The design process could be abstractly considered as a future-creating activity that goes beyond facticity and creates visions of a desirable future among groups of agents. It requires the engagement of individual or groups of cognitive systems in purposeful and intentional (meaning-based) interactions with their environment and consequently with each other. It is argued that a design process should be interactive, future-anticipatory and open-ended. Furthermore, a framework explaining and supporting such a design process should have as its basis a framework of cognition.
The cognitivist and the etiological approaches to cognition are examined with respect to the set of principles explaining the design process. It is shown that essential properties such as, meaning representation and intentionality which surround the notion of cognition, but are differently interrelated and considered in each approach, affect and limit in different ways the design process. Particularly, it is argued that the cognitivist and the etiological approaches cannot support the type of functionality needed for the anticipative interaction of the cognitive system engaging in the design process, and the respectively implied notions of autonomy are deemed inadequate to support a naturalistic explanation of the design process.
It is suggested that the design process should primarily be examined within an interactive framework of cognition based on 2nd order cybernetic epistemology. Future-oriented anticipation requires functionality, which can be thought of as a future-directed activity, and in turn, all but the simplest functioning requires anticipation in order to be effective. Therefore, anticipation is an integral feature of autonomous systems because of their need to shape the dynamical interaction with their environment in ways that they achieve the kind of functionality that contributes to the enhancement of their autonomy. Based on the fundamental notions of closure, self-reference and self-organisation, a cybernetically-inspired systems-theoretic notion of autonomy is proposed. This conception of autonomy is immediately related to the anticipative functionality of the cognitive system, which constructs emergent representations while it interactively participates in a design process.
Consequently, the design process is seen as an interaction between two or more self-organising autonomous systems in order to construct ever more adaptive representations towards ill-defined outcomes. For each self-organising system a different representational content is dynamically emerging from their mutual attempts to incorporate an artefact, as a perturbation and not as a static informational structure, into their organization. Therefore, the design process is considered as a purposeful communication between two or more self-organising systems via the use of an artefact as the common cognitive interface in order to maintain and enhance their autonomy. It is argued that such a kind of autonomy is fundamental for the interactive establishment and the designation of the open-ended nature of the design process.

The Relevance of Sellars and Heidegger to the Internalism-Externalism Debate

The purpose of this text is twofold. First, it seeks to highlight a parallel in the epistemological strategies of 20th century analytic and continental philosophy. In Martin Heidegger and in Wilfrid Sellars, we see a sort of maverick Kantianism that in one way or another takes its cue from the dictum that "thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind". In different ways, Sellars' psychological nominalism and Heidegger's notion of Vor-struktur present perception, awareness of our mental states and introspective reports as being derivative of the rules governing discourse about public objects. Each tries to maintain the irreducibility of intentional idioms by showing how mindedness, which includes capacities to make perceptual reports and to engage in theoretical and practical inference, supervenes on the normative structure of some sort of Lebenswelt or form of life. The impetus for this structure is a resistance to what Sellars called the "given": the alleged immediacy of the content of any intention or perception. Within this context, objects of perception exist only to the extent that the concepts of a Lebenswelt make them cognitively accessible. Secondly, I argue that while these broadly internalist positions have an element that is worth defending in contemporary epistemological debates, they have a potential a blind spot. Here, I attempt to demonstrate the possibility of experiences for which no semantic concept is anteriorly given. I thus argue that the epistemic and semantic forms of internalism described in this paper must be supplemented with an "externalist reservation".

We will present a naturalistic account of the truth operator in natural languages focusing on the pragmatic role of truth ascriptions. What speakers do with truth-words is the point of departure of our enquiry. Once the pragmatic features of truth-terms are attended, we will explain the semantic and syntactic roles performed by the truth operator. Truth is a complex and multi-functional operator. The various jobs reserved to the truth operator in natural languages are performed with the help of different expressions belonging to diverse grammatical and logical categories. It can appear as a predicate, as in the locution "is true", or as an adverb, "truly". It can appear as a sentence operator, as in "It is true that", or as an abstract substantive, "the Truth". Besides, it has to be distinguished between the definition of the concept, a mission for the philosophy of language, and the various contexts in which the truth operator shows its utility. These contexts can belong to epistemology or to metaphysics, to philosophy of science or to ethics. But in order to understand what truth does in them, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of its meaning and role within language.
One of the theses developed will be that truth is unique although there are many truths, or said more precisely, that although the content of a particular truth ascription can be any element of a wide range of propositions, the truth operator is not ambiguous in natural languages. The phenomenon of ambiguity is related to meaning and at the level of meaning truth performs the same task across contexts. Truth ascriptions, on the other hand, acquire new contents in every new context, but this fact doesn't have anything to do with ambiguity. Truth ascriptions work in natural languages, we will maintain, as complex propositional variables, i.e., sentences with a fixed meaning able to transmit many different contents depending on contextual factors. A truth ascription such as "What Victoria told you was true" does not have any content if it is deprived of a suitable context of use. This ascription might have as a content that Joan was at school or that Darwin was basically right in his picture of how species develop, depending on the particular content of the speech act performed by Victoria, to which the truth ascription refers.
Our approach to the analysis of truth will be plural. We will pay attention to the pragmatist account of language elaborated during the last century and also to the semantic and syntactic proposals offered by philosophers of language, linguists and formal semanticists. Our intention will be to propose a comprehensive explanation of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of the truth operator and give a structured theory capable of explaining the role of truth, its significance and the real weight of some of the difficulties, puzzles and paradoxes related to the concept.
Being plural, our approach to the topic has a defined structure. We take the pragmatic level, i.e. what speakers do with words, as the foundational level. To understand the notion of truth one has to understand what speakers use it for. On top of that, it is the job of theorists to propose semantic hypotheses able to explain the meaning of the linguistic complex in which truth-terms appear and also syntactic conjectures that account for its combinatorial traits. The speaker's practices are the hard facts to be explained, semantic and syntactic theories are the scientific proposals aimed at offering explanations of some of these facts.

Naturalized Epistemology for Autonomous Systems

From Knowing How To Knowing That: Acquiring Categories By Word of Mouth

Nature is only interested in know-how, not "know-that": Foraging, feeding, fleeing, fledging, etc. So if know-how were all we had, then naturalizing epistemology would be easy (but neither epistemology, nor even language would have fledged). So is it enough just to add that knowing facts and formulas is part of the cognitive competence subserving our know-how? The answer may be a bit subtler than that, because the evolution of sociality and language have themselves "commodified" knowledge, so that acquiring a fact can be as much of an adaptive imperative as acquiring a fruit. But there is a bootstrapping problem, getting here from there: Acquiring facts cannot become like acquiring fruit until we have language. So it's down to the origins and adaptive value of language. Here is a hypothesis: Categorization is, at bottom, know-how: It's knowing what's the right thing to do with the right kind of thing (what to feed, flee or fledge, and what not) in order to survive, reproduce, and beat the competition. But if categories are based on our practical know-how, then the ones we already have can also be named (another case of know-how). And if categories can be named, then still other categories (that you have but I haven't, yet) can be described, even defined, by stringing those names into propositions with truth values. This is the capacity that sets our own species apart from all others: Every species that can learn can acquire categories by trial and error from direct sensorimotor experience, detecting the invariant sensorimotor features and rules that reliably distinguish the category members from the nonmembers. But only our species can also acquire categories from hearsay. And that not only opens up a vast wealth of potential categories, all the way from the practical to the platonic. More important, making all those invariant features and rules explicit and communicable saves us a lot of time, effort and risk in acquiring our adaptive know-how -- enough to have radically altered the brains of our ancestors at least 100,000 years ago, and turned them into us. It also made possible that form of distributed, collaborative, collective cognition we call culture.
REFERENCES
Cangelosi, A., Greco, A. & Harnad, S. (2002) Symbol Grounding and the Symbolic Theft Hypothesis. In: Cangelosi, A. & Parisi, D. (Eds.) Simulating the Evolution of Language. London, Springer. http://cogprints.org/2132/
Harnad, S. (2003) Symbol-Grounding Problem. Encylopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/7720/
Harnad, S. (2005) Distributed Processes, Distributed Cognizers and Collaborative Cognition. Pragmatics and Cognition 13(3): 501-514. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10997/
Harnad, S. (2005) To Cognize is to Categorize: Cognition is Categorization, in Lefebvre, C. and Cohen, H., Eds. Handbook of Categorization. Elsevier. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11725/
Harnad, S. and Dror, I. (2006) Distributed Cognition: Cognizing, Autonomy and the Turing Test. Pragmatics & Cognition 14. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12368/

Web search engines and distributed assessment systems

I analyse the impact of search engines on our cognitive and epistemic practices. For that purpose, I describe the processes of assessment of documents on the Web as relying on distributed cognition. Search engines together with Web users, are distributed assessment systems whose task is to enable efficient allocation of cognitive resources of those who use search engines. Specifying the cognitive function of search engines within these distributed assessment systems allows interpreting anew the changes that have been caused by search engine technologies. I describe search engines as implementing reputation systems and point out the similarities with other reputation systems. I thus call attention to the continuity in the distributed cognitive processes that determine the allocation of cognitive resources for information gathering from others.

Naturalizing Neuroscience?

At the end of the previous century a remarkable reformulation of epistemology emerged, i.e., naturalized epistemology. What is characteristic of this epistemology is its rejection to infallibilism and apriorism. It asserts that scientific empirical results are crucial to solve traditional inquiries about knowledge. Quinean naturalized epistemology claimed that we should abandon traditional epistemology and replace it with psychology.
Another branch of naturalized epistemology is evolutionary epistemology, an approach to knowledge aiming to answer traditional epistemological questions based on the theory of evolution by natural selection. It has two different but interrelated programs, the first of them (EET) accounts for scientific theory change as resembling the mechanisms of natural selection theory. The second program (EEM) studies the development of our cognitive capacities and structures as well as their fixation in our brain along evolution. It is the extension of biological theory of evolution to cognitive activity and its apparatus like the brain and sensory and motor systems.
After quinean epistemology and evolutionary epistemology, another brand of naturalized epistemology arouse, one that is continuing much of the theoretical work started by the first two, i.e., neuro-epistemology. This last tries to answer traditional epistemic enquiries analyzing the place where knowledge is produced: the brain.
A particular representative of this project is P. S. Churchland 'neurophilosophy', a program that looks forward to reduce and eliminate traditional epistemology. Churchland is convinced that neurology is all we need to elucidate questions about knowledge. In a way, neuro-epistemology is the updated version of quinean original proposal.
The three programs have accomplished some kind of reductionism, mainly an eliminative one. This is what I'm going to analize here.

Apparent conformity to naďve intuitions is often used as an argument in favor of certain a priori analyses of the folk concepts. Philosophical theories of mind (Fodor) and action (Searle) are sometimes explicitly claimed to be fully consistent with our commonsense folk understanding of mental states and actions respectively. Cognitive science seems surprisingly susceptible to those declarations and it takes the philosophical a priori interpretations of the folk concepts for granted too often, despite having its own methods for studying them.
I will discuss some recent empirical results (Knobe, Malle, Nicols), suggesting huge discrepancies between the folk intuitions about intentions and intentional actions, and the philosophical models of those intuitions (Searle). I will also present the results of my own empirical research suggesting gaps in the Searle's a priori model of the folk theory of action, and as well as in his notion of intention-in-action. Broader implications for interdisciplinary research on folk concepts will be discussed as well.

Farmer Popper's advice, or how to breed better theories
(Popper's evolutionary epistemology and the problems of naturalisation)

One of the fundamental problems of Popper's evolutionary epistemology is that since it can be considered as a naturalization attempt, we have to accept the theory that has served as the analogy with all it's consequences. It seems though that Popper emphasized only those consequences that supported his cause.
The first problem here is the naturalization of rationality. From the evolutionary theory point of view the Popperian objectivity of the third world does not bear a proper interpretation. In this perspective we can not distinguish between epistemic and non-epistemic factors, false decisions or calculations, the sociological and ideological obstacles of scientific progress and those events that support this progress, by which we traditionally understand the rational activity of scientists.
Since Popper used the Darwinian evolutionary theory as a justification for scientific progress, if we'd like to accept his arguments we have to investigate what the Darwinian theory can warrant concerning progress at all. The theories of Darwin and the Neo-Darwinists do not imply such a warranty. Evolution in their understanding only means change, the direction of this process can not be determined on a global scale. This is exactly how Thomas Kuhn relies on the Darwinian theory. So it's not a mere coincidence that Popper himself takes efforts to form a theory which he calls the "spearhead model", which implies the growth of complexity experienced in the process of evolution. This attempt did not turn out to be successful.
The analogy to Darwinism is problematic in two ways: (1) it does not make it possible to separate the epistemic and sociological factors, (2) it can not warrant the strictly monotone and rational progress in science.
In my presentation I want to show, that by the further elaboration of the naturalization program by appealing to more advanced evolutionary theories, we can bring up arguments for the progress of science but not for the rationality of this progress. We can assert that the process leads to a growth of complexity in the long run but there is no warranty for any actual change that it can be considered progress.

The personal level and empirical psychology

A central theme in the philosophy of psychology is the relationship between the so-called personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. Unfortunately there is a good deal of confusion and unclarity concerning exactly what these levels are and what they signify. Originally introduced by Dennett to denote a common sense difference between what is only properly attributable to an agent or subject and what is attributable to some part of the subject or her body, such as her brain, it is sometimes used to denote a wider distinction between the level of intentional states and their vehicles, whilst in the hands of thinkers like John McDowell and Jennifer Hornsby it has come to be connected with a peculiar style of explanation, one that is intended effectively to rule out any genuine illumination of our mental life by empirical studies from psychology or cognitive science. At the same time, workers such as Susan Hurley have sought to employ the distinction to a more constructive end, aming to show how empirical work on the sub-personal level can illiminate personal level phenomena without reducing them, as is arguably the case in classical computationalist cognitive science.
In this paper I want to do something by way of clarification of these issues. Firstly I want to discuss exactly what the contrast between the personal and sub-personal levels really amounts to; where it is most and least plausible. On the way I shall refer to work by Jose Luis Bermudez, Georges Rey as well as earlier work of my own which I think threatens the sharpness of the distinction and the idea that the twain shall never meet. However, these considerations do not (nor are in and of themselves intended to) undermine the distinction entirely; nor, ultimately I think, do they show that it cannot still be invoked by inveterate opponents of psychological science if they adopt a certain conception of content. Secondly, I want to consider the work by Susan Hurley mentioned above, which seeks to develop a more constructive framework for thinking about the personal/sub-personal distinction. Hurley stresses a conception of the personal level as centrally involving the having of a unified rational perspective on the world, at the same time as insisting that there is some genuine illumination of this level to be gotten from science. It turns out, however, on closer inspection that what she actually offers seems either to be speculations concerning the non-constitutive sub-personal underpinnings of purely personal level phenomena, or else (moderately) revisionist accounts of the latter in which the distinction between sub-personal and personal is signficantly blurred. The related distinction between vehicle and content will also be discussed, and also turns out to be less significant once we see it in the light of the kind of vehicle-externalism Hurley defends.
In conclusion it seems that the personal/sub-personal distinction may remain a significant barrier to scientific psychology if wielded in conjunction with a sufficiently realist and anti-reductive notion of content. On the other hand, if we can set this notion of content to one side (as I think in fact we have reason to, though that is another story), it is far from clear that the distinction is one that corresponds to any clear fault-line in reality and hence one that should constrain theory-construction in cognitive science.

"Double-grounding: a missing dimension in the AI quest for meaning"

While extracting meaning from and generating meaning with sensorimotor or symbolic representations (i.e. moving or static images, action, text/speech) has been the objective in most AI sub-disciplines (e.g. Natural Language Processing, Image Understanding etc.) the research focus has mostly been on individual types of representations (e.g. visual, motoric or linguistic) rather than on their integration. Even in cases when researchers had to develop prototypes that needed to integrate sensorimotor and symbolic representations, integration was never treated systematically, for a number of reasons: difficulties in measuring sensorimotor human behaviour, and analyzing visual and motoric representations, the tendency for isolation among researchers working on e.g. extracting meaning from language or images, lack of a corresponding theoretical, cognitive or/and neurophysiological background that would provide a solid basis for computational investigation of the issue. While the needs for developing integration mechanisms and resources become more demanding in AI (cf. e.g. conversational robots, multimedia processing systems etc.), the topic of integration of sensorimotor and symbolic representations remains in the research background (Pastra and Wilks 2004, Pastra 2005).
In this paper, we argue that the theory of meaning that comes closest to providing the necessary framework for integration, is the Symbol Grounding theory (Harnad 1990). In an attempt to answer criticisms with regard to the intentionality of artificial agents by Searle (1980), the association (grounding) of symbols to sensorimotor experiences has been argued to be necessary for AI agents, for the latter to grasp the meaning (the intentionality) expressed in symbolic representations (natural language) and to respond appropriately, i.e. in a meaningful and coherent way (Harnad 1989, 1990, 2002). The related literature points to the fact that concepts/symbols come part and parcel with sensorimotor experiences (cf. Pastra 2005 for an overview). However, we further argue that the traditional notion/theory of Symbol Grounding requires considerable extensions in order to stand as a theory of integration; in this paper we will present the Double-Grounding theory, a thesis on meaning that goes beyond the traditional grounding approaches in that (Pastra 2004, Pastra 2005):
1. It considers grounding to be a bi-directional process (double-grounding), during which symbols are grounded to corresponding sensorimotor representations for getting tied to the physical entities/events/properties they refer to, and they also ground -in their turn- the sensorimotor representations for enriching them with intentionality indicators. In other words, different aspects of meaning emerge through this two-way integration of symbolic and sensorimotor representations: meaning that disambiguates/clarifies linguistic reference (e.g. word-sense disambiguation), and meaning that disambiguates/clarifies sensorimotor reference (e.g. focus, salience, type-token distinctions), i.e. it renders intentionality in human behaviour (sensorimotor representations) explicit.
2. It does not consider all symbols able or suitable for grounding; some symbols do not need to be grounded, they are not meant to be tied to sensorimotor experience, they serve different purposes; i.e. to abstract away from the sensorimotor nature of human behaviour and comment on the functional, purposive, intentional nature of such behaviour .
In this paper, we will elaborate on how Double-Grounding provides a theoretical background for the development of resources and mechanisms that allow for meaning to emerge from the automatic integration of sensorimotor and symbolic representations and in particular, from:
a) the integration of different types of representations that refer to the same entity/event/property ;
b) the integration of representations that refer to different entities/events/properties but collaborate in forming concepts at different levels of abstraction
Last, we will show how this extended grounding theory correlates with findings in Cognitive Psychology and Neurobiology.

"Deep Blue vs. the Ebola Virus: Complexity, evolution and agency"

Are all products of adaptive evolutionary processes agents? Are such products the only agents?
There is a long philosophical tradition that uses normativity considerations to argue in favour of the irreductibility and ineliminability of personal level concepts. Whether limited to linguistic creatures or extended to social animals, the line adopted by philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Ryle or Davidson highlights the insufficiency of nomological descriptions of animals that attribute agency to each other or that are capable of situating themselves within complex social networks. If we concentrate exclusively on the internal machinery of the agent, or on subpersonal descriptions of the relationship between parts of the agent and microphysical features of the environment, we may even lose sight of the role they play with regards to the situatedness of the agent in its physical and social environment. At its most radical, the refusal to abandon personal level concepts is grounded, not on ontological considerations, but rather on a refusal to adopt a perspective towards persons where these are thought of as subject to prediction and control much as any other portion of reality (see, for instance, Ramberg 2000).
Some authors have extended the defence of the personal / subpersonal distinction to animals that clearly don't deserve to be called persons. For instance, McDowell (1994) has argued that we should avoid the conflation between the distinction between a person and its part (the personal / subpersonal distinction) and between persons and other animals (person / non-person distinction). No animal, inasmuch as it is capable of competently inhabiting its environment, can be fully understood without vocabulary that makes essential reference to the relevance of salient features of its medium to it as a whole. Here, instead of appealing to normativity, the argument rests on a deeply non-Cartesian form of externalism. We have argued elsewhere (Noble & Pinedo 2004, Pinedo & Noble 2007) that such an agent / subagent distinction is necessary in any explanatory project aimed at making sense of entities resulting from evolutionary processes, be they natural or artificial. To do so we focused on the case of simulated organisms from the field of artificial life, and dwelt on Tinbergen's plea for explanatory pluralism in biology.
In this paper we would like to consider whether an evolutionary history is a necessary feature of agency in addition to being a sufficient one, i.e., whether the role of the agent / subagent distinction could be extended to designed mechanisms. We compare arguments that link agency and intentionality to complexity (such as those found in the work of Dennett) with arguments that favour history (such as the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph, or those familiar from the work of Millikan). While we find that the question is admittedly open, we feel that a proper elucidation of the role of evolution can take us a long way in our conceptualization of agency.
Ramberg, B. (2000), Post-ontological philosophy of mind: Rorty vs. Davidson, in R. Brandom (ed.) Rorty and his Critics, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 352-69.
McDowell, J. (1994), The content of perceptual experience, in his Mind, Value, & Reality, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 341-358.
Noble, J. & Pinedo, M. de (2004), Mechanistic and ecological explanations in agent-based models of cognition, in J. Pollack et al. (eds.), Artificial Life IX, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, pp. 528-533.
Pinedo, M. de & Noble, J. (2007), Beyond persons: Extending the personal / subpersonal distinction to non-rational animals and artificial agents, Biology and Philosophy, in press.

The meaning of 'epistemic norm' and 'doxastic justification' within naturalised epistemology

The topic of my paper is to be the problem of normativity within naturalised epistemology. I pose this as the question of whether naturalism needs to be normative or whether it can be conducted only as a descriptive enterprise. My claim is that naturalised epistemology could be seen as normative but in a radically different sense from traditional, aprioristic epistemology. The reason for this difference can be identified with a shift in the meaning of the main, evaluative epistemological terms such as 'epistemic norm' and 'doxastic justification' that takes place in naturalism. Naturalists use these traditional terms in a different sense which causes a change of conditions under which a belief is regarded to be justified. This situation leads to numerous misunderstandings when the disputants are not aware of the differences and the reasons for their occurrence. As the shift in meaning is grounded in the naturalist rejection of the naturalistic fallacy, the discussion of the normativity of naturalism can be to a large degree reduced to the debate concerning the naturalistic fallacy. In my paper, I plan to show - on the basis of Quine's, Goldman's, Laudan's and Knowles' papers - how the meanings of "epistemic norm" and "doxastic justification" have changed in naturalism and why this changes are introduced.
There is also lively discussion concerning norms on the ground of naturalism itself. What does it mean that norms are derived from facts? If they are derived form facts they have to be something different form them. What is the difference? Is the only difference in a form of a sentence which has normative and not factual structure? Maybe it does not make sense to say about deriving norms from facts, because norms are facts so it is enough to refer only to facts as Knolwes wants. If so, we do not have logical problem with deriving normative form factual statements, because normative statements are in fact factual, they have only different practical interpretation, form of recommendation or advice, which is useful in some practical situation. Thus, norms in naturalism take nothing but advisable structure of sentence from their traditional meaning. There would be many naturalists however who do not agree with such a position. They are trying to formulate a theory of epistemic norms which are grounded on facts, but do not reduce to them. To what extend if at all is it possible on the naturalistic assumptions? In my paper I will pay attention on these problems.