Eric Vandendriessche's Books

String Figures as Mathematics?

An Anthropological Approach to String Figure-making in Oral Tradition Societies

By: Eric Vandendriessche

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String Figures as Mathematics?

An Anthropological Approach to String Figure-making in Oral Tradition Societies

By: Eric Vandendriessche

This book addresses the mathematical rationality contained in the making of string figures. It does so by using interdisciplinary methods borrowed from anthropology, mathematics, history and philosophy of mathematics. The practice of string figure-making has long been carried out in many societies, and particularly in those of oral tradition. It consists in applying a succession of operations to a string (knotted into a loop), mostly using the fingers and sometimes the feet, the wrists or the mouth. This succession of operations is intended to generate a final figure. The book explores different modes of conceptualization of the practice of string figure-making and analyses various source material through these conceptual tools: it looks at research by mathematicians, as well as ethnographical publications, and personal fieldwork findings in the Chaco, Paraguay, and in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, which all give evidence of the rationality that underlies this activity. It concludes that the creation of string figures may be seen as the result of intellectual processes, involving the elaboration of algorithms, and concepts such as operation, sub-procedure, iteration, and transformation.

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Page Count

405

Publisher

Springer

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ISBN 10

331911994X

ISBN 13

9783319119946

The Building Blocks of Thought

A Rationalist Account of the Origins of Concepts

By: Stephen Laurence,Eric Margolis

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The Building Blocks of Thought

A Rationalist Account of the Origins of Concepts

By: Stephen Laurence,Eric Margolis

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This is a broad and authoritative study of one of the central topics in the study of the mind: the origins of concepts. The authors survey the debate between rationalists and empiricists which stretches back to the very beginnings of philosophy, and has been at the centre of some of the most exciting research in cognitive science. Many have charged that the debate is riddled with confusion or that rationalist approaches, in particular, are deeply problematic. The Building Blocks of Thought offers a comprehensive rethinking of the foundations of this debate, showing that these negative appraisals are based on misunderstandings. Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis argue that the debate should be understood to concern the nature of the unlearned psychological traits that provide the foundation for learning all concepts. They go on to argue for a version of concept nativism according to which there is a rationalist account of the origins of many concepts across many different conceptual domains. This rationalist view is developed around seven distinct arguments, drawing on a wealth of data across the cognitive sciences, which are shown to come together to form a unified large-scale argument to the best explanation for a rationalist account of the origins of concepts. Rounding out the case for concept nativism, the book contrasts this view with the most important and influential empiricist views, as well as alternative rationalist views, including Fodor's infamous radical concept nativism and his claim that concept learning is impossible. The Building Blocks of Thought argues for the enormous importance of learning and culture, showing how a thoroughly rationalist approach facilitates and enhances cultural learning and provides the foundations for the best overall account of the origins of concepts.

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Page Count

692

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0192654179

ISBN 13

9780192654175

Karstology

Karsts, Caves and Springs: Elements of Fundamental and Applied Karstology

By: Eric Gilli

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Karstology

Karsts, Caves and Springs: Elements of Fundamental and Applied Karstology

By: Eric Gilli

Karst landscapes are home to 25 percent of the world's drinking water supplies, and in many countries water supply is highly dependent on karst aquifers. Their unique structures, containing many voids, are a particular problem for building corporations and land developers. This book, written by the well-known karstologist Eric Gilli, presents

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Page Count

254

Publisher

CRC Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1482243164

ISBN 13

9781482243161

Digital Oil

Machineries of Knowing

By: Eric Monteiro

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Digital Oil

Machineries of Knowing

By: Eric Monteiro

How is digitalization of the offshore oil industry fundamentally changing how we understand work and ways of knowing? Digitalization sits at the forefront of public and academic conversation today, calling into question how we work and how we know. In Digital Oil, Eric Monteiro uses the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry as a lens to investigate the effects of digitalization on embodied labor, and in doing so shows how our use of new digital technology transforms work and knowing. For years, roughnecks have performed the dangerous and unwieldy work of extracting the oil that lies three miles below the seabed along the Norwegian Continental Shelf. Today, the Norwegian oil industry is largely digital, operated by sensors and driven by data. Digital representations of physical processes inform work practices and decision-making with remotely operated, unmanned deep-sea facilities. Drawing on two decades of in-depth interviews, observations, news clips, and studies of this industry, Eric Monteiro dismantles the divide between the virtual and the physical in Digital Oil. What is gained or lost when objects and processes become algorithmic phenomena with the digital inferred from the physical? How can data-driven work practices and operational decision-making approximate qualitative interpretation, professional judgement, and evaluation? How are emergent digital platforms and infrastructures, as machineries of knowing, enabling digitalization? In answering these questions Monteiro offers a novel analysis of digitalization as an effort to press the limits of quantification of the qualitative.

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Page Count

229

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262544679

ISBN 13

9780262544672

A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures

By: Eric Schwitzgebel

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A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures

By: Eric Schwitzgebel

A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other burning questions. In a series of quirky and accessible short pieces that cover a mind-boggling variety of philosophical topics, Schwitzgebel offers incisive takes on matters both small (the consciousness of garden snails) and large (time, space, and causation). A common theme might be the ragged edge of the human intellect, where moral or philosophical reflection begins to turn against itself, lost among doubts and improbable conclusions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. (See, for example, “Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants.”) Some of the texts resist thematic categorization—thoughts on the philosophical implications of dreidels, the diminishing offensiveness of the most profane profanity, and fatherly optimism—but are no less interesting. Schwitzgebel has selected these pieces from the more than one thousand that have appeared since 2006 in various publications and on his popular blog, The Splintered Mind, revising and updating them for this book. Philosophy has never been this much fun.

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Page Count

381

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262539594

ISBN 13

9780262539593

The Road to General Intelligence

By: Jerry Swan,Eric Nivel,Neel Kant,Jules Hedges,Timothy Atkinson,Bas Steunebrink

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The Road to General Intelligence

By: Jerry Swan,Eric Nivel,Neel Kant,Jules Hedges,Timothy Atkinson,Bas Steunebrink

Humans have always dreamed of automating laborious physical and intellectual tasks, but the latter has proved more elusive than naively suspected. Seven decades of systematic study of Artificial Intelligence have witnessed cycles of hubris and despair. The successful realization of General Intelligence (evidenced by the kind of cross-domain flexibility enjoyed by humans) will spawn an industry worth billions and transform the range of viable automation tasks.The recent notable successes of Machine Learning has lead to conjecture that it might be the appropriate technology for delivering General Intelligence. In this book, we argue that the framework of machine learning is fundamentally at odds with any reasonable notion of intelligence and that essential insights from previous decades of AI research are being forgotten. We claim that a fundamental change in perspective is required, mirroring that which took place in the philosophy of science in the mid 20th century. We propose a framework for General Intelligence, together with a reference architecture that emphasizes the need for anytime bounded rationality and a situated denotational semantics. We given necessary emphasis to compositional reasoning, with the required compositionality being provided via principled symbolic-numeric inference mechanisms based on universal constructions from category theory.• Details the pragmatic requirements for real-world General Intelligence.• Describes how machine learning fails to meet these requirements.• Provides a philosophical basis for the proposed approach.• Provides mathematical detail for a reference architecture.• Describes a research program intended to address issues of concern in contemporary AI.The book includes an extensive bibliography, with ~400 entries covering the history of AI and many related areas of computer science and mathematics.The target audience is the entire gamut of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning researchers and industrial practitioners. There are a mixture of descriptive and rigorous sections, according to the nature of the topic. Undergraduate mathematics is in general sufficient. Familiarity with category theory is advantageous for a complete understanding of the more advanced sections, but these may be skipped by the reader who desires an overall picture of the essential concepts This is an open access book.

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Page Count

142

Publisher

Springer Nature

Published Date

ISBN 10

3031080203

ISBN 13

9783031080203

Holomorphic Dynamical Systems

Lectures given at the C.I.M.E. Summer School held in Cetraro, Italy, July 7-12, 2008

By: Nessim Sibony,Dierk Schleicher,Dinh Tien Cuong,Marco Brunella,Eric Bedford,Marco Abate

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Holomorphic Dynamical Systems

Lectures given at the C.I.M.E. Summer School held in Cetraro, Italy, July 7-12, 2008

By: Nessim Sibony,Dierk Schleicher,Dinh Tien Cuong,Marco Brunella,Eric Bedford,Marco Abate

The theory of holomorphic dynamical systems is a subject of increasing interest in mathematics, both for its challenging problems and for its connections with other branches of pure and applied mathematics. A holomorphic dynamical system is the datum of a complex variety and a holomorphic object (such as a self-map or a vector ?eld) acting on it. The study of a holomorphic dynamical system consists in describing the asymptotic behavior of the system, associating it with some invariant objects (easy to compute) which describe the dynamics and classify the possible holomorphic dynamical systems supported by a given manifold. The behavior of a holomorphic dynamical system is pretty much related to the geometry of the ambient manifold (for instance, - perbolic manifolds do no admit chaotic behavior, while projective manifolds have a variety of different chaotic pictures). The techniques used to tackle such pr- lems are of variouskinds: complexanalysis, methodsof real analysis, pluripotential theory, algebraic geometry, differential geometry, topology. To cover all the possible points of view of the subject in a unique occasion has become almost impossible, and the CIME session in Cetraro on Holomorphic Dynamical Systems was not an exception.

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Page Count

357

Publisher

Springer

Published Date

ISBN 10

3642131719

ISBN 13

9783642131714

Book's by Eric Vandendriessche

String Figures as Mathematics?

String Figures as Mathematics?

The Building Blocks of Thought

The Building Blocks of Thought

Karstology

Karstology

Digital Oil

Digital Oil

A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures

A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures

The Road to General Intelligence

The Road to General Intelligence

Holomorphic Dynamical Systems

Holomorphic Dynamical Systems

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