The use of cognitive systems like pattern recognition or video tracking technology in security applications is becoming ever more common. The paper considers cases in which the cognitive systems are meant to assist human tasks by providing information, but the final decision is left to the human. All these systems and their various applications have a common feature: an intrinsic difference in how a situation or an event is assessed by a human being and a cognitive system. This difference, which (...) here is named “the model gap,” is analyzed pertaining to its epistemic role and its ethical consequences. The main results are as follows: (1) The model gap is not a problem, which might be solved by future research, but the central feature of cognitive systems. (2) The model gap appears on two levels: the aspects of the world, which are evaluated, and the way they are processed. This leads to changes in central concepts. While differences on the first level often are the very reason for the deployment of cognitive systems, the latter is hard to notice and often goes unreflected. (3) Such a missing reflection is ethically problematic because the human is meant to give the final judgment. It is particularly problematic in security applications where it might lead to a conflation of descriptive and normative concepts. (4) The idea of the human operator having the last word is based on an assumption of independent judgment. This assumption is flawed for two reasons: The cognitive system and the human operators form a “hybrid system” the components of which cannot be assessed independently; and additional modes of judgment might pose new ethical problems. (shrink)

Computational modeling of the brain holds great promise as a bridge from brain to behavior. To fulfill this promise, however, it is not enough for models to be 'biologically plausible': models must be structurally accurate. Here, we analyze what this entails for so-called psychobiological models, models that address behavior as well as brain function in some detail. Structural accuracy may be supported by (1) a model's a priori plausibility, which comes from a reliance on evidence-based assumptions, (2) fitting existing (...) data, and (3) the derivation of new predictions. All three sources of support require modelers to be explicit about the ontology of the model, and require the existence of data constraining the modeling. For situations in which such data are only sparsely available, we suggest a new approach. If several models are constructed that together form a hierarchy of models, higher-level models can be constrained by lower-level models, and low-level models can be constrained by behavioral features of the higher-level models. Modeling the same substrate at different levels of representation, as proposed here, thus has benefits that exceed the merits of each model in the hierarchy on its own. (shrink)

The analysis of genetic and epigenetic mechanisms of the genotype–phenotypic connection has, so far, only been possible in a handful of genetic model systems. Recent technological advances, including next‐generation sequencing methods such as RNA‐seq, ChIP‐seq and RAD‐seq, and genome‐editing approaches including CRISPR‐Cas, now permit to address these fundamental questions of biology also in organisms that have been studied in their natural habitats. We provide an overview of the benefits and drawbacks of these novel techniques and experimental approaches that can (...) now be applied to ecological and evolutionary vertebrate models such as sticklebacks and cichlid fish. We can anticipate that these new methods will increase the understanding of the genetic and epigenetic factors influencing adaptations and phenotypic variation in ecological settings. These new arrows in the methodological quiver of ecologist will drastically increase the understanding of the genetic basis of adaptive traits – leading to a further closing of the genotype–phenotype gap. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper we study the automorphism groups of models of Peano Arithmetic. Kossak, Kotlarski, and Schmerl [9] shows that the stabilizer of an unbounded element a of a countable recursively saturated model of Peano Arithmetic M is a maximal subgroup of Aut if and only if the type of a is selective. We extend this result by showing that if M is a countable arithmetically saturated model of Peano Arithmetic, Ω ⊂ M is a very good interstice, (...) and a ∈ Ω, then the stabilizer of a is a maximal subgroup of Aut if and only if the type of a is selective and rational. (shrink)

The White Coats for Black Lives and #ShutDownSTEM movements have galvanised biomedical practitioners and researchers to eliminate institutional and systematic racism, including barriers faced by Black researchers in biomedicine and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In our study on Black–White funding gaps for National Institutes of Health Research Project grants, we found that the overall award rate for Black applicants is 55% of that for white applicants. How can systems for allocating research grant funding be made more fair while improving (...) their efficiency? (shrink)

Using a decision theoretic model of scientists’ time allocation between potential research projects I explain the fact that on average women scientists publish less research papers than men scientists. If scientists are incentivised to publish as many papers as possible, then it is necessary and sufficient for a productivity gap to arise that women scientists anticipate harsher treatment of their manuscripts than men scientists anticipate for their manuscripts. I present evidence that women do expect harsher treatment and that scientists’ (...) are incentivised to publish as many papers as possible, and discuss some epistemological consequences of this conjecture. (shrink)

We succeed to say something on the identities of when μ > θ > cf with μ strong limit θ-compact or even μ is limit of compact cardinals.

Fiora Salis compares the fictional and the artifactual views of models. She argues that both accounts contain several deep insights concerning the nature of scientific models but they also face some difficult challenges. She then puts forward an account of the ontology of models intended to incorporate the benefits of both views avoiding their main difficulties. Her key idea is that models are human-made artifacts that are akin to literary works of fiction. In this view, models are complex objects that (...) are constituted by a model description and the model content generated within a game of make-believe. As per the fiction view, model descriptions are construed as props in a game of make-believe, where props are concrete objects that prescribe certain imaginings. As per the artifactual view, model descriptions are construed as concrete representational tools that enable and constrain a scientist’s cognitive processes and provide intersubjective epistemic access to their imaginings. (shrink)

The article revisits two basic questions of political theory posed by Jon Elster. First, should the political process be defined as private or public, and second, should its purpose be understood instrumentally or intrinsically? Having posed these questions, Elster arrives at three views of politics: social choice , republican and discourse theory . I argue for a fourth view , and explain Elster's omission of this model by referring to his underlying paradigm of politics, that is, as will formation. (...) The main thesis in Elster's article is about whether the process of will formation should be relegated to the market mechanism or dealt with via deliberative forums. I reject this paradigm and argue instead for politics as jurisdiction. This notion of politics is concerned with the question of how both market and forum processes of will formation should be institutionalized. Defining politics as jurisdiction strongly improves the plausibility of the missing fourth model of democratic will formation, as a depiction of democratic will formation as private in its process and intrinsic in its purpose illustrates the importance of distinguishing between two levels of democracy: namely, the civil level of will formation and the political level of jurisdiction. (shrink)

Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs’ semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally (...) different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. (shrink)

We show that a $$ -simplified morass can be added by a forcing with working parts of size smaller than $\kappa $. This answers affirmatively the question, asked independently by Shelah and Velleman in the early 1990s, of whether it is possible to do so.Our argument use a modification of a technique of Mitchell’s for adding objects of size $\omega _2$ in which collections of models – all of equal, countable size – are used as side conditions. In our modification, (...) whilst the individual models are, as in Mitchell’s technique, taken ad hoc from quite general classes, the collections of models are very highly structured, in a way that is somewhat different from, perhaps more stringent than, Mitchell’s original, arguably making the method more wieldy and giving the prospect of further uses with more delicate working parts. (shrink)

We prove the Main Gap for the class of a -models (sufficiently saturated models) of an arbitrary stable 1-based theory T . We (i) prove a strong structure theorem for a -models, assuming NDOP, and (ii) roughly compute the number of a -models of T in any given cardinality. The analysis uses heavily group existence theorems in 1-based theories.

The article revisits two basic questions of political theory posed by Jon Elster. First, should the political process be defined as private or public, and second, should its purpose be understood instrumentally or intrinsically? Having posed these questions, Elster arrives at three views of politics: social choice , republican and discourse theory . I argue for a fourth view , and explain Elster's omission of this model by referring to his underlying paradigm of politics, that is, as will formation. (...) The main thesis in Elster's article is about whether the process of will formation should be relegated to the market mechanism or dealt with via deliberative forums. I reject this paradigm and argue instead for politics as jurisdiction. This notion of politics is concerned with the question of how both market and forum processes of will formation should be institutionalized. Defining politics as jurisdiction strongly improves the plausibility of the missing fourth model of democratic will formation, as a depiction of democratic will formation as private in its process and intrinsic in its purpose illustrates the importance of distinguishing between two levels of democracy: namely, the civil level of will formation and the political level of jurisdiction. (shrink)

Hunt and Vitell''s General Theory (1992) is used in a cross-cultural comparison of U.S. and Taiwanese business practitioners. Results indicate that Taiwanese practitioners exhibit lower perceptions of an ethical issue in a scenario based on bribery, as well as milder deontological evaluations and ethical judgments relative to their U.S. counterparts. In addition, Taiwan respondents showed higher likelihood of making the payment. Several of the paths between variables in the theory are confirmed in both U.S. and Taiwan samples, with summary data (...) suggesting the Hunt and Vitell theory performs well in both U.S. and Taiwan. Some unanticipated linkages within the model were uncovered in the samples. Results and implications are discussed. (shrink)

The ‘global justice gap’ refers to the state of affairs in which the just entitlements of the global poor do not correlate with the justly enforceable duties of the global rich. The possibility of a global justice gap is controversial, because it is widely thought that claims of justice cannot exist unless they are matched up with corresponding duties. In this essay, I refute this sceptical view by showing that the global justice gap is indeed a theoretical possibility. My strategy (...) is to argue for a particular way of understanding the concept of distributive justice which I call the ‘dual-component model of justice’. On this view, distributive justice is a single value with two distinct components: (1) a fairness component, which specifies the situation that people would be in if they lived under conditions of what I call ‘basic distributive fairness’, and (2) a legitimacy component, specifying the rights that people have according to what I call the ‘principles of justified coercion’, which limit the ways in which they may permissibly be coerced. The global justice gap arises when the two components of justice are not in alignment. This happens when, although it is within the collective capacity of the members of the developed world to bring the global distribution much closer to the ideal of basic distributive fairness, there are considerations that make it unjust to coerce them into exercising this capacity. (shrink)

Semiotics provides the tools for studying the process of decoding law, one of the most important tasks in the daily work of courts. The semiotic review of juridical interpretation and gap filling concludes that in juridical and semiotic methodology the same question—how a norm is interpreted—is answered from different perspectives. According to the semiotic model proposed in the current paper, juridical interpretation can be structured into three levels: intra-, inter- and supranormative sign-process. For legal theory semiotics can highlight the (...) similarities in the interpretation of norms and gaps. In gap filling the iconic, indexical and symbolic relations compensate for the missing of intranormative semiosis. The applicability of the proposed model is tested on an example of case law. Semiotic investigation of the judgements of Supreme Court of Estonia and European Court of Human Rights shows that semiotics gives a well structured picture of the juridical interpretation process. (shrink)

Dan Talayco has recently defined the gap cohomology group of a tower in p/fin of height ω1. This group is isomorphic to the collection of gaps in the tower modulo the equivalence relation given by two gaps being equivalent if their levelwise symmetric difference is not a gap in the tower, the group operation being levelwise symmetric difference. Talayco showed that the size of this group is always at least 2N0 and that it attains its greatest possible size, 2N1, if (...) ⋄ holds and also in some generic extensions in which CH fails, for example on adding many Cohen or random reals. In this paper it is shown that there is always some tower whose gap cohomology group has size 2N1. It is still open as to whether there are models in which there are towers whose gap cohomology group has size less than 2ω1. (shrink)

England and Wales are moving toward a model of ‘opt out’ for use of personal confidential data in health research. Existing research does not make clear how acceptable this move is to the public. While people are typically supportive of health research, when asked to describe the ideal level of control there is a marked lack of consensus over the preferred model of consent. This study sought to investigate a relatively unexplored difference between the consent model that (...) people prefer and that which they are willing to accept. It also sought to explore any reasons for such acceptance. (shrink)

This study introduces the notion of an “expertise gap,” a mismatch between researcher expertise and research content. I show that these gaps can exist and warrant our attention in research endeavors that involve multidisciplinarity embedded in complex research designs. Writing as an education researcher concerned with educator quality, I show that several expertise gaps are embedded in a particular statistical approach to the measurement of teacher effectiveness: the use of value-added models. My analysis lays out the basic argument structure behind (...) these models, locates eight consequential assumptions that researchers are obligated to make, and considers the kind of disciplinary expertise that these assumptions call for. I argue for the importance of illuminating expertise gaps and studying how they shape public understanding of science and technology. (shrink)

In a countable, recursively saturated model of Peano Arithmetic, an interstice is a maximal convex set which does not contain any definable elements. The interstices are partitioned into intersticial gaps in a way that generalizes the partition of the unbounded interstice into gaps. Continuing work of Bamber and Kotlarski [1], we investigate extensions of Kotlarski's Moving Gaps Lemma to the moving of intersticial gaps.

The paper presents a novel view of social norms that reflects the importance of different agent types, their specific motivations and roles. How one identifies with a role and behavioral options available to the agent is crucial for the sustainability of the social norms. The analysis of a simple case of social norm is suggested as a default model for analysis, and then the classification of subjects, enforcers, and audience is introduced. This triangular typology of agents is extended by (...) introducing a network of interlocking patterns underlying social behavior. Lastly, the paper describes two categories of transgressions based on misidentification. (shrink)

During active vision, the eyes continually scan the visual environment using saccadic scanning movements. This target article presents an information processing model for the control of these movements, with some close parallels to established physiological processes in the oculomotor system. Two separate pathways are concerned with the spatial and the temporal programming of the movement. In the temporal pathway there is spatially distributed coding and the saccade target is selected from a Both pathways descend through a hierarchy of levels, (...) the lower ones operating automatically. Visual onsets have automatic access to the eye control system via the lower levels. Various centres in each pathway are interconnected via reciprocal inhibition. The model accounts for a number of well-established phenomena in target-elicited saccades: the gap effect, express saccades, the remote distractor effect, and the global effect. High-level control of the pathways in tasks such as visual search and reading is discussed; it operates through spatial selection and search selection, which generally combine in an automated way. The model is examined in relation to data from patients with unilateral neglect. (shrink)

This paper identifies and addresses persistent gaps in the consideration of ethical practice in ‘technology for good’ development contexts. Its main contribution is to model an integrative approach using multiple ethical frameworks to analyse and understand the everyday nature of ethical practice, including in professional practice among ‘technology for good’ start-ups. The paper identifies inherent paradoxes in the ‘technology for good’ sector as well as ethical gaps related to (1) the sometimes-misplaced assignment of virtuousness to an individual; (2) difficulties (...) in understanding social constraints on ethical action; and (3) the often unaccounted for mismatch between ethical intentions and outcomes in everyday practice, including in professional work associated with an ‘ethical turn’ in technology. These gaps persist even in contexts where ethics are foregrounded as matters of concern. To address the gaps, the paper suggests systemic, rather than individualized, considerations of care and capability applied to innovation settings, in combination with considerations of virtue and consequence. This paper advocates for addressing these challenges holistically in order to generate renewed capacity for change at a systemic level. (shrink)

We prove that in the Cohen extension adding ℵ3 generic reals to a model of containing a simplified (ω1, 2)‐morass, gap‐2 morass‐definable η1‐orderings with cardinality ℵ3 are order‐isomorphic. Hence it is consistent that and that morass‐definable η1‐orderings with cardinality of the continuum are order‐isomorphic. We prove that there are ultrapowers of over ω that are gap‐2 morass‐definable. The constructions use a simplified gap‐2 morass, and commutativity with morass‐maps and morass‐embeddings, to extend a transfinite back‐and‐forth construction of order‐type ω1 to (...) an order‐preserving bijection between objects of cardinality ℵ3. (shrink)

Grush and Churchland (1995) attempt to address aspects of the proposal that we have been making concerning a possible physical mechanism underlying the phenomenon of consciousness. Unfortunately, they employ arguments that are highly misleading and, in some important respects, factually incorrect. Their article ‘Gaps in Penrose’s Toilings’ is addressed specifically at the writings of one of us (Penrose), but since the particular model they attack is one put forward by both of us (Hameroff and Penrose, 1995; 1996), it is (...) appropriate that we both reply; but since our individual remarks refer to different aspects of their criticism we are commenting on their article separately. The logical arguments discussed by Grush and Churchland, and the related physics are answered in Part l by Penrose, largely by pointing out precisely where these arguments have already been treated in detail in Shadows of the Mind (Penrose, 1994). In Part 2, Hameroff replies to various points on the biological side, showing for example how they have seriously misunderstood what they refer to as ‘physiological evidence’ regarding to effects of the drug colchicine. The reply serves also to discuss aspects of our model ‘orchestrated objective reduction in brain microtubules – Orch OR’ which attempts to deal with the serious problems of consciousness more directly and completely than any previous theory. (shrink)

Specially selected articles from the Journal of Advanced Nursing have been updated where appropriate by the original author. Models, Theories and Concepts brings together international authorities in their specialist fields to consider the gaps occurring between theory and practice, as well as the evaluation of a selection of models and emerging theories.

The is-ought gap is Hume’s claim that we can’t get an ‘ought’ from just ‘is’s. Prior (“The Autonomy of Ethics,” 1960) showed that its most straightforward formulation, a staple of introductory philosophy classes, fails. Many authors attempt to resurrect the claim by restricting its domain syntactically or by reformulating it in terms of models of deontic logic. Those attempts prove to be complex, incomplete, or incorrect. I provide a simple reformulation of the is-ought gap that closely fits Hume’s description of (...) it. My formulation of the gap avoids the proposed counterexamples from Prior and offers a natural explanation of why they seem compelling. Moreover, I show that my formulation of the gap is guaranteed by standard theories of the semantics of normative terms, and that provides a more general reason to accept it. (shrink)

This paper develops a model of choice with an agent that is capable of experiencing curiosity using Loewenstein’s :75–98, 1994) information gap interpretation of curiosity. We then proceed to determine the restrictions on choice behaviour implied by the model in two choice environments: no discovery—where the Decision-Maker does not have the opportunity to learn—and discovery—where she is afforded such an opportunity. These restrictions can be applied by an observer to determine if a Decision-Maker’s choices align with the (...) class='Hi'>model. (shrink)

Answering one of the main questions of [S.-D. Friedman, T. Hyttinen and V. Kulikov, Generalized descriptive set theory and classification theory, Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 230 80, Chap. 7], we show that there is a tight connection between the depth of a classifiable shallow theory [Formula: see text] and the Borel rank of the isomorphism relation [Formula: see text] on its models of size [Formula: see text], for [Formula: see text] any cardinal satisfying [Formula: see text]. This is achieved by (...) establishing a link between said rank and the [Formula: see text]-Scott height of the [Formula: see text]-sized models of [Formula: see text], and yields to the following descriptive set-theoretical analog of Shelah’s Main Gap Theorem: Given a countable complete first-order theory [Formula: see text], either [Formula: see text] is Borel with a countable Borel rank, or it is not Borel at all. The dividing line between the two situations is the same as in Shelah’s theorem, namely that of classifiable shallow theories. We also provide a Borel reducibility version of the above theorem, discuss some limitations to the possible complexities of [Formula: see text], and provide a characterization of categoricity of [Formula: see text] in terms of the descriptive set-theoretical complexity of [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

In this topical section, we highlight the next step of research on modeling aiming to contribute to the emerging literature that radically refrains from approaching modeling as a scientific endeavor. Modeling surpasses “doing science” because it is frequently incorporated into decision-making processes in politics and management, i.e., areas which are not solely epistemically oriented. We do not refer to the production of models in academia for abstract or imaginary applications in practical fields, but instead highlight the real entwinement of science (...) and policy and the real erosion of their boundaries. Models in decision making – due to their strong entwinement with policy and management – are utilized differently than models in science; they are employed for different purposes and with different constraints. We claim that “being a part of decision-making” implies that models are elements of a very particular situation, in which knowledge about the present and the future is limited but dependence of decisions on the future is distinct. Emphasis on the future indicates that decisions are made about actions that have severe and lasting consequences. In these specific situations, models enable not only the acquisition of knowledge (the primary goal of science) but also enable deciding upon actions that change the course of events. As a result, there are specific ways to construct effective models and justify their results. Although some studies have explored this topic, our understanding of how models contribute to decision making outside of science remains fragmentary. This topical section aims to fill this gap in research and formulate an agenda for additional and more systematic investigations in the field. (shrink)

The concept of cultural capital has been increasingly used in American sociology to study the impact of cultural reproduction on social reproduction. However, much confusion surrounds this concept. In this essay, we disentangle Bourdieu and Passeron's original work on cultural capital, specifying the theoretical roles cultural capital plays in their model, and the various types of high status signals they are concerned with. We expand on their work by proposing a new definition of cultural capital which focuses on cultural (...) and social exclusion. We note a number of theoretical ambiguities and gaps in the original model, as well as specific methodological problems. In the second section, we shift our attention to the American literature on cultural capital. We discuss its assumptions and compare it with the original work. We also propose a research agenda which focuses on social and cultural selection and decouples cultural capital from the French context in which it was originally conceived to take into consideration the distinctive features of American culture. This agenda consists in 1) assessing the relevance of the concept of legitimate culture in the U.S.; 2) documenting the distinctive American repertoire of high status cultural signals; and 3) analyzing how cultural capital is turned into profits in America. (shrink)

This thesis evaluates several powerful arguments that not only deny that brain states and conscious states are one and the same thing, but also claim that such an identity is unintelligible. I argue that these accounts do not undermine physicalism because they don’t provide any direct or independent justification for their tacit assumptions about a link between modes of presentation and explanation. In my view intelligibility of psychophysical identity should not be based exclusively on the analysis of meaning. The main (...) concern then should be why expect that fully intelligible explanation must be based on the descriptions of the causal roles as modes of presentation. To this effect I propose that we examine "psychological concepts". The psychological concepts are concepts that use descriptions of the functional roles but are about qualities of our experiences. I propose to analyze them in quality space models in order to unveil why phenomenal concepts are expected to refer via descriptions of the causal or functional roles. The quality space should be understood here as a multidimensional space consisting of several axes of relative similarity and differences among the structures of ordering in different modalities of conscious experience. On my proposal it is possible that some axes in the quality space consist of their own quality spaces so we could “zoom in” and “zoom out” into the descriptions of the functional roles and see more clearly what the explanation of certain aspects of consciousness looks like when thought of in terms of psychological concepts. (shrink)

We give some information about the action of Aut on M, where M is a countable arithmetically saturated model of Peano Arithmetic. We concentrate on analogues of moving gaps and covering gaps inside M.

This paper aims to model multilevel interdependencies in complex organisational systems and proposes application for resilience analysis. Most of the existing research studied interdependencies only at the single-level and overlooked their multilevel character. In response to this gap, we propose a multilevel approach to better comprehend the complexity of interdependencies in organisational systems. More specifically, the study focuses on how interdependencies are shaped across multiple organisational levels. To understand the research problem, we use multilevel and social network theories to (...) elaborate the concept at five organisational levels, namely, individual, intraunit, interunit, intraorganisational, and interorganisational. Further, we show the application of multilevel interdependencies into analysis of organisational resilience. To this end, we construct a multiplex model of a real world organisational system that comprises formal and informal relations of different social exchange strength. Using the agent-based simulations of the organisational system, we investigate the relations between organisational interdependencies and organisational performance in normal and disrupted conditions. With the results, we argue that managing multilevel interdependencies is crucial to reduce vulnerability of organisational systems. By introducing the multilevel conceptualisation of interdependencies and presenting their influence on organisational resilience, we hope to pave a path to managing the complexity of interdependencies and strategic resilience enhancement in organisational systems. (shrink)

ArgumentAgent-based social simulations have historically been evaluated using two criteria: verification and validation. This article questions the adequacy of this dual evaluation scheme. It claims that the scheme does not conform to everyday practices of evaluation, and has, over time, fostered a theory-practice gap in the assessment of social simulations. This gap originates because the dual evaluation scheme, inherited from computer science and software engineering, on one hand, overemphasizes the technical and formal aspects of the implementation process and, on the (...) other hand, misrepresents the connection between the conceptual and the computational model. The mismatch between evaluation theory and practice, it is suggested, might be overcome if practitioners of agent-based social simulation adopt a single criterion evaluation scheme in which: i) the technical/formal issues of the implementation process are tackled as a matter of debugging or instrument calibration, and ii) the epistemological issues surrounding the connection between conceptual and computational models are addressed as a matter of validation. (shrink)

This article aims to clarify and improve thinking on normative government laboratories: partly publically funded laboratories that work to improve the functioning of society, particularly through boosting innovation. This article focuses on a case study of TNO, a large Dutch laboratory, and an exemplary case of this type of laboratory. This article argues that TNO is perceived as a plug to fill a gap between knowledge production and use, in a belief that there is a direct and causal link between (...) laboratory knowledge production and use. As a plug to fill a gap, however, TNO, and laboratories like it, can never perform satisfactorily, making an enduring cycle of negative performance evaluations and major reorganizations inevitable. This article suggests that a network model of innovation might provide a way out of the impasse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Loopholes, Gaps, and What Is Held Fast”Lorraine Code (bio)Keywordsepistemology, incredulity, knowing other people, memory, testimonyNancy Potter’s compelling essay points to some of the limitations of the theoretical apparatus that the post-positivist empiricist epistemologies of the Anglo-American mainstream make available for evaluating experiential memory claims in general, and “false memory syndrome” in particular. The loopholes and gaps in these theories of knowledge push urgent questions about testimony, trust, (...) and the politics of knowledge into a prominent place on the agendas of successor epistemology projects. These politics are enacted in societies whose dominant rhetoric privileges eye-witness evidence and “knowledge by acquaintance” as sources of objective knowledge, yet whose practices of incredulity—of granting and withholding acknowledgement to testimonial knowledge claims—expose power-saturated structures of dominance and subordination and of arbitrarily uneven distributions of epistemic authority. 1For classical empiricists and their successors, perception, memory and testimony, hierarchically ordered with perception on top, count as the principal sources of empirical knowledge. This ordering maps the relative reliability of the processes, with perception ranking as most stable, reliable and secure, memory coming second on all of these scores, and testimony ranking a poor third, closer to opinion, hearsay and rumor than to the other more respectable sources. Perception, for these theories, is “immediate” in that it is direct, bare, uncontaminated either by the particularities of the perceiving subject or of the perceptual event: from its presumed (but contestable) immediacy, all the rest follows. Memory counts as perception at one remove, its reliability a function of the relative “vividness” of the perceptions it commemorates. The esteem commonly claimed for eye-witness testimony derives from this conception of memory, which is believed to ground the testimony because of its presumed proximity to “immediate” perception. Yet testimony, even in its restricted “knowledge by description” form, tends by contrast with perception and memory to be a shaky affair; and as the temporal distance between event and testimony increases, so knowledge of matters unavailable to direct observation fares less and less well in classical and post-positivist epistemologies. A distrust of testimony is at once understandable and odd, because so small a proportion both of communal and of “individual” knowledge indeed derives from first-hand observations and experiences: most of it comes from testimony in an extended sense that encompasses books, teachings, media reports, all of the sources and resources on which both secular and scholarly knowledge relies for much of its substance. This expanded construction of the term runs alongside [End Page 255] the first-personal “testimonial” sense that is more plainly operative in discussions of false memory syndrome which, despite its experiential source, is often likewise contested on grounds that discredit the “privileged access” status that these same epistemologies claim for experience at first hand.Epistemologists commonly assimilate testimony to monologic, observational knowledge, deriving its constitutive features from instances where a testimonial utterance can pose as another perception—this time an auditory one—in a personal set of knowledge-producing observations (e.g., Fricker 1987). Because the speaker may be lying or mistaken, the process may fail to transmit knowledge; but this failure can be read as a simple perceptual error or a misremembering. Such approaches ignore the constitutive function of an interpreter/listener in fostering or thwarting testimonial knowledge to subsume it, too, much under an observational model. Indeed, not only do they separate the knower from the known and the process of knowing, as Potter observes, they also separate the knower from other knowers to guard against their influencing (= contaminating) the knowledge-production process. Experiences where an interlocutor actually enables the production of knowledge do not figure in such analyses, 2 whose effect is to suggest that giving or hearing testimony invokes no more significant moral-political issues than do acts of perceiving tables and chairs: that hearing, like seeing, is believing. (Norman Malcolm’s analysis of memory, which Potter cites, would also underwrite such a view of testimony.) Yet standard empiricist and post-positivist epistemologies generate an inquisitorial model of eliciting testimony in which the more generalized “testimony” in the knowledge that people acquire from books, media reports, conversation, reference sources recedes from... (shrink)

The fundamental tenet of contemporary sociobiology, namely the assumption of a single process of evolution involving the selection of genes, is critically examined. An alternative multiple-level, multiple-process model of evolution is presented which posits that the primary process that operates via selection upon the genes cannot account for certain kinds of biological phenomena, especially complex, learned, social behaviours. The primary process has evolved subsidiary evolutionary levels and processes that act to bridge the gap between genes and these complex behaviours. (...) The subsidiary levels are development, individual animal learning, and socioculture itself. It is argued that individual learning is pivotal to the derivation and biological analysis of culture. The differences between cultural and noncultural societies are stressed. It is concluded that such a multiple-level model of evolution can form the basis for reconciling opposing sides in the sociobiology debate. (shrink)

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence, such as large language models and text-to-image models, has had a profound impact on society. The ability of these systems to simulate human capabilities such as text writing and image creation is radically redefining a wide range of practices, from artistic production to education. While there is no doubt that these innovations are beneficial to our lives, the pervasiveness of these technologies should not be underestimated, and raising increasingly pressing ethical questions that require a (...) radical resemantization of certain notions traditionally ascribed to humans alone. Among these notions, that of technological intentionality plays a central role. With regard to this notion, this paper first aims to highlight what we propose to define in terms of the intentionality gap, whereby, insofar as, currently, (1) it is increasingly difficult to assign responsibility for the actions performed by AI systems to humans, as these systems are increasingly autonomous, and (2) it is increasingly complex to reconstruct the reasoning behind the results they produce as we move away from good old fashioned AI; it is now even more difficult to trace the intentionality of AI systems back to the intentions of the developers and end users. This gap between human and technological intentionality requires a revision of the concept of intentionality; to this end, we propose here to assign preter-intentional behavior to generative AI. We use this term to highlight how AI intentionality both incorporates and transcends human intentionality; i.e., it goes beyond (preter) human intentionality while being linked to it. To show the merits of this notion, we first rule out the possibility that such preter-intentionality is merely an unintended consequence and then explore its nature by comparing it with some paradigmatic notions of technological intentionality present in the wider debate on the moral (and technological) status of AI. (shrink)

Experimental studies show that some corvids, apes, and rodents possess a common long-term memory system that allows them to take goal-directed actions on the basis of absent spatiotemporal contexts. In other words, evidence supports the hypothesis that Episodic Memory —far from being uniquely human— has evolved as a cross-species meaning making system. However, within this zoosemiotic breakthrough, neurocognitive studies now struggle characterizing the relations between teleological factors and phenomenological factors that would account for the episodic behavior displayed by these living (...) beings. Within such field, this paper identifies four epistemological gaps —the ‘Nagelian’, ‘de Waalian’, ‘Chomskyan’, and ‘semiotic’ gaps—, making a case for the need of a future biosemiotic model of Alloanimal Episodic Memory to come into the equation. As a whole, I conclude that experimental developments in AEM research, and philosophical advancements in biosemiotics could converge through the concept of semiosis. Introducing the latter would account for animal episodic agency as a causal influence and continuity between the above relations, outclassing the reductionist and Cartesian separation between ‘external’ bodily behavior and ‘internal’ computational operations. (shrink)

abstract Apparently, there are some important tensions that must be confronted in grappling with the issue of the permissibility of humanitarian intervention. Notably, there is the tension between respecting sovereignty and responding to the plight of the needy, that is, there is tension between respecting governments’ authority and desire for non‐interference, and respecting the individuals who suffer under their leadership. I argue that these and other tensions should be resolved in favour of protecting the individuals who suffer in humanitarian crises, (...) though the way to do this defensibly requires that we put in place many safeguards against abuse. My main theoretical argument emerges from a model of global justice that I develop. I then examine recent reports on intervention and state sovereignty compiled by an inter‐national commission in order to show that consensus is building about the permissibility of military intervention to protect fundamental human rights for vulnerable populations in certain cases. Some important public policy proposals are evolving in the direction of protecting individuals over states, but there are still some important gaps that remain between what is theoretically desirable and proposals about international law. I show where some of those gaps are and how we can close them. (shrink)