A sequel to Pollock's How to Build a Person, this volume builds upon that theoretical groundwork for the implementation of rationality through artificial intelligence. Pollock argues that progress in AI has stalled because of its creators' reliance upon unformulated intuitions about rationality. Instead, he bases the OSCAR architecture upon an explicit philosophical theory of rationality, encompassing principles of practical cognition, epistemic cognition, and defeasible reasoning.
This book makes available to linguists and Sanskritists a collection of the most important articles on the Sanskrit grammarians, and provides a connected historical outline of their activities.
Leading figures working in the philosophy of action debate foundational issues relating to the causal theory of action.The causal theory of action (CTA) is widely recognized in the literature of the philosophy of action as the "standard story" of human action and agency—the nearest approximation in the field to a theoretical orthodoxy. This volume brings together leading figures working in action theory today to discuss issues relating to the CTA and its applications, which range from experimental philosophy to moral psychology. Some of the contributors defend the theory while others criticize it; some draw from historical sources while others focus on recent developments; some rely on the tools of analytic philosophy while others cite the latest empirical research on human action. All agree, however, on the centrality of the CTA in the philosophy of action. The contributors first consider metaphysical issues, then reasons-explanations of action, and, finally, new directions for thinking about the CTA. They discuss such topics as the tenability of some alternatives to the CTA; basic causal deviance; the etiology of action; teleologism and anticausalism; and the compatibility of the CTA with theories of embodied cognition. Two contributors engage in an exchange of views on intentional omissions that stretches over four essays, directly responding to each other in their follow-up essays. As the action-oriented perspective becomes more influential in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, this volume offers a long-needed debate over foundational issues.ContributorsFred Adams, Jesús H. Aguilar, John Bishop, Andrei A. Buckareff, Randolph Clarke, Jennifer Hornsby, Alicia Juarrero, Alfred R. Mele, Michael S. Moore, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Josef Perner, Johannes Roessler, David-Hillel Ruben, Carolina Sartorio, Michael Smith, Rowland Stout
John Carroll shows how a pervasive but underused element of design practice, the scenario, can transform information systems design.Difficult to learn and awkward to use, today's information systems often change our activities in ways that we do not need or want. The problem lies in the software development process. In this book John Carroll shows how a pervasive but underused element of design practice, the scenario, can transform information systems design. Traditional textbook approaches manage the complexity of the design process via abstraction, treating design problems as if they were composites of puzzles. Scenario-based design uses concretization. A scenario is a concrete story about use. For example: "e;A person turned on a computer; the screen displayed a button labeled Start; the person used the mouse to select the button."e; Scenarios are a vocabulary for coordinating the central tasks of system development-understanding people's needs, envisioning new activities and technologies, designing effective systems and software, and drawing general lessons from systems as they are developed and used. Instead of designing software by listing requirements, functions, and code modules, the designer focuses first on the activities that need to be supported and then allows descriptions of those activities to drive everything else. In addition to a comprehensive discussion of the principles of scenario-based design, the book includes in-depth examples of its application.
In The Creation of Value, the first volume of his Meaning in Life trilogy, Singer studies the nature of imagination, idealization, and love in the context of humanity's attempt to define itself through the pursuit of meanings and values that it creates. Singer confronts life's most troubling problems: the meaning of death, the place of anxiety in daily existence, the conditions needed for us to have a life worth living, and the possibility of a love of life in others as well as in ourselves.
A study of the pragmatic roots of American environmentalism-as seen in the work of Liberty Hyde Bailey, Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and Aldo Leopold-and how it can inform a new, civic-minded environmentalism today.
A pioneering work in comparative history and social science that compares population behavior in response to adversity in Europe and Asia.This highly original book—the first in a series analyzing historical population behavior in Europe and Asia—pioneers a new approach to the comparative analysis of societies in the past. Using techniques of event history analysis, the authors examine 100,000 life histories in 100 rural communities in Western Europe and Asia to analyze the demographic response to social and economic pressures. In doing so they challenge the accepted Eurocentric Malthusian view of population processes and demonstrate that population behavior has not been as uniform as previously thought—that it has often been determined by human agency, particularly social structure and cultural practice.The authors examine the complex relationship between human behavior and social and economic environment, analyzing age, gender, family, kinship, social class and social organization, climate, food prices, and real wages to compare mortality responses to adversity. Their research at the individual, household, and community levels challenges the previously accepted characterizations of social and economic behavior in Europe and Asia in the past. The originality of the analysis as well as the geographic breadth and historical depth of the data make Life Under Pressure a significant advance in the field of historical demography. Its findings will be of interest to scholars in economics, environmental studies, demography, history, and sociology as well as the general reader interested in these subjects.
This book addresses the organization and distribution of functional categories in American Sign Language (ASL), focusing on tense, agreement, and wh-constructions.
By systematically confronting theoretical models with econometric data, a leading macroeconomist and microeconomist present a unified and coherent view how and when productivity gains and economic growth are aided or hindered by competition policy.
Discussions of questions at the cutting edge of macroeconomics that are central to contemporary policy debates, analyzing both current macroeconomic issues and recent theoretical advances.
A theoretical and empirical study of agricultural contracts and organization based on the transaction cost framework.
A useful and integrated perspective on tariffs and quotas in imperfect competition.
This book identifies and takes up an important problem in international economics--the split in theoretical and empirical work in international finance and in international trade.
How social and economic conditions have precipitated advances in engineering.
A detailed history of one instance of a vanishing phenomenon, the small New England textile town.
The title of this book is derived from a graduate course in which Professor Egon Orowan presented to M.I.T. students a clear and simple picture of the basic concepts in crystal plasticity and the mechanics of fracture of materials. Since the publication of his pioneering papers on dislocations and atomic mechanisms of fracture in the early 1930's, Professor Orowan has been one of the principal contributors to the field of physics of plasticity and strength. During the past 10 to 15 years, the perfection of many direct experimental methods has caused a great increase of activity in the elucidation of the effects of dislocations on mechanical and physical properties. Equally intensive activity is taking place in the field of physics and mechanics of fracture processes. Professor Ali Argon felt that the retirement of Professor Orowan from the M.I.T. faculty was an appropriate occasion to take stock of the developments in the immediate past and to produce a needed synthesis of this technologically important field. For this purpose he invited 37 of the world's leading figures in the field to contribute theoretical papers of original work. The 17 papers on the Physics of Plasticity fall into two categories: (1) Individual Dislocations and Basic Deformation Mechanisms, and (2) Hardening Mechanisms and Dislocation Dynamics. The 10 papers on the Physics of Strength concentrate on (1) Cracks and Fracture, and (2) Geology.
This collection of current research presents results from a three-year, ESPRIT-funded effort to explore the integration of the foundational issues of functional, logic, and object-oriented programming.
Investigating meta-programming within the logic programming paradigm, Meta-Logics and Logic Programming presents original research on an important extension of logic programming that makes it more amenable for knowledge representation and programming in general. The 12 contributions, many written especially for this book, explore the foundations, language design issues, and applications of meta-programming in logic programming. Meta-programming--the process of writing computer programs that can manipulate representations of other programs--has been key both in the foundations of computer science and in its practical developments. Examples of meta-programs include compilers, interpreters, program analyzers, and partial evaluators. The choice of logic programming as a basis for meta-programming offers several practical and theoretical advantages: among them, the possibility of tackling critical foundational problems of meta-programming within a strong theoretical framework, and the surprising ease of programming. The usual framework of logic programming (and more generally first-order logic), however, has to be modified and extended to formally deal with meta-programs, extensions the editors call meta-logics. Along with an exploration of meta-programming in logic programming, the definitions, formal properties, and use of these extensions constitute one of the book's main themes. The first part of the book, Foundations, focuses on the representation problem--how object programs are represented within meta-programs. The second part, Language Support for Meta-Logics, is concerned with language extensions that make meta-programming easier and more elegant. The third part, Meta-Logics for Knowledge Management, deals with the use of meta-logic for advanced knowledge representation purposes.
Leading academics and prominent economists of central banks and international organizations analyze and discuss the key problems and issues of monetary policy of developed countries.
A set of related papers dealing with the meaning of causality in simulataneous dynamic equation systems. Investigation of the systems which only approximately satisfy the conditions enabling the definition of causality, leads to a set of limiting theorems concerning the dynamic behavior of such systems over time, and estimation procedures for the parameters of such systems. Implications of these theorems for some well-known propositions in economics and other social sciences are considered.
This tour de force in experimental robotics describes the first robot able to play, and even beat, human ping-pong players.
Studies based on the Rankine-Hugoniot relations have classified MHO shock waves as fast, switch-on, intermediate, switch-off, and slow. Any waves found in nature must also: (a) possess steady-state structures and (b) be stable in the presence of small-flow disturbances. In this monograph, Dr. Anderson examines these criteria in relation to plane shocks for which the collision frequency is large compared with cyclotron frequency. It contains a three-dimensional graphic representation of shock end states and presents an exact solution for the shock adiabatic curve in a convenient form. An MIT Press Research Monograph.
An empirical study evaluating the choice of manufacturing equipment by firms in developing nations.
A list of errata for this title is available upon request directed to A. Bers at bers@mit.edu.
Research collected from many disciplines, including computer architecture, computer-aided design, parallel algorithms, semiconductor technology, and testing.
The selected papers of William Phelps Allis are gathered here in celebration of his elevation from Professor to Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This gathering was arranged as a surprise tribute to Professor Allis and was prepared under conditions of conspiring silence. The presentation was held at M.I.T. on May 10, 1967.The papers selected here are a worthy extension of the man himself, in their directness and essential simplicity. And in their abiding value. In the words of his editor, student, and colleague Sanborn C. Brown, "he has succeeded in leading a whole generation of Physicists with such a timeless approach that this volume should be considered not as a look backward but as a compilation of fundamental insights upon which to build future progress."
An overview and synopsis of European connectionist research from both classical and mathematical perspectives.
Understanding the impact of economic growth rates of countries on individual firms.
Exchange-Rate Devaluation in a Semi-Industrialized Country analyzes the impact, of the exchange rate on the domestic economy and the balance of payments of Argentina during the period 1955-1961. It contains a study of the short-run mechanism of adjustment of the balance of payments of that country during the nineteen-fifties and early sixties, concentrating especially on an analysis of the effects of the December 1958 devaluation of the peso. This book is one of the few case studies to consider fully the impact of devaluation in semi-industrialized economies.After reviewing the existing theoretical literature on devaluation, the author presents a model that deals explicitly with the redistributive effect. This model serves as a guide to the empirical analysis of other chapters in the book and is far more usable than the standard devaluation models normally employed. Other chapters study the demand and supply conditions for importable and exportable goods in Argentina. The mechanics of the inflationary process are also discussed. The last two chapters present a detailed description of the evolution of the Argentine economy during 1955-1961 and the conclusions reached by this study. Exchange-Rate Devaluation in a Semi-Industrialized Country contains an intensive analysis of the redistributive effect, and its main conclusion is that one must take explicitly into account the redistributive effect when analyzing the impact of devaluation in a semi-industrialized country. In recent years a great debate has arisen on the appropriateness of economic policies recommended by the International Monetary Fund in several Latin American countries, aimed at correcting disequilibrium in the balance of payments; this book can be useful in providing an objective account of one experience where the I.M.F. policies were at least partially followed. This book will prove valuable to the economist as well as to anyone interested in international and, especially, Latin American economics. Volume No.5 in the M.I.T. Economics Monograph Series
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