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18W. Suerbaum: Cato Censorius in der Forschung des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine kommentierte chronologische Bibliographie für 1900–1999 nebst systematischen Hinweisen und einer Darstellung des Schriftstellers M. Porcius Cato (234–149 v. Chr.). (Bibliographien zur Klassischen Philologie 2.) Pp. 312. Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2004. Cased, €44.80. ISBN: 3-487-12589-7 (review)The Classical Review 55 (2): 695-695. 2005.
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622Self-Legislating Machines: What Can Kant Teach Us About Original Intentionality?Kant Studien 113 (3): 555-576. 2022.In this paper, I attempt to address a fundamental challenge for machine intelligence: to understand whether and how a machine’s internal states and external outputs can exhibit original non-derivative intentionality. This question has three aspects. First, what does it take for a machine to exhibit original de dicto intentionality? Second, what does it take to exhibit original de re intentionality? Third, what is required for the machine to defer to the external objective world by respecting the…Read more
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340The Apperception EngineIn Hyeongjoo Kim & Dieter Schönecker (eds.), Kant and Artificial Intelligence, De Gruyter. pp. 39-104. 2022.This paper describes an attempt to repurpose Kant’s a priori psychology as the architectural blueprint for a machine learning system. First, it describes the conditions that must be satisfied for the agent to achieve unity of experience: the intuitions must be connected, via binary relations, so as to satisfy various unity conditions. Second, it shows how the categories are derived within this model: the categories are pure unary predicates that are derived from the pure binary relations. Th…Read more
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229Making Sense of Raw InputArtificial Intelligence 299 (C): 103521. 2021.How should a machine intelligence perform unsupervised structure discovery over streams of sensory input? One approach to this problem is to cast it as an apperception task [1]. Here, the task is to construct an explicit interpretable theory that both explains the sensory sequence and also satisfies a set of unity conditions, designed to ensure that the constituents of the theory are connected in a relational structure. However, the original formulation of the apperception task had one fundamen…Read more
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316Making Sense of Sensory InputArtificial Intelligence 293 (C): 103438. 2021.This paper attempts to answer a central question in unsupervised learning: what does it mean to “make sense” of a sensory sequence? In our formalization, making sense involves constructing a symbolic causal theory that both explains the sensory sequence and also satisfies a set of unity conditions. The unity conditions insist that the constituents of the causal theory – objects, properties, and laws – must be integrated into a coherent whole. On our account, making sense of sensory input is a ty…Read more
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1706Formalizing Kant’s RulesJournal of Philosophical Logic 48 1-68. 2019.This paper formalizes part of the cognitive architecture that Kant develops in the Critique of Pure Reason. The central Kantian notion that we formalize is the rule. As we interpret Kant, a rule is not a declarative conditional stating what would be true if such and such conditions hold. Rather, a Kantian rule is a general procedure, represented by a conditional imperative or permissive, indicating which acts must or may be performed, given certain acts that are already being performed. These ac…Read more
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2262Representing Personality Traits as ConditionalsAisb 4 (1): 35-42. 2011.This paper compares two approaches to representing personality traits in synthetic agents. It proposes a set of goals that any computational implementation of personality should satisfy. It describes the personality trait system used in The Sims 3. Then an alternative system is described, in which traits are represented as conditionals relating world state to emotional state. It is shown that the conditionals model does a better job of satisfying the desiderata.
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50A Kantian Cognitive ArchitectureIn Matteo Vincenzo D'Alfonso & Don Berkich (eds.), On the Cognitive, Ethical, and Scientific Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence, Springer Verlag. pp. 233-262. 2019.In this paper, I reinterpret Kant’s Transcendental Analytic as a description of a cognitive architecture. I describe a computer implementation of this architecture, and show how it has been applied to two unsupervised learning tasks. The resulting program is very data efficient, able to learn from a tiny handful of examples. I show how the program achieves data-efficiency: the constraints described in the Analytic of Principles are reinterpreted as strong prior knowledge, constraining the set of…Read more
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554The Logical Form of Status-Function DeclarationsEtica E Politica 11 (1): 203-259. 2009.We are able to participate in countless different sorts of social practice. This indefinite set of capacities must be explainable in terms of a finite stock of capacities. This paper compares and contrasts two different explanations. A standard decomposition of the capacity to participate in social practices goes something like this: the interpreter arrives on the scene with a stock of generic practice-types. He looks at the current scene to fill-in the current tokens of these types. He looks at…Read more
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1917Introducing Exclusion Logic as a Deontic LogicDEON 2010 10 (1): 179-195. 2010.This paper introduces Exclusion Logic - a simple modal logic without negation or disjunction. We show that this logic has an efficient decision procedure. We describe how Exclusion Logic can be used as a deontic logic. We compare this deontic logic with Standard Deontic Logic and with more syntactically restricted logics.
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496Cathoristic logic is a multi-modal logic where negation is replaced by a novel operator allowing the expression of incompatible sentences. We present the syntax and semantics of the logic including complete proof rules, and establish a number of results such as compactness, a semantic characterisa- tion of elementary equivalence, the existence of a quadratic-time decision pro- cedure, and Brandom’s incompatibility semantics property. We demonstrate the usefulness of the logic as a language for k…Read more
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1331Computer Models of Constitutive Social PracticesIn Vincent Müller (ed.), Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence, Springer. pp. 389-409. 2016.Research in multi-agent systems typically assumes a regulative model of social practice. This model starts with agents who are already capable of acting autonomously to further their individual ends. A social practice, according to this view, is a way of achieving coordination between multiple agents by restricting the set of actions available. For example, in a world containing cars but no driving regulations, agents are free to drive on either side of the road. To prevent collisions, we introd…Read more
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447The central claim of normative pragmatism is that intentional states can be explained in terms of participation in practices. My aim in this paper is not so much to defend this claim as to rearticulate it in a different medium: the medium of computation. I describe two computer programs in which this claim is re-expressed. The first is the latest version of THE SIMS, in which participation in practices enables the Sims to do and understand more. The second is a prototype simulation of philosophi…Read more
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Imperial College LondonGraduate student
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Social Science |