Negotiating Sacred Grounds? Resolving Islamist Armed Conflicts

Negotiating boundaries in the definition of life: Wittgensteinian and Darwinian insights on resolving conceptual border conflicts

What is the definition of life? Artificial life environments provide an interesting test case for this classical question. Understanding what such systems can tell us about biological life requires negotiating the tricky conceptual boundary between virtual and real life forms. Drawing from Wittgenstein’s analysis of the concept of a game and a Darwinian insight about classification, I argue tha...

Sacred Grounds and Profane Plantations: The Spiritual Landscapes of Barbados

Resolving Conflicts in Action Descriptions

We study resolving conflicts between an action description and a set of conditions (possibly obtained from observations), in the context of action languages. In this formal framework, the meaning of an action description can be represented by a transition diagram—a directed graph whose nodes correspond to states and whose edges correspond to transitions describing action occurrences. This allow...

On resolving Conflicts between Arguments

Argument systems are based on the idea that one can construct arguments for propositions structured reasons justifying the belief in a proposition. Using defeasible rules, arguments need not be valid in all circumstances, therefore, it might be possible to construct an argument for a proposition as well as its negation. When arguments support conflicting propositions, one of the arguments must ...

Resolving Conflicts in Agent Guidance

For agent technology to be accepted in real-world applications, humans must be able to customize and control agent operations. One approach for providing such controllability is to enable a human supervisor to define guidance for agents in the form of policies that establish boundaries on agent behavior. This paper considers the problem of conflicting guidance for agents, making contributions i...