The proliferation of biometric identification technology raises difficult issues in the matter of security, privacy and identity. Though biometric "images" are not images per se, they are both unique representations of an individual in themsevles and a means of access to other identifying information. I compare biometric imaging with other kinds of identifying representations and find that there are issues specific to biometric ID's. Because they represent information that is written into the body they are directly related to one's sense (...) of autonomy and self-esteem. Releasing biometric ID's into the public sphere therefore involves a tangible loss of control and privacy. This does not mean that to do so is never a reasonable act, but rather that it should be carefully weighed, and should never be mandatory in order to receive any fundamental rights or benefits. (shrink)

The essays in the book have two main emphases. Regarding the late Wittgenstein, they focus on the idea that skepticism about rule-following is undermined, indeed incoherent, in virtue of Wittgenstein's emphasis on context of utterance and "forms of life" (roughly the "community" view of his later work). In the early Wittgenstein they take a "resolute" position on nonsense, saying that he did not believe there was some ineffable or informative nonsense, but only pure and utter nonsense, including everything in the (...) Tractatus. Although many of the essays are interesting and insightful, they do not amount to a demonstration that Wittgenstein held the positions attributed to him; moreover the positions are counterintuitive, and appear to be undermined by historical evidence regarding Wittgenstein's own view of his work. (shrink)

In 1929 Wittgenstein began to work on the first philosophical manuscripts he had kept since completing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1918. The impetus for this was his conviction that the logic of the TLP was flawed: it was unable to account for the fact that a proposition that assigns a single value on a continuum to a simple object thereby excludes all assignments of different values to the object . Consequently Wittgenstein's "atomic propositions" could not be logically independent of one (...) another. ;Initially he thought he could replace the "logically perfect language" of the TLP with a "phenomenological language" in which experiential propositions about various "spaces" would form systems. The system described by a phenomenological language would be independent of the one described by ordinary "physicalistic" language; the physical "world" was known only by inference from the phenomenological. But he soon realized there was a fundamental error in this conception: phenomenology has to describe the same world as physics or it fails to provide a foundation for it. This suggests that there is only one world, and one language with two different modes of expression. Wittgenstein's now comes to his fundamental insight: ordinary language is biased towards the description of physical objects and their relations, but it is our only method of expressing phenomenological or abstract concepts. Failure to recognize this difficulty leads to the misapplication of physicalistic concepts, i.e., to grammatical errors. ;This insight had the following impact: the task of philosophy is not to invent logical or phenomenological languages, but to understand the grammar of ordinary language; the notion of a language of pure experience was itself connected with a false, physicalistic idea of the soul as an observer of a private world; the conception of analysis that had guided philosophy since Frege was based on a misused metaphor taken from the grammar of physics: the analysis of an object into its parts or chemical constituents. These ideas reach their ultimate expression in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Thus his "later" work actually begins with these 1929--30 manuscripts. (shrink)

This paper takes a stand on Hamblin semantics and its relation to the semantics-to-pragmatics interface. Biased questions, where the speaker finds one of the options more likely and expects the confirmation that p is true, raise a concern about the limits of Hamblin semantics. I argue that biased questions have modified Hamblin semantics, while unbiased questions have unconstrained Hamblin semantics. The optional bias feature explains compositionally. It is triggered by likelihood presuppositions ranging Hamblin sets and highlighting the preferred alternative(s). Biased (...) effects are exceptionally possible in alternative and wh-questions, but only in polar questions, they can be encoded lexically and grammatically. I argue that Hamblin semantics covers all core types of questions, while some of its applications for non-questions are problematic. (shrink)

I discuss the foundations of predicate ontologies based on two model notions – elementary states of affairs and eventualities, i.e. ordered pairs of initial and end states of affairs. Vendlerian classifications are oriented towards elementary states and tense logic, while Davidsonian classifications deal with eventualities and event logic. There are two kinds of atemporal predicates - fact and properties. Facts are propositional arguments of second-order predicates which add a special meaning that the embedded proposition was verified. Properties are atemporal first-order (...) predicates that lack eventive interpretation and are not associated with factive frames. Davidsonian states are homogeneous durable spatiotemporal things distinct both from atemporal properties and spatiotemporal dynamic predicates. Davidsonian states are causally independent, while resultatives are causally determined as they reconstruct a preceding event that has caused the end state p. I discuss the contrast between external and internal Davidsonian states. The former lack a priority argument and can be quantified extensionally. The latter have a priority experiential argument and can only be quantified intensionally. External states can be observed, while internal states cannot. (shrink)

This article considers natural signs and their role in the origin of language. Natural signs, sometimes called primary signs, are connected with their signified by causal relationships, concomitance, or likeliness. And their acquisition is directed by both objective reality and past experience (memory). The discovery and use of natural signs is a required prerequisite of existence for any living systems because they are indispensable to movement, the search for food, regulation, communication, and many other information-related activities. It is argued that (...) the birth of conventional signs, sometimes called secondary signs, was determined by a connotative use of natural signs and that, regulated and maintained by them, human language developed. At the same time, the origin and development of human language presupposes a ‘rational turn’ from the given and external reality of natural signs to the rationally constructed reality of artificial signs and rules that are internally maintained by the subjects’ deliberate activities, and actual and inherited social tradition (social memory). In view of this, language is defined as a dynamic system that must both be natural and artificial, empirical and a priori, inductive and deductive. This bilateral origin and regulation of language is the dual-inference of language. (shrink)

Adaptive Planning is an approach to planning in the commonsense domain. An adaptive planner takes advantage of the habitual nature of many of the planning situations for which it plans by bosing its activities on a memory of pre‐stored plans. A critical issue, and the subject of this paper, is the question of flexibility: How does an adaptive planner refit an old plan in order to meet the demands of some new planning situation? An adaptive planner refits prestored plans by (...) constructing an interpretation of the situation in which it is engaged. Key elements in the theory of adaptive planning are its treatment of specific plans and a notion of situation matching. The theory of adaptive planning has been modeled by a computer program called PLEXUS. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In this paper, we attempt to provide starting points for a discussion on immediate and longer term consequences of COVID-19-induced uses of digital technologies for the distinction of the public an...

In contrast to the theories of relativity, quantum mechanics is not yet based on a generally accepted conceptual foundation. It is proposed here that the missing principle may be identified through the observation that all knowledge in physics has to be expressed in propositions and that therefore the most elementary system represents the truth value of one proposition, i.e., it carries just one bit of information. Therefore an elementary system can only give a definite result in one specific measurement. The (...) irreducible randomness in other measurements is then a necessary consequence. For composite systems entanglement results if all possible information is exhausted in specifying joint properties of the constituents. (shrink)

This collection of ten essays elucidates some of the more challenging aspects of Anscombe’s work and affirms her reputation as one of our most original ...

I follow the distinction of predicative versus attributive adjectives introduced by P.T. Geach in 1956 and discuss Atina Knowles' arguments contra the revisions of Geach's original conception.

Analizamos aquí un conjunto de narrativas de docentes de escuela secundaria durante la pandemia de COVID-19 en la Argentina. Los resultados muestran la transformación de su práctica ante la virtualidad forzada y la pérdida de la materialidad de la escuela. La institución aparece así como el lugar de “lo común” y de fortalecimiento de los vínculos en un contexto de incertidumbre.

Agency is a power, but what is it a power to do? The tradition presents us with three main answers: (1) that agency is a power to affect one’s own will, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of a part of one's body; (2) that agency is a power to affect one’s own body, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of an object that one touches; and (3) that agency is (...) a power to affect that material upon which one brings one's action to bear---e.g. the apple one is peeling (with a knife in one's hand). These three answers correspond to three increasingly expansive conceptions of the province of human agency. I refer to them, respectively, as volitionalism, corporealism and materialism. Only the first two are seriously considered in contemporary action theory. Favoring the third, and hoping to sharpen the conflict between the third and the first, I criticize the second. Corporealism has been a popular position—arguably, the default position in the philosophy of action—since Donald Davidson’s classic paper “Agency” (1971). Although it seems to occupy a sensible middle ground between volitionalism and materialism, corporealism is, I argue, indefensible: it shares the vulnerabilities of both its two rivals, without possessing the strengths of either. Nevertheless, reflection on corporealism lights the road to materialism, which, in the end, is the only possible alternative to volitionalism. (shrink)

Conventional behaviors develop from practice for regularly occurring problems of coordination within a community of actors. Reusing and extending conventional methods for coordinating behavior is the task of everyday reasoning.The computational model presented in the paper details the emergence of convention in circumstances where there is no ruling body of knowledge developed by prior generations of actors within the community to guide behavior. The framework we assume combines social theories of cognition with human information processing models that have been developed (...) within Cognitive Science. The model presented reflects both elements of the framework. Conventional behaviors are partially coded in the predisposition of participants in a joint activity to expect certain points of coordination to develop during the course of the activity. The expected points of coordination that are commonly assumed form a design for an activity. Because of uncertainty, interruptions, and numerous other opportunities to get off‐track and out‐of‐synch, the participants must work jointly and continuously to achieve conventional coordination.One feature of the model is that the community improves its performance despite the fact that individual actors reason independently about their experiences. Another important feature of the model is that the mechanisms for improving behavior are tied to the memory function of individual actors. A third important feature is that the social interaction among the participants simplifies and drives the everyday reasoning processes. An analysis of a large set of computational experiments supports the theoretical position that is developed regarding everyday reasoning and convention. (shrink)

The article proposes to further develop the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by including into evolutionary research an analysis of phenomena that occur above the organismal level. We demonstrate that the current Extended Synthesis is focused more on individual traits (genetically or non-genetically inherited) and less on community system traits (synergetic/organizational traits) that characterize transgenerational biological, ecological, social, and cultural systems. In this regard, we will consider various communities that are made up of interacting populations, and for which the (...) individual members can belong to the same or to different species. Examples of communities include biofilms, ant colonies, symbiotic associations resulting in holobiont formation, and human societies. The proposed model of evolution at the level of communities revises classic theorizing on the major transitions in evolution by analyzing the interplay between community/social traits and individual traits, and how this brings forth ideas of top-down regulations of bottom-up evolutionary processes (collaboration of downward and upward causation). The work demonstrates that such interplay also includes reticulate interactions and reticulate causation. In this regard, we exemplify how community systems provide various non-genetic ‘scaffoldings’, ‘constraints’, and ‘affordances’ for individual and sociocultural evolutionary development. Such research complements prevailing models that focus on the vertical transmission of heritable information, from parent to offspring, with research that instead focusses on horizontal, oblique and even reverse information transmission, going from offspring to parent. We call this reversed information transfer the ‘offspring effect’ to contrast it from the ‘parental effect’. We argue that the proposed approach to inheritance is effective for modelling cumulative and distributed developmental process and for explaining the biological origins and evolution of language. (shrink)

The conclusion of practical reasoning is commonly said to rest upon a diverse pair of representations—a “major” and a “minor” premise—the first of which concerns the end and the second, the means. Modern and contemporary philosophers writing on action and practical reasoning tend to portray the minor premise as a “means-end belief”—a belief about, as Michael Smith puts it, “the ways in which one thing leads to another,” or, as John McDowell puts it, “what can be relied on to bring (...) about what.” On this point there is little difference between followers of Davidson and followers of Anscombe, or between those who invoke Hume’s legacy and those who invoke Aristotle’s. But Aristotle himself held a very different position. According to him, the minor premise concerns particulars, a sphere controlled by perception. The perception of particulars—that is, of the really-existing people and things confronted in the field of action—plays no essential role in the modern account of rational agency. Because it does not, the modern account fails to explain how one could act for a reason, or how practical reasoning could deliver any conclusion. (shrink)

Anscombe holds that a proper account of intentional action must exhibit “a ‘form’ of description of events.” But what does that mean? To answer this question, I compare the method of Anscombe’s Intention with that of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic—another classic work of analytic philosophy that consciously opposes itself to psychological explanations. On the one hand, positively, I aim to identify and elucidate the kind of account of intentional action that Anscombe attempts to provide. On the other hand, negatively, I (...) hope to dispel the canard that Anscombe’s opposition to the causal theory of action is a product of “behaviorism.”. (shrink)

What the participants share, their common “sense” of the world, creates a foundation, a framing, an orientation that enables human actors to see and act in coordination with one another. For recurrent activities, the methods the participants use to understand each other as they act change, making the intersubjective space in which actors operate richer and easier to produce. This article works through some of the issues that emerge from a close examination of intersubjectivity as it is managed through representation (...) and interaction. The data that are presented document, in detail, a sequence of related interactions, within and across episodes of cooperation, where continuity and change can be observed. The emergence of conversational structure and coordinating representations are significant milestones in the long‐term development of a representational practice that support the runtime co‐construction of intersubjective space. Conversational structures emerge interactively to mediate recurrent points of coordination in the domain activity, and only secondarily the conversation itself. Coordinating representations change the representational practice of the participants by making it easier to manage their “shared view” of the collective work, enabling the participants to make progress, expand the field of the common activity, while exhibiting more control of if and when explicit grounding occurs. (shrink)

To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogs are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz 2006). In this paper, we show that in terms of our framework we can account for several types of implicatures in a uniform way, (...) suggesting that there is no need for an independent linguistic theory of generalized implicatures. In the final section, we show how we can embed our theory in the framework of signaling games, and how it relates with other game theoretic analyses of implicatures. (shrink)

In this paper we are going to show that error coping strategies play an essential role in linguistic pragmatics. We study the effect of noisy speaker strategies within a framework of signalling games with feedback loop. We distinguish between cases in which errors occur in message selection and cases in which they occur in signal selection. The first type of errors affects the content of an utterance, and the second type its linguistic expression. The general communication model is inspired by (...) the Shannon–Weaver communication model. We test the model by a number of benchmark examples, including examples of relevance implicatures, quantity implicatures, and presupposition accommodation. (shrink)

When an agent intentionally changes something separate from herself—when, say, she opens a bottle—what is the relation between what the agent does and what the patient suffers? This paper defends the Aristotelian thesis that action is to passion as the road from Thebes to Athens is to the road from Athens to Thebes: they are two aspects of a single material reality. Philosophers of action tend to think otherwise. It is generally taken for granted that intentional transactions must be analyzed (...) in terms of a causal relation. Controversy surrounds the question what the causal relata are: event-causalists claim that both of the relata are events; agent-causalists claim that the first relatum is an agent, and they dispute among themselves whether the second is an event or a terminal state of the patient. But the entire controversy assumes the necessity of some causal analysis of transactions. This paper argues that, far from being necessary, no such analysis is even possible. (shrink)

This paper develops Lewis’ notion of convention within a framework that mixes cognitive science with some more social theories of activity like distributed cognition and activity theory. The close examination of everyday situations of convention-based activity will produce some interesting issues for a cognitive theory of behavior. Uncertainty, dynamics, and the complexities of the performance of convention-based activities that are distributed over time and/or place, are driving factors in the analysis that is presented. How the actors reason and manage their (...) collaboration is characterized as pragmatic action. During the course of recurrent activities, the participants adapt previously learned convention-based activities to new circumstances. The coordinating representations that are a part of the design of the context mediate parts of the activity. As they act, the participants learn. (shrink)

The target article interprets current psychological research on everyday memory in terms of a correspondence metaphor. This metaphor is based on a reduction of everyday memory to autobiographical and eyewitness memory. This commentary focuses on everyday memory as it functions in activity. Viewed from this perspective, the joining of everyday memory to a correspondence metaphor is problematic. A more natural way to frame the processes of everyday memory is in terms of context, practice, and pragmatics.

This paper explores the assumption of autonomy. Several arguments are presented against the assumption of runtime autonomy as a principle of design for artificial intelligence systems. The arguments vary from being theoretical, to practical, and to analytic. The latter parts of the paper focus on one strategy for building non-autonomous systems (the practice view). One critical theme is that intelligence is not located in the system alone, it emerges from a history of interactions among user, builder, and designer over a (...) given set of data as mediated by the system. A second critical theme is that artificially intelligent systems are ongoing projects that must be continuously adapted and revised using joint person-machine efforts. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 778-792, June 2022.