What is a Human Being? (original) (raw)

Educating Human Beings in the Contemporary Society through ELT : A Socio-philosophical Analysis

2009

The twofold purpose of this paper is to clarify the concept of human beings and to contrast the difference between aim and objective, or goal and end from the viewpoint of English Language Teaching. The analysis is conducted through the frameworks of social philosophies, particularly those by Arendt, Habermas, Luhmann, Negri and Hardt. The paper argues that the aim/goal of English Language Teaching in this global society is to develop plurilingual abilities to continue communication, appreciating and utilizing differences that communication assumes and produces. The paper also pointed out that the descriptions in Japanese ELT discourse are individualistic and technocratic and neglect the social and political dimensions of language teaching

Nature, Humans and Environmental Policy : How Can Development of Humans Coexist with the Environment?

2006

The reason for the failures of our environmental policies are not only in our“anthropocentric”views and over confidence in modern technology,but also in our negligence towards the humans’role in nature.To alter environmental policy,we do not,however,need to coincide with ideas such as deep ecology or“biocentrism”,which diminishes the human role in the environment.The author recommends learning from the relationships between men and nature in traditional communities,which humans are important part of the natural environment itself. キーワード:人と自然の関係性、環境政策、コモンズ、環境主義

Expressing Robot's Mind by Human-like Motion

Transactions of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we focus on a problem in designing for home robots. There are some design methods for conventional artifacts such as home electric appliances. However, not all methods can be applied effectively for robots. Especially, we deal with the situation in which a robot asks a user to help it by expressing its internal state of mind. We then propose a novel design method "motion overlapping (MO)" by which a robot can perform human-like behavior to express its internal state. We consider that human-like behavior of a robot causes a user to understand its internal state of mind easily. A small sweeping robot which performs "back-and-forth" motion is designed based on MO. In experiments, we compare the expressing by MO with sounding by a buzzer and lighting by a LED as conventional nonverbal expressing. We investigate effects on users' reaction for the sweeping robot. We find that the expressing by MO causes most of the users to help the robot. The differences in the users' reaction are statistically significant. The results show that our proposed method is effective as one of design method for home robots.