Here simulation, emulation, and reenactment refer to three distinct processes. A simulation imitates some specific and outwardly observable aspects of the simulated system’s behavior, but is implemented in a different way. Simulation involves modeling the sufficient details of the underlying state of the system singled out for the purpose of simulation. Emulation, on the other hand, replicates the inner workings of the system being emulated and adheres to all of its rules in order to reproduce the same exact external behavior. The target of reenactment is neither the imitation/reproduction of the observable functional properties nor the replication of the inner workings of the system. Instead, a reenactment attempts to identify and reconstruct parameters under which the system structurally and functionally evolves through an ongoing interaction with its environment. Here the emphasis is on the coupling between system and its environment (the background information), the parameters of the real-time interaction, the type of interaction, and the situatedness of different behaviors and functional capacities.
For example, consider conceptual thinking and imagination: conceptual contents responsible for the semantic complexity of cognition are determined by their inferential role—normative function—in discursive linguistic practices. At the level of conceptual thinking, functional properties of thought need to be understood normatively in the context of the linguistic uses and performances of a community of language users. Cognitive thinking is coextensive with the proficiency of using public natural language. Inner cognitive thoughts are, in this sense, structured by and modeled on normative characteristics of outer linguistic activities. However, imagination (even in the narrow sense of the construction of counterfactual/hypothetical scenarios) is not only tied to linguistic-normative functions but also guided by embodied activities (heuristics, physical interaction, sensory information processing, and so forth). Understanding imagination as a capacity would require understanding the roles of embodiment (both as an enabling condition and as a causal constraint) and the dynamic parameters pertaining to the situatedness of the embodied agent in abstract thinking. See, for example, the work of Claude Vandeloise on the role of embodiment in spatial perception, imagination, and the structure of language, or the morphodynamic functionalist approach of Jean Petitot to perception and cognition, causally constrained lower functional capacities, and linguistic higher functional capacities: Claude Vandeloise, Spatial Prepositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Jean Petitot and René Doursat, Cognitive Morphodynamics: Dynamical Morphological Models of Constituency in Perception and Syntax (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011).
See Plato’s Philebus, Timaeus, Phaedo, and Book VI of the Republic. For Sellars’s work on the craft of life as the rational pursuit of the form of the good, see Wilfrid Sellars,“The Soul as Craftsman: An Interpretation of Plato on the Good,” in Philosophical Perspectives (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1967), 5–22; and “Reason and the Art of Living in Plato,” in Essays in Philosophy and Its History (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1974), 3–26.
Sellars, “Reason and the Art of Living in Plato,” 9.
In his reading of Plato, Sellars identifies action-principles and practices of craft as belonging to physis (“by nature and objective ends”), in contrast to nomos (“by law and convention”). In Plato’s account of craftsmanship, purposive actions are neither conventional nor arbitrary in that they are rational strivings pertaining to forms as realms of intelligibilities (or what Sellars calls form as “object-of-striving-ness” or “to-be-realized-ness”). These actions or strivings belong to the intelligible order and as such can be assessed by reason and on the basis of objective fact. A helpful example for understanding the difference between principle (by nature) and convention (by nomos) would be the difference between actions that ought to be done given a certain range of circumstances, and material ingredients to actually build a house and the conventions of a builder’s guild, namely, codes and regulations for building a house. The principle takes the form of “ought to do” and the convention takes the imperative form of “do that!” In the best possible scenario, conventions and laws correspond to rational action-principles and their objective ends, but they can also significantly diverge from them, as in the case of a builder’s guild that becomes corrupt. A corrupt guild might enforce laws demanding that materials to which only the guild members have access be used in making houses. This difference between action-principles and action-conventions can be extended to other forms of craft, including the craft of the polis. It is precisely the rational nature of action-principles—i.e., the fact that they can be explained and be subjected to the procedures of truth and rational assessment—that harbors a subversive potential against sociocultural and political conventions and codified laws.
The question that motivates the development of formal calculi of action is how to accurately represent and reason about actions and their effects in the world. Put more elaborately, this is the question of the formalization of action in relation to a world that is not simply a wax block that can be molded and imprinted upon by our actions, but a complex manifold that consists of different domains, has dynamic properties, and resists intervention. The formalization of action is necessary for planning the course of action—for its precise execution, monitoring, adjustment, and implementation. But this formalization should be able to incorporate a dynamic representation of the world, its domains, and the entities that constitute them. What I have in mind for the scientific study of action execution are various formal languages of action built on logical formalisms, such as situation calculus and event calculus devised for representing and reasoning about dynamic systems. In these frameworks, actions are analyzed in terms of the formal syntax of the action sequence and the semantics of situations or events that represent the progression of the dynamic world as the result of the action being performed on its fluents or dynamic properties. Even though these formalisms are primarily developed for modeling in robotics and system engineering, their scope of application goes far beyond these fields. They are as much toolsets for artificial intelligence and robotics as they are indispensable components of the scientific armamentarium of a political project that aims at the proper and effective execution of tactical and strategic actions. For an introduction to situation calculus and the analysis of action performance, see Raymond Reiter, Knowledge in Action: Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
In information science, these descriptive frameworks are known as mid-level (mesoscopic) ontologies. Here the concept of ontology refers to a system for the formal naming and definition of types, properties, roles, and interrelations of entities/particulars in a specific domain of discourse. An upper-level or mid-level ontology supports broad semantic interoperability between a large amount of ontologies accessible under it. In this sense, it is a framework through which data across an expansive range of different domains can be exchanged, tracked, and computed. One of the main functions of these ontologies is to “specify our conceptual hierarchy in a way that is general enough to describe a complex categorization including physical and social objects, events, roles and organizations” (Porello et al., 2014). A sophisticated example of these ontologies is DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering), a mid-level or descriptive ontology that classifies and integrates information about human agents and social and physical systems according to categories that are “thought of as cognitive artifacts ultimately depending on human perception, cultural imprints and social conventions.” For an introduction to ontologies and DOLCE, see Claudio Masolo et al., The WonderWeb Library of Foundational Ontologies-Preliminary Report (2003), available at →. And for an application of ontologies, particularly DOLCE, to the study and design of multiagent sociotechnical systems, see Daniele Porello et al., “Multiagent Socio-Technical Systems: An Ontological Approach,” in Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Coordination, Organisations, Institutions and Norms (2014), 42–62.
In Between Saying and Doing, Robert Brandom analyzes meaning(semantics)-use(pragmatics) relations in terms of what one says or asserts when using vocabularies or linguistic expressions, and what one must do in order to use various vocabularies so as to count as saying or thinking various kinds of things. One of the most interesting aspects of Brandom’s project is that this way of thinking about semantic complexity and the activities required for generating it presents consequential practical schemas for both the project of artificial general intelligence and an egalitarian pedagogical politics (see chapter 3, “Artificial Intelligence and Analytic Pragmatism”). Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
For a remarkably painstaking disquisition on time-generality and logical forms of temporal thought, see Sebastian Rödl, Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry Into the Forms of the Finite Intellect (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
For more details on practical reasoning, rational motivation, and knowledge, see Sellars, “On Knowing the Better and Doing the Worse,” in Essays in Philosophy and Its History, 27–43.
This question is often attributed to Socrates and his distinctly philosophical attitude. Rather than dismissing or discrediting the activities of his fellow Athenians, by posing this question Socrates attempted to force people into making explicit their incoherent or incompatible thoughts and commitments. This is what Robert Brandom calls the “dark and pregnant” core of expressive rationalism inaugurated by the Socratic method (Making It Explicit, 106–107) and what Michel Foucault associates with the attitude of Socrates as a philosophical parrhesiast (truth-teller) rather than a political one. In avoiding a political life, Socrates establishes the critical distance necessary to interrogate and assess political means and ends. He justifies his death in the service not of politics, but rather in the service of a philosophical life that unremittingly interrogates politics. See Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). And for a more elaborate engagement with this Socratic question, see C. P. Ragland and Sarah Heidt,“The Act of Philosophizing,” in What Is Philosophy? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
See Ray Brassier, Dialectics Between Suspicion and Trust (2015, forthcoming).
