Philosophy & Ethics

In 1987, Robert Bork became the target of an organized, special interest smear campaign aimed at ruining his chances for being confirmed by the Senate as a Supreme Court justice.   Since then, a tit-for-tat approach has made Supreme Court appointments a political football. These politicized Supreme Court nomination battles have eroded public support of the high Court and a study of public reactions during the Samuel Alito nomination process shows it is only going to get worse. In a new book, researchers reveal how television advertisements that opposed Alito's nomination in 2005 had a…

From 1958 to 1970 Wladimiro Dorigo, my father, directed a political and cultural magazine called "Questitalia" ("This italy"), where emerging political issues were discussed, and the ongoing transformations of Italian society were dissected by a distinguished group of intellectuals. I own a copy of all the 150 issues of that publication, and every once in a while I pick one of them out of the lot at random, and learn what Italy was 40 or 50 years ago. I  often find myself amazed at realizing that despite the incredible evolution of our society and of the world during this frenetic fin…

Matthew C. Nisbet, assistant professor in the School of Communication writing in Nature Biotechnology, says there are changes that must be made to ensure quality science communication in the future. Some of his recommendations, based on the results of a science communication workshop in Washington, D.C., are: 1. Scientists should pursue a trust- and dialogue-based relationship with the public. The goal is not to 'sell the public' but to democratize public input about scientific issues so that members of the public can meaningfully participate in science-related decision making, which is not…

During my essentially casual research of the native cultures that settled the Southwestern U.S., I repeatedly come across both archaeological and anthropological references to the concept of oneness.  Additionally, current Native American cultures carry forward modern expressions of this concept.  The definition I have gathered from these sources bridges both ancient and current cultural practices.  Oneness, in this respect is a state of cultural being in which the relationship by Native American cultures between their real and spiritiual environment is expressed in their art,…

Word Salad And Rules Of Conformity The conversation-capable computer has often been said to be just around the corner.  All too often, what is found around the corner is  an impenetrable wall. Word saladWord salad is a string of words which gives the impression of having been formed by selecting words mostly or entirely at random.  The psychological terms for this include 'verbigeration' and  'schizophasia'. The linguistic term is  'modern poetry'. Rules of conformity When people communicate, they use the communal protocols of their language.  When a small…

Random Reward Schedules and the Ambiguity of Language. I had the clue from Pavlov: control your conditions and you will see order. B.F. Skinner, A Case History In Scientific Method. Skinner discovered that the rate with which the rat pressed the bar depended not on any preceding stimulus (as Watson and Pavlov had insisted), but on what followed the bar presses. This was new indeed. Unlike the reflexes that Pavlov had studied, this kind of behavior operated on the environment and was controlled by its effects. Skinner named it operant behavior. Julie S. Vargas A Brief Biography of B.F.…

If you’re not familiar with the work of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake it may help to know that his most popular experiments were featured on British television in the form of specials that you can view, at least in part, on youtube, under titles like “Dogs that know when their owners are coming home.” and “Telephone telepathy.” The topic is relevant to the latest posting by Patrick Lockerby “Thinking Machines and Semantic Quagmire” because of his definitions of “reality” and the discussion of influence upon it. Patrick brings up the concept of “everything being real,” and also talks about the…

The Intelligence in the Chinese Room. In my  article Digging Beneath the Surface of Grammar, I wrote:     It may be noted in passing that Searle's Chinese Room argument fails to convince because, amongst other defects of logic, for every possible natural language input there are infinite possible outputs.  A machine capable of conversing in a convincing, human-like manner, cannot be based on a book of look-up rules, however large that book might be.  The output of a machine capable of passing - or even better, administering - a Turing test must be designed around…

Strangeness And Ambiguity In Language My major linguistic interest lies in the problem of getting a computer to interact with us humans using language in exactly the way that we do.  It is just not acceptable to any rational human being that they should be forced to adopt a jargon or baby-talk just to get a computer to do what it was invented for: making life easier.  Under no circumstances should we accept a computer operating system or program that has the audacity to issue commands to a human. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers…

Thinking Machines and The Semantic Quagmire What Is The Semantic Quagmire? I use the term "semantic quagmire" to refer to a peculiar state of mind which must ultimately be reached when thinking about thought itself, and cognition generally, if one cannot avoid infinite semantic regression.  By semantic regression I mean the sort of inquiry that children make when they ask "What does word x mean?", "OK, so what does word y mean?", and so on indefinitely, trying to make sense of words by dint of pure semantics.  The final question in the chain is not "What does 'mean' mean?", because…