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Newsletter May 23, No. 30



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
May 23, 1985                    Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 30
_____________________________________________________________________________
                                
     A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
     Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
                              ____________

            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, May 23, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``A Procedural Logic''
     Conference Room    Michael Georgeff (SRI and CSLI), Amy Lansky (SRI),
			and Pierre Bessiere (SRI)	
			Discussion led by Michael Georgeff and Amy Lansky

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Representations, Information, and the 
     Room G-19          Physical World'' by Ivan Blair
			Discussion led by Meg Withgott

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``Lexical Structure Constraints and Morphological
     Room G-19		Parsing''
			John McCarthy, AT&T Bell Laboratories
                               ___________

            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, May 30, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Computers and Emotion''
     Conference Room    Discussion led by Helen Nissenbaum
			(Abstract on page 2)

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``On Modelling Shared Understanding''
     Room G-19          Jon Barwise, CSLI
			(Abstract on page 2)

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``Natural Kinds, Homeostasis, and the Limits of
     Room G-19		Essentialism'' 
			Richard Boyd, Prof. of Philosophy, Cornell University
			(Abstract on page 2)
			

Page 2  		     CSLI Newsletter   	                  May 23, 1985
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                    ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
                       ``Computers and Emotions''

      Emotion is an integral part of human consciousness. Yet common
   practice in AI takes its ideal to be an intelligent, goal-driven agent
   entirely devoid of passion.  The assumption behind the practice is
   that emotionless intellect is possible, and that a purely cognitive
   agent is a valid abstraction from the total human individual.  The
   TINLunch, inspired by a TINLunch held October 13, 1981, titled ``Will
   Robots Need Emotions?'', probes the AI assumption.  I offer the
   following as starting points for the discussion:
      - What would it take to have a computer with emotions?
      - Why worry about this?  A passionless automaton is fully rational
   and far better off for not having emotions.  (Too bad we humans suffer
   this affliction.)
      - These are idle speculations.  A sufficiently complex robot, that
   could truly be said to understand and be goal-driven, will, of
   necessity, have emotion, no matter what the intentions of its
   creators.
      Background readings are excerpts from Hume's ``Of the Passions'',
   Jerome Shaffer's ``An Assessment of Emotion'' and TINLunch Outline
   ``Will Robots Need Emotions?'' by A. Archbold and N. Haas.
							--Helen Nissenbaum
                              ____________
                     ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
                   ``On Modelling Shared Understanding''

      There are basically three approaches to understanding shared
   understanding -- things like public information, common knowledge, and
   mutual belief: the iterated attitude approach, the fixed point
   approaches, and the shared environment approach.  In this talk I will
   discuss ways to model each of these, and show how the resulting models
   are related.  I will conclude with a brief discussion of applications
   to language, deterrence and the Conway paradox.		--Jon Barwise
                              ____________
                   ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
     ``Natural Kinds, Homeostasis, and the Limits of Essentialism''

      An account of naturalistic definitions is offered which applies to
   a wide class of natural kinds, properties and relations.  It agrees
   with current naturalistic accounts in holding that natural kinds,
   properties, etc., possess `a posteriori' naturalistic definitions:
   that they are defined by ``real essences'' rather than by conventional
   ``nominal essences''.  It departs from the picture suggested by the
   definition ``water = H2O'' in that it holds that `a posteriori'
   definitions are sometimes provided by partially indeterminate
   homeostatic property clusters.  In this regard, it resembles ordinary
   language property cluster conceptions of definitions, except that the
   unity of definitions is held to be causal rather than conceptual.
   Several philosophical applications of the proposed account are
   offered.  In particular, it is argued that realism regarding kinds
   with such real essences entails indeterminacy rather than bivalence,
   that such real essences support a much narrower range of
   counterfactuals than contemporary essentialism might suggest, and that
   key philosophical notions like knowledge and reference are among those
   which possess homeostatic cluster definitions.  Implications for
   philosophical methodology are explored.		--Richard Boyd

Page 3                       CSLI Newsletter                     May 23, 1985
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                       SUMMARY OF THE RRR MEETING

      A new seminar on the Role of Representation in Reasoning (``RRR'')
   has been meeting since the beginning of the spring quarter.  It
   combines a variety of groups that met last spring to discuss similar
   issues: F1, F3, F4, C3, and the special representation group that Meg
   Withgott organized.  The format is to have a one-hour presentation
   followed by a full hour of discussion.  So far this quarter, Stan
   Rosenschein and Fernando Pereira have presented a discussion of
   situated automata, including a suggestion as to how to include a
   notion of representation in their theory; David Israel led a
   discussion reexamining the notion of a Turing machine; and John Perry
   led two sessions on his paper ``Circumstantial Attitudes and
   Benevolent Cognition''.  The RRR group meets at 2:15 each Tuesday in
   the Ventura Hall seminar room.
      On May 21, Brian Smith presented an overview of a general theory of
   representation that he is developing, covering what we normally think
   of as models, representations, perhaps in the end leading up even to
   language.  This theory will play a role in his project of developing
   an account of embedded computation.  Traditionally, representation
   relationships are viewed in one of two ways: as forming a strict
   hierarchy, like a hierarchy of meta-languages, with use/mention errors
   resulting from a failure to distinguish each level.  On the other
   hand, other representation relationships, like that between a model
   and what it models, are sometimes viewed as so close to an isomorphism
   that the representation (model) and what is represented (modelled) are
   identified.  Brian sketched an account of a continuum of
   representation relationships, ranging from strong isomorphisms up
   through the complexities of language.  He identified some increasingly
   strong properties such relationships can have, including: absorption
   (when a property or relation in the representation, such as linear
   order, is used to represent exactly the same property in what is
   represented; objectification, when a property or relationship is
   represented by an object (as for example in predicate calculus when a
   relation is signified by a predicate letter); what he called
   ``inexistence'', when an object's presence in the representation
   signifies an absence in what is represented (such as traces in
   linguistics, or ``eof'' signals in computation); and so on and so
   forth.
      Next week's RRR discussion will be led by Ned Block.
                              ____________
                      SITUATION SEMANTICS MADE EASY
                      Three lectures by John Perry
            Monday, Wednesday, Friday, June 3, 5, 7, at 3:15
                             Redwood G-19

      The first lecture will be aimed at those who know nothing at all
   about situation semantics.
                              ____________
                    PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
                       ``Is Computation Formal?''
                    Brian Smith, CSLI and Xerox PARC
          Friday, May 24, 3:15, Philosophy Seminar Room, 90:92Q

Page 4                      CSLI Newsletter                      May 23, 1985
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                             NEW CSLI REPORT

      Report No. CSLI--85--23, ``Querying Logical Databases'' by Moshe
   Vardi, has just been published.  This report may be obtained by
   writing to David Brown, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305 or
   Brown@SU-CSLI.






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