Fuzzy expert systems in civil engineering

Imperial Users onl

Learning from Experience: A Philosophical Perspective

This work examines philosophical solutions to David Hume’s problem of induction—a skeptical attack on our ability to learn from experience. I explore the logical, ontological, and epistemic difficulties behind the everyday assumption that the future will resemble the past. While historical solutions by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper have been unsuccessful at tackling these complications, combining recent work on natural kinds and naturalistic epistemology has promise. Ultimately, I expand on work done by Howard Sankey, Hilary Kornblith, and Brian Ellis to create an account of nature and epistemology that explains why objects in nature have predictable behavior. I find Sankey\u27s solution incomplete, but I fix the major I identify and show why the work by Sankey builds into a powerful solution to Hume\u27s problem

A Decision Support System For The Intelligence Satellite Analyst

The study developed a decision support system known as Visual Analytic Cognitive Model (VACOM) to support the Intelligence Analyst (IA) in satellite information processing task within a Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) domain. As a visual analytics, VACOM contains the image processing algorithms, a cognitive network of the IA mental model, and a Bayesian belief model for satellite information processing. A cognitive analysis tool helps to identify eight knowledge levels in a satellite information processing. These are, spatial, prototypical, contextual, temporal, semantic, pragmatic, intentional, and inferential knowledge levels, respectively. A cognitive network was developed for each knowledge level with data input from the subjective questionnaires that probed the analysts’ mental model. VACOM interface was designed to allow the analysts have a transparent view of the processes, including, visualization model, and signal processing model applied to the images, geospatial data representation, and the cognitive network of expert beliefs. VACOM interface allows the user to select a satellite image of interest, select each of the image analysis methods for visualization, and compare ‘ground-truth’ information against the recommendation of VACOM. The interface was designed to enhance perception, cognition, and even comprehension to the multi and complex image analyses by the analysts. A usability analysis on VACOM showed many advantages for the human analysts. These include, reduction in cognitive workload as a result of less information search, the IA can conduct an interactive experiment on each of his/her belief space and guesses, and selection of best image processing algorithms to apply to an image context

Analogy

This essay (a revised version of my undergraduate honors thesis at Stanford) constructs a theory of analogy as it applies to argumentation and reasoning, especially as used in fields such as philosophy and law. The word analogy has been used in different senses, which the essay defines. The theory developed herein applies to analogia rationis, or analogical reasoning. Building on the framework of situation theory, a type of logical relation called determination is defined. This determination relation solves a puzzle about analogy in the context of logical argument, namely, whether an analogous situation contributes anything logically over and above what could be inferred from the application of prior knowledge to a present situation. Scholars of reasoning have often claimed that analogical arguments are never logically valid, and that they therefore lack cogency. However, when the right type of determination structure exists, it is possible to prove that projecting a conclusion inferred by analogy onto the situation about which one is reasoning is both valid and non-redundant. Various other properties and consequences of the determination relation are also proven. Some analogical arguments are based on principles such as similarity, which are not logically valid. The theory therefore provides us with a way to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate arguments. It also provides an alternative to procedures based on the assessment of similarity for constructing analogies in artificial intelligence systems

Sadomasochistic Judging

1 online resource (PDF, page 437-470)Book review: Law and legitimacy in the Supreme Court. Richard H. Fallon, Jr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 221. Reviewed by David Schrau

A Competency Model for Judges

Throughout most modern and contemporary legal scholarship there appears an unbridgeable division between two dominant approaches to judicial decision making. Put succinctly, legal scholars argue that there exist either objective, foundational, ultimate groundings for legal theory and decisions or legal theory and practice inevitably follow a path to relativism and skepticism. This dissertation argues for a theory of evaluation grounded in the Pragmatic, practical ontology and epistemology. Grounding the theory in this fashion avoids the philosophical views of extreme objectivism and extreme subjectivism. In contrast to these conventional stances, which are rooted in philosophical dualism, the view argued for in this dissertation perceives the ontological and epistemological relationship between humans and their environment as inherently interconnected or relational. This philosophical relationship is characterized as intentional, perspectival, and dialectical and embodied. Consonant with the Pragmatic Ontology, the dissertation argues for a conception of rationality termed embodied reason. Unlike abstract versions of rationality, embodied reason is characterized by its concreteness, situatedness, and intersubjective validation. The theory clarifies the concept of legal reasoning and develops meta-theory underlining practical, expert based, holistic, narrative, argumentative, intuitive dimensions. Additionally, given the embodied and perspectival characteristic of judicial decision making the importance of individual differences, especially context-dependent, holistic thinking style is underlined

The dual pathway to information avoidance in information systems use

This article develops an explanatory model of information avoidance behavior from extant theory and examines its hypotheses using psychophysiological methods. It integrates existing but partially conflicting explanations into a coherent positivist model based on Coping Theory. The existence of two distinct but interlinked causal pathways to information avoidance will be outlined. Both pathways are cause by defects in the information quality. The first pathway is grounded on being threatened by the information’s inconsistency. The second pathway is based on being distressed by the information’s complexity. Due to the involvement of cognition as well as affect, the usefulness of traditional measurement methods alone is deemed to be limited. Thus, we will draw upon recent advances from NeuroIS research in order to integrate psychophysiological measures into an extended, triangulated measurement protocol. This article intends to contribute to this special issue in three ways. First, it shapes a theoretical model for studying information avoidance which has received little attention in IS research. Second, it exemplifies the derivation and instantiation of a NeuroIS measurement model and the selection of appropriate NeuroIS methods for scrutinizing the theoretical information avoidance model. Third, based on the evidence of an experiment, it provides guidelines for how to conduct eye-tracking, pupillometry, and facial electromyography measurements as well as how to subsequently derive meaning from the initial data collected

Engineering judgement in reliability and safety and its limits: what can we learn from research in psychology?

Engineering judgement has an important role in safety or reliability assessment. This paper focuses on the use of engineering judgement for integrating diverse evidence into an assessment of the safety or reliability of a product. In many cases of stringent safety requirements, this form of engineering (or "expert") judgement, i.e., "informal inference from complex evidence", is the crucial resource for the decision maker, for lack of more solid, objective evidence. This dependence on judgement is especially evident in the assessment of the unreliability due to possible design faults in complex products, and computer software in particular. Although engineering judgement plays an essential role in the assessment, there are good reasons to doubt the ability of experts in some of the judgement tasks in which they are usually employed. Experimental research both about the way humans think and integrate evidence, and about the performance of experts in tasks similar to engineering judgement, support the idea that the ability of experts may be overrated. This paper summarises some literature about common fallacies and ways to guard against them, and argues for a more disciplined use of expert judgement

#WeToo

The #MeToo movement has caused a widespread cultural reckoning over sexual violence, abuse, and harassment. “Me too” was meant to express and symbolize that each individual victim was not alone in their experiences of sexual harm; they added their voice to others who had faced similar injustices. But viewing the #MeToo movement as a collection of singular voices fails to appreciate that the cases that filled our popular discourse were not cases of individual victims coming forward. Rather, case after case involved multiple victims, typically women, accusing single perpetrators. Victims were believed because there was both safety and strength in numbers. The allegations were not by a “me,” but far more frequently by a “we.” The #MeToo movement is the success of #WeToo. This Article assesses the implications of #WeToo for criminal law. #WeToo—multiple allegations against individual perpetrators—brings some grounds for hope about the criminal justice system’s treatment of sexual assault. Currently, victims face unwarranted obstacles with respect to police, prosecutors, and juries, but #WeToo may spur better policing, encourage prosecution, and counteract a jury’s credibility discounting of an individual victim’s testimony. However, there are also significant reasons to worry. The rise of #WeToo risks frustrating jury expectations due to a narrative mismatch between the media’s coverage of sexual violence and the typical facts on the ground, the imposition of a de facto corroboration requirement wherein individual victims cannot attain justice unless another person was victimized, and the perversion of fairness commitments due to the accused through permissive joinder rules and sloppy or unjustified evidentiary arguments. This Article grapples with these impacts that #WeToo will have on the criminal justice system, including the effects of #WeToo’s intersection with racial injustices—the over-policing of Black men and under-protection of Black women