bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dorsal Prefrontal Cortex
Authors: Passingham Richard E.
Published: August 2021

The dorsal prefrontal (PF) cortex generates and plans the goals or targets for foveal search and manual foraging. The goals are conditional on the relative recency of prior events and actions, and the connections of areas 9/46 and 46 explain how these areas can support the ability to generate the next goal. Area 9/46 can generate sequences of eye movements because it has visuospatial inputs from the cortex in the intraparietal sulcus and outputs to the frontal eye field and superior colliculus. Area 46 can generate sequences of hand and arm movements because it has inputs from the inferior parietal areas PFG and SII and outputs to the forelimb regions of the premotor areas and thence to the motor cortex. Both areas get timing and order information indirectly from the parietal cortex and hippocampus, and colour and shape information from the ventral prefrontal cortex. Inputs from the orbital prefrontal cortex enable both areas to integrate generate goals in accordance with current needs.
Human Prefrontal Cortex
Authors: Passingham Richard E.
Published: August 2021

This chapter and the next one consider how to account for the astonishing difference in intelligence between humans and our nearest living ancestors, the great apes. An integrated system that includes the dorsal prefrontal cortex and the parietal association cortex is activated when subjects attempt tests of non-verbal intelligence. It has been suggested that this system might act as a ‘multiple-demand system’ or ‘global workspace’ that can deal with any problem. However, closer examination suggests that the tasks used to support this claim have in common that they involve abstract sequences. These problems can be solved by visual imagery alone. But humans also have the advantage that they also have access to a propositional code. This means that they can solve problems that involve verbal reasoning, as well as being able to form detailed plans for the future. They can also form explicit judgements about themselves, including their perceptions, actions, and memories, and this means that they can represent themselves as individuals. The representation of the self depends in part on tissue in the medial prefrontal cortex (PF).
Human Prefrontal Cortex
Authors: Passingham Richard E.
Published: August 2021

Humans differ from their nearest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, in being predominantly right-handed. In the human brain handedness is also associated with an asymmetry in the arcuate fasciculus, favouring the left. This links the inferior parietal, superior and middle temporal cortex with area in the inferior caudal PF cortex (areas 44 and 45B), as well as the ventral PF cortex more anteriorly. There is activation in the inferior caudal PF cortex when subjects imitate, whether via gestures or speech; and damage to the arcuate fasciculus impairs the ability to repeat words. The ability to imitate gestures and sounds was essential for the evolution of learned communication. The left inferior caudal PF cortex (area 44) supports the sequences of speech, whether words, phrases, or sentences. The areas that are connected by the left arcuate fasciculus also support the semantic system. The ability to teach in sentences means that knowledge and skills can be passed on with high fidelity from one generation to another. It also aids communication on cooperative enterprises. The need to cooperate has also led to pressure to be able to understand the intentions of others, and the medial PF cortex forms part of the system that makes this possible. Cooperation requires that individuals obey social and moral rules, and damage to the medial and polar PF cortex impairs the ability to do this.
Fragmentation and Coarse-Grained Content
Authors: Greco Daniel
Published: August 2021

This chapter defends the possible worlds framework for modeling the contents of belief. Both the threats against which the chapter defends it—the problems of coarse grain—and the ‘fragmentationist’ response it offers are familiar. At least as a sociological matter, the fragmentationist response has been unpersuasive, likely because it can look like an ad hoc patch—an unmotivated epicycle aimed at saving a flailing theory from decisive refutation. The chapter offers two responses to this charge. First, the problems of coarse grain aren’t unique to the possible worlds framework and indeed arise for anyone who accepts certain very attractive views about the relationship between beliefs, desires, and action. Second, the fragmentationist response to these problems is in fact a special case of an independently motivated, ‘modest’ approach to model-building in philosophy.
Belief Fragments and Mental Files
Authors: Murez Michael
Published: August 2021

Belief fragments and mental files are based on the same idea: that information in people’s minds is compartmentalized rather than lumped all together. Philosophers mostly use the two notions differently, though the exact relationship between fragments and files has yet to be examined in detail. This chapter has three main goals. The first is to argue that fragments and files, properly understood, play distinct yet complementary explanatory roles; the second is to defend a model of belief that includes them both; and the third is to raise and address a shared dilemma that confronts them: that they threaten to be either explanatorily lightweight or empirically refuted. This chapter contends that it is better to embrace the horn of this dilemma that opens up files and fragments to empirical refutation or confirmation, by adopting a psychofunctionalist approach.
Rational Agency and the Struggle to Believe What Your Reasons Dictate
Authors: Gertler Brie
Published: August 2021

According to an influential view known as agentialism, our capacity to believe and intend directly on the basis of reasons—our rational agency—has a normative significance that distinguishes it from other kinds of agency. Agentialists maintain that insofar as we exercise rational agency, we bear a special kind of responsibility for our beliefs and intentions, and those attitudes are truly our own. This chapter will challenge these agentialist claims. The argument centers on a case in which a thinker struggles to align her belief to her reasons and succeeds only by resorting to non-rational methods. The chapter argues that she is responsible for the attitude generated by this struggle, that this process expresses her capacities for rationality and agency, and that the belief she eventually arrives at is truly her own. So rational agency is not distinctive in the ways that agentialists contend.
Reimagining the body image
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: August 2021

This chapter considers a variety of criticisms and a number of applications in which the usefulness of the body image/body schema distinction is still apparent. The chapter suggests that one can find complexity in this distinction by exploring several theoretical and practical directions, for example, by developing a non-reductive neuroscientific explanation, by investigating various pathologies, by exploring deeper psychoanalytic aspects, and by analysing different forms of embodied performance. Each of these projects are complex ones and some of them involve social and cultural analyses, as reflected in recent work in feminist, race, and gender studies. More specifically, this chapter discusses body image and body-schematic processes in cases of expert performance.
Body models in humans, animals, and robots: mechanisms and plasticity
Authors: Hoffmann Matej
Published: August 2021

Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth or failures, or using tools. The key foundation is an internal representation of the body that the agent—human, animal, or robot—has developed. In the biological realm, evidence has been accumulating in diverse disciplines, giving rise to the concepts of body image, body schema, and others. In robotics, a model of the robot is an indispensable component that enables to control the machine. This chapter compares the character of body representations in biology with their robotic counterparts and relates that to the differences in performance observed. Conclusions are drawn about how robots can inform the biological sciences dealing with body representations and which of the features of the ‘body in the brain’ should be transferred to robots, giving rise to more adaptive and resilient self-calibrating machines.
The embodied and social self: insights on body image and body schema from neurological conditions
Authors: Cole Jonathan
Published: August 2021

In neurological illnesses, the body may present itself to perception in ways which allows insights into the concepts of body image and body schema. Three such conditions are explored. From those who live with spinal cord injury, paralysed and insentient from the neck down, aspects of the importance of the body in one’s sense of self are revealed. Some also describe a coming to terms with their altered bodies. When considering the body image, its adaptability and this reconciliation to a new normal should be considered. Studies on acquired severe sensory loss explore how conscious control, at the body image level, may partially replace the deafferented body schema. There is little evidence, however, for these subjects extending access to previously non-conscious motor schema. Lastly, some narratives from those with congenital absence of movement of facial muscles describe reduced emotional experience and felt embodiment as children. These can be developed as young adults, through shared social interactions. The importance of the social in elaboration of the body image is further implicit in a consideration of the stigma associated with facial disfigurement. Others’ responses to one’s body are crucial in developing our body image and sense of self.
Body schema and body image disturbances in individuals with multiple sclerosis
Authors: Normann Britt
Published: August 2021

This chapter argues that the concepts of body schema and body image can deepen our understanding of individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) and can advance our conception of the physiotherapeutic process. Experiences of agency and body ownership are closely connected to body schema and body image and relate directly to the self-experiences of individuals with MS. The chapter argues that the concept of self-pattern provides a way to integrate these different factors. Sensorimotor disturbances in persons with MS compromise body schema and can disrupt various elements of their self-pattern, including pre-reflective experiential, reflective, extended, and intersubjective factors. On this view, movement analysis, handling skills, and clinical reasoning within physiotherapy can be recontextualized. Specificity is particularly important in this context, as sensorimotor functions are cornerstones of intentionality and an individual’s perceptions of affordances in daily life and are not merely neurophysiological processes, as conceived in traditional views on physiotherapy.
Monetary Policy in Low Financial Development Countries
Authors: Morales Juan Antonio , Reding Paul
Published: August 2021

The book gives broad coverage of monetary policy issues in Low Financial Development Countries (LFDCs). These low- and lower-middle-income countries are characterized by a predominance of bank finance, shallow financial markets, low financial inclusion, weak integration with world capital markets, and a high degree of informality in economic activity. Monetary policy acquires special twists, making it different in many aspects from the policies followed in advanced and emerging market economies. The book covers the main facets of monetary policy-making, using an approach that combines discussion of theoretical arguments, of results from empirical studies, and of policy experiences relevant for LFDCs. The book presents the monetary policy instruments used in these countries, and assesses the specificities of their monetary transmission mechanism. It evaluates the advantages, drawbacks, and challenges of the different nominal anchors they may choose from: exchange rate targeting, monetary targeting, and inflation targeting. This discussion is set against the background of the three main goals pursued by central banks: price, output, and financial stability. Particular attention is devoted to the issue of the credibility of central banks and to the trade-offs they face when external shocks, to which these countries are very vulnerable, lead to conflicts among the three goals they pursue. The book also covers more specific topics, such as challenges raised by fiscal dominance and by dollarization, implications of informal labour markets and of microfinance institutions for monetary policy-making, and the role of models for forecasting and policy evaluation.
Introduction
Authors: Alonso Alex
Published: August 2021

The introduction sets out the influence of the United States on Muldoon’s work before and after he arrives there, and establishes that his emigration from Ireland in 1987 marked a turning point in his career. Muldoon’s continued preoccupation in the USA with his early life in Northern Ireland produces a distinctly transatlantic consciousness, with his later works characterized by an increasingly transnational outlook. The imaginative freedom to move between places results in—or results from—a kind of formal inventiveness that is the distinguishing feature of his US writing. The introduction also explores Muldoon’s cultural influences from Ireland and America, and shows how his own Transatlantic departure recurs as a kind of template throughout his American career.
‘I fluttered, like an erratum slip’
Authors: Alonso Alex
Published: August 2021

Chapter 3 addresses a poetics and politics of error increasingly prevalent in Muldoon’s work since arriving in the United States. It argues that Muldoon’s slips and self-corrections have become a principle of composition in his American writing, part of which comes back to Joyce as well as the Freudian slip. In Muldoon’s US period, miswriting becomes a terrifically fertile form of writing, and the slip as a topographical and autobiographical phenomenon now extends across his poetry in America. This chapter explores the ways in which a poem might make an enrichment of errors, or turn the slip or mistake into a creative opportunity. Drawing on a series of close readings and archival findings, it offers a new model for understanding Muldoon’s later poetics.
Regional Outlook
Authors: Gingrich Jane , Greer Scott L.
Published: August 2021

The regional outlook for Ireland and the United Kingdom, both liberal market economies characterized by a limited role for the state, presents a brief comparative assessment of the historical development of their healthcare systems, health politics, and selected health-related indicators. The two are quite different in terms of health financing, with the UK’s health system relying on substantially larger tax expenditures and less private financing. Reported unmet need in the UK is therefore largely attributed to waiting times, whereas in Ireland it is mainly due to cost. Notably, reported unmet need is higher in both than it was in 2005. Since at least 2002, healthcare has tended to be a salient political issue in both Ireland and the UK.
Finland
Authors: Tynkkynen Liina-Kaisa , Koivusalo Meri , Keskimäki Ilmo
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the health system in Finland, which combines universal tax-financed health services provided by municipalities, national health insurance coverage for private provision, and an occupational healthcare system for those in employment. The chapter traces the development of the Finnish healthcare system, characterized by a long history of state and municipal governments sharing responsibility for organizing health services and multichannel healthcare delivery. The need to control costs, maintain financial sustainability, and ensure equitable access has underpinned political debate, but large-scale structural reform has been impeded. As the chapter shows, reform priorities have been advanced under the guise of more technical issues, such as public sector and administrative reform or, increasingly, choice, competition, and engagement with the private sector as means for change. Furthermore, via local measures such as cooperation among municipalities the system is gradually moving towards a more centralized organization without major reform. Widespread support for universal healthcare provision means that politics have focused to a large extent on how universal access is to be achieved, rather than whether the system should be universal.
Norway
Authors: Schoyen Mi Ah
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the predominantly tax-financed public healthcare system in Norway. It traces the development of the Norwegian healthcare system, as shaped by policy decisions affected as much by tensions between the center and the periphery as by those between left- and right-wing political leanings. Since the late 1990s, improving efficiency through enhanced coordination across the primary and secondary care sectors and the expansion of patient rights legislation have been high on the agenda. As the chapter explains, despite a far-reaching 2001 hospital reform, achieving a good balance between local hospital services close to the patient and regional hospitals able to offer more advanced specialist treatments remains on the political agenda. Questions about the public funding of private providers, made possible via a treatment choice scheme, reflect both traditional left–right and center–periphery conflict lines.
Lithuania
Authors: Murauskienė Liubovė
Published: August 2021

This chapter examines health politics and the compulsory health insurance system in Lithuania and traces the development of its healthcare system. Since the country declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, Lithuanian health politics have revolved around restructuring and rationalizing the overcapacities of the inherited healthcare system, increasing levels of public finance to those sufficient to meet healthcare needs, and making good on the patient rights implied by a universal system. Despite those efforts, high out-of-pocket payments remain an obstacle to health solidarity, healthcare provision—which is predominantly public—is overly dependent on inpatient care, and public financing measured as a share of GDP remains low. As the chapter outlines, other issues include low levels of satisfaction with and trust in the health system and the persistence of informal payments to ensure quality care.
Regional OutlookContinental Europe
Authors: Immergut Ellen M.
Published: August 2021

The Continental Europe regional outlook presents a comparative assessment of the historical development of the healthcare system, health politics, and selected health-related indicators for Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. In terms of health financing, these countries rely on the compulsory contributory insurance and corporatist administrative practices characteristic of Bismarckian health systems, to which the Netherlands and Switzerland have added mandated private insurance. Health outcomes are very positive, with high life expectancy, low infant mortality, and comparatively low levels of health inequality. Unmet need is the lowest in Europe, and satisfaction is among the highest. Since at least 2002, healthcare has tended to be a highly salient issue for Germany and the Netherlands, but not so for Belgium and Luxembourg, the two countries with the highest levels of public satisfaction with the health system. The key issues in Continental Europe have been cost containment, patient rights, and the introduction of long-term care, as well as some discussion of the role of private insurance and the efficiency of corporatist institutions.
The Netherlands
Authors: Anderson Karen M. , Van Druenen Ruud J.
Published: August 2021

This chapter provides an extended look at health politics and the mandated health insurance system in the Netherlands. It traces the historical development of the Dutch healthcare system, analyzing the emergence of a bifurcated public–private system and its replacement with mandated private insurance in 2006. The Dutch case is thus notable for large-scale privatization accompanied by expanding state regulation of private actors. Dramatic shifts in the party system since the 1980s shaped reform processes as the center-left consensus in favor of social health insurance and redistributive financing was replaced by center-right consensus supporting managed competition among private insurers. Reforms adopted since 2005 have aimed to control costs without sacrificing quality, largely by strengthening managed competition and the regulation underpinning it.
Luxembourg
Authors: Leist Anja
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the compulsory health insurance system in Luxembourg, which historically was based on a long tradition of mutual aid society funds, as well as coverage by the large company fund of the main employer in the previously dominant steel sector. An unusually high proportion of the compulsorily-insured in Luxembourg are cross-border commuting workers. The chapter traces the development of the Luxembourgish healthcare system, characterized by its consensual mode of decision-making, the Quadripartite, which tends to rule out radical change. Since the early 1990s, health policy reform efforts have focused on consolidating the plurality of sickness funds into a unified scheme, introducing direct third-party payment for low-income persons, and efforts to introduce a highly controversial gatekeeping function for primary physicians. Other healthcare issues have been long-term care, cost containment, as well as assisted suicide, which caused a constitutional crisis.
Austria
Authors: Diesenreiter Carina , Wendt Claus
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the compulsory health insurance system in Austria. It traces the development of the Austrian healthcare system, characterized by its corporatist and federalist structures. Since the early 1990s, there has been a trend towards increased centralization of health planning, and, at several junctures, a departure from consensus politics to unilateral adoption of cost-containment measures, and the re-structuring of the health insurance system through a merger of the regional funds (despite a challenge in the Constitutional Court). Other healthcare issues have been long-term care, employment conditions of caregivers, and the quality of primary care.
Switzerland
Authors: Rüefli Christian
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the mandatory health insurance system in Switzerland. It traces the development of the Swiss healthcare system, characterized by the strong role of the cantons and private stakeholder organizations in managing the system as well as the reliance on voluntary private insurance for most of the twentieth century. Since 1994, when a law on mandatory health insurance was adopted, the main issues in Swiss healthcare politics have been increasing costs, managed competition, the introduction of case-based payment, and healthcare governance. Switzerland’s consociational political system, with its instruments of direct democracy, federalism, and corporatist interest representation, impedes the development of consensus across the left–right divide about whether the health system should rely more on market mechanisms and individual responsibility or on state control and universal coverage.
Hungary
Authors: Földes Mária Éva
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the social health insurance-based system in Hungary. It traces the development of the Hungarian healthcare system, characterized by seismic shifts from a Bismarckian, solidarity-based social health insurance to centrally planned healthcare pledging universal access to health services as a citizen’s right. After the fall of state socialism, Hungary returned to a social health insurance model, and since then the main policy efforts have focused on decentralization, strengthening of private provision and entrepreneurship, and financial consolidation of the health system. After the highly contested and ultimately failed attempt to introduce managed competition and user fees between 2006 and 2008, there has been a shift back to an increasingly centralized system with tax-based financing. As noted in the chapter, the consequences of recentralization for the solidarity, accessibility, affordability, and quality of healthcare in Hungary are still to be seen.
Slovakia
Authors: Popic Tamara
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the health system in Slovakia based on compulsory social health insurance. It traces the development of the Slovak healthcare system, characterized by the shift from a social health insurance model to a Semashko model of health provision under communism. Slovak post-communist health politics has been marked by strong left–right political conflict and institutional barriers to reforms. Nevertheless, health policy in Slovakia displays a dramatic shift to a market-oriented healthcare provision based on user fees and managed competition, introduced in 2003 and 2004. Attempts to reverse market-oriented reforms were partially successful and have involved supranational and international authorities of the European Commission and of the International Court of Arbitration. As outlined in the chapter, some of the main issues facing the Slovak healthcare system have been overcapacity in the hospital sector, a malfunctioning referral system, and corruption.
Serbia
Authors: Popic Tamara
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the universal health system in Serbia based on compulsory social health insurance. It traces the development of the Serbian healthcare system after the breakup of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, characterized by a move from the self-managed insurance model to a more standard Bismarckian health insurance system combined with passive privatization. Despite efforts to restructure healthcare provision through a reform in 2005, the system’s two-tier structure remains firmly entrenched, protected by professional interests. The chapter highlights other healthcare issues including long waiting lists and corruption.
Bosnia And Herzegovina
Authors: Hasić Jasmin
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the social health insurance system in the separate entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina. It traces the development of the healthcare system in Bosnia and Herzegovina, marked by the introduction of self-managed insurance system during communism. After Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992 following the breakup of the SFRY, the health system deteriorated during the devastating Bosnian War, and the nation-building process dominated the political agenda. Since 1996, facilitated by international organizations, health politics has focused on remodeling the socialist self-managed insurance system towards a more standard social insurance system with market elements. While the Republika Srpska entity has a centralized social insurance system, in the Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine entity the social insurance is decentralized, governed independently by ten cantons. As described in the chapter, the main healthcare issues have been the significant portion of uninsured, inequalities in health access both across and within regions, the high cost of private health services, and difficulties with collecting sufficient insurance contributions due to high rates of unemployment and informal employment.
Difficulties of The Theory
Authors: Ågren J. Arvid
Published: August 2021

This chapter addresses common criticisms of the gene’s-eye view. The first is the use of intentional language and the anthropomorphizing involved in calling genes selfish. The chapter shows how disagreements over the suitability of such language reflects an old conflict in biology over the place for telological explanations. The second is the criticisms that came from mathematical population geneticists and the chapter outlines the phenomena of epistasis and hetorozygous advantage and evaluates how the gene’s-eye view handles interactions between genes. It discusses whether the gene’s-eye’s view is merely accounting and if it is bound to commit the so-called averaging fallacy. It also assesses the charge from developmental biologists that the gene’s-eye view affords too much causal power to genes in the process of development and in so doing ignores too many other interesting biological processes. Lastly, the chapter deals with how the gene’s-eye view fits into evolutionary biology#x2019;s troubled relationship with the concept of human nature and morality.
Inclusive Fitness and Hamilton’s Rule
Authors: Ågren J. Arvid
Published: August 2021

This chapter evaluates the long and intimate association between the gene’s-eye view and the work of W.D. Hamilton. Hamilton’s key insight was that individual organisms can affect the transmission of their genes through personal reproductive success, as well as through the success of close relatives. Inclusive fitness provides a way to view this process from the perspective of individual organisms, but it can also be seen from a gene’s-eye view. Dawkins and others have repeatedly emphasized the formal equivalence of the two perspectives. Yet, this chapter shows there is an underappreciated tension between the two perspectives. It demonstrates how this tension is expressed in both the current kerfuffle over the value of inclusive fitness theory stemming from Martin Nowak and colleagues and in Alan Grafen’s ongoing Formal Darwinism Project. The chapter ends by discussing two recent attempts to resolve this tension.
Empirical Implications
Authors: Ågren J. Arvid
Published: August 2021

The initial success of the gene’s-eye view came from making sense of old problems in evolutionary biology, in particular those related to social behaviour. It also stimulated new empirical research areas. This chapter is about three such new areas. The first is extended phenotypes, which are examples of phenotypic effects that occur outside of the body in which a gene is located. The second area is greenbeard genes, which gets its name from the thought-experiment devised to show that for altruism to evolve it is the relatedness between the actor and the recipient at the locus underlying the altruistic behaviour that matters, not the genome-wide relatedness. Finally, selfish genetic elements are genetic elements that have the ability to promote their own transmission even if it come at the expense of the fitness of the individual organism. The chapter outlines the current understanding of these topics and the role of the gene’s-eye view in uncovering them.
Modelling Virtual Bargaining using Logical Representation Change
Authors: Bundy Alan , Philalithis Eugene , Li Xue
Published: August 2021

We discuss work in progress on the computational modelling of virtual bargaining: inference-driven human coordination under severe communicative constraints. For this initial work we model variants of a two-player coordination game of item selection and avoidance taken from the current virtual bargaining literature. In this range of games, human participants collaborate to select items (e.g. bananas) or avoid items (e.g. scorpions), based on signalling conventions constructed and updated from shared assumptions, with minimal information exchange. We model behaviours in these games using logic programs interpretable as logical theories. From an initial theory comprised of rules, background assumptions and a basic signalling convention, we use automated theory repair to jointly adapt that basic signalling convention to novel contexts, with no explicit coordination between players. Our ABC system for theory repair delivers spontaneous adaptation, using reasoning failures to replace established conventions with better alternatives, matching human players’ own reasoning across several games.
Teaching and Explanation: Aligning Priors between Machines and Humans
Authors: Hernández-Orallo José , Ferri Cèsar
Published: August 2021

Machine intelligence differs signficantly from human intelligence. While human perception has similarities to the way machine perception works, human learning is mostly a directed process, guided by other people: parents, teachers, ... The area of machine teaching is becoming increasingly popular as a different paradigm for making machines learn. In this chapter, we start from recent results in machine teaching that show the relevance of prior alignment between humans and machines. From here, we focus on the scenario when a machine has to teach humans, a situation more and more common in the future. Specifically, we analyse how machine teaching relates to explainable artificial intelligence, and how simplicity priors play a role beyond intelligibility. We illustrate this with a general teaching protocol and a few examples in several representation languages: feature-value vectors and sequences. Some straightforward experiments with humans indicate when a strong simplicity prior is --and is not-- sufficient.
Apperception
Authors: Evans Richard
Published: August 2021

This paper describes a neuro-symbolic system for distilling interpretable logical theories out of streams of raw, unprocessed sensory experience. We combine a binary neural network, that maps raw sensory input to concepts, with an inductive logic programming system, that combines concepts into declarative rules. Both the inductive logic programming system and the binary neural network are encoded as logic programs, so the weights of the neural network and the declarative rules of the theory can be solved jointly as a single SAT problem. This way, we are able to jointly learn how to perceive (mapping raw sensory information to concepts) and apperceive (combining concepts into declarative rules). We apply our system, the Apperception Engine, to the Sokoban domain. Given a sequence of noisy pixel images, the system has to construct objects that persist over time, extract attributes that change over time, and induce rules explaining how the attributes change over time. We compare our system with a neural network baseline, and show that the baseline is significantly outperformed by the Apperception Engine.
Human–Machine Perception of Complex Signal Data
Authors: Alahmadi Alaa , Davies Alan , Vigo Markel , Dempsey Katherine , Jay Caroline
Published: August 2021

Electrocardiograms (ECGs), which capture the electrical activity of the human heart, are widely used in clinical practice, and notoriously difficult to interpret. Whilst there have been attempts to automate their interpretation for several decades, human reading of the data presented visually remains the ‘gold standard’. We demonstrate how a visualisation technique that significantly improves human interpretation of ECG data can be used as a basis for an automated interpretation algorithm that is more accurate than current signal processing techniques, and has the benefit of the human and machine sharing the same representation of the data. We discuss the potential of the approach, in terms of its accuracy and acceptability in clinical practice.
Fast and Slow Learning in Human-Like Intelligence
Authors: Mareschal Denis , Blakeman Sam
Published: August 2021

In this chapter we review the extent to which rapid one-short learning or fast-mapping exists in human learning. We find that it exists in both children and adults, but that it is almost always accompanied by slow consolidated learning in which new knowledge is integrated with existing knowledge-bases. Rapid learning is also present in a broad range of non-human species, particularly in the context of high reward values. We argue that reward prediction errors guide the extent to which fast or slow learning dominates, and present a Complementary Learning Systems neural network model (CTDL) of cortical/hippocampal learning that uses reward prediction errors to adjudicate between learning in the two systems. Developing human-like artificial intelligence will require implementing multiple learning and inference systems governed by a flexible control system with an equal capacity to that of human control systems.
What Can the Conjunction Fallacy Tell Us about Human Reasoning?
Authors: Tentori Katya
Published: August 2021

This chapter briefly summarizes some the main results obtained from more than three decades of studies on the conjunction fallacy. It shows that this striking and widely discussed reasoning error is a robust phenomenon that can systematically affect the probabilistic inferences of both laypeople and experts, and it introduces an explanation based on the notion of evidential impact in terms of contemporary Bayesian confirmation theory. Finally, the chapter tackles the open issue of the greater accuracy and reliability of impact assessments over posterior probability judgments and outlines how further research on the role of evidential reasoning in the acceptability of explanations might contribute to the development of effective human-like computing.
Logic-based Robotics
Authors: Sammut Claude , Farid Reza , Wicaksono Handy , Wiley Timothy
Published: August 2021

This chapter explores methods for combining symbolic and sub-symbolic reasoning and learning systems to take advantage of the strengths of each approach in challenging tasks in robotics. In perception, Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) can be used to learn descriptions of classes of objects and to find relations between objects. Examples are given of perception for robots in urban search and rescue. We also describe systems for learning plans and behaviours for robots. Relational learning is used to acquire abstract model of robot actions that are then used to constrain sub-symbolic learning for low-level control. Models can be variously expressed in the classical STRIPS representation or as qualitative models. A STRIPS-like model is acquired by a robot that learns to use tools and also designs new tools. A qualitative model is constructed by a robot that learns to traverse uneven terrain in urban search and rescue. The model is refined by reinforcement learning.
Predicting Problem Difficulty in Chess
Authors: Bratko Ivan , Hristova Dayana , Guid Matej
Published: August 2021

We investigate the question of automatic prediction of task difficulty for humans, of problems that are typically solved through informed search. Our experimental domain is the game of chess. We analyse experimental data from human chess players solving tactical chess problems. The players also estimated the difficulty of these problems. We carried out an experiment with an approach to automatically estimate the difficulty of problems in this domain. The idea of this approach is to use the properties of a “meaningful search tree” to learn to estimate the difficulty of example problems. The construct of a meaningful search tree is an attempt at approximating problem solving by human experts. The learned difficulty classifier was applied to our experimental problems, and the resulting difficulty estimates matched well with the measured difficulties on the Chess Tempo website, and also with the average difficulty perceived by the players.
Lafcadio Hearn and Global Aestheticism
Authors: Evangelista Stefano
Published: August 2021

Lafcadio Hearn’s writings provide a radically different understanding of literary cosmopolitanism from Wilde’s. This chapter studies Hearn’s attempts to translate and transpose aestheticism onto a global stage. It argues that Hearn’s works compound a commitment to preserving cultural differences with essentialism, exoticism, and even, paradoxically, elements of cultural nationalism. Hearn’s early translations of Théophile Gautier’s fantastic stories created a dialogue between metropolitan European aestheticism and the cosmopolitan culture of nineteenth-century New Orleans. In his writings on Japan, Hearn employed literary impressionism and ghost narratives (some of which look back to Gautier) to interrogate his own authority as Western essayist and to capture the peculiar temporality of turn-of-the-century Japan, a country caught between traditional culture and modernization, nationalist and cosmopolitan tendencies. In Japan, Hearn also lectured extensively on British aestheticism, encouraging his students to draw inspiration from it for the creation of a cosmopolitan Japanese literature of the future.
Controversies in the Periodical Press
Authors: Evangelista Stefano
Published: August 2021

This chapter argues that the periodical medium played a fundamental role in the construction of literary cosmopolitanism as a discursive phenomenon. It focuses on two periodicals launched in the fin de siècle: the American Cosmopolitan and the European Cosmopolis. The commercially oriented and middle-brow Cosmopolitan promoted cosmopolitanism as a female-gendered social identity linked to class privilege, as testified by the serialization of Elizabeth Bisland’s round-the-world trip in 1889. However, it also interrogated the cosmopolitan tendencies of modern American literature embodied by the writings of Henry James. By contrast, the short-lived Cosmopolis was a high-brow periodical that aimed to revive Kant’s Enlightenment ideal and Goethe’s notion of world literature. It was committed to multilingualism and to fighting nationalism. The chapter closes with an analysis of Cosmopolis as a competitor to the iconic 1890s English literary periodicals, the Yellow Book and The Savoy.
Practical Concepts
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper is a successor to the author’s ‘In Defence of Thick Concepts’. It asks first whether all thick concepts have a default valence. It then considers how to account for the combination of the descriptive and the evaluative (which is sometimes called ‘interpenetration’) in a thick concept, and suggests that the so-called ‘no-priority’ view fails to do this. We might also wonder why the descriptive element is not always capable of separate instantiation. Various alternative moves are considered. The paper offers a considerably more varied list of supposedly thick concepts than is normal. It ends by suggesting that thick concepts are evaluative because competence with them involves grasp of their evaluative point.
Arguments from Illusion
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper lays out in detail various versions of an argument from illusion in areas of philosophy other than the familiar one in the theory of perception. Those are the philosophy of action (doing vs. trying), the theory of motivation, the theory of knowledge, the theory of justification, and, in the philosophy of action, the distinction between act and agent. The suggestion is that we learn something about the force of such arguments, and about the best way to resist them, by seeing how they function in different contexts. There is also a suggestion (but no more than that) that if you are tempted by one instance, you should be equally tempted by the others. The paper also examines the much less familiar distinction between disjunctivism and non-conjunctivism.
Moore’s Account of Vindictive Punishment: A Test Case for Theories of Organic Unities
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper discusses two conceptions of organic unities. Moore, who first brought the notion of an organic unity to prominence, argues for an intrinsicalist conception of the organic: items do not have different non-instrumental value in different contexts, but the value they contribute to a whole of which they are a part may vary according to other parts of that whole. In this sense, they can contribute value that they have not got. This paper contrasts that conception with a different, variabilist conception which is more friendly to a general holism in the theory of value. It argues that intrinsicalism gives an incoherent account of what Moore calls vindictive punishment.
On Cities and Their Opposites (an Introduction)
Authors: Nappi Carla
Published: August 2021

This chapter introduces the book and its main themes, topics, and points of inquiry. It explains the shape and nature of the work to come, its inspiration in the work of Italo Calvino, and its contribution to the history of translation in early modern China.
Documents (1389/1608)
Authors: Nappi Carla
Published: August 2021

Chapter 2 tells the story of two Mongolian–Chinese translators: sixteenth-century translator Wang Zilong, and fourteenth-century translator Qoninci. They take turns telling the story of the Hua Yi yiyu collection of documents that formed the foundation for the textbooks used by translators at official translation bureaus in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The chapter explores the nature of translation as a kind of bodywork, and of foreign-language primers as history books.
Poems (1848)
Authors: Nappi Carla
Published: August 2021

Chapter 5 follows the story of Qing Dynasty Manchu poet and translator Bujilgen Jakdan, following the course of the Manchu and mixed-verse Manchu–Chinese poems included in the final volume of his poetry collection. It considers the integral relationship between the Manchu and Chinese languages in helping to create a formal poetic register of Manchu. It also follows Jakdan’s poetic descriptions of his own life as a translator, and discusses the broader context of translation in nineteenth-century China.
Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness
Authors: Tye Michael
Published: August 2021

Either consciousness appeared suddenly in living beings so that its appearance is like that of a light switch being turned on or it arose through intermediate stages. On the former view, consciousness is an on/off matter, but once it arose, it became richer and richer through time rather as a beam of light may become brighter and broader in its sweep. On the latter view, consciousness is not an on/off matter. There are shades of gray. Consciousness arose gradually just as life did, becoming richer through time as animal brains became more complex. I argue that both these views encounter insuperable difficulties and thus that a kind of paradox arises. The way out of the paradox is to accept that the various species of consciousness are vague, admitting of borderline cases, and are to be accounted for within a representationalist view of conscious states but that consciousness itself, or rather a central element of consciousness I call “consciousness*”, is sharp. Consciousness*, I claim, is a fundamental feature of micro-reality, and thus it did not evolve, unlike conscious states. The view with which I end up presents novel solutions to three important problems (of undirected consciousness, of combination, and of tiny, psychological subjects). It also takes up the question of how consciousness can be causally efficacious with respect to animal behavior. The final chapter of the book turns to the question of where in the brain macro-consciousness is located and which animal brains so evolved as to support conscious states.
The Location of Consciousness
Authors: Tye Michael
Published: August 2021

Consciousness*, as I call it in Chapter 4, is everywhere, residing as it does wherever there is a quark or some other fundamental entity. But what about consciousness? Evidently, consciousness requires a brain. If creatures with brains had never evolved, there would have been no such thing as consciousness. But where in the brain is consciousness located? A proposal by Crick and Koch is considered, as is one by Damasio. It is shown that a puzzle arises for both of their proposals and a reconciliation offered. The further question of which brains support consciousness is also addressed. It is argued that honeybees and fruit flies are conscious but leeches and box jellyfish are not.