The Logic of Conditional Belief

The logic of indicative conditionals remains the topic of deep and intractable philosophical disagreement. I show that two influential epistemic norms—the Lockean theory of belief and the Ramsey test for conditional belief—are jointly sufficient to ground a powerful new argument for a particular conception of the logic of indicative conditionals. Specifically, the argument demonstrates, contrary to the received historical narrative, that there is a real sense in which Stalnaker’s semantics for the indicative did succeed in capturing the logic of the Ramseyan indicative conditional

Decision Taking for Selling Thread Startup

Decision Taking is discussed in the context of the role it may play for a selling agent in a search market, in particular for agents involved in the sale of valuable and relatively unique items, such as a dwelling, a second hand car, or a second hand recreational vessel. Detailed connections are made between the architecture of decision making processes and a sample of software technology based concepts including instruction sequences, multi-threading, and thread algebra. Ample attention is paid to the initialization or startup of a thread dedicated to achieving a given objective, and to corresponding decision taking. As an application, the selling of an item is taken as an objective to be achieved by running a thread that was designed for that purpose

The responsibility to protect human rights and the RtoP: prospective and retrospective responsibility

This article argues that -- contrary to the way that it is often framed -- the first pillar of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) is not best understood as an instantiation of a broader international responsibility to protect human rights. Firstly, the RtoP reverts to a discourse of powerful savours and passive victims, which runs against advocates' claim that the RtoP is a 'rights-based norm'. Secondly, although it distinguishes between prevention and response, the RtoP is still fundamentally a discussion of retrospective responsibility. The responsibility to protect human rights, by contrast, is importantly prospective. The article's separation of prospective/retrospective responsibility from the responsibility to prevent and to respond is an independent contribution, with broader significance beyond the RtoP context. Thirdly, the RtoP becomes activated when atrocity is building, imminent or underway; whereas the responsibility to protect human rights may be breached even without a clear causal link to harm

Harnessing Higher-Order (Meta-)Logic to Represent and Reason with Complex Ethical Theories

The computer-mechanization of an ambitious explicit ethical theory, Gewirth's Principle of Generic Consistency, is used to showcase an approach for representing and reasoning with ethical theories exhibiting complex logical features like alethic and deontic modalities, indexicals, higher-order quantification, among others. Harnessing the high expressive power of Church's type theory as a meta-logic to semantically embed a combination of quantified non-classical logics, our work pushes existing boundaries in knowledge representation and reasoning. We demonstrate that intuitive encodings of complex ethical theories and their automation on the computer are no longer antipodes.Comment: 14 page

Epistemic virtues, metavirtues, and computational complexity

I argue that considerations about computational complexity show that all finite agents need characteristics like those that have been called epistemic virtues. The necessity of these virtues follows in part from the nonexistence of shortcuts, or efficient ways of finding shortcuts, to cognitively expensive routines. It follows that agents must possess the capacities – metavirtues –of developing in advance the cognitive virtues they will need when time and memory are at a premium

How to do things with modals

Mind &Language, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 115-138, February 2020

Methodological Frontiers in Environmental Epidemiology

Environmental epidemiology comprises the epidemiologic study of those environmental factors that are outside the immediate control of the individual. Exposures of interest to environmental epidemiologists include air pollution, water pollution, occupational exposure to physical and chemical agents, as well as psychosocial elements of environmental concern. The main methodologic problem in environmental epidemiology is exposure assessment, a problem that extends through all of epidemiologic research but looms as a towering obstacle in environmental epidemiology. One of the most promising developments in improving exposure assessment in environmental epidemiology is to find exposure biomarkers, which could serve as built-in dosimeters that reflect the biologic footprint left behind by environmental exposures. Beyond exposure assessment, epidemiologists studying environmental exposures face the difficulty of studying small effects that may be distorted by confounding that eludes easy control. This challenge may prompt reliance on new study designs, such as two-stage designs in which exposure and disease information are collected in the first stage, and covariate information is collected on a subset of subjects in state two. While the analytic methods already available for environmental epidemiology are powerful, analytic methods for ecologic studies need further development. This workshop outlines the range of methodologic issues that environmental epidemiologists must address so that their work meets the goals set by scientists and society at large

Understanding rural areas dynamics from a complex perspective. An application of Prospective Structural Analysis

The development of rural areas continues to be an international priority. The urgent need to fight poverty (mainly concentrated in rural areas) in developing countries, and the demand for increasing economic and social cohesion in developed countries, explain this priority on the political agendas of multilateral bodies, the EU and most other countries. When Development Economics was acknowledged as part of the social and economic theory in the 50’s, different theories and models have tried to explain the unevenness of development and the key elements or conditions that foster it. Traditional rural development programmes were characterised by the implementation of non coordinated, sectoral, horizontal and top-down policies and strategies. The lack of effectiveness and the failures prompted by these policies have propelled the development of new approaches. Territorial rural development is a policy approach embracing contributions from different theoretical frameworks that attempt to foster development strategies based on the consideration of territory as a social construction. Thus, the territory (including all the existing elements and its interactions) has become a key actor for development. However, most of these approaches contemplate rural world through simplistic and monodimensional analysis based on methodologies from single disciplines and on quantitative and/or qualitative morphological descriptions. The pretended multidisciplinarity, frequently ends up on an addition of mono-disciplinary analysis around the object of study. The objective of the present paper is to check the role different elements considered relevant for development by literature´s recent approaches play or can play in rural territories with a very different development situation, using techniques and tools that allow the analysis of rural areas from a complex perspective.territorial rural development, complexity, prospective structural analysis, Community/Rural/Urban Development,