Cognition, Agency and Rationality: Proceedings of the Fifth International Colloquium on Cognitive Science

206 Pages·1999·6.67 MB·English

by  Ernest Sosa (auth.)

COGNITION, AGENCY AND RATIONALITY
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES
VOLUME 79
Founded by Wilfrid S. Sellars and Keith Lehrer
Editor
Keith Lehrer, University ofA rizona, Tucson
Associate Editor
Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University, Tempe
Board of Consulting Editors
Lynne Rudder Baker, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Radu Bogdan, Tulane University, New Orleans
Allan Gibbard, University of Michigan
Denise Meyerson, University of Cape Town
Franois Recanati, Ecole Poly technique, Paris
Stuart Silvers, Clemson University
Nicholas D. Smith, Michigan State University
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
COGNITION,
AGENCY AND RATIONALITY
Proceedings of the Fifth International
Colloquium on Cognitive Science
Edited by
KEPAKORTA
Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language, and Information (ILCLl),
Donostia - San Sebastian,
Spain
ERNESTSOSA
Department of Philosophy,
Brown University, Providence
and Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, U.S.A.
and
XABIER ARRAZOLA
Institutefor Logic, Cognition, Language, and Information (ILCLl),
Donostia - San Sebastian,
Spain
SPRINGER-SCLENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.Y.
A C.l.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5321-3 ISBN 978-94-017-1070-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-1070-1
Printed on acid-free paper
AII Rights Reserved
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced OI'
utilized in any form OI' by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording OI' by any information storage amI
retrieval system, without written permission from
the copyright owner
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Vll
ARE HUMANS RATIONAL?
Ernest Sosa
How CAN FALLACIES ARISE ABOUT FALLACIES?
L. Jonathan Cohen 9
RETHINKING RA TIONALITY: FROM BLEAK IMPLICATIONS To
DARWINIAN MODULES
Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich, and Patrice D. Tremoulet 21
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COUNTERF ACTUAL CONDITIONALS
Ruth MJ. Byrne, Alessandra Tasso, and Valerie Thompson 63
MEANINGS AND CONCEPTS
Stephen Schiffer 79
CONTEXTUALISM AND THE MEANING-INTENTION PROBLEM
Thomas HofWeber 93
PRESUPPOSITIONAL AND RHETORICAL EFFECTS OF Focus PARTICLES:
THE CASE OF 'EVEN'
Fernando Garcia Murga 105
LOGICS FOR MENTAL STATES
Ton Sales 123
SOCIALL Y RESPONSIBLE DECISION MAKING By AUTONOMOUS
AGENTS
Susanne Kalenka and Nicholas R. Jennings 135
DIVERSITY IN RATIONALITY. A MULTI-AGENT PERSPECTIVE
Rosaria Conte 151
THE CONTEXTS OF COLLABORA TION
Barbara 1. Grosz 175
SUBJECT INDEX 189
NAME INDEX 195
v
INTRODUCTION
COGNITION, AGENCY, AND RATIONALITY
The Fifth International Colloquium on Cognitive Science (ICCS-97), co-organized
by the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language, and Information (ILCLI) and the
Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, both from the University of the
Basque Country, took place at Donostia - San Sebastian from May 7 to 10, 1997,
with the following as its main topics:
1. Rationality and Psychology of Reasoning.
2. Knowledge in Context: Language, Mind, Society.
3. Rational Agency in Multi-Agent Systems.
4. Compositional Semantics and Natural Language.
A little less than a hundred researchers from all over the world exchanged their most
recent contributions to Cognitive Science in an exceptionally fruitful and friendly
atmosphere. This volume contains a small but representative sample of the main
papers. They all were invited papers except the one by Ton Sales, which
corresponds to a tutorial, and the one by Fernando Garcia Murga, a contributed
paper that merited the IBERDROLA Best Paper Award, given in ICCS-97 for the
second time.
In the first provisional program of ICCS-97 a tutorial on "Towards a
(psychological) Pragmatics" was scheduled, to be delivered by Victor Sanchez de
Zavala, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Language at the Institute and the
Department here, in Donostia -San Sebastian. At the end of October 1996, we were
much affected by the sudden news of his death. His absence was especially and
deeply felt by his colleagues during the Colloquium, which the organizers dedicated
to his memory. We want to do the same with this volume.
The volume contains three kinds of papers corresponding to three of the main
disciplines in Cognitive Science: philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence.
Sosa's, Cohen's, Schiffer's, and HofWeber's are clearly philosophical papers;
Samuels, Stich and Tremoulet's and Byrne, Tasso and Thompson's are within
psychology; Sales's, Kalenka and Jennings's, Conte's and Grosz's are from
Artificial Intelligence. The title "Cognition, Agency and Rationality" is intended to
capture the main issues addressed by the papers. Of course, all are concerned with
cognition, but some are specially centered on the very concept of rationality (as
Sosa's, Cohen's, Samuels, Stich and Tremoulet's or Conte's) while others are
focused on (multiple) agency (specially, Kalenka and Jennings's and Grosz's
vii
K. Korta et al. (eds.), Cognition, Agency and Rationality, vii-xi
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
viii COGNITION, AGENCY AND RATIONALITY
papers). Garcia Murga's paper lies somewhere outside these groupings: it is a paper
in linguistics (semantics and pragmatics) and addresses the particular topic cf
presuppositions.
Now, we will briefly describe each paper one by one.
1. Ernest Sosa, 'Are Humans Rational?'. A stream of experimental results has put
in doubt the traditional conception of man as the rational animal. The mistakes
people make are said to be more than just occasional and superficial. They are said
to be systematic, entrenched, and as deep as misapplying modus ponens in
propositional logic and the conjunction rule in probability theory. Some have tried
to explain away the apparent mistakes as deriving from misinterpreted instructions.
On a case by case basis, this sort of interpretational response can seem quite
plausible. On a broader view, though, it becomes increasingly unattractive. As each
new interpretative proposal runs afoul of the next batch of experimental results, the
reinterpretation strategy starts to seem disturbingly ad hoc. But what do these
experimental results really show? What exactly is rationality and just how do the
results show us to fall short of it?
2. L. Jonathan Cohen also addresses the issue of the consequences of the
experimental results on human rationality in his 'How Can Fallacies Arise about
Fallacies?'. These experiments that purported to show 'bleak implications for
human rationality' came under criticism by the author himself and others in the
eighties. They argued that psychologists had involved themselves in fallacious
reasonings that made them conclude, incorrectly, that the subjects of the
experiments were involves in patterns of fallacious reasoning. "How can it be that a
considerable number of professionally trained experimental psychologists have all
committed similar fallacies in interpreting their subjects' responses, and what is the
nature of their mistake?". This is the question that Cohen tries to answer. If the
answer is satisfactory, "the case against the 'bleak implications' psychologists is
thereby strengthened." He considers the experimental data concerning both
judgements of probability and judgements of deducibility, and claims that
psychologists are guilty of the fallacy of undisambiguated probability and
undisambiguated deducibility. He argues for a pluralistic stance in the conceptual
analysis of probabilistic and deductive reasoning.
3. "Rethinking Rationality: From Bleak Implications to Darwinian Modules" by
Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich and Patrice D. Tremoulet is the longest paper in
the volume. It too addresses the "bleak implications" issue, but in a way more
extensive and sympathetic to the empirical side of the debate. After sketching some
of the better known experiments in the area, they focus on the notion of competence,
which is usually invoked by the "bleak implications" party. One of the most recent
challenges to this pessimistic view on human rationality comes from the
interdisciplinary field of evolutionary psychology, which defends a highly modular
view of human mind. The two main sections of the paper are devoted to the
modular picture of the mind advanced by evolutionary psychologists, and to several
recent studies that appear to confirm its main predictions, respectively. They
conclude that the arguments and the experimental evidence offered do not constitute
a conclusive case for the evolutionary psychologists' theory about the mind, and
they go on to consider a hypothetical question: "If the evolutionary psychologists'
INTRODUCTION ix
account turns out to be in the right track, what implications would this have ttr
questions about the nature and the extent of human rationality or irrationality?"
4. How do people reason about what might have been? Ruth Byrne, Alessandra
Tasso and Valerie Thompson answer this question in their "The Psychology cf.
Counterfactual Reasoning." First, they present the challenge posed to a general
theory of conditionals by counterfactual conditionals, and then they propose a
mental model theory of conditionals that covers both reasoning about matters of fuct
(factual conditionals) and reasoning about matters of possibility and impossibility
(counterfactual conditionals). Their theory explains why counterfactual conditionals
seem to mean something very different from factual conditionals, even if there is a
single cognitive mechanism involved. They also describe some experiments that
corroborate the predictions of their theory about the inferences people make.
The next two papers lead us to central topics in the Philosophy of Language and
the Philosophy of Mind.
5. "Meaning and Concepts" by Stephen Schiffer extends his case against
compositional semantics, by developing a theory of meaning called pleonastic
Fregeanism, in which the propositions we believe and assert are pleonastic
propositions composed of pleonastic concepts or modes of presentation. But, while
within full-blown Fregeanism the fact that two propositions are different is explained
by the fact that they have different constituents, according to pleonastic Fregeanism,
two propositions having different constituents is entirely derivative on the
conceptually prior fact that the propositions are determined as different. Schiffer
concludes that, though languages may have pleonastic compositional meaning
theories, they will not explain any of the things theorists have thought they needed
compositional semantics to explain.
6. Thomas Hofweber, in his "Contextualism and the Meaning-Intention Problem"
addresses the problem of the context sensitivity of knowledge ascriptions. He
defends contextualism against Schiffer argument that the contextualist explanation is
in contradiction with the Gricean idea that meaning has to be backed by speaker's
communicative intentions (the meaning-intention problem). Hofweber argues, contra
Schiffer, that in knowledge ascriptions there is an aspect of the content of the
knowledge ascribing utterance that the speaker is unaware of, that there is what he
calls hidden relativity.
7. Fernando Garcia Murga's "Presuppositional and Rhetorical Effects of Focus
Particles" presents a general account of the semantics and pragmatics of the word
'even', within a new general theory of linguistic presuppositions which, according
to the author, 'redeems' the term 'presupposition' from the wastepaper basket where
it was thrown in the late seventies. The theory is built using lackendotrs
Conceptual Semantics and treats 'even' as a focal presuppositional construction
whose behaviour is similar to other focal presuppositional elements such as
contrastive stress. One important result of the paper is the distinction between
linguistic and argumentative presuppositions, which cuts across the distinction
between semantics and pragmatics of natural language. This paper won the
IBERDROLA Best Paper Award.
x COGNITION, AGENCY AND RATIONALITY
8. Ton Sales' "Logics for Mental States" is a schematic survey of formalizations of
a wide variety of mental states for computational purposes. The content of the paper
was intended as a tutorial on the subject, the most relevant literature on the topic is
described in a concise and clear way. This paper leads to the last three chapters
which concern multi-agent systems in Artificial Intelligence.
9. One of the main problems in multi-agent systems is to reach a satisfactory
balance between the exploitation of the conceptual power of autonomous individual
agents and the coherent performance of the overall system. Susanne Kalenka and
Nicholas R. Jennings' "Socially Responsible Decision Making by Autonomous
Agents" presents a framework for characterising social decision and proposes a
socially responsible decision making principle (the prinCiple of social rationality),
which enables agents to exploit interactions with others for their own gain, but
which considers also that they can be sometimes willing to do things for the greater
good. Three socially responsible decision making functions are identified and used
in a multi-agent system for unloading lorries at a warehouse, making a empirical
evaluation of their effectiveness.
10. Rosaria Conte, in her "Diversity in Rationality. A Multi-Agent Perspective",
examines the "marriage" between AI (multi-agent systems and distributed artificial
intelligence), on the one hand, and economic and strategic rationality (game theory,
economic decision theory), on the other. She discusses some of the main limits of
the concept of rationality offered by the economic theory and proposes various
amendments, which essentially amount to the introduction of diversity in the
rationality paradigm. She also presents a computational model (MICROdep) to
simulate the formation of partnerships in social markets and test some empirical
hypotheses concerning negotiation.
11. Barbara J. Grosz's "The Context of Collaboration" concerns the role of contexts
in collaborative activity. After briefly reviewing the roles of contexts in language
processing, she presents the SharedPlans model of collaborative activity which
encompasses the distinction between "intentions-to" and "intentions-that" as well
as the concept "intentional context", and that has been used both as a critical
constituent of a computational model of dialogue and as the basis for building
computer agents that collaborate with one another or with humans. The intentional
contexts and the intention operators are used to distinguish between the actions of
two types of business school graduates in a well-known example used by Searle to
argue against individualistic accounts of collective activity.
In sum, these Proceedings ofI CCS-97 collect the papers by some very well-known
researchers in Cognitive Science, which represent leading edge work on Cognition,
Agency and Rationality. The diversity of their disciplinary origins and standpoints
not only reflects the main topics and the range of different positions presented at
ICCS-97 but also serves as proof of the richness, fruitfulness, and diversity of
research in Cogntive Science today.
Acknowledgements
ICCS-97 was financially supported by the Secretary of State of Education and
Culture (Ministerio de Educaci6n y Cultura) of the Spanish Government, the
INTRODUCTION xi
Secretary of Education of the Basque Government, the Kutxa Foundation, and
Iberdrola Electric Company. We would like to thank the members of the Organizing
and Program Committees of the Colloquium for their invaluable work before and
during the Colloquium. Concerning the preparation of this volume, an anonymous
referee and the responsibles from Kluwer, especially Keith Lehrer, Maja de Keijzer,
Rudolf Rijgersberg and Iolanda Voogd must be thanked. And, last but not least, Eli
Mendizabal and Edurne Atxa (lLCLI) deserve a special mention here for their help in
typing and formatting.
Kepa Korta, Ernest Sosa and Xabier Arrazola