-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF COGNITIVE SYSTEMS 23rd ANNUAL WORKSHOP, 12-15 June 2006 Kloster Bernried, Bavaria (South of Munich, Germany) The aim of the annual workshops is the exchange of knowledge, information, and opinions on all aspects of cognition and related topics, with emphasis on exchanges between different disciplines involved. Papers may be either of a general kind, or specific, but with sufficient attention for the general aspects, and understandable for the audience from a wide variety of disciplines. The following disciplines belong explicitly to the scope of the workshop: - psychology (cognitive, developmental), perception, - artificial intelligence (general aspects), - associative memory and neural networks, neuroscience, - language (also origin of language), - education and instruction, - philosophy, history of concepts. Experimental papers should be placed within a theoretical framework. Papers accepted for the workshop may be published in the journal of the ESSCS, 'Cognitive Systems'. The scientific meetings will take place in the nunnery. Accomodation will be available in convenient single rooms. Additional accomodation can be found in nearby hotels. Full board: about 55 Euros per person per day. A block booking has been made until 10 June 2006. First deadline: 15 March 2006. Last-minute participation is possible if room is available, but the number of papers is limited to 24, and the number of participants to 40. Length of abstracts: between 20 and 40 lines, to be sent by E-mail (preferably textfile with linebreaks). Registration fee 32 Euro for members of the ESSCS, ASoCS, LOS, 42 Euro for others, students 15 Euro. Arrival: Monday 12 June afternoon, dinner at 18.00, welcome party in the evening. Lectures will start on Tuesday 13 June at 9.30. The airport closest to Bernried is Munich. There is much to be seen near the place of the workshop, and, of course, also in Munich. Telephone Netherlands +31-50-3636454 (or 3636472), E-mail: esscs@ppsw.rug.nl =========================================================== -------------------------- Causality and Motivation 1st workshop of the interest area "Causality and Motivation" Mitteleuropa Foundation, Bolzano (Italy), April 20-21, 2006 The "Causality and Motivation" research group is one of the three interest areas of SophiaEuropa, a project of Metanexus Institute in conjunction with leading universities in Europe, made possible by the support of the John Templeton Foundation (USA). This workshop is the first in a row and will have a mainly explorative purpose. Further events, explicitly focused on specific aspects of Causality and Motivation will follow. If you are interested in attending the workshop and/or contributing your own ideas, please send an email (with a two-page abstract in attachment if you intend to give a presentation) to Roberto Poli before March 15. Rationale The belief is widely held that the physical world is causally-driven. The world is one because a tangled web of causally-driven processes keeps it together. The actual world is the way it is, because it is the causally-driven outcome of its previous states. However, both the psychological and the social worlds cannot be articulated in causal terms only. Hereby, "motivation" is used as the most general term referring to whatever keeps (synchronically) together and provides (diachronic) reasons explaining the behavior of psychological and social systems. Biology does not fit easily with either picture. Organisms are part and parcel of nature but they cannot be reduced to a complex web of physical causes, causes that can merely explain the "mechanical" side of such organisms. No serious scholars deny that organisms contain and are based on many mechanisms. However, it cannot be argued that organisms are nothing else than (collections of) mechanisms. Something more is needed. At the same time, motivation does not work for organisms. Again, something else is needed. This section of the project will address basic category issues. The aim is to sketch at least some fragment of the conceptual framework needed for understanding the various types of realities populating the world and their interrelations. Topics of interest include but are not limited to: • Levels of reality (the material, the psychological and the social realms); their interconnections and their internal organization (the connection between physics and chemistry within the material stratum is different from the connection between art and politics within the social stratum); • Emergence, supervenience, complexity; • Forms of causality (the classical billiard-ball form of causality is understood as only one of many different types of causation; network and field-like types should be considered, together with upward ("emergence") and downward (from higher to lower levels) types, and who know how many other types as well); • Types of motivation (taking decisions, building projects, planning, etc.); • The concepts of person and agent; • Biological, psychological and social forms of anticipation ("future-driven" behavior as opposed to "past-driven" behavior). Selected list of talks Roberto Poli (Trento). Systemic Preliminaries to Causality and Motivation After distinguishing four main ontological types of systems (material, biological, psychological and social) I shall submit them to a finer-grained classification organized along different dimensions (open—closed, computable—non-computable; reactive—adaptive; deterministic—non-deterministic; etc). The main outcome of this exercise will be the distinction among three main families of systems: simple, complex, and hyper-complex. The concept of hyper-complex systems will then be spelt out in some details and the thesis will be defended that biological, psychological and social systems are all hyper-complex systems. Johanna Seibt (Aarhus). Levels of Reality and Forms of Interactivity The main purpose of the talk is to show that different levels of reality can be distinguished in terms of forms of interaction between the components of that level. I introduce a basic relationship of generative composition defined on processes. I rehearse common arguments for a non-reductive approach in the philosophy of mind and the ontology of social structures and show that these arguments crucially draw on characteristic forms of interaction between the entities at that 'level'. I then show how one might define these various characteristic forms of interaction (causation, functional dependency, circular and reciprocal dependencies, weakly and strongly entangled agency) as species of process composition. Jean-Michel Roy (Lyon). Motivation and the Exclusion Problem The exclusion problem is the thesis that functionalism deprives psychological properties of any non redundant causal efficacy. I want to analyse the possible roots the exclusion problem might have in the conception of psychological causality in which it is framed. Accordingly, the general question I want to address is whether the concept of motivation, which has frequently been opposed to the concept of causality, could offer a viable way out of the difficulty. This question, in turn, raises four main problems: (1) How should the notion of motivation be exactly understood, and how does it differ from mainstream conceptions of causality, while retaining a necessary causal or efficacious component? (2) Is it theoretically and empirically relevant for a theory of cognition? (3) Can it be itself naturalized, and how? (4) Does it eliminate the source of the exclusion problem? Liliana Albertazzi (Trento). Causation: A Subjective Integration on Data Driven Information Laboratory research shows that the structural characteristics of certain dynamic events involving the perception of causation constitute the origin of conceptual categories expressed linguistically by causatives of the type ‘launching’, ‘entraining’, ‘avoiding’, etc. My intention is to show that the perception of causation is based on specific spatio-temporal structures, to which one can connect the conceptualizations relative to the differences in meaning among the terms expressing mechanical causation, or among the terms expressing movements which manifest intentional sentiments. Zbigniew Kotulski (Warsaw), Human and Software Agent Analogies. How IT Attempts to Solve this Problem? Every human being is an individual, distinguishable item, something which is a whole; sometimes she wants to be anonymous, sometimes she wants to be explicitly seen and presents herself to other beings. She lives somewhere and moves around in the environment. She may both keep secrets and present certain information to her audience. Human beings have will, collect information and make decisions. They reacts to other human beings. These reactions can be typical or individual, cooperative or adversative. Finally, human beings may react to their partners' feelings. I shall enquiry whether and to what extend software agents could behave in the same way. Angela Ales Bello (Lateran University, Rome). Causality and Motivation according to Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein My contribution will be dedicated to the comparative analysis of Husserl's Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Edith Stein's Beitraege regarding the meaning of the two notions, in order to discuss their interpretation in contraposition with a positivist point of view. Antonio Russo (Trieste). The man and his "naturale Neigung" according to Franz Brentano. The main purpose of my talk is to investigate the impact of Blaise Pascal on Franz Brentano. I shall consider in particular Brentano's Die Bleibende Deutung der Lehre Jesu (1916) and some of his unpublished writings on Modernism. I shall further analyse the differences between Brentano, Schell and Blondel on this topic. Antonio Clericuzio (Cassino). Mechanism and Vitalism in 17th-Century Science In my paper I will take into account two rival conceptions of matter and life that were formulated in the 17th century, namely, the mechanical and the iatrochemical. Mechanical philosophers explained human body in terms of matter and motion. By contrast, iatrochemists described human body as a chemical laboratory, the main physiological operations were deemed as chemical reactions, that were conceived as qualitative changes, produced by forces, vital principles (the so called archaei), spirits and ferments. According to the chemical philosophers, matter is active, or it is activated by some spiritual agent. In the last part of my paper I will take into account Isaac Newton's physiological views, which were based on aether and short range forces, marking a departure from the orthodox mechanical philosophy. =================================================================================== This workshop is the first in a row and will have a mainly explorative purpose. Further events, explicitly focused on specific aspects of Causality and Motivation will follow. If you are interested in attending the workshop and/or contributing your own ideas, please send an email (with a two-page abstract in attachment if you intend to give a presentation) to Roberto Poli before March 15. -------------------------------------------------- Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft Schriftführer: Prof. Dr. Manfred Thüring Webmaster: Nikolaus Rötting e-Mail: sf@gk-ev.de Web: http://www.gk-ev.de --------------------------------------------------