koglist September 2004

koglist@maillist.ttk.hu

10 participants
31 discussions

by Istvan Aranyosi

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/

21 years, 7 months

Tomasello et al./Understanding and sharing intentions: BBS Call for Commentators

by Behavioral & Brain Sciences

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 -------------------------------------------------------------------

21 years, 7 months

Sunstein/Moral Heuristics: BBS Call for Commentators

by Behavioral & Brain Sciences

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 -------------------------------------------------------------------

21 years, 7 months

Fwd: Senior Job Opportunity in London

by Gergely Csibra

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

21 years, 8 months

Sunstein/Moral Heuristics: BBS Call for Commentators

by Behavioral & Brain Sciences

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 -------------------------------------------------------------------

21 years, 8 months

Victory for the NIH open access plan in the House (fwd)

by Stevan Harnad

*** apologies for cross-posting ** ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 15:45:26 +0100 From: Peter Suber <peters AT earlham.edu> To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM AT LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG Subject: Victory for the NIH open access plan in the House If the Open Access News blog is so full of news these days that you can't read every item, then let me draw special attention to this one from yesterday: Victory for the NIH plan in the House By an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 388-13 the House of Representatives tonight adopted the appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and related agencies (H.R. 5006). The bill includes the directive to the NIH to develop an open-access plan by December 1, 2004. On to the Senate! H.R. 5006 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:h.r.05006 <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:h.r.05006> : (the final colon is part of the URL) Section containing the directive to NIH http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/? <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&db_id=cp108&r_n=hr636.108&sel=T OC_338641> &db_id=cp108&r_n=hr636.108&sel=TOC_338641& (the final ampersand is part of the URL) Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html> Peter Suber

21 years, 8 months

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, September

by Laszlo E. Szabo

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

21 years, 8 months

Steels & Belpaeme/Coordinating Perceptually Grounded Categories through Language: BBS Call for Commentators

by Behavioral & Brain Sciences

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 -------------------------------------------------------------------

21 years, 8 months

Steels & Belpaeme/Coordinating Perceptually Grounded Categories through Language: BBS Call for Commentators

by Behavioral & Brain Sciences

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. 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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. 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21 years, 8 months

Re: A Note of Caution About "Reforming the System"

by Stevan Harnad

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

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koglist September 2004