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43Why Eshkol-Wachman behavioral notation is not enoughBehavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (2): 266-267. 1992.
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69Methodological questions beggedBehavior and Philosophy 39. 2011.I argue in opposition to Sam Rakover that the current lack of fully adequate theories of the subjective and qualitative aspects of mind does not justify the adoption of what he calls “methodological dualism” (Rakover, this issue). Scientific understanding of consciousness requires the continuation of attempts to explain it in terms of the neural mechanisms that support it. It would be premature to adopt a methodological stance that could foreclose on the possibility of more reductionistic approa…Read more
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70Ethics, Law, and the Science of Fish WelfareBetween the Species 16 (1): 7. 2013.Fish farming is one of the fastest growing sectors of agriculture, attracting considerable attention to the question of whether existing farming regulations and animal welfare laws are adequate to deal with the expanding role of fish in feeding humans. The role of fish as model organisms in scientific research is also expanding -- a majority of research biology departments now keep zebrafish for the purposes of genome biology, and they are used widely used for basic neuroscience research. Howeve…Read more
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20Letters to the EditorProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 75 (2). 2001.
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52918 Ethical Issues in Chronic Pain ResearchIn B. L. Gant & M. E. Schatman (eds.), Ethical Issues in Chronic Pain Management, . pp. 295. 2006.As the above quote clearly highlights, it is the responsibility of researchers and research supervisors to be certain that their research staff and students assistants are very familiar with all of the ethical principles and current standards relevant to the research they are conducting. Indeed, they must take an active role in being certain that their research staff and students complete appropriate training in these ethical principles and standards, and how they apply them to the research cont…Read more
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230Machine morality: bottom-up and top-down approaches for modelling human moral faculties (review)AI and Society 22 (4): 565-582. 2008.The implementation of moral decision making abilities in artificial intelligence (AI) is a natural and necessary extension to the social mechanisms of autonomous software agents and robots. Engineers exploring design strategies for systems sensitive to moral considerations in their choices and actions will need to determine what role ethical theory should play in defining control architectures for such systems. The architectures for morally intelligent agents fall within two broad approaches: th…Read more
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263A Conceptual and Computational Model of Moral Decision Making in Human and Artificial AgentsTopics in Cognitive Science 2 (3): 454-485. 2010.Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in general, comprehensive models of human cognition. Such models aim to explain higher-order cognitive faculties, such as deliberation and planning. Given a computational representation, the validity of these models can be tested in computer simulations such as software agents or embodied robots. The push to implement computational models of this kind has created the field of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Moral decision making is arguabl…Read more
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293The close kinship between humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans is a central theme among participants in the debate about human treatment of the other apes. Empathy is probably the single most important determinant of actual human moral behavior, including the treatment of nonhuman animals. Given the applied nature of questions about the treatment of captive apes, it is entirely appropriate that the close relationship between us should be highlighted. But the role that relatedness should…Read more
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177Ethics and the science of animal mindsTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27 (4): 375-394. 2006.Ethicists have commonly appealed to science to bolster their arguments for elevating the moral status of nonhuman animals. I describe a framework within which I take many ethicists to be making such appeals. I focus on an apparent gap in this framework between those properties of animals that are part of the scientific consensus, and those to which ethicists typically appeal in their arguments. I will describe two different ways of diminishing the appearance of the gap, and argue that both of th…Read more
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1Review of Peter Carruthers' Language, thought, and consciousness (review)Philosophical Psychology 11 91-94. 1998.
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753Mining Arguments From 19th Century Philosophical Texts Using Topic Based ModellingIn Nancy Green, Kevin Ashley, Diane Litman, Chris Reed & Vern Walker (eds.), Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining, . pp. 79-87. 2014.In this paper we look at the manual analysis of arguments and how this compares to the current state of automatic argument analysis. These considerations are used to develop a new approach combining a machine learning algorithm to extract propositions from text, with a topic model to determine argument structure. The results of this method are compared to a manual analysis.
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523We show how faceted search using a combination of traditional classification systems and mixed-membership topic models can go beyond keyword search to inform resource discovery, hypothesis formulation, and argument extraction for interdisciplinary research. Our test domain is the history and philosophy of scientific work on animal mind and cognition. The methods can be generalized to other research areas and ultimately support a system for semi-automatic identification of argument structures. We…Read more
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134A Perceptual Account of Symbolic ReasoningFrontiers in Psychology 5. 2014.People can be taught to manipulate symbols according to formal mathematical and logical rules. Cognitive scientists have traditionally viewed this capacity—the capacity for symbolic reasoning—as grounded in the ability to internally represent numbers, logical relationships, and mathematical rules in an abstract, amodal fashion. We present an alternative view, portraying symbolic reasoning as a special kind of embodied reasoning in which arithmetic and logical formulae, externally represented as …Read more
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204Mental content and evolutionary explanationBiology and Philosophy 7 (1): 1-12. 1992.Cognitive ethology is the comparative study of animal cognition from an evolutionary perspective. As a sub-discipline of biology it shares interest in questions concerning the immediate causes and development of behavior. As a part of ethology it is also concerned with questions about the function and evolution of behavior. I examine some recent work in cognitive ethology, and I argue that the notions of mental content and representation are important to enable researchers to answer questions an…Read more
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84Umwelt or Umwelten? How should shared representation be understood given such diversity?Semiotica 2014 (198): 137-158. 2014.It is a truism among ethologists that one must not forget that animals perceive and represent the world differently from humans. Sometimes this caution is phrased in terms of von Uexküll’s Umwelt concept. Yet it seems possible (perhaps even unavoidable) to adopt a common ontological framework when comparing different species of mind. For some purposes it seems sufficient to anchor comparative cognition in common-sense categories; bats echolocate insects (or a subset of them) after all. But for …Read more
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196Fish Cognition and ConsciousnessJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26 (1): 25-39. 2013.Questions about fish consciousness and cognition are receiving increasing attention. In this paper, I explain why one must be careful to avoid drawing conclusions too hastily about this hugely diverse set of species
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72Conditioned anti-anthropomorphismComparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews 2 147-150. 2007.How should scientists react to anthropomorphism (defined for the purposes of this paper as the attribution of mental states or properties to nonhuman animals)? Many thoughtful scientists have attempted to accommodate some measure of anthropomorphism in their approaches to animal behavior. But Wynne will have none of it. We reject his argument against anthropomorphism and argue that he does not pay sufficient attention to the historical facts or to the details of alternative approaches.
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178The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy: A developed dynamic reference workIn James Moor & Terrell Ward Bynum (eds.), Cyberphilosophy: the intersection of philosophy and computing, Blackwell. pp. 210-228. 2002.In this entry, the authors outline the goals of a "dynamic reference work", and explain how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been designed to achieve those goals.
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87Animal Minds, Cognitive Ethology, and EthicsThe Journal of Ethics 11 (3): 299-317. 2007.Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It is not appropriate to treat some widely reported results in animal cognition as if their interpretation…Read more
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123Synthese special issue: representing philosophySynthese 182 (2): 181-183. 2011.This special issue of Synthese discusses conceptual, ontological, technological, ethical, political, and professional dimensions of attempts to represent the entire discipline of philosophy. One of our goals with this issue was to collect in one place several of the leading projects in digital philosophy so that the profession can begin to discern and debate what might be the best practices for the representation of philosophy in the 21st century.
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554Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called “mirror neurons” in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionality, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behav…Read more
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130Consciousness and ethics: Artificially conscious moral agentsInternational Journal of Machine Consciousness 3 (01): 177-192. 2011.
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5John Macnamara and Gonzalo E. Reyes, eds., The Logical Foundations of Cognition Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 15 (3): 188-190. 1995.
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718Deciphering animal painIn Murat Aydede (ed.), Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study, Mit Press. 2005.In this paper we1 assess the potential for research on nonhuman animals to address questions about the phenomenology of painful experiences. Nociception, the basic capacity for sensing noxious stimuli, is widespread in the animal kingdom. Even rel- atively primitive animals such as leeches and sea slugs possess nociceptors, neurons that are functionally specialized for sensing noxious stimuli (Walters 1996). Vertebrate spinal cords play a sophisticated role in processing and modulating nocicepti…Read more
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113The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition (edited book)MIT Press. 2002.The fifty-seven original essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition.
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117Answer Set Programming on Expert Feedback to Populate and ExtendIn David Wilson & H. Chad Lane (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference, Aaai Press. pp. 500-505. 2008.dynamic ontologies must be inferred and populated in part from the reference corpora themselves, but ontological rela-.
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176The Geometry of Partial UnderstandingAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 50 (3): 249-262. 2013.Wittgenstein famously ended his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1922) by writing: "Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence." (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.) In that earliest work, Wittgenstein gives no clue about whether this aphorism applied to animal minds, or whether he would have included philosophical discussions about animal minds as among those displaying "the most fundamental confusions (of which the whole of philosophy is full)" …Read more
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93Animal conceptsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1): 66-66. 1998.Millikan's account of concepts is applicable to questions about concepts in nonhuman animals. I raise three questions in this context: (1) Does classical conditioning entail the possession of simple concepts? (2) Are movement property concepts more basic than substance concepts? (3) What is the empirical content of claiming that concept meanings do not necessarily change as dispositions change?
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90314. Real Traits, Real Functions?In André Ariew, Robert Cummins & Mark Perlman (eds.), Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, Oxford University Press. pp. 373. 2002.Discussions of the functions of biological traits generally take the notion of a trait for granted. Defining this notion is a non-trivial problem. Different approaches to function place different constraints on adequate accounts of the notion of a trait. Accounts of function based on engineering-style analyses allow trait boundaries to be a matter of human interest. Accounts of function based on natural selection have typically been taken to require trait boundaries that are objectively real. Af…Read more
UCLA
Department Of Philosophy
Alumnus
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Computing and Information |
PhilPapers Editorships
Animal Minds |
Animal Communication |
Animal Minds, Misc |