Objective We reviewed human–robot interaction (HRI) participatory design (PD) research with older adults. The goal was to identify methods used, determine their value for design of robots with older adults, and provide guidance for best practices. Background Assistive robots may promote aging-in-place and quality of life for older adults. However, the robots must be designed to meet older adults’ specific needs and preferences. PD and other user-centered methods may be used to engage older adults in the robot development process to (...) accommodate their needs and preferences and to assure usability of emergent assistive robots. Method This targeted review of HRI PD studies with older adults draws on a detailed review of 26 articles. Our assessment focused on the HRI methods and their utility for use with older adults who have a range of needs and capabilities. Results Our review highlighted the importance of using mixed methods and including multiple stakeholders throughout the design process. These approaches can encourage mutual learning (to improve design by developers and to increase acceptance by users). We identified key phases used in HRI PD workshops (e.g., initial interview phase, series of focus groups phase, and presentation phase). These approaches can provide inspiration for future efforts. Conclusion HRI PD strategies can support designers in developing assistive robots that meet older adults’ needs, capabilities, and preferences to promote acceptance. More HRI research is needed to understand potential implications for aging-in-place. PD methods provide a promising approach. (shrink)

Neonatal intensive care units represent simultaneously one of the great success stories of modern medicine, and one of its most controversial developments. One particularly controversial issue is the resuscitation of extremely preterm infants. Physicians in the United States generally accept that they are required to resuscitate infants born as early as 25 weeks and that it is permissible to resuscitate as early as 22 weeks. In this article, I question the moral pressure to resuscitate by criticizing the idea that resuscitation (...) in this context “saves” a human life. Our radical medical advancements have allowed us to intervene in the life of a human before it makes sense to say that such an intervention “saves” someone; rather, what the physician does in resuscitating and treating an extremely preterm infant is to take over creating it. This matters, I argue, because “rescues” are much more morally urgent than “creations.”. (shrink)

Authored by an acclaimed teacher of quantum physics and philosophy, this textbook pays special attention to the aspects that many courses sweep under the carpet. Traditional courses in quantum mechanics teach students how to use the quantum formalism to make calculations. But even the best students - indeed, especially the best students - emerge rather confused about what, exactly, the theory says is going on, physically, in microscopic systems. This supplementary textbook is designed to help such students understand that they (...) are not alone in their confusions (luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Erwin Schroedinger, and John Stewart Bell having shared them), to sharpen their understanding of the most important difficulties associated with interpreting quantum theory in a realistic manner, and to introduce them to the most promising attempts to formulate the theory in a way that is physically clear and coherent. The text is accessible to students with at least one semester of prior exposure to quantum (or "modern") physics and includes over a hundred engaging end-of-chapter "Projects" that make the book suitable for either a traditional classroom or for self-study. (shrink)

There is a view abroad on which perceptual experience has representational content in this sense: in it something is represented to the perceiver as so. On the view, a perceptual experience has a face value at which it may be taken, or which may be rejected. This paper argues that that view is mistaken: there is nothing in perceptual experience which makes it so that in it anything is represented as so. In that sense, the senses are silent, or, in (...) Austin's term, dumb. Perceptual experience is not as such either veridical or delusive. It may mislead, but it does not take representation to accomplish that. (shrink)

The question of how to frame agential preferences in economics finds one caught between Scylla and Charybdis. If preferences are framed in as minimal and deflationary a manner as revealed preference theory recommends, the theory falls prey to objections about its predictiveness and explanatory power. Alternatively, if too many cognitive and causal intricacies are incorporated into the preference concept, revealed preference models will violate pragmatic norms of model construction, surrendering model simplicity and generality. This paper charts a middle course, arguing (...) that the path to salvation lies through an understanding of revealed preference models as program explanations. (shrink)

Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts (...) less tightly to the linguistic forms which express them than traditional views of the matter, and in two directions: a given linguistic form, meaning fixed, may express an indefinite variety of thoughts; one thought can be expressed in an indefinite number of syntactically and semantically distinct ways. Travis highlights the importance of this view for linguistic theory, and shows how it gives new form to a variety of traditional philosophical problems. (shrink)

I consider how complex logical operations might self-assemble in a signalling-game context via composition of simpler underlying dispositions. On the one hand, agents may take advantage of pre-evolved dispositions; on the other hand, they may co-evolve dispositions as they simultaneously learn to combine them to display more complex behaviour. In either case, the evolution of complex logical operations can be more efficient than evolving such capacities from scratch. Showing how complex phenomena like these might evolve provides an additional path to (...) the possibility of evolving more or less rich notions of compositionality. This helps provide another facet of the evolutionary story of how sufficiently rich, human-level cognitive or linguistic capacities may arise from simpler precursors. 1Signalling and Self-assembly2Simple Unary Logic Games3Composing Unary Functions for Binary Inputs 3.1Utilizing pre-evolved dispositions3.2Co-evolving logical dispositions3.3Learning appropriate outputs3.4Taking account of the full state-space of unary games3.5Role-free composition4Discussion 4.1Efficacy and efficiency of learning complex dispositions4.2Other binary operations4.3To infinity and beyond5Conclusion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This essay argues for the importance of formalizing public engagement efforts around bioethics as something we might call "bioethics communication," and it outlines the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics' plans for engaging in this effort. Because science is complex and difficult to explain to nonexperts, the field of science communication has arisen to meet this need. The field involves both a practice and a subject of empirical research. Like science, bioethics is also complex and difficult to explain, which is (...) why the world needs bioethics communication. The authors are engaged in a brand-new effort to establish the sort of public bioethics efforts that would constitute bioethics communication, through a program which they call the Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab. The authors invite colleagues to experiment and learn with them as they invest in the development of bioethics communicators and their products. (shrink)

This paper advances the view that some explanations in cognitive science are extra-mathematical explanations. Demonstrating the plausibility of this interpretation centers around certain efficient coding cases which ineliminably enlist information theoretic laws, facts and theorems to identify in-principle, mathematical constraints on neuronal information processing capacities. The explanatory structure in these cases is shown to parallel other putative instances of mathematical explanation. The upshot for cognitive mathematical explanations is thus two-fold: first, the view capably rebuts standard mechanistic objections to non-mechanistic explanation; (...) second, this view serves to importantly widen the possibility space for non-mechanistic forms of explanation in cognitive science. (shrink)

Charles Travis presents a series of essays on philosophy of perception, inspired by the insights of Gottlob Frege. He engages with a range of contemporary thinkers, and explores key issues including how perception can make the world bear on what we do or think, and what sorts of capacities we draw on in representing something as (being) something.

In this paper we suggest that differing approaches to the science of social cognition mirror the arguments between radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognition. We contrast the use in social cognition of theoretical inference and mental simulation mechanisms with approaches emphasizing a direct perception of others’ mental states. We build from a recent integrative framework unifying these divergent perspectives through the use of dual-process theory and supporting social neuroscience research. Our elaboration considers two complementary notions of direct perception: one (...) primarily stemming from ecological psychology and the other from enactive cognition theory. We use this as the foundation from which to offer an account of the informational basis for social information and assert a set of research propositions to further the science of social cognition. In doing so, we point out how perception of the minds of others can be supported in some cases by lawful information, supporting direct perception of social affordances and perhaps, mental states, and in other cases by cues that support indirect perceptual inference. Our goal is to extend accounts of social cognition by integrating advances across disciplines to provide a multi-level and multi-theoretic description that can advance this field and offer a means through which to reconcile radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

This book provides a novel interpretation of the ideas about language in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Travis places the "private language argument" in the context of wider themes in the Investigations, and thereby develops a picture of what it is for words to bear the meaning they do. He elaborates two versions of a private language argument, and shows the consequences of these for current trends in the philosophical theory of meaning.

Complex work in teams requires coordination across team members and their technology as well as the ability to change and adapt over time to achieve effective performance. To support such complex interactions, recent efforts have worked toward the design of adaptive human-autonomy teaming systems that can provide feedback in or near real time to achieve the desired individual or team results. However, while significant advancements have been made to better model and understand the dynamics of team interaction and its relationship (...) with task performance, appropriate measures of team coordination and computational methods to detect changes in coordination have not yet been widely investigated. Having the capacity to measure coordination in real time is quite promising as it provides the opportunity to provide adaptive feedback that may influence and regulate teams’ coordination patterns and, ultimately, drive effective team performance. A critical requirement to reach this potential is having the theoretical and empirical foundation from which to do so. Therefore, the first goal of the paper is to review approaches to coordination dynamics, identify current research gaps, and draw insights from other areas, such as social interaction, relationship science, and psychotherapy. The second goal is to collate extant work on feedback and advance ideas for adaptive feedback systems that have potential to influence coordination in a way that can enhance the effectiveness of team interactions. In addressing these two goals, this work lays the foundation as well as plans for the future of human-autonomy teams that augment team interactions using coordination-based measures. (shrink)

I introduce an extension of the Lewis-Skyrms signaling game, analysed from a dynamical perspective via simple reinforcement learning. In Lewis’ (Convention, Blackwell, Oxford, 1969) conception of a signaling game, salience is offered as an explanation for how individuals may come to agree upon a linguistic convention. Skyrms (Signals: evolution, learning & information, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010a) offers a dynamic explanation of how signaling conventions might arise presupposing no salience whatsoever. The extension of the atomic signaling game examined here—which I (...) will refer to as a salience game—introduces a variable parameter into the atomic signaling game which allows for degrees of salience, thus filling in the continuum between Skyrms’ and Lewis’ models. The model does not presuppose any salience at the outset, but illustrates a process by which accidentally evolved salience is amplified, to the benefit of the players. It is shown that increasing degrees of salience allow populations to avoid sub-optimal pooling equilibria and to coordinate upon conventions more quickly. (shrink)

What words mean plays a role in determining when they would be true; but not an exhaustive one. For that role leaves room for variation in truth conditions, with meanings fixed, from one speaking of words to another. What role meaning plays depends on what truth is; on what words, by virtue of meaning what they do are requied to have done (as spoken) in order to have said what is true. There is a deflationist position on what truth is: (...) the notion is exhausted by a given, specified, mass of 'platitudes', each to the effect that if words said (say) things to be thus, things must be that way. (The thought that thus-and-so is true iff thus-and-so.) These platitudes, and so deflationism, miss that aspect of truth that determines meaning's role. Truth requires words to have the uses which, given what they mean, they should have in the circumstances of their speaking. Through this link with use, when words would be true is a factor fixing what it is they said. (shrink)

In support of logical nihilism, according to which there are no logical laws, Gillian Russell offers purported counterexamples to two laws of logic. Russell’s examples rely on cleverly constructed predicates not found in ordinary English. I show that similar apparent counterexamples to the same logical laws can be constructed without exotic predicates but using only what ordinary language provides. We correctly analyze such arguments so that they do not actually constitute counterexamples to any logic laws. I claim that we can (...) and should do the same for Russell’s arguments. (shrink)

Peter Singer argues that we’re obligated to donate our entire expendable income to aid organizations. One premiss of his argument is "If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so." Singer defends this by noting that commonsense morality requires us to save a child we find drowning in a shallow pond. I argue that Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment doesn’t justify this premiss. I offer (...) my own Drowning Children thought experiment, which should reveal that commonsense morality entails that premiss two is actually false. (shrink)

It has historically been a crime in Canada to provide assistance to someone in ending their own life, however, this paradigm was inverted in 2015 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that restrictions on this practice, within certain defined parameters, violated the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. Subsequently, recent legal and policy decisions have highlighted the issue of how to balance the rights of individuals to access MAiD with the rights of care providers to exercise (...) conscience-based objections to participation in this process. We argue that there is significant harm and ethical hazard in disregarding individual and institutional rights to conscientious objection and since measures less coercive than the threat of regulatory or economic sanctions do exist, there should be no justification for such threats in Canada’s health care systems. (shrink)

Recently, Orilia and Oaklander have attempted to revive the so-called old tenseless theory of time, which most tenseless theorists themselves had given up as untenable, heralding the appearance of the so-called new tenseless theory. I argue that Orilia and Oaklander have not successfully shown that the old tenseless theory of time is still viable.

This paper explores a type of poetry, music, and theater that is said to be responsible for the birth of participatory democracy. While Aristotle and Nietzsche briefly mention a similar genealogy of democracy in their work, Book III of Plato’s Laws archives a remarkable history of how participatory democracy emerged in Athens’s theater. After connecting Plato's account to a participatory style of music and poetry that is associated initially with the term polyphōnia, I consider a line of philosophical commentary on (...) this type of music from Plato to Rousseau to Derrida. For these philosophers, I claim, polyphōnia disrupts the political hierarchy of those with and those with bare voices and encourages equal participation. If the phenomenon of polyphōnia is indeed behind Plato’s historical account of democracy in the Laws, then it may tell us how democracy was first performed in the theater and how it was initially critiqued by philosophers. (shrink)

Brian Earp and his colleagues argue in this issue’s target article that racial justice requires ending the War on Drugs. In this they are absolutely correct. Indeed, de...

We examine the prevalent use of the phrase “local realism” in the context of Bell’s Theorem and associated experiments, with a focus on the question: what exactly is the ‘realism’ in ‘local realism’ supposed to mean? Carefully surveying several possible meanings, we argue that all of them are flawed in one way or another as attempts to point out a second premise (in addition to locality) on which the Bell inequalities rest, and (hence) which might be rejected in the face (...) of empirical data violating the inequalities. We thus suggest that the phrase ‘local realism’ should be banned from future discussions of these issues, and urge physicists to revisit the foundational questions behind Bell’s Theorem. (shrink)

A continuous Oxford tradition on knowledge runs from John Cook Wilson to John McDowell. A central idea is that knowledge is not a species of belief, or that, in McDowell's terms, it is not a hybrid state; that, moreover, it is a kind of taking in of what is there that precludes one's being, for all one can see, wrong. Cook Wilson and McDowell differ on what this means as to the scope of knowledge. J.L. Austin set out the requisite (...) foundations for McDowell to be right. McDowell has shown why the tradition, and his version of it, need to be right. But he does not accept Austin's innovation. That is a shame. For, despite McDowell's very great insightfulness, precisely that much separates him from a very powerful, and correct, view of what knowledge is. (shrink)

Sometimes retracted or refuted scientific information is used and propagated long after it is understood to be misleading. Likewise, retracted news items may spread and persist, despite being publi...

Do facts about what an agent would freely do in certain circumstances at least partly determine any of her moral obligations? Actualists answer ‘yes’, while possibilists answer ‘no’. We defend two novel hybrid accounts that are alternatives to actualism and possibilism: Dual Obligations Hybridism and Single Obligation Hybridism. By positing two moral ‘oughts’, each account retains the benefits of actualism and possibilism, yet is immune from the prima facie problems that face actualism and possibilism. We conclude by highlighting one substantive (...) difference between our two hybrid accounts. (shrink)

Let us begin with a piece of intellectual history. The story begins in a period encapsulating the second world war – say the ‘40’s, give and take a bit. Around then, it began to be argued with force that an expression – e.g., an English one – while it well might mean something, does not say anything, and notably no one thing in particular. The principal behind the argument was surely J.L. Austin, though, I would claim, the same point was (...) argued in a somewhat different way by Wittgenstein. The intended point was not merely a grammatical one: we say of an expression that it means such and such, but not that it says such and such. Be that as it may, the main point was quite substantive: typically, an English expression is such that, with its meaning fixed, there are a variety of distinct things to be said in using it on some production of it or other. (shrink)

We use tools from evolutionary game theory to examine how power might influence the cultural evolution of inequitable conventions between discernible groups (such as gender or racial groups) in a population of otherwise identical individuals. Similar extant models always assume that power is homogeneous across a social group. As such, these models fail to capture situations where individuals who are not themselves disempowered nonetheless end up disadvantaged in bargaining scenarios by dint of their social group membership. Our models show that (...) even when most individuals in two discernible sub-groups are relevantly identical, powerful individuals can affect the social outcomes for their entire group under a range of conditions; this results in power by association for their in-group and a bargaining disadvantage for their out-group. (shrink)

Thought's Footing is an enquiry into the relationship between the ways things are and the way we think and talk about them. It is also a study of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: Charles Travis develops his account of certain key themes into a unified view of the work as a whole. The central question is: how does thought get its footing? How can the thought that things are a certain way be connected to things being that way?

Marc Lange has recently raised three objections to the account of minimal model explanations offered by Robert Batterman and Collin Rice. In this article, I suggest that these objections are misguided. I suggest that the objections raised by Lange stem from a misunderstanding of the what it is that minimal model explanations seek to explain. This misunderstanding, I argue, consists in Lange’s seeing minimal model explanations as relating special types of models to particular target systems rather than seeing minimal model (...) explanations as looking to explain robust patterns of behavior that are exhibited by a variety of physically diverse systems. (shrink)

Jury nullification refers to the behaviour of a jury that votes to acquit a defendant of criminal charges despite believing that: a) the defendant did in fact commit the actions with which she is charged; and, b) such actions are, indeed, prohibited by law. While there are many objections to this practice, the most striking thing about jury nullification is that nothing is done to actually prevent or punish jurors who behave this way. In this paper, I explore three rationales (...) for why jury nullification is an officially tolerated, if not necessarily welcome, element of Anglo-American criminal law jury trials. All three of these rationales centre in one way or another on the idea that the very concept of a jury trial necessitates allowing the jury to extend its traditional purview in such a manner. (shrink)

In his classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach famously cites the opening pages of Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot as emblematic of modern realism. With their minute description of the boardinghouse, where much of the novel’s action takes place, these pages emphasize physical setting, Auerbach argues, in a way new to Western literature. Yet Balzac’s descriptions are driven by something more than an ambition to represent “contemporary life” in scrupulous detail. In Auerbach’s view, the characteristic (...) element of Balzac’s realism is an obsession with the reciprocal action of characters and milieu, a scientific or philosophical principle according to which the quality... (shrink)

The debate over the explanatory nature of cognitive models has been waged mostly between two factions: the mechanists and the dynamical systems theorists. The former hold that cognitive models are explanatory only if they satisfy a set of mapping criteria, particularly the 3M/3m* requirement. The latter have argued, pace the mechanists, that some cognitive models are both dynamical and constitute covering-law explanations. In this paper, I provide a minimal model interpretation of dynamical cognitive models, arguing that this both provides needed (...) clarity to the mechanist versus dynamicist divide in cognitive science and also paves the way towards further insights about scientific explanation generally. (shrink)

We are concerned here with how structural properties of language may come to reflect features of the world in which it evolves. As a concrete example, we will consider how a simple term language might evolve to support the principle of indifference over state descriptions in that language. The point is not that one is justified in applying the principle of indifference to state descriptions in natural language. Instead, it is that one should expect a language that has evolved in (...) the context of facilitating successful action to reflect probabilistic features of the world in which it evolved. (shrink)

This paper applies the theoretical criteria laid out by D’Arms et al. to various aspects of evolutionary models of signalling. The question that D’Arms et al. seek to answer can be formulated as follows: Are the models that we use to explain the phenomena in question conceptually adequate? The conceptual adequacy question relates the formal aspects of the model to those aspects of the natural world that the model is supposed to capture. Moreover, this paper extends the analysis of D’Arms (...) et al. by asking the following additional question: Are the models that we use sufficient to explain the phenomena in question? The sufficiency question asks what formal resources are minimally required for the model to get the right results most of the time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ease of CareTravis CearleyRoughly nine years ago, I was deer hunting on a friend's property just outside of Canaan, Missouri, where he had graciously provided me access to one of his premier tree stands. It was early in bow season and even though the calendar had suggested it was Autumn, the weather mirrored a classic Missouri August morning, muggy and thick. Dressed in my lightest hunting gear, I had (...) just gotten settled—bow in lap, arrow knocked, binoculars ready—when I felt a stinging sensation in my calf. Slowly hiking up my pant leg so as not to make too many sudden movements, I saw a familiar yet harrowing sight: Seed ticks had invaded my socks, and I was covered from the mid-calf down with black pulsating parasites. I knew instantly (as many outdoorsmen know) that my hunt had come to an end. Somewhere on the hike down the hillside or the climb into the tree, I had stepped on a nest of ticks, and the rest of my morning was shot (no pun intended). I quickly clambered out of the stand, made my way back to my friend's house and proceeded to strip down in his front yard. Left with only one option, I placed all "infected" articles of clothing in a burn pile, took my naked self to the nearest hose, rinsed feverishly in his yard, and checked every inch of my body for burrowed residents. You see, removal—complete and thorough—is the only way to keep the tick from becoming an unwelcome guest, causing itching and burning, or even spreading disease.The seed tick is an especially menacing foe. He can be invisible to the naked eye. He is faster than you would expect. He travels in herds. However, all ticks, regardless of size, are capable of causing weeks of discomfort. This discomfort and concern multiplies based on where the tick chooses to lodge itself. You see, there is a spot on the base of a man's penis where the penis itself meets the scrotum—a private, quiet, warm and damp location—that is particularly enticing to the tick. As an avid outdoorsman and lover of nature, I have had my fair share of uninvited guests attempt to call this place home. Multiple times in my life, I have taken caution in the painstaking removal of ticks in all sorts of locations, and I will tell you, few tasks are more galling or difficult than removing one burrowed next to the crease of the scrotum just under the penis itself. It seems they are keenly aware of the small bit of extra skin that exists on this part of the male anatomy, and part of me believes that they are also aware of the difficulty it presents. [End Page 79]At the time of the Canaan seed tick attack, my wife was pregnant with our first son who was due to be born that coming December. I am now the father of three sons. As a family, being outside is our favorite pastime. We run, we play, we chore; and whenever we can, we spend time in the woods. Whether we are exploring the various state parks of Missouri or rambling through the treelines of the family farm, some of the happiest times we spend as a family include nature. Nature means bugs; and even as a veteran tick assassin, I wasn't really prepared for the painstaking process of removing one from my son's nether regions. A few shivers, a few gasps and more than a few tears—juggling the "Get it off me, dad" with the "Don't worry, Daddy does this all the time"—nothing builds trust like tweezing a parasite from another person's scrotum. It is these moments that also remind me of how thankful I am for the absence of foreskin.I am a circumcised father of three circumcised boys. My wife and I chose to have our sons "clipped" after their births and by a medical professional. When my wife and I discussed whether or not to have them circumcised, I consistently came back to the same thought: "What benefit could foreskin... (shrink)

Joshua Parker’s article on green inhaler prescribing is important and timely. I agree with much of it, specifically regarding the institutional duty to make climate-friendly changes (from environmentally expensive prescriptions to ‘greener,’ similarly effective ones). The challenge, however, comes in determining how that institutional obligation impacts the rights and duties of patients. In this commentary, I want to offer a friendly alternative to Parker’s view of individual patient obligation, which I suggest is important for reasons that go beyond this one (...) case. Parker’s broad view is that, because metered-dose inhalers (MDIs) emit far more greenhouse gases (GHG) than do dry powder inhalers (DPIs), and the two are equally effective for most patients, the healthcare system should switch most patients on MDIs to DPIs, and the patients have a pro tanto duty to accept this change.1 The problem is that no individual inhaler use causes harmful climate change, and so it is difficult to explain a duty not to use MDIs. It seems that my individual behaviour ‘makes no difference’ to climate change, so familiar more principles have a difficult time justifying a prohibition of such behaviour. Parker’s response to this worry fits into the consequentialist tradition,2 3 as he argues that each individual contribution to climate change causes some amount of ‘expected harm,’ because it contributes a little bit to future climate changes which will cause harm. And since we have a duty to minimise expected harm, we have a duty not to make such small contributions to climate change. I think we should be sceptical of this sort of argument. It makes the most sense if we endorse a bathtub metaphor, in which the atmosphere is like a bathtub, and once it is full, every …. (shrink)