Trust is a natural mechanism by which an autonomous party, an agent, can deal with the inherent uncertainty regarding the behaviours of other parties and the uncertainty in the information it shares with those parties. Trust is thus crucial in any decentralised system. This paper builds on recent efforts to use argumentation to reason about trust. Specifically, a set of schemes is provided, and abstract patterns of reasoning that apply in multiple situations geared towards trust. Schemes are described in which (...) one agent, A, can establish arguments for trusting another agent, B, directly, as well as schemes that A can use to construct arguments for trusting C, where C is trusted by B. For both sets of schemes, a set of critical questions is offered that identify the situations in which these schemes can fail. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

We present a generic denotational semantic framework for protocols for dialogs between rational and autonomous agents over action which allows for retraction and revocation of proposals for action. The semantic framework views participants in a deliberation dialog as jointly and incrementally manipulating the contents of shared spaces of action-intention tokens. The framework extends prior work by decoupling the identity of an agent who first articulates a proposal for action from the identity of any agent then empowered to retract or revoke (...) the proposal, thereby permitting proposals, entreaties, commands, promises, etc., to be distinguished semantically. (shrink)

This paper outlines the concept of values-based food systems building on the related idea of values-based food chains (VBFCs), terms which are definitionally diffuse but which cohere around a common commitment to environmental sustainability and social justice. The paper examines the development of four multi-stakeholder local food partnerships in Birmingham, Bristol, Rotherham and Sheffield—and the national Sustainable Food Places network to which they are affiliated. Based on our collaborative research with these organizations and a review of their public statements, the (...) paper identifies the values that guide their work. The paper then draws on the evidence of a series of workshops which revealed some of the challenges the partnerships face as they seek to put their values into practice, focusing on governance issues (and related funding challenges) and the implementation of equity, diversity and inclusion policies. Our findings show that the partnerships’ work is consistent with the concept of values-based food systems though they do not use the term themselves. Our research also shows the range of work being undertaken by these local food partnerships with much in common but also some significant divergence in their activities. The paper concludes with some reflections about scale and the differences between our English case studies and earlier work on VBFCs in the US. (shrink)

We presume a background theory which allows for indeterminacy of states of affairs involving objects, extending even to indeterminacy of identity between objects. A sentence reporting such an indeterminate state of affairs lacks truth-value. We extend this to a theory of sets, similar to ZFU, in which membership in, and identity between, sets may also be indeterminate.

We present a logic-based formalism for modeling ofdialogues between intelligent and autonomous software agents,building on a theory of abstract dialogue games which we present.The formalism enables representation of complex dialogues assequences of moves in a combination of dialogue games, and allowsdialogues to be embedded inside one another. The formalism iscomputational and its modular nature enables different types ofdialogues to be represented.

Mood profiling has a long history in the field of sport and exercise. Several novel mood profile clusters were identified and described in the literature recently ( Parsons-Smith et al., 2017 ). In the present study, we investigated whether the same clusters were evident in an Italian-language, sport and exercise context. The Italian Mood Scale (ITAMS; Quartiroli et al., 2017 ) was administered to 950 Italian-speaking sport participants (659 females, 284 males, 7 unspecified; age range = 16–63 year, M (...) = 25.03, SD = 7.62) and seeded k -means clustering methodology applied to the responses. Six distinct mood profiles were identified, termed the iceberg, inverse iceberg, inverse Everest, shark fin, surface, and submerged profiles, which closely resembled those reported among English-speaking participants ( Parsons-Smith et al., 2017 ). Significant differences were found in the distribution of specific mood profiles across gender and age groups. Findings supported the cross-cultural generalizability of the six mood profiles and offer new research avenues into their antecedents, correlates and behavioral consequences in Italian-language contexts. (shrink)

Advancements and deployments of AI-based systems, especially Deep Learning-driven generative language models, have accomplished impressive results over the past few years. Nevertheless, these remarkable achievements are intertwined with a related fear that such technologies might lead to a general relinquishing of our lives’s control to AIs. This concern, which also motivates the increasing interest in the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) research field, is mostly caused by the opacity of the output of deep learning systems and the way that it is (...) generated, which is largely obscure to laypeople. A dialectical interaction with such systems may enhance the users’ understanding and build a more robust trust towards AI. Commonly employed as specific formalisms for modelling intra-agent communications, dialogue games prove to be useful tools to rely upon when dealing with user’s explanation needs. The literature already offers some dialectical protocols that expressly handle explanations and their delivery. This paper fully formalises the novel Explanation–Question–Response (EQR) dialogue and its properties, whose main purpose is to provide satisfactory information (i.e., justified according to argumentative semantics) whilst ensuring a simplified protocol, in comparison with other existing approaches, for humans and artificial agents. (shrink)

Models of deliberative dialogue are fundamental for developing autonomous systems that support human practical reasoning. The question discussed in this paper is whether existing models are able to...

In multi-agent systems (MAS), abstract argumentation and argumentation schemes are increasingly important. To be useful for MAS, argumentation schemes require a computational approach so that agent...

In this paper11This is a version of a paper originally presented at ArgMAS 2014. we address some limitations with proposals concerning an argumentation scheme for practical reasoning grounded on ac...

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

Firewalls are an important tool in the assurance of network security. Packet filtering firewalls are configured by providing a set of rules that identify how to handle individual data packets that...

The importance of negotiation has increased in the last years as a relevant interaction to solve conflicts in multi-agent systems. Although there are many different scenarios, a typical negotiating...

This paper began life as a short section of a more general paper about non-classical mereologies. In that paper I had a mereological theory that I wanted to show could be applied to all sorts of different metaphysical positions — notably, to those positions that believe in mereological vagueness in re — in “vague individuals”. To do that I felt I first had to dispatch the leading rival theory of vague individuals, which is due to Peter van Inwa-gen, and (...) holds that the part-whole relation admits of degrees. It seemed to me that this theory had a serious technical problem, or at best a serious gap. I sat down to write a paragraph or two highlighting the gap, preferably showing that it couldn’t be filled. This paper is the result. (shrink)

For nearly four centuries Peter of Spain's influential Summaries of Logic was the basis for teaching logic; few university texts were read by more people. This new translation presents the Latin and English on facing pages, and comes with an extensive introduction, chapter-by-chapter analysis, notes, and a full bibliography.

Peter Geach describes the 'doctrine of distribution' as the view that a term is distributed if it refers to everything that it denotes, and undistributed if it refers to only some of the things that it denotes. He argues that the notion, so explained, is incoherent. He claims that the doctrine of distribution originates from a degenerate use of the notion of ?distributive supposition? in medieval supposition theory sometime in the 16th century. This paper proposes instead that the doctrine (...) of distribution occurs at least as early as the 12th century, and that it originates from a study of Aristotle's notion of a term's being ?taken universally?, and not from the much later theory of distributive supposition. A detailed version of the doctrine found in the Port Royal Logic is articulated, and compared with a slightly different modern version. Finally, Geach's arguments for the incoherence of the doctrine are discussed and rejected. (shrink)

In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehäuse that modern capitalism has created, a concept that Talcott Parsons famously rendered as the "iron cage." This article examines the status of Parsons's canonical translation; the putative sources of its imagery ; and the more complex idea that Weber himself sought to evoke with the "shell as hard as steel": a reconstitution of the human subject under bureaucratic capitalism in which "steel" becomes emblematic of (...) modernity. Steel, unlike the "element" iron, is a product of human fabrication. It is both hard and potentially flexible. Further, whereas a cage confines human agents, but leaves their powers otherwise intact, a "shell" suggests that modern capitalism has created a new kind of being. After examining objections to this interpretation, I argue that whatever the problems with Parsons's "iron cage" as a rendition of Weber's own metaphor, it has become a "traveling idea," a fertile coinage, in its own right, an intriguing example of how the translator's imagination can impose itself influentially on the text and its readers. (shrink)

Social theory has a discovered and discoverable past and a complex, contested, dynamic, and anxious present. All of these adjectives save the last one-anxious-are reflected in various ways and with differing emphases throughout this handbook. I will say something about "anxious" below, but before doing so will offer a rationale for producing this multi-authored, two-volume overview reflecting the diversity of theory work in sociology and offering a sense of both where the discipline has come and where it is today. There (...) is no univocal answer to the question, What does social theory mean? Since the institutionalization of sociology in the academy and its development of subfields, theory has found a place in the overall educational structure of the discipline, in a manner akin to the way that methodology has. That is to say, both theory and methodology have been viewed in some fashion as essential to sociological inquiry, and thus relevant to all of the substantive subfields within it. At the same time, it became clear early on that consensus regarding the meaning of theory has proven elusive. As World War II came to an end and the rapid expansion in higher education was about to commence, Robert K. Merton (1945), the protégé of Talcott Parsons, claimed that six types of analysis had come to be described as sociological theory. Over six decades later, Gabriel Abend (2008) identified seven distinct though sometimes overlapping meanings attributed to theory-a figure that Omar Lizardo (2014) thinks is at the lower end of the actual number of different meanings. (shrink)

Needless to say, Charles Parsons’s long awaited book1 is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the philosophy of mathematics. But as Parsons himself says, this has been a very long time in the writing. Its chapters extensively “draw on”, “incorporate material from”, “overlap considerably with”, or “are expanded versions of” papers published over the last twenty-five or so years. What we are reading is thus a multi-layered text with different passages added at different times. And this (...) makes for a rather bumpy read. There is another route Parsons could have taken: he could have reprinted the relevant papers with postscripts, and then top-and-tailed the collection with a preface and added concluding reflections. It must sound very ungrateful, but I rather suspect that that might have worked better. Much of the book is about arithmetic. But Parsons has woven into the discussion claims about mathematics more generally and about set theory in particular. We might well have a basic worry about this structure: for do defensible claims about the ontology and epistemology of arithmetic have to be generalizable to apply to more infinitary mathematics? For example, suppose you are attracted to a Hellman-like modal structuralist account of arithmetic: then should you think it a problem if you suspect that such an account can’t readily be extended to cope e.g. with set theory (since you boggle at the idea of possible worlds free of abstracta but with enough structure to somehow model ZFC)? Parsons himself seems to waver over such questions. So for present purposes, I’ll focus just on arithmetic, and in what follows I’ll revisit two of the most familiar Parsonian themes, his views on structuralism as an account of the ontology of arithmetic, and his exploration of the role of intuition in grounding arithmetical knowledge. (shrink)

El concepto moderno de solidaridad destaca por su carácter dinámico que se asienta sobre una tensión dialéctica entre la individualización de una sociedad pluralista por un lado y la funcionalidad integradora de una comunidad delimitada por otro. Pero la inmersión de los sujetos en instituciones que remedian los intereses individuales a través de una “confiabilidad abstracta” nos exige revisar la relación entre Estado moderno e identidad nacional desde una perspectiva crítica inspirada en la teoría de Nicos Poulantzas. Esto nos lleva (...) a un nuevo concepto de solidaridad que sustituye la homogeneización nacional por otra forma de igualdad razonada sobre individuos autónomos e independientes. Un modelo de solidaridad así reconstruido resuelve las deficiencias de la teoría sociológica acerca del fundamento normativo del Estado de bienestar. (shrink)

The contributions to this volume are from participants of the international conference "Kreisel's Interests - On the Foundations of Logic and Mathematics", which took place from 13 to 14 2018 at the University of Salzburg in Salzburg, Austria. The contributions have been revised and partially extended. Among the contributors are Akihiro Kanamori, Göran Sundholm, Ulrich Kohlenbach, Charles Parsons, Daniel Isaacson, and Kenneth Derus. The contributions cover the discussions between Kreisel and Wittgenstein on philosophy of mathematics, Kreisel's Dictum, proof theory, (...) the discussions between Kreisel and Gödel on philosophy of mathematics, some bibliographical facts, and a collection of extracts from Kreisel's letters. (shrink)

Nine of the papers collected here derive directly from a conference organized by Schirn in Munich in 1991. Seven others, three of them reprinted, have been intelligently chosen to complement the original nine. The collection has no overarching theme, nor is it dominated by any particular approach to Frege’s thought. It is “a mixed selection”, and aims to reflect “the prevailing tendency in current Frege scholarship”. The influence of Dreben is less in evidence than one might expect, but otherwise the (...) collection meets that broad brief pretty well. Some of the collection’s best papers—for example, those by Burge, Boolos, Dummett, Heck, and Terence Parsons—are essential reading. Inevitably, not all the others have that standing. But, excepting only an over-long essay by the editor, each deserves its place. (shrink)

Explores the philosophy of corporate responsibility in in terms of collective vs individualist theory. It reports and defends distinctions among collectivities that run counter to individualist theory, develops a theory of the corporation as a moral person, and provides applications of the theory to actual cases.

Normative ethical theories owe us an account of how to evaluate decisions under risk and uncertainty. Deontologists seem at a disadvantage here: our best decision theories seem tailor-made for consequentialism. For example, decision theory enjoins us to always perform our best option; deontology is more permissive. In this paper, we discuss and defend the idea that, when some pro-tanto wrongful act is all-things considered permissible, because it is a ‘lesser evil’, it is often merely permissible, by the lights of deontology. (...) We show that this raises new problems for deontological decision theory, and we show that to resolve them, we need to take a more innovative approach to morally evaluating decision-making under risk and uncertainty. (shrink)

Technology is our conduit of power. In our modern world, technology is the gatekeeper deciding who shall have and who shall have not. Either technology works for you or you work for technology. It shapes the human race just as much as we shape it. But where is this symbiosis going? Who provides the directions, the intentions, the goals of this human-machine partnership? Such decisions do not derive from the creators of technology who are enmeshed in their individual innovations. They (...) neither come from our social leaders who possess only sufficient technical understanding to react to innovations, not to anticipate or direct their progress. Neither is there evidence of some omnipotent 'invisible hand,' the simple fact is that no one is directing this enterprise. In Mind, Machine and Morality, Peter Hancock asks questions about this insensate progress and has the temerity to suggest some cognate answers. He argues for the unbreakable symbiosis of purpose and process, and examines the dangerous possibilities that emerge when science and purpose meet. Historically, this work is a modern-day child of Bacon's hope for the 'Great Instauration.' However, unlike its forebear, the focus here is on human-machine systems. The emphasis centers on the conception that the active, extensive face of modern philosophy is technology. Whatever we are to become is bound up not only in our biology but critically in our technology also. And to achieve rational progress we need to articulate manifest purpose. This book is one step along the purposive road. (shrink)

Subjectivism about moral wrongness is the view that the moral wrongness of an action (if and how wrong that action is) is grounded solely in facts about the agent's mental state at the time of action. Antisubjectivism is the denial of subjectivism. I offer an argument against subjectivism, and for antisubjectivism, based on an examination of the main concern of the morally conscientious person, viz., the concern to avoid acting wrongly.

With the intensifying shortage of care-providers and mounting financial burden of an aging population in Japan, artificial intelligence (AI) offers a potential solution through AI-driven robots, chatbots, smartphone apps, and other AI medical services. Yet Japanese acceptance of medical AI, especially patient care, largely depends on the degree of ‘humanness’ that can be integrated into intelligent technologies. As empathy is considered a core value in the practice of healthcare workers, artificially intelligent agents must have the ability to perceive human emotions (...) and respond in an affective, human-like manner. This paper presents the results of a nationwide survey in Japan 2023 about the public perception of the use of emotionalized AI (EAI) in healthcare. The sample included 2000 Japanese citizens from 20 to 69 years old with an average age of 45 years. The questionnaire included 65 items in six categories: demographic, perception of the existing healthcare system, attitude towards the use of AI, and EAI in healthcare, trust and privacy concerns and fear of AI, and seeking literacy on new technologies. The analysis of the responses demonstrates that overall, the Japanese population has a limited knowledge of AI, EAI, and smart technologies but trusts the healthcare system, physicians, and staff to use it properly, with little worries over the potential pitfalls related to data security and safety. However, they prefer the use of more human resources and are concerned about privacy and the high cost of new technology, and believe little information is being provided to them through government and media. (shrink)

There is presently a debate between Subjectivists and Objectivists about moral wrongness. Subjectivism is the view that the moral status of our actions, whether they are morally wrong or not, is grounded in our subjective circumstances – either our beliefs about, or our evidence concerning, the world around us. Objectivism, on the other hand, is the view that the moral status of our actions is grounded in our objective circumstances – all those facts other than those which comprise our subjective (...) circumstances. A third view, Ecumenism, has it that the moral status of our actions is grounded both in our subjective and our objective circumstances. After outlining and evaluating the various arguments both against Subjectivism and against Objectivism, this Element offers a tentative defense of Objectivism about moral wrongness. (shrink)

In the past few decades, scholars have offered positive, normative, and most recently, interpretive theories of contract law. These theories have proceeded primarily from deontological and consequentialist premises. In A Theory of Contract Law: Empirical Understandings and Moral Psychology, Professor Peter A. Alces confronts the leading interpretive theories of contract and demonstrates their interpretive doctrinal failures. Professor Alces presents the leading canonical cases that inform the extant theories of Contract law in both their historical and transactional contexts and, argues (...) that moral psychology provides a better explanation for the contract doctrine than do alternative comprehensive interpretive approaches. (shrink)

We study the proof-theoretic strength and effective content of the infinite form of Ramsey's theorem for pairs. Let RT n k denote Ramsey's theorem for k-colorings of n-element sets, and let RT $^n_{ denote (∀ k)RT n k . Our main result on computability is: For any n ≥ 2 and any computable (recursive) k-coloring of the n-element sets of natural numbers, there is an infinite homogeneous set X with X'' ≤ T 0 (n) . Let IΣ n and BΣ (...) n denote the Σ n induction and bounding schemes, respectively. Adapting the case n = 2 of the above result (where X is low 2 ) to models of arithmetic enables us to show that RCA 0 + IΣ 2 + RT 2 2 is conservative over RCA 0 + IΣ 2 for Π 1 1 statements and that $RCA_0 + I\Sigma_3 + RT^2_{ , is Π 1 1 -conservative over RCA 0 + IΣ 3 . It follows that RCA 0 + RT 2 2 does not imply BΣ 3 . In contrast, J. Hirst showed that $RCA_0 + RT^2_{ does imply BΣ 3 , and we include a proof of a slightly strengthened version of this result. It follows that $RT^2_{ is strictly stronger than RT 2 2 over RCA 0. (shrink)

The purpose of this communication is to announce some recent results on the computably enumerable sets. There are two disjoint sets of results; the first involves invariant classes and the second involves automorphisms of the computably enumerable sets. What these results have in common is that the guts of the proofs of these theorems uses a new form of definable coding for the computably enumerable sets.We will work in the structure of the computably enumerable sets. The language is just inclusion, (...) ⊆. This structure is called ε.All sets will be computably enumerable non-computable sets and all degrees will be computably enumerable and non-computable, unless otherwise noted. Our notation and definitions are standard and follow Soare [1987]; however we will warm up with some definitions and notation issues so the reader need not consult Soare [1987]. Some historical remarks follow in Section 2.1 and throughout Section 3.We will also consider the quotient structure ε modulo the ideal of finite sets, ε*. ε* is a definable quotient structure of ε since “Χ is finite” is definable in ε; “Χ is finite” iff all subsets of Χ are computable. We use A* to denote the equivalent class of A under the ideal of finite sets. (shrink)

Although knowledge of torture and physical and psychological abuse was widespread at both the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and known to medical personnel, there was no official report before the January 2004 Army investigation of military health personnel reporting abuse, degradation, or signs of torture. Mounting information from many sources, including Pentagon documents, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc., indicate that medical personnel failed to maintain medical records, (...) conduct routine medical examinations, provide proper care of disabled and injured detainees, accurately report illnesses and injuries, and falsified medical records and death certificates. Medical personnel and medical information was also used to design and implement psychologically and physically coercive interrogations. The United States military medical system failed to protect detainee's human rights, violated the basic principles of medical ethics and ignored the basic tenets of medical professionalism. (shrink)

Peter Kwasniewski shows that St. Thomas contemplates the nature of ecstasy at key stages in the development of his thought and that it plays a crucial role in his doctrine of love. St. Thomas recognized that all love involves ecstatic transcendence, whether it be the creature's self-oblation to the Creator, the reverence of an inferior for a superior, a superior's generosity toward an inferior, or the mutual affection and help of equals joined in friendship. Love of persons for their (...) own sake generates an ecstatic love in which the self is borne as a gift to another subject by sharing a common life aspiring to common goods. Kwasniewski also examines Aquinas on the question of whether or not God experiences ecstasy, and if so, in what ways. (shrink)