1 Cognitive Architectures 2 Multilayer Perceptrons 3 Relations between Variables 4 Structured Representations 5 Individuals 6 Where does the Machinery of Symbol Manipulation Come From? 7 Conclusions.

Cicero's essay On Friendship (Laelius de amicitia) is of interest as much for the light it sheds on Roman society as for its embodiment of ancient philosophical views on the subjects of friendship. The Dream of Scipio was excerpted in late antiquity from Cicero's De Republica, a dialogue in six books which now only survives in fragmentary form. In the excerpt, which probably formed the conclusion to the dialogue, Cicero describes his vision of the cosmos and the rewards of immortality (...) that the good statesman can expect after death. This work is particularly important for its influence on later literature in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.Both dialogues are examples of the best Ciceronian prose. They are presented in this volume in the context of Cicero's philosophical writing. Their place in ancient thought and their literary characteristics are discussed fully in the introduction, while individual points of interpretation are dealt with in the commentary. The text of both works is new and will also be published in a forthcoming volume in the Oxford Classical Texts series. There is a separate appendix of notes on textual points. Text with translation and commentary. (Aris and Phillips 1991). (shrink)

Using Chicago as our case, this article puts forth a notion of black placemaking that privileges the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being black and being around other black people in the city. Black placemaking refers to the ways that urban black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction. Our framework offers a corrective to existing accounts that depict urban blacks as bounded, plagued by violence, victims and perpetrators, unproductive, and isolated from one (...) another and the city writ large. While ignoring neither the external assaults on black spaces nor the internal dangers that can make everyday life difficult, we highlight how black people make places in spite of those realities. Our four cases – the black digital commons, black public housing reunions, black lesbian and gay nightlife, and black Little League baseball – elucidate the matter of black lives across genders, sexualities, ages, classes, and politics. (shrink)

For the philosopher Ivan Illich, society became a set of systems rather than a group of people. As such, society depersonalizes life and brings the need for open non-systematized spaces where people can act and interact outside their typical roles. On the other hand, an absence of formal structures may simply open spaces for the informal reproduction of society’s already well-established structures. Given this conjuncture, can systems be designed to foster personal expression? The answer I found in cybernetics is self-organization, (...) a process of adaptation to a context that can grow different organizations depending on what this context provides. This implies that personal expression is a concern in society’s emergent organizations, calling for meta planning to design the context of some of society’s self-organization processes. The cybernetician Gordon Pask argued that depersonalization follows from non-conversational communications, like the ones that develop in large committees. In response, Pask’s fellow cybernetician Stafford Beer proposed a meeting protocol called Team Syntegrity allowing large groups to subdivide into small integrated discussion groups. While Beer’s work has been extensively discussed in existent literature, this article presents the results of four experiments conducted by using variations of Beer’s protocol to understand both the ease with which it can be adapted to different situations, and the implications of its conversational structure on personal expression. The experiment’s realization demonstrates that the protocol’s preparation is laborious and hard to adapt in a timely manner in situations where participant numbers fluctuate. Automation of these processes, however, offers possibilities to use the approach in loosely organized groups. Automation can also help choosing the most appropriate protocol for particular situations through the manipulation of its configuration. Despite difficulties, the protocol offers promise for different purposes, encouraging personal expression in a way that reverberates with others’ personal perspectives. (shrink)

The apparent very close similarity between the learning of the past tense by Adam and the Plunkett and Marchman model is exaggerated by several misleading comparisons--including arbitrary, unexplained changes in how graphs were plotted. The model's development differs from Adam's in three important ways: Children show a U-shaped sequence of development which does not depend on abrupt changes in input; U-shaped development in the simulation occurs only after an abrupt change in training regimen. Children overregularize vowel-change verbs more than no-change (...) verbs; the simulation overregularizes vowel-change verbs less often than no-change verbs. Children, including Adam, overregularize more than they irregularize; the simulation overregularized less than it irregularized. Interestingly, the RM model--widely criticized as being inadequate--does somewhat better, correctly overregularizing vowel-change verbs more often than no-change verbs, and overregularizing more often than it irregularizes. Although Plunkett and Marchman's (1993) state of the art model incorporated hidden layers and back-propagation, used a more realistic phonological coding scheme, and explored a broader range of parameters than Rumelhart and McClelland's model, their results are farther from psychological reality. It is unknown whether any connectionist model can mimic a child's performance without resorting to unrealistic exogenous changes in the training or input, but it is clear that adding a hidden-layer and back-propagation does not ensure a solution. (shrink)

Is the human tendency toward musicality better thought of as the product of a specific, evolved instinct or an acquired skill? Developmental and evolutionary arguments are considered, along with issues of domain‐specificity. The article also considers the question of why humans might be consistently and intensely drawn to music if musicality is not in fact the product of a specifically evolved instinct.

Rogers & McClelland's (R&M's) précis represents an important effort to address key issues in concepts and categorization, but few of the simulations deliver what is promised. We argue that the models are seriously underconstrained, importantly incomplete, and psychologically implausible; more broadly, R&M dwell too heavily on the apparent successes without comparable concern for limitations already noted in the literature.

This chapter examines an apparent tension created by recent research on neurological development and genetics on the one hand and cognitive development on the other. It considers what it might mean for intrinsic signals to guide the initial establishment of functional architecture. It argues that an understanding of the mechanisms by which the body develops can inform our understanding of the mechanisms by which the brain develops. It cites the view of developmental neurobiologists Fukuchi-Shimogori and Grove, that the patterning of (...) the part of the brain responsible for our higher functions is coordinated by the same basic mechanisms and signaling protein families used to generate patterning in other embryonic organs. Thus, what's good enough for the body, is good enough for the brain. (shrink)

Connectionist networks excel at extracting statistical regularities but have trouble extracting higher-order relationships. Clark & Thornton suggest that a solution to this problem might come from Elman, but I argue that the success of Elman's single recurrent network is illusory, and show that it cannot in fact represent abstract relationships that can be generalized to novel instances, undermining Clark & Thornton 's key arguments.

The mere fact that a particular aspect of mind could offer an adaptive advantage is not enough to show that that property was in fact shaped by that adaptive advantage. Although it is possible that the tendency towards positive illusion is an evolved misbelief, it it also possible that positive illusions could be a by-product of a broader, flawed cognitive mechanism that itself was shaped by accidents of evolutionary inertia.

This commentary discusses the logic of inferring modularity or the lack of modularity from observed patterns of developmental disorders.

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

We find the theory of neural reuse to be highly plausible, and suggest that human individual differences provide an additional line of argument in its favor, focusing on the well-replicated finding of in which individual differences are highly correlated across domains. We also suggest that the theory of neural reuse may be an important contributor to the phenomenon of positive manifold itself.

This book provides the first English translations of pivotal essays and debates on the role of language politics, linguistics, and translation in Antonio Gramsci's influential cultural theory. It also includes new works from leading and up-and-coming anglophone scholars to create a vital resource for a wide variety of readers interested in Gramsci across many disciplines including cultural studies, critical political economy, social and political theory, literature, sociology, post-colonialism, and philosophy.

Group selection, as advocated by Sober and Wilson, is theoretically plausible, although it remains an open question as to what extent it occurs in nature. If group selection has operated in hominids, it is likely to have selected cultural not genetic variation. A focus on niche construction helps delineate the conditions under which cooperation is favoured. Group selection may favour between-group conflict as well as within-group cooperation.

Cigarette smoking and other addictive behaviors are among the main preventable risk factors for several severe and potentially fatal diseases. It has been argued that addictive behavior is controlled by an automatic-implicit cognitive system and by a reflective-explicit cognitive system, that operate in parallel to jointly drive human behavior. The present study addresses the formation of implicit attitudes towards smoking in both smokers and non-smokers, using a Go/NoGo association task, and behavioral and electroencephalographic measures. The GNAT assesses, via quantifying participants’ (...) reaction times, the strength of association between a target category and either pole of an evaluative dimension. EEG analysis is performed to determine the temporal course of the event-related potential components underlying Go/NoGo decisions and implicit attitude formation. Both smokers and non-smokers showed prolonged reaction times to smoking-related pictures when the pictures were coupled with positive evaluative words. This indicates negative implicit attitudes towards smoking in both groups alike at the time point of the behavioral response. However, only the non-smokers, not the smokers, were found to show a delay of the N200 component in the incongruent condition. This is interpreted as reflecting ambivalent or even positive implicit attitudes towards smoking in the smoker group at the time point of the N200. Our study thus provides evidence for the hypothesis that implicit attitudes are subject to changes within several hundred milliseconds after stimulus presentation, and can be altered in the course of their formation. (shrink)

Though we agree with their argument that language is shaped by domain-general learning processes, Christiansen & Chater (C&C) neglect to detail how the development of these processes shapes language change. We discuss a number of examples that show how developmental processes at multiple levels and timescales are critical to understanding the origin of domain-general mechanisms that shape language evolution.