The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it is (...) misleading, as it is founded in erroneous intensional misreadings of the logical positivists’—especially Carnap’s—extensional notions of translation and meaning, as well as misinterpretations of the positivists’ shift from the strong thesis of translation-physicalism to the weaker and more liberal notion of reduction-physicalism that occurred in the Unity of Science programme. After setting the historical record straight, the essay traces the first truly modern identity theory to Schlick’s pre-positivist views circa 1920 and goes on to explore its further development in Feigl, arguing that the fundamental difference between the Schlick-Feigl identity theory and the more familiar and influential Place-Smart-Armstrong identity theory has resurfaced in the deep and seemingly unbridgeable gulf in contemporary philosophy of consciousness between inflationary mentalism and deflationary physicalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe paper compares Mead’s and Quine’s behaviouristic theories of meaning and language, focusing in particular on Mead’s notion of sympathy and Quine’s notion of empathy. On the one hand, Quine seems to resort to an explanation similar to Mead’s notion of sympathy, referring to ‘empathy’ in order to justify the human ability to project ourselves into the witness’s position; on the other hand, Quine’s reference to the notion of empathy paves the way to a more insightful comparison between Mead’s (...) class='Hi'>behaviourism and an explanation of the emergence of the linguistic from pre-linguistic communication based on empathic identification processes. However, Mead is less ambiguous than Quine in his use of the notion of sympathy finds a fecund parallel in the current neuroscientific and neuro-phenomenological hypothesis on ‘empathy’. The article contends that the ambiguity in Quine’s account of empathy is due to the exigency of trying to elucidate the link between the rules of language in a cultural context and... (shrink)

In the last two decades Anglophone political theory witnessed a renewed interest in social-scientific empirical findings—partly as a reaction against normative theorizing centred on the formulation of abstract, intuition-driven moral principles. This brief paper begins by showing how this turn has taken two distinct forms: (i) a non-ideal theoretical orientation, which seeks to balance the emphasis on moral principles with feasibility and urgency considerations, and (ii) a fact-centric orientation, which seeks to ground normative conclusions in empirical results. The core (...) of the paper then compares and contrast three variants of fact-centric political theory: normative behaviourism, grounded normative theory, and radical realism. The upshot: normative behaviourism achieves focus on observable behaviour at the cost of status quo bias, grounded normative theory achieves radicalism at the cost of endorsing an activist orientation to theorising, and radical realism combines a non-activist orientation with the potential for far-reaching critique of the status quo. (shrink)

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are nothing but constructs re-describing people's behaviour. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, on a par with the unobservables in science, such as electrons and electromagnetic fields. While behaviourism has gone out of fashion in psychology, it remains influential in economics, especially in ‘revealed preference’ theory. We defend mentalism in economics, construed as a positive science, and show that it fits (...) best scientific practice. We distinguish mentalism from, and reject, the radical neuroeconomic view that behaviour should be explained in terms of brain processes, as distinct from mental states. (shrink)

According to Bem’s self-perception theory, people know their own minds in the same way that they know those of others: they infer their own minds by observing their own behavior and the circumstances in which this behavior takes place. Although Bem’s theory seems anti-introspectionistic, it claims that people infer their minds by observing their own behavior only when internal cues are weak, ambiguous, or un-interpretable. This has led some to argue that Bem does not rule out a priori (...) introspective access to the mind and thus introspection as a research method. This paper will discuss self-perception theory and its influence over recent research and will argue that introspection is not an autonomous research method. This is so because of its radical behavioristic outlook, according to which all methods and data of psychology must be public and not private. Then, the paper will discuss the epistemological implications of this behavioristic attitude on psychology. Finally, it will argue in favor of introspection as an autonomous research method and an independent source of data for psychology. (shrink)

Functionalism has become one of the predominant theories in the philosophy of mind, with its many merits supposedly including its capacity for precise formulation. The most common method to express this precise formulation is by means of the modified Ramsey sentence. In this article, I will apply work from the field of the philosophy of science to functionalism for the first time, examining how Newman’s objection undermines the Ramsey sentence as a means of formalising functionalism. I will also present a (...) formal variation on Newman’s objection through mathematical induction. Together, these proofs suggest that functionalism formalised by the Ramsey sentence trivially reduces to a kind of behaviourism plus a cardinality constraint on the number of relations holding between mental-relevant behaviours. As most functionalists see functionalism as a distinct theory of mind from behaviourism, this suggests that the modified Ramsey sentence cannot form a satisfactory formalism for functionalism. (shrink)

The article highlights George Herbert Mead’s and Wilfrid Sellars’ reliance on a behaviourally-grounded conception of meaning as strictly related to the possibility of distinguishing mental from non-mental phenomena as both related to the semantic dimension. Mead’s position is in fact akin to Wilfrid Sellars’ argument that the concepts of ‘inner events’ are essentially inter-subjective. Thoughts are displayed as consisting of related linguistic acts linked inferentially through intra-linguistic moves that respond to a particular ‘language practice’ governed by norms. Introspection is an (...) ‘inner conversation’, namely an ‘inner’ speaking analogous to linguistic activity that does not involve actual equivalents of the words in the mind. (shrink)

Professor C. A. Mace, the psychologist, once wrote: ‘It is difficult … to present and defend any sort of behaviourism whatever without committing oneself to nonsense.’ I shall illustrate this thesis. I shall comment on the writings of some psychologists. This is relevant to my topic; for psychologists' expositions of behaviourism contain much more philosophy than science, and the inconsistencies which permeate their versions of behaviourism reappear in the works of eminent philosophers. My quotation from Mace comes (...) from a paper defending what he calls ‘analytical behaviourism’; which he distinguishes from ‘methodological behaviourism’ and ‘metaphysical behaviourism’. According to Mace, analytical behaviourism does not question the truth of our everyday statements about a person's mind or states of consciousness; what it claims is that such statements ‘turn out to be, on analysis, statements about the behaviour of material things’, that is, about a person's ‘bodily acts, bodily states, bodily dispositions, bodily “states of readiness” to act in various ways’. The father of behaviourism, J. B. Watson, rarely says anything suggesting this doctrine. As he presents it, behaviourism is both a methodological principle and a metaphysical theory. (shrink)

The debate on bottom-up approaches in political theory has been recently enriched by Jonathan Floyd’s “normative behaviourism”, an approach that starts from and refers to actual behaviours so as to let normative concerns emerge and political responses be found. Despite its merits, I argue that normative behaviourism suffers from three weaknesses: the _tip of the iceberg_, the _invisibility_, and the _over-inclusive justification_ problems. These problems emerge because behaviours can be normatively significant only when the beliefs behind those (...) behaviours are known. To overcome these problems, I suggest a “revised” version of normative behaviourism, which makes use of focus groups to reach two objectives: first, to understand the beliefs driving behaviours; and, second, to filter out unacceptable beliefs that might lead to inappropriate political solutions when their corresponding behaviour is considered normatively relevant for institutional reform. While revised normative behaviourism is still at the stage of a drafted proposal, it has the potential to pave a way for data collection to contribute to the very _formulation_ of normative standards rather than just to the identification of practical constraints to the _application_ of normative standards. (shrink)

Focusing on ‘real actions’ of ‘real people’, normative behaviourism turns facts about observable patterns of behaviour into grounds for specific normative political principles. For this reason, this way of doing normative political theory has strong political realist credentials, given its methods, values and ambitions. In fact, according to its supporters, normative behaviourism is an improvement of political realism since it solves two problems that allegedly face many realists, namely, the ‘legitimacy problem’, i.e., how we should distinguish genuine (...) acceptance of a political system from false acceptance, and ‘the institutional problem’, i.e., how we should translate political principles into viable political institutions. In this paper, we make two claims. First, normative behaviourism does not solve the legitimacy problem encountered by realists, because its solution rests on a flawed distinction between foundational principles and ‘principles that matter’, together with a problematic use of a Humean internal reasons approach. Second, normative behaviourism does not solve the institutional problem encountered by realists, because its solution is in fact much more unfeasible than realist prescriptions, since feasibility is interpreted as mere possibility. We wind up our analysis by showing that normative behaviourism encounters new problems that realist approaches typically do not face. (shrink)

Abstract The accumulated case studies in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge have been taken to establish the Strong Programme's thesis that beliefs have social causes in contradistinction to psychological ones. This externalism is essentially a commitment to the stimulus control of behaviour which was the principal tenet of orthodox Skinnerian Behaviorism. Offered as ?straight forward scientific hypotheses? these claims of social determination are asserted to be ?beyond dispute?. However, the causes of beliefs and especially their contents has also been the (...) subject of intense study in the quite different domain of cognitive science where internal states, images, rules, representations and schemas are postulated as explanatory constructs. Such explanations which postulate mental states are described by Bloor as infected by the ?disease? of ?psychologism? and Bloor has defined his Strong Programme in terms of its diametrical opposition to mentalistic theories. For example, Bloor has explicitly endorsed the Behaviourist rejection of mental representations such as images. Accordingly, a direct comparison of these radically divergent approaches to a common subject matter is of considerable interest. The paper attempts to reveal the unnoticed enormity and recidivism of the sociological programme, and how its vulnerability is betrayed in Bloor's response to criticism on central issues. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses John Danaher’s ‘ethical behaviourism’, a theory on how the moral status of robots should be determined. The basic idea of this theory is that a robot’s moral status is determined decisively on the basis of its observable behaviour. If it behaves sufficiently similar to some entity that has moral status, such as a human or an animal, then we should ascribe the same moral status to the robot as we do to this human (...) or animal. The paper argues against ethical behaviourism by making four main points. First, it is argued that the strongest version of ethical behaviourism understands the theory as relying on inferences to the best explanation when inferring moral status. Second, as a consequence, ethical behaviourism cannot stick with merely looking at the robot’s behaviour, while remaining neutral with regard to the difficult question of which property grounds moral status. Third, not only behavioural evidence ought to play a role in inferring a robot’s moral status, but knowledge of the design process of the robot and of its designer’s intention ought to be taken into account as well. Fourth, knowledge of a robot’s ontology and how that relates to human biology often is epistemically relevant for inferring moral status as well. The paper closes with some concluding observations. (shrink)

I examine some behavioural and heuristic models of individual decision-making and argue that the diverse psychological mechanisms these models posit are too demanding to be implemented, either consciously or unconsciously, by actual decision makers. Accordingly, and contrary to what their advocates typically claim, behavioural and heuristic models are best understood as ‘as-if’ models. I then sketch a version of scientific antirealism that justifies the practice of as-if modelling in decision theory but goes beyond traditional instrumentalism. Finally, I (...) relate my account of decision models to the recent controversy about mentalism versus behaviourism, reject both positions, and offer an alternative view. (shrink)

Scientific realism has been advanced as an interpretation of the natural sciences but never the behavioral sciences. This book introduces a novel version of scientific realism, Measured Realism, that characterizes the kind of theoretical progress in the social and psychological sciences that is uneven but indisputable. It proposes a theory of measurement, Population-Guided Estimation, that connects natural, psychological, and social scientific inquiry. Presenting quantitative methods in the behavioral sciences as at once successful and regulated by the world, the book (...) will engage philosophers of science, historians of science, sociologists of science, and scientists interested in the foundations of their own disciplines. Part I introduces measured realism beginning with a novel realist theory of measurement (Population-Guided Estimation, or PGE). It examines two other versions of scientific realism — minimal (Hacking) and robust (Boyd, Putnam, and Newton-Smith) — and advances measured realism as best supported by the evidence in the behavioral sciences. It also critically evaluates the anti-realist arguments of van Fraassen, Laudan, and Fine. Part II formulates and develops a version of epistemological naturalism most appropriate to measured realism. Drawing upon the realist theory of measurement developed earlier, it favorably appraises a variety of statistical methods in the behavioral sciences against selected criticisms. It concludes that traditional, narrative methods in the behavioral and social sciences are unreliable by the measures of epistemological naturalism. (shrink)

The Hospital for Rehabilitation, Stavern, in Norway has treated patients with physical symptoms with no organic cause, so called conversion disorder patients, for over a decade. For four years research on the treatment has been carried out. Patients with conversion disorder seem not to fit in traditional somatic hospitals because their patienthood depends upon psychiatric diagnosis. Ironically, they appear not to belong in psychiatric hospitals because of their physical symptoms. The treatment offered these patients at hospitals for rehabilitation is adapted (...) physical activity consisting of behaviour elements such as positive reinforcement of normal function and lack of positive reinforcement at dysfunction. The pedagogical approach is seen as crucial in the successful rehabilitation of the patients. The disorder and treatment can be understood by using theories about the ecstatic body, radical behaviourism and phenomenology. When patients have problems in behaviour concerning both body and mind, it would be natural to employ both in the road to recovery. This article describes the various treatments and discusses them from phenomenological, ethical and philosophical perspectives. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that it would be unprincipled to withhold mental predicates from our behavioural duplicates however unlike us they are "on the inside." My arguments are unusual insofar as they rely neither on an implicit commitment to logical behaviourism in any of its various forms nor to a verificationist theory of meaning. Nor do they depend upon prior metaphysical commitments or to philosophical "intuitions". Rather, in assembling reminders about how the application of our consciousness (...) and propositional attitude concepts are ordinarily defended, I argue on explanatory and moral grounds that they cannot be legitimately withheld from creatures who behave, and who would continue to behave, like us. I urge that we should therefore reject the invitation to revise the application of these concepts in the ways that would be required by recent proposals in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

A reasonable choice between Skinner's and Chomsky's theories requires reference to a conception of human nature. It is explained in detail why this is so, in the context of an analysis of what it is to ‘choose’ a theory. This account helps to explain the unity and coherence of the science, methodology, conception of science, object of scientific inquiry and views towards control of each of Skinner and Chomsky, and thereby explains the chasm which separates the parties to their (...) respective programs. The analysis given implies that, in a precise sense, the theory-choice is implicated in value-judgments. (shrink)

This paper defends revealed preference theory against a pervasive line of criticism, according to which revealed preference methodology relies on appealing to some mental states, in particular an agent’s beliefs, rendering the project incoherent or unmotivated. I argue that all that is established by these arguments is that revealed preference theorists must accept a limited mentalism in their account of the options an agent should be modelled as choosing between. This is consistent both with an essentially behavioural interpretation (...) of preference and with standard revealed preference methodology. And it does not undermine the core motivations of revealed preference theory. (shrink)

Theories of the mind have been celebrating their new-found freedom to study consciousness. Earlier this century, when the methodology of psychology was still under the influence of behaviourism—the view that psychology can only study observable behaviour—the ‘superstition and magic’ of consciousness (in John Watson’s words) was not the proper object of scientific investigation. But now, there are respectable journals devoted to the study of consciousness, there are international interdisciplinary conferences on the subject, and some of the world’s leading scientists—notably (...) Roger Penrose and Francis Crick—have stepped in to have their say about the nature of consciousness. (shrink)

The study of animal cognition raises profound questions about the minds of animals and philosophy of mind itself. Aristotle argued that humans are the only animal to laugh, but in recent experiments rats have also been shown to laugh. In other experiments, dogs have been shown to respond appropriately to over two hundred words in human language. In this introduction to the philosophy of animal minds Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems and debates as they cut across (...) animal cognition and philosophy of mind. She addresses the following key topics: what is cognition, and what is it to have a mind? What questions should we ask to determine whether behaviour has a cognitive basis? the science of animal minds explained: ethology, behaviourist psychology, and cognitive ethology rationality in animals animal consciousness: what does research into pain and the emotions reveal? What can empirical evidence about animal behaviour tell us about philosophical theories of consciousness? does animal cognition involve belief and concepts; do animals have a ‘Language of Thought’? animal communication other minds: do animals attribute ‘mindedness’ to other creatures? moral reasoning and ethical behaviour in animals animal cognition and memory. Extensive use of empirical examples and case studies is made throughout the book. These include Cheney and Seyfarth’s ververt monkey research, Thorndike’s cat puzzle boxes, Jensen’s research into humans and chimpanzees and the ultimatum game, Pankseep and Burgdorf’s research on rat laughter, and Clayton and Emery’s research on memory in scrub-jays. Additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary make this an indispensable introduction to those teaching philosophy of mind, animal cognition. It will also be an excellent resource for those in fields such as ethology, biology and psychology. (shrink)

The idea of meaning plays, together with the notion of caring, a pivotal role in recent nursing theory, informing its approach to philosophy, research and practice. Unlike caring, however, it has received relatively little analytical attention – a fact that is surprising in view of the scepticism about meaning that is characteristic of much contemporary philosophy and social theory. This paper reviews the philosophical literature on meaning, highlighting sceptical currents in the Wittgensteinian corpus, neo‐behaviourism and poststructuralism. It (...) also considers a similar line of thought that has emerged in social theory, questioning the explanatory value of concepts such as ‘practice’, ‘culture’, ‘norms’, ‘tacit knowledge’, and ‘tradition’. All these perspectives suggest that there is something wrong with the common‐sense picture of a set of shared, implicit rules that account for our ability to understand and communicate; and they all point to an alternative picture which is naturalistic, materialist and causal, and which depicts ‘shared meaning’ as a rather mysterious quality, unable to explain the familiar regularities of verbal and nonverbal behaviour. In this picture, while the idea of meaning can be retained, it ceases to be something shared, and becomes something individual and idiosyncratic, a unique cluster of associations, concomitants, and other habits of thought. The paper closes with a brief interpretation of what the alternative implies for a research methodology in nursing. In particular, it proposes that certain well established approaches will have to be abandoned, and that qualitative strategies will have to be grounded in a rigorous scientific framework, rather than in techniques (such as phenomenology), which presuppose a misleading and inaccurate conception of what meaning is. (shrink)

Drawing on new evidence from the Dewey archive, this paper traces how John Dewey conceived his Hegelian-inspired theory of mind and how he tested it in the 1930s by collaborating with infant experimentalist Myrtle McGraw in her pioneering studies of the ontogeny of consciousness and judgment. Her studies challenged behaviourism and maturationism, which advanced environmental and genetic theories of human development, by showing that infants possess consciousness and the judgment needed to guide their own development. -/- Dewey drew (...) on Darwinian evolution and neuroscience to transform the Hegelian phenomenology of being and becoming into psychological terms that would elucidate the role of mind, consciousness and judgment in human experience. Dewey believed that consciousness arises under conditions of uncertainty demanding ingenuity, self-confidence and a sense of balance. McGraw demonstrated how infants cope with uncertainty and the physical challenges posed by gravity and the biological forces of growth, by exploiting the contingencies of order and variation afforded by their experience of motor development. McGraw demonstrated how consciousness emerges through reciprocal processes of neural and behavioural interaction which make possible the introduction of novel changes in ontogeny. -/- This paper describes the extraordinary methods that McGraw devised, with Dewey's help, during the heyday of behaviourism and maturationism, to find a place for consciousness in human development. I contend that, while Dewey's theory of mind and McGraw's discoveries remain controversial and poorly understood, they are not merely of historical interest but approach the threshold of an integrated neurobiological and neurobehavioural understanding of consciousness. (shrink)

Should answers to fundamental questions of political philosophy be ‘convincing’ and ‘meaningful’ to real people with vested interests? Normative behaviourists argue that they should, and this can be achieved by avoiding the use of intuitions in our normative theorizing and instead relying on long-term empirical evidence of human behaviour. In this paper, I argue that to obtain the full benefits of behaviourism, it needs to be accompanied by some form of mentalism. Normative behaviourism sacrifices critical distance from the (...) status quo to provide answers that are convincing and meaningful. However, there is no clear benefit obtained from this sacrifice. Furthermore, because of behaviourism’s institutional focus in its current form, it does not have much to say about how to achieve its goals. Behaviourists can solve both problems by incorporating a mentalist account of political agency, one that determines what values and ideals political agents should fight for and helps political agents develop strategies to achieve their goals. (shrink)

If existing or future robots appear to have some capacity, state or property, how can we determine whether they truly have it or whether we are deceived into believing so? John Danaher addresses this question by formulating his approach to what he refers to as superficial state deception (SSD) from the perspective of his theory termed ethical behaviourism (EB), which was initially designed to determine the moral status of robots. In summary, Danaher believes that focusing on behaviour is (...) sufficient to determine whether SSD occurs. My general claim is that Danaher’s approach to SSD based on EB is implausible since it results in the impossibility of conceptualizing SSD, e.g., it does not enable determining whether or not SSD occurs in a particular case. Moreover, I show how Danaher’s approach to SSD needs to be transformed to become plausible. To make my point, I (1) examine the main features of EB and distinguish its two versions by showing how Danaher revised the original EB in response to criticism; (2) discuss Danaher’s approach to the problem of deception from the perspective of EB; (3) criticize that approach by showing that it requires revisions analogous to those that have already been recommended in reference to EB, and (4) propose an alternative method for determining the presence of SSD that covers diverse, plausible approaches to SSD. (shrink)

This introductory guide to philosophy tackles the key area which students of the subject will cover, in a clear and informative way. The book is organised around the different areas of philosophy including Philosophy of Religion, Theory of Knowledge, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, and Philosophy of Mind. Contents: Philosophy of Knowledge; Perception and Knowledge; Descartes' Rationalism; Hume's Theory of Knowledge; Russel's Problems of Philosophy; A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic; Problems in the Philosophy of Mind; Cartesian (...) Dualism; Physicalism; Persons; The Problem of Other Minds; Behaviourism; Freud and Psychoanalysis; The Problem of Free Will and Determinism; The Philosophy of the Social Sciences; Artificial Intelligence; The Philosophy of Religion; Introductory Remarks; Arguments For the Existence of God; Problems Facing the Religious Believer; The Concept of Faith; Verificationism and Religious Language; An Introduction to Ethics; Plato's Ethical Theory; Aristotle: the Nicomachean Ethics; Utilitarianism; Dentological Ethics; The Emotive Theory of Ethics; Richard Hare and Prescriptivism; Moral Principles and Behaviour; Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism; Social and Political Philosophy; Introduction to Social and Political Philosophy; Images of Society. (shrink)

It is time to transcend the arid debate between rationality and ir-, a-, or non-rationality as our basic assumption about human agency.1 There are powerful arguments and extensive evidence both for and against the rationality assumption, with heavily defended entrenchments on both sides. Managers and management scholars continually make at least tacit assumptions about how they expect others to behave. If only we could have in both theory and practice the coherence and precision of rational models as well as (...) the descriptive richness of ‘behavioural’ approaches. The message of this paper is that perhaps we can. The advent of consciousness studies and, more recently, neuroeconomics would seem to indicate the way forward to transcend the opposition in some kind of synthesis. This paper investigates rationality in the light of Daniel Dennett’s thesis that it is at the core of all intentionality that is the defining characteristic of mental phenomena. Neuroeconomics seeks to enhance understanding of agency by investigating new insights on the materialist basis of mental phenomenology in the neurophysiology of the brain and nervous system. Experimental evidence mapping intentional states onto neurophysiological states is emerging, some researchers even claiming to have found a ‘neurophysiological utility function’. Dennett closes the circuit by locating the existence of brain-hardware supporting satisficing intentional choice and action as the output of evolutionary ‘design’. The dichotomy is transcended: satisficing models (of which normative optimising rational choice models are a reasonable abstraction) are a good basis both for statistical prediction of the behaviour of large numbers, and as the first base on which to construct and refine a model of expectation-formation about particular types of agent and then of individual agents. Using both the old (‘external’) and the new (sub-individual) behaviourism as well as work on unpacking the abstract notion of rationality, we can concretise optimising rational choice both generally, for epistemic theory-building purposes, and specifically for understanding and deploying models of managerial agency. Such models will need to incorporate emotion with cognition in an integrated approach. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore artificial moral agency by reflecting upon the possibility of a Moral Turing Test and whether its lack of focus on interiority, i.e. its behaviouristic foundation, counts as an obstacle to establishing such a test to judge the performance of an Artificial Moral Agent. Subsequently, to investigate whether an MTT could serve as a useful framework for the understanding, designing and engineering of AMAs, we set out to address fundamental challenges within (...) the field of robot ethics regarding the formal representation of moral theories and standards. Here, typically three design approaches to AMAs are available: top-down theory-driven models and bottom-up approaches which set out to model moral behaviour by means of models for adaptive learning, such as neural networks, and finally, hybrid models, which involve components from both top-down and bottom-up approaches to the modelling of moral agency. With inspiration from Allen and Wallace as well as Prior, we elaborate on theoretically driven approaches to machine ethics by introducing deontic tense logic. Finally, within this framework, we explore the character of human interaction with a robot which has successfully passed an MTT. Design/methodology/approach – The ideas in this paper reflect preliminary theoretical considerations regarding the possibility of establishing a MTT based on the evaluation of moral behaviour, which focusses on moral reasoning regarding possible actions. The thoughts reflected fall within the field of normative ethics and apply deontic tense logic to discuss the possibilities and limitations of artificial moral agency. Findings – The authors stipulate a formalisation of logic of obligation, time and modality, which may serve as a candidate for implementing a system corresponding to an MTT in a restricted sense. Hence, the authors argue that to establish a present moral obligation, we need to be able to make a description of the actual situation and the relevant general moral rules. Such a description can never be complete, as the combination of exhaustive knowledge about both situations and rules would involve a God eye’s view, enabling one to know all there is to know and take everything relevant into consideration before making a perfect moral decision to act upon. Consequently, due to this frame problem, from an engineering point of view, we can only strive for designing a robot supposed to operate within a restricted domain and within a limited space-time region. Given such a setup, the robot has to be able to perform moral reasoning based on a formal description of the situation and any possible future developments. Although a system of this kind may be useful, it is clearly also limited to a particular context. It seems that it will always be possible to find special cases in which a given system does not pass the MTT. This calls for a new design of moral systems with trust-related components which will make it possible for the system to learn from experience. Originality/value – It is without doubt that in the near future we are going to be faced with advanced social robots with increasing autonomy, and our growing engagement with these robots calls for the exploration of ethical issues and stresses the importance of informing the process of engineering ethical robots. Our contribution can be seen as an early step in this direction. (shrink)

The idea of meaning plays, together with the notion of caring, a pivotal role in recent nursing theory, informing its approach to philosophy, research and practice. Unlike caring, however, it has received relatively little analytical attention – a fact that is surprising in view of the scepticism about meaning that is characteristic of much contemporary philosophy and social theory. This paper reviews the philosophical literature on meaning, highlighting sceptical currents in the Wittgensteinian corpus, neo‐behaviourism and poststructuralism. It (...) also considers a similar line of thought that has emerged in social theory, questioning the explanatory value of concepts such as ‘practice’, ‘culture’, ‘norms’, ‘tacit knowledge’, and ‘tradition’. All these perspectives suggest that there is something wrong with the common‐sense picture of a set of shared, implicit rules that account for our ability to understand and communicate; and they all point to an alternative picture which is naturalistic, materialist and causal, and which depicts ‘shared meaning’ as a rather mysterious quality, unable to explain the familiar regularities of verbal and nonverbal behaviour. In this picture, while the idea of meaning can be retained, it ceases to be something shared, and becomes something individual and idiosyncratic, a unique cluster of associations, concomitants, and other habits of thought. The paper closes with a brief interpretation of what the alternative implies for a research methodology in nursing. In particular, it proposes that certain well established approaches will have to be abandoned, and that qualitative strategies will have to be grounded in a rigorous scientific framework, rather than in techniques (such as phenomenology), which presuppose a misleading and inaccurate conception of what meaning is. (shrink)

This article examines the ‘integrated conception of competence’ as conceived by Paul Hager and David Beckett and suggests that its characterization in terms intended to distance it from behaviouristic and reductionist notions of competence is not sufficient to differentiate it from other models. Taking up Hager and Beckett’s idea that competence must be inferred from behaviour, it is suggested that this indicates how the integrated conception is more properly distinguished by virtue of the method used rather than what it is (...) that is assessed. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson, it is argued that it is possible to discern two logically distinct methodological approaches to competence assessment, allowing a clear distinction to be made between the integrated conception and the kind of approach which predominates in the UK’s framework of vocational qualifications. While the latter is shown to be rightly criticized for its deficiencies, in contrast the integrated conception is seen to suggest a methodological approach that is capable of acknowledging the full richness of occupational practice. (shrink)

From a phenomenological perspective, skin is an important boundary. My model here is the psychology of interpersonal relations . It is the behaviour of O that is visible from the perspective of P, the perceiver. Whether or not one is justified in going beyond the evidence available is a matter of some controversy in psychological circles e.g. between behaviourists and gestalt psychologists . Here the skin is an important boundary, at least in the visual modality. The divergence in perspective between (...) actor and observer is due to the fact that they occupy two different points in space/time . There is less of a divergence in perspective between speaker and listener since they could both be one and the same person . Skinner , in a pun on his own name, observed that in speech skin is not at all an important boundary. The implications for social psychology of this asymmetry between vision and speech are explored more fully . An attempt is made to identify when the skin is and when it is not a significant boundary. The history of psychology is briefly reviewed in the light of this distinction. (shrink)

In the first half of this paper I show how H. L. A. Hart's theory of rules can resolve, or at least clarify, a central methodological problem in legal anthropology that was first posed in Llewellyn and Egebel's The Cheyenñe Way In the second half I explore and develop Hart's theory of rules, and apply it to problems of agency and behaviourism in legal anthropology, and of legal development, and apply it to the problem of rule-scepticism in (...) legal anthropology as it is posed in Roberts and Comaroffs Rules and Processes and elsewhere. (shrink)