Volume 23, Issue 2, April 2024, Page 187-223.

This paper explores the difference between Connectionist proposals for cognitive a r c h i t e c t u r e a n d t h e s o r t s o f m o d e l s t hat have traditionally been assum e d i n c o g n i t i v e s c i e n c e . W e c l a i m t h a t t h (...) e m a j o r d i s t i n c t i o n i s t h a t , w h i l e b o t h Connectionist and Classical architectures postulate representational mental states, the latter but not the former are committed to a symbol-level of representation, or to a ‘language of thought’: i.e., to representational states that have combinatorial syntactic and semantic structure. Several arguments for combinatorial structure in mental representations are then reviewed. These include arguments based on the ‘systematicity’ of mental representation: i.e., on the fact that cognitive capacities always exhibit certain symmetries, so that the ability to entertain a given thought implies the ability to entertain thoughts with semantically related contents. We claim that such arguments make a powerful case that mind/brain architecture is not Connectionist at the cognitive level. We then consider the possibility that Connectionism may provide an account of the neural (or ‘abstract neurological’) structures in which Classical cognitive architecture is implemented. We survey a n u m b e r o f t h e s t a n d a r d a r g u m e n t s t h a t h a v e b e e n o f f e r e d i n f a v o r o f Connectionism, and conclude that they are coherent only on this interpretation. (shrink)

This essay explores a conception of responsibility at work in moral and criminal responsibility. Our conception draws on work in the compatibilist tradition that focuses on the choices of agents who are reasons-responsive and work in criminal jurisprudence that understands responsibility in terms of the choices of agents who have capacities for practical reason and whose situation affords them the fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. Our conception brings together the dimensions of normative competence and situational control, and we factor normative (...) competence into cognitive and volitional capacities, which we treat as equally important to normative competence and responsibility. Normative competence and situational control can and should be understood as expressing a common concern that blame and punishment presuppose that the agent had a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This fair opportunity is the umbrella concept in our understanding of responsibility, one that explains it distinctive architecture. (shrink)

The central contention of The Implicit Mind is that understanding the two faces of spontaneity-its virtues and vices-requires understanding the "implicit mind." In turn, Michael Brownstein maintains that understanding the implicit mind requires the consideration of three sets of questions. First, what are implicit mental states? What kind of cognitive structure do they have? Second, how should we relate to our implicit attitudes? Are we responsible for them? Third, how can we improve the ethics of our implicit minds?

Emotion is conceptualised as an emergent, dynamic process based on an individual's subjective appraisal of significant events. It is argued that theoretical models of emotion need to propose an architecture that reflects the essential nature and functions of emotion as a psychobiological and cultural adaptation mechanism. One proposal for such a model and its underlying dynamic architecture, the component process model, is briefly sketched and compared with some of its major competitors. Recent empirical evidence in support of the (...) model is reviewed. Special emphasis is given to the dynamic aspect of emotion processes, in particular the sequence of appraisal checks and the synchronisation of response systems, as well as the capacity of the model to predict individual differences in emotional responding. (shrink)

This paper presents a blueprint for an ecological cognitive architecture. Ecological psychology, I contend, must be complemented with a story about the role of the CNS in perception, action, and cognition. To arrive at such a story while staying true to the tenets of ecological psychology, it will be necessary to flesh out the central metaphor according to which the animal perceives its environment by ‘resonating’ to information in energy patterns: what is needed is a theory of resonance. I (...) offer here the two main elements of such a theory: a framework and a methodology. (shrink)

Article history: This article sketches the Parallel Architecture, an approach to the structure of grammar that Accepted 29 August 2006 contrasts with mainstream generative grammar (MGG) in that (a) it treats phonology, Available online 13 October 2006 syntax, and semantics as independent generative components whose structures are linked by interface rules; (b) it uses a parallel constraint-based formalism that is nondirectional; (c) Keywords: it treats words and rules alike as pieces of linguistic structure stored in long-term memory.

This paper proposes a brain-inspired cognitive architecture that incorporates approximations to the concepts of consciousness, imagination, and emotion. To emulate the empirically established cognitive efficacy of conscious as opposed to non-conscious information processing in the mammalian brain, the architecture adopts a model of information flow from global workspace theory. Cognitive functions such as anticipation and planning are realised through internal simulation of interaction with the environment. Action selection, in both actual and internally simulated interaction with the environment, is (...) mediated by affect. An implementation of the architecture is described which is based on weightless neurons and is used to control a simulated robot. (shrink)

How we experience space by listening: the concepts of aural architecture, with examples ranging from Gothic cathedrals to surround sound home theater. We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening. We can navigate a room in the dark, and "hear" the emptiness of a house without furniture. Our experience of music in a concert hall depends on whether we sit in the front row or under the balcony. The unique acoustics of religious spaces acquire symbolic meaning. (...) Social relationships are strongly influenced by the way that space changes sound. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter examine auditory spatial awareness: experiencing space by attentive listening. Every environment has an aural architecture.The audible attributes of physical space have always contributed to the fabric of human culture, as demonstrated by prehistoric multimedia cave paintings, classical Greek open-air theaters, Gothic cathedrals, acoustic geography of French villages, modern music reproduction, and virtual spaces in home theaters. Auditory spatial awareness is a prism that reveals a culture's attitudes toward hearing and space. Some listeners can learn to "see" objects with their ears, but even without training, we can all hear spatial geometry such as an open door or low ceiling. Integrating contributions from a wide range of disciplines—including architecture, music, acoustics, evolution, anthropology, cognitive psychology, audio engineering, and many others—Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? establishes the concepts and language of aural architecture. These concepts provide an interdisciplinary guide for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of how space enhances our well-being. Aural architecture is not the exclusive domain of specialists. Accidentally or intentionally, we all function as aural architects. (shrink)

Community energy based on a mix of distributed technologies offers a serious alternative to the current energy system. The nature of community energy and the role that such initiatives might play in the general fabric of civic life is not, however, well understood. Community energy initiatives might involve only those citizens who prefer to be actively and continuously involved in intense, democratic debate. A more robust conceptualization of community energy might, on the other hand, be guided by Benjamin Barber’s notion (...) of “strong democracy,” in which community energy initiatives would draw upon a much broader citizen base, involving people from many walks of life and from quarters not generally presumed to be part of a sustained democratic process. The history of community energy is explored and a number of case studies are presented to illustrate the problems, prospects, and limitations of a socially and technologically decentralized energy system. (shrink)

Mediaeval psychological theory was a “faculty psychology”: a confederation of semiautonomous sub-personal agents, the interaction of which constitutes our psychological experience. One such faculty was intellective appetite, that is, the will. On what grounds was the will taken to be a distinct faculty? After a brief survey of Aristotle's criteria for identifying and distinguishing mental faculties, I look in some detail at the mainstream mediaeval view, given clear expression by Thomas Aquinas, and then at the dissenting views of John Duns (...) Scotus and William of Ockham. I conclude with some reflections on why the mainstream mediaeval view was discarded by Descartes. (shrink)

In this paper, I reinterpret Kant’s Transcendental Analytic as a description of a cognitive architecture. I describe a computer implementation of this architecture, and show how it has been applied to two unsupervised learning tasks. The resulting program is very data efficient, able to learn from a tiny handful of examples. I show how the program achieves data-efficiency: the constraints described in the Analytic of Principles are reinterpreted as strong prior knowledge, constraining the set of possible solutions.

It has recently been argued that the success of the connectionist program in cognitive science would threaten folk psychology. I articulate and defend a "minimalist" construal of folk psychology that comports well with empirical evidence on the folk understanding of belief and is compatible with even the most radical developments in cognitive science.

Originally published in 1992 in Portuguese, the English translation of the 2015, updated edition of Kósmos Noetós will open Ivo Ibri's fine book to a wider audience. The book ventures into the most difficult territory of Peirce's body of work. The topics of Prof. Ibri's study include the more recondite matters of Peirce's objective idealism, synechism, tychism, cosmology, and the accounts of reality. Starting with the phenomenology, Ibri attempts a coherent picture of Peirce's metaphysics, using the results to provide an (...) interesting interpretation of Peirce's pragmatism.The book is divided into three major sections: the World as Appearance, the World as Reality, and the Knowable World. In a very nice exegesis of... (shrink)

Cognition, writ broadly to include motivation and emotion, is best conceived of as control structure for autonomous agents . Autonomous agents are situated in a environment. They both sense and act on that environment, over time, so as to effect subsequent sensing. Examples of such agents include humans, animals, some mobile robots, some artificial life creatures (who "live" in a simulated environment on a computer) and some software agents (who "live" in a file system, a database, or on a network). (...) Their actions are in pursuit of their own agendas, as designed in by their maker or programmer, or as evolved and shaped by culture. Each such agent employs some control mechanism whose continual duty is to select the next action. The term "cognition," in its broad sense, refers to the workings of such control mechanisms. (shrink)

Decision-makers in governments, enterprises, businesses and agencies or individuals, typically, make decisions according to various regulations, guidelines and policies based on existing records stored in various databases, in particular, relational databases. To assist decision-makers, an expert system, encompasses interactive computer-based systems or subsystems to support the decision-making process. Typically, most expert systems are built on top of transaction systems, databases, and data models and restricted in decision-making to the analysis, processing and presenting data and information, and they do not provide (...) support for the normative layer. This paper will provide a solution to one specific problem that arises from this situation, namely the lack of tool/mechanism to demonstrate how an expert system is well-suited for supporting decision-making activities drawn from existing records and relevant legal requirements aligned existing records stored in various databases.We present a Rule-based reporting systems architecture, which is intended to integrate databases, in particular, relational databases, with a logic-based reasoner and rule engine to assist in decision-making or create reports according to legal norms. We argue that the resulting RuleRS provides an efficient and flexible solution to the problem at hand using defeasible inference. To this end, we have also conducted empirical evaluations of RuleRS performance. (shrink)

This paper is about how to give human-like powers to complete agents. For this the most important design choice concerns the overall architecture. Questions regarding detailed mechanisms, forms of representations, inference capabilities, knowledge etc. are best addressed in the context of a global architecture in which different design decisions need to be linked. Such a design would assemble various kinds of functionality into a complete coherent working system, in which there are many concurrent, partly independent, partly mutually supportive, (...) partly potentially incompatible processes, addressing a multitude of issues on different time scales, including asynchronous, concurrent, motive generators. Designing human like agents is part of the more general problem of understanding design space, niche space and their interrelations, for, in the abstract, there is no one optimal design, as biological diversity on earth shows. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Radical Constructivist Structural Design Education for Large Cohorts of Chinese Learners” by Christiane M. Herr. Upshot: In the target article, Christiane Herr offers an insightful characterization of how von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism can be implemented in structural design education in architecture. In this commentary, I articulate possible connections between research on problem solving and problem posing in mathematics education and design processes in structural design education as described in the target article.

The cover image of Nathaniel Coleman’s Imagining and Making the World is a photo by Coleman of Carlo Scarpa’s Castelvecchio Museum renovation in Verona. It shows the skillful layering of elements from different eras assembled by Scarpa and the bridge that connects the upper floors of two buildings from different periods. Such skillful connecting of disparate things is rare. Yet this is what Coleman and his contributors have set out to do: connect architecture and utopia.Coleman himself seems to question (...) this enterprise. In his introduction he writes, “If the likelihood of achieving a utopian moment in architecture that is sustainable through time and occupation appears... unpromising, what possible claim could.. (shrink)