Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 7

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
Intentional Actions ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Theories Of Action ◽  
Causal Theories ◽  
Observational Knowledge

This is the seventh volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility (OSAR), and the fifth drawn from papers presented at the New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR, November 14–16, 2019). The OSAR series is devoted to publishing cutting edge, interdisciplinary work on the wide array of topics falling under the general rubric of ‘agency and responsibility.’ In this volume, roughly half of the chapters focus on agency, and half focus on responsibility. In the former camp, there are essays about the non-observational knowledge we have about our current intentional actions, constitutivism, answerability, organizational agency, socially embedded agency, and a brain sciences critique of causal theories of action. In the latter camp, there are essays about praise, guilt, blame, sanction, forgiveness, and disclaimers.

How a Brain Makes a Mind

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-85
Author(s):  
Stephen Grossberg
Keyword(s):  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mind And Brain

A historical overview is given of interdisciplinary work in physics and psychology by some of the greatest nineteenth-century scientists, and why the fields split, leading to a century of ferment before the current scientific revolution in mind-brain sciences began to understand how we autonomously adapt to a changing world. New nonlinear, nonlocal, and nonstationary intuitions and laws are needed to understand how brains make minds. Work of Helmholtz on vision illustrates why he left psychology. His concept of unconscious inference presaged modern ideas about learning, expectation, and matching that this book scientifically explains. The fact that brains are designed to control behavioral success has profound implications for the methods and models that can unify mind and brain. Backward learning in time, and serial learning, illustrate why neural networks are a natural language for explaining brain dynamics, including the correct functional stimuli and laws for short-term memory (STM), medium-term memory (MTM), and long-term memory (LTM) traces. In particular, brains process spatial patterns of STM and LTM, not just individual traces. A thought experiment leads to universal laws for how neurons, and more generally all cellular tissues, process distributed STM patterns in cooperative-competitive networks without experiencing contamination by noise or pattern saturation. The chapter illustrates how thinking this way leads to unified and principled explanations of huge databases. A brief history of the advantages and disadvantages of the binary, linear, and continuous-nonlinear sources of neural models is described, and how models like Deep Learning and the author’s contributions fit into it.

Reasons and Action Explanation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Wald ◽  
Sergio Tenenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Action ◽  
Theory Of Action ◽  
Action Explanation ◽  
Theories Of Action ◽  
Causal Theories

The problem of deviant causation has been a serious obstacle for causal theories of action. We suggest that attending to the problem of deviant causation reveals two related problems for causal theories. First, it threatens the reductive ambitions of causal theories of intentional action. Second, it suggests that such a theory fails to account for how the agent herself is guided by her reasons. Focusing on the second of these, we argue that the problem of guidance turns out to be related to a number of other issues in the literature on action explanation, and that it is much more general: it threatens not only causal theories but any theory of action. Finally, we suggest that a certain version of the view that acting has a constitutive or formal aim can overcome this problem.

scholarly journals Fischer Receives 2017 Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology Dansgaard Award

Eos ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Research Impact ◽  
Societal Impact ◽  
Fall Meeting ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
American Geophysical ◽  
American Geophysical Union

Hubertus Fischer will receive the 2017 Dansgaard Award at the 2017 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, to be held 11–15 December in New Orleans, La. The award is given in recognition of the awardee’s research impact, innovative interdisciplinary work, educational accomplishments (mentoring), societal impact, and other relevant contributions and to acknowledge that the awardee shows exceptional promise for continued leadership in paleoceanography or paleoclimatology.

scholarly journals Representing first-order causal theories by logic programs

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAOLO FERRARIS ◽  
JOOHYUNG LEE ◽  
YULIYA LIERLER ◽  
VLADIMIR LIFSCHITZ ◽  
FANGKAI YANG
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Logic Programming ◽  
Logic Programs ◽  
Action Languages ◽  
First Order ◽  
National Conference ◽  
Theories Of Action ◽  
Causal Theories ◽  
Causal Logic ◽  
The Way

AbstractNonmonotonic causal logic, introduced by McCain and Turner (McCain, N. and Turner, H. 1997. Causal theories of action and change. In Proceedings of National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Stanford, CA, 460–465) became the basis for the semantics of several expressive action languages. McCain's embedding of definite propositional causal theories into logic programming paved the way to the use of answer set solvers for answering queries about actions described in such languages. In this paper we extend this embedding to nondefinite theories and to the first-order causal logic.

Causal Theories of Action

1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 831-854 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Costa
Keyword(s):  
Intentional State ◽  
Causal Connection ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
Bodily Movement ◽  
Composite Event ◽  
Theories Of Action ◽  
The Right ◽  
Causal Theories ◽  
Bodily Movements

Causal theories of action are attempts to develop an account of actions in terms of events (typically bodily movements and their effects) which have the right kind of causal ancestry. The causal ancestry must be traced back to some kind of intentional state (or combination of intentional states) in the agent, such intentional state (or states) must have the right kind of content, and it must cause the bodily movement (or other effect) in the ‘right’ way. Causal accounts differ on the nature of the intentional state, the nature of the content it must have, and the specification of the ‘right’ kind of causal connection to bodily movements or other effects. Causal accounts also differ on the identification of the action itself. Some acounts say that the action is the bodily movement, provided that it was caused in the right way and had the right kind of effects. Others identify the action with the triggering intentional state (called a volition or trying), provided that it has the right kind of effects. Yet others identify the action with the composite event of the intentional state's causing the appropriate effects. Finally there are those which fail to identify the action with any of these events or combinations of them.

scholarly journals Intentional Action

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-91
Author(s):  
Joshua Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Side Effect ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Gettier Cases ◽  
Technical Problems ◽  
Theories Of Action ◽  
Causal Theories

The project of analyzing intentional action has been out of favor for some time. In part this is due to exhaustion over details—accounts are usually subject to very technical problems or elaborate counterexamples. This chapter builds build on the earlier accounts of control and non-deviance to offer a new account of intentional action. This account builds on Mele and Moser’s influential work, and goes beyond it in some ways. After offering the account, this chapter considers a range of ancillary issues and problem cases. It discusses, for example, side-effect cases, senseless movements, the role of belief and knowledge in intentional action, and action theoretic versions of systematic Gettier cases. Finally, it turns to issues of reductionism that motivate some rejections of causal theories of action. The upshot is that anti-causalists have a new account to contend with, and one that has answers to the problems often thought to be damning for causalism.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Emar Maier ◽  
Andreas Stokke
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Human Capacity

Fiction is the ultimate application of the human capacity for displacement—thinking and talking about things beyond the here and now. Fictional characters may live in very remote possible or even impossible worlds. Yet our engagement with fictional stories and characters seems effortless and permeates every aspect of our everyday lives. How is this possible? How does fictional talk relate to assertions about the here and now, or indeed to modal talk about other possible worlds? What is the relation between fiction and mental states like belief and imagination? How does a sequence of fictional statements become a story? What are fictional characters? How do narrators manage to give us access to their characters’ innermost thoughts and desires? This introductory chapter traces the development of various strands of research on these questions within linguistics, narratology, and philosophy in order to lay a foundation for the cutting-edge interdisciplinary work in this volume.

scholarly journals Gonzalez Receives 2017 Space Weather and Nonlinear Waves and Processes Prize

Eos ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Space Weather ◽  
Nonlinear Waves ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Fall Meeting ◽  
American Geophysical ◽  
American Geophysical Union

Walter Gonzalez will receive the Space Weather and Nonlinear Waves and Processes Prize at the 2017 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, to be held 11–15 December in New Orleans, La. The award recognizes “cutting-edge work in the fields of space weather and nonlinear waves and processes.”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document