A Modal Logic for Subject-Oriented Spatial Reasoning

We present a modal logic for representing and reasoning about space seen from the subject\u27s perspective. The language of our logic comprises modal operators for the relations "in front", "behind", "to the left", and "to the right" of the subject, which introduce the intrinsic frame of reference; and operators for "behind an object", "between the subject and an object", "to the left of an object", and "to the right of an object", employing the relative frame of reference. The language allows us to express nominals, hybrid operators, and a restricted form of distance operators which, as we demonstrate by example, makes the logic interesting for potential applications. We prove that the satisfiability problem in the logic is decidable and in particular PSpace-complete

Decision procedures for some strong hybrid logics

Hybrid logics are extensions of standard modal logics, which significantly increase the expressive power of the latter. Since most of hybrid logics are known to be decidable, decision procedures for them is a widely investigated field of research. So far, several tableau calculi for hybrid logics have been presented in the literature. In this paper we introduce a sound, complete and terminating tableau calculus TH(@,E,D,♦ −) for hybrid logics with the satisfaction operators, the universal modality, the difference modality and the inverse modality as well as the corresponding sequent calculus SH(@,E,D,♦ −). They not only uniformly cover relatively wide range of various hybrid logics but they are also conceptually simple and enable effective search for a minimal model for a satisfiable formula. The main novelty is the exploitation of the unrestricted blocking mechanism introduced as an explicit, sound tableau rule

Czy język naturalny ma strukturę logiczną?

Zainicjowany przez Boole’a, Peirce’a i Fregego gwałtowny rozwój aparatury formalnej pozwalającej badać i poprawnie formułować logikę zaowocował wieloma opozycyjnymi koncepcjami w sporze o ontologiczny i lingwistyczny status logiki. Ramy niniejszego tekstu nie pozwalają na dokładny przegląd wszystkich, lub choćby większości, najbardziej znaczących stanowisk w tej debacie. Należało dokonać wyboru reprezentantów poszczególnych orientacji filozoficznych w sporze o relację pomiędzy logiką a językiem. Każda selekcja tego rodzaju jest narażona na zarzut arbitralności, wydaje się jednak, iż trzy przedstawione i poddane analizie w dalszej części tekstu koncepcje dobrze ilustrują kontrowersje wokół postawionego w tytule problemu oraz przedkładają propozycje jego rozstrzygnięcia

Action Understanding in Infancy: Do Infant Interpreters Attribute Enduring Mental States or Track Relational Properties of Transient Bouts of Behavior?

We address recent interpretations of infant performance on spontaneous false belief tasks. According to most views, these experiments show that human infants attribute mental states from a very young age. Focusing on one of the most clearly worked out, minimalist versions of this idea, Butterfill and Apperly's (2013) "minimal theory of mind" framework, we defend an alternative characterization: the minimal theory of rational agency. On this view, rather than conceiving of social situations in terms of states of an enduring mental substance animating agents, infant interpreters parse observed bouts of behavior and their contexts into goals, rational means to those goals, and available information. In other words, the social ontology of infant interpreters consists in goal-directed, (mis- or un-) informed bouts of behavior, by non-enduring agents, rather than agents animated by states of enduring, unobservable minds. We discuss a number of experiments that support this interpretation of infant socio-cognitive competence

Digitale Lehr- und Lernunterstützung an deutschen Universitäten: Anforderungen und Rahmenbedingungen für die Implementierung einer Mentoring Workbench

Deutsche Universitäten bemühen sich aufgrund überfüllter Hörsäle, heterogener Studierendengruppen (Heublein et al., 2017) und hoher Abbruchquoten (Heublein, 2014) seit Jahren um die stärkere Unterstützung der Studierenden, um so die Verbleibszahlen und den Studienerfolg zu erhöhen und Lehrende zu entlasten. Ein Ansatz für die Sicherung des Lernerfolges fokussiert die individuelle und motivierende Unterstützung und Betreuung der Studierenden (Bülow-Schramm, Merkt, & Rebenstorf, 2011). Da Lehrende jedoch ihre Studierenden häufig nicht persönlich kennen und auch keine Zeit für individuelle Beratung haben, begreifen wir im Projekt “tech4comp – Personalisierte Kompetenzentwicklung durch skalierbare Mentoringprozesse“ digital gestütztes Mentoring als Lösungsansatz. Mentoring wird im Projekt als dyadischer Prozess des akademischen Austausches von Ideen und Wissen auf Augenhöhe verstanden und umfasst sowohl die sozio-emotionale Unterstützung der Studierenden als auch die individuelle Begleitung der Kompetenzentwicklung. Um diese Art von Mentoring an Hochschulen für eine variierende Zahl an Studierenden etablieren zu können, setzt das Projekt auf die Umsetzung mittels Informations- und Kommunikationstechnik (IKT) in Form der Mentoring Workbench. Diese ermöglicht elektronisch gestütztes Mentoring (E-Mentoring). Um die derzeit an vier sächsischen Hochschulen exemplarisch erprobte Mentoring Workbench auch über die Projektlaufzeit hinaus und deutschlandweit zu implementieren, werden die dafür zu erfüllenden Anforderungen an Hochschulen aus einer Literaturanalyse zusammengetragen und daraus Empfehlungen für den Projektkontext abgeleitet

Moving Stories: Agency, Emotion and Practical Rationality

What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding

Boolean Dynamics with Random Couplings

This paper reviews a class of generic dissipative dynamical systems called N-K models. In these models, the dynamics of N elements, defined as Boolean variables, develop step by step, clocked by a discrete time variable. Each of the N Boolean elements at a given time is given a value which depends upon K elements in the previous time step. We review the work of many authors on the behavior of the models, looking particularly at the structure and lengths of their cycles, the sizes of their basins of attraction, and the flow of information through the systems. In the limit of infinite N, there is a phase transition between a chaotic and an ordered phase, with a critical phase in between. We argue that the behavior of this system depends significantly on the topology of the network connections. If the elements are placed upon a lattice with dimension d, the system shows correlations related to the standard percolation or directed percolation phase transition on such a lattice. On the other hand, a very different behavior is seen in the Kauffman net in which all spins are equally likely to be coupled to a given spin. In this situation, coupling loops are mostly suppressed, and the behavior of the system is much more like that of a mean field theory. We also describe possible applications of the models to, for example, genetic networks, cell differentiation, evolution, democracy in social systems and neural networks.Comment: 69 pages, 16 figures, Submitted to Springer Applied Mathematical Sciences Serie

Folk psychological and neurocognitive ontologies

It is becoming increasingly clear that our folk psychological ontology of the mental is unlikely to map neatly on to the functional organisation of the brain, leading to the development of novel ‘cognitive ontologies’ that aim to better describe this organisation. While the debate over which of these ontologies to adopt is still ongoing, we ought to think carefully about what the consequences for folk psychology might be. One option would be to endorse a new form of eliminative materialism, replacing the old folk psychological ontology with a novel neurocognitive ontology. This approach assumes a literalist attitude towards folk psychology, where the folk psychological and neurocognitive ontologies represent competing and incompatible ways of categorising the mental. According to an alternative approach, folk psychology aims to describe coarse-grained behaviour rather than fine-grained mechanisms, and the two kinds of ontology are better thought of as having different aims and purposes. In this chapter I will argue that the latter (coarse-grained) approach is a better way to make sense of everyday folk psychological practice, and also offers a more constructive way to understand the relationship between folk psychological and neurocognitive ontologies. The folk psychological ontology of the mental might not be appropriate for describing the functional organisation of the brain, but rather than eliminating or revising it, we should instead recognise that it has a very different aim and purpose than neurocognitive ontologies