The uncanny valley—the unnerving nature of humanlike robots—is an intriguing idea, but both its existence and its underlying cause are debated. We propose that humanlike robots are not only unnerving, but are so because their appearance prompts attributions of mind. In particular, we suggest that machines become unnerving when people ascribe to them experience, rather than agency. Experiment 1 examined whether a machine’s humanlike appearance prompts both ascriptions of experience and feelings of unease. Experiment 2 tested whether a machine capable (...) of experience remains unnerving, even without a humanlike appearance. Experiment 3 investigated whether the perceived lack of experience can also help explain the creepiness of unfeeling humans and philosophical zombies. These experiments demonstrate that feelings of uncanniness are tied to perceptions of experience, and also suggest that experience—but not agency—is seen as fundamental to humans, and fundamentally lacking in machines. (shrink)

Concepts from functional theories of emotions are integrated with principles of skill development to produce a theory of emotional development. The theory provides tools for predicting both the sequences of emotional development and the ways emotions shape development. Emotions are characterised in terms of three component models: (a) the process of emotion generation from event appraisal, (b) a hierarchy of emotion categories organised around a handful of basic-emotion families, and (c) a characterisation of emotions in terms of prototypic event scripts. (...) The basic emotions and the positive vs. negative hedonic components of emotions function as constraints or organisers that shape behaviour whenever an emotion is activated. Through these patterning effects, emotions shape both short-term behavioural organisation and long-term development. The skill-development component of the theory explains how, as children grow, they construct and control increasingly complex skills—which affect many aspects of emotion, from appraisal to emotional self-control. These skills can be characterised in terms of a series of developmental tiers and levels; they are not fixed traits of the child but instead are affected by assessment conditions and emotional action tendencies. The developmental process gradually moves from basic, species-specific emotions to culture-specific, subordinate-category emotions and the complexities of adult emotional experiences. The theory provides a set of conceptual and methodological tools to predict and assess emotional development. It also indicates how emotional development fits with other aspects of systematic change in the organisation of behaviour. (shrink)

Individuals’ implicit theories that people’s character is fixed versus malleable are associated with their holding beliefs that morality is primarily determined by fulfilling prescribed duties versus upholding basic rights of others, respectively. Three studies provide evidence that the ability to recognize that a situation can legitimately be considered from a moral point of view is interactively dependent upon the nature of perceivers’ implicit theories and the extent to which the issue involves a violation that emphasizes a failure to fulfill a (...) prescribed duty versus a failure to uphold a fundamental right of others. The studies experimentally manipulated the characteristics of a hypothetical business situation to involve either a duty-based violation or a rights-based violation or no behavioral violation. In addition, Study 1 experimentally manipulated subjects’ implicit theories, while Studies 2 and 3 measured subjects’ chronically held implicit theories. Collectively, the studies provide consistent evidence that entity theorists have greater moral awareness than incremental theorists when considering situations involving duty-based violations, while incremental theorists have greater moral awareness than entity theorists when considering situations involving rights-based violations, and moral awareness is not significantly different for perceivers who are neither strongly entity nor incremental theorists, when considering situations involving duty- versus rights-based violations. Study 3 also found evidence of a moderated-mediated association between violation type and moral intentions, through moral awareness as a mediator, moderated by perceivers’ implicit theories. (shrink)

Die naive Idee des wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts beruht auf der irrtümlichen Annahme, daß es absolute Tatsachen und Grundsätze gibt, auf denen aufbauend die Wissenschaft ein ständig verbessertes Bild der Wirklichkeit liefert und sich mehr und mehr einer absoluten Wahrheit nähert. Im Gegensatz dazu wird gezeigt, daß wissenschaftliche Tatsachen und Grundsätze nur innerhalb der Interpretationsschemata von "Systemmengen" vermittelt werden können, von denen die jeweiligen "historischen Situationen" bestimmt werden. Die Entwicklung der Wissenschaften wird durch Unstimmigkeiten innerhalb solcher Systemmengen und durch den darin begründeten (...) Wandel hervorgerufen. Dabei liegt ein historischer Relativismus bloßer Fatalität oder Willkür nicht vor, weil nicht nur Kriterien für die Wahrheit von Aussagen innerhalb von Systemen logisch, sondern weil auch die Systeme selbst samt ihren Veränderungen, und zwar situationslogisch begründet werden können. Ist nun Wissenschaftsgeschichte "Systemgeschichte", so kommen nur zwei Bewegungsformen in Frage, in denen Fortschritte erzielt werden können: Nämlich erstens "Systemexplikation" und zweitens "Systemmutation". Entsprechend ist ein Fortschritt I von einem Fortschritt II zu unterscheiden. Beide werden mit Hilfe des Begriffs "Harmonisierung einer Systemmenge" genauer definiert. (shrink)

Summary For Imre Lakatos hismethodology of scientific research programmes was not only a philosophical theory of science and scientific change but also the conceptual foundation of empirical and historical studies of science. At least terminologically this view is today widely accepted: The concept of aresearch programme is used in all sorts of literature on science. In the present paper I argue that this concept can lead to serious distortions of empirical and historical studies of science if it is not detached (...) from the Lakatosian philosophical framework. Themethodology of scientific research programmes has three main pitfalls, which may lead to disorientations of empirical and historical studies of science: (1) Contrary to what the term research programme may suggest, it offers no perspective on scientific research as an object of analysissui generis; (2) its concept of science is too narrow and covers only minor parts of what counts as science in the real world; (3) it reduces history of science to a mere sequence of research programmes and thereby eliminates the fact that there is an evolution of the structure of research programmes, too. (shrink)

The repertory of theories, practices, and stories associated with Greek and Roman Stoicism fills a significant compartment in the Western philosophical archive, the meaning and value of which are ceaselessly reconfigured by each generation’s archivists. In the recent decades, it is not only specialists who have browsed, rearranged, and relabeled these shelves; following Foucault’s Hermeneutics of the Subject as well as a powerful synergy between Anglophone scholars and cognitive-behavioral therapists, there is now a wave of enthusiasm, inquiry, and experimentation.1 Into (...) these vigorous currents I propose that we release yet another stream, namely the numerous commentaries on Stoicism in the psychoanalytic.. (shrink)

In der philosophischen Tradition nehmen geschichtsphilosophische Gesichtspunkte wie die Wahrnehmung von Geschichte, der Begriff von Wissen und Vernunft, das sich daraus ergebende Folgeproblem von Einheit und Vielheit und die Rolle und Funktion des Subjektes eine grundlegende Bedeutung ein. In der Postmoderne erfahren diese Aspekte in ihrem philosophischen Stellenwert eine deutliche Profilveränderung. Diese Veränderung, die auf ein ,,entdifferenzierendes Denken" innerhalb der Postmoderne zurückzuführen ist, wird kritisch überprüft.

In this paper, we discuss what we argue is a newly observed use of nouns like woman, man, and lawyer, in the sort of morphosyntax characteristic of count nouns. We argue that the relevant data constitutes normative uses of the relevant nouns, and we build an analysis on the assumption that such nouns are polysemous between descriptive and normative senses (Leslie 2015), using the formal account of polysemy in Pustejovsky (1998), and the analysis of count- ability in Rothstein (2010). In (...) doing so, we provide evidence in support of the aforementioned kinds of analyses of social terms and countability, as opposed to others which do not seem to be able to account for the data in as straight forward a way. (shrink)