Paul Dumouchel

Emotions as Strategic Signals

In this article, we ask how much, if anything, of Robert Frank’s (1988, 2004) theory of emotions as evolved strategic commitment devices can survive rejection of its underlying game-theoretic model. Frank’s thesis is that emotions serve to prevent people from reneging on threats and promises with enough reliability to support cooperative equilibria in prisoner’s dilemmas and similar games with inefficient dominant equilibria. We begin by showing that Frank, especially in light of recent revisions to the theory, must be interpreted as endorsing a version of so-called ‘constrained maximization’ as proposed by Gauthier (1986). This concept has been subjected to devastating criticism by Binmore (1994), which we endorse: no consistent mathematical sense can be made of games in which constrained maximization is allowed. However, this leaves open the question of whether Frank has identified a genuine empirical phenomena by means of his confused theoretical model. We argue that he in fact has; but that seeing this depends on our rejecting a muddled folk-psychological model of emotions, which Frank himself follows, according to which emotions are inner states of people. Instead, following Dennett (1987, 1991) and other so-called ‘externalist’ philosophers of cognitive science, we argue that emotions, properly speaking, are social signals coded in culturally evolved intentional conventions that find their identity conditions outside of individuals, in the social environment. As such, their evolutionary proper functions lie in their capacity to enable individuals to solve what we call ‘game determination’ problems - that is, coordination on multiple-equilibrium meta-games over which base-games to play. This allows emotions to indeed serve as commitment devices in assurance games (though not in prisoner’s dilemmas). Thus the empirical core of Frank’s thesis is recovered, though only by way of drastic revisions to both the game theory and the psychology incorporated in his model.

Against Injustice: The New Economics of Amartya Sen

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Introduction Reiko Gotoh and Paul Dumouchel Part I: 1. Economics, law and ethics Amartya Sen 2. Neorepublicanism and Sens economic, legal and ethical desiderata Philip Pettit 3. The Prajapati test: response to Amartya Sen Marcel Henaff Part II: 4. The power of a democratic public Philip Pettit 5. The challenge of gender justice Martha C. Nussbaum 6. Gift, market, and social justice Marcel Henaff 7. Justice and public reciprocity Reiko Gotoh 8. Reasoning with preferences? John Broome 9. Conceptions of individual rights and freedom in welfare economics: a re-examination Prasanta K. Pattanaik and Yongsheng Xu Part III: 10. On synthetic indices of multidimensional well-being: health and income inequalities in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom Andrea Brandolini 11. Assessing childrens capabilities: operationalising metrics for evaluating music programs to poor children in Brazilian primary schools Flavio Comim 12. The search for socially sustainable development Jean-Luc Dubois Part IV: 13. Response Amartya Sen Index.

Towards Human–Robot Affective Co-evolution Overcoming Oppositions in Constructing Emotions and Empathy

This article deals with contemporary research aimed at building emotional and empathic robots, and gives an overview of the field focusing on its main characteristics and ongoing transformations. It interprets the latter as precursors to a paradigmatic transition that could significantly change our social ecologies. This shift consists in abandoning the classical view of emotions as essentially individual states, and developing a relational view of emotions, which, as we argue, can create genuinely new emotional and empathic processes—dynamics of “human–robot” affective coordination supporting the development of mixed (human–robot) ecologies.

Gilbert Simondon's plea for a philosophy of technology

This paper argues that most contemporary philosophy of technology hardly lives up to its name. What goes by that name gives nearly exclusive attention to the social and political consequences of technological innovations, leaving unattended the properly philosophical questions related to the nature and mode of existence of technical objects. After reviewing some of the reasons for this situation, I argue that, over thirty years ago, Gilbert Simondon offered a stimulating analysis of these problems which is still relevant today. I then present some of the major concepts of Simondons analysis of technical objects and of his criticism of the then (and still) current reflections on technology. The concepts of technical objects, of concretization, of technical progress, of hypertelic adaptation, and of technical individual are presented and analysed. Finally, I recall Simondons claim that our difficult relationship to technology stems, to a large extent, from a lack of understanding, and that philosophers h...

Artificial Empathy: An Interdisciplinary Investigation

One central issue in social robotics research is the question of the affective involvement of users. The problem of creating a robot able to establish and to participate competently in dynamic affective exchanges with human partners has been recognized as fundamental, especially for the success of projects involving assistive or educational robotics. This locates social robotics at the crossroad of many interconnected issues related to various disciplines, such as epistemology, cognitive science, sociology and ethics. Among these issues are, for example, the epistemological and theoretical problems of defining how emotions can be represented in a robot and under which conditions robots are able to participate effectively in emotional and empathic dynamics with human beings. Can robots experience emotions, or can they only express them? If we identify robotic ‘emotions’ as ‘pure simulations’, to which no actual inner experience corresponds, what are the conditions under which we can consider robots as authentic partners in emotional and empathic relations? These questions are related, on the one hand, to basic scientific research, to which robotics can contribute through operational models and experimentation carried out with the

Sincerity is Just Consistency: Reply to Frank

Here is roughly how the folk think they use information conveyed by emotional signals to facilitate cooperation and coordination. They know that people sometimes make promises they don’t intend to keep and threats on which they wouldn’t really follow through. Fortunately, most people have special personal bonds with some others. These bonds are experienced by each person emotionally. The emotions in question are publicly manifest in tones of voice, body language, directness of gaze, and various other cues that people can discern and which are difficult to fake. We can therefore do things with people whose emotional expressions are consistent with their bonds with us, like form business arrangements, that would pose difficult principal–agent problems if attempted with strangers. The folk are basically right about all of this. Of course, the account itself offers absolutely no explanation of why emotions successfully signal anything. For that, one must move outside the folk picture, since folk pictures merely describe familiar patterns and their practical implications. The fact that folk pictures aren’t built for explanation is typically exposed when they are extended to handle even slightly off-center situations; at that point, the fact that the network of folk assumptions is pure surface description, with no underlying theoretical ontology tested for coherence, as in the case of a scientific theory, reveals itself. Thus suppose you’re considering hiring a manager, in the scenario described by Robert Frank in his reply to our paper, with whom you don’t have an established personal bond. Suppose you notice that

Y a-t-il des sentiments moraux?

A quick survey of the literature reveals that authors disagree as to which sentiments are moral and which are not, they disagee as to how to distinguish between moral and other sentiments, and finally that often the same author will claim a sentiment is moral at some times but not at others. These difficulties arise, I argue, from an underlying concept of emotion that I call atomism. Viewing emotions as means of coordination among agents, rather than as psychic atoms, suggests a radically different approach to the question of morality and affects, one where emotions pave the way for normative expectations.

Anthropomorphism in Human–Robot Co-evolution

Social robotics entertains a particular relationship with anthropomorphism, which it neither sees as a cognitive error, nor as a sign of immaturity. Rather it considers that this common human tendency, which is hypothesized to have evolved because it favored cooperation among early humans, can be used today to facilitate social interactions between humans and a new type of cooperative and interactive agents – social robots. This approach leads social robotics to focus research on the engineering of robots that activate anthropomorphic projections in users. The objective is to give robots “social presence” and “social behaviors” that are sufficiently credible for human users to engage in comfortable and potentially long-lasting relations with these machines. This choice of ‘applied anthropomorphism’ as a research methodology exposes the artifacts produced by social robotics to ethical condemnation: social robots are judged to be a “cheating” technology, as they generate in users the illusion of reciprocal social and affective relations. This article takes position in this debate, not only developing a series of arguments relevant to philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences, and robotic AI, but also asking what social robotics can teach us about anthropomorphism. On this basis, we propose a theoretical perspective that characterizes anthropomorphism as a basic mechanism of interaction, and rebuts the ethical reflections that a priori condemns “anthropomorphism-based” social robots. To address the relevant ethical issues, we promote a critical experimentally based ethical approach to social robotics, “synthetic ethics,” which aims at allowing humans to use social robots for two main goals: self-knowledge and moral growth.

The Barren Sacrifice

As violence, unable to renew itself in the repetition of the scapegoat foundation, exhausts its cultural creativity, its self-regulation fails more and more and institutions increasingly tend to exasperate the disorders they used to limit. This article is an analysis of the fate of one institution in this historical process: the modern state. I show how modern nation-state gained ascendancy in the West and then expanded to other regions of the world as its ability to protect us from violence decreased. The modern nation-state entertains a complex relationship with secularization and Christianity, which should not be seen as a static entity, but as the historical process of religious change that made the modern state possible.

Biological Modules and Emotions

Biologists, more precisely evolutionary biologists, and not only psychologists and philosophers also speak of modularity. However the way in which this theoretical construct functions in their discipline is relatively different from the role it obtains in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. Rather than postulating modules to explain particular traits of organisms, such as the specifi city of input systems or limitations of human reasoning abilities, biologists originally simply assume that some form of modularity constitutes a precondition of evolution.1 They argue that, in order for natural selection to fi ne tune organisms to their environment, different traits must be able to evolve independently from one another. This implies modularity in one form or another. Organisms will only be able to adapt if they do not come all in one piece, so to speak. It must therefore be possible for changes to occur in one characteristic of an animal without those changes having repercussions throughout the whole organism. It seems that evolution requires that organisms be modular; it requires that they be made of relatively independent building blocks that are nonetheless in some way integrated. How is this delicate bal-