Anti-anthropomorphism and Its Limits

Anthropomorphism and its Discontents

The usefulness of an approach in science is a difficult beast to capture. Attempts to quantify the fertility of anthropomorphism can quickly degenerate into something akin to a scientific beauty contest (at worst) or a matter of counting publications or citations of protagonists (at best). Blumberg asks “whether individuals who explicitly engage in anthropomorphism have a track record of scient...

Robots and Anthropomorphism

Our natural tendency to anthropomorphism, grounded in Theory of Mind and related psychological mechanisms, is crucial to our interactions with robots. Some relatively superficial aspects of robots (e.g. physical appearance) can trigger animistic, even empathetic, responses on the part of human beings. Other factors are more subtle, e.g. various aspects of the language (if any) used by the artif...

Anthropomorphism Revisited

The MIT scientist Donald Griffin, widely-recognized for his experimental confirmation that bats use echo location in tracking insects and avoiding obstacles in the dark (Griffin, 1958/1974), later wrote widely defending the view that other animals are consciously aware and intelligent, like humans (Griffin, 1976, 2001). Based on the assumption that an example of possible human-like cleverness i...

Prediction and its limits.

Separation and its limits

away from this point here. .. The problem, schematically Terminologically, I will usemorphomic, etc. in a restricted sense, for the specific kind of distribution that is illustrated in this section; the main elements involved in this definition are adapted from Aronoff ’s  discussion. Consider a language that has different Root classes, in which a particular stem form—concretely, Stem—...