This paper examines an insoluble Cartesian problem for classical AI, namely, how linguistic understanding involves knowledge and awareness of u’s meaning, a cognitive process that is irreducible to algorithms. As analyzed, Descartes’ view about reason and intelligence has paradoxically encouraged certain classical AI researchers to suppose that linguistic understanding suffices for machine intelligence. Several advocates of the Turing Test, for example, assume that linguistic understanding only comprises computational processes which can be recursively decomposed into algorithmic mechanisms. Against this (...) background, in the first section, I explain Descartes’ view about language and mind. To show that Turing bites the bullet with his imitation game, in the second section I analyze this method to assess intelligence. Then, in the third section, I elaborate on Schank and Abelsons’ Script Applier Mechanism (SAM, hereby), which supposedly casts doubt on Descartes’ denial that machines can think. Finally, in the fourth section, I explore a challenge that any algorithmic decomposition of linguistic understanding faces. This challenge, I argue, is the core of the Cartesian problem: knowledge and awareness of meaning require a first-person viewpoint which is irreducible to the decomposition of algorithmic mechanisms. (shrink)

This paper deals with the rationalist assumptions behind researches of artificial intelligence (AI) on the basis of Hubert Dreyfus’s critique. Dreyfus is a leading American philosopher known for his rigorous critique on the underlying assumptions of the field of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence specialists, especially those whose view is commonly dubbed as “classical AI,” assume that creating a thinking machine like the human brain is not a too far away project because they believe that human intelligence works on the (...) basis of formalized rules of logic. In contradistinction to classical AI specialists, Dreyfus contends that it is impossible to create intelligent computer programs analogous to the human brain because the workings of human intelligence is entirely different from that of computing machines. For Dreyfus, the human mind functions intuitively and not formally. Following Dreyfus, this paper aims to pinpointing the major flaws classical AI suffers from. The author of this paper believes that pinpointing these flaws would inform inquiries on and about artificial intelligence. Over and beyond this, this paper contributes something indisputably original. It strongly argues that classical AI research programs have, though inadvertently, falsified an entire epistemological enterprise of the rationalists not in theory as philosophers do but in practice. When AI workers were trying hard in order to produce a machine that can think like human minds, they have in a way been testing—and testing it up to the last point—the rationalist assumption that the workings of the human mind depend on logical rules. Result: No computers actually function like the human mind. Reason: the human mind does not depend on the formal or logical rules ascribed to computers. Thus, symbolic AI research has falsified the rationalist assumption that ‘the human mind reaches certainty by functioning formally’ by virtue of its failure to create a thinking machine. (shrink)

In this Interview, Professor Robert B. Brandom answered ten detailed questions about his philosophy of Rational Pragmatism and Semantic Expressivism, grouped into four topics. 1. Metaphysics and Anthropology, 2. Pragmatics and Semantics, 3. Epistemic Expressivism and 4. Philosophy of Logic. With his careful answers Professor Brandom offers many additional insights into his rigorously constructed account of the relationship “between what we say and think, and what we are saying and thinking about” around the human practice of asking for and giving (...) reasons. A final, additional question pointed at a principal motivation for putting together the present issue: how to reconcile Wittgenstein’s assertion that philosophy must not proffer any theories with the very explicit system of explanations Brandom has constructed. This same issue is addressed to some extent already in Professor Brandom’s new article contained in this issue, but his answer, asserting that he does not proffer a theory but only makes explicit what is already there, might be seen as an unambiguous statement of the continuous presence of a contested Wittgensteinian principle in Brandom’s work. (shrink)

In Chinese pre-Qin period, Mohism was the first school that challenged Confucianism. A common view is that Mohists attacked Confucianism by proposing jian ai, often translated as “universal love,” that opposes Confucian “graded love”. The Confucian-Mohist debate on ethics is often regarded as a debate between Mohist “universal love,” on the one hand; and Confucian emphasis on family and kinship, on the other. However, it is misleading to translate jian ai as “universal love,” as it distorts our understanding of the (...) debate. The word jian in classical Chinese means “inclusive,” not “impartial”. The Jian Ai chapters in the Mozi do not object to the idea that our moral practices ought to vary according to our relationship with others and their social positions. Furthermore, Mohist jian ai was not proposed in the first instance to refute Confucian ideas. The Confucian-Mohist debate should not be understood as a battle between nepotism and excessive insistence on impartiality, because both of them advocate that we should care for people in general and that we should maintain close relational ties. (shrink)

During the last decade there has been burgeoning research concerning the ways in which we should think of and apply the concept of responsibility for Artificial Intelligence. Despite this conceptual richness, there is still a lack of consensus regarding what Responsible AI entails on both conceptual and practical levels. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethical dimension of responsibility in Responsible AI with Aristotelian virtue ethics, where notions of context and dianoetic virtues play a grounding role for (...) the concept of moral responsibility. The paper starts by highlighting the important difficulties in assigning responsibility to either technologies themselves or to their developers. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to moral responsibility are then contrasted, as we explore how they could inform debates about Responsible AI. We highlight the limits of the former ethical approaches and build the case for classical Aristotelian virtue ethics. We show that two building blocks of Aristotle’s ethics, dianoetic virtues and the context of actions, although largely ignored in the literature, can shed light on how we could think of moral responsibility for both AI and humans. We end by exploring the practical implications of this particular understanding of moral responsibility along the triadic dimensions of ethics by design, ethics in design and ethics for designers. (shrink)

The philosophy of AI has seen some changes, in particular: 1) AI moves away from cognitive science, and 2) the long term risks of AI now appear to be a worthy concern. In this context, the classical central concerns – such as the relation of cognition and computation, embodiment, intelligence & rationality, and information – will regain urgency.

the aidos of phaedra and the meaning of the hyppolytus.

Besides the direct tradition, these verses are cited by Stephanus of Byzantium, s.n. Aγυς, who explains: λγος πρ ‘Eλυης Λακωυικς οὒσης κα ρρυ μτκοσης κα τ ’Aλζυδρω κα Δηϊøβω γαμηθσης Commentators have followed him both as to the identity of the three husbands and the sense of θηλπαις: ‘female-childed’.

Besides the direct tradition, these verses are cited by Stephanus of Byzantium, s.n. Aῖγυς, who explains: λγος π∊ρ ‘Eλυης Λακωυικς οὒσης καῷ ἂρρ∊υ μτ∊κοσης κα τ ’Aλ∊ζυδρω κα Δηϊøβω γαμηθ∊σης Commentators have followed him both as to the identity of the three husbands and the sense of θηλπαις: ‘female-childed’.

Besides the direct tradition, these verses are cited by Stephanus of Byzantium, s.n. Aῖγυς, who explains: λγος π∊ρ ‘Eλυης Λακωυικς οὒσης καῷ ἂρρ∊υ μτ∊κοσης κα τ ’Aλ∊ζυδρω κα Δηϊøβω γαμηθ∊σης Commentators have followed him both as to the identity of the three husbands and the sense of θηλπαις: ‘female-childed’.

We cooperate with other people despite the risk of being exploited or hurt. If future artificial intelligence (AI) systems are benevolent and cooperative toward us, what will we do in return? Here we show that our cooperative dispositions are weaker when we interact with AI. In nine experiments, humans interacted with either another human or an AI agent in four classic social dilemma economic games and a newly designed game of Reciprocity that we introduce here. Contrary to the hypothesis that (...) people mistrust algorithms, participants trusted their AI partners to be as cooperative as humans. However, they did not return AI's benevolence as much and exploited the AI more than humans. These findings warn that future self-driving cars or co-working robots, whose success depends on humans' returning their cooperativeness, run the risk of being exploited. This vulnerability calls not just for smarter machines but also better human-centered policies. (shrink)

Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988) argue that any successful model of cognition must use classical architecture; it must depend upon rule-based processing sensitive to constituent structure. This claim is central to their defense of classical AI against the recent enthusiasm for connectionism. Connectionist nets, they contend, may serve as theories of the implementation of cognition, but never as proper theories of psychology. Connectionist models are doomed to describing the brain at the wrong level, leaving the classical view to (...) account for the mind.This paper considers whether recent results in connectionist research weigh against Fodor and Pylyshyn's thesis. The investigation will force us to develop criteria for determining exactly when a net is capable of systematic processing. Fodor and Pylyshyn clearly intend their thesis to affect the course of research in psychology. I will argue that when systematicity is defined in a way that makes the thesis relevant in this way, the thesis is challenged by recent progress in connectionism. (shrink)

Classical symbolic computational models of cognition are at variance with the empirical findings in the cognitive psychology of memory and inference. Standard symbolic computers are well suited to remembering arbitrary lists of symbols and performing logical inferences. In contrast, human performance on such tasks is extremely limited. Standard models donot easily capture content addressable memory or context sensitive defeasible inference, which are natural and effortless for people. We argue that Connectionism provides a more natural framework in which to model (...) this behaviour. In addition to capturing the gross human performance profile, Connectionist systems seem well suited to accounting for the systematic patterns of errors observed in the human data. We take these arguments to counter Fodor and Pylyshyn's (1988) recent claim that Connectionism is, in principle, irrelevant to psychology. (shrink)

This paper investigates the responses of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art AI language model, to ten prominent philosophical paradoxes, and evaluates its capacity to reason and make decisions in complex and uncertain situations. In addition to analyzing GPT-4's solutions to the paradoxes, this paper assesses the model's Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities by testing its understanding of mental states, intentions, and beliefs in scenarios ranging from classic ToM tests to complex, real-world simulations. Through these tests, we gain insight into AI's potential for (...) social reasoning and its capacity for more sophisticated forms of human-AI interaction. The paper also explores the limitations and biases of AI-generated reasoning and its implications for our comprehension of complex philosophical problems. (shrink)

In this book, the author examines the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence systems as they integrate and replace traditional social structures in new sociocognitive-technological environments. She discusses issues related to the integrity of researchers, technologists, and manufacturers as they design, construct, use, and manage artificially intelligent systems; formalisms for reasoning about moral decisions as part of the behavior of artificial autonomous systems such as agents and robots; and design methodologies for social agents based on societal, moral, and legal values. Throughout (...) the book the author discusses related work, conscious of both classical, philosophical treatments of ethical issues and the implications in modern, algorithmic systems, and she combines regular references and footnotes with suggestions for further reading. This short overview is suitable for undergraduate students, in both technical and non-technical courses, and for interested and concerned researchers, practitioners, and citizens. (shrink)

Healthcare systems across the globe are struggling with increasing costs and worsening outcomes. This presents those responsible for overseeing healthcare with a challenge. Increasingly, policymakers, politicians, clinical entrepreneurs and computer and data scientists argue that a key part of the solution will be ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) – particularly Machine Learning (ML). This argument stems not from the belief that all healthcare needs will soon be taken care of by “robot doctors.” Instead, it is an argument that rests on the classic (...) counterfactual definition of AI as an umbrella term for a range of techniques that can be used to make machines complete tasks in a way that would be considered intelligent were they to be completed by a human. Automation of this nature could offer great opportunities for the improvement of healthcare services and ultimately patients’ health by significantly improving human clinical capabilities in diagnosis, drug discovery, epidemiology, personalised medicine, and operational efficiency. However, if these AI solutions are to be embedded in clinical practice, then at least three issues need to be considered: the technical possibilities and limitations; the ethical, regulatory and legal framework; and the governance framework. In this article, we report on the results of a systematic analysis designed to provide a clear overview of the second of these elements: the ethical, regulatory and legal framework. We find that ethical issues arise at six levels of abstraction (individual, interpersonal, group, institutional, sectoral, and societal) and can be categorised as epistemic, normative, or overarching. We conclude by stressing how important it is that the ethical challenges raised by implementing AI in healthcare settings are tackled proactively rather than reactively and map the key considerations for policymakers to each of the ethical concerns highlighted. (shrink)

The European Workshop on Logics in Artificial Intelligence was held at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, September 10-14, 1990. This volume includes the 29 papers selected and presented at the workshop together with 7 invited papers. The main themes are: - Logic programming and automated theorem proving, - Computational semantics for natural language, - Applications of non-classical logics, - Partial and dynamic logics.

The year 2005 has been named the World Year of Physics in recognition of the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's "Miracle Year," in which he published four landmark papers which had deep and great influence on the last and the current century: quantum theory, general relativity, and statistical mechanics. Despite the enormous importance that Einstein’s discoveries played in these theories, most physicists adopt a version of quantum theory which is incompatible with the idea that motivated Einstein in the first place. (...) This seems to suggest that Einstein was fundamentally incapable of appreciating the `quantum revolution,’ and that his vision of physics as an attempt to reach a complete and comprehensive description of reality was ultimately impossible to obtain. Relativity theory has provided us with a picture of reality in which the world can be though as independent on who observes it, and the same can be said for statistical mechanics. Instead, quantum mechanics seems to suggest that physical objects do not exist `out there’ when someone is not observing them. In this framework, it is often suggested that any kind of causal explanation is impossible in the atomic and subatomic world, and therefore should be abandoned. This is why many think that it is in principle impossible for quantum theory to provide us with a coherent and comprehensive view of the world, in contrast with what happens with relativity and statistical mechanics. Is it really impossible to pursue Einstein’s ideal of physics also in the quantum framework? This book argues that this is not the case: the central idea is that Einstein’s vision of physics is still a live option, and indeed it is the one that best allows obtaining a unitary understanding of our physical theories. One can consider all the three theories mentioned above, suitably modified, as theories that are able to account and explain the world around us without too much departure from the classical framework. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -/- La teoria della relatività, la meccanica statistica e la meccanica quantistica hanno profondamente rivoluzionato il nostro modo di concepire spazio, tempo, materia, probabilità e causalità, nonché il rapporto tra universo fisico ed osservatore, nozioni che sono state al centro della discussione filosofica dal mondo greco fino ai nostri giorni. Questo volume, opera di Valia Allori, Mauro Dorato, Federico Laudisa e Nino Zanghì, non solo intende suggerire nuovi metodi di confronto tra fisica e filosofia, ma prova altresì a rendere espliciti i presupposti filosofici che sono presenti nell'interpretazione che i fisici stessi danno del formalismo matematico. (shrink)

Besides the direct tradition, these verses are cited by Stephanus of Byzantium, s.n. Aῖγυς, who explains: λγος π∊ρ ‘Eλυης Λακωυικς οὒσης καῷ ἂρρ∊υ μτ∊κοσης κα τ ’Aλ∊ζυδρω κα Δηϊøβω γαμηθ∊σης Commentators have followed him both as to the identity of the three husbands and the sense of θηλπαις: ‘female-childed’.

Pauly'sReal-Encyclopädieknows of two women named after the attractive looking,but allegedly unappetising fish,c⋯λπη. The first is mentioned several times in theelder Pliny, who on one occasion refers to her as anobstetrix, while the second features in theDeipnosophistaeof Athenaeus as a writer of πα⋯γνια. In a recent issue of this journal J. N. Davidson has made the suggestion that they were one and the same person. Salpe's πα⋯γνια, Davidson argues, would not have consisted of light or frivolous verse, but of a compilation (...) of prose recipes of a kind that is to be found in a section of a London magical papyrus which is headed πα⋯γνια Δημοκρ⋯του. Such recipes might well have cohabited with the kind of practicalmedical advice reportedly given by the Salpe referred to in Pliny. His case is superficially attractive since, as will be seen, such a collocation of practical help and frivolity is easy to parallel in magical and other subliterary texts. It needs to be scrutinized, however, in the light of a fuller presentation and consideration of the evidence than is to be found in his note. First, it is worth describing at greater length the phenomena in question, which are much more common than one would gather from a reading of Davidson and which are, I suspect, not as yet as familiar to the scholarly world as they should be. (shrink)

Pauly's Real-Encyclopädie knows of two women named after the attractive looking,but allegedly unappetising fish, cλπη. The first is mentioned several times in theelder Pliny, who on one occasion refers to her as an obstetrix, while the second features in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus as a writer of παγνια. In a recent issue of this journal J. N. Davidson has made the suggestion that they were one and the same person. Salpe's παγνια, Davidson argues, would not have consisted of light or (...) frivolous verse, but of a compilation of prose recipes of a kind that is to be found in a section of a London magical papyrus which is headed παγνια Δημοκρτου. Such recipes might well have cohabited with the kind of practicalmedical advice reportedly given by the Salpe referred to in Pliny. His case is superficially attractive since, as will be seen, such a collocation of practical help and frivolity is easy to parallel in magical and other subliterary texts. It needs to be scrutinized, however, in the light of a fuller presentation and consideration of the evidence than is to be found in his note. First, it is worth describing at greater length the phenomena in question, which are much more common than one would gather from a reading of Davidson and which are, I suspect, not as yet as familiar to the scholarly world as they should be. (shrink)

Pauly'sReal-Encyclopädieknows of two women named after the attractive looking,but allegedly unappetising fish,c⋯λπη. The first is mentioned several times in theelder Pliny, who on one occasion refers to her as anobstetrix, while the second features in theDeipnosophistaeof Athenaeus as a writer of πα⋯γνια. In a recent issue of this journal J. N. Davidson has made the suggestion that they were one and the same person. Salpe's πα⋯γνια, Davidson argues, would not have consisted of light or frivolous verse, but of a compilation (...) of prose recipes of a kind that is to be found in a section of a London magical papyrus which is headed πα⋯γνια Δημοκρ⋯του. Such recipes might well have cohabited with the kind of practicalmedical advice reportedly given by the Salpe referred to in Pliny. His case is superficially attractive since, as will be seen, such a collocation of practical help and frivolity is easy to parallel in magical and other subliterary texts. It needs to be scrutinized, however, in the light of a fuller presentation and consideration of the evidence than is to be found in his note. First, it is worth describing at greater length the phenomena in question, which are much more common than one would gather from a reading of Davidson and which are, I suspect, not as yet as familiar to the scholarly world as they should be. (shrink)

In the course of giving a brief sketch of the rule of Augustus Dio passes the following remark on the state of public elections.

In the course of giving a brief sketch of the rule of Augustus Dio passes the following remark on the state of public elections.

On its surface, the movie her depicts a classical romance: boy meets girl, both fall in love, the relationship evolves, until they finally and sadly break up. What makes this conventional plot special and worthwhile of being used in philosophical investigation is the fact that the girl in this case is an artificial intelligence —Samantha is an operating system owned by Theodore. But is reciprocal, romantic love between a human and an AI even possible, and, if so, might there (...) be aspects of such a loving relationship that warrant ethical criticism? Assuming, for the sake of argument, a positive answer to the first question, this chapter focuses on the latter. In addressing the ethical implications of such a loving relationship, we highlight the likelihood of its sexist and misogynistic traits. Current depictions of AI lovers—just like Samantha—usually fulfill the female stereotype of being warm, caring, and always up to satisfying the user’s needs. This is due to a fundamental asymmetry which is constitutive for relationships between humans and AIs—after all, the latter are programmed and bought for the very reason to satisfy the buyer’s needs. We argue that romantic love between a human and an AI, therefore, warrants substantial ethical criticism, as it falls short of important ethical aspects of a romantic love worthwhile pursuing. (shrink)

In this essay, I challenge the egocentric tradition which privileges the standpoint of an isolated individual, and propose a speech-based dialogical approach as an alternative. Considering that the egocentric tradition can be deciphered in part by analyzing the distortions undergone by pronominal discourse in the language of classical philosophy, I reexamine the pragmatics of ordinary language featuring the pronoun I in an effort to recover a more relational understanding of persons. I develop such an analysis of the deep grammar (...) of pronominal discourse under the heading of ‘I–you connectedness’. I–you connectedness emphasizes the communicative structure of experience, in particular the phenomenological importance of the addressee, the inseparability of ‘I’ and ‘You’, and the nature of the alternation between them. I–you connectedness is the best thematized within living speech, which is invariably oriented towards an interlocutor, and animated by mutual address. Yet, I–you connectedness extends beyond living speech to other modalities of meaning, notably thinking and writing, where one notes a similar orientation to a living, imagined, or virtual addressee. I–you connectedness extends, therefore, beyond discursive experience, and captures the deep dialogic dimension of meaning in pre-linguistic and extra-linguistic life. I briefly consider its implications for theoretical and practical issues within robotics and AI. (shrink)

An academic anthology on Jewish studies and education in memory of dr. Avraham Zalkin.

In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and everything else), while (...) others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists. (shrink)

Abstract The notion of representation lies at the crossroads of questions about the nature of belief and knowledge, meaning, and intentionality. But there is some hope that it might be simpler than all those. If we could understand it clearly, it might then help to explicate those more difficult notions. In this paper, my central aim is to find a principled criterion, along lines that make biological sense, for deciding just when it becomes theoretically plausible to ascribe to some process (...) or state a representational role. I shall be especially concerned with some differences, in this regard, between classical and connectionist models. The relation between ?standard? artificial intelligence and connectionism turns out to illustrate a ?first in, last out? principle: What we most easily understand (and so can program) is what we have most recently invented; tasks we ourselves perform best, by contrast, are a lot harder to understand. Classical AI has modelled the former; connectionism tries to tackle the latter. I end with some speculations about the possible implications of these considerations for our understanding of understanding. (shrink)

Knowledge can be expressed in language using a plethora of grammatical means. Four major groups of meanings related to knowledge are Evidentiality: grammatical expression of information source; Egophoricity: grammatical expression of access to knowledge; Mirativity: grammatical expression of expectation of knowledge; and Epistemic modality: grammatical expression of attitude to knowledge. The four groups of categories interact. Some develop overtones of the others. Evidentials stand apart from other means in many ways, including their correlations with speech genres and social environment. This (...) essay presents a framework which connects the expression of knowledge across the world's languages in a coherent way, showing their dependencies and complexities, and pathways of historical development in various scenarios, including language obsolescence. (shrink)