Graham White

Queen Mary, University of London | QMUL · School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science

In this paper, we explore the idea that independently developed Dynamic Syntax accounts of dialogue and interaction fit well within the general approach of radical embodied and enac-tive accounts of cognition (REEC). This approach enables a rethinking of the grounding of linguistic universal constraints, specifically tree structure restrictions, as...

This paper uses the example of software and electronic devices used in musical improvisation to develop a critique of the dominant view of technology, specified by function and input–output behaviour, and optimized so that it is as domesticated as a faithful dog. The optimization in question attempts to avoid discontinuity and, more generally, unfo...

This chapter discusses the emergence of the Internet of Things, using a case study of a citizen science initiative, focusing in particular on issues involved in measuring air quality. The core of the citizen science initiative was formed by a world-wide network of early adaptors of the Internet of Things who, motivated by public health issues, set...

This chapter discusses the emergence of the Internet of Things, using a case studyof a citizen science initiative, focusing in particular on issues involved in measuringair quality. The core of the citizen science initiative was formed by a worldwidenetwork of early adaptors of the Internet of Things who, motivated by publichealth issues, set out t...

This paper contrasts the procedures of science and art by examining the processes of the evolution of thought, and of the context which grounds thought, in both families of disciplines. The decisive difference is the attitude towards reproducibility: in science, reproducibility is sought after, whereas, in contrast, variation (either deliberately p...

We start with a example of assembler programming, and show how even at this low level the structure of the programming language does not directly mirror the structure of the hardware, but that it is also decisively influenced by the human practices surrounding computer use, and that assembly language gives a view of the hardware which is accommodat...

The Church-Turing thesis is widely stated in terms of three equivalent models of computation (Turing machines, the lambda calculus, and rewrite systems), and it says that the intuitive notion of a computable function is what is defined by any one of these models. Despite this well-established equivalence, the philosophical literature concentrates a...

Conversational clusters refer to groups of two or more people engaged in face-to-face interaction, wherein the arrangement of people's bodies in space determines the spatial layout of clusters. Existing computational models have mostly focused on simulating 'circular' agent clusters. This paper questions the realistic appeal of a circular manifesta...

This paper demonstrates agents forming clusters that are spatially akin to human conversational groups. Demo works based on two different models: Model 1 operates at a global level to organize agents into predominantly circular clusters; whereas Model 2 operates at a local level to organize agents into variably shaped clusters.

The use of critical information is ubiquitous in today’s world, and often distributed across multiple participants of a socio-technical work-system. However, incidents sometimes unfortunately happen, because the dual constraints of using correct, and consistent information were not fully satisfied. To support investigation, and learning from such i...

Investigations into incidents are an important means of improving the safety and security of sociotechnical systems. Numerous models and approaches have been proposed, but little research has been done to understand the link between such theories and their practice in actual investigation. We propose an analytical framing of this link to facilitate...

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-medieval

We compare Fresco’s analysis of the Turing machine-based notion of computation with that of others, in particular with functional programming and with the reversible computing paradigm of Toffoli and others. We conclude that, although much useful philosophical work can be done by the sort of analysis that Fresco proposes, there is, nevertheless, al...

We outline the logic of current approaches to the so-called ``frame problem'' (that is, the problem of predicting change in the physical world by using logical inference), and we show that these approaches are not completely extensional since none of them is closed under uniform substitution. The underlying difficulty is something known, in the phi...

We start with the ambition -- dating back to the early days of the semantic web -- of assembling a significant portion human knowledge into a contradiction-free form using semantic web technology. We argue that this would not be desirable, because there are concepts, known as essentially contested concepts, whose definitions are contentious due to...

We consider the symbol grounding problem, and apply to it philosophical arguments against Cartesianism developed by Sellars and McDowell: the problematic issue is the dichotomy between inside and outside which the definition of a physical symbol system presupposes. Surprisingly, one can question this dichotomy and still do symbolic computation: a d...

We compare the role of Cartesian assumptions in the symbol grounding problem and in the Myth of the Given: We argue that the Sellars- McDowell critique of the Myth of the Given and, in particular, its use of the concept of normativity can provide useful resources for responding to the symbol grounding problem. We also describe the concepts of norma...

Concepts of space are fundamental to our understanding of human action and interaction. The common sense concept of uniform, metric, physical space is inadequate for design. It fails to capture features of social norms and practices that can be critical to the success of a technology. The concept of ‘place’ addresses these limitations by taking acc...

Some of the Reiter's important ideas and the fibrational theory is presented. Reiter's system is described in an artificial intelligence idiom called the situation calculus and the prime motive of the idiom are situations, actions, and fluents. Reiter stipulate that the set of situations should be freely generated by the actions. The fundamental pr...

The UK Network in Computer Algebra (NETCA) organised a workshop on various aspects of continuous systems verification, mainly with the focus on theorem proving. The workshop provides a forum for work in progress on new and emerging areas to be presented and discussed, and experiences to be shared.

We give a modal presentation of the McCain and Turner's "causal theories"; we show how to for- malise, in this framework, Foo and Zhang's inter- polation argument (Zhang and Foo, 2002).

McCain and Turner [6] have an interesting theory of causal reasoning. We give a modal treatment of McCain and Turner’s theory of causal reasoning: we thereby formulate theories equivalent to their original model-theoretic treatment, while preserving its good properties (in particular, its independence of vocabulary).

This paper examines the semantics of a group of logical techniques, used by the Artificial Intelligence community, and which are fundamental for circumscriptionbased approaches to the situation calculus. At first sight, this calculus appears to be an operationalised version of David Lewis' account of causal reasoning: there are items -- here called...

This paper describes an application of linear logic programming to the frame problem. This treatment has both practical and conceptual advantages over standard treatments: it is computationally efficient, and this efficiency arises because linear logic respects the identity, or otherwise, of situations.

This paper is concerned with the use of linear logic as an approach to the frame problem; it extends the work in [18, 20, 19, 21]. It is a common observation that linear logic "solves the frame problem", and by this is usually meant that linear logic can be used to encode fairly simple reasoning about changes in the manner of Strips. Typically, one...

One of the themes of this year’s workshop is the challenge of designing usable systems that make use of shared environments. Based on this, one of the scenarios selected for discussion by the working groups consists of “genuinely co-operative applications, involving concurrent interaction between multiple parties in some form of shared world”.

this report, the author was paid by Project Dynamo, supported by the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under grant number GR/K 19266. The views expressed in this paper are the author's own, and the principal investigators of the project -- John Bell and Wilf Hodges -- bear no responsibility for them. 1 A The Connecti...

This paper is concerned with the contrast between simulation- and deduction-based approaches to reasoning about physical objects. We show that linear logic can give a unified account of both simulation and deduction concerning physical objects; it also allows us to draw a principled distinction between simulation and deduction, since simulations co...

David Lewis' account of counterfactuals is based on a relation of comparative similarity between possible worlds. We investigate what this relation might amount to in the case where the possible worlds are trajectories of dynamic systems: for most dynamic systems, there are unexpected difficulties in defining the sort of relation that Lewis require...

this report, the author was paid by Project Dynamo, supported by the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under grant number GR/K 19266. The views expressed in this paper are the author's own, and the principal investigators of the project -- John Bell and Wilfrid Hodges -- bear no responsibility for them.

We deene a translation between the language Golog and a fragment of linear logic augmented with deenitions; we prove bisimulation for this translation and nally suggest some extensions to Golog motivated by the translation.

This paper describes an application of the linear logic programming language Lygon

Husserl was born in 1859. He was trained as a mathematician, and studied at Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna; he received his doctorate, at the latter university, in 1882. In 1883 he took up a post in Berlin, but in that year he was, as it were, “converted” to philosophy; he returned to Vienna to study philosophy with Franz Brentano, and stayed there fr...

An Introduction to Modern European Philosophy, contains scholarly but accessible essays by nine British academics on Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maritain, Hannah Arendt, Habermas, Foucault, and the 'Events' of 1968. Written for English-speaking readers, it describes the varied t...

this report, the author was supported by Project Dynamo, funded by EPSRC. The views expressed in the report are the author's own, and the principal investigators of the project -- John Bell and Wilfred Hodges -- bear no responsibility for them. 5 Two-Sided Resolution 16 6 Implementation 17

Jan was not pleased: her ski trip started tomorrow, she had a complicated paper to write towards her Master’s degree, and it looked as if she was going to have to stay up all night to finish it. Might as well start it, though. She looked at her desk, covered with old, boring, crumbly books about Western intellectual history in the late twentieth ce...

Husserl was born in 1859. He was trained as a mathematician, and studied at Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna; he received his doctorate, at the latter university, in 1882. In 1883 he took up a post in Berlin, but in that year he was, as it were, “converted” to philosophy; he returned to Vienna to study philosophy with Franz Brentano, and stayed there fr...

An Introduction to Modern European Philosophy contains scholarly but accessible essays by seven British academics on Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Habermas, Foucault, and the 'Events' of 1968. Written for English-speaking readers, it describes the varied traditions within 19th and...

This book is an introduction to European philosophy for English-speaking readers. This is a neutral description, both of the subject matter and of the intended audience — but to be neutral covers up the unavoidable fact that the situation is, and for a long time has been, extremely polemical: European philosophy and Anglo-Saxon thought are supposed...

This article criticizes the “argument from finiteness” – namely, the argument that, since human epistemic capacities are finite, what we know can be formalized only by using recursively enumerable (and hence first order) theories. Associated with this argument from finiteness is a definition of knowledge as provability in a recursively enumerable t...

1. Cf. J. E. Murdoch's impressive series of articles, and, in particular: J. E. Murdoch, "Scientia Mediantibus Vocibus," Miscellanea Medievalia 13/1 (1981): 73-106. 2. J. E. Murdoch 78. 3. G. Leff, William of Ockham (Manchester 1975) 561 f. 4. Ockham, Quodl. VII, q. 2 (OTh IX, 708) Ockham, Exp. Physicorum, lib. II, c. 2 (OPh IV, 241-42). Ockham, Su...

This document surveys the problems posed by ellipsis data, some of them very wellknown, but as a set still posing very considerable challenges and, as a proof of concept of the insights expressible by Dynamic Syntax analyses, uses the intrinsic incrementality of the DS framework to capture structural and semantic properties of elliptical fragments...

While the ubiquitous presence of context dependency in every utterance exchange is now common currency, the full significance of shifting to such a perspective incorporating the incremental nature of context-building has yet to be spelled out. In this talk, our point of departure is the demonstration that split utterances, a pervasive characteristi...