Diederik Aerts

Bruce Edmonds

Carlos Gershenson

Scientific, technological, and cultural changes have always had an impact upon philosophy. They can force a change in the way we perceive the world, reveal new kinds of phenomena to be understood, and provide new ways of understanding phenomena. Complexity science, immersed in a culture of information, is having a diverse but particularly significant impact upon philosophy. Previous ideas do not necessarily sit comfortably with the new paradigm, resulting in new ideas or new interpretations of old ideas.In this unprecedented interdisciplinary volume, researchers from different backgrounds join efforts to update thinking upon philosophical questions with developments in the scientific study of complex systems. The contributions focus on a wide range of topics, but share the common goal of increasing our understanding and improving our descriptions of our complex world. This revolutionary debate includes contributions from leading experts, as well as young researchers proposing fresh ideas.

Worldviews, Science And Us: Philosophy And Complexity

Scientific, technological, and cultural changes have always had an impact upon philosophy. They can force a change in the way we perceive the world, reveal new kinds of phenomena to be understood, and provide new ways of understanding phenomena. Complexity science, immersed in a culture of information, is having a diverse but particularly significant impact upon philosophy. Previous ideas do not necessarily sit comfortably with the new paradigm, resulting in new ideas or new interpretations of old ideas. In this unprecedented interdisciplinary volume, researchers from different backgrounds join efforts to update thinking upon philosophical questions with developments in the scientific study of complex systems. The contributions focus on a wide range of topics, but share the common goal of increasing our understanding and improving our descriptions of our complex world. This revolutionary debate includes contributions from leading experts, as well as young researchers proposing fresh ideas.

Philosophy and Complexity : University of Liverpool, UK, 11-14 September 2005

Worldviews, Science and Us

Maria Xenitidou

This book explores the view that normative behaviour is part of a complex of social mechanisms, processes and narratives that are constantly shifting. From this perspective, norms are not a kind of self-contained social object or fact, but rather an interplay of many things that we label as norms when we ‘take a snapshot’ of them at a particular instant. Further, this book pursues the hypothesis that considering the dynamic aspects of these phenomena sheds new light on them. The sort of issues that this perspective opens to exploration include: Of what is this complex we call a "social norm" composed of? How do new social norms emerge and what kind of circumstances might facilitate such an appearance? How context-specific are the norms and patterns of normative behaviour that arise? How do the cognitive and the social aspects of norms interact over time? How do expectations, beliefs and individual rationality interact with social norm complexes to effect behaviour? How does our social embeddedness relate to social constraint upon behaviour? How might the socio-cognitive complexes that we call norms be usefully researched?

The Complexity of Social Norms

Lola Canamero

Kerstin Dautenhahn

Alan H. Bond

Socially situated planning provides one mechanism for improving the social awareness ofagents. Obviously this work isin the preliminary stages and many of the limitation and the relationship to other work could not be addressed in such a short chapter. The chief limitation, of course, is the strong commitment to de?ning social reasoning solely atthe meta-level, which restricts the subtlety of social behavior. Nonetheless, our experience in some real-world military simulation applications suggest that the approach, even in its preliminary state, is adequate to model some social interactions, and certainly extends the sta- of-the art found in traditional training simulation systems. Acknowledgments This research was funded by the Army Research Institute under contract TAPC-ARI-BR References [1] J. Gratch. Emile: Marshalling passions in training and education. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pages 325–332, New York, 2000. ACM Press. [2] J. Gratch and R. Hill. Continous planning and collaboration for command and control in joint synthetic battlespaces. In Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation, Orlando, FL, 1999. [3] B. Grosz and S. Kraus. Collaborative plans for complex group action. Arti?cial Intelli gence, 86(2):269–357, 1996. [4] A. Ortony, G. L. Clore, and A. Collins. The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 1988. [5] R.W.PewandA.S.Mavor,editors. Modeling Human and Organizational Behavior. National Academy Press, Washington D.C., 1998.

Bruce Edmonds

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