This book aims to pinpoint the connection feelings have with behaviour - a connection that, while clear, has never been fully explained. Following William James, Laird argues that feelings are not the cause of behavior but rather its consequences; the same goes for behaviour and motives and behaviour and attitudes. He presents research into feelings across the spectrum, from anger to joy to fear to romantic love, that support this against-the-grain view. Laird discusses the problem of common sense, self-perception theory, (...) the association between feelings and higher cognitive processes, and also the literature on facial expression, posture, and gaze. (shrink)

Game semantics extends the Curry–Howard isomorphism to a three-way correspondence: proofs, programs, strategies. But the universe of strategies goes beyond intuitionistic logics and lambda calculus, to capture stateful programs. In this paper we describe a logical counterpart to this extension, in which proofs denote such strategies. The system is expressive: it contains all of the connectives of Intuitionistic Linear Logic, and first-order quantification. Use of Lairdʼs sequoid operator allows proofs with imperative behaviour to be expressed. Thus, we can embed first-order (...) Intuitionistic Linear Logic into this system, Polarized Linear Logic, and an imperative total programming language.The proof system has a tight connection with a simple game model, where games are forests of plays. Formulas are modelled as games, and proofs as history-sensitive winning strategies. We provide a strong full completeness result with respect to this model: each finitary strategy is the denotation of a unique analytic proof. Infinite strategies correspond to analytic proofs that are infinitely deep. Thus, we can normalise proofs, via the semantics. (shrink)

An ethic is rational if it can justify itself rationally—that is to say, if there is a “why” and a “wherefore” in it amenable to reflection, and underivative. An ethic, on the other hand, is irrational if reason and reflection are irrelevant to it, or if, being relevant, they are fundamentally subordinate, and are only the lackeys of a governing consideration which is either irrational or non-rational. The intention of this lecture is to explore the possibilities of rationalism in ethics, (...) supposing that the meaning of rationalism is, broadly speaking, what has just been stated. (shrink)

The essence of Hume’s eighteenth-century philosophy was that all the sciences were ‘dependent on the science of man’, and that the foundations of any such science need to rest on experience and observation. This title, first published in 1932, examines in detail how Hume interpreted ‘the science of man’ and how he applied his experimental methodology to humankind’s understanding, passions, social duties, economic activities, religious beliefs and secular history throughout his career. Particular attention is paid to the English, French and (...) Latin sources that shaped Hume’s theories. This is a full and fascinating title, of particular relevance to students with an interest in the philosophy of Hume specifically, as well as the philosophy of human nature and the methodologies applied to its study more generally. (shrink)

We present a general cognitive architecture that tightly integrates symbolic, spatial, and visual representations. A key means to achieving this integration is allowing cognition to move freely between these modes, using mental imagery. The specific components and their integration are motivated by results from psychology, as well as the need for developing a functional and efficient implementation. We discuss functional benefits that result from the combination of multiple content-based representations and the specialized processing units associated with them. Instantiating this theory, (...) we then discuss the architectural components and processes, and illustrate the resulting functional advantages in two spatially and visually rich domains. The theory is then compared to other prominent approaches in the area. (shrink)

On page 157 of Bradley's Ethical Studies the following passage occurs: “There are few laws a breach of which morality does not allow, and I believe there is none which is not to be broken in conceivable circumstances, though the necessity of deciding the question does not practically occur.” And Bradley added the extremely significant footnote: “Except, of course, the universal law to do the best we can in the circumstances.”.

We describe a fully abstract semantics for a simple functional language with locally declared names which may be used as pointers to names. It is based on a category of dialogue games acted upon by the group of natural number automorphisms. This allows a formal, semantic characterization of the key properties of names such as freshness and locality.We describe a model of the call-by-value λ-calculus based on these games, and show that it can be used to interpret the nu-calculus of (...) Pitts and Stark. We then construct a model of our pointer-language by extending our category of games with an explicit representation of the store, using a notion of semantic garbage-collection to erase inaccessible pointers. Using factorization and decomposition techniques, we show that the compact elements of our model are definable as terms, and hence it is fully abstract. (shrink)

The essence of Hume’s eighteenth-century philosophy was that all the sciences were ‘dependent on the science of man’, and that the foundations of any such science need to rest on experience and observation. This title, first published in 1932, examines in detail how Hume interpreted ‘the science of man’ and how he applied his experimental methodology to humankind’s understanding, passions, social duties, economic activities, religious beliefs and secular history throughout his career. Particular attention is paid to the English, French and (...) Latin sources that shaped Hume’s theories. This is a full and fascinating title, of particular relevance to students with an interest in the philosophy of Hume specifically, as well as the philosophy of human nature and the methodologies applied to its study more generally_. _. (shrink)