In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Art of Teaching in the MuseumRika Burnham (bio) and Elliott Kai-Kee (bio)A class is studying a small painting by Rembrandt in the galleries of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The museum educator has been inviting the assembled visitors to look ever more closely, guiding the class toward an understanding both of the painting itselfand of our reasons for studying it. The class has been (...) anything but passive—indeed, it has been lively. The painting is The Abduction of Europa (1632), a picture that depicts in delicate detail a story from Greek mythology, the kidnapping of the Phoenician princess Europa by Zeus in the guise of a white bull. The visitors have shared their observations, speculations, ideas. As the class concludes, the museum educator asks the participants to speculate on the painting's larger meaning, to say what they think this work is, finally, about, as revealed by their long discussion. The group's experience has clearly moved beyond the telling of a single story. One participant suggests that Rembrandt's work is about the fearlessness of traveling into the unknown. Another says that it concerns the story of the soul's leaving the earthly for the heavenly realm. When the class comes to an end, people move closer to the painting and continue their discussions.In the same museum, another museum educator is also conducting a group of students through the galleries. He begins with a Roman statue of Venus, followed by an eighteenth-century French terra-cotta bust of Madame Récamier by Joseph Chinard. For each sculpture, he asks the students to focus on only one detail, the hands. The students are encouraged to observe and take note of the sculpted figures' gestures, much as if they were studying a person. Time seems to slow as perception sharpens. The educator listens patiently as the students begin to "read" the sculptures as a whole through the expressiveness of the hands. The group moves on to a mysterious portrait by Millet in which the students discuss the nature of love, and [End Page 65] then to a painting of a Russian princess by Winterhalter, in which the artifice of all the details is suddenly theatrical, dazzling, and delightful. At the end, no one wants to leave.As museum educators we teach in many kinds of programs, and teach in many ways. Every museum educator brings unique gifts to the art of teaching through works of art. The two classes described above might seem at first glance quite different. The first museum educator stays with a single work of art for the entire session, constructs her class around the observations and ideas of the students, and trusts that through their collective experience, a larger meaning will emerge. The second educator inspires his students with a feeling of confidence by guiding their observations of a single feature common to several works, and then allows a main idea to emerge. The two classes, however, are also alike in certain essential ways. In both cases, the students and the instructor are animated, concentrated, focused, and active. Their investigation is tightly focused on the works under discussion, and the group together reaches for a sense of the artworks as a whole. At the end, when the participants cluster around the works of art, still wanting to continue the experience of discovery, the instructors know that theirstudents have understood that engagement with a work of art is a beginning, not an end.The opportunities museum educators have to teach and learn are granted to us by the collections of objects in the care of the institutions in which we work, and by the students and visitors we invite to consider these objects. These artworks also impose upon us a great obligation, to bring them alive for those we lead through the galleries. For ultimately, it is our devoted attention that keeps artworks alive generation after generation.This essay is the result of our work as museum educators. It began with a casual discussion about what constitutes good teaching, and what we can do to guide ourselves and our docent colleagues toward consistent and principled teaching in our museums. We... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Museum Education and the Project of Interpretation in the Twenty-First CenturyRika Burnham and Elliott Kai-KeeThis is what we shall look for as we move: freedom developed by human beings who have acted to make a space for themselves in the presence of others, human beings become "challengers" ready for alternatives, alternatives that include caring and community. And we shall seek, as we go, implications for emancipatory education conducted (...) by and for those willing to take responsibility for themselves and for each other. We want to discover how to open spaces for persons in their plurality, spaces where they can become different, where they can grow.—Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom, 56In the art museum of the future, we walk into a gallery in which the hum of conversation fills the space. A small group of visitors clusters around a single work of art, exchanging their observations, led quietly in their conversation by a museum educator. The group has gathered for a program in which visitors are invited into a dialogue with the educator, with each other, and above all, with the artwork. As this group's conversation concludes, other groups will take their place, attending to different works of art, unfolding them in different ways.We share with David Carrier a vision of the future museum rooted in the Enlightenment dream of a sphere of conversation accessible to all citizens, a public museum space "devoted to a genuinely democratic talk about visual art." In such a museum the galleries are not primarily considered places where art historical information is transferred. They are instead redefined as places where conversation takes place around works of art and where the project of interpretation is constantly enacted.The educators who are responsible for these conversations have a central place in the future museum. Once charged with translating curatorial interpretations to the public, educators are now charged with including everyone [End Page 11] in the translation of the artworks. Knowledgeable in the collections and experienced with audiences, they bring people and works of art together for appreciation and exploration. Engaged in the exchange of thoughts and observations about artworks, carried into the back-and-forth flow of discussion about the artworks, visitors translate impressions into conjectures, and, ideally, understanding and interpretation.Visitors come to the museum to learn about art through gallery conversations during which they actively take part in a form of interpretive play that animates, and in a sense performs, works of art as visitors look at them and talk about them. When the play is successful, it is full of energy and passion. The museum galleries become active places where ideas are freely exchanged, where hermeneutic improvisation and experimentation are encouraged and valued.The constantly recurring play of art makes the museum a place of interpretive freedom, open to many viewpoints and the possibility of multiple interpretations. Educator and visitor both realize that understandings of works of art are never complete. They know that every conversation opens the artworks to the possibility of new meanings and new interpretations.In the museum of the future, the mission of offering visitors such special experiences is not distinct from the museum's traditional charge of caring for the objects in its collections. For it is only when visitors attend to the works of art, and interpret them, that the artworks come alive. As John Dewey said almost a century ago, the work of art comes alive in the viewer's experience. Visitors, educators, and curators share in the endeavor of making sense of works of art, each taking their own part in the process of bringing them to life with their scrutiny, and keeping them alive as they interpret and reinterpret them.The deepest and most affecting experiences visitors have in art museums are those in which they share in the unfolding, unraveling, and translation of the meaning of artworks. In the museum of the future, everyone is invited into such conversations. Everyone understands that they are important participants in the lives of the objects displayed there, as they take part in the play of interpretation that dances around them.Museums are first and foremost for people; they are... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to My CommentatorsDavid CarrierI am immensely thankful to Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Klaus Ottmann, and Sean Ulmer for their comments on my book. And to Daniel A. Siedell for organizing this mini-symposium, which really is an author's dream. By gently pressing me to think about important issues, these sympathetic commentators have advanced dialogue.When writing Museum Skepticism I became very aware that there are (...) two kinds of literature that discuss museums. There are memoirs of curators or other museum employees, and there are the commentaries by academics, which usually look at museums from the outside. My ambition was to look at this institution in a way that would both be sympathetic to the practical concerns and embody a theoretical point of view. One otherwise sympathetic reviewer complained that I was only looking at the museum from the outside.1 That certainly is correct, but for obvious reasons people who work in museums are unusually unwilling to describe their inner workings. To have a good theory of the museum, you need to be practical. Often, for example, critics complain about the proliferation of shops and restaurants, urge that admission be free, or say that blockbuster shows are destructive and overcrowded. However one judges such moralizing, the museum director who needs to balance the budget can hardly be guided by such reasoning. One can be critical, as I am, about the power of the super-rich in museum life. But in what other way could funding be found? The history of debates about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) points to obvious ways in which, in America at least, reliance on public funding poses problems. My goal, then, was to develop a realistic analysis.Sean Ulmer correctly notes that to understand the art in museums, we must consider its prior history. Chinese paintings, Islamic decorations, Maori sculpture, and premodern European art were not made to be displayed in public galleries. And so there are legitimate questions about how to set it alongside modernist art, whose natural home is the art museum. Allowing this much, I am not sure why he thinks it impossible to describe museums in a single book. We need to understand how artifacts with such varied origins can be coherently displayed in one building. Here, then, we get to Ulmer's second concern—museum displays. Recently museums have experimented with thematic displays. The Museum of Modern Art in New York did that before its recent reconstruction; the Tate Modern has such a system; and during summer 2006 the Whitney tried such a plan. I understand the need of museums to experiment, to find new ways to attract visitors to the permanent collection. Still, a straight chronological display has the obvious advantage of presenting that history of art in which, for example, Impressionism leads to Cubism, and then on to Abstract Expressionism. The obvious danger of thematic displays is that they bewilder the larger public. [End Page 22]When I said that museums are top-down institutions, I was thinking of the grander public museums where the function of the trustees is to raise money, either by giving themselves or by networking. These people who provide funding no doubt have their own agendas, but they, in turn, respond to larger economic and political concerns. I would be astonished if the Metropolitan Museum of Art asked Arthur Danto or Leo Steinberg to be a trustee; or, to look closer at hand, if the Carnegie Museum of Art or the Cleveland Museum of Art asked me to play that role. Since we are mere professors, what practical help could we provide? I expect that at smaller museums the situation is different. But here, again, it is important to be realistic. Cleveland's art historians have not had any influence on the rebuilding plan for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Of course I would be flattered if the new director asked for my opinion, but to be honest, I am not sure that I could tell him anything useful. When Ulmer discusses the comparative role of permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, he touches on a very important point. Like him, I... (shrink)

This interview with Jeremy Waldron covers three topics. Firstly, we dealt with the methodology debate, that is, the discussion about how to proceed in analyzing the nature of law. Does the question ‘What is law?’ require a descriptive analysis of the concept of law or, rather, a normative exercise in political philosophy? Secondly, we spoke about the role of law in response to historic injustice, especially in relation to the restitution of property rights. On this topic Waldron vindicates the ‘supersession-thesis’, (...) the idea that, due to changed circumstances and the passage of time, historic injustices become superseded. The third section of the interview is devoted to Waldron’s perspective on the citation of foreign law by national judges. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one‐shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

Media in Question sets the agenda for a revitalized debate on the hybrid communicative practices that constitute the postmodern media landscape: practices that cross the boundaries between fact and fiction, information and entertainment, public knowledge, and popular culture. In this challenging and provocative collection, the individual contributors rethink key issuesùthe meaning of the public interest, the quality of media performance, and deregulation. In the process they raise questions rarely addressed in normative media theories, for example, the ethics of sports reporting, (...) the moral reasoning in popular culture, and the required professional standards for infotainment genres such as reality television and gossip journalism. Accessible and wide-ranging, The Media in Question will be essential reading for students in mass communication and political communication studies. (shrink)

This paper asks why information should ever be expressed vaguely, re-assessing some previously proposed answers to this question and suggesting some new ones. Particular attention is paid to the benefits that vague expressions can have in situations where agreement over the meaning of an expression cannot be taken for granted. A distinction between two different versions of the above-mentioned question is advocated. The first asks why human languages contain vague expressions, the second question asks when and why a speaker should (...) choose a vague expression when communicating with a hearer. While the former question is purely theoretical, the latter has practical implications for the computational generation of utterances in Natural Language Generation (NLG). (shrink)

Recent psychology research has established that people do not employ a simple unidimensional scale for attributions of personhood, increasing from non-sentient rocks to mentally complex humans. Rather, there are two personhood dimensions: agency (e.g. planning, deciding, acting) and experience (e.g. feeling, desiring, experiencing). Here we show that this subtle distinction also occurs in the semantic space of natural language. We develop computational-linguistics tools for measuring variation in agency and experience in language and validate the measures against human judgments. To demonstrate (...) the usefulness of the method, we map both dimensions of personhood in historical English-language corpora over the last 200 years. First, we show that while women are now perceived as having similar levels of agency as men, they are still perceived as more patient-like. Second, we show that domesticated animals have gradually gained higher attributions of experience, but not agency, over time. -/- . (shrink)

We see a systematic set of cut-free axiomatisations for all the basic normal modal logics formed by some combination the axioms d, t, b, 4, 5. They employ a form of deep inference but otherwise stay very close to Gentzen’s sequent calculus, in particular they enjoy a subformula property in the literal sense. No semantic notions are used inside the proof systems, in particular there is no use of labels. All their rules are invertible and the rules cut, weakening and (...) contraction are admissible. All systems admit a straightforward terminating proof search procedure as well as a syntactic cut elimination procedure. (shrink)

Many philosophers are attracted to a complaints-based theory of the procreation asymmetry, according to which creating a person with a bad life is wrong (all else equal) because that person can complain about your act, whereas declining to create a person who would have a good life is not wrong (all else equal) because that person never exists and so cannot complain about your act. In this paper, I present two problems for such theories: the problem of impairable-life acceptance and (...) an especially acute version of the problem of improvable-life avoidance. I explain how these problems afflict two recent complaints-based theories of the procreation asymmetry, from Joe Horton and Abelard Podgorski. (shrink)

Common wisdom holds that communication is impossible when messages are costless and communicators have totally opposed interests. This article demonstrates that such wisdom is false. Non-convergent dynamics can sustain partial information transfer even in a zero-sum signalling game. In particular, I investigate a signalling game in which messages are free, the state-act payoffs resemble rock–paper–scissors, and senders and receivers adjust their strategies according to the replicator dynamic. This system exhibits Hamiltonian chaos and trajectories do not converge to equilibria. This persistent (...) out-of-equilibrium behaviour results in messages that do not perfectly reveal the sender's private information, but do transfer information as quantified by the Kullback–Leibler divergence. This finding shows that adaptive dynamics can enable information transmission even though messages at equilibria are meaningless. This suggests a new explanation for the evolution or spontaneous emergence of meaning: non-convergent adaptive dynamics. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of the recent financial crisis on the relation between a firm’s risk and social performance using a sample of non-financial U.S. firms covering the period 1991–2012. We find that the relation between SP and risk is significantly different in the crisis period compared to the pre-crisis period. SP reduces volatility during the financial crisis. The risk reduction potential of SP is mainly due to the strengths component of SP. Since the relation of risk is stronger (...) with SP strengths than SP concerns, this implies an asymmetric relation between these SP components and a firm’s risk. Specifically, strengths act as a risk reduction tool during an adverse economic environment. (shrink)

According to Critical-Level Views in population axiology, an extra life improves a population only if that life’s welfare exceeds some fixed ‘critical level.’ An extra life at the critical level leaves the new population equally good as the original. According to Critical-Range Views, an extra life improves a population only if that life’s welfare exceeds some fixed ‘critical range.’ An extra life within the critical range leaves the new population incommensurable with the original. -/- In this paper, I sharpen some (...) old objections to these views and offer some new ones. Critical-Level Views cannot avoid certain Repugnant and Sadistic Conclusions. Critical-Range Views imply that lives featuring no good or bad components whatsoever can nevertheless swallow up and neutralise goodness or badness. Both classes of view entail that certain small changes in welfare correspond to worryingly large differences in contributive value. -/- I then offer a view that retains much of the appeal of Critical-Level and Critical-Range Views while avoiding the above pitfalls. On the Imprecise Exchange Rates View, the quantity of some good required to outweigh a given unit of some bad is imprecise. This imprecision is the source of incommensurability between lives and populations. (shrink)

Lexical views in population axiology can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating Transitivity or Separability. However, they imply a dilemma: either some good life is better than any number of slightly worse lives, or else the ‘at least as good as’ relation on populations is radically incomplete. In this paper, I argue that Archimedean views face an analogous dilemma. I thus conclude that the lexical dilemma gives us little reason to prefer Archimedean views. Even if we give up on lexicality, (...) problems of the same kind remain. (shrink)

This is a most unusual book. Mao Zedong was one of the most powerful people in the twentieth century. With Chiang Kai-shek he drove out the Japanese from China and then defeated Chiang in turn and carried out a major revolution over which he presided for many years. Everyone knows he was a poet and, like every Marxist leader, he was a philosopher of sorts. His Marxist philosophy evolved from his youth to old age, and he developed differences from the (...) Soviet model of Marxism that were quite significant. He "converted" to Marxism in his twenties and identified himself with that movement until he died in his eighties. But what was his education in philosophy like before he encountered Marxism? Whereas Marx, Lenin, and... (shrink)

Arrhenius’s impossibility theorems purport to demonstrate that no population axiology can satisfy each of a small number of intuitively compelling adequacy conditions. However, it has recently been pointed out that each theorem depends on a dubious assumption: Finite Fine-Grainedness. This assumption states that there exists a finite sequence of slight welfare differences between any two welfare levels. Denying Finite Fine-Grainedness makes room for a lexical population axiology which satisfies all of the compelling adequacy conditions in each theorem. Therefore, Arrhenius’s theorems (...) fail to prove that there is no satisfactory population axiology. In this paper, I argue that Arrhenius’s theorems can be repurposed. Since all of our population-affecting actions have a non-zero probability of bringing about more than one distinct population, it is population prospect axiologies that are of practical relevance, and amended versions of Arrhenius’s theorems demonstrate that there is no satisfactory population prospect axiology. These impossibility theorems do not depend on Finite Fine-Grainedness, so lexical views do not escape them. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Experiential Roots of Religion The ARE in the Twentieth Century The Decline of Traditional Foundationalism and Stock Objections to RE The ARE via the Principle of Critical Trust (PCT) RE and TE Conceptual Coherence of TE Intracoherence of TE The Structure of the CTA The Impartiality Argument for the PCT Objections to the ARE The ARE in the Twenty‐First Century References.

I explain the shutdown problem: the problem of designing artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don’t try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals competently. I prove three theorems that make the difficulty precise. These theorems show that agents satisfying some innocuous-seeming conditions will often try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, even in cases where it’s costly to do so. And (...) patience trades off against shutdownability: the more patient an agent, the greater the costs that agent is willing to incur to manipulate the shutdown button. I end by noting that these theorems can guide our search for solutions. (shrink)

The Fourth Edition of this long-established text retains all the key features of the previous editions, covering the basic topics of a solid first course in ...

This study examined lexical bundles used differently by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics in their dissertation abstracts. Two corpora were built, with each having 700 dissertation abstracts produced by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics, respectively. The study then used lexical analysis software to retrieve frequently used three-word LBs, from which LBs having different frequencies at a significant level across the two corpora were identified and termed as bundles used differently. BUDs were then categorized and analyzed manually (...) in terms of structure, function, and distribution in rhetorical moves. The major findings were: 57.14% of the frequently used LBs were BUDs, of which 90.67% had occurrences in both corpora. The BUDs distributed inequivalently across categories and moves, with the text-oriented category and the move of Result having the most BUDs; and BUDs exhibited two major patterns: the Chinese and American students filled different constituents into structurally and functionally similar constructions, and used LBs of dissimilar functions to fulfill the same communicative purposes. These findings indicate that variations in LB use have a high pedagogic value and confirm the need for using corpora to identify and teach core genre-specific vocabularies to second/foreign language learners. (shrink)

Lewis signalling games are often used to explain how it is possible for simple agents to develop systems of conventional semantic meaning. In these games, all players obtain identical payoffs in every outcome. This is an unrealistic payoff structure, but it is often employed because it is thought that semantic meaning will not emerge if interests conflict. Here it is shown that not only is conventional meaning possible when interests conflict, but it is the most likely outcome in a finite (...) population model of learning known as the Moran process. On the basis of this result it is suggested that evolutionary game theory’s standard models may yield results that are systematically distorted for a class of signalling games that have the abstract structure of social dilemmas. 1 Introduction2 The Seduction Game3 Imitation Dynamics with Small Mutations4 Dynamics with Unverifiable Message5 Analysis of a Related Three-Strategy Game6 Conclusion. (shrink)

Critical-set views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by subtracting some constant from the welfare score of each life in a population. These views are thus sensitive to facts about biographical identity: identity between lives. In this paper, I argue that questions of biographical identity give us reason to reject critical-set views and embrace the total view. I end with a practical implication. If we shift our credences towards the total view, we should also shift our efforts towards ensuring that humanity survives (...) for the long term. (shrink)

Scientific research that could cause grave harm, either through accident or intentional malevolence, is known as dual-use research. Recent high-profile cases of dual-use research in the life sciences have led to debate about the extent to which restrictions on the conduct and dissemination of such research may impede scientific progress. We adapt formal models of scientific networks to systematically explore the effects that different regulatory schemes may have on a community’s ability to learn about the world. Our results suggest that, (...) contrary to common wisdom, some restrictions on the conduct and dissemination of dual-use research do not inhibit scientific progress and may actually aid communities in learning. (shrink)

I explain and motivate the shutdown problem: the problem of creating artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don’t try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals competently. I then propose a solution: train agents to have incomplete preferences. Specifically, I propose that we train agents to lack a preference between every pair of different-length trajectories. I suggest a way to train such agents using reinforcement learning: (...) we give the agent lower reward for repeatedly choosing same-length trajectories. (shrink)

We first look at an existing infinitary sequent system for common knowledge for which there is no known syntactic cut-elimination procedure and also no known non-trivial bound on the proof-depth. We then present another infinitary sequent system based on nested sequents that are essentially trees and with inference rules that apply deeply inside these trees. Thus we call this system “deep” while we call the former system “shallow”. In contrast to the shallow system, the deep system allows one to give (...) a straightforward syntactic cut-elimination procedure. Since both systems can be embedded into each other, this also yields a syntactic cut-elimination procedure for the shallow system. For both systems we thus obtain an upper bound of φ20 on the depth of proofs, where φ is the Veblen function. (shrink)

This response discusses the experiment reported in Krahmer et al.’s Letter to the Editor of Cognitive Science. We observe that their results do not tell us whether the Incremental Algorithm is better or worse than its competitors, and we speculate about implications for reference in complex domains, and for learning from ‘‘normal” (i.e., non-semantically-balanced) corpora.

Philosophers and social scientists have recently turned to Lewis sender–receiver games to provide an account of how lexical terms can acquire meaning through an evolutionary process. However, the evolution of meaning is contingent on both the particular sender–receiver game played and the choice of evolutionary dynamic. In this paper I explore some differences between models that presume an infinitely large and randomly mixed population and models in which a finite number of agents communicate with their neighbors in a social network. (...) My results show that communication with neighbors is more conducive to the evolution of meaning than communication with strangers. Additionally, I show that the behavior of the system is highly dependent on the topological structure of the social network. I argue that a specific class of networks—small world graphs—is especially conducive to the evolution of meaning. This is because small world graphs have a short characteristic path length while still maintaining a high degree of correlation between neighbors. Since many actual social networks, such as friendship networks and nervous systems, are conjectured to be small world structures, these results indicate that these networks are quite hospitable to the efficient evolution of meaning. (shrink)