8 research outputs found
Abduction, Dispositions, and Alternatives in Science : On the Rational Reconstruction of Scientific Negotiation
Abduction, Dispositions, and Alternatives in Science : On the Rational Reconstruction of Scientific Negotiatio
Consciousness in Interdisciplinary Perspective: Discussions from the Hall Center for the Humanities Fall Faculty Colloquium 2011
This volume contains a collection of discussions from the 2011 Hall Center for the Humanities Fall Faculty Colloquium, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Where is cognition? Towards an embodied, situated, and distributed interactionist theory of cognitive activity
In recent years researchers from a variety of cognitive science disciplines have begun to challenge some of the core assumptions of the dominant theoretical framework of cognitivism including the representation-computational view of cognition, the sense-model-plan-act understanding of cognitive architecture, and the use of a formal task description strategy for investigating the organisation of internal mental processes. Challenges to these assumptions are illustrated using empirical findings and theoretical arguments from the fields such as situated robotics, dynamical systems approaches to cognition, situated action and distributed cognition research, and sociohistorical studies of cognitive development. Several shared themes are extracted from the findings in these research programmes including: a focus on agent-environment systems as the primary unit of analysis; an attention to agent-environment interaction dynamics; a vision of the cognizer's internal mechanisms as essentially reactive and decentralised in nature; and a tendency for mutual definitions of agent, environment, and activity. It is argued that, taken together, these themes signal the emergence of a new approach to cognition called embodied, situated, and distributed interactionism. This interactionist alternative has many resonances with the dynamical systems approach to cognition. However, this approach does not provide a theory of the implementing substrate sufficient for an interactionist theoretical framework. It is suggested that such a theory can be found in a view of animals as autonomous systems coupled with a portrayal of the nervous system as a regulatory, coordinative, and integrative bodily subsystem. Although a number of recent simulations show connectionism's promise as a computational technique in simulating the role of the nervous system from an interactionist perspective, this embodied connectionist framework does not lend itself to understanding the advanced 'representation hungry' cognition we witness in much human behaviour. It is argued that this problem can be solved by understanding advanced cognition as the re-use of basic perception-action skills and structures that this feat is enabled by a general education within a social symbol-using environment
Emergent Design
Explorations in Systems Phenomenology in Relation to Ontology, Hermeneutics and the Meta-dialectics of Design
SYNOPSIS
A Phenomenological Analysis of Emergent Design is performed based on the foundations of General Schemas Theory. The concept of Sign Engineering is explored in terms of Hermeneutics, Dialectics, and Ontology in order to define Emergent Systems and Metasystems Engineering based on the concept of Meta-dialectics.
ABSTRACT
Phenomenology, Ontology, Hermeneutics, and Dialectics will dominate our inquiry into
the nature of the Emergent Design of the System and its inverse dual, the Meta-system. This is an speculative dissertation that attempts to produce a philosophical, mathematical, and theoretical view of the nature of Systems Engineering Design. Emergent System Design, i.e., the design of yet unheard of and/or hitherto non-existent Systems and Metasystems is the focus. This study is a frontal assault on the hard problem of explaining how Engineering produces new things, rather than a repetition or reordering of concepts that already exist. In this work the philosophies of E. Husserl, A. Gurwitsch, M. Heidegger, J. Derrida, G. Deleuze, A. Badiou, G. Hegel, I. Kant and other Continental Philosophers are brought to bear on different aspects of how new technological systems come into existence through the midwifery of Systems Engineering. Sign Engineering is singled out as the most important aspect of Systems Engineering. We will build on the work of Pieter Wisse and extend his theory of Sign Engineering to define Meta-dialectics in the form of Quadralectics and then Pentalectics. Along the way the various ontological levels of Being are explored in conjunction with the discovery that the Quadralectic is related to the possibility of design primarily at the Third Meta-level of Being, called Hyper Being. Design Process is dependent upon the emergent possibilities that appear in Hyper Being. Hyper Being, termed by Heidegger as Being (Being crossed-out) and termed by Derrida as Differance, also appears as the widest space within the Design Field at the third meta-level of Being and therefore provides the most leverage that is needed to produce emergent effects. Hyper Being is where possibilities appear within our worldview. Possibility is necessary for emergent events to occur. Hyper Being possibilities are extended by Wild Being propensities to allow the embodiment of new things. We discuss how this philosophical background relates to meta-methods such as the Gurevich Abstract State Machine and the Wisse Metapattern methods, as well as real-time architectural design methods as described in the Integral Software Engineering Methodology. One aim of this research is to find the foundation for extending the ISEM methodology to become a general purpose Systems Design Methodology. Our purpose is also to bring these philosophical considerations into the practical realm by examining P. Bourdieuâs ideas on the relationship between theoretical and practical reason and M. de Certeauâs ideas on practice. The relationship between design and implementation is seen in terms of the Set/Mass conceptual opposition. General Schemas Theory is used as a way of critiquing the dependence of Set based mathematics as a basis for Design. The dissertation delineates a new foundation for Systems Engineering as Emergent Engineering based on General Schemas Theory, and provides an advanced theory of Design based on the understanding of the meta-levels of Being, particularly focusing upon the relationship between Hyper Being and Wild Being in the context of Pure and Process Being
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Modelling Scholarly Debate: Conceptual Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology
Knowledge Domain Analysis (KDA) research investigates computational support for users who desire to understand and/or participate in the scholarly inquiry of a given academic knowledge domain. KDA technology supports this task by allowing users to identify important features of the knowledge domain such as the predominant research topics, the experts in the domain, and the most influential researchers. This thesis develops the conceptual foundations to integrate two identifiable strands of KDA research: Library and Information Science (LIS), which commits to a citation-based Bibliometrics paradigm, and Knowledge Engineering (KE), which adopts an ontology-based Conceptual Modelling paradigm. A key limitation of work to date is its inability to provide machine-readable models of the debate in academic knowledge domains. This thesis argues that KDA tools should support users in understanding the features of scholarly debate as a prerequisite for engaging with their chosen domain.
To this end, the thesis proposes a Scholarly Debate Ontology which specifies the formal vocabulary for constructing representations of debate in academic knowledge domains. The thesis also proposes an analytical approach that is used to automatically detect clusters of viewpoints as particularly important features of scholarly debate. This approach combines aspects of both the Conceptual Modelling and Bibliometrics paradigms. That is, the method combines an ontological focus on semantics and a graph-theoretical focus on structure in order to identify and reveal new insights about viewpoint-clusters in a given knowledge domain. This combined ontological and graph-theoretical approach is demonstrated and evaluated by modelling and analysing debates in two domains. The thesis reflects on the strengths and limitations of this approach, and considers the directions which this work opens up for future research into KDA technology
Inductive Pattern Formation
With the extended computational limits of algorithmic recursion, scientific investigation is transitioning
away from computationally decidable problems and beginning to address computationally undecidable complexity. The analysis of deductive inference in structure-property models are yielding to the synthesis of inductive inference in process-structure simulations. Process-structure modeling has examined external order parameters of inductive pattern formation, but investigation of the internal order parameters of self-organization have been hampered by the lack of a mathematical formalism with the ability to quantitatively define a specific configuration of points.
This investigation addressed this issue of quantitative synthesis. Local space was developed by the
Poincare inflation of a set of points to construct neighborhood intersections, defining topological distance and introducing situated Boolean topology as a local replacement for point-set topology. Parallel development of the local semi-metric topological space, the local semi-metric probability space, and the local metric space of a set of points provides a triangulation of connectivity measures to define the quantitative architectural identity of a configuration and structure independent axes of a structural configuration space. The recursive sequence of intersections constructs a probabilistic discrete spacetime model of interacting fields to define the internal order parameters of self-organization, with order parameters external to the configuration modeled by adjusting the morphological parameters of individual neighborhoods and the interplay of excitatory and inhibitory point sets. The evolutionary trajectory of a configuration maps the development of specific hierarchical structure that is emergent from a specific set of initial conditions, with nested boundaries signaling the nonlinear properties of local causative configurations. This exploration of architectural configuration space concluded with initial process-structure-property models of deductive and inductive inference spaces.
In the computationally undecidable problem of human niche construction, an adaptive-inductive pattern formation model with predictive control organized the bipartite recursion between an information structure and its physical expression as hierarchical ensembles of artificial neural network-like structures. The union of architectural identity and bipartite recursion generates a predictive structural model of an evolutionary design process, offering an alternative to the limitations of cognitive descriptive modeling. The low computational complexity of these models enable them to be embedded in physical constructions to create the artificial life forms of a real-time autonomously adaptive human habitat
Modelling the algebra of weakest preconditions
In expounding the notions of pre- and postconditions, of termination and nontermination, of correctness and of predicate transformers I found that the same trivalent distinction played a major role in all contexts. Namely: Initialisation properties: An execution of a program always, sometimes or never starts from an initial state. Termination/nontermination properties: If it starts, the execution always, sometimes or never terminates. Clean-/messy termination properties: A terminating execution always, sometimes or never terminates cleanly. Final state properties: All, some or no final states of α from s have a given property
The development of a theory of life-environment disruption to account for the phenomenon of premature morbidities and mortalities associated with a radical change in a personâs living environment
The thesis originates in an unresolved phenomenon associated with moving into a
nursing home and concerns the reports of emotional distress, depression and
increased risk of morbidity and mortality associated with the move; shedding-life is
used to capture the broad character of this phenomenon. Shedding-life has been
the subject of scientific inquiry for seventy years and yet the phenomenon is still not
understood and, possibly because of this, there appears to be no generally accepted
approaches to ameliorate this harm. This thesis inquiries into the genesis of
shedding life and presents a theory to account for it.
The failure of existing research to account for shedding-life indicated an alternative
approach was required. As shedding-life arises in the context of a significant
change in a personâs living-environment it was surmised that the phenomenon
involves the relationship between the person and the changing environment in which
they live. Based on this, the approach taken was to use the philosophical research
of Martin Heidegger concerning the structural relationship between the person and
their living environment, an approach not previously explored.
Heideggerâs research, undertaken within the empiricist tradition, identifies and
describes the structural processes by which the person is both constituted by its
formative socio-cultural environment and bound to it as the locus and source of its
ongoing existence. This means that who the individual human person becomes is
both contingent and dependent upon the living environment into which it is born and
raised, where the concept of living environment is understood in terms of
possibilities for a meaningful life. On this account if a personâs access to their living environment
is materially disrupted they are at risk of experiencing a decline in the
meaningfulness of their existence. As this is a naturalistic account, founded on the
biological processes of the body, the loss of an appropriate living environment is
reflected in psychological distress which in turn is frequently manifested in bodily
morbidities; this is the basis of shedding life, a structural rather than a psychological
phenomenon.
This contingent account of the person is in stark contrast to the materialist approach
that posits the person as essentially the biological body, independent of its
environment. The materialist view informs the design and running of nursing homes
resulting in a significant disruption to a personâs life-environment contributing to rather than ameliorating shedding-life, as such nursing homes are iatrogenic, i.e.
cause harm. Left unaddressed nursing home environments will continue to cause
harm and fail to assist older people live a meaningful life in their remaining years.
While the thesis commenced from a concern about nursing homes, the
phenomenon of shedding-life is a much broader phenomenon. The Theory of Life-
Environment Disruption, derived from the structure of being a person, provides an
account of shedding-life by identifying the essential relationship between the person
and their life-environment. The theory predicts that whenever there is a material
disruption to a personâs life-environment they are at risk of shedding life and as such
the theory has broad applicability for human affairs more generallyThesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, The Joanna Briggs Institute, 201