Although the philosophical literature on social institutions has been insightful for social scientific studies, the application of its core concepts, such as collective intentionality, to real inst...

The promised open space of cyber-interaction has its dark side hidden behind its brilliant rhetoric. The danger emerges within the very center of developing this technology (cyber-evolution). That is a more fundamental danger than this dark side seems to have. The possible replacement of our primary reality with virtual reality might erode the significance of our existential reality. This means also that the virtual reality might lose its own ground to be constructed. In order to clarify this fundamental problem at (...) issue I show some results from a questionnaire done on younger generation. The results seem to suggest possible way of facing this problem. (shrink)

John Dewey’s stay in Tokyo in early 1919 coincided with the height of the social movement calling for parliamentary democracy in Japan. His lectures at Tokyo Imperial University offered a new way of viewing the world and human actions that emphasizes the importance of communication and the growth of democratic personality. Those who expected to hear from him something else were disillusioned. But the disillusionment was mutual. Dewey was disillusioned by the Japanese intellectuals whose affection for European philosophy led them (...) to an uncritical acceptance of the emperor system and Japan’s imperialism abroad. His criticism toward the Japanese intellectuals grew severe as he saw the Japanese aggression while he was on the continent. Dewey’s lecture on democracy left some impact on a few of intellectuals who modified their view of person’s actions that was eventually to be crashed when Japan fell into the all-out war-making. (shrink)

book 1. Eternal life.--book 2. Ideal society.

Fifty-seven years ago. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were annihilated by unprecedented state terrorism. But survivors of both cities never said "Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki!" No survivors harbored the feeling "once recovered from devastation of the holy land, Japan will not fail to revenge". Instead, they realized in the atomic inferno that violence begets violence and pledged: "Rest in peace. We will never repeat the mistakes. No more Hiroshima, No more Nagasaki".

As a criterion of a good firm, a lucrative and growing business has been said to be important. Recently, however, high profitability and high growth potential are insufficient for the criteria, because social influences exerted by recent firms have been extremely significant. In this paper, high social relationship is added to the list of the criteria. Empirical corporate social performance versus corporate financial performance (CSP–CFP) relationship studies that consider social relationship are very limited in Japan, and there are no definite (...) conclusions for the studies in the world, because of scant data and the inappropriate methods, especially for supporting linear hypothesis which these studies are based on. In this paper, the CSP–CFP relationship is analyzed by an artificial neural networks model, which can deal with a non-linear relationship, using 10-year follow-up survey data. (shrink)

In the context of medical ethics, how can the concept of informed consent be effectively implemented in a traditional society such as Japan? If the need for more openness and transparency is not felt in the practice of medicine and welfare, the clients must remain under the spell of paternalistic data. Patients and health-care professionals other than doctors are taken to be "responsible for what they do but not to be accountable for their conduct" because they do not participate in (...) a decision-making process. I explore the possibility of the concept's full implementation against the particularists' and communitarian ethicists' effort to reject the universal nature of the concept. (shrink)

In this paper we contend that the ability to engage in meta-dialog is necessary for free and exible conversation. Central to the possibility of meta-dialog is the ability to recognize and negotiate the distinction between the use and mention of a word. The paper surveys existing theoretical approaches to the use-mention distinction, and brie y describes some of our ongoing e orts to implement a system which represents the use-mention distinction in the service of simple meta-dialog.

This article traces the connection between William James's writings in The Varieties of Religious Experience and Jean Piaget's work on moral development through Piagets early work on religious experience. James characterises religious experience as unlocking deep personal power that can sustain a ?strenuous mood?. These ideas impacted the early work of Piaget on religious experience through the influence of Henri Bergson and The?odore Flournoy, both friends of James. The shared depth-psychology approach to religious experience of James and Piaget is important (...) to current debates on spiritual and moral education. (shrink)

Recently, dynamic text presentation, such as scrolling text, has been widely used. Texts are often presented at constant timing and speed in conventional dynamic text presentation. However, dynamic text presentation enables visually presented texts to indicate timing information, such as prosody, and the texts might influence the impression of reading. In this paper, we examined this possibility by focusing on the temporal features of digital text in which texts are represented sequentially and with varying speed, duration, and timing. We call (...) this “textual prosody.” We used three types of textual prosody: “Recorded,” “Shuffled,” and “Constant.” Recorded prosody is the reproduction of a reader’s reading with pauses and varying speed that simulates talking. Shuffled prosody randomly shuffles the time course of speed and pauses in the recorded type. Constant prosody has a constant presentation speed and provides no timing information. Experiment 1 examined the effect of textual prosody on people with normal hearing. Participants read dynamic text with textual prosody silently and rated their impressions of texts. The results showed that readers with normal hearing preferred recorded textual prosody and constant prosody at the optimum speed. Recorded prosody was also preferred at a low presentation speed. Experiment 2 examined the characteristics of textual prosody using an articulatory suppression paradigm. The results showed that some textual prosody was stored in the articulatory loop despite it being presented visually. In Experiment 3, we examined the effect of textual prosody with readers with hearing loss. The results demonstrated that readers with hearing loss had positive impressions at relatively low presentation speeds when the recorded prosody was presented. The results of this study indicate that the temporal structure is processed regardless of whether the input is visual or auditory. Moreover, these results suggest that textual prosody can enrich reading not only in people with normal hearing but also in those with hearing loss, regardless of acoustic experiences. (shrink)

A key issue in social intelligence design is the realization of artifacts that can fluently communicate with people. Thus, we proposed a two-layered approach to enhance a robot’s capacity of involvement and engagement. The upper layer flexibly controls social interaction by dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN) representing social interaction patterns. The lower layer improves the robustness of the system by detecting rhythmic and repetitive gestures. We designed a listener robot that can follow and record humans’ explanation on how to assemble and/or (...) disassemble a bicycle. The implementation of this system is described by assembling the key algorithms presented in this paper. (shrink)