Cameron Buckner - phd

The Darwinian protolanguage hypothesis is one of the most popular theories of the evolution of human language. According to this hypothesis, language evolved through a three stage process involving general increases in intelligence, the emergence of grammatical structure as a result of sexual selection on protomusical songs, and finally the attachment of meaning to the components of those songs. The strongest evidence for the second stage of this process has been considered to be birdsong, and as a result researchers have investigated the existence of various forms of grammar in the production and comprehension of songs by birds. Here, we argue that mating dances are another relevant source of sexually-selected complexity that has until now been largely overlooked by proponents of Darwinian protolanguage, focusing especially on the dances of long-tailed manakins. We end by sketching several lines of research that should be pursued to determine the relevance of mating dances to the evolution of language.

Recent studies purported to demonstrate that chimpanzees, monkeys and corvids possess a basic Theory of Mind, the ability to attribute mental states like seeing to others. However, these studies remain controversial because they share a common confound: the conspecific's line of gaze, which could serve as an associative cue. Here, we show that ravens Corvus corax take into account the visual access of others, even when they cannot see a conspecific. Specifically, we find that ravens guard their caches against discovery in response to the sounds of conspecifics when a peephole is open but not when it is closed. Our results suggest that ravens can generalize from their own perceptual experience to infer the possibility of being seen. These findings confirm and unite previous work, providing strong evidence that ravens are more than mere behaviour-readers.

The functionalist approach to kinds has suffered recently due to its association with law-based approaches to induction and explanation. Philosophers of science increasingly view nomological approaches as inappropriate for the special sciences like psychology and biology, which has led to a surge of interest in approaches to natural kinds that are more obviously compatible with mechanistic and model-based methods, especially homeostatic property cluster theory. But can the functionalist approach to kinds be weaned off its dependency on laws? Dan Weiskopf has recently offered a reboot of the functionalist program by replacing its nomological commitments with a model-based approach more closely derived from practice in psychology. Roughly, Weiskopf holds that the natural kinds of psychology will be the functional properties that feature in many empirically successful cognitive models, and that those properties need not be localized to parts of an underlying mechanism. I here skeptically examine the three modeling practices that Weiskopf thinks introduce such non-localizable properties: fictionalization, reification, and functional abstraction. In each case, I argue that recognizing functional properties introduced by these practices as autonomous kinds comes at clear cost to those explanations' counterfactual explanatory power. At each step, a tempting functionalist response is parochialism: to hold that the false or omitted counterfactuals fall outside the modeler's explanatory aims, and so should not be counted against functional kinds. I conclude by noting the dangers this attitude poses to scientific disagreement, inviting functionalists to better articulate how the individuation conditions for functional kinds might outstrip the perspective of a single modeler.

Our prominent definitions of cognition are too vague and lack empirical grounding. They have not kept up with recent developments, and cannot bear the weight placed on them across many different debates. I here articulate and defend a more adequate theory. On this theory, behaviors under the control of cognition tend to display a cluster of characteristic properties, a cluster which tends to be absent from behaviors produced by non-cognitive processes. This cluster is reverse-engineered from the empirical tests that comparative psychologists use to determine whether a behavior was generated by a cognitive or a non-cognitive process. Cognition should be understood as the natural kind of psychological process that non-accidentally exhibits the properties assessed by these tests (as well as others we have not yet discovered). Finally, I review two plausible neural accounts of cognition's underlying mechanisms—one based in localization of function to particular brain regions and another based in the more recent distributed networks approach to neuroscience—which would explain why these properties non-accidentally cluster. While this notion of cognition may be useful for a number of debates, I here focus on its application to a recent crisis over the distinction between cognition and association in comparative psychology.
 

Philosophers have worried that research on animal mind-reading faces a “logical problem”:  the difficulty of experimentally determining whether animals represent mental states (e.g. seeing) or merely the observable evidence for those states (e.g. line-of-gaze).  The most impressive attempt to confront this problem has been mounted recently by Robert Lurz (2009, 2011).  However, Lurz’ approach faces its own logical problem, revealing this challenge to be a special case of the more general problem of distal content.  Moreover, participants in this debate do not appear to agree on criteria for representation.  As such, future debate on this question should either abandon the representational idiom or confront differences in underlying semantics.
 

For the most part, the Aesthetic Theory of Art—any theory of art claiming that the aesthetic is a descriptively necessary feature of art—has been repudiated, especially in light of what are now considered traditional counterexamples. We argue that the Aesthetic Theory of Art can effectively vitiate such counterexamples by abandoning aesthetic-feature possession by the artwork in favor of aesthetic-concept possession by the artist. This move productively re-frames and re-energizes the debate surrounding the relationship between art and the aesthetic. That is, we claim Aesthetic Theory so re-framed suggests that the aesthetic might have a central and substantial explanatory role to play within both traditional philosophical inquiries as well as recent and more empirical inquiries into the psychological and cognitive aspects of art and its practice.  Finally, we discuss the directions this new work might take—by tying art theory to investigations of the distinctive sensorimotor capacities of artists, their specialized aesthetic conceptual schemata, and the ways these distinctive capacities and schemata contribute to the production of artworks.
 

Ontology evaluation poses a number of diffcult challenges requiring different evaluation methodologies, particularly for a "dynamic ontology" generated by a combination of automatic and semi-automatic methods. We review evaluation methods that focus solely on syntactic (formal) correctness, on the preservation of semantic structure, or on pragmatic utility. We propose two novel methods for dynamic ontology evaluation and describe the use of these methods for evaluating the different taxonomic representations that are generated at different times or with different amounts of expert feedback. These methods are then applied to the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO), and used to guide the ontology enrichment process.
 

In The Ego Tunnel, Thomas Metzinger offers us an original and informed overview of the science and philosophy of consciousness. In contrast to his earlier books, Metzinger's discussion is aimed at not professional philosophers or scientists, but rather the wider public. The book's most distinctive contribution is Metzinger's visionary analysis of the future of consciousness research. Updating themes commonly associated with the Churchlands, Metzinger warns that this future research will grant us new capabilities to understand and manipulate our own conscious states, and we had better get ready.
 

The "wisdom of crowds" is accomplishing tasks that are cumbersome for individuals yet cannot be fully automated by means of specialized computer algorithms. One such task is the construction of thesauri and other types of concept hierarchies. Human expert feedback on the relatedness and relative generality of terms, however, can be aggregated to dynamically construct evolving concept hierarchies. The InPhO (Indiana Philosophy Ontology) project bootstraps feedback from volunteer users unskilled in ontology design into a precise representation of a specific domain. The approach combines statistical text processing methods with expert feedback and logic programming to create a dynamic semantic representation of the discipline of philosophy. In this paper, we show that results of comparable quality can be achieved by leveraging the workforce of crowdsourcing services such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In an extensive empirical study, we compare the feedback obtained from AMT's workers with that from the InPhO volunteer users providing an insight into qualitative differences of the two groups. Furthermore, we present a set of strategies for assessing the quality of different users when gold standards are missing. We finally use these methods to construct a concept hierarchy based on the feedback acquired from AMT workers.

The Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project is presented as one of the first social-semantic web endeavors which aims to bootstrap feedback from users unskilled in ontology design into a precise representation of a specific domain. Our approach combines statistical text processing methods with expert feedback and logic programming approaches to create a dynamic semantic representation of the discipline of philosophy. We describe the basic principles and initial experimental results of our system.
 

inpho: a system for collaboratively populating and extending a dynamic ontology

(with Mathias Niepert, Jaimie Murdock, and Colin Allen)
2009, bulletin of the ieee technical committee on digital libraries 5(1)   (1,000 WORDS)
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The world is not flat: expertise and Inpho

(with Mathias Niepert and Colin Allen)
2008 Selected papers from the 9th Annual WebWise Conference. First Monday, 13(8)
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answer set programming to learn and populate dynamic ontologies

(with Mathias Niepert and Colin Allen)
2008 proceedings of 21st FLAIRS conference,. coconut grove, florida, Aaai press
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