Could a robot flirt? 4E cognition, reactive attitudes, and robot autonomy

AI & Society ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Lassiter
Author(s):  
John Deigh

The essay offers an interpretation of P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” on which attributions of moral responsibility presuppose a practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions, and what explains the practice is our liability to such reactive attitudes as resentment and indignation. The interpretation is offered to correct a common misinterpretation of Strawson’s essay. On this common misinterpretation, attributions of moral responsibility are implicit in the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation, and consequently our liability to these attitudes cannot explain these attributions. The reason this is a misinterpretation of Strawson’s essay is that Strawson’s compatibilist solution to the free will problem requires that our liability to the reactive attitudes be conceptually prior to our attributions of moral responsibility.


Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm

Whereas most accounts of the reactive attitudes and of responsibility focus on norms of action, we must also consider norms of character: norms that govern the kind of person we can or must be. We are bound by norms of character and so responsible to fellow members for who we are in the same way as for norms of action: via the interpersonal rational patterns in our reactive attitudes. Accordingly, this Chapter develops an account of pride, shame, esteem, and contempt as character-oriented reactive attitudes, clarifies the sense in which these are globalist emotions, distinguishes between personal and social forms of pride and shame, and provides a partial defense of the value of shame and contempt. The result both illuminates the distinction between guilt and shame and, more fundamentally, provides a unified account of responsibility without dividing it into aretaic and accountability faces as Gary Watson does.


Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm

In having reactive attitudes, we hold each other responsible to the norms of a community. Doing so appropriately presupposes both that one has the requisite authority and that the other is bound by that norm. We can understand this by turning to communities of respect and the patterns of reactive attitudes discussed in Chapter 3. As a member of a community of respect, one is party to a joint commitment, constituted by interpersonal rational patterns of reactive attitudes, to the import of that community and thereby to the import of its members and norms. This joint commitment binds one to those norms and makes one be responsible to them. Likewise, to have authority is to have dignity as a member of such a community and so be a fit object of recognition respect by others who thereby normally ought to respond to the “call” of one’s reactive attitudes.


Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm

The nature of both respect and the reactive attitudes is illuminated by understanding the reactive attitudes to be a class of emotions distinguished by their forming a distinctively interpersonal pattern of rationality. In feeling a reactive attitude such as resentment, one holds the wrongdoer responsible by “calling on” him to feel guilt and on witnesses to feel disapprobation or indignation; other things being equal, one’s resentment is unwarranted if that “call” is not taken up by others. This call and its uptake are made intelligible through the community members’ joint background commitment to the value of the community and its norms, and to the dignity of its members as members—a commitment undertaken and reaffirmed in their reactive attitudes. The resulting interpersonal rational patterns of reactive attitudes constitute their joint recognition respect for its norms and for each other as a part of their joint reverence for the community.


Author(s):  
Sven Walter

I offer some critical thoughts on some philosophical issues touched upon in the four papers in the section on Cognition, Action, and Perception. I highlight these issues because, apart from revealing some problematic aspects of the arguments presented therein, they illustrate a general concern about some prominent debates in the context of 4E approaches to cognition: that at some times we are so excited that we can bring philosophy in close touch with empirical results that we forget our core business as philosophers—the argument—while at other times we can’t stop overdoing it with our philosophical concept-mongery and thereby fail to see important lessons empirical results have to teach us. In addition, I want to draw attention to a topic that one might have expected to be covered in a handbook on 4E cognition, in particular in the section on Cognition, Action, and Perception, but that isn’t addressed: the topic of self-control.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ismael Palacios-Garcia ◽  
Francisco J. Parada

Cognitive process and associated states such as wellbeing are embodied, in a process of phylogenetic and ontogenic interdependencies, encompassing an organism’s both internal and external environments. Diurnal mammals’ physiology has been enslaved by the day/night cycle, imposed to planet Earth from the cosmos. Mammals’ physiology is furthermore entangled to the micro-dynamics of small organisms, imposed onto the body through the development of a symbiotic relationship unfolding throughout ontogeny and phylogeny. Therefore, adequate scientific study of human behavior will include as many levels as possible: socio-cultural, psychological, microbiological, etc. The brain-gut-microbiota topic represents a fascinating opportunity to expand our knowledge about cognition, mental health, and life in general. It is important to frame this research topic from multiple perspectives including biological/medical sciences, public policy, architecture, urbanism, and psychology. Furthermore, recent philosophical and epistemological advances, under the 4E-cognition framework, will help the integration of evidence, providing new insights and novel hypotheses.


Author(s):  
Renata Gambino ◽  
Grazia Pulvirenti

Recent theories within the avenue of the bio-cultural turn, and particularly about embodied cognition are forecasted in the anthropological, philosophical, physiological and scientific debate of the late 18th century in Germany. Philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder contributed to this discourse sigificantly, opening up new perspectives on the link among thought and language and body. In this paper we aim at highlighting some core issues of Herders’s discourse about knowledge, perception and cognition, that seem to anticipate some of the most recent 4E Cognition issues.


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