In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children’s awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in, and then performed an action that constituted a mistake in the game. In control conditions, the puppet performed the exact same action as in the experimental conditions, but the context was different such that this act did not constitute a mistake. Children’s normative responses to the puppet’s acts (e.g., protest, critique, or teaching) were scored. Both age groups performed more normative responses in the target than in the control conditions, but the 3-year-olds did so on a more explicit level. These studies demonstrate in a particularly strong way that even very young children have some grasp of the normative structure of conventional activities.

Robot-Cub undertakes to (1) develop an open platform for developmental cognitive robotics and (2), using that platform, to perform experimental work in line with theories of early childhood development. The platform (in the shape of a 2-year old child) will be available to the research community at large. Work in the first year proceeded essentially as foreseen in the 18 months implementation plan. At this stage the reviewers did not notice any major flaws or shortcomings that might jeopardise the success of the project. By and large they appear to be supportive of both the project objectives and the approach taken to achieve these objectives. They were critical though of a number of details and pointed out potential pitfalls. They agreed on a set of recommendations that should be taken into account in revising the implementation plan for phase two (months 13-30). Resources match results.

Abstract. Philosophy, artificial intelligence and cognitive science have long been dominated by the presupposition that intelligence is fundamentally individual. Recent work in cognitive science clearly undermines that notion. Increasingly, intelligence is seen not as having its locus in the individual, but in the network of relationships that the individual has with the external world and other individuals. At the same time, there has been an increasing neo-Heideggerian focus on the role of embodiment and anti-representationalism, as shown by work ranging from robotics to dynamical systems. While philosophers are carefully trying to justify this development, the most significant computational phenomenon by far- the World Wide Web-is a veritable explosion of representations. In its latest stage, the Web has become increasingly more the realm of representations used for social real-time co-ordination, as a tool for “collective intelligence.” In order to make sense of these developments, we first summarize the

Subjectivity after Wittgenstein Wittgenstein’s embodied and embedded subject and the debate about the death of manILLC Dissertation Series DS-2009-06 For further information about ILLC-publications, please contact

The contribution of this dissertation is to show how interlocutors in dialogue can reason probabilistically about natural language interpretation, dialogue state (context), and natural language generation in a way that is consistent with three fundamental claims made by mainstream theories of pragmatic reasoning in human-human dialogue: 1. interlocutors track and exploit the evolving context to coordinate their individual contributions; 2. the current context depends on what the previous utterances of both interlocutors have meant (contributed); 3. what a speaker can recognizably mean (contribute) by a specific choice of words depends on the current context. Mainstream pragmatic theories depend on these assumptions to explain how a speaker can make linguistic choices that the hearer will interpret as intended, but these theories do not lend themselves to straightforward probabilistic reasoning. Engineering approaches to building dialogue systems implement straightforward probabilistic reasoning, but sacrifice one or more (sometimes all) of these fundamental aspects of pragmatic theory in order to do so. This dissertation shows how we can achieve the robustness and data-driven methodology enjoyed by engineering approaches while keeping