Interactive and common knowledge in the state-space model

This paper deals with the prevailing formal model for knowledge in contemporary economics, namely the state-space model introduced by Robert Aumann in 1976. In particular, the paper addresses the following question arising in this formalism: in order to state that an event is interactively or commonly known among a group of agents, do we need to assume that each of them knows how the information is imparted to the others? Aumann answered in the negative, but his arguments apply only to canonical, i.e., completely specified state spaces, while in most applications the state space is not canonical. This paper addresses the same question along original lines, demonstrating that the answer is negative for both canonical and not-canonical state spaces. Further, it shows that this result ensues from two counterintuitive properties held by knowledge in the state-space model, namely Substitutivity and Monotonicity.

Anomalous monism and mental causality : on the debate of Donald Davidson’s philosophy of the mental

The English version of the first chapter of Erwin Rogler and Gerhard Preyer: Materialismus, anomaler Monismus und mentale Kausalität. Zur gegenwärtigen Philosophie des Mentalen bei Donald Davidson und David Lewis (2001) "Anomaler Monismus und Mentale Kausalität. Ein Beitrag zur Debatte über Donald Davidsons Philosophie des Mentalen" is a contribution to the current debates on the philosophy of the mental and mental causality initiated from Donald Davidson's philosophy with his article "Mental Events" (1970). It is the intent of the English version to give a response to the controversy among American, British and Australian philosophers in the context of a global exchange of ideas on problems understanding the mental. Contents 1. Preliminary Remarks 2. The Critique of Property-Epiphenomenalism and Counterarguments (a) The Enlargement of Nomological Reasoning (b) The Counterfactual Analysis (c) Supervenient Causality 3. Are Mental Properties real or unreal (fictive)? Abstract Things and events are fundamental entities in Davidson's ontology. Less distinct is the ontological status of properties, especially of mental types. Despite of some eliminative allusions there are weighty reasons to understand Davidson's philosophy of mind as including intentional realism. With it, the question of mental causality arises. There are two striking solutions to this problem: the epiphenomenalism of mental properties and the downward causation of mental events. Davidson cannot accept either. He claims to justify the mental as supervenient causality in order to thus integrate it into physicalism (his version of monism). But his argument at best proves the explanatory, not the causal relevance of mental properties. For this and for other reasons, Davidson fails the aspired synthesis of a sufficiently strong physicalism and the autonomy of the mental; a project whose realization is anyhow hard to achieve

Getting Lost to be Found: The Insider-Outsider Paradoxes in Relational Ethnography

Purpose: The paper draws on the direct experience of a practitioner undertaking real-time research in his organization to offer insights into the dual role of practical insider and theoretical outsider. The duality helps the researcher to live ‘in’ and think ‘out’ of the research context to develop a theory for practice and then transpose it to a practice for theory through the collaboration of an external theoretical insider. Design/Methodology/Approach: This is a theoretical account of the reflexive experience of the practitioner reintroducing relational ethnography, where the researcher regards processes and spaces as the objects of analysis rather than bounded groups and places. It emphasizes the relational significance of the researcher, researched, and theoretical insider in exploring the structures of relations and meanings in the field of professional practice. Findings: The paper argues that understanding the complementariness and paradoxes of the dual role helps the researcher to identify knowledge gaps and contest commonsense knowledge in search of critical knowledge and theoretical insights. Transition between the bounded (restrained) and unbounded (unrestrained) selves occurs in the holding space of research, influencing the position from which the researcher views himself, his subjects, and his social world. Originality/Value: The paper extends the dimension of ethnographic research, which de-centers the authority and control of the researcher to that of the relationship between the researcher and informants, by focusing on the relational significance between the researcher, researched, and theoretical insider. This perspective gives rise to a deeper understanding of relational ethnography, seen largely in sociological research, as relevant to organizational research, where structures of relations and actions explored in real-time could account for the configuration, conflict, and coordination of work practices

The Knowledge Level in Cognitive Architectures: Current Limitations and Possible Developments

In this paper we identify and characterize an analysis of two problematic aspects affecting the representational level of cognitive architectures (CAs), namely: the limited size and the homogeneous typology of the encoded and processed knowledge. We argue that such aspects may constitute not only a technological problem that, in our opinion, should be addressed in order to build articial agents able to exhibit intelligent behaviours in general scenarios, but also an epistemological one, since they limit the plausibility of the comparison of the CAs' knowledge representation and processing mechanisms with those executed by humans in their everyday activities. In the final part of the paper further directions of research will be explored, trying to address current limitations and future challenges

EVOLUTIONARY STABLE PROPERTIES OF POLITICAL PARTIES IN INDONESIA

The major idea is to use memetics as an analytical tool on viewing how the existing political parties towards General Election 2004 creating formation of their presidential candidacy, ideology behind it, the change of political atmosphere it will bring, etc. into a compact evolutionary model that exhibits fitness of each political party within population of a society. The strategy used is through transforming polling statistical language into evolutionary stable language of dynamical system. Here, memetic method is applied as an evolutionary computational tool

Causal Responsibility and Counterfactuals.

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in multiple agent contexts. We draw on the structural model account of actual causation (e.g., Halpern & Pearl, 2005) and its extension to responsibility judgments (Chockler & Halpern, 2004). We review the main theoretical and empirical issues that arise from this literature and propose a novel model of intuitive judgments of responsibility. This model is a function of both pivotality (whether an agent made a difference to the outcome) and criticality (how important the agent is perceived to be for the outcome, before any actions are taken). The model explains empirical results from previous studies and is supported by a new experiment that manipulates both pivotality and criticality. We also discuss possible extensions of this model to deal with a broader range of causal situations. Overall, our approach emphasizes the close interrelations between causality, counterfactuals, and responsibility attributions