Generalising what is learned about one stimulus to other but perceptually related stimuli is a basic behavioural phenomenon. We evaluated whether a rule learning mechanism may serve to explain such generalisation. To this end, we assessed whether inference rules communicated through verbal instructions affect generalisation. Expectancy ratings, but not valence ratings, proved sensitive to this manipulation. In addition to revealing a role for inference rules in generalisation, our study has clinical implications as well. More specifically, we argue that targeting inference (...) rules might prove to be an effective strategy to affect the excessive generalisation that is often observed in psychopathology. (shrink)

Although convergence in emotion expressions within small groups is well documented, the motives that explain why members converge are rarely explicated. We approach expressive convergence from a conformity perspective and introduce the Emotional Conformity Framework, in which we posit that members match their groupmates’ emotion expressions because they are motivated to gain an accurate understanding of reality (informational conformity motive) or to form and maintain social relationships (normative conformity motive). These motives determine members’ standards for correctness, social responses, and plausible (...) convergence mechanisms, while members’ personalities and situational properties shape the relative strength of the two motives. By explicating these motivational underpinnings, the Framework improves our capacity to understand, predict, and regulate expressive convergence and emphasizes its functionality. (shrink)

The notion that emotional expressions regulate social life by providing information is gaining popularity. Prior research on the effects of emotional expressions on observers’ inferential processes has focused mostly on inferences regarding the personality traits of the expresser, such as dominance and affiliation. We extend this line of research by exploring the possibility that emotional expressions shape observers’ construal of social situations. Across three vignette studies, an interaction partner's expressions of anger, compared to expressions of happiness or disappointment, led observers (...) to construe hypothetical situations as less cooperative, both in dyads and groups. These effects occurred even when factual information regarding the cooperativeness or competitiveness of the situation was provided, attesting to the power of emotional expressions in shaping the construal of social situations. Results are discussed in relation to appraisal theory, reverse appraisals, emotions as social information theory, and the emergence of cooperation in groups and cultures. (shrink)

Pleidooi voor de beleving als kennis-instrument.

People across the world seek out beautiful sounds in nature, such as a babbling brook or a nightingale song, for positive human experiences. However, it is unclear whether this positive aesthetic response is driven by a preference for the perceptual features typical of nature sounds versus a higher‐order association of nature with beauty. To test these hypotheses, participants provided aesthetic judgments for nature and urban soundscapes that varied on ease of recognition. Results demonstrated that the aesthetic preference for nature soundscapes (...) was eliminated for the sounds hardest to recognize, and moreover the relationship between aesthetic ratings and several measured acoustic features significantly changed as a function of recognition. In a follow‐up experiment, requiring participants to classify these difficult‐to‐identify sounds into nature or urban categories resulted in a robust preference for nature sounds and a relationship between aesthetic ratings and our measured acoustic features that was more typical of easy‐to‐identify sounds. This pattern of results was replicated with computer‐generated artificial noises, which acoustically shared properties with the nature and urban soundscapes but by definition did not come from these environments. Taken together, these results support the conclusion that the recognition of a sound as either natural or urban dynamically organizes the relationship between aesthetic preference and perceptual features and that these preferences are not inherent to the acoustic features. Implications for nature's role in cognitive and affective restoration are discussed. (shrink)

There is a growing recognition that philosophy isn’t unique to the West, that it didn’t begin only with the classical Greeks, and that Greek philosophy was influenced by Near Eastern traditions. Yet even today there is a widespread assumption that what came before the Greeks was "before philosophy." In Philosophy before the Greeks, Marc Van De Mieroop, an acclaimed historian of the ancient Near East, presents a groundbreaking argument that, for three millennia before the Greeks, one Near Eastern people (...) had a rich and sophisticated tradition of philosophy fully worthy of the name. In the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily praised the Babylonians for their devotion to philosophy. Showing the justice of Diodorus’s comment, this is the first book to argue that there were Babylonian philosophers and that they studied knowledge systematically using a coherent system of logic rooted in the practices of cuneiform script. Van De Mieroop uncovers Babylonian approaches to knowledge in three areas: the study of language, which in its analysis of the written word formed the basis of all logic; the art of divination, which interpreted communications between gods and humans; and the rules of law, which confirmed that royal justice was founded on truth. The result is an innovative intellectual history of the ancient Near Eastern world during the many centuries in which Babylonian philosophers inspired scholars throughout the region—until the first millennium BC, when the breakdown of this cosmopolitan system enabled others, including the Greeks, to develop alternative methods of philosophical reasoning. (shrink)

The belief that conscious will is merely "an illusion created by the brain" appears to be gaining in popularity among cognitive neuroscientists. Its main adherents usually refer to the classic, but controversial 'Libet-experiments', as the empirical evidence that vindicates this illusion-claim. However, based on recent work that provides other interpretations of the Libet-experiments, we argue that the illusion-claim is not only empirically invalid, but also theoretically incoherent, as it is rooted in a category mistake; namely, the presupposition that neuronal activity (...) causes conscious will. We show that the illusion-claim is based on the behaviorist 'input-output' paradigm, and discuss the notions of 'self-organization' and 'self-steering' to provide an alternative perspective on the causal efficacy of conscious will. In the final sections, a tentative theoretical picture is sketched of conscious will as an instance of self-steered self-organization. We conclude that the subjective experience of conscious will is not a misguided one, but rather that the mechanisms supporting conscious will are considerably more complex than mainstream cognitive neuroscience currently acknowledges. (shrink)

We assessed how synchronous speech listening and lipreading affects speech recognition in acoustic noise. In simple audiovisual perceptual tasks, inverse effectiveness is often observed, which holds that the weaker the unimodal stimuli, or the poorer their signal-to-noise ratio, the stronger the audiovisual benefit. So far, however, inverse effectiveness has not been demonstrated for complex audiovisual speech stimuli. Here we assess whether this multisensory integration effect can also be observed for the recognizability of spoken words. To that end, we presented audiovisual (...) sentences to 18 native-Dutch normal-hearing participants, who had to identify the spoken words from a finite list. Speech-recognition performance was determined for auditory-only, visual-only (lipreading) and auditory-visual conditions. To modulate acoustic task difficulty, we systematically varied the auditory signal-to-noise ratio. In line with a commonly-observed multisensory enhancement on speech recognition, audiovisual words were more easily recognized than auditory-only words (recognition thresholds of -15 dB and -12 dB, respectively). We here show that the difficulty of recognizing a particular word, either acoustically or visually, determines the occurrence of inverse effectiveness in audiovisual word integration. Thus, words that are better heard or recognized through lipreading, benefit less from bimodal presentation. Audiovisual performance at the lowest acoustic signal-to-noise ratios (45%) fell below the visual recognition rates (60%), reflecting an actual deterioration of lipreading in the presence of excessive acoustic noise. This suggests that the brain may adopt a strategy in which attention has to be divided between listening and lipreading. (shrink)

Résumé Jacques Serrano conçoit un système d’échange économique structurellement de même nature que sa production artistique non-matérialisée, qui permet de repenser la fonction et le statut de collectionneur. Cette réflexion s’accompagne d’un exemple de mise en application. Marc Halévy éclaire les enjeux économiques de cette proposition, et Ghislain Mollet-Viéville en analyse l’originalité en termes de collection.

Logical puzzles like the doctrinal paradox raise the problem of how to aggregate individual judgements into a collective judgement, or alternatively, how to merge collectively inconsistent knowledge bases. In this paper, we view judgement aggregation as a function on propositional logic valuations, and we investigate how logic constrains judgement aggregation. In particular, we show that there is no non-dictatorial decision method for aggregating sets of judgements in a logically consistent way if the decision method is local, i.e., only depends on (...) the individual judgements on the proposition under consideration. (shrink)

(1970). The Relation between the Historical Jesus and the Biblical Picture of Jesus as the Christ, according to Paul Tillich. Bijdragen: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 171-188.

Goal-oriented requirements modeling approaches aim to capture the intentions of the stakeholders involved in the development of an information system as goals and tasks. The process of constructing such goal models usually involves discussions between a requirements engineer and a group of stakeholders. Not all the arguments in such discussions can be captured as goals or tasks: e.g., the discussion whether to accept or reject a certain goal and the rationale for acceptance or rejection cannot be captured in goal models. (...) In this paper, we apply techniques from computational argumentation to a goal modeling approach by using a coding analysis in which stakeholders discuss requirements for a Traffic Simulator. We combine a simplified version of a traditional goal model, the Goal-oriented Requirements Language (GRL), with ideas from argumentation on schemes for practical reasoning into a new framework (RationalGRL). RationalGRL provides a formal semantics and tool support to capture the discussions and outcomes of the argumentation process that leads to a goal model. We also define the RationalGRL development process to create a RationalGRL model. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

“Tu es de mon sang”: Les alliances dans le Proche-Orient ancien. By Dominique Charpin. Paris: collège de France, les Belles leTTres, 2019. Pp. 337, illus. €21.

Cet article offre une analyse succincte des œuvres critiques de Ramus contre les deux grands rhéteurs de l’ancienne Rome, Cicéron et Quintilien, les Brutinae Quaestiones in Oratorem Ciceronis de 1547 et les Rhetoricae Distinctiones in Quintilianum de 1549. Ces œuvres se présentent comme des commentaires textuels, mais elles ne constituent pas une contribution substantielle à l’étude philologique des deux traités antiques. Elles semblent plutôt avoir pour but de montrer que, selon Ramus, la rhétorique ne concerne que l’élocution et l’action, et (...) que la séparation stricte des arts du Trivium au niveau de la théorie est la seule méthode appropriée pour les enseigner. (shrink)

‘Vandaag ga je toch niet hardlopen, met zo'n rotweer?’ Vraag van een collega aan een andere collega. ‘Natuurlijk wel,’ klonk het antwoord. ‘Net met dit regenweer vind ik het heerlijk om er eens tegenaan te gaan.’ Dat antwoord beviel me wel. Vorige winter heb ik het nog zo vaak mogen meemaken tijdens het fietsen. Een geselende wind, ijskoude regendruppels, opspattende modder: bij het begin van een trainingsrit roept dat vraagtekens op naar de zin van dit gedoe. Dat duurt hooguit een (...) uur. Dan worden je twijfels overstemd door wat je lichaam je zeer nadrukkelijk influistert: dit is genieten. Van binnen in je lijf lijken allerlei explosieve stofjes naar buiten te willen. Lijden als springstof. Een klein beetje doodgaan om je springlevend te voelen. Duursporters kennen die wijsheid van het lichaam. (shrink)

(Near-final version.) Accepted for publication in Artificial Intelligence Journal.

The Royal Dutch Medical Association recently completed a researchproject aimed at investigating how guidelines for `appropriatemedical care' should be construed. The project took as a startingpoint that explicit attention should be given to ethical andpolitical considerations in addition to data about costs andeffectiveness. In the project, two research groups set out todesign guidelines and cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) for twocircumscribed medical areas (angina pectoris and majordepression). Our third group was responsible for the normativeanalysis. We undertook an explorative, qualitative pilot study ofthe (...) normative considerations that played a role in constructingthe guidelines and CEAs, and simultaneously interviewedspecialists about the normative considerations that guided theirdiagnostic and treatment decisions. Explicating normativeconsiderations, we argue, is important democratically: the issuesat stake should not be left to decision analysts and guidelinedevelopers to decide. Moreover, it is a necessary condition for asuccessful implementation of such tools: those who draw uponthese tools will only accept them when they can recognizethemselves in the considerations implied. Empirical normativeanalysis, we argue, is a crucial tool in developing guidelinesfor appropriate medical care. (shrink)

Governments and companies are increasingly promoting and organizing Responsible Innovation. It is, however, unclear how the seemingly incompatible demands for responsibility, which is associated with care and caution, can be harmonized with demands for innovation, which is associated with risk-taking and speed. We turn to the tradition of virtue ethics and argue that it can be a strong accomplice to Responsible Innovation by focussing on the agential side of innovation. Virtue ethics offers an adequate response to the epistemic and moral (...) complexity in innovation and encourages moral behaviour. We enumerate a number of virtues that people involved in Responsible Innovation would need to cultivate both related to responsibility, such as justice, anticipation, civility and inclusion, and virtues related to innovation, such as courage, dedication, curiosity and creativity. We put forward practical wisdom as a key virtue to regulate relevant virtues and to deal with the tension between responsibility and innovation. Practical wisdom helps an agent to find an appropriate mean in exercising and expressing the other virtues—where the mean is relative to the specific context of action and the role and abilities of the agent. (shrink)

These last years, the development of AI robots for agriculture, livestock farming and food processing industries is rapidly increasing. These robots are expected to help produce and deliver food more efficiently for a growing human population, but they also raise societal and ethical questions. As the type of questions raised by these AI robots in society have been rarely empirically explored, we engaged in four case studies focussing on four types of AI robots for agri-food ‘in the making’: manure collectors, (...) weeding robots, harvesting robots and food processing robots which select and package fruits, vegetables and meats. Based on qualitative interviews with 33 experts engaged in the development or implementation of these four types of robots, this article provides a broad and varied exploration of the values that play a role in their evaluation and the ethical questions that they raise. Compared to the recently published literature reviews mapping the ethical questions related to AI robots in agri-food, we conclude that stakeholders in our case studies primarily adopt a relational perspective to the value of AI robots and to finding a solution to the ethical questions. Building on our findings we suggest it is best to seek a distribution of tasks between human beings and robots in agri-food, which helps to realize the most acceptable, good or just collaboration between them in food production or processing that contributes to realizing societal goals and help to respond to the 21 century challenges. (shrink)

Anticipating the ethical impact of emerging technologies is an essential part of responsible innovation. One such emergent technology is the digital twin which we define here as a living replica of a physical system (human or non-human). A digital twin combines various emerging technologies such as AI, Internet of Things, big data and robotics, each component bringing its own socio-ethical issues to the resulting artefacts. The question thus arises which of these socio-ethical themes surface in the process and how they (...) are perceived by stakeholders in the field. In this report we present the results of a qualitative study into the socio-ethical benefits and socio-ethical risks of using digital twins in healthcare. Employing insights from ethics of technology and the Quadruple Helix theory of innovation, we conducted desk research of white literature and 23 interviews with representatives from the four helixes: industry, research, policy and civil society. The ethical scan revealed several important areas where the digital twin can produce socio-ethical value (e.g., prevention and treatment of disease, cost reduction, patient autonomy and freedom, equal treatment) but also several important areas of socio-ethical risks (e.g., privacy and property of data, disruption of existing societal structures, inequality and injustice). We conclude with a reflection on the employed analytical tool and suggestions for further research. (shrink)

A study of the philosophical and theological thought of Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486-1535). It contains new perspectives on Agrippa's place in the world of humanism and offers a new approach to the interpretation of Renaissance declamations.

The related fields of fractal image encoding and fractal image analysis have blossomed in recent years. This book, originating from a NATO Advanced Study Institute held in 1995, presents work by leading researchers. It is developing the subjects at an introductory level, but it also has some recent and exciting results in both fields. The book contains a thorough discussion of fractal image compression and decompression, including both continuous and discrete formulations, vector space and hierarchical methods, and algorithmic optimizations. The (...) book also discusses multifractal approaches to image analysis, segmentation, and recognition, including medical applications. (shrink)

Reductionism as a scientific methodology has been extraordinarily successful in biology. However, recent developments in molecular biology have shown that reductionism is seriously inadequate in dealing with the mind-boggling complexity of integrated biological systems. This title presents an appropriate balance between science and philosophy and covers traditional philosophical treatments of reductionism as well as the benefits and shortcomings of reductionism in particular areas of science. Discussing the issue of reductionism in the practice of medicine it takes into account the holistic (...) and integrative aspects that require the context of the patient in his biological and psychological entirety. The emerging picture is that what first seems like hopeless disagreements turn out to be differences in emphasis. Although genes play an important role in biology, the focus on genetics and genomics has often been misleading. The consensus view leads to pluralism: both reductionst methods and a more integrative approach to biological complexity are required, depending on the questions that are asked. * An even balance of contributions from scientists and philosophers of science - representing a unique interchange between both communities interested in reductionism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOther people’s emotional reactions to a third person’s behaviour are potentially informative about what is appropriate within a given situation. We investigated whether and how observers’ inferences of such injunctive norms are shaped by expressions of anger and disgust. Building on the moral emotions literature, we hypothesised that angry and disgusted expressions produce relative differences in the strength of autonomy-based versus purity-based norm inferences. We report three studies using different types of stimuli to investigate how emotional reactions shape norms about (...) potential norm violations, and contexts. Consistent with our theoretical argument, the results indicate that observers use others’ emotional reactions not only to infer whether a particular behaviour is inappropriate, but also why it is inappropriate: because it primarily violates auto... (shrink)

Human cognition is unique in the way in which it relies on combinatorial (or compositional) structures. Language provides ample evidence for the existence of combinatorial structures, but they can also be found in visual cognition. To understand the neural basis of human cognition, it is therefore essential to understand how combinatorial structures can be instantiated in neural terms. In his recent book on the foundations of language, Jackendoff described four fundamental problems for a neural instantiation of combinatorial structures: the massiveness (...) of the binding problem, the problem of 2, the problem of variables, and the transformation of combinatorial structures from working memory to long-term memory. This paper aims to show that these problems can be solved by means of neural “blackboard” architectures. For this purpose, a neural blackboard architecture for sentence structure is presented. In this architecture, neural structures that encode for words are temporarily bound in a manner that preserves the structure of the sentence. It is shown that the architecture solves the four problems presented by Jackendoff. The ability of the architecture to instantiate sentence structures is illustrated with examples of sentence complexity observed in human language performance. Similarities exist between the architecture for sentence structure and blackboard architectures for combinatorial structures in visual cognition, derived from the structure of the visual cortex. These architectures are briefly discussed, together with an example of a combinatorial structure in which the blackboard architectures for language and vision are combined. In this way, the architecture for language is grounded in perception. Perspectives and potential developments of the architectures are discussed. Key Words: binding; blackboard architectures; combinatorial structure; compositionality; language; dynamic system; neurocognition; sentence complexity; sentence structure; working memory; variables; vision. (shrink)

In this contribution the author tries to formulate an approach to the art of living with technology based on Heidegger’s The Principle of Reason, a work often overlooked by contemporary commentators in the philosophy of technology. This approach couples the concept of releasement to insights hailing from Wolfgang Schirmacher concerning Heidegger’s nihilism.

We discuss a visual blackboard architecture that could be involved in imagery. In this architecture, networks that process identity information interact with networks that process location information, in a manner that produces structural (compositional) forms of representation. Architectures of this kind can be identified in the visual cortex, but perhaps also in prefrontal cortex areas related with working memory.