•  20
    Letters to the Editor
    with Michael Kerlin and Eleanor Wittrup
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 75 (2). 2001.
  •  927
    18 Ethical Issues in Chronic Pain Research
    with Robert J. Gatchel and Perry N. Fuchs
    In 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
  •  206
    Machine morality: bottom-up and top-down approaches for modelling human moral faculties (review)
    with Wendell Wallach and Iva Smit
    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
  •  233
    A Conceptual and Computational Model of Moral Decision Making in Human and Artificial Agents
    with Wendell Wallach and Stan Franklin
    Topics 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
  •  290
    The 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
  •  173
    Ethics and the science of animal minds
    Theoretical 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
  •  613
    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.
  •  425
    Multi-level computational methods for interdisciplinary research in the HathiTrust Digital Library
    with Jaimie Murdock, Katy Börner, Robert Light, Simon McAlister, Andrew Ravenscroft, Robert Rose, Doori Rose, Jun Otsuka, David Bourget, John Lawrence, and Chris Reed
    PLoS ONE 12 (9). 2017.
    We 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
  •  62
    A Perceptual Account of Symbolic Reasoning
    Frontiers 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
  •  717
    Deciphering animal pain
    In Murat Aydede (ed.), Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, Bradford Book/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
  •  109
    The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition (edited book)
    with Marc Bekoff and Gordon M. Burghardt
    MIT Press. 2002.
    The fifty-seven original essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition.
  •  87
    Answer Set Programming on Expert Feedback to Populate and Extend
    In 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-.
  •  176
    The Geometry of Partial Understanding
    American 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
  •  853
    14. Real Traits, Real Functions?
    In Andre 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
  •  84
    Animal concepts
    Behavioral 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?
  •  37
    Monkeys mind
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1): 147-147. 1992.
  •  454
    Is anyone a cognitive ethologist?
    Biology and Philosophy 19 (4): 589-607. 2004.
  •  85
    In the last decade it has become en vogue for cognitive comparative psychologists to study animal behavior in an ‘integrated’ fashion to account for both the ‘innate’ and the ‘acquired’. We will argue that these studies, instead of really integrating the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, rather cement this old dichotomy. They combine empty nativist interpretation of behavior systems with blatantly environmentalist explanations of learning. We identify the main culprit as the failure to take de…Read more
  •  147
    The demise of behaviorism has made ethologists more willing to ascribe mental states to animals. However, a methodology that can avoid the charge of excessive anthropomorphism is needed. We describe a series of experiments that could help determine whether the behavior of nonhuman animals towards dead conspecifics is concept mediated. These experiments form the basis of a general point. The behavior of some animals is clearly guided by complex mental processes. The techniques developed by compar…Read more
  •  47
    Working the crowd: Design principles and early lessons from the social-semantic web
    Proceedings of Workshop on Web 3.0: Merging Semantic Web and Social Web 2009 (SW)^2 Turin, Italy, June 29, 2009, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073. 2009.
    The Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project is presented as one of the first social-semantic web endeavors which aims to bootstrap feedback from users unskilled in ontology design into a precise representation of a specific domain. Our approach combines statistical text processing methods with expert feedback and logic programming approaches to create a dynamic semantic representation of the discipline of philosophy. We describe the basic principles and initial experimental results of our sy…Read more
  •  346
    Artificial morality: Top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid approaches (review)
    with Iva Smit and Wendell Wallach
    Ethics and Information Technology 7 (3): 149-155. 2005.
    A principal goal of the discipline of artificial morality is to design artificial agents to act as if they are moral agents. Intermediate goals of artificial morality are directed at building into AI systems sensitivity to the values, ethics, and legality of activities. The development of an effective foundation for the field of artificial morality involves exploring the technological and philosophical issues involved in making computers into explicit moral reasoners. The goal of this paper is t…Read more
  •  12
    Nature’s Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology (edited book)
    with Marc Bekoff and George V. Lauder
    The MIT Press. 1997.
    This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.
  •  418
    Animal Behavior
    In Michael Ruse (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology, Oxford University Press. pp. 327--348. 2008.
    Few areas of scientific investigation have spawned more alternative approaches than animal behavior: comparative psychology, ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behavioral endocrinology, behavioral neuroscience, neuroethology, behavioral genetics, cognitive ethology, developmental psychobiology---the list goes on. Add in the behavioral sciences focused on the human animal, and you can continue the list with ethnography, biological anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology (c…Read more
  •  10
    Logic Primer
    MIT Press. 1992.
    Presents a self-contained introduction to logic suitable for majors and nonmajors, and can be covered entirely in a one-semester course. Natural deduction systems of sentential logic and of first-order logic, truth tables, and the basic ideas of model theory are presented without superfluous discussion.
  •  86
    Framing robot arms control
    Ethics and Information Technology 15 (2): 125-135. 2013.
    The development of autonomous, robotic weaponry is progressing rapidly. Many observers agree that banning the initiation of lethal activity by autonomous weapons is a worthy goal. Some disagree with this goal, on the grounds that robots may equal and exceed the ethical conduct of human soldiers on the battlefield. Those who seek arms-control agreements limiting the use of military robots face practical difficulties. One such difficulty concerns defining the notion of an autonomous action by a ro…Read more
  •  60
    Evolving Phenomenal Consciousness
    Anthropology and Philosophy 6 (1-2). 2005.
  •  176
    The application of digital humanities techniques to philosophy is changing the way scholars approach the discipline. This paper seeks to open a discussion about the difficulties, methods, opportunities, and dangers of creating and utilizing a formal representation of the discipline of philosophy. We review our current project, the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project, which uses a combination of automated methods and expert feedback to create a dynamic computational ontology for the disci…Read more