Psychological evidence for assumptions of path-based inheritance reasoning

The psychological validity of inheritance reasoners is clarified. Elio and Pelletier (1993) presented the first pilot experiment exploring some of these issues. We investigate other foundational assumptions of inheritance reasoning with defaults: transitivity, blocking of transitivity by negative defaults, pre-emption in terms of structurally defined specificity and structurally defined redundancy of information. Responses were in accord with the assumption of at least limited transitivity, however, reasoning with negative information and structurally defined specificity conditions did not support the predictions of the literature. 'Preemptive' links were found to provide additional information leading to indeterminacy, rather than providing completely overriding information as the literature predicts. On the other hand, results support the structural identification of certain links as redundant. Other findings suggest that inheritance proof-theory might be excessively guided by its syntax

Generics as reflecting conceptual knowledge

Generics are proposed to reflect the content of the conceptual system, whose prototype structure and vague boundaries make an unreliable basis for traditional treatments of truth and logic. Examples from the psychological literature are used to illustrate the relation between generics, similarity‐based reasoning and concepts

The Political Morality of Nudges in Healthcare

A common critique of nudges is that they reduce someone's of choices or elicit behavior through means other than rational persuasion. In this paper, I argue against this form of critique. I argue that, if there is anything distinctively worrisome about nudges from the standpoint of morality, it is their tendency to hide the amount of social control that they embody, undermining democratic governance by making it more difficult for members of a political community to detect the social architect’s pulling of the strings. This concern is particularly salient as to choices where it is important for people to directly engage with a certain set of values, “big personal decisions” (to use a simplifying phrase). Many healthcare decisions are exactly these kinds of choices

The FTC Has a Dog in the Patent Monopoly Fight: Will Antitrust’s Bite Kill Generic Challenges?

Antitrust laws have been notoriously lenient in the patent realm, the underlying reason being that patents’ grant of exclusion create monopolies that defy antitrust laws in order to incentivize innovation. Thus, antitrust violations have rarely been found in the patent cases. But after the Supreme Court’s holding in FTC v. Actavis, brand name pharmaceutical companies may need to be more cautious when settling Hatch-Waxman litigation with potential patent infringers. Both brand-name drug manufacturers and generic drug manufacturers have incentives to settle cases by having the brand-name pay the generic in exchange for delaying their entry into the market. While courts usually found that these reverse-payment settlements did not violate antitrust laws, the Supreme Court recently held that they sometimes can, even if the settlement’s anticompetitive effects fall within the scope of the exclusionary potential of the patent. The Court tried to take the middle ground after rejecting several bright line rules promulgated by appellate courts, including the Third Circuit’s “quick look” presumption against reverse payment settlements and the Second, Eleventh, and Federal Circuit’s “scope of the patent” test. This note finds that the Supreme Court’s ruling will make the Hatch- Waxman legal landscape murky and, therefore, difficult for district courts to rule on the legality of reverse-payment settlements in the future. The ruling may hinder generics from challenging brandname manufacturers, a result that would certainly contravene the principle purpose behind the Hatch Waxman Act

Children's Developing Intuitions About the Truth Conditions and Implications of Novel Generics Versus Quantified Statements

Generic statements express generalizations about categories and present a unique semantic profile that is distinct from quantified statements. This paper reports two studies examining the development of children's intuitions about the semantics of generics and how they differ from statements quantified by all, most, and some. Results reveal that, like adults, preschoolers (a) recognize that generics have flexible truth conditions and are capable of representing a wide range of prevalence levels; and (b) interpret novel generics as having near‐universal prevalence implications. Results further show that by age 4, children are beginning to differentiate the meaning of generics and quantified statements; however, even 7‐ to 11‐year‐olds are not adultlike in their intuitions about the meaning of most‐quantified statements. Overall, these studies suggest that by preschool, children interpret generics in much the same way that adults do; however, mastery of the semantics of quantified statements follows a more protracted course.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111169/1/cogs12176.pd

OpenJML: Software verification for Java 7 using JML, OpenJDK, and Eclipse

OpenJML is a tool for checking code and specifications of Java programs. We describe our experience building the tool on the foundation of JML, OpenJDK and Eclipse, as well as on many advances in specification-based software verification. The implementation demonstrates the value of integrating specification tools directly in the software development IDE and in automating as many tasks as possible. The tool, though still in progress, has now been used for several college-level courses on software specification and verification and for small-scale studies on existing Java programs.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2014, arXiv:1404.578

Generics, modality, and morality

The issues in this dissertation reside at the intersections of, and relationships between, topics concerning the meaning of generic generalizations, natural language modality, the nature and role of moral principles, and the place of supererogation in the overall structure of the normative domain. In ’Generics and Weak Necessity’, I argue that generics—exception-granting generalizations such as ’Birds fly’ and ’Tigers are striped’—involve a covert weak necessity modal at logical form. I argue that this improves our understanding of the variability and diversity of generics. This chapter also argues that we can account for variability concerning normative generics within a modal approach to generics. In ’The Genericity of Moral Principles’, I provide evidence for the view that moral principles are generic generalizations, and, on the basis of this claim, argue that moral principles do not provide adequate support for reasoning about the moral statuses of particular cases. In ’Supererogation and the Structure of the Normative Domain’, I investigate the diversity of the central normative modal notions and argue that we should distinguish between two senses of supererogation based different ways deontic modals are sensitive to background information