Philosophers and linguists have suggested that the meaning of a concept can be represented by a rule or function that picks out examples of the concept across all possible worlds. We turn this idea into a computational model of concept learning, and demonstrate that this model helps to account for two aspects of human learning. Our first experiment explores how humans learn relational concepts ...

It is commonly assumed that all propositions have modal profiles and therefore bear their truth-values either contingently or necessarily. In what follows, I argue against this commonly assumed view and in defense of amodalism, according to which certain true propositions are neither necessarily nor contingently true, but only true simpliciter. My defense of amodalism proceeds indirectly. I beg...

An agent operating in a complex environment can benefit from adapting its behavior to the situation at hand. The agent's choice of actions at any point in time can, however , be based only on its local knowledge and beliefs. When many agents are present, the success of one's agent's actions will typically depend on the actions of the other agents. These, in turn, are based on the other agents' ...

I argue that consciousness is an aspect of an agent's intelligence, hence of its ability to deal adaptively with the world. In particular, it allows for the possibility of noting and correcting the agent's own errors. This in turn requires a robust self model as part of its world model, as well as the capability to come to see that world model as residing in its belief base (part of its self mo...

Watson and Lovelock’s daisyworld model [1] was devised to demonstrate how the biota of a world could stabilise it, driving it to a temperature regime that favoured survival of the biota. The subsequent studies have focused on the behaviour of daisyworld in various fields. This study looks at the emergent patterns that arise in 2D daisyworlds at different parameter settings, demonstrating that a...

Actions depend crucially on what an agent knows and does not know. For example, an action may have a precondition that requires knowing the referent of a term, which is generally referred to as knowing who or knowing what. Alternatively, executing a sense action may be the result of realizing that the referent of a term is not known yet. The latter requires an agent to reason about all it knows...

Problem: distinguish chance regularities from causal regularities. Lewis’s solution: use ideal theory – promote those regularities to causal that, under reflective equilibrium, given all the evidence, retain their regularity under a nearest possible worlds account of counterfactuals Thus, R2: A causes B iff B is later than A and there is a constant conjunction of events of type A and type B in ...

1. Introduction Analytic metaphysics is in resurgence; there is renewed and vigorous interest in topics such as time, causation, persistence, parthood and possible worlds. We who share this interest often pay lip-service to the idea that metaphysics should be informed by modern science; some take this duty very seriously.

According to the pragmatic or functional conception of attitudes, we can say that John desires A iff John behaves such that he tends to bring it about that the actual world is an A-world, if his beliefs are true. This puts certain constraints on how to analyse desire attributions, but it leaves open a number of alternative analyses. Several alternatives will be discussed and compared in this pa...

In this paper I discuss and evaluate different arguments for the view that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. I conclude that essentialist arguments from the nature of natural kinds fail to establish that essences are ontologically more basic than laws, and fail to offer an a priori argument for the necessity of all causal laws. Similar considerations carry across to the argument ...