Although Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) was published over 50 years ago, behavior-analytic research on human language and cognition has been slow to develop. In recent years, a new behavioral approach to language known as relational frame theory (RFT) has generated considerable attention, research, and debate. The controversy surrounding RFT can be difficult to fully appreciate, partly becaus...

These notes have a dual goal. On the one hand we shall give an overview of the recently introduced class of scalable frames. These are (finite) frames with the property that each frame vector can be rescaled in such a way that the resulting frames are tight. This process can be viewed as a preconditioning method for finite frames. In particular, we shall: (1) describe the class of scalable fram...

Work in machine ethics has thus far been focused on giving autonomous agents the ability to select morally-correct behaviors given well-formed moral problems. While this is a necessary component to enable an agent to comport to standards of moral behavior, it is not sufficient. In this paper, we present a simple task-domain to illustrate this point. We show that even in simple domains, the pote...

A new class of alternative dual frames is introduced in the setting of finite frames for Rd. These dual frames, called Sobolev duals, provide a high precision linear reconstruction procedure for Sigma-Delta (Σ∆) quantization of finite frames. The main result is summarized as follows: reconstruction with Sobolev duals enables stable rth order Sigma-Delta schemes to achieve deterministic approxim...

The subject of this article is the frame problem, as conceived by certain cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, notably Fodor for whom it stands as a fundamental obstacle to progress in cognitive science. The challenge is to explain the capacity of so-called informationally unencapsulated cognitive processes to deal effectively with information from potentially any cognitive domain wit...