Porfirio Silva

In this essay we try an answer to the question has intentionality to be reduced to anything? We propose that it is possible to reduce any variety of intentionality to a specification of mechanisms (internal organization of the items involved in a given intentional phenomenon) and a historical pattern of interaction (structure of mutual significant relations historically acquired by different items involved in the same intentional phenomenon). We first clarify the meaning of this proposal having recourse to the Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics. Then, we assess the relevance and feasibility of our proposal, considering, in a succession, the case of animals and humans, of machines, and of sophisticated human collectives. We conclude arguing the heuristic nature of the proposed reduction. DOI:10.5007/1808-1711.2010v14n2p255

In this essay we try an answer to the question has intentionality to be reduced to anything? We propose that it is possible to reduce any variety of intentionality to a specification of mechanisms (internal organization of the items involved in a given intentional phenomenon) and a historical pattern of interaction (structure of mutual significant relations historically acquired by different items involved in the same intentional phenomenon). We first clarify the meaning of this proposal having recourse to the Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics. Then, we assess the relevance and feasibility of our proposal, considering, in a succession, the case of animals and humans, of machines, and of sophisticated human collectives. We conclude arguing the heuristic nature of the proposed reduction.

Pioneer approaches to Artificial Intelligence have traditionally neglected, in a chronological sequence, the agent body, the world where the agent is situated, and the other agents. With the advent of Collective Robotics approaches, important progresses were made toward embodying and situating the agents, together with the introduction of collective intelligence. However, the currently used models of social environments are still rather poor, jeopardizing the attempts of developing truly intelligent robot teams. In this paper, we propose a roadmap for a new approach to the design of multi-robot systems, mainly inspired by concepts from Institutional Economics, an alternative to mainstream neoclassical economic theory. Our approach intends to sophisticate the design of robot collectives by adding, to the currently popular emergentist view, the concepts of physically and socially bounded autonomy of cognitive agents, uncoupled interaction among them and deliberately set up coordination devices.

There are plenty of intelligent machines in our world today: digital computers and autonomous robots. At the heart of each of these machines there are automatic formal systems (programs running on a digital computer). Now, if the interpretation of a formal system does not belong to the formal system itself, if the interpretation has to be added, it is worth asking: in the case of these intelligent machines that are massively interspersed in our social interactions, where does the interpretation come from? In this paper, we analyse what we call the invisibility of interpretation. Dealing with various types of formal systems (computers, robots, formalist approaches to Economics), the human source of the interpretation of these systems is sometimes concealed by a formalist restriction. To show how the formalist restriction produces the invisibility of interpretation allows us to underline our responsibility, as human agents, for all this interpretative work—and its importance for us as human beings.