Dear Colleague,
below please find the details of September 2004 philosophy events at CEU.
Budapest Mind Society (BMS) events:
(The BMS has been founded and is currently managed by Hong Yu Wong
and Istvan Aranyosi)
--------------------------------------------
Inaugural lecture by
Professor Howard Robinson
CEU Department of Philosophy
September 17, 2004 (THIS FRIDAY)
CEU philosophy department's seminar room (Zrinyi ut. 14, room 412) at 2 pm
Abstract:
This talk might have either of two titles. It might be called 'The
knowledge argument and the conceivability of zombies' or, alternatively,
'Reduction, supervenience and the a priori sufficiency of the base'.
The common factor is the question of what kind of relation a physicalist
must think there to be between physical and mental states, and whether,
and in what way, he could accept the knowledge argument and still hold
on to his physicalism. I shall look at the issue of whether the base
should entail states that supervene on it (as Chalmers and Jackson 2001
claim) or whether the relation can be contingent. Those who defend the
latter view include Block and Stalnaker 1999, and Balog 1999, in their
respective Philosophical Review articles. I shall try also to bring out
what I take to be features common to the debates on different kinds of
physicalism.
Balog, K. 1999. Conceivability, possibility, and the mind-body
problem. Philosophical Review 108:497-528.
Block, N. & Stalnaker, R. 1999. Conceptual analysis, dualism, and the
explanatory gap. Philosophical Review 108:1-46.
Chalmers, D. J. & Frank Jackson. 2001. Conceptual Analysis and
Reductive Explanation. Philosophical Review 110:315-61.
-------------------------------------------------------
Second BMS meeting:
István Aranyosi
Philosophy, CEU
"Why Property Dualism drives me Out of My Mind"
September 22, 2004
CEU philosophy department's seminar room (Zrinyi ut. 14, room 412) at 5 pm
Abstract:
Property Dualism has become a more popular doctrine than substanve dualism. I will analyze the coherence of the property dualist view about disembodiment, according to which the conceivability of disembodiment can coexist with its impossibility. Since the argument for such a view draws largely on Saul Kripke's idea of a posteriori necessity, I will also appeal to it, but in order to show that such a view is incoherent. The puzzle that I find can be solved only by rejecting property dualism and adopting either substance dualism or a certain kind of materialism.
Chalmers, D. J. 2002. Does Conceivability Entail Possibility? In T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.) Conceivability and Possibility. Oxford University Press, pp.145-200.
Kripke, S. 1972. Naming and Necessity. In D. Davidson and G. Harman, (eds.) Semantics of Natural Language, Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 253--355.
--------------------------------------------------
CEU, "Work in Progress Seminar" lecture series:
István Aranyosi
Philosophy, CEU
"Concluding Dualism"
September 29, 2004
CEU philosophy department's seminar room (Zrinyi ut. 14, room 412) at 5 pm
Abstract:
The past twenty years or so of debate around the qualia based objection to materialism have been focused exclusively on either defenses of materialism or of anti-materialism. In this paper I want to inquire into what exactly the most important such anti-materialist arguments have as their conclusion. I will not question the soundness of these arguments, but will assume it. What I am interested in is what more can be said about their conclusions, besides their being negations of materialism. I will analyze the conclusions that follow from the premises of three qualia arguments, David Chalmers' zombie argument (1996), Frank Jackson's knowledge argument (1982), and Stephen White's property dualism argument (1986). I will formulate property dualism in what I think is its most intuitive form, and will try to show that while certainly anti-materialistic, the conclusions of the above mentioned arguments imply weaker kinds of property dualism than the intuitive one. After that, I will offer an argument for property dualism whose conclusion conforms to the intuitive understanding of property dualism. Finally, I will offer a classification of property dualisms according to their closeness to the intuitive and strongest version, a classification that has not been offered so far in the literature, as a result of the exclusive focus on the materialism/antimaterialism issue, which obscured and made philosophers fail to recognize more fine tuned distinctions within the property dualist doctrine.
Chalmers, D. J. 1996. The Conscious Mind. In search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford University Press.
Horgan, T. and J. Tienson, 2001. Deconstructing new wave materialism. In B. Loewer and C. Gillett (eds.), Physicalism and Its Discontents, Cambridge University Press, pp. 307-318.
Jackson, F. 1982. Epiphenomenal qualia, Philosophical Quarterly, 32: 127-136.
White, S. 1986 Curse of the Qualia, Synthese, 68, 333-368.
NOTE: paper available online at:
http://www.personal.ceu.hu/students/03/Istvan_Aranyosi/Concluding%20dualism…
------------------------------------------------------------------
Everyone welcome!
With best wishes,
Istvan
*********************
István A. Aranyosi
Department of Philosophy
Central European University
Zrinyi u. 14, 1051 Budapest, Hungary
Tel: +3(0)670-576-1081
Fax: (36-1) 327-3072
Homepage: http://www.personal.ceu.hu/students/03/Istvan_Aranyosi/
Dear Dr. Qwerty,
Below the proposal instructions please find the abstract, keywords, and
a link to the full text of the forthcoming BBS target article:
Understanding and sharing intentions:
The origins of cultural cognition
Michael Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call,
Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to:
calls(a)bbsonline.org
The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation
(indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on
every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to
comment, or to suggest someone to comment.
If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate
(there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your
work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators
are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS
Associates is available at this location to help you select a name:
http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html
If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your
Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to
ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime,
your name, address and email address will be entered into our database
as an unaffiliated investigator.)
=======================================================================
*** COMMENTARY PROPOSAL INSTRUCTIONS ***
=======================================================================
To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be
most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant
expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the
paper you would anticipate commenting upon.
Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal
invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the
final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and
frequency of prior commentaries in BBS.
=======================================================================
*** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION ***
=======================================================================
TITLE: Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural
cognition
AUTHORS: Michael Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne,
and Henrike Moll
ABSTRACT: We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition
and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in
collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared
intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only
especially powerful forms of intention-reading and cultural learning,
but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others
and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result
of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural
cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use
of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual
beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this
proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes (and some
children with autism) understand the basics of intentional action, but
they still do participate in activities involving joint intentions and
attention (shared intentionality). Human children's skills of shared
intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as
two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: (i) the general ape line of
understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents,
and (ii) a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and
activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's
ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable
them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human
cognition.
KEYWORDS: Collaboration, Cooperation, Cultural Learning, Culture,
Evolutionary Psychology, Intentions, Shared Intentionality, Social
Cognition, Social Learning, Theory of Mind, Joint Attention
FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Tomasello-01192004/Referees/
FIGURES: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Tomasello-01192004/Referees/Tomasello.fi…
=======================================================================
SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT
=======================================================================
(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review
In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.
(Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
impact!).
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for
Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not
wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot
status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your
username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the
subject line.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Barbara Finlay - Editor
Paul Bloom - Editor
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
bbs(a)bbsonline.org
http://www.bbsonline.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Below the proposal instructions please find the abstract, keywords, and
a link to the full text of the forthcoming BBS target article:
Moral Heuristics
Cass R. Sunstein
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to:
calls(a)bbsonline.org
The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation
(indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on
every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to
comment, or to suggest someone to comment.
If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate
(there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your
work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators
are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS
Associates is available at this location to help you select a name:
http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html
If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your
Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to
ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime,
your name, address and email address will be entered into our database
as an unaffiliated investigator.)
=======================================================================
*** COMMENTARY PROPOSAL INSTRUCTIONS ***
=======================================================================
To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be
most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant
expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the
paper you would anticipate commenting upon.
Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal
invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the
final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and
frequency of prior commentaries in BBS.
=======================================================================
*** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION ***
=======================================================================
TITLE: Moral Heuristics
AUTHORS: Cass R. Sunstein
ABSTRACT: With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics
mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that
also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too moral
short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd
moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to
morality, but to law and politics as well. Examples are given from a
number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction
and sexuality, and the act/omission distinction. In all of these
contexts, rapid, intuitive judgments make a great deal of sense but
sometimes produce moral mistakes that are replicated in law and policy.
One implication is that moral assessments ought not to be made by
appealing to intuitions about exotic cases and problems; those
intuitions are peculiarly unlikely to be reliable. Another implication
is that some deeply held moral judgments are unsound if they are
products of moral heuristics. The idea of error-prone heuristics is
especially controversial in the moral domain, where agreement on the
correct answer may be hard to elicit; but in many contexts, heuristics
are at work and they do real damage. Moral framing effects, including
those in the context of obligations to future generations, are also
discussed.
KEYWORDS: acts and omissions, biases, cognition, heuristics, morality,
punishment
FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Sunstein-01102004/Referees/
=======================================================================
SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT
=======================================================================
(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review
In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.
(Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
impact!).
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for
Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not
wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot
status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your
username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the
subject line.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Barbara Finlay - Editor
Paul Bloom - Editor
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
bbs(a)bbsonline.org
http://www.bbsonline.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Birkbeck College, London
Faculty of Science
Head of School: Reader/Professor in Psychology
The School of Psychology (RAE 5) is seeking an exceptional individual
to provide strategic leadership for an already successful School, with
particular strengths in developmental and cognitive neuroscience,
developmental and cognitive psychology, and psychosocial studies.
The person appointed will have an established international research
reputation, and have demonstrated effective managerial and leadership
abilities in an academic or related environment.
Tenure is permanent; the post of Head of School is a rotating one and
the successful candidate will be expected to fill it for the first four
years of their appointment.
The post is tenable from 31 March 2005.
Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience, and
level of appointment.
Closing date: 1 December 2004
For application forms and further details please see
http://www.bbk.ac.uk or send an A4 sae (quoting Ref: APS109), to the
Human Resources Team, Birkbeck, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London, WC1E
7HX or e-mail humanresources(a)bbk.ac.uk
Birkbeck is an Equal Opportunities Employer
Dear Dr. Qwerty,
Below the proposal instructions please find the abstract, keywords, and
a link to the full text of the forthcoming BBS target article:
Moral Heuristics
Cass R. Sunstein
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to:
calls(a)bbsonline.org
The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation
(indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on
every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to
comment, or to suggest someone to comment.
If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate
(there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your
work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators
are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS
Associates is available at this location to help you select a name:
http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html
If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your
Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to
ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime,
your name, address and email address will be entered into our database
as an unaffiliated investigator.)
=======================================================================
*** COMMENTARY PROPOSAL INSTRUCTIONS ***
=======================================================================
To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be
most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant
expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the
paper you would anticipate commenting upon.
Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal
invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the
final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and
frequency of prior commentaries in BBS.
=======================================================================
*** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION ***
=======================================================================
TITLE: Moral Heuristics
AUTHORS: Cass R. Sunstein
ABSTRACT: With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics
mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that
also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too moral
short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd
moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to
morality, but to law and politics as well. Examples are given from a
number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction
and sexuality, and the act/omission distinction. In all of these
contexts, rapid, intuitive judgments make a great deal of sense but
sometimes produce moral mistakes that are replicated in law and policy.
One implication is that moral assessments ought not to be made by
appealing to intuitions about exotic cases and problems; those
intuitions are peculiarly unlikely to be unreliable. Another implication
is that some deeply held moral judgments are unsound if they are
products of moral heuristics. The idea of error-prone heuristics is
especially controversial in the moral domain, where agreement on the
correct answer may be hard to elicit; but in many contexts, heuristics
are at work and they do real damage. Moral framing effects, including
those in the context of obligations to future generations, are also
discussed.
KEYWORDS: acts and omissions, biases, cognition, heuristics, morality,
punishment
FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Sunstein-01102004/Referees/
=======================================================================
SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT
=======================================================================
(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review
In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.
(Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
impact!).
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for
Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not
wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot
status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your
username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the
subject line.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Barbara Finlay - Editor
Paul Bloom - Editor
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
bbs(a)bbsonline.org
http://www.bbsonline.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------
P h i l o s o p h y o f S c i e n c e C o l l o q u i u m
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest
Room 6.54 (6th floor) Monday 4:00 PM
Pazmany P. setany 1/A Budapest, Hungary
Phone/Fax: (36-1) 372 2924
http://hps.elte.hu/seminar
Program: September
20 September 4:00 PM 6th floor 6.54
(Language: English)
R o b e r t B i s h o p
Philosophy, Probability, and Modeling Group
Center for Junior Research Fellows
University of Konstanz
Free will and physics
Abstract: http://hps.elte.hu/seminar/2004/September/#1
27 September 4:00 PM 6th floor 6.54
(Language: English, except if all participants speak Hungarian)
L a s z l o E. S z a b o
Theoretical Physics Research Group
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest
Does principle of relativity hold in relativistic physics?
Abstract: http://hps.elte.hu/seminar/2004/September/#2
___________________________________
The 60-minute lecture is followed by a 10-minute break. Then we hold a
30-60-minute discussion. The participants may comment on the talks and
are encouraged to initiate discussion through the Internet. The
comments should be written in the language of the presentation.
The organizer of the colloquium: Laszlo E. Szabo (email: leszabo(a)hps.elte.hu)
--
L a s z l o E. S z a b o
Theoretical Physics Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Eotvos University, Budapest
http://hps.elte.hu/leszabo
Below the instructions please find the abstract, keywords, and full text
link to the forthcoming BBS target article:
Coordinating Perceptually Grounded
Categories through Language.
A Case Study for Colour.
by
Luc Steels and Tony Belpaeme
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences
(BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary
on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive
sciences.
Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be
considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate
commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply
by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org
The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed,
it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion!
Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest
someone to comment.
If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are
currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you.
All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS
Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this
location to help you select a name:
http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html
If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae
and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be
prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address
will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.)
=======================================================================
** IMPORTANT **
=======================================================================
To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most helpful
if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to
bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would anticipate commenting
upon.
Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation,
indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is
constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior
commentaries in BBS.
To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this
article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract,
keywords below.
=======================================================================
*** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION ***
=======================================================================
TITLE: Coordinating Perceptually Grounded Categories through Language. A Case
Study for Colour.
AUTHORS: Luc Steels and Tony Belpaeme
ABSTRACT: The paper proposes a number of models to examine through what mechanisms
a population of autonomous agents could arrive at a repertoire of perceptually
grounded categories that is sufficiently shared to allow successful communication.
The models are inspired by the main approaches to human categorisation being
discussed in the literature: nativism, empiricism, and culturalism. Colour is
taken as a case study. Although the paper takes no stance on which position is to
be accepted as final truth with respect to human categorisation and naming, it
points to theoretical constraints that make each position more or less likely and
contains clear suggestions on what the best engineering solution would be.
Specifically, it argues that the collective choice of a shared repertoire must
integrate multiple constraints, including constraints coming from communication.
KEYWORDS: Autonomous agents, symbol grounding, colour categorisation, colour
naming, genetic evolution, connectionism, memes, cultural evolution,
self-organisation, origins of language, semiotic dynamics
FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Steels-09262002/Referees/
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
*** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT ***
(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review
In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.
(Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
impact!).
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for
Calls for Commentators, which is why you received this email. If you do
not wish to receive further BBS Calls please email a response with the
word "remove" in the subject line.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Barbara Finlay - Editor
Paul Bloom - Editor
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
bbs(a)bbsonline.org
http://www.bbsonline.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Dr. Qwerty,
Below the instructions please find the abstract, keywords, and full text link to
the forthcoming BBS target article:
Coordinating Perceptually Grounded
Categories through Language.
A Case Study for Colour.
by
Luc Steels and Tony Belpaeme
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences
(BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary
on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive
sciences.
Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be
considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate
commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply
by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org
The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed,
it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion!
Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest
someone to comment.
If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are
currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you.
All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS
Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this
location to help you select a name:
http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html
If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae
and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be
prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address
will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.)
=======================================================================
** IMPORTANT **
=======================================================================
To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most helpful
if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to
bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would anticipate commenting
upon.
Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation,
indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is
constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior
commentaries in BBS.
To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this
article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract,
keywords below.
=======================================================================
*** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION ***
=======================================================================
TITLE: Coordinating Perceptually Grounded Categories through Language. A Case
Study for Colour.
AUTHORS: Luc Steels and Tony Belpaeme
ABSTRACT: The paper proposes a number of models to examine through what mechanisms
a population of autonomous agents could arrive at a repertoire of perceptually
grounded categories that is sufficiently shared to allow successful communication.
The models are inspired by the main approaches to human categorisation being
discussed in the literature: nativism, empiricism, and culturalism. Colour is
taken as a case study. Although the paper takes no stance on which position is to
be accepted as final truth with respect to human categorisation and naming, it
points to theoretical constraints that make each position more or less likely and
contains clear suggestions on what the best engineering solution would be.
Specifically, it argues that the collective choice of a shared repertoire must
integrate multiple constraints, including constraints coming from communication.
KEYWORDS: Autonomous agents, symbol grounding, colour categorisation, colour
naming, genetic evolution, connectionism, memes, cultural evolution,
self-organisation, origins of language, semiotic dynamics
FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Steels-09262002/Referees/
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
*** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT ***
(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review
In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.
(Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
impact!).
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for
Calls for Commentators, which is why you received this email. If you do
not wish to receive further BBS Calls please email a response with the
word "remove" in the subject line.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Barbara Finlay - Editor
Paul Bloom - Editor
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
bbs(a)bbsonline.org
http://www.bbsonline.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Commentary on:
Richard Wellen, Taking on Commercial Scholarly Journals: Reflections
on the 'Open Access' Movement, Journal of Academic Ethics, 2, 1
(2004) pp. 101-118.
http://ipsapp007.kluweronline.com/IPS/content/ext/x/J/5960/I/6/A/8/abstract…
This is a good article, although the author has perhaps over-complicated
what is happening and why. It is understandable that he should do so,
however, as developments are not always described or seen (or portray
themselves) in the most straightforward way.
What is really happening is extremely simple: For hundreds of years the
way peer-reviewed research findings have been reported is that scholars
first submit them to journals for peer review. These journals have
known public track-records for their quality standards. Once an
article has been accepted and certified as having met the peer-review
standards of a given journal, it is published -- which used to mean just
being printed and distributed on paper. Those users -- scholars/scientists
and their institutions, for the most part -- who can afford access to
the journal in which they are published can then use them; those who
cannot, cannot.
The only thing that has changed is that there is now a new form of access:
online access. In principle, every scholar/scientist could access every
one of the 2.5 million articles published yearly in the 24,000 peer-reviewed
journals -- if he or his institution could afford the access-tolls.
But no individual or institution can afford all the access-tolls; most
can afford only a small fraction of them.
The resulting losers are not just the would-be users who cannot afford the
access, but the authors of the articles, who lose all those would-be users'
potential impact (in the form of reading, usage, and citation). The other
losers are the authors' employing institutitions and research-funders,
who also lose all that research impact, which means lost research
productivity and progress.
And the remedy is super-simple, even though it has been obscured by
speculative and ideological talk about "reforming the system," with
reforms ranging from hypothetical changes to (or even abandonment of)
peer review to experimental changes in the cost-recovery model of (or
even the abandonment of) journals. Yet these are not the remedies at all,
and are mostly just speculations or experiments with a tiny fraction of
the literature.
The remedy is for authors to simply supplement the toll-access version
of their article -- which they continue to publish in the peer-reviewed
journal, as before -- with a self-archived (online) version that is
made accessible toll-free for all would-be users webwide.
That's all! In discussing my approach, Richard Wrllen discusses the
speculative factors that have nothing to do with the concrete proposal
I am recommending -- which does not reform or replace either journals or
peer review, but merely supplements toll-acccess with open-access. This is
already being done for 10-20% of the yearly journal articles published. It
remains to be done for the remaining 80-90%. The retardant is not the
journals, over 90% of which have already given their green light to
author self-archiving.
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
The retardant is the research community itself, which has not yet realized
how much potential research impact it is losing by not self-archiving:
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
Harnad, S. & Brody, T. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access
(OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals, D-Lib Magazine 10
(6) June http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html
And the remedy is also already at hand: Self-archiving needs to be mandated by
their employing institutions and research-funders, in a natural online-age
extension of their exsiting publish-or-perish mandate:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
It is hard to see what this simple, fully within-reach remedy has to do with
what Richard Wellen writes in his abstract:
"certain proposals and models for reform are premised on
over-optimistic views about disintermediation in scholarly
communication as well as exaggerated assertions about the benefits
of removing price barriers when larger issues about the system of
'open science' remain to be addressed."
I don't know about other proposals, but my own is optimistic only about
one thing: that researchers (or their institutions and funders) will
realize that maximizing their impact by maximizing their access is within
their own hands in the online age, and 100% of them will accordingly
go ahead and do it, as 10-20% already have! No "disintermediation" is
needed, price barriers need not be removed (access merely needs to be
author-supplemented), and no larger "open science" issues are involved.
Richard writes write that:
"Hence [according to Harnad], although journals will still be
necessary, they may have to "scale-down" to become mere peer review
"services" (Harnad, 2003b). Yet Harnad cannot explain why journals
would still survive in any meaningful way at all, since, in his
system, they would only be able to sell "add on" services like
printing which he says no one will need."
My speculations about what journals may or may not have to do in response
to 100% self-archiving are merely speculations, like everyone else's. (I
rather regret having made them, as they are irrelevant and superfluous.)
What is relevant is the concrete proposal that researchers can and should
self-archive, immediately.
But there is a contradiction in the very way my view is described in
the above passage! For Richars writes I cannot explain why journals would
survive if they scaled down to just peer-review service-provision
(and certification), because they would have nothing to sell: But the
peer-review service-provision/certification itself is what they could
sell (at $200-$500 per article, to the author-institution)!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2
Richard goes on to add:
"Neither can Harnad explain why academics in some (perhaps most)
disciplines are still attached to journals as authoritative organizers
of the literature, and not simply as review services. To put it
simply, many academics still like to browse journals (on-line or in
the library stacks) rather than simply search for articles through
indexes and Google."
But (if we refrain from speculating), what is there in the concrete
proposal to supplement toll-access with open-access through author
self-archiving that prevents those who are still attached to journals
from continuing to pay the tolls to access them? or to browse them in
any way they desire?
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#21.Serendipity
Stevan Harnad
Pertinent Prior Topic Threads:
A Note of Caution About "Reforming the System"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1169.html
Peer Review Reform Hypothesis-Testing
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0479.html
Self-Selected Vetting vs. Peer Review: Supplement or Substitute?
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2340.html
"Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1583.html
"Savings from Converting to On-Line-Only: 30%- or 70%+ ?"
(Started Aug 27 1998)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0002.html
"Online Self-Archiving: Distinguishing the Optimal from the Optional"
(Started May 11 1999)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0248.html
The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)"
(Started July 5 1999)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0303.html
"Separating Quality-Control Service-Providing from Document-Providing"
(Started November 30 1999)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0466.html
"Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons"
(Started July 2001)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1437.html
"Journal expenses and publication costs"
(Started January 10 2003)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2589.html
"The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition"
(Started January 7 2004)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3378.html