The information explosion and digital modes of learning often combine to inform the quest for the best ways of transforming information in digital form for pedagogical purposes. This quest has become more urgent and pervasive with the ‘turn’ to online learning in the context of COVID-19. This can result in linear, asynchronous, transmission-based modes of teaching and learning which commodify, package and deliver knowledge for individual ‘customers’. The primary concerns in such models are often technical and economic (...) – technology as a cost-effective ‘solution’ to educational challenges. In this paper I argue for the importance of dialogic learning space in teaching and learning by means of Information and Communication Technologies, whether in the form of fully online learning, blended learning or face-to-face encounters using ICT affordances. Although the 20th Century theorists Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) produced their seminal works before the advent of ICTs, they were both concerned with the quality and authenticity of human engagement with texts and with other persons and contexts. Besides a shared interest in dialogue as an ontological feature of human life and being, they both used spatiotemporal concepts for understanding and interpreting texts. The article draws on Gadamer’s notions of dialogue and horizon, and Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue and chronotope, to conceptualize dialogic possibilities for online education. Its purpose is to provide a framework, grounded in Bakhtin’s and Gadamer’s ideas, for a dialogic approach to online teaching and learning in higher education. (shrink)

This volume outlines a model of language that can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. The core idea is that linguistic structure is not stable and uniform, but continually refreshed by the interaction between three components: usage, the communicative activities of speakers; conventionalization, the social processes triggered by these activities and feeding back into them; and entrenchment, the individual cognitive processes that are also linked to these activities in a feedback loop. Hans-Joerg Schmid explains how this multiple (...) feedback system works by extending his Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model, showing how the linguistic system is created, sustained, and continually adapted by the ongoing interaction between usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Fulfilling the promise of usage-based accounts, the model explains how exactly usage is transformed into collective and individual grammar and how these two grammars in turn feed back into usage.0The book is exceptionally broad in scope, with insights from a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines. It provides a coherent account of the role of multiple factors that influence language structure, variation, and change, including frequency, economy, identity, multilingualism, and language contact. (shrink)

The application of deep learning methods to problems in natural language processing has generated significant progress across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. For some of these applications, deep learning models now approach or surpass human performance. While the success of this approach has transformed the engineering methods of machine learning in artificial intelligence, the significance of these achievements for the modelling of human learning and representation remains unclear. Deep Learning and Linguistic (...) Representation looks at the application of a variety of deep learning systems to several cognitively interesting NLP tasks. It also considers the extent to which this work illuminates our understanding of the way in which humans acquire and represent linguistic knowledge. Key Features: combines an introduction to deep learning in AI and NLP with current research on Deep Neural Networks in computational linguistics. is self-contained and suitable for teaching in computer science, AI, and cognitive science courses; it does not assume extensive technical training in these areas. provides a compact guide to work on state of the art systems that are producing a revolution across a range of difficult natural language tasks. (shrink)

In this article, I develop a loosely Wittgensteinian conception of what it takes for a being, including an AI system, to understand language, and I suggest that current state of the art systems are closer to fulfilling these requirements than one might think. Developing and defending this claim has both empirical and conceptual aspects. The conceptual aspects concern the criteria that are reasonably applied when judging whether some being understands language; the empirical aspects concern the question whether a given (...) being fulfills these criteria. On the conceptual side, the article builds on Glock’s concept of intelligence, Taylor’s conception of intrinsic rightness as well as Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. On the empirical side, it is argued that current transformer-based NNLP models, such as BERT and GPT-3 come close to fulfilling these criteria. (shrink)

This research aims to show grammatical relations between the elements of the sentence based around the syntactic connection. The phenomenon of syntactic connection is one of the basic concepts for al-Jurjānī’s theory of nazm (construction). This view, which makes more understanding the structure of Arabic sentence, is studied in the light of the ideas of classic and modernists linguists. This attempt to facilitate Arabic grammar has continued routinely from relationships between grammar and meaning. The integration of grammar, which consists of (...) words, is an important property for native speakers and others. This field is open to new developments considering the successive developments in the field of linguistics. It is important to develop the principles that will help in understanding the grammatical structure of a language in which communication pathways are growing. Reinterpretation of prominent approaches appeared in classical sources and updating the concepts that explain the basic structures of language are needed to increase the effectiveness of Arabic.Summary: The linguists, who accept the language structures as a system of expressing thoughts, search out the relationship between meaning and grammar. The rules of grammar, which maintain its importance from the past to the present is one of the basic language areas. In the looking at the researches in the field of Arabic language, it is seen that the grammatical structures of this language is much emphasized. In this context, the grammatical markers theory, which is trying to explain the connection between the sentence elements in the light of different scientific disciplines, such as philosophy and logic is a theory, which the linguists put to explain the Arabic grammar. The grammatical discussions around the grammatical markers have continued for a long time. ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 471/1078) is one of the most prominent Arabic grammarians whose opinions are widely mentioned in this field. Al-Jurjānī, who found that the discipline of grammar area was limited, established a new method in language studying. In this context, the linguistic researches continue around the views of al-Jurjānī’s theory of construction. The term of construction, which describes the relationship between meaning and grammar, means composition and arrangement. The current linguistic studies have ensured the magnificence and accuracy of this theory. According to this theory, grammar meaning is arising from the choice of word and grammatical elements. The relation between words in the sentence is explained as a construction. According to al-Jurjānī, grammar is the result of various language skills beyond the distinction of truth and error. This comprehensive language understanding, which evaluates the grammar from a different point of view, has started as of Sībawayhi (d. 180/796). The Arabic linguistic studies from the early period are characterized by taking care of both form and meaning, in addition to semantic.Term of the syntactic connection is one of the basic concepts, which al-Jurjānī focuses on while explaining views on grammar. He gives much importance to the method of linking words and to the way they join each other to form sentences. The syntactic connection is an interaction between words and grammatical meanings. In this process, the mechanism of affixation and association occur between the elements of sentence. The term affixation refers to direct connection relations of the elements of sentence, while the term association refers to indirect relations. This term used to describe the grammar structures, is also closely related with the meanings of the words. The basic sentence in classical Arabic consists of the musnad and the musnad ilayhi. In the Arabic language, besides the basic elements of the sentence, other units are important as well. These units work together to express a central idea that may be further developed or refined by other elements. The factor, which determines the function of a word in the sentence, is the place of word. In this context, the linguistic studies carried out within the syntactic connection will make an important contribution to language teaching.The other thing in the context of the syntactic connection is the terms of “deep and surface structure”, which are the basic concepts of the transformational grammar theory developed by Chomsky. While the deep structure consists of simple sentence structures, the surface structure is composed of sentences. According to the transformational grammar theory, the deep structure is an important factor for determining the meaning. They draw attention to the mental side of the language. It is because the language is a phenomenon, which produces unlimited sentences with limited elements. In this form, the language cannot be explained by a mechanical interpretation. The language should be examined in the light of human dynamics. The competence and performance are the cause of the emergence of deep and surface structure terms. The purpose of the word is effective in determining the structure of speech. The target language is to express unlimited meanings with limited words. Classical Arabic grammarians have introduced the idea of transformation to Arabic grammar – though they may not know this term. The Arabic grammarians have talked about preposing, postposing, deletion, increase and interpretation, which used and developed by Chomsky. Transformational grammar theory has produced a new paradigm in grammar. This theory is widely discussed among modern linguists. The term grammatical coherence is a new terminology used by the modern linguists for definition of sentence structure. This term, which shows evidence and relation between both things, is divided into two namely: verbal and semantic coherence. When the definitions of grammatical terms in the classical grammar sources, it is possible to see the emphasis of the grammatical coherences. This language understanding, which tries to substitute the inflection theory, aims to bring innovations in sentence analysis. The linguists point to the importance of this theory, which bring a new perspective in understanding the Arabic grammar. Tammām Ḥassān (1918-2011) attempts to link the grammatical coherences with ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s theory of semantic formation and its relationship to linguistic analysis. Tammām Ḥassān, likened to Sībawayhi, is regarded as one of the most important representatives of the innovative language understanding with his theory. According to him, the system of language, which provides a framework to shape man's thinking, is constituted by three subsystems: phonetics, vocabulary and grammar. Grammar may be defined as a system of word changing and other means of expressing relations of words in the sentence. In this context, the concepts of syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure are important to understand the general structure of languages. According to linguistics, grammar should study both paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of sentences. The syntagmatic structure refers to the relationship between language units depending on the language system in the language. The relationship network between words that belong to the same semantic field is called paradigmatic structure. The paradigmatic structure provides similar criteria for all languages. Such approaches that introduced by linguistics, provides significant contributions to language learning. The modern linguistic studies have made the sentence a starting point to clarify the linguistic structures and relations to achieve the sound linguistic communication. A sentence is the largest unit in a language described by grammar. (shrink)

Modelling with Words is an emerging modelling methodology closely related to the paradigm of Computing with Words introduced by Lotfi Zadeh. This book is an authoritative collection of key contributions to the new concept of Modelling with Words. A wide range of issues in systems modelling and analysis is presented, extending from conceptual graphs and fuzzy quantifiers to humanist computing and self-organizing maps. Among the core issues investigated are - balancing predictive accuracy and high level transparency in learning (...) - scaling linguistic algorithms to high-dimensional data problems - integrating linguistic expert knowledge with knowledge derived from data - identifying sound and useful inference rules - integrating fuzzy and probabilistic uncertainty in data modelling. (shrink)

Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus requires a rich description of the computational structures that underlie mature moral judgments, an account of the acquisition and development of these structures, and (...) an analysis of those components of the moral system that are uniquely human and uniquely moral. In this paper we present the theoretical motivations for adopting LA in the study of moral cognition: (a) the distinction between competence and performance, (b) poverty of stimulus considerations, and (c) adopting the computational level as the proper level of analysis for the empirical study of moral judgment. With these motivations in hand, we review recent empirical findings that have been inspired by LA and which provide evidence for at least two predictions of LA: (a) the computational processes responsible for folk-moral judgment operate over structured representations of actions and events, as well as coding for features of agency and outcomes; and (b) folk-moral judgments are the output of a dedicated moral faculty and are largely immune to the effects of context. In addition, we highlight the complexity of the interfaces between the moral faculty and other cognitive systems external to it (e.g., number systems). We conclude by reviewing the potential utility of the theoretical and empirical tools of LA for future research in moral psychology. (shrink)

Agroecology has been proposed as a key building block for food sovereignty. This article examines the meaning, practices and potentials of ‘transformative agroecology learning’ as a collective strategy for food system transformation. Our study is based on our qualitative and action research with the European Coordination of Via Campesina to develop the European Agroecology Knowledge Exchange Network. This network is linked to the global network of La Via Campesina and builds on the strong experiences and traditions of popular (...) education in Latin American peasant movements. Rather than focusing on agroecology education as a process of individual learning, we analyse how a transformative agroecology education can be strengthened as a critical repertoire of action used by social movements to advance food sovereignty. Our analysis contributes a new theory of transformative agroecology learning based on four key characteristics or qualities: horizontalism; diálogo de saberes ; combining practical and political knowledge; and building social movement networks. While these different elements of transformative agroecology learning were present across EAKEN, they were unevenly developed and, in many cases, not systematized. The framework can help to strategically and reflexively systematize and strengthen a transformative agroecology learning approach as a key building block for food sovereignty. (shrink)

I will take it that general intelligence is intelligence of the kind that a typical human being—Fred, say—manifests in his role as a cognitive agent, that is, as an acquirer, receiver and circulator of knowledge in his cognitive economy. Framed in these terms, the word “general” underserves our ends. Hereafter our questions will bear upon the all-purpose intelligence of beings like Fred. Frederika appears as Fred’s AI-counterpart, not as a fully programmed and engineered being, but as a presently unrealized theoretical (...) construct. Our basic question is whether it is in principle possible to equip Frederika to do what Fred does as an all-purpose participant in his own cognitive economy. Can she achieve a sufficiency of relevant similarity to him to allow us to say that she herself can do what Fred can do, perhaps even better? One of the things that Fred can do—or at least could learn from experience to do—is discharge the duties of an Appeals Court judge. As set down in the ancient doctrine of lex non scripta, Fred must be able to detect, understand and correctly apply certain tacit and implicit rules of law which defy express propositional formulation and linguistic articulation. Fred has an even more widespread capacity for the epistemically tacit and implicit, clearly one of his most cost-saving kinds of intelligence. Indeed, most by far of what Fred will ever know he will know tacitly and implicitly. So we must ask: how tightly bound to the peculiarities of Fred’s cognitive enablement conditions is the character of the intelligence that he manifests? And how far down Fred’s causal make-up does intelligence actually go? (shrink)

There is disagreement over the notion of representation in cognitive science. Many investigators equate representations with symbols, that is, with syntactically defined elements in an internal symbol system. In recent years there have been two challenges to this orthodoxy. First, a number of philosophers, including many outside the symbolist orthodoxy, have argued that "representation" should be understood in its classical sense, as denoting a "stands for" relation between representation and represented. Second, there has been a growing challenge to orthodoxy under (...) the banner of connectionism. Although this connectionist challenge has evoked emotionally-charged rebukes from the symbolist camp, connectionists as a group have not articulated a conception of representation to replace the symbolist view. Nonetheless, most agree on the need for a nonsymbolic notion of representation. This paper advances a "stands for" sense of representation as primary by incorporating it into a general approach to cognitive science consonant with the connectionism. The idea is to marry connectionism to a particular version of functionalism, viz., one that builds its notion of "function" on the similarity between functional analysis in biology and in psychology. It builds on my earlier work adapting and revising Marr's tri-level approach to cognition. My proposal frees Marr's analysis from its moorings in the orthodox symbolic view of representation and allies it with a notion of functional analysis akin to that proposed by Cummins, developed further by Haugeland, and invoked by Millikan and Dretske. Unlike these authors, however, I do not wed representation to a general belief-desire analysis of behavior. Rather, I follow what I take to be the lesson of psychological practice, according to which the investigator does not seek to explain behavior in general but seeks to analyze the cognitive capacities that underlie behavior, such as vision, memory, learning, and linguistic capacities. Accordingly, ascriptions of representational content are made not by working back from belief-desire ascriptions, but in the context of forming psychological models to account for specific cognitive capacities. Because conceptions of representation in cognitive science typically are embedded in a general approach to the study of cognition, arguments for the comparative plausibility of a particular conception of representation must scout these larger frameworks. I therefore begin by characterizing the interlocking set of assumptions that gave life to the orthodox symbolist approach, paying special attention to the complementarity between representation and process that naturally arises from those assumptions. I then consider two versions of an alternative approach to representation: Dretske's and my own. Finally, I urge the merits of the "cognitive capacities" over the "belief-desire" approach to the subject-matter of cognitive science. (shrink)

Children learning to read in two different orthographic systems are exposed to cross-linguistic interferences. We explored the effects of school and grade on phonological activation during a visual word recognition task. Elementary school children from Spain completed a lexical decision task in English. The task included real words and pseudohomophones following Spanish or English phonological rules. Using the mouse-tracking paradigm, we analyzed errors, reaction times, and computer mouse movements. Children in the bilingual school performed better than children (...) in the monolingual school. Children in higher grades performed better than children in lower grades. The interference effect of Spanish phonology was weak and became weaker in higher grades. Spanish children differentiate between first and second language grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences since early on in the educational process. In 6th grade, children from the bilingual school responded better to words and Spanish pseudohomophones, while children from the monolingual school were less distracted by the English pseudohomophones. Children in the bilingual school had stronger inhibition of Spanish phonology and stronger activation of English phonology. Instructional method plays an important role on the processing strategies Spanish children rely on when reading in English. School and grade influence the link between orthographic and phonological representations. (shrink)

A decentralized adaptive control based on human linguistic is investigated to learn human behaviors for multiple robotic manipulators. Many experts’ words or sentences can be transferred into the control actions by employing membership functions in robot systems, which can be synthesized fuzzy controller by employing reasoning mechanism. For the unknown model dynamical robot manipulators, one adjustable parameter that relates to the approximation accuracy of fuzzy logic systems is introduced at first, which be utilized to deal with the (...) unknown dynamics of robot manipulators. Switching fuzzy adaptive controller is designed to overcome the limitation of logic structure that the number of adaptive laws only focus on fuzzy rules in conventional fuzzy logic systems. Another advantage of this design method is that the control with human linguistic extend the semi-global stability to global stability. Finally, effectiveness of the developed control design scheme has been shown in simulation example. (shrink)

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a (...) large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages. (shrink)

The dependency of a speech recognition system on the accent of a user leads to the variation in its performance, as the people from different backgrounds have different accents. Accent labeling and conversion have been reported as a prospective solution for the challenges faced in language learning and various other voice-based advents. In the English TTS system, the accent labeling of unregistered words is another very important link besides the phonetic conversion. Since the importance of the primary stress is (...) much greater than that of the secondary stress, and the primary stress is easier to call than the secondary stress, the labeling of the primary stress is separated from the secondary stress. In this work, the labeling of primary accents uses a labeling algorithm that combines morphological rules and machine learning; the labeling of secondary accents is done entirely through machine learning algorithms. After 10 rounds of cross-validation, the average tagging accuracy rate of primary stress was 94%, the average tagging accuracy rate of secondary stress was 94%, and the total tagging accuracy rate was 83.6%. This perceptual study separates the labeling of primary and secondary accents providing the promising outcomes. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

This fifth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered. First Part of this book presents some (...) theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modified Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classifiers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes. Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identification of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classification. Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classification, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well. (shrink)

We present two proof systems for first-order logic with identity and without function symbols. The first one is an extension of the Rasiowa-Sikorski system with the rules for identity. This system is a validity checker. The rules of this system preserve and reflect validity of disjunctions of their premises and conclusions. The other is a Tableau system, which is an unsatisfiability checker. Its rules preserve and reflect unsatisfiability of conjunctions of their premises and conclusions. We show that the two (...) systems are dual to each other. The duality is expressed in a formal way which enables us to define a transformation of proofs in one of the systems into the proofs of the other. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce’s first rule of logic (EP 2.48, 1898) identifies the inception point of human inquiry. Taking a closer look at this principle, we find at its core a necessary relationship between emptiness and desire that underlies all genuine instances of human learning and adaptation. This composite relationship plays a critical role in the function or failure of learning but has received scant attention in the literature. As a result, the complexities of the first rule of logic (...) are not well understood, often being mistakenly conflated with the rule’s famous corollary, ‘do not block the way of inquiry’, or passed over with cursory definitions, including ‘wonder’, ‘doubt’ and ‘the will to learn’. Following a background discussion highlighting the nature of reflexive inquiry and fallibilism that situate human consciousness both within and beyond animal being, I draw on multiple layers of evidence from a range of disciplines to better reveal the complex dynamics intrinsic to the first rule of logic. These layers include a closer reading and exegesis of the original passage and surrounding text; a semiotic reanalysis of this reading in light of recent advances in the semiotic theory of learning; a resituation of these distinctions within broader contemporary discussions of emptiness ontology to which I contribute in part via an original semantic/rhetorical analysis of a linguistic construction in Laozi; the introduction of a closely related pedagogical tool under development in the context of my own university-level teaching in ethnography and research methods; and the dialogic situation of this diagram within discourses of psychotherapy, philosophy and literature. Building on these principles and distinctions, the paper closes with a perspective shift on obstacles and desire in human learning and an expanded reformulation of the first rule of logic. (shrink)

Rooth & Partee (1982) and Rooth (1985) have shown that the English-specific rule-by-rule system of PTQ can be factored out into function application plus two transformations for resolving type mismatch (type lifting and variable binding). Building on these insights, this article proposes a universal system for type-driven translation, by adding two more innovations: local type determination for gaps (generalizing Montague 1973) and a set of semantic filters (extending Cooper 1983). This system, dubbed Cross-Linguistic Semantics (XLS), is shown to account (...) for various phenomena — including scope relations in English and Greenlandic Eskimo, internally headed relative clauses in Lakhota, serial verbs in Yoruba and VP ellipsis in English. (shrink)

The topic of this dissertation is the nature of linguistic competence, the capacity to understand and produce sentences of natural language. I defend the empiricist account of linguistic competence embedded in the connectionist cognitive science. This strand of cognitive science has been opposed to the traditional symbolic cognitive science, coupled with transformational-generative grammar, which was committed to nativism due to the view that human cognition, including language capacity, should be construed in terms of symbolic representations and hardwired rules. (...) Similarly, linguistic competence in this framework was regarded as being innate, rule-governed, domain-specific, and fundamentally different from performance, i.e., idiosyncrasies and factors governing linguistic behavior. I analyze state-of-the-art connectionist, deep learning models of natural language processing, most notably large language models, to see what they can tell us about linguistic competence. Deep learning is a statistical technique for the classification of patterns through which artificial intelligence researchers train artificial neural networks containing multiple layers that crunch a gargantuan amount of textual and/or visual data. I argue that these models suggest that linguistic competence should be construed as stochastic, pattern-based, and stemming from domain-general mechanisms. Moreover, I distinguish syntactic from semantic competence, and I show for each the ramifications of the endorsement of a connectionist research program as opposed to the traditional symbolic cognitive science and transformational-generative grammar. I provide a unifying front, consisting of usage-based theories, a construction grammar approach, and an embodied approach to cognition to show that the more multimodal and diverse models are in terms of architectural features and training data, the stronger the case is for the connectionist linguistic competence. I also propose to discard the competence vs. performance distinction as theoretically inferior so that a novel and integrative account of linguistic competence originating in connectionism and empiricism that I propose and defend in the dissertation could be put forward in scientific and philosophical literature. (shrink)

This paper discusses the interrelationship between wisdom, science and craft from the perspective of the Wittgenstein concept of tacit knowledge. It challenges the notion of the ‘rules-model’ as put forward by Logical Positivists, and shows the limitation of this model for describing the tacit dimension of knowledge. The paper demonstrates the crucial role of practice in ‘rule-following’ in the real world. It is held that ‘to follow a rule’ is to practice a custom, a usage or an institutional practice. Hence, (...) rules can only exist as a link in social life.The dream of the ‘precise’ language can only be realised in a closed scientific world. It is inadequate for reflecting the user's relationship to language and its content and practice in varied ‘use situations’. It is only through examples that we learn to deal with, describe, interpret and learn from the new situations.The rule-based models which are used to acquire and describe human knowledge in syntactic and propositional forms are, in effect, an impoverishment of the description of reality. It is argued that expert knowledge and linguistic knowledge are linked together and emerge as two sides of the same subject as the pragmatic perspective of reality. The tacit dimension of expert knowledge is, in many cases, more significant than the linguistic knowledge, especially in the case of the vocational and aesthetic world.The challenge to AI researchers, therefore, is to recognise that knowledge based systems which ignore the tacit dimension of expert knowledge not only distance the user from reality but also impoverish the learning process itself. (shrink)

A well-trod debate at the nexus of cognitive science and linguistics, the so-called past tense debate, has examined how rules and exceptions are individually acquired. However, this debate focuses primarily on individual mechanisms in learning, saying little about how rules and exceptions function from a sociolinguistic perspective. To remedy this, we use agent-based models to examine how rules and exceptions function across populations. We expand on earlier work by considering how repeated interaction and cultural transmission across speakers affects the (...) dynamics of rules and exceptions in language, measuring linguistic outcomes within a social system rather than focusing individual learning outcomes. We consider how population turnover and growth effect linguistic rule dynamics in large and small populations, showing that this method has considerable potential particularly in probing the mechanisms underlying the linguistic niche hypothesis. (shrink)

Dialogue is a seminal concept within the work of the Brazilian adult education theorist, Paulo Freire, and the Russian literary critic and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. While there are commonalities in their understanding of dialogue, they differ in their treatment of dialectic. This paper addresses commonalities and dissonances within a Bakhtin-Freire dialogue on the notions of dialogue and dialectic. It then teases out some of the implications for education theory and practice in relation to two South African contexts of learning (...) that facilitate the access to education of disadvantaged groups, one in higher education and the other in early childhood education. (shrink)

A number of ways of taxonomizing human learning have been proposed. We examine the evidence for one such proposal, namely, that there exist independent explicit and implicit learning systems. This combines two further distinctions, (1) between learning that takes place with versus without concurrent awareness, and (2) between learning that involves the encoding of instances (or fragments) versus the induction of abstract rules or hypotheses. Implicit learning is assumed to involve unconscious rule learning. (...) We examine the evidence for implicit learning derived from subliminal learning, conditioning, artificial grammar learning, instrumental learning, and reaction times in sequence learning. We conclude that unconscious learning has not been satisfactorily established in any of these areas. The assumption that learning in some of these tasks (e.g., artificial grammar learning) is predominantly based on rule abstraction is questionable. When subjects cannot report the rules that govern stimulus selection, this is often because their knowledge consists of instances or fragments of the training stimuli rather than rules. In contrast to the distinction between conscious and unconscious learning, the distinction between instance and rule learning is a sound and meaningful way of taxonomizing human learning. We discuss various computational models of these two forms of learning. (shrink)

We distinguish the question whether only human minds are equipped with a language of thought (LoT) from the question whether human minds employ a single uniquely human learning mechanism. Thus separated, our answer to both questions is negative. Even very simple minds employ a LoT. And the comparative data reviewed by Penn et al. actually suggest that there are many distinctively human learning mechanisms.

A number of ways of taxonomizing human learning have been proposed. We examine the evidence for one such proposal, namely, that there exist independent explicit and implicit learning systems. This combines two further distinctions, between learning that takes place with versus without concurrent awareness, and between learning that involves the encoding of instances versus the induction of abstract rules or hypotheses. Implicit learning is assumed to involve unconscious rule learning. We examine the evidence (...) for implicit learning derived from subliminal learning, conditioning, artificial grammar learning, instrumental learning, and reaction times in sequence learning. We conclude that unconscious learning has not been satisfactorily established in any of these areas. The assumption that learning in some of these tasks is predominantly based on rule abstraction is questionable. When subjects cannot report the “implicitly learned” rules that govern stimulus selection, this is often because their knowledge consists of instances or fragments of the training stimuli rather than rules. In contrast to the distinction between conscious and unconscious learning, the distinction between instance and rule learning is a sound and meaningful way of taxonomizing human learning. We discuss various computational models of these two forms of learning. (shrink)

This paper examines the transformation of environmental regulatory system in Poland during the 1990s. It is a case of institutional transplantation from the past into the present: the place remained constant but the economic and political context rapidly changed over time. Drawing on five case studies of privatized firms, a mailed questionnaire, and policy and institutional analysis, it investigates how Poland developed an effective system for managing industrial pollution while also achieving considerable socioeconomic progress. One key lesson is that (...) considerable and effective evolution of policies can take place during radical shifts in the political-economic context, as long as certain conditions are fulfilled. These include a good “fit” between the approaches taken and the existing modes of conducting societal transactions; wide sharing of certain values among the key societal actors; and continuity in policies and institutions. It also appears that a broad support for the rule of law and due process are crucial. The case of Poland also suggests that, while the developing countries do not necessarily need to reenact the evolution that has taken place among the developed countries during the past three decades, neither can they expect to leapfrog from a highly polluting “dirty” economy to a sustainable economy. The study also suggests that success in the first phase of regulatory system’s transformation—centered around reducing pollution from the energy and manufacturing sectors—is not a predictor of its success in next phase, centered around sustainability issues. The types of institutions, political circumstances, and national capabilities are different for each phase. (shrink)

Undeniably, the greatest way for a Moslem to be closer to Allah, is recitation of Holy-Quran approves with the method conveyed from Messenger of Allah Mohammed from the feature of speech points of letters and the intrinsic and fleeting characteristics of the letters, So, there is a persistent need to teach all Moslems the science of Tajweed Al-Quran. ITS (Intelligent Tutoring System) is computer software that supplies direct and tailored training or response to students without human teacher interfering. The main (...) target of ITS is smoothing the learning process using the wide-ranging facilities of computer. The proposed system will be implemented using the ITSB Authoring tool. In this thesis, the researcher presents an intelligent tutoring system for teaching Reciting Al-Quran "Tajweed" with Rewaya: Hafs from ‘Aasem by the way of Shatebiyyah. It was a novel idea that the researcher combined the science of Tajweed Al-Quran and the science of artificial intelligence in his thesis. The researcher arranged the material into chapters, lessons, examples then, added all these to the proposed system. He also added questions, right answers and the level of difficulty for each lesson. He prepared an exam for each chapter and a final exam to test the knowledge of the learner in the whole material. The system was evaluated by teachers and students in reciting science and the outcome of the assessment was encouraging and promising. (shrink)

Quality improvement is an important function of learning health systems, and public policy should promote QI activities. Use of systematic methodologies in QI has prompted substantial confusion regarding when QI is human subjects research under the Common Rule, and this confusion persists with the revised Rule. Difficulty distinguishing research from QI imposes costs on the quality improvement process. I offer guidance to IRBs to mitigate these costs and suggest a new regulatory exclusion for minimal risk quality improvement activities.

The Communicational Theory of Law (CTL) usually differentiates between Legal Sociology and Legal Theory, in the sense that Legal Sociology is concerned with the social validity of the rules and Legal Theory with the formal or legal validity of the rules. It can be argued that both disciplines are two different perspectives of the same empirical reality (legal rules). Also, legal System and social milieu are two closely linked realities; they cannot be separated because they need each other. The Law (...) is the form or order that the social milieu takes, and, at the same time, the social environment provides the ideas, collective representations and other matters that need a legal regulation. For this reason, the epistemological separation between Sociology and Legal Theory must be overcome when the theoretical perspective comes to legal decisions. Thus, the decisional moment becomes the meeting point between the legal System and the social milieu. This is where the concept of the legal System fulfils its main function, as it allows for the dynamism and adaptability of the legal order. The hermeneutic re-elaboration of the normative texts will be the channel through which the social facts and other material elements can inform the meaning or possible interpretations of the rules and institutions of the legal order. This happens primarily by influencing theoretical and doctrinal works of an expository and didactic nature; and secondarily by influencing the decisions of legal operators and courts. This study seeks to explain how the social context influences legal decisions and the formation of the legal System, from a communicational perspective of Law. In order to do so, it will be necessary to set out two epistemological premises of CTL: the semiotic tripartition of the Theory of Law and the legal Order-legal System distinction. (shrink)

The acquisition of expertise in formal problem solving has been assumed to involve either a shift from backwards to forwards inference, or a shift from unguided to guided forwards inference. In a longitudinal study, the acquisition of formal problem-solving expertise was investigated. Participants were tested as novices before undertaking controlled practice in the problem domain which involved transformation rule problems , and were finally tested as experts. The direction of inference in problem solutions was found to be inadequate to (...) describe the strategic differences between novices and experts. Therefore, a new solution coding system was applied, based on atomic components of problem solution. Analysis of novice and expert solutions revealed no systematic strategy in the novice stage solutions were confused and contained unproductive steps and backtracking. Several strategies were found in the expert solutions, but they did not agree with previously reported results. It was therefore proposed that the acquisition of expertise does not involve a change from one specific solution strategy to another, but rather the development of an efficient strategy, which can differ between participants. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.1 (2004) 72-91 [Access article in PDF] Passing Theories through Topical Heuristics: Donald Davidson, Aristotle, and the Conditions of Discursive Competence Stephen R. Yarbrough Department of English The University of North Carolina at Greensboro What are the conditions of discursive competence? In "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs" Donald Davidson explains how it is possible that in practice we can, with little effort, understand and appropriately respond (...) to linguistic anomalies such as the malapropism—anomalies because, by definition, the "language" cannot account for how we understand them. Such anomalies, Davidson concludes, are the exceptions that do not prove but refute the traditional rule that antecedent linguistic systems govern discursive meaning. If that is so, then meanings are not a property of a linguistic system and are not "governed by learned conventions or regularities" (1986, 436); therefore, learning and sharing such conventions, what we traditionally call "language," is not a necessary condition of successful communication. He shows this by arguing that two conditions must be met for successful interlocution and that meeting these sufficiently allows successful interlocution to take place. A third condition—that the interlocutors share a language, an organized set of learned conventions or regularities "learned in advance of occasions of interpretation" (436) for which phenomena such as malapropisms would be anomalous—is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of discursive competence.What I hope to show in this paper is that the two conditions Davidson argues interlocution must meet in order to succeed both involve the interlocutor's implicit knowledge of what since Aristotle the rhetorical tradition has called topical heuristics. Although Davidson himself seems unaware of it, his philosophy places invention in a new light, one that allows us to understand that the invention process is not merely a supplement to discourse, useful only for professional speakers and writers, but intrinsic to all intercourse, and that the topics are not merely formal but pragmatic relations that develop from the processes of our interactions with others and with objects of our common concern in a world we can come to share. [End Page 72] Inferential method Davidson argues that the first condition necessary for successful interlocution is that "the interpreter can learn the semantic role of each of a finite number of words or phrases and can learn the semantic consequences of a finite number of modes of expression" (1986, 437). "For this to be possible," says Davidson, "there must be systematic relations between the meanings of utterances" (436). Here he is not talking about grammatical systems but about systematic relations between and among the interlocutors' discursive actions and the world with its objects to which their actions refer. As I'll explain more fully shortly, these are topical relations. What makes these relations possible, Davidson argues, is that the interlocutors share, not a set of learned conventions, but a "recursive characterization of the truth conditions of all possible utterances of the speaker" (437).Such a theory of truth can be something like a Tarski truth definition, the explanation of which can be extremely convoluted (see Davidson 1984), but it boils down to saying that an utterance is true if the anticipations raised by a belief in an interpreted utterance are met by the consequences of believing the utterance; or, to put it another way, if the utterance is an answer to the question that solicited it or a solution to the problem to which it responds. Thus, an example of such a truth definition would be "The grass is green (an utterance made by someone, somewhere, somewhen, under certain conditions) is true if and only if the grass is green (to that person, at that place, at that time, under those conditions)." The force of a Tarski truth definition is that to understand what an utterance means is to understand the conditions that make it true (to the speaker). This, in turn, implies that in order for the interpreter to learn the semantic roles of the speaker's words and phrases and the semantic consequences of her modes of expression, the... (shrink)

Linguistic category learning has been shown to be highly sensitive to linear order, and depending on the task, differentially sensitive to the information provided by preceding category markers (premarkers, e.g., gendered articles) or succeeding category markers (postmarkers, e.g., gendered suffixes). Given that numerous systems for marking grammatical categories exist in natural languages, it follows that a better understanding of these findings can shed light on the factors underlying this diversity. In two discriminative learning simulations and an (...) artificial language learning experiment, we identify two factors that modulate linear order effects in linguistic category learning: category structure and the level of abstraction in a category hierarchy. Regarding category structure, we find that postmarking brings an advantage for learning category diagnostic stimulus dimensions, an effect not present when categories are non‐confusable. Regarding levels of abstraction, we find that premarking of super‐ordinate categories (e.g., noun class) facilitates learning of subordinate categories (e.g., nouns). We present detailed simulations using a plausible candidate mechanism for the observed effects, along with a comprehensive analysis of linear order effects within an expectation‐based account of learning. Our findings indicate that linguistic category learning is differentially guided by pre‐ and postmarking, and that the influence of each is modulated by the specific characteristics of a given category system. (shrink)

Linguistic category learning has been shown to be highly sensitive to linear order, and depending on the task, differentially sensitive to the information provided by preceding category markers (premarkers, e.g., gendered articles) or succeeding category markers (postmarkers, e.g., gendered suffixes). Given that numerous systems for marking grammatical categories exist in natural languages, it follows that a better understanding of these findings can shed light on the factors underlying this diversity. In two discriminative learning simulations and an (...) artificial language learning experiment, we identify two factors that modulate linear order effects in linguistic category learning: category structure and the level of abstraction in a category hierarchy. Regarding category structure, we find that postmarking brings an advantage for learning category diagnostic stimulus dimensions, an effect not present when categories are non‐confusable. Regarding levels of abstraction, we find that premarking of super‐ordinate categories (e.g., noun class) facilitates learning of subordinate categories (e.g., nouns). We present detailed simulations using a plausible candidate mechanism for the observed effects, along with a comprehensive analysis of linear order effects within an expectation‐based account of learning. Our findings indicate that linguistic category learning is differentially guided by pre‐ and postmarking, and that the influence of each is modulated by the specific characteristics of a given category system. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the idea of external language and examine the role it plays in our understanding of human linguistic practice. Following Michael Devitt, I assume that the subject matter of a linguistic theory is not a psychologically real computational module, but a semiotic system of physical entities equipped with linguistic properties. 2 What are the physical items that count as linguistic tokens and in virtue of what do they possess phonetic, syntactic and semantic (...) properties? According to Devitt, the entities in question are particular bursts of sound or bits of ink that count as standard linguistic entities3 — that is, strings of phonemes, sequences of words and sentences — in virtue of the conventional rules that constitute the structure of the linguistic reality. In my view, however, the bearers of linguistic properties should rather be understood as complex physical states of affairs — that I call, following Ruth G. Millikan, complete linguistic signs4 — within which one can single out their narrow and wide components, that is, (0 sounds or inscriptions produced by the speaker and (if) salient aspects of the context of their production. Moreover, I do not share Devitt's view on the nature of linguistic properties. Even though I maintain the general idea of convention-based semantics — according to which semantic properties of linguistic tokens are essentially conventional — I reject the Lewisian robust account of conventionality. Following Millikan, I assume that language conventions involve neither regular conformity nor mutual understanding. (shrink)

Roy Bhaskar's Social Cube model based on critical realist philosophy has not been dealt with in theory of decision-making at any length, nor has it raised any notable debate in social theory in general. The model demonstrates that decision-making is regulated and transformed by a constantly evolving complexity of mechanisms emerging from physical, mental, material, human and social levels of reality. With the help of this device, Graham Allison's argument against the Rational Actor Model that decisions are not so much (...) acts of unitary decision-makers but more outputs of large organisations can be elaborated and converted into a statement that decisions are products of a complexity of knowledge-producing mechanisms. The openness of social systems revealed by the Social Cube therefore requires methodological pluralism, for example the application of psychological theories in order to explain political phenomena. By applying the Social Cube model and by drawing new empirical evidence from the Linda Melvern Rwanda Genocide Archive, this article demonstrates that the Somalia effect on the UN's failure in Rwanda was more complicated than the existing literature claims; it was “multi-layered”, generated not only by intentional political calculations, as previous studies argue, but also by a multiplicity of other mechanisms operative at various levels, particularly cognitive dissonance in organisational learning at the unintentional or subconscious level. (shrink)

A representation is a remnant of previous experience that allows that experience to affect later behavior. This paper develops a metatheoretical view of representation and applies it to issues concerning representation in animals. To describe a representational system one must specify the following: thedomainor range of situations in the represented world to which the system applies; thecontentor set of features encoded and preserved by the system; thecodeor transformational rules relating features of the representation to the corresponding features of the represented (...) world; themedium, or the representation's physical instantiation; and thedynamics, or how the system changes with time. In part because of the behaviorist assumption that the hypothetical, covert changes occurring in an organism during learning correspond to the overt physical changes that are observed, issues of representation in animal behavior have been largely ignored as irrelevant or misleading. However, it can be inferred that representations, acting as models of environmental regularities, operate at many levels of behavioral functioning, both cognitive and noncognitive. Objections to the use of this concept in explanations of animal behavior, based on the claim that it is indeterminate and on behaviorist considerations of parsimony, can be answered. Animal representations may be specialized in terms of tasks and species. Data from tasks involving spatial memory, delayed matching-to-sample, and sequence learning suggest some foundations for a general theory of animal representations. (shrink)

Phonological rules create alternations in the phonetic realizations of related words. These rules must be learned by infants in order to identify the phonological inventory, the morphological structure, and the lexicon of a language. Recent work proposes a computational model for the learning of one kind of phonological alternation, allophony . This paper extends the model to account for learning of a broader set of phonological alternations and the formalization of these alternations as general rules. In Experiment 1, (...) we apply the original model to new data in Dutch and demonstrate its limitations in learning nonallophonic rules. In Experiment 2, we extend the model to allow it to learn general rules for alternations that apply to a class of segments. In Experiment 3, the model is further extended to allow for generalization by context; we argue that this generalization must be constrained by linguistic principles. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future (...) class='Hi'>systems will need to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Crisis requires society to renew itself, albeit in a disruptive way. The current Covid-19 pandemic is transforming ways of working, living, and relating to each other on a global level, suddenly and dramatically. This paper focuses on the field of education to show how higher education institutions are undergoing radical transformations driven by the need to digitalize education and training processes in record time with academics who lack innate technological capabilities for online teaching. The university system must strive to overcome (...) this situation to be competitive and provide high-quality education in a scenario of digital transformation, disruptive technological innovations, and accelerated change. To achieve these goals, this paper explains some barriers and challenges that universities encounter, as well as technological resources and methodologies they have used in the current scenario to transform higher education to face Covid-19 disruption. The discussion and conclusion synthesize significant insights that can be applied to the digitalization of education in the foreseeable future. (shrink)

Human participants and recurrent (“connectionist”) neural networks were both trained on a categorization system abstractly similar to natural language systems involving irregular (“strong”) classes and a default class. Both the humans and the networks exhibited staged learning and a generalization pattern reminiscent of the Elsewhere Condition (Kiparsky, 1973). Previous connectionist accounts of related phenomena have often been vague about the nature of the networks’ encoding systems. We analyzed our network using dynamical systems theory, revealing topological and (...) geometric properties that can be directly compared with the mechanisms of non-connectionist, rule-based accounts. The results reveal that the networks “contain” structures related to mechanisms posited by rule-based models, partly vindicating the insights of these models. On the other hand, they support the one mechanism (OM), as opposed to the more than one mechanism (MOM), view of symbolic abstraction by showing how the appearance of MOM behavior can arise emergently from one underlying set of principles. The key new contribution of this study is to show that dynamical systems theory can allow us to explicitly characterize the relationship between the two perspectives in implemented models. (shrink)