Human–robot interactions are often affected by error situations that are caused by either the robot or the human. Therefore, robots would profit from the ability to recognize when error situations occur. We investigated the verbal and non-verbal social signals that humans show when error situations occur in human–robot interaction experiments. For that, we analyzed 201 videos of five human–robot interaction user studies with varying tasks from four independent projects. The analysis shows that there are two types of error situations: social (...) norm violations and technical failures. Social norm violations are situations in which the robot does not adhere to the underlying social script of the interaction. Technical failures are caused by technical shortcomings of the robot. The results of the video analysis show that the study participants use many head movements and very few gestures, but they often smile, when in an error situation with the robot. The results suggest that participants do not see the robot as a social interaction partner with comparable communication skills. Our findings have implications for builders and evaluators of human–robot interaction systems. The builders need to consider including modules for recognition and classification of head movements to the robot input channels. The evaluators need to make sure that the presence of an experimenter does not skew the results of their user studies. (shrink)

When randomly assigning participants to experimental roles and the according payment prospects, participants seem to receive “manna from heaven.” In our view, this seriously questions the validity of laboratory findings. We depart from this by auctioning off player roles via the incentive compatible random price mechanism thus avoiding the selection effect of competitive second price auctions. Our experiment employs the generosity game where the proposer chooses the size of the pie, facing an exogenously given own agreement payoff, and the responder (...) is the residual claimant. We find that entitlement crowds out equality seeking and strengthens efficiency seeking. More generally, we find that inducing entitlement for the roles in which participants find themselves makes a difference. Interpreting participants’ willingness to pay for their role as their aspiration level further allows to test satisficing and explore “mutual satisficing.” We find that responder participants apparently do not anticipate proposer generosity in aspiration formation. (shrink)

This abridged and revised edition of the original book (Springer-Verlag Vienna, 2001) offers the only comprehensive history and documentation of the Vienna Circle based on new sources with an innovative historiographical approach to the study of science. With reference to previously unpublished archival material and more recent literature, it refutes a number of widespread clichés about "neo-positivism" or "logical positivism". Following some insights on the relation between the history of science and the philosophy of science, the book offers an accessible (...) introduction to the complex subject of "the rise of scientific philosophy" in its socio-cultural background and European philosophical networks till the forced migration in the Anglo-Saxon world. The first part of the book focuses on the origins of Logical Empiricism before World War I and the development of the Vienna Circle in "Red Vienna" (with the "Verein Ernst Mach"), its fate during Austro-Fascism (Schlick's murder 1936) and its final expulsion by National-Socialism beginning with the "Anschluss" in 1938. It analyses the dynamics of the Schlick-Circle in the intellectual context of "late enlightenment" including the minutes of the meetings from 1930 on for the first time published and presents an extensive description of the meetings and international Unity of Science conferences between 1929 and 1941. The chapters introduce the leading philosophers of the Schlick Circle (e.g., Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Felix Kaufmann, Edgar Zilsel) and describe the conflicting interaction between Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath, the long term communication between Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as between the Vienna Circle with Heinrich Gomperz and Karl Popper. In addition, Karl Menger's "Mathematical Colloquium" with Kurt Gödel is presented as a parallel movement. The final chapter of this section describes the demise of the Vienna Circle and the forced exodus of scientists and intellectuals from Austria.The second part of the book includes a bio-bibliographical documentation of the Vienna Circle members and for the first time of the assassination of Moritz Schlick in 1936, followed by an appendix comprising an extensive list of sources and literature. (shrink)

This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS following Chafe (1976) within a communicative model of Common Ground (CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. It then defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and (...) Topic (as specifying what an statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not satisfy the local communicative needs totally. It also points out that the rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS. (shrink)

Scientific Philosophy: Origins and Development is the first Yearbook of the Vienna Circle Institute, which was founded in October 1991. The book contains original contributions to an international symposium which was the first public event to be organised by the Institute: `Vienna--Berlin--Prague: The Rise of Scientific Philosophy: The Centenaries of Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach and Edgar Zilsel.' The first section of the book - `Scientific Philosophy - Origins and Developments' reveals the extent of scientific communication in the inter-War years between (...) these great metropolitan centres, as well as presenting systematic investigations into the relevance of the heritage of the Vienna Circle to contemporary research and philosophy. This section offers a new paradigm for scientific philosophy, one which contrasts with the historiographical received view of logical empiricism. Support for this re-evaluation is offered in the second section, which contains, for the first time in English translation, Gustav Bergmann's recollections of the Vienna Circle, and an historical study of political economist Wilhelm Neurath, Otto Neurath's father. The third section gives a report on current computer-based research which documents the relevance of Otto Neurath's `Vienna method of pictorial statistics', or `Isotypes'. A review section describes new publications on Neurath and the Vienna Circle, as well anthologies relevant to Viennese philosophy and its history, setting them in their wider cultural and political perspective. Finally, a description is given of the Vienna Circle Institute and its activities since its foundation, as well as of its plans for the future. (shrink)

The current implementation of the Neo-Darwinian model of evolution typically assumes that the set of possible phenotypes is organized into a highly symmetric and regular space. Most conveniently, a Euclidean vector space is used, representing phenotypic properties by real-valued variables. Computational work on the biophysical genotype-phenotype model of RNA folding, however, suggests a rather different picture. If phenotypes are organized according to genetic accessibility, the resulting space lacks a metric and can be formalized only in terms of a relatively unfamiliar (...) structure. Patterns of phenotypic evolution—such as punctuation, irreversibility, and modularity—result naturally from the properties of the genotype-phenotype map, which, given the genetic accessibility structure, define accessibility in the phenotype space. The classical framework, however, addresses these patterns exclusively in terms of natural selection on suitably constructed fitness landscapes. Recent work has extended the explanatory level for phenotypic evolution from fitness considerations alone to include the topological structure of phenotype space as induced by the genotype-phenotype map. Lewontin’s notion of “quasi-independence” of characters can also be formalized in topological terms: it corresponds to the assumption that a region of the phenotype space is represented by a product space of orthogonal factors. In this picture, each character corresponds to a factor of a region of the phenotype space. We consider any region of the phenotype space that has a given factorization as a “type”, i.e., as a set of phenotypes that share the same set of phenotypic characters. Thus, a theory of character identity can be developed that is based on the correspondence of local factors in different regions of the phenotype space. (shrink)

Als »Subjektphilosophie« hat man das neuzeitliche Denken insgesamt charakterisiert. Diese Auszeichnung verdankt das Subjekt der verwegenen Hoffnung, es eigne sich zum ultimativen Prinzip der Wissensbegründung. Das Interesse an einer Aufklärung seiner Struktur wurde dadurch jedoch in den Hintergrund gedrängt. Diese Struktur steht im Zentrum von Manfred Franks jüngstem Buch, das einen Blick auf die moderne Geschichte der Subjekttheorien mit Analysen der inneren Beschaffenheit und der Zeitlichkeit des Subjekts sowie seines Verhältnisses zur Intersubjektivität und einer Auseinandersetzung mit klassischen und neuesten (...) analytischen Theoriebildungen verbindet. Dem Begriff der Präreflexivität kommt dabei die Schlüsselrolle zu. (shrink)

Der Autor hat sich das Ziel gesetzt, verschiedene Ansatze zur formalen Logik unter einer einheitlichen Fragestellung darzustellen und zu erortern. Das Buch beginnt deshalb mit der Aristotelischen Syllogistik als einer historisch bedeutsamen Auspragung der formalen Logik. Dann wird durch die schrittweise Erweiterung der einfachen Aussagenlogik zur klassischen Quantorenlogik in einen wesentlichen Teil der mathematischen Logik eingefuhrt. Es folgen einige Anwendungen der formalen Logik, Ansatze zu einer Theorie der Argumentation, ein kurzer Abriss der Geschichte der formalen Logik und ein Uberblick uber (...) andere Logiken als die bereits genannten. Ein Kapitel mit Aufgaben und deren Losungen soll die aktive Auseinandersetzung mit dem Inhalt des Buches fordern.". (shrink)

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universitèat Berlin.

This volume is a result of the international symposium “The Tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School in European Culture,” which took place in Warsaw, Poland, September 2015. It collects almost all the papers presented at the symposium as well as some additional ones. The contributors include scholars from Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Poland. The papers are devoted to the history and reception of the Lvov-Warsaw School, a Polish branch of analytic philosophy. They present the School’s achievements as well as its (...) connections to other analytic groups. The contributors also show how the tradition of the School is developed contemporarily. The title will appeal to historians of analytic philosophy as well as historians of philosophy in Central Europe. (shrink)

This book presents a vivid argument for the almost lost idea of a unity of all natural sciences. It starts with the "strange" physics of matter, including particle physics, atomic and quantum mechanics, cosmology, relativity and their consequences (Chapter 1), and it continues by describing the properties of material systems that are best understood by statistical and phase-space concepts (Chapter 2). These lead to entropy and to the classical picture of quantitative information, initially devoid of value and meaning (Chapter 3). (...) Finally, "information space" and dynamics within it are introduced as a basis for semantics (Chapter 4), leading to an exploration of life and thought as new problems in physics (Chapter 5). Dynamic equations - again of a strange (but very general) nature - bring about the complex familiarity of the world we live in. Surprising new results in the life sciences open our eyes to the richness of physical thought, and they show us what can and what cannot be explained by a Darwinian approach. The abstract physical approach is applicable to the origins of life, of meaningful information and even of our universe. [T]itle presents a vivid argument for a unity of all natural sciences. This unity engenders the 'complex familiarity' of the world in which we live and which can be described in 'strangely simple' theoretical terms, leading to new insights into the mysterious phenomenon of life. (shrink)

Maine de Biran’s concept of the embodied mind is most suitable to alert our consciousness today, while people are being exceedingly exposed to and submerged by comforting invasive virtual realities of metaverses that essentially minimize their _resistance_-potential to generate _will_ and _effort_.

(2012). Reasoning without believing: on the mechanisation of presuppositions and partiality. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 295-317. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2012.705962.

This book explores the complexity of two philosophical traditions, extending from their origins to the current developments in neopragmatism. Chapters deal with the first encounters of these traditions and beyond, looking at metaphysics and the Vienna circle as well as semantics and the principle of tolerance. There is a general consensus that North-American pragmatism and European Logical Empiricism were converging philosophical traditions, especially after the forced migration of the European Philosophers. But readers will discover a pluralist image of this relation (...) and interaction with an obvious family resemblance. This work clarifies and specifies the common features and differences of these currents since the beginning of their mutual scientific communication in the 19th century. The book draws on collaboration between authors and philosophers from Vienna, Tübingen, and Helsinki, and their networks. It will appeal to philosophers, scholars in the history of philosophy, philosophers of science, pragmatists and beyond. (shrink)

1. Aufklärung, Gesellschaft, Kritik -- 2. Aufklärung, Geschichte, Revolution.

There is little more than a decade left before the bells allover the world will be ringing in the first hour of the twenty-first century, which will surely be an era of highly advanced technology. Looking back on the century that we live in, one can realize that generations of people who have already lived in it for the better parts of their lives have begun to ask the same question that also every individual person thinks about when he is (...) faced with the first signs of the end of his life. It is the question: "Why did everything in my life happen the way it did?" Or, "It would have been so easy to have channelled events into directions other than the way they went. " Or, "Why, in all the world, is my life coming to an end as it does, or, why must all of us face this kind of end of our century?" Whenever human beings take retrospective views of their lives and times - when they are faced with their own personal "fin du siecle" - there appears to be an increasing anxiety throughout the masses asso ciated with a somber feeling of pessimism, which may even be mixed with a slight degree of fatalism. There is quite another feeling with those persons who were born late in this century and who did not share all the events the older generation experi enced. (shrink)

Verzameling filosofische verhandelingen over tijd onder de titel Kairos = de juiste tijd of het juiste moment in het Grieks.