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Full Description
Catching Ourselves in the Act uses situated robotics, ethology, and developmental psychology to erect a new framework for explaining human behavior. Rejecting the cognitive science orthodoxy that formal task-descriptions and their implementation are fundamental to an explanation of mind, Horst Hendriks-Jansen argues for an alternative model based on the notion of interactive emergence.Situated activity and interactive emergence are concepts that derive from the new discipline of autonomous agent research. Hendriks-Jansen puts these notions on a firm philosophical basis and uses them to anchor a "genetic" or "historical" explanation of mental phenomena in species-typical activity patterns that have been selected by a cultural environment of artifacts, language, and intentional scaffolding by adults. Situated robotics, allied with techniques and principles from ethology, allows the testing of hypotheses framed in terms of natural kinds that can be grounded through the theory of natural selection. This approach negotiates the "nature versus nurture" dispute in a radically new way.Catching Ourselves in the Act provides a thorough overview of autonomous agent research in America and Europe, focusing in particular on work by such eminent researchers as Rodney Brooks, Pattie Maes, Maja Mataric, and Rolf Pfeifer. It reassesses the basic principles of artificial life and explores the repercussions of autonomous agent research for human psychology and the philosophy of mind, as well as its affinities with the "contextual revolution" in sociology and anthropology.A Bradford Book. Complex Adaptive Systems
Contents
Situated robotics, natural selection, and cultural scaffolding - the ingredients of a historical explanation: meeting the challenge of a new paradigm; symbol processing as a scientific theory of human and animal behaviour; the basic ingredients of an alternative approach; can situated activity and interactive emergence explain the intentional behaviour of human beings? travelling through the book by different routes. Computers, models, and theories: the search for a unifying calculus in computational psychology; alternative types of scientific explanation; interactive emergence. Internal representation and natural selection - epistemological and ontological strains in the cognitive approach: Dennett's formulation of the problem; attempts to reconcile internal representation and natural selection; Millikan's definition of proper function; Task domains and skill domains. Connectionism - its promise and limitations as currently conceived: analytic and synthetic connectionism; Harnad's model of symbol grounding; what do we mean by "symbols"? Smolensky's "Proper treatment"; the curious case of the horseshoe crab; the limitations of an input-output model. Scientific explanation of behaviour - the approach through formal task definition: grounding scientific paradigms; Turing's time-and-motion study of a mathematician at work; Newell and Simon's physical symbol system; Marr's concept of internal representation; Chomsky and competence theories; conclusion. Scientific explanation of behaviour - the logic of evolution and learning: liberating behaviour from behaviourist explanations; functions, goals, and purposes; why is it there? fitness and survival value; historical explanation and economic models; situated patterns of activity: the natural kinds of a historical explanation of intelligent behaviour. Toward a working definition of activity - recent developments in AI that try to come to terms with the S-Domain: the advantages of an existence proof; the concepts and methodology of autonomous agent research; an autonomous agent that builds maps by finding its way in the world; Mataric and Millikan: history of use; conclusion. An examination of alternative conceptual framework for autonomous agent research: an alternative version of Mataric's wall-following program; Horswill's implements relation; a robot that learns from emergent activity; delineating the space of possibilities. Models of behaviour selection: various aspects of the problem; economic models of choice mechanisms in artificial life; choice mechanisms in autonomous agents; choice mechanisms involving situated activity. (Part contents).
