This paper presents an application of the theory of granular partitions proposed in (Smith and Brogaard, to appear), (Smith and Bittner 2001) to the phenomenon of vagueness. We understand vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. This is in contrast to those views which hold that there are intrinsically vague objects or attributes in reality and thus conceive vagueness in a de re fashion. All entities are crisp, on de dicto view here defended, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being its extension. We show that the theory of granular partitions provides a general framework within which we can understand the relation between terms and concepts on the one hand and their multiple referents or extensions on the other, and we show how it might be possible to formulate within this framework a solution to the Sorites paradox. 1.

this paper is inspired by philosophical work, it is squarely motivated by the concerns of building intelligent systems that are capable of collaborative behavior, either with a user, or with other such systems. Still, we hope that the paper sheds light on philosophical issues, and treats the subject of joint action at a sufficiently precise level to be illuminating of problems that any philosophical account needs to confront. An important consequence of focusing on joint actions, rather than solely on individual actions, is the opportunity to rethink related theories. In particular, we claim that speech act theory will need to be recast in light of joint action theory since many of the basic illocutionary acts (e.g., requests, promises) are intimately involved in eatablishing, monitoring, and discharging joint activities. However, despite this tight relationship, no existing speech act theory provides guidance on this connection. This paper takes a first step in the direction of linking speech act theory and joint action theory by showing how various speech acts can be used to form and disband teams. It is by now commonplace to observe that joint action is different from a collection of individual actions, even if they are coordinated. Agents can be acting in a coordinated fashion, as in ordinary automobile traffic, but not be acting together. Conversely, agents can be acting together, but not be coordinated except at the start and end of their joint action (e.g, see [36]) The key property distinguishing joint or collaborative action from mere coordinated action is the joint mental state of the participants. The best way to explore what this mental state must be is to imagine a joint action going astray. Our favorite example is driving in a convoy, versus ordinary traff...

This paper discusses the issues pertinent to the development of a meaningful social interaction between robots and people through employing degrees of anthropomorphism in a robot's physical design and behaviour. As robots enter our social space, we will inherently project/impose our interpretation on their actions similar to the techniques we employ in rationalising for example, a pet's behaviour. This propensity to anthropomorphise is not seen as a hindrance to social robot development, but rather a useful mechanism that requires judicious examination and employment in social robot research.

This work analyzes the central role of interpretation in non-routine design. Based on this analysis, a theory of computer support for interpretation in cooperative design is constructed. The theory is grounded in studies of design and interpretation. It is illustrated by mechanisms provided by a software substrate for computer-based design environments, applied to a sample task of lunar habitat design. Computer support of

The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one's thought as the cause of the act. Conscious will is thus experienced as a function of the priority, consistency, and exclusivity of the thought about the action. The thought must occur before the action, be consistent with the action, and not be accompanied by other causes. An experiment illustrating the role of priority found that people can arrive at the mistaken belief that they have intentionally caused an action that in fact they were forced to perform when they are simply led to think about the action just before its occurrence. Conscious will is a pervasive human experience. We all have the sense that we do things, that we cause our acts, that we are agents. As William James (1890) observed, "the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life... depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago " (p. 453). And yet, the very notion of the will seems to contradict the core assumption of psychological science. After all, psychology examines how behavior is caused by mechanisms—the rattling off of genetic, unconscious, neural, cognitive, emotional, social, and yet other chains that lead, dully or not, to the things people do. If the things we do are caused by such mechanisms, how is it that we nonetheless experience willfully doing them? Our approach to this problem is to look for yet another chain—to examine the mechanisms that produce the experience of conscious will itself. In this article, we do this by exploring the possibility that the experience of will is a result of the same mental processes that people use in the perception of causality more generally. Quite simply, it may be that people experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action. This idea means that people can experience conscious will quite independent of any actual causal connection between

This article presents a formal theory of robot perception as a form of abduction. The theory pins down the process whereby low-level sensor data is transformed into a symbolic representation of the external world, drawing together aspects such as incompleteness, top-down information flow, active perception, attention, and sensor fusion in a unifying framework. In addition, a number of themes are identified that are common to both the engineer concerned with developing a rigorous theory of perception, such as the one on offer here, and the philosopher of mind who is exercised by questions relating to mental representation and intentionality.

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Intentions are an important concept in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We present a formal theory of intentions...

1.1 Four assays of quality................................................................ 4 1.2 The structure of appearance.................................................... 11 1.3 Intrinsic versus relational........................................................ 13 1.4 Four refutations....................................................................... 17 2. Qualities and their Places................................................................ 25 2.1 The appearance of space......................................................... 25 2.2 Some brain-mind mysteries..................................................... 26 2.3 Spatial qualia........................................................................... 33 2.4 Appearances partitioned.......................................................... 35 2.5 Ties that bind........................................................................... 38 2.6 Feature-placing introduced...................................................... 43 3 Places Phenomenal and Real............................................................ 47 3.1 Space-time regions.................................................................. 47 3.2 Three varieties of visual field.................................................. 50 3.3 Why I am not an array of impressions..................................... 55 3.4 Why I am not an intentional object......................................... 58 3.5 Sensory identification.............................................................. 61 3.6 Some examples of sensory reference....................................... 66

In this paper, we present an abstract formal model of decision-making in a social setting that covers all aspects of the process, from recognition of a potential for cooperation through to joint decision. In a multi-agent environment, where self-motivated autonomous agents try to pursue their own goals, a joint decision cannot be taken for granted. In order to decide effectively, agents need the ability to (a) represent and maintain a model of their own mental attitudes, (b) reason about other agents' mental attitudes, and (c) influence other agents' mental states. Social mental shaping is advocated as a general mechanism for attempting to have an impact on agents' mental states in order to increase their cooperativeness towards a joint decision. Our approach is to specify a novel, high-level architecture for collaborative decision-making in which the mentalisfic notions of belief, desire, goal, intention, preference and commitment play a central role in guiding an individual's and the group's decision-making behaviour. We identify preconditions that must be fulfilled before collaborative decision-making can commence and prescribe how cooperating agents should behave, in terms of their own decision-making apparatus and their interactions with others, when the decision-making process is progressing satisfactorily. The model is formalised through a new, many-sorted, multi-modal logic.