The Temporal Logic of the Tower Chief System

The purpose is to describe the logic used in the reasoning scheme employed in the Tower Chief system, a runway configuration management system. First, a review of classical logic is given. Defensible logics, truth maintenance, default logic, temporally dependent propositions, and resource allocation and planning are discussed

Scaring the public: fear appeal arguments in public health reasoning

The study of threat and fear appeal arguments has given rise to a sizeable literature. Even within a public health context, much is now known about how these arguments work to gain the public's compliance with health recommendations. Notwithstanding this level of interest in, and examination of, these arguments, there is one aspect of these arguments that still remains unexplored. That aspect concerns the heuristic function of these arguments within our thinking about public health problems. Specifically, it is argued that threat and fear appeal arguments serve as valuable shortcuts in our reasoning, particularly when that reasoning is subject to biases that are likely to diminish the effectiveness of public health messages. To this extent, they are rationally warranted argument forms rather than fallacies, as has been their dominant characterization in logic

Rights of Nature and Indigenous Cosmovision: A Fundamental Inquiry

In this paper, I ask whether we can weigh and balance indigenous cosmovision—the reasoning used as the main source of legitimacy in some rights of nature legislation—within a secular legal system. I examine three barriers that rights of nature and their corollary spiritual reasoning are likely to encounter if they are invoked in secular courts: (a) spiritual reasoning is non-defeasible (Part 3) and (b) irrational (Part 4), and (3) the current concept of human rights as a universal legal norm is based on a circular logic (Part 5). In order to overcome these barriers, I draw inspiration from Dworkin’s ‘rights as trumps’ thesis and the proportionality principle (5.2), and propose that for rights of nature and their spiritual connotation to be operational in a secular court, we need to create an exception—a meta rule for these legal concepts—and subject them to the proportionality principle

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

Censure theory still best accounts for punishment of the guilty: reply to Montague

Philosophia, 37 (2009)In an article previously published in this journal, Phillip Montague critically surveys and rejects a handful of contemporary attempts to explain why state punishment is morally justified. Among those targeted is one of my defences of the censure theory of punishment, according to which state punishment is justified because the political community has a duty to express disapproval of those guilty of injustice. My defence of censure theory supposes, per argumentum, that there is always some defeasible moral reason for the state to proportionately punish the guilty, and then demonstrates that censure theory best entails and explains this intuition. Montague does not question the intuition, but instead argues that three rival theories of punishment, including his societal-defence view, account for it to no worse a degree than my censure theory. In this article I defend my initial argument, noting resources for its defence that Montague does not appreciate and that, I maintain, provide those who believe that there is always pro tanto injustice in the state failing to proportionately punish the guilty reason to adopt censure theory over all competitors, including Montague’s societal-defence theory

Probabilistic single function dual process theory and logic programming as approaches to non-monotonicity in human vs. artificial reasoning

In this paper, it is argued that single function dual process theory is a more credible psychological account of non-monotonicity in human conditional reasoning than recent attempts to apply logic programming (LP) approaches in artificial intelligence to these data. LP is introduced and among other critiques, it is argued that it is psychologically unrealistic in a similar way to hash coding in the classicism vs. connectionism debate. Second, it is argued that causal Bayes nets provide a framework for modelling probabilistic conditional inference in System 2 that can deal with patterns of inference LP cannot. Third, we offer some speculations on how the cognitive system may avoid problems for System 1 identified by Fodor in 1983. We conclude that while many problems remain, the probabilistic single function dual processing theory is to be preferred over LP as an account of the non-monotonicity of human reasoning

The Ethical Basis for Veganism

This chapter examines the ethical case that can be mounted for veganism. Because there has been comparatively little discussion in ethics focused directly on veganism, the central aim of this chapter is threefold: to orient readers to (some of) the most important philosophical literature relevant to the topic, to provide a clear explanation of the current state of the ethical case for veganism, and to focus attention on the most important outstanding or underexplored questions in this domain. The chapter examines the range of positions that deserve to be called ethical veganism, and some of the types of reasons that philosophers can potentially appeal to in arguing for veganism. It then spells out the core of the most promising case for veganism, which argues directly for the wrongness of making animals suffer and die. The chapter then considers three ways of arguing from this conclusion to an ethical defense of the vegan lifestyle, which appeal respectively to the ethical significance of the effects of individual use of animal products, of group efficacy, and of complicity with wrongdoing. The chapter concludes by examining several neglected complications facing the ethical case for veganism

Defeasible A Priori Warrants: Evidence, Diversity of Opinion, and Strength

Self-evident warrants are self-backed and thus knowable a priori. Warrants licencing inferring a moral conclusion from a morally relevant premise are paradigm examples. Such warrants are defeasible, for example where there is a conflict of duties. Evidence for them involves moral intuition. Moral realism argues for the objectivity of such intuition and of defeasible a priori warrants. Warrant strength depends on how many rebuttals may be brought against a warrant and their plausibility