actually gets done, especially how people involve each other in their work. In particular, a model of practice reveals how people accomplish a collaboration through multiple and alternative means of communication, such as meetings, computer tools, and written documents. Choices of what and how to communicate are dependent upon social beliefs and behaviors---what people know about each other's activities, intentions, and capabilities and their understanding of the norms of the group. As a result, Brahms models can help human---computer system designers to understand how tasks and information actually flow between people and machines, what work is required to synchronize individual contributions, and how tools hinder or help this process. In particular, workflow diagrams generated by Brahms are the emergent product of local interactions between agents and representational artifacts, not pre-ordained, end-to-end p

Searle's celebrated Chinese Room Argument has shaken the foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Many refutations have been attempted, but none seem convincing. This paper is an attempt to sort out explicitly the assumptions and the logical, methodological and empirical points of disagreement. Searle is shown to have underestimated some features of computer modeling, but the heart of the issue turns out to be an empirical question about the scope and limits of the purely symbolic (computational) model of the mind. Nonsymbolic modeling turns out to be immune to the Chinese Room Argument. The issues discussed include the Total Turing Test, modularity, neural modeling, robotics, causality and the symbol-grounding problem. 1.

Before one can even begin to model consciousness and what exactly it means that it is a subjective phenomenon one needs a theory about what a first-person perspective really is. This theory has to be conceptually convincing, empirically plausible and, most of all, open to new developments. The chosen conceptual framework must be able to accommodate scientific progress. Its basic assumptions have to be plastic as it were, so that new details and empirical data can continuously be fed into the theoretical model as it grows and becomes more refined. This paper makes an attempt at sketching the outlines of such a theory, offering a representationalist analysis of the phenomenal first-person perspective. Three phenomenal target properties are centrally relevant: “mineness” (phenomenal appropriation; the sense of ownership), “selfhood ” (the conscious experience of being someone), and “perspectivalness ” (a structural feature: phenomenal space as a whole is organized around a center, a supramodal point of view). This contribution analyzes these properties on a representational as well as on a functional level of description. The author introduces new conceptual

. Increasingly, we are entangled during our daily working lives in a web of distributed, networked information sources offering varied means of electronic communication. We have become information explorers in this complex, electronic world-at-large. In addressing the problems of navigation and orientation that these developments raise, a user interaction model is developed which also deals with some of the issues of workspace management addressed by systems such as Rooms and the Information Visualizer. In this model, the world-at-large is represented as Information Islands, each of which contains Buildings which themselves house items of information. The user explores this world in a Vehicle which has two views of the world; the public, comprehensive view, and a private, customised view. The Vehicle can also be seen as the user's own private workspace. Wherever the user wanders in cyberspace, he is always at home. 1 Introduction The last few years have witnessed a fusio...

1. What are called ‘intuitions ’ in philosophy are just applications of our ordinary capacities for judgement. We think of them as intuitions when a special kind of scepticism about those capacities is salient. 2. Like scepticism about perception, scepticism about judgement pressures us into conceiving our evidence as facts about our internal psychological states: here, facts about our conscious inclinations to make judgements about some topic rather than facts about the topic itself. But the pressure should be resisted, for it rests on bad epistemology: specifically, on an impossible ideal of unproblematically identifiable evidence. 3. Our resistance to scepticism about judgement is not simply epistemic conservativism, for we resist it on behalf of others as well as ourselves. A reason is needed for thinking that beliefs tend to be true. 4. Evolutionary explanations of the tendency assume what they should explain. Explanations that appeal to constraints on the determination of reference are more promising. Davidson’s truth-maximizing principle of charity is examined but rejected. 5. An alternative principle is defended on which the nature of reference is to maximize knowledge rather than truth. It is related to an externalist conception of mind on which knowing is the central mental state. 6. The knowledge-maximizing

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Many bioinformaticians seem to shy away from believing that we can have knowledge about a mind-independent biological reality. This paper attempts to show that this tendency is neither well-founded nor harmless. Even though most bioinformaticians work only with terms and concepts, they cannot altogether disregard the question whether these terms and concepts have any real referents. The paper consists of three parts. Part I clarifies three different positions in the philosophy of science with which it would be good for the philosophical outlook of bioinformaticians to become familiar, and it defends one of them, Karl Popper’s epistemological realism. Part II discusses a distinction which is necessary for epistemological realism and is of practical importance for bioinformatics, the distinction between the use and mention of terms and concepts. Part III, finally, contains some brief concluding words about realism, both in general and in relation to bioinformatics.

It is claimed that there are pre-objective phenomena, which cognitive science should explain by employing the notion of non-conceptual representational content. It is argued that a match between parallel distributed processing (PDP) and non-conceptual content (NCC) not only provides a means of refuting recent criticisms of PDP as a cognitive architecture; it also provides a vehicle for NCC that is required by naturalism. A connectionist cognitive mapping algorithm is used as a case study to examine the affinities between PDP and NCC.

This chapter focuses on the World Wide Web (Web) as a provider of shared information landscapes. It reviews our work to design 3D spaces for information navigation and social interaction, and suggests an approach to such design based on an experiential theory of meaning. The increasing use of virtual 3D space in information environments is noted, and Personal Spaces are contrasted with Public Places. Earlier work on Information Islands, Vehicles and customisable Views of such information spaces is also presented. The experiential approach, as applied to information landscape design, is contrasted with the traditional view of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design as a means of conveying system functionality from the mind of the designer to that of the user. This experiential approach seems promising, if we assume that we do not know in advance what the functions of interactions in shared information spaces might be. As with life in general, such interactions mean what they are experienced to be. 2 1

While the use of formal systems has been an important topic within CSCW, their use as representations has been relatively neglected. This paper, using ethnographic data from a large British oil company, investigates how representations are used. In the company studied an electronic timesheet system was implemented to be used by staff to account for their work. Looking at the implementation of this system gives a view on what changes when processes are computerised. In particular, with the computerised timesheet system inflexible computerised rules were used to enforce a division of labour between the accoutants who ran the system, and those who filled in their timesheets. This rigidity of the computerised system was also important for enforcing the division of labour between staff. In turn, it also contributed to establishing the accuracy of the timesheet system. The accountants who ran the system did "representational work" to establish the system as a valid representation of the organisation. This invisible work was essential to the smooth running of the system.