Mill's feminism has been attacked as being logically incoherent. The general verdict has been that Mill can easily be defended from the charge. However, both sides in the debate have ignored the fact that his feminism is part of a broader theory of liberal empiricism. Placing The Subjection of Women in this context re–opens the question of its logical credentials and reveals a basic weakness in Millian feminism.

`Folk Psychology' - our everyday talk of beliefs, desires and mental events - has long been compared with the technical language of `Cognitive Science'. Does folk psychology provide a correct account of the mental causes of our behaviour, or must our everyday terms ultimately be replaced by a language developed from computational models and neurobiology? This broad-ranging book addresses these questions, which lie at the heart of psychology and philosophy. Providing a critical overview of the key literature in the field, (...) including the seminal work of Fodor and Churchland, the author explores the classic `Frame Problem' and assesses the future prospects of cognitive science. The scope of the frame problem, touching on connec. (shrink)

This paper investigates connectionism's potential to solve the frame problem. The frame problem arises in the context of modelling the human ability to see the relevant consequences of events in a situation. It has been claimed to be unsolvable for classical cognitive science, but easily manageable for connectionism. We will focus on a representational approach to the frame problem which advocates the use of intrinsic representations. We argue that although connectionism's distributed representations may look promising from this perspective, doubts can (...) be raised about the potential of distributed representations to allow large amounts of complexly structured information to be adequately encoded and processed. It is questionable whether connectionist models that are claimed to effectively represent structured information can be scaled up to a realistic extent. We conclude that the frame problem provides a difficulty to connectionism that is no less serious than the obstacle it constitutes for classical cognitive science. (shrink)

Rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence are leading to an increasing human reliance on machine decision making. Even in collaborative efforts with Decision Support Systems (DSSs), where a human expert is expected to make the final decisions, it can be hard to keep the expert actively involved throughout the decision process. DSSs suggest their own solutions and thus invite passive decision making. To keep humans actively ‘on’ the decision-making loop and counter overreliance on machines, we propose a ‘reflection machine’ (RM). This (...) system asks users questions about their decision strategy and thereby prompts them to evaluate their own decisions critically. We discuss what forms RMs can take and present a proof-of-concept implementation of a RM that can produce feedback on users’ decisions in the medical and law domains. We show that the prototype requires very little domain knowledge to create reasonably intelligent critiquing questions. With this prototype, we demonstrate the technical feasibility to develop RMs and hope to pave the way for future research into their effectiveness and value. (shrink)

This volume is a critical edition of the eight-year correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Burcher de Volder, professor of philosophy and mathematics at Leiden University. Containing the surviving correspondence between Leibniz and De Volder, the volume also presents a generous selection from the letters between Leibniz and his friend Johann Bernoulli, through whose intercession the correspondence began. Bernoulli acted as intermediary throughout, and the often candid discussions between Leibniz and Bernoulli provide illuminating background to the correspondence proper. Each of (...) the selections appears both in the original Latin and in English translation. (shrink)

This volume contains papers that represent Leibniz’s early thoughts on the problem of evil, centering on a dialogue, the Confessio philosophi, in which he formulates a general account of God’s relation to sin and evil that becomes a fixture in his thinking. How can God be understood to be the ultimate cause, asks Leibniz, without God being considered as the author of sin, a conclusion incompatible with God’s holiness? Leibniz’s attempts to justify the way of God to humans lead him (...) to deep discussion of related topics: the nature of free choice, the problems of necessitarianism and fatalism, the nature of divine justice and holiness. All but one of the writings presented here are available in English for the first time. (shrink)