Previous research into the formalisation of statute law identified a number of uses of language which posed problems for formalisation. A previous paper argued that these uses establish the requirement that a formalisation be isomorphic, but noted that this has odd consequences. This paper expands on what these consequences are and argues that they undermine the very idea of formalisation. Therefore, the whole argument constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of formalising statute law. The paper provides reasons why (...) this activity is impossible and places the conclusion in the context of the development of modem logic, in which context it appears uncontroversial. (shrink)

Robert Cummins [(1996) Representations, targets and attitudes, Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT, p. 1] has characterized the vexed problem of mental representation as "the topic in the philosophy of mind for some time now." This remark is something of an understatement. The same topic was central to the famous controversy between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld in the 17th century and remained central to the entire philosophical tradition of "ideas" in the writings of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid and Kant. However, the scholarly, (...) exegetical literature has almost no overlap with that of contemporary cognitive science. I show that the recurrence of certain deep perplexities about the mind is a systematic and pervasive pattern arising not only throughout history, but also in a number of independent domains today such as debates over visual imagery, symbolic systems and others. Such historical and contemporary convergences suggest that the fundamental issues cannot arise essentially from the theoretical guise they take in any particular case. (shrink)

This article presents a formal theory of robot perception as a form of abduction. The theory pins down the process whereby low‐level sensor data is transformed into a symbolic representation of the external world, drawing together aspects such as incompleteness, top‐down information flow, active perception, attention, and sensor fusion in a unifying framework. In addition, a number of themes are identified that are common to both the engineer concerned with developing a rigorous theory of perception, such as the one on (...) offer here, and the philosopher of mind who is exercised by questions relating to mental representation and intentionality. (shrink)

I propose a new approach to the constitutive problem of psychology ‘what is mind?’ The first section introduces modifications of the received scope, methodology, and evaluation criteria of unified theories of cognition in accordance with the requirements of evolutionary compatibility and of a mature science. The second section outlines the proposed theory. Its first part provides empirically verifiable conditions delineating the class of meaningful neural formations and modifies accordingly the traditional conceptions of meaning, concept and thinking. This analysis is part (...) of a theory of communication in terms of inter-level systems of primitives that proposes the communication-understanding principle as a psychological invariance. It unifies a substantial amount of research by systematizing the notions of meaning, thinking, concept, belief, communication, and understanding and leads to a minimum vocabulary for this core system of mental phenomena. Its second part argues that written human language is the key characteristic of the artificially natural human mind. Overall, the theory both supports Darwin’s continuity hypothesis and proposes that the mental gap is within our own species. (shrink)

I do not think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world or the sciences. (G.E. Moore, 1942, p. 14).

Knowledge representation is one of the central concepts in Artificial Intelligence. It is very common that knowledge about a field is expressed in natural language. Therefore, most of the times, knowledge representation using a logic programming language derives into a translation problem. This translation consists in the formalization of the statements, belonging to the knowledge level, which are converted into formulas of the so called symbolic level. Knowledge may be imprecise or vague and, in order to deal with vagueness using (...) declarative techniques, fuzzy logic programming amalgamates classical logic programming and fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic programming has mainly led to programming languages that use annotations to represent vagueness. But vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon which is implicit in the statements of the knowledge level. Hence, the natural connection existing between these two levels is broken when annotations are employed, since they introduce weights in a symbolic level which are not present in the knowledge level and converts knowledge representation in a more complex, counterintuitive task. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a fuzzy linguistic logic framework which allows the treatment of imprecision through linguistic resources. This framework makes a clean separation between precise knowledge and vague knowledge. In this paper, we argue that this separation is more declarative than the one dispensed by the approach based on annotations, and can be beneficial for modeling a problem. (shrink)

While the recent special issue of JCS on machine consciousness (Volume 14, Issue 7) was in preparation, a collection of papers on the same topic, entitled Artificial Consciousness and edited by Antonio Chella and Riccardo Manzotti, was published. 1 The editors of the JCS special issue, Ron Chrisley, Robert Clowes and Steve Torrance, thought it would be a timely and productive move to have authors of papers in their collection review the papers in the Chella and Manzotti book, and include (...) these reviews in the special issue of the journal. Eight of the JCS authors (plus Uziel Awret) volunteered to review one or more of the fifteen papers in Artificial Consciousness; these individual reviews were then collected together with a minimal amount of editing to produce a seamless chapter-by-chapter review of the entire book. Because the number and length of contributions to the JCS issue was greater than expected, the collective review of Artificial Con- sciousness had to be omitted, but here at last it is. Each paper’s review is written by a single author, so any comments made may not reflect the opinions of all nine of the joint authors! (shrink)