Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats that of humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking (...) machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes toward these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models. (shrink)

Discovering the underlying mathematical expressions describing a dataset is a core challenge for artificial intelligence. This is the problem of symbolic regression. Despite recent advances in training neural networks to solve complex tasks, deep learning approaches to symbolic regression are underexplored. We propose a framework that leverages deep learning for symbolic regression via a simple idea: use a large model to search the space of small models. Specifically, we use a recurrent neural network to emit a distribution over tractable mathematical (...) expressions and employ a novel risk-seeking policy gradient to train the network to generate better-fitting expressions. Our algorithm outperforms several baseline methods (including Eureqa, the gold standard for symbolic regression) in its ability to exactly recover symbolic expressions on a series of benchmark problems, both with and without added noise. More broadly, our contributions include a framework that can be applied to optimize hierarchical, variable-length objects under a blackbox performance metric, with the ability to incorporate constraints in situ, and a risk-seeking policy gradient formulation that optimizes for best-case performance instead of expected performance. (shrink)

Over a 20-year period, the United States has developed a consensus of legal opinion concerning living wills and other advance directives. At the heart of this consensus are two interconnected principles. First, the state should minimally interfere with the wishes of patients and surrogates and the decisions of physicians about foregoing life-sustaining treatments. Second, state interference is permissible for the sake of protecting a compelling state interest. The overwhelming majority of states with advance directive laws have attained this balance of (...) minimal interference and compelling state interest in developing their laws. (shrink)

Both scientists and children make important structural discoveries, yet their computational underpinnings are not well understood. Structure discovery has previously been formalized as probabilistic inference about the right structural form—where form could be a tree, ring, chain, grid, etc.. Although this approach can learn intuitive organizations, including a tree for animals and a ring for the color circle, it assumes a strong inductive bias that considers only these particular forms, and each form is explicitly provided as initial knowledge. Here we (...) introduce a new computational model of how organizing structure can be discovered, utilizing a broad hypothesis space with a preference for sparse connectivity. Given that the inductive bias is more general, the model's initial knowledge shows little qualitative resemblance to some of the discoveries it supports. As a consequence, the model can also learn complex structures for domains that lack intuitive description, as well as predict human property induction judgments without explicit structural forms. By allowing form to emerge from sparsity, our approach clarifies how both the richness and flexibility of human conceptual organization can coexist. (shrink)

In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia’s love affair with social perfection and reveals how ...

This volume consists of fourteen chapters selected from papers presented at the conference 'Ethics, Medicine and Health Care: An Appraisal of the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.' along with a response to those chapters by Engelhardt and a Foreword by Laurence B. McCullough. The chapters direct primary attention to various aspects of Engelhardt's philosophy of medicine and bioethics as presented in The Foundations of Bioethics and Bioethics and Secular Humanism: The Search for a Common Morality. Among the topics treated (...) are the economics of health care and the medical profession, the libertarian and communitarian aspects of Engelhardt's thought, the moral status of children, abortion, the moral foundations for a health care system, feminism and clinical epistemology, and the relation between secular and religious moralities. In response to the various challenges posed by the authors, Engelhardt considers the implications of the failure of the modern philosophical project, the role of reason in ethics, and the resolution of conflict among communities that do not share the same moral vision. The book will be of interest to professionals in medicine, philosophy, theology, health policy, and law, and to graduate students in those disciplines. (shrink)

This article begins with a criticism of Mclntyre and Gorovitz's account of medical error. Their theory implies that error, at least sometimes, it a necessary consequence of the inductive character of medical inquiry. The counter intuitive consequences of this account suggest that the issues surrounding induction may not be the most fertile area for developing a coherent interpretation of medical error. Given these shortcomings, I develop a new theory which assumes that the best philosophical soil for constructing a theory of (...) medical trror is the problem of universals. I then explain the problem and how the medical universal functions within arguments concerning diagnosis and treatment. A Wittgensteinian solution to the problem is presented which emphasizes the "borderline" character of some, if not many, medical judgments. Next, an argument is offered to establish that questions of medical error are not purely professional questions. This is because the theories used to make such professional judgments permit borderline cases even under the best circumstances. Finally, while there are a number of legitimate responses to this situation, I recommend one which involves legislative action. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The term “ideology” can cover almost any set of ideas, but its power to bewitch political activists results from its strange logic. It is part philosophy, part science, and part spiritual revelation, all tied together in leading to a remarkable paradox—that the modern Western world, beneath its liberal appearance, is actually the most systematically oppressive system of despotism the world has ever seen. In Alien Powers, Kenneth Minogue takes this complex intellectual construction apart, analyzing its logical, rhetorical, and psychological (...) devices, and thus opening it up to critical analysis. This new, ISI Books’ Background edition of Alien Powers includes a new introduction to the text by Martyn P. Thompson and critical essays on the text by political theorist Paul Gottfried and philosopher Stephen A. Erickson. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner's The Foundations of Modern Political Thought is primarily of interest to philosophers not for its excellent account of European thought about the state but for the self–conscious philosophy which has gone into it. It is a rare historian who pauses to get his philosophy in order before he embarks on a major enterprise, though such a policy is possibly less unusual in intellectual history than in other fields. In Skinner's case, however, this order of doing things has been (...) pushed so far that he counts as a philosopher in his own right, rather than as merely someone who is unusually careful to think about what he is doing. The publication of this major work thus provides a convenient opportunity to make a few remarks about the relation between historical theory and practice. (shrink)

We were encouraged by the broad enthusiasm for building machines that learn and think in more human-like ways. Many commentators saw our set of key ingredients as helpful, but there was disagreement regarding the origin and structure of those ingredients. Our response covers three main dimensions of this disagreement: nature versus nurture, coherent theories versus theory fragments, and symbolic versus sub-symbolic representations. These dimensions align with classic debates in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, although, rather than embracing these debates, we (...) emphasize ways of moving beyond them. Several commentators saw our set of key ingredients as incomplete and offered a wide range of additions. We agree that these additional ingredients are important in the long run and discuss prospects for incorporating them. Finally, we consider some of the ethical questions raised regarding the research program as a whole. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

In this article I will identify the position from which I write and the methodology I will employ, and then I will ask: ”Is the Foucauldian conception of disciplinary power still at work in contemporary forms of imprisonment?” I will answer this question in the affirmative and report the results of a case study of the operational philosophy of a contemporary prison in Melbourne Australia while highlighting some key comparative points from Discipline and Punish . How prisoners resist and subvert (...) disciplinary power by turning an inclusive grouping within the prison into a site from which they highly differentiate Self from Other will be touched upon. I will conclude by finding that homo criminalis has in fact become a definite object in the field of knowledge and he is emerging as a product from the machine for altering minds. (shrink)

This essay explores some concerns about the quality of informed consent in patients whose autonomy is diminished by fatal illness. It argues that patients with diminished autonomy cannot give free and voluntary consent, and that recruitment of such patients as subjects in human experimentation exploits their vulnerability in a morally objectionable way. Two options are given to overcome this objection: (i) recruit only those patients who desire to contribute to medical knowledge, rather than gain access to experimental treatment, or (ii) (...) provide prospective subjects the choice to participate in standard doubleblind study or receive the experimental treatment. Either option would guarantee that patients in desperate conditions are given a more meaningful choice and a richer freedom, and thus a higher quality of informed consent, than under standard randomized trials. (shrink)

FOUCAULT: A CRITICAL READER Edited by David Couzens Hoy New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. 246pp., $45.00 ($14.95 paper) MICHEL FOUCAULT by Mark Cousins and Althar Hussain New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984. 278pp., $27.95 ($11.95 paper).

My intention is to explore the Hobbesian account of civil association in terms of his conception of the state of nature, especially as it relates to his view of language in politics. I start from the view that the achievement of a political philosopher must be to reveal some central presupposition of our thought and action, as the Greeks did in their exploration of justice, Rousseau with the general will, and Locke with the idea of property. Hobbes takes the view (...) that we cannot properly understand ideas such as sovereignty, government, law, obligation and so on without presupposing the kind of unstable conflict-ridden situation he called the condition of nature. (shrink)

Bas van Fraassen has formulated a semantical or model theoretic analysis of the structure of scientific theories. He contrasts his semantical approach with the syntactic approach of the logical positivists and argues that his theory is preferable on a number of grounds. The aims of this paper are threefold. First, a brief description of van Fraassen's approach is presented. Secondly, his theory is compared with that of the logical positivists and, in so doing, the virtues that van Fraassen believes recommend (...) his theory over the positivist theory are identified. Finally, an objection that is positivist in spirit is raised which suggests that, epistemically, his account is indistinguishable from classical historicism. (shrink)

Bas van Fraassen has formulated a semantical or model theoretic analysis of the structure of scientific theories. He contrasts his semantical approach with the syntactic approach of the logical positivists and argues that his theory is preferable on a number of grounds. My aims in this paper will be threefold. First, I will present a brief description of van Fraassen's approach. Secondly, I will compare his theory with that of the logical positivists and, in so doing, identify the virtues that (...) van Fraassen believes recommend, his theory over the positivist theory. Finally, I will raise an objection that is positivist in spirit which suggests that, epistemically, his account is indistinguishable from classical historicism.For van Fraassen, “To present a theory is to specify a family of structures, itsmodels; and secondly, to specify certain parts of these models (theempirical substructures) as candidates for the direct representation of observable phenomena. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner's The Foundations of Modern Political Thought is primarily of interest to philosophers not for its excellent account of European thought about the state but for the self–conscious philosophy which has gone into it. It is a rare historian who pauses to get his philosophy in order before he embarks on a major enterprise, though such a policy is possibly less unusual in intellectual history than in other fields. In Skinner's case, however, this order of doing things has been (...) pushed so far that he counts as a philosopher in his own right, rather than as merely someone who is unusually careful to think about what he is doing. The publication of this major work thus provides a convenient opportunity to make a few remarks about the relation between historical theory and practice. (shrink)

It is one of Karl Popper's great distinctions that he has an intense—some would say too intense—awareness of the history of philosophy within which he works. He knows not only its patterns, but also its comedies, and sometimes he plays rhetorically against their grain. He knows, for example, that the drive to consistency tends to turn philosophy into compositions of related doctrines, each seeming to involve the others. Religious belief, for example, tends to go with idealism and free will, religious (...) scepticism with materialism and determinism. Popper does not believe in a religion, was for long some kind of a socialist, and takes his bearings from the philosophy of science. Aha! it seems we have located him. Here is a positivist, a materialist, probably a determinist. But of course he denies he is any of these things. Again, like many modern thinkers, he wants to extend scientific method not only to the social sciences but also to history. So far so familiar, until we discover that he regards nature as no less ‘cloudy’ than human societies. (shrink)

In The Structure of Scientific Inference, Mary Hesse has argued for a realist interpretation of science. Her realism, however, is not to be understood in the context of the traditional realist/instrumentalist debate within the philosophy of science. That debate focused on the question of whether or not science did anything other than systematize the empirical data given in our experience. The traditional realist answered “yes” and most frequently described the theoretical statements of science, not only as true, but also as (...) providing descriptions of the world. The instrumentalist on the other hand answered “no” and ascribed no descriptive force to the theoretical statements of science. However, according to Hesse, neither party in the contemporary realism debate assumes the notion of an empirical given. Consequently, the present dispute must be understood as taking place on a level which is logically prior to its predecessor. (shrink)

Because psychotherapists are not moral teachers, they ought not to advise their clients about evaluative questions. This means that their advice must be limited to a concern with the client''s view of reality. It happens that in our times, there are prefabricated views of reality on offer from a variety of ideologies-Marxism and feminism being currently the most influential. Ideologists not only offer prefabricated realities-called consciousness- but also present a set of arguments to show that because choice is unreal, consciousness (...) is all that matters. Adopting the ideological concept of consciousness thus becomes a backdoor variant of the ultimate sin against scientific method: namely smuggling unsubstantiated, indeed undiscussed, values into therapy. (shrink)

My aim in this essay is to distinguish and comment on a specific movement of thought which I shall call “democracy as a telos.” This expression refers to a conception of democracy, cultivated by normative political philosophers, in which all democratic potentialities have at last been realized. The result is thought to be a perfected political community. Democracy as a telos must thus be distinguished from the actual liberal democracies we enjoy at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, democracy (...) as a telos takes off from a specific rejection of such familiar institutions as elections, political parties, oppositions, a free press, and the rest, which are regarded, according to taste, as individualistic, bourgeois, atomistic, formal, and abstract. Democracy as a telos refers to the theories of reformers who, dissatisfied with our present condition, argue that only a radically transformed democracy can generate a real political community. (shrink)

The word ‘freedom’ leads a double life. As a rallying cry in the mouths of politicians and publicists, it features in speech acts which inspire men to brave endeavours. Freedom or death are the proffered alternatives, and they are generally linked with fatiguing dispositions such as vigilance. As a philosophical concept, on the other hand, freedom is a territory in which battles are fought about such issues as positivity and negativity, virtue, determinism and the character of the will. There is (...) remarkably little connection between these two lives. Philosophers do not seem to take much interest in courage, and politicians do not tarry to specify whether it is negative or positive liberty they are talking about. (shrink)

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Mark Freeman, Necessary Evils: Amnesties and the Search for Justice, xx + 376 pp. An amnesty generally deserves to be respected or supported if it...