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- Volume 15, Issue, 2007
Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 15, Issue 3, 2007
Volume 15, Issue 3, 2007
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A sense of presence
Author(s): Andy Clarkpp.: 413–433 (21)More LessOur apparently simple and basic sense of our own location is, I argue, the fruit of an ongoing project. It is a construct formed by our implicit awareness of our current set of potentials for action, social engagement and intervention. Nonetheless, most attempts at technologically supported telepresence seem shallow and unsatisfying. In what follows, I explore the potential of richer and more varied technologies to impact our fundamental sense of location.
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Social cognition and social robots
Author(s): Shaun Gallagherpp.: 435–453 (19)More LessSocial robots are robots designed to interact with humans or with each other in ways that approximate human social interaction. It seems clear that one question relevant to the project of designing such robots concerns how humans themselves interact to achieve social understanding. If we turn to psychology, philosophy, or the cognitive sciences in general, we find two models of social cognition vying for dominance under the heading of theory of mind: theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST). It is therefore natural and interesting to ask how a TT design for a social robot would differ from the ST version. I think that a much more critical question is whether either TT or ST provide an adequate explanation of social cognition. There is a growing although still minority consensus that, despite their dominance in the debate about social cognition, neither TT nor ST, nor some hybrid version of these theories, offers an acceptable account of how we encounter and interact with one another. In this paper I will give a brief review of the theory of mind debate, outline an alternative theory of social cognition based on an embodied interactive approach, and then try to draw out a few implications about social robotics.
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A biosemiotic note on organisms, animals, machines, cyborgs, and the quasi-autonomy of robots
Author(s): Claus Emmechepp.: 455–483 (29)More LessIt is argued in this paper that robots are just quasi-autonomous beings, which must be understood, within an emergent systems view, as intrinsically linked to and presupposing human beings as societal creatures within a technologically mediated world. Biosemiotics is introduced as a perspective on living systems that is based upon contemporary biology but reinterpreted through a qualitative organicist tradition in biology. This allows for emphasizing the differences between (1) an organism as a general semiotic system with vegetative and self-reproductive capacities, (2) an animal body also with sentience and phenomenal states, and (3) higher forms of anthroposemiotic systems such as humans, machines and robots. On all three levels, representations (or sign action) are crucial processes. The “representationalism” invoked by critiques of cognitive science and robotics tends to focus only on simplistic notions of representation, and must be distinguished from a Peircean or biosemiotic notion of representation. Implications for theorizing about the physical, biological, animate, phenomenal and social body and their forms of autonomy are discussed.
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Autonomous agency, AI, and allostasis: A biomimetic perspective
Author(s): Ioan Muntean and Cory D. Wrightpp.: 485–513 (29)More LessWe argue that the concepts of mechanism and autonomy appear to be antagonistic when autonomy is conflated with agency. Once these concepts are disentangled, it becomes clearer how autonomy could emerge from complex forms of control — especially, homeostatic regulatory systems. While research in AI and robotics would do well to continue incorporating biomimetic strategies, we propose that invoking models of allostatic mechanisms is a better way to understand how autonomy in artificial systems can be enhanced.
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Robotics, biological grounding and the Fregean tradition
Author(s): Marti Hooijmans and Fred Keijzerpp.: 515–546 (32)More LessDynamic, embodied and situated cognition set up organism-environment interaction — agency for short — as the core of cognitive systems. Robotics became an important way to study this behavioral kernel of cognition. In this paper, we discuss the implications of what we call the biological grounding problem for robotic studies: Natural and artificial agents are hugely different and it will be necessary to articulate what must be replicated by artificial agents such as robots. Interestingly, once this issue is explicitly raised, it seems that a full replication of biological features is required for cognition itself to be plausibly cast as a biological phenomenon. Several issues come to the fore once one takes this implication seriously. Why does a full biological interpretation of cognition remain so controversial? How does this impact the relevance of robotics for the study of cognition? We try to articulate and ease the various tensions that arise from this biological scenario.
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Aristotle, autonomy and the explanation of behaviour
Author(s): Carlos Herrera Pérez and Tom Ziemkepp.: 547–571 (25)More LessThis paper examines Aristotle’s notion of autonomy and its implication for the mechanicism/autonomy debate. We introduce the basic principles of Aristotle’s scientific framework, including his theory of four causes for the explanation of nature. We draw parallels between these notions of autonomy and causation and autopoietic theory, dynamical systems and robotics, suggesting that they may be compatible with Aristotle’s framework. We argue that understanding the problem of design of autonomous robots may benefit from the consideration of integration of Aristotle’s causes, while robotics, in turn, may contribute to the debate providing a common ground for epistemological and ontological notions of autonomy.
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Mechanism is not enough
Author(s): Mark H. Bickhardpp.: 573–585 (13)More LessI will argue that mechanism is not sufficient to capture representation, thus cognition. More generally, mechanism is not sufficient to capture normativity of any sort. I will also outline a model of emergent normativity, representational normativity in particular, and show how it transcends these limitations of mechanism. To begin, I will address some illustrative attempts to model representation within mechanistically naturalistic frameworks, first rather generally, and then in the cases of the models of Fodor and Millikan.
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Whence the autonomy?: A response to Harnad and Dror
Author(s): Alexander V. Kravchenkopp.: 587–597 (11)More LessThe internalist (computational) account of cognition is questioned and the explanatory power of the biology of cognition in resolving epistemological issues is emphasized. It is argued that, far from being an autonomous activity within the brains of cognizers which generates input/output capacity and can be auditioned by the Turing Test, cognition is a function of living systems as unities of interactions that exist in an environment in structural coupling. Therefore, it is distributed.
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Maturana’s autopoietic hermeneutics versus Turing’s causal methodology for explaining cognition
Author(s): Stevan Harnadpp.: 599–603 (5)More LessKravchenko (2007) suggests replacing Turing’s suggestion for explaining cognizers’ cognitive capacity through autonomous robotic modelling by ‘autopoiesis’, Maturana’s extremely vague metaphor for the relations and interactions among organisms, environments, and various subordinate and superordinate systems (‘autopoietic systems’) therein. I suggest that this would be an exercise in hermeneutics rather than causal explanation.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 31 (2024)
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Volume 30 (2023)
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Volume 29 (2022)
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Volume 28 (2021)
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Volume 27 (2020)
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Volume 26 (2019)
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Volume 25 (2018)
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Volume 24 (2017)
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Volume 23 (2016)
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Volume 22 (2014)
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Volume 21 (2013)
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Volume 20 (2012)
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Volume 19 (2011)
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Volume 18 (2010)
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Volume 17 (2009)
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Volume 16 (2008)
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Volume 15 (2007)
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Volume 14 (2006)
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Volume 13 (2005)
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Volume 12 (2004)
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Volume 11 (2003)
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Volume 10 (2002)
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Volume 9 (2001)
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Volume 8 (2000)
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Volume 7 (1999)
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Volume 6 (1998)
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Volume 5 (1997)
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Volume 4 (1996)
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Volume 3 (1995)
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Volume 2 (1994)
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Volume 1 (1993)
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