The main result in this paper is a method for obtaining derivation trees from sentences of certain formal grammars. No parsing algorithm was previously known to exist for these grammars.Applied to Montague's PTQ the method produces all parses that could correspond to different meanings. The technique directly addresses scope and reference and provides a framework for examining these phenomena. The solution for PTQ is implemented in an efficient and useful computer program.

Computing with logic / Maier, D., Warren, D.S.

The four essays collected in this dossier are directed upon the contemporary understandings of blackness, as an ontology, a phenomenology, or a historicity. In the order of their presentation they encompass and situate what seems first to limit black being or overflow it, but which, when questioned, that is, disclosed, or unconcealed, does not fit into this logos, nor is ordered by it, even making what is most discernable about blackness in its past, future, or present, seem imaginary, moored in (...) a non-present,and presence, but in ways which make the non-being that marks blackness as sign, affect, or speaking being, unthinkable except as an appearing, a manifestation, an identity.As a dossier directed upon the present philosophical understanding of blackness, each paper seeks to unanchor blackness from the meanings and presuppositions that it normally calls forth. Beyond what is discernable, or ready-made, each paper addresses structures that make (and have made) blackness discernable as the always given to be seen, as meaningless speech, as pathology, as a concept beyond reason.The dossier opens with a question: what kind of disturbance does blackness present to being? Why does it seem to madden reason, or call forth frenzy? In Calvin Warren’s essay, “The Karen Call,” what comes into correlation with blackness are various kinds of emergency that structure white thought and presence but that belie witnessing and intelligibility, and in whose chain of significations can be discerned an ontological privilege that constitutes the world. To appear emergent, it seems, all blackness has to do is become one with the myth that bans or compromises it; a manifestation in which subject-object relations are already polarized by the dangers that deploy it in dramas of emergency. Once blackness becomes emergent, there is no escape, for it comes up against what Warren, reading Heidegger against the grain, suggests is a racial destiny of Being. To appear black is forthwith to resemble an es gibt that is indissociable from threat, falsehood, fantasy, and obliteration. To that extent, blackness attests to a kind of ontological emergency without surcease or hope, and one whose trace remains in every moment or glimpse; whose technical modality and structure always returns us to the call that is neither speech nor gaze, word nor symbol, but represents an extimacy that is undeconstructable, beyond utterance, meaning, or reparation.Such extimacy seems to induce a crisis in the philosophical notion of being itself. In Axelle Karera’s essay, “Paraontology,” the question asked is why blackness cannot be contained or fitted into ontology itself; or, if philosophy is ontology, why does blackness seem to signify an irreducible resistance to it?How does such resistance occur? If blackness can only be presented as “paraontology,” a word that seems to shelter ontology at the same time as it presents the search for a new order of being, what does the para teach us about blackness as disorder, resistance, or identity? What is its philosophical genealogy and affiliation, and why does the para itself seem to never get beyond its own conciliation, or filiation to philosophy, whose ordering and racist historicity thereby remains the seme and mark of the para as interval, trope, and index? Or, put more simply, can blackness ever resist its own resistance as trope, conjuncture, or representation? Retracing that genealogy through the work of Oskar Becker, Karera uncovers a surreptitious repetition in black uses of the word, in whose weave can be discerned a fascist interference that not only undermines the fugitivity of the resistance so claimed, but one that unwittingly repeats a fascist ontology of world, history, and being.1 It’s a startling, deeply disturbing claim. But the apparent echoing of the Heideggerian bell in black significations of ontology suggests that what is being reabsorbed here is not so much a radical difference but a concept that remains justified and in fee to, pardoned and annulled by, a white notion of being. What, then, can it mean to think blackness as para? Nothing more than a philosophical confusion that confuses l’être qui fuit, that is, the lack that Lacan says cannot be completed or resisted, for an appositional fantasy of displacement. Here everything that is deemed black has to be made meaningful in apposition to ontology, but everything that is black must also, it seems, always return apposition to the white para of ontology; to be black and appositional would, it seems, produce only the disavowal of the philosophical genealogy that always already determines it.One would be right to distrust such claims—the moralism of the refusal, and the scandal of the faux resistance by which the para hides behind its own whited-out screen.In the third contribution to the dossier, the question asked is what would it mean for blackness to repair itself, to let go or retrieve and so redeem its own historical conjuncture? How do we refer to an irreparable past, that is, a past that keeps on coming back, but one that has no sign or signified, no memory that can recapture or reveal it, or simply rejoin us to it without remainder? Rinaldo Walcott’s essay, “‘Retrospective Significance,’” revisits the reparations debate as a question of black being. Instead of repair, he finds desolation and emptiness, or what he calls a staggeringly incoherent rhetoric of coherency. It’s a paradox that addresses what it means to remember or to forget a nothing; if blackness is nothing, how does one reconnect with it, bond with it, compensate it in its historic devastation? What would it mean to receive meaning from such devastation, to express it if this nothingness is absolute, or absolutely valueless? If ontology is a structure, then blackness, Walcott suggests, expresses nothing less than a “slave-ness” that continues to confront and disturb us absolutely, irrevocably. As such slave-ness is the trace that remains as a sign of the irreparable. As a trace, and not a sign, slave-ness becomes the primordial signifier of being, nation, history, and diaspora. But it is what makes it irrecuperable that defines its value and difficulty for the very language of reparation. Walcott pursues this difficult, enigmatic thread through the work of black thinkers on diaspora and identity. He concludes: black being cannot be dissociated from the disturbance it offers value, conscience, and any thought of alterity.The final and fourth contribution returns to the question of blackness as the trace or thread (the monstration) of being. How does one follow the thread (montrer) of blackness if it is always already withdrawn from being? David Marriott’s essay, “Ontology and Lalangue,” evokes Lacan’s concept of lalangue in pursuit of this enigmatic equivocation between letter and signifier, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Showing how both discourses have sought to master this exorbitance as master and/or free it as slave, I show how blackness is extinguished by the very words used to precipitate it into being. The slavish audacity of this lalangue is then shown to disarticulate, or more exactly, withdraw from ontology, but only so that whiteness can be presented and proclaimed all the more as the un-representable truth and logic of Dasein. This way of excluding blackness while preserving whiteness is not only central to philosophical and psychoanalytic understandings of language, Marriott argues, but this way of manifesting itself without manifesting itself is also crucial to the racialization of the logos as such.What is essential here is the way a meaning that is beyond meaning or representation is inserted into a problematic of mastery and servitude that advances-conceals a racial genealogy but in ways that makes the being of blackness an enigma. As such, blackness becomes an exorbitance that is always effaced in its monstration. More, its revelation must necessarily be unrecognized as the very locus of knowledge and truth. In that sense, what would it mean to figure, or to speak, this n’est pas without the consolation of being, meaning, truth, or logic? What would it mean to represent it as situated or defined by the language of ontology? Is black speaking being always in a relationship to and simultaneously the manifestation of a lalangue of lalangue? (shrink)

Building relationships is crucial for satisfaction and success, especially when entering new social contexts. In the present paper, we investigate whether attempting to improve others’ feelings helps people to make connections in new networks. In Study 1, a social network study following new networks of people for a twelve-week period indicated that use of interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) strategies predicted growth in popularity, as indicated by other network members’ reports of spending time with the person, in work and non-work interactions. (...) In Study 2, linguistic analysis of the tweets from over 8000 Twitter users from formation of their accounts revealed that use of IER predicted greater popularity in terms of the number of followers gained. However, not all types of IER had positive effects. Behavioral IER strategies (which use behavior to reassure or comfort in order to regulate affect) were associated with greater popularity, while cognitive strategies (which change a person’s thoughts about his or her situation or feelings in order to regulate affect) were negatively associated with popularity. Our findings have implications for our understanding of how new relationships are formed, highlighting the important the role played by intentional emotion regulatory processes. (shrink)

The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is a collection of essays from experts in a variety of fields seeking to redefine the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The essayists place the legacy of the study within the evolution of racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Contributors include two leading historians on the study, two former United States Surgeons General, and other prominent scholars from a wide range of fields.

Plato claimed that morality exits to control conflict. Business people increasingly are called upon to resolve moral conflicts between various stakeholders who maintain opposing ethical positions or principles. Attempts to resolve these moral conflicts within business discussions may be exacerbated if disputants have different communicative styles. To better understand the communication process involved in attempts to resolve a moral dilemma, we investigate the "discourse ethics" procedure of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas claims that an individual's level of moral reasoning parallels the type (...) of communication which that individual typically uses in attempts to resolve conflict. Our research focuses upon the relationship between the communicative style used by participants attempting to resolve a particular moral dilemma involving workplace safety and the level of moral reasoning possessed by those participants. The results of our study suggest that, contrary to Habermas' views, participants with "higher" levels of moral reasoning do not use "discursive" communicative tactics more frequently than participants that possessed "lower" moral reasoning. (shrink)

Deception has been practiced by sellers since the beginning of the marketplace. Research in marketing ethics has established benchmarks and parameters forethical behavior that include honesty, full disclosure, equity, and fairness. Deception in marketing, however, has not received the same level of attention. This paper proposes to treat deception in marketing within the context of criminology. By examining deception in marketing within the context of criminology, additional insight can be gained into identifying its antecendents and the likelihood of its occurrence. (...) To this end, deception in marketing is interpreted under the empathy/harm matrix, Cressey’s fraud triangle, and the transparency/time-lag matrix. These frameworks are then combined into a diagram detailing antecedents affecting the likelihood of marketing agents participating in deceptive marketing actions. A number of propositions are presented. (shrink)

Motivated by a desire to narrate and contextualize the deluge of "French theory," After the Deluege showcases recent work by today's brightest scholars of French intellectual history that historicizes key debates, figures, and turning points in the postwar era of French thought.

The article draws on critiques in political theory and morality to argue that womanism, a worldview rooted in Black women's lives and history, provides an alternative conceptual framework to prevailing Eurocentric thinking, for promoting socially just institutions of higher education. Presupposing a positioned, encultured, and embodied account of identity, womanism’s social change perspective holds transformative promise. It foregrounds Black women’s penchant for reaching solutions that promote communal balance, affirm one’s humanity and attend to the spiritual dimension (Phillips, 2006 Phillips, L. (...) (Ed.). (2006). The womanist reader. Routledge.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]). Directed first towards scholars of color, fostering inclusivity, communalist values and acknowledged intersectionality offers an ethic of the embodied self. As a corollary, it argues for a universal that recommends at least two guiding principles for a pedagogical philosophy. It is, first oriented towards a love of self and second towards placing all disciplines within a cultural-historical context. In the first claim, there is potential for nothing less than suspending the symbolic and ontological violence to one’s sense of belonging in academia. In the second claim, such an understanding can position scholars of color to actively re-narrate their fields. As illustrations, we focus on three academic fields of education, theology in higher education, and criminal justice. (shrink)

Some of the authors of the essays on Chinese philosophers prefer the pin yin system of romanization for Chinese names and words, while others prefer the Wade‐Giles system. Given that both systems are in wide use today, important names and words are given in both their pin yin and Wade‐Giles formulations. The author's preference is printed first, followed by the alternative romanization within brackets.

With the publication of their first collaborative book Thinking Through Confucius, David Hall and Roger Ames launched a comparative philosophical project juxtaposing American pragmatism and Chinese Confucianism. This essay focuses on the role pragmatic assumptions play in Hall’s and Ames’s announced goal of opening a “new route” into Chinese intellectual history. Hall and Ames aim to teach scholars whose scholarly sensibilities have been formed in the West what they must acknowledge about their own traditions before they can engage Chinese (...) thinkers constructively. After happily acknowledging my own debt to Hall and Ames and defending as hugely helpful the broad arc of their work, this essay raises questions about the way they deploy pragmatic assumptions as tools for “removing the useless lumber” that they claim “block” Western thinkers’ access to Chinese intellectual history. Specifically it argues that the “useless lumber” metaphor is misplaced. (shrink)

A book review of a "Psychology in Progress" collection of these early 1980s articles from a variety of cognitive science disciplines that were pushing back against behaviourism, exploring the nature and function of consciousness, &/or advancing (or rediscovering) content-driven or representational models. Book Chapters: Editor's introduction: "Human brain anatomy" Harry J. Jerison, "On the Evolution of mind" Keith Oatley, "Representations of the physical and social world" John O'Keefe, "Is consciousness the gateway to the hippocampal cognitive map? A speculative essay on (...) the neural basis of mind" David A. Oakley, "Cognition and imagery in animals" David A. Oakley, "Animal awareness, consciousness and self-image" Freda Newcome, "Neuropsychology of consciousness: a review of human clinical evidence" Joseph E. LeDoux, "Brain, mind and language" David A. Oakley and Lesley C. Eames, "The plurality of consciousness". (shrink)

“It is the creation of the paternalistic but secretive company which produces moral indifference towards its employees”. This Turner & Newall case‐study highlights the significance of how a corporate morality or a thought world can affect the ethical conduct of the individuals in the organization. Geoffrey Tweedale is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Business History, and Richard C. Warren is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Business Studies, at The Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Building, Aytoun Street, Manchester. (...) M1 3GH. Acknowledgments. This study draws partly on a study funded by the Wellcome Trust. Also to be thanked are David Jeremy and Andrew Lock. Michael O’Connor of Chase Manhattan Bank kindly provided court transcripts and other records from the Bank’s collection of non‐confidential T&N materials. (shrink)

“It is the creation of the paternalistic but secretive company which produces moral indifference towards its employees”. This Turner & Newall case‐study highlights the significance of how a corporate morality or a thought world can affect the ethical conduct of the individuals in the organization. Geoffrey Tweedale is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Business History, and Richard C. Warren is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Business Studies, at The Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Building, Aytoun Street, Manchester. (...) M1 3GH.Acknowledgments. This study draws partly on a study funded by the Wellcome Trust. Also to be thanked are David Jeremy and Andrew Lock. Michael O’Connor of Chase Manhattan Bank kindly provided court transcripts and other records from the Bank’s collection of non‐confidential T&N materials. (shrink)

In his magnum opus, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, the distinguished philosopher Jurgen Habermas presented his ideas as a whole, providing the first major defense of his philosophy. David Ingram here summarizes the themes of Habermas's masterwork, placing them in the context of the philosopher's other work, relating them to poststructuralism, hermeneutics, and Neo-Aristotelianism, and surveying what other critics have said about Habermas. "Ingram's exposition of Habermas is impressive for its erudition and its faithful adherence to the major contours of (...) Habermas's work."—James Farganis, _Contemporary Sociology_ "A valuable contribution to the understanding of an important, but difficult, thinker."—_Ethics_ "The book is indispensable to an understanding of both Habermas and the contemporary human condition."—Scott Warren, _Social Science Quarterly _ "Ingram has done sociologists, philosophers, and political scientists a great service by demystifying Habermas's more recent theory of communicative action."—R. George Kirkpatrick, _American Journal of Sociology_ "Likely to be and to remain the leading study on Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action. What McCarthy did for Habermas's earlier writings, Ingram accomplishes for his more recent work."—Fred R. Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame. (shrink)

Corruptionism is the view that following physical death, the human being ceases to exist but their soul persists in the afterlife. Survivalism holds that both the human being and their soul persist in the afterlife, as distinct entities, with the soul constituting the human. Each position has its defenders, most of whom appeal both to metaphysical considerations and to the authority of St Thomas Aquinas. Corruptionists claim that survivalism violates a basic principle of any plausible mereology, while survivalists tend to (...) reject the principle, though without as much detail as one would like. In this paper I examine both the key exegetical issues and the mereological question, arguing that Aquinas cannot be shown to have supported the principle in question, and that the principle should be rejected on independent grounds. If correct, some key planks in support of survivalism are established, with others to await further examination. (shrink)

The environmental justice movement began in 1982, when residents of Shocco Township, a low-income, African-American community located in Warren County, North Carolina, protested the state’s plan to...

The first book-length treatment in English of Habermas’s theory of social evolution and progress.

Moral puzzles about actions which bring about very small or what are said to be imperceptible harms or benefits for each of a large number of people are well known. Less well known is an argument by Warren Quinn that standard theories of rationality can lead an agent to end up torturing himself or herself in a completely foreseeable way, and that this shows that standard theories of rationality need to be revised. We show where Quinn's argument goes wrong, (...) and apply this to the moral puzzles. (shrink)

In this paper we define Martin-L¨of complexes to be algebras for monads on the category of (reflexive) globular sets which freely add cells in accordance with the rules of intensional Martin-L¨of type theory. We then study the resulting categories of algebras for several theories. Our principal result is that there exists a cofibrantly generated Quillen model structure on the category of 1-truncated Martin-L¨of complexes and that this category is Quillen equivalent to the category of groupoids. In particular, 1-truncated Martin-L¨of complexes (...) are a model of homotopy 1-types. In order to establish these facts we give a proof-theoretic analysis, using a modified version of Tait’s logical predicates argument, of the propositional equality classes of terms of identity type in the 1-truncated theory. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Learning Difference Against Ignoring Difference I Am Because We Are and We Are Because I Am Practicing Just Parenting Teaching Alienation? Notes.

Ten years after over half a million Christians signed their names to a statement of conscience clarifying where they stood, the three issues dealt with in the Manhattan Declaration are of more cultural importance than ever. The main difference now, as opposed to then, is the state has since claimed authority, not only over life, but also over marriage and religious liberty." -- Amazon.com.

Although the language of vocation was born in a religious context, the contributors in this volume demonstrate that it has now taken root within the broad framework of higher education and has become intertwined with a wide range of concerns. This volume makes a compelling case for vocational reflection and discernment in undergraduate education today, arguing that it will encourage faculty and students alike to venture out of their narrow disciplinary specializations and to reflect on larger questions of meaning and (...) purpose. In conversation with a growing range of scholarly resources, these essays advance the cause of vocational reflection and discernment well beyond its occasional mention in general education courses and career placement offices. The book's thirteen contributors all work in higher education, but they do so as biologists and musicians, sociologists and engineers, doctors and lawyers, college presidents and deans, and scholars of history, literature, and business administration. Together, they demonstrate that vocation has an important role to play across the entire range of traditional academic disciplines and applied fields. Regardless of major, all undergraduates need to consider their current and future responsibilities, determine the stories they will live by, and discover resources for addressing the tensions that will inevitably arise among their multiple callings. Vocation across the Academy will help to reframe current debates about the purpose of higher education. It underscores the important role that colleges and universities can play in encouraging students to reflect more deeply on life's most persistent questions and to consider how they might best contribute to the common good. (shrink)

What is the cultural value of illegal works that violate the copyrights of popular fiction? Why do they persist despite clear and stringent intellectual property laws? Drawing on the disciplines of new media, law, and literary studies, Illegal Literature suggests that extralegal works such as fan fiction are critical to a system that spurs the evolution of culture. Reconsidering voices relegated to the cultural periphery, David S. Roh shows how infrastructure--in the form of legal policy and network distribution--slows or (...) accelerates the rate of change. He analyzes the relationship between intellectual property rights and American literature in two recent copyright disputes. And, in comparing American fan fiction and Japanese dojinshi, he illustrates how infrastructure and legal climates detract from or encourage fledgling creativity. Illegal Literature fills a crucial gap between the scholarly and the popular by closely examining several modes of marginalized cultural production. Roh makes the case for protecting an environment conducive to literary heresy, the articulation of an accretive rather than solitary authorial genius, and the idea that letting go rather than holding on is important to a generative creative process. In a media ecology inundated by unauthorized materials, Illegal Literature argues that the proliferation of unsanctioned texts may actually benefit literary and cultural development. (shrink)

Warren Quinn suggests a presumption against usefully involving others in foreseeably harmful agency. Frances Kamm offers her Party Case, in which one throws a party only because one expects one’s guests will feel indebted to clean up, to argue that Quinn’s presumption should not apply to all agency undertaken because it will bring about this involvement but only to agency in which this involvement is intended. I offer impermissible and intentional variants of Party Case and consider other cases to (...) argue that the permissibility of usefully involving others depends on their independent rights, rather than whether their involvement is intended. (shrink)

_Real Essentialism_ presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many, if not most, philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. _Real Essentialism_ reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essentialist metaphysics, defending the reality and knowability (...) of essence, the possibility of objective, immutable definition, and its relevance to contemporary scientific and metaphysical issues such as whether essence transcends physics and chemistry, the essence of life, the nature of biological species, and the nature of the person. (shrink)

"Nivison brings out the exciting variety within Confucian thought, as he interprets and elucidates key thinkers from over two thousand years, from Confucius himself, through Mencius and Xunzi, to such later Confucians as Wang Yangming, Dai Zhen, and Zhang Xuecheng."--Cover.

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.

According to divine premotionism, God does not merely create and sustain the universe. He also moves all secondary causes to action as instruments without undermining their intrinsic causal efficacy. I explain and uphold the premotionist theory, which is the theory of St Thomas Aquinas and his most prominent exponents. I defend the premotionist interpretation of Aquinas in some textual detail, with particular reference to Suarez and to a recent paper by Louis Mancha. Critics, including Molinists and Suarezians, raise various objections (...) to the view that premotion is compatible with genuine secondary causation. I rebut a number of these objections, in the course of which I respond to the central challenge that premotionism destroys free will. I also offer a number of positive reasons for embracing the premotionist theory. (shrink)

DCPS is a connectionist production system interpreter that uses distributed representations. As a connectionist model it consists of many simple, richly interconnected neuron‐like computing units that cooperate to solve problems in parallel. One motivation for constructing DCPS was to demonstrate that connectionist models are capable of representing and using explicit rules. A second motivation was to show how “coarse coding” or “distributed representations” can be used to construct a working memory that requires far fewer units than the number of different (...) facts that can potentially be stored. The simulation we present is intended as a detailed demonstration of the feasibility of certain ideas and should not be viewed as a full implementation of production systems. Our current model only has a few of the many interesting emergent properties that we eventually hope to demonstrate: It is damage‐resistant, it performs matching and variable binding by massively parallel constraint satisfaction, and the capacity of its working memory is dependent on the similarity of the items being stored. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealisedexplanation gamein which players collaborate to find the best explanation(s) for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal patterns of (...) variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a (conditionally) optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

We examine two different descriptions of the behavioral functions of the hippocampal system. One emphasizes spatially organized behaviors, especially those using cognitive maps. The other emphasizes memory, particularly working memory, a short-term memory that requires iexible stimulus-response associations and is highly susceptible to interference. The predictive value of the spatial and memory descriptions were evaluated by testing rats with damage to the hippocampal system in a series of experiments, independently manipulating the spatial and memory characteristics of a behavioral task. No (...) dissociations were found when the spatial characteristics of the stimuli to be remembered were changed; lesions produced a similar deficit in both spatial and nonspatial test procedures, indicating that the hippocampus was similarly involved regardless of the spatial nature of the task. In contrast, a marked dissociation was found when the memory requirements were altered. Rats with lesions were able to perform accurately in tasks that could be solved exclusively on the basis of reference memory. They performed at chance levels and showed no signs of recovery even with extensive postoperative training in tasks that required working memory. In one experiment all the characteristics of the reference memory and working memory procedures were identical except the type of memory required. Consequently, the behavioral dissociation cannot be explained by differences in attention, motivation, response inhibition, or the type of stimuli to be remembered. As a result of these experiments we propose that the hippocampus is selectively involved in behaviors that require working memory, irrespective of the type of material that is to be processed by that memory. (shrink)

As machine learning has gradually entered into ever more sectors of public and private life, there has been a growing demand for algorithmic explainability. How can we make the predictions of complex statistical models more intelligible to end users? A subdiscipline of computer science known as interpretable machine learning (IML) has emerged to address this urgent question. Numerous influential methods have been proposed, from local linear approximations to rule lists and counterfactuals. In this article, I highlight three conceptual challenges that (...) are largely overlooked by authors in this area. I argue that the vast majority of IML algorithms are plagued by (1) ambiguity with respect to their true target; (2) a disregard for error rates and severe testing; and (3) an emphasis on product over process. Each point is developed at length, drawing on relevant debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. Examples and counterexamples from IML are considered, demonstrating how failure to acknowledge these problems can result in counterintuitive and potentially misleading explanations. Without greater care for the conceptual foundations of IML, future work in this area is doomed to repeat the same mistakes. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)