2,915 research outputs found
Effects and Propositions
The quantum logical and quantum information-theoretic traditions have exerted
an especially powerful influence on Bub's thinking about the conceptual
foundations of quantum mechanics. This paper discusses both the quantum logical
and information-theoretic traditions from the point of view of their
representational frameworks. I argue that it is at this level, at the level of
its framework, that the quantum logical tradition has retained its centrality
to Bub's thought. It is further argued that there is implicit in the quantum
information-theoretic tradition a set of ideas that mark a genuinely new
alternative to the framework of quantum logic. These ideas are of considerable
interest for the philosophy of quantum mechanics, a claim which I defend with
an extended discussion of their application to our understanding of the
philosophical significance of the no hidden variable theorem of Kochen and
Specker.Comment: Presented to the 2007 conference, New Directions in the Foundations
of Physic
Counterfactual thinking in cooperation dynamics
Counterfactual Thinking is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide
variety of domains. It captures the process of reasoning about a past event
that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurred,
or, otherwise, to reason about an event that did occur but what would ensue had
it not. Given the wide cognitive empowerment of counterfactual reasoning in the
human individual, the question arises of how the presence of individuals with
this capability may improve cooperation in populations of self-regarding
individuals. Here we propose a mathematical model, grounded on Evolutionary
Game Theory, to examine the population dynamics emerging from the interplay
between counterfactual thinking and social learning (i.e., individuals that
learn from the actions and success of others) whenever the individuals in the
population face a collective dilemma. Our results suggest that counterfactual
reasoning fosters coordination in collective action problems occurring in large
populations, and has a limited impact on cooperation dilemmas in which
coordination is not required. Moreover, we show that a small prevalence of
individuals resorting to counterfactual thinking is enough to nudge an entire
population towards highly cooperative standards.Comment: 18 page
Alfredo Deaño and the non-accidental transition of thought
If the cultural variations concerning knowledge and research on ordinary
reasoning are part of cultural history, what kind of historiographical method is needed
in order to present the history of its evolution? This paper proposes to introduce the
study of theories of reasoning into a historiographic perspective because we assume
that the answer to the previous question does not only depend of internal controversies
about how reasoning performance is explained by current theories of reasoning. [...
The Value of Weather Event Science for Pending Climate Policy Decisions
This essay furthers debate about the burgeoning science of Probabilistic Event Attribution (PEA) and its relevance to imminent climate policy decisions. It critically examines Allen Thompson and Friederike Otto’s recent arguments concerning the implications of PEA studies for how the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) policy framework should be revised during the 2016 ‘review and decision.’ I show that their contention that PEA studies cannot usefully inform decision-making about adaptation policies and strategies is misguided and argue that the current UNFCCC treaty, the “Paris Agreement,” supersedes their proposed revision
Reason Maintenance - State of the Art
This paper describes state of the art in reason maintenance with a focus on its future usage in the KiWi project. To give a bigger picture of the field, it also mentions closely related issues such as non-monotonic logic and paraconsistency. The paper is organized as follows: first, two motivating scenarios referring to semantic wikis are presented which are then used to introduce the different reason maintenance techniques
Medical Diagnosis and Actual Causation
I suggest that some diagnoses can be seen as causal ex-planations based on \u201cparticulars\u201d \u2013 instead of regularities \u2013 and on the notion of actual causation. Diagnoses based on case-based rea-soning provide a particularly vivid example
Conditional Degree of Belief
This paper articulates and defends a suppositional interpretation of conditional degree of belief. First, I focus on a type of probability that has a crucial role in Bayesian inference: conditional degrees of belief in an observation, given a statistical hypothesis. The suppositional analysis explains, unlike other accounts, why these degrees of belief track the corresponding probability density functions. Then, I extend the suppositional analysis and argue that all probabilities in Bayesian inference should be understood suppositionally and model-relative. This sheds a new and illuminating light on chance-credence coordination principles, the relationship between Bayesian models and their target system, and the epistemic significance of Bayes' Theorem
- …