the problem of responsibility ascription to such machines, trying to avoid the metaphysical pitfalls of the mind-body problem. We propose five criteria for purely legal responsibility, which are in accordance both with the findings of contemporary analytic philosophy and with legal practise. We suggest that Stahl\u27s (2006) concept of quasi-responsibility might also be a way to handle the responsibility gap

Rethinking International Compensation: From Expatriate and National Cultures to Strategic Flexibility

[Excerpt] We are on the verge of a worldwide restructuring of compensation and reward systems. Even long established, seemingly carved-in-granite cultural norms, such as lifetime employment in Japan and industry-wide bargaining in Germany, are weakening in response to the pressures of a global economy. So also are our previously hard-and-fast assumptions about international compensation -- the idea that pay systems should keep expatriates “economically whole” and the notion that local compensation should be tailored to fit national cultures

Commentary on Linda Mealey (1995), The sociobiology of sociopathy: An integrated evolutionary model

[SFS] When Genotype × Environment (G × E) interactions are present, heritability estimates are not interpretable. Mealey cites abundant evidence for G × E interactions in the etiology of sociopathy, thereby completely undermining estimates of the heritability of sociopathy which form the foundation of her model. Without proper evidence for a genetic basis of sociopathy, Mealey’s sociobiological model collapses under its own great weight. [LM] It is impossible to discuss the constructs “heritability,” “theory of mind,” and “normality” in a single coherent essay. The following three rejoinders address each of these exceedingly complex constructs individually, as each relates to the two-path model of sociopathy and psychopathy

Intentionality and neuroscience

Most, if not all of us, are in practice mental realists: We explain and predict each other's actions by invoking the attribution of mental states. It is characteristic for many mental states to have intentional content, i.e. for thoughts, desires, intentions or emotions to be about dinner, meetings, sunshine, stock markets, elections, and so on. Intentional contents are assigned on the basis of a rational assessment of behavioral (and other) evidence. Many of us also wish to adhere to the notion that invoking intentional mental states does not imply having to commit to dualism, to a ghostly realm of minds and souls which exists over and above the physical world. Specifically, it is widely believed that the investigation of the brain is integral to explaining how the mind works, and that our mental states fundamentally depend on what happens in our brains. At the same time, it is not all that clear that matters of the mind are in any ontological or explanatory way identical to matters of the brain. Hence, it is prudent to neither adopt the notion that mental states are unrelated to the physical, nor that they can be reduced to the physical. Rather, a moderate position between dualism and reductionism is warranted. This book both gives a comprehensive account of the way explanation by mental state works and of how representational/intentional properties are related to matters of the brain, i.e. to matters described by physics, chemistry and biology. The former, which takes up the first part of the book, is rooted in major accounts of a scientific model of explanation by mental states as delineated by recent analytic philosophy, such as Davidson's, Dennett's, Cummins's or Fodor's. The latter, which takes up the second part, involves an inquiry into current empirical studies investigating matters of neural representation and the theoretical frameworks which – sometimes openly, sometimes tacitly – come with it. It not only yields a unified account of representation in cognitive and neuroscience, but also relates cognitive and neural representation to mental intentionality, and ultimately endorses the investigation of cognition by neuroscientific methods as a way of establishing a translation manual between mind and brain state descriptions. Specifically, recent “mindreading” or braincomputer-interface studies are considered as examples for this ongoing endeavor. Building on Quine's and Davidson's theories of interpretation, it is shown that such correlational studies in cognitive neuroscience satisfy their criteria for empirically specifying meaning by way of holistic truth theories, thereby producing localized translations. These translations are non-reductive, since they are bound to irreducible principles underlying the ascription of intentional content, but at the same time, they establish strong semantic bonds between mind and brain, honoring widely shared views about a strong constitutional link between brain and mind

Epistemological vs. Ontological Relationalism in Quantum Mechanics: Relativism or Realism?

In this paper we investigate the history of relationalism and its present use in some interpretations of quantum mechanics. In the first part of this article we will provide a conceptual analysis of the relation between substantivalism, relationalism and relativism in the history of both physics and philosophy. In the second part, we will address some relational interpretations of quantum mechanics, namely, Bohr's relational approach, the modal interpretation by Kochen, the perspectival modal version by Bene and Dieks and the relational interpretation by Rovelli. We will argue that all these interpretations ground their understanding of relations in epistemological terms. By taking into account the analysis on the first part of our work, we intend to highlight the fact that there is a different possibility for understanding quantum mechanics in relational terms which has not been yet considered within the foundational literature. This possibility is to consider relations in (non-relativist) ontological terms. We will argue that such an understanding might be capable of providing a novel approach to the problem of representing what quantum mechanics is really talking about.Comment: Welcome