729 research outputs found
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 Ottoâs 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 âreview and decision.â 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 âParis Agreement,â supersedes their proposed revision
The Toulmin Model and Non-monotonic Reasoning
While the nature of warrants is unclear in both Toulminâs Uses of Argument and in textbook pedagogy based on it, the theory of non-monotonic reasoning could clarify and enhance our understanding of warrants
Closure, credence and rationality: a problem for non-belief hinge epistemology
Duncan Pritchardâs Epistemic Angst promises a novel solution to the closure-based sceptical problem that, unlike more traditional solutions, does not entail revising our fundamental epistemological commitments. In order to do this, it appeals to a Wittgensteinian account of rational evaluation, the overarching theme of which is that it neither makes sense to doubt nor to believe in our anti-sceptical hinge commitments. The purpose of this paper is to show that the argument for the claim that there can be no rational basis to believe our anti-sceptical hinge commitments relies upon an implicit assumption about rational support that I label The Pritchensteinian Rational Grounds Principle. I argue that, insofar as this principle is intended to apply to closure-style inferences, it leads to irrational doxastic attitudes. I consider a seemingly plausible modification of the principle that would avoid this result but show that this modified principle faces serious problems of its own
Parikh and Wittgenstein
A survey of Parikhâs philosophical appropriations of Wittgensteinian themes, placed into historical context against the backdrop of Turingâs famous paper, âOn computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblemâ (Turing in Proc Lond Math Soc 2(42): 230â265, 1936/1937) and its connections with Wittgenstein and the foundations of mathematics. Characterizing Parikhâs contributions to the interaction between logic and philosophy at its foundations, we argue that his work gives the lie to recent presentations of Wittgensteinâs so-called metaphilosophy (e.g., Horwich in Wittgensteinâs metaphilosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012) as a kind of âdead endâ quietism. From early work on the idea of a feasibility in arithmetic (Parikh in J Symb Log 36(3):494â508, 1971) and vagueness (Parikh in Logic, language and method. Reidel, Boston, pp 241â261, 1983) to his more recent program in social software (Parikh in Advances in modal logic, vol 2. CSLI Publications, Stanford, pp 381â400, 2001a), Parikhâs work encompasses and touches upon many foundational issues in epistemology, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and value theory. But it expresses a unified philosophical point of view. In his most recent work, questions about public and private languages, opportunity spaces, strategic voting, non-monotonic inference and knowledge in literature provide a remarkable series of suggestions about how to present issues of fundamental importance in theoretical computer science as serious philosophical issues
De Finettian Logics of Indicative Conditionals Part I: Trivalent Semantics and Validity
This paper explores trivalent truth conditions for indicative conditionals, examining the âdefectiveâ truth table proposed by de Finetti (1936) and Reichenbach (1935, 1944). On their approach, a conditional takes the value of its consequent whenever its antecedent is true, and the value Indeterminate otherwise. Here we deal with the problem of selecting an adequate notion of validity for this conditional. We show that all standard validity schemes based on de Finettiâs table come with some problems, and highlight two ways out of the predicament: one pairs de Finettiâs conditional (DF) with validity as the preservation of non-false values (TT-validity), but at the expense of Modus Ponens; the other modifies de Finettiâs table to restore Modus Ponens. In Part I of this paper, we present both alternatives, with specific attention to a variant of de Finettiâs table (CC) proposed by Cooper (Inquiry 11, 295â320, 1968) and Cantwell (Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 49, 245â260, 2008). In Part II, we give an in-depth treatment of the proof theory of the resulting logics, DF/TT and CC/TT: both are connexive logics, but with significantly different algebraic properties
A conciliatory answer to the paradox of the ravens
In the Paradox of the Ravens, a set of otherwise intuitive claims about evidence seems to be inconsistent. Most attempts at answering the paradox involve rejecting a member of the set, which seems to require a conflict either with commonsense intuitions or with some of our best confirmation theories. In contrast, I argue that the appearance of an inconsistency is misleading: âconfirmsâ and cognate terms feature a significant ambiguity when applied to universal generalisations. In particular, the claim that some evidence confirms a universal generalisation ordinarily suggests, in part, that the evidence confirms the reliability of predicting that something which satisfies the antecedent will also satisfy the consequent. I distinguish between the familiar relation of confirmation simpliciter and what I shall call âpredictive confirmationâ. I use them to formulate my answer, illustrate it in a very simple probabilistic model, and defend it against objections. I conclude that, once our evidential concepts are sufficiently clarified, there is no sense in which the initial claims are both plausible and inconsistent
Proof theory for hybrid(ised) logics
Hybridisation is a systematic process along which the characteristic features of hybrid logic, both at the syntactic and the semantic levels, are developed on top of an arbitrary logic framed as an institution. In a series of papers this process has been detailed and taken as a basis for a specification methodology for reconfigurable systems. The present paper extends this work by showing how a proof calculus (in both a Hilbert and a tableau based format) for the hybridised version of a logic can be systematically generated from a proof calculus for the latter. Such developments provide the basis for a complete proof theory for hybrid(ised) logics, and thus pave the way to the development of (dedicated) proof support.The authors are grateful to Torben BrÀuner for helpful, inspiring discussions, and to the anonymous referees for their detailed comments.
This work is funded by ERDFâEuropean Regional Development Fund, through the COMPETE Programme, and by National Funds through Fundação para a CiĂȘncia e a Tecnologia(FCT) within project PTDC/EEI-CTP/4836/2014. Moreover, the first and the second authors are sponsored by FCT grants SFRH/BD/52234/2013 and SFRH/BPD/103004/2014, respectively. M. Mar-tins is also supported by the EU FP7 Marie Curie PIRSES-GA-2012-318986 project GeTFun: Generalizing Truth-Functionality and FCT project UID/MAT/04106/2013 through CIDMA. L.Barbosa is further supported by FCT in the context of SFRH/B-SAB/113890/2015
Reasoning in non-probabilistic uncertainty: logic programming and neural-symbolic computing as examples
This article aims to achieve two goals: to show that probability is not the only way of dealing with uncertainty (and even more, that there are kinds of uncertainty which are for principled reasons not addressable with probabilistic means); and to provide evidence that logic-based methods can well support reasoning with uncertainty. For the latter claim, two paradigmatic examples are presented: Logic Programming with Kleene semantics for modelling reasoning from information in a discourse, to an interpretation of the state of affairs of the intended model, and a neural-symbolic implementation of Input/Output logic for dealing with uncertainty in dynamic normative context
Left Hemisphere Lesions Differentially Impact Conditional Reasoning with Familiar and Emotional Content
Conditional reasoning has been widely studied in the cognitive literature, and in the past decade, neuroimaging studies have started to investigate brain networks recruited to solve these logical conditionals. A meta-analysis of these neuroimaging studies of healthy adults has shown that conditional arguments are primarily associated with left-lateralized activation in the parietal and frontal lobes. Beyond logical form, content factors such as belief- logic congruency, familiarity, and emotion have been shown to recruit networks different from the main effect of reasoning. To date, conditional connectives have not been investigated using traumatic brain injury patients, therefore, the goal of this thesis was to study the effect of brain lesions on conditional reasoning.
A whole brain analysis using voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM) was conducted on 72 neurological patients with unilateral lesions in order to explore the impact of brain lesions on reasoning accuracy scores. Results indicated that conditional reasoning with familiar content is highly dependent on left hemisphere intactness, whereas right hemisphere volume loss does not inhibit performance and in some conditions may even lead to improved performance. In particular, we found that familiar believable content failed to benefit patients with left hemisphere lesions. Additionally, VLSM analysis isolated a region in the left medial prefrontal cortex deemed necessary for reasoning with emotional content, the 10 patients with lesions in this cluster performed significantly worse than all other patients and controls on emotional conditionals.
Our findings provide additional evidence that reasoning processes involving familiar content are largely left lateralized and that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is specifically engaged in reasoning about emotional content. This is the first study to use a lesion analysis to investigate conditionals, and thus contributes important new information to the existing neuroimaging literature
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