Desire, belief, and conditional belief

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-132).This dissertation studies the logics of value and conditionals, and the question of whether they should be given cognitivist analyses. Emotivist theories treat value judgments as expressions of desire, rather than beliefs about goodness. Inference ticket theories of conditionals treat them as expressions of conditional beliefs, rather than propositions. The two issues intersect in decision theory, where judgments of expected goodness are expressible by means of decision-making conditionals. In the first chapter, I argue that decision theory cannot be given a Humean foundation by means of money pump arguments, which purport to show that the transitivity of preference and indifference is a requirement of instrumental reason. Instead, I argue that Humeans should treat the constraints of decision theory as constitutive of the nature of preferences. Additionally, I argue that transitivity of preference is a stricter requirement than transitivity of indifference. In the second chapter, I investigate whether David Lewis has shown that decision theory is incompatible with anti-Humean theories of desire. His triviality proof against "desire as belief' seems to show that desires can be at best conditional beliefs about goodness. I argue that within causal decision theory we can articulate the cognitivist position where desires align with beliefs about goodness, articulated by the decision making conditional. In the third chapter, I turn to conditionals in their own right, and especially iterated conditionals.(cont.) I defend the position that indicative conditionals obey the import-export equivalence rather than modus ponens (except for simple conditionals), while counterfactual subjunctive conditionals do obey modus ponens. The logic of indicative conditionals is often thought to be determined by conditional beliefs via the Ramsey Test. I argue that iterated conditionals show that the conditional beliefs involved in indicative supposition diverge from the conditional beliefs involved in learning, and that half of the Ramsey Test is untenable for iterated conditionals.by David Jeffrey Etlin.Ph.D

On the role of deduction in reasoning from uncertain premises

The probabilistic approach to reasoning hypothesizes that most reasoning, both in everyday life and in science, takes place in contexts of uncertainty. The central deductive concepts of classical logic, consistency and validity, can be generalised to cover uncertain degrees of belief. Binary consistency can be generalised to coherence, where the probability judgments for two statements are coherent if and only if they respect the axioms of probability theory. Binary validity can be generalised to probabilistic validity (p-validity), where an inference is p-valid if and only if the uncertainty of its conclusion cannot be coherently greater than the sum of the uncertainties of its premises. But the fact that this generalisation is possible in formal logic does not imply that people will use deduction in a probabilistic way. The role of deduction in reasoning from uncertain premises was investigated across ten experiments and 23 inferences of differing complexity. The results provide evidence that coherence and p-validity are not just abstract formalisms, but that people follow the normative constraints set by them in their reasoning. It made no qualitative difference whether the premises were certain or uncertain, but certainty could be interpreted as the endpoint of a common scale for degrees of belief. The findings are evidence for the descriptive adequacy of coherence and p-validity as computational level principles for reasoning. They have implications for the interpretation of past findings on the roles of deduction and degrees of belief. And they offer a perspective for generating new research hypotheses in the interface between deductive and inductive reasoning. Keywords: Reasoning; deduction; probabilistic approach; coherence; p-validit

On the role of deduction in reasoning from uncertain premises

The probabilistic approach to reasoning hypothesizes that most reasoning, both in everyday life and in science, takes place in contexts of uncertainty. The central deductive concepts of classical logic, consistency and validity, can be generalised to cover uncertain degrees of belief. Binary consistency can be generalised to coherence, where the probability judgments for two statements are coherent if and only if they respect the axioms of probability theory. Binary validity can be generalised to probabilistic validity (p-validity), where an inference is p-valid if and only if the uncertainty of its conclusion cannot be coherently greater than the sum of the uncertainties of its premises. But the fact that this generalisation is possible in formal logic does not imply that people will use deduction in a probabilistic way. The role of deduction in reasoning from uncertain premises was investigated across ten experiments and 23 inferences of differing complexity. The results provide evidence that coherence and p-validity are not just abstract formalisms, but that people follow the normative constraints set by them in their reasoning. It made no qualitative difference whether the premises were certain or uncertain, but certainty could be interpreted as the endpoint of a common scale for degrees of belief. The findings are evidence for the descriptive adequacy of coherence and p-validity as computational level principles for reasoning. They have implications for the interpretation of past findings on the roles of deduction and degrees of belief. And they offer a perspective for generating new research hypotheses in the interface between deductive and inductive reasoning. Keywords: Reasoning; deduction; probabilistic approach; coherence; p-validit

Methods of Teaching Latin: Theory, Practice, Application

In this project, I present a way to effectively blend modern theories of language acquisition and the contemporary practice of teaching Latin. I intend to demonstrate that a curriculum is able to balance both traditional and innovative philosophies by adapting Second Language Acquisition Theory’s idealized way to learn a language to fit the realistic limitations of the classroom. I begin with a discussion of the history of language pedagogy, focusing on Latin’s influence on the study of language learning from antiquity to present. Next, I present the key topics in SLA and the practical implications of this research for today’s Latin classrooms. I then turn from the scholarly theories of language acquisition to the daily practices of Latin teachers. Basing my discussion on an IRB-approved survey, I consider the goals and practices of contemporary Latin educators, concentrating on the three dominant teaching methodologies: the Grammar and Translation, Comprehensible Input, and Reading Methods. Finally, I briefly discuss a selection of the factors that affect course design and teaching practices and limit the applicability of idealized learning methods. In conclusion, I argue that today’s Latin teachers should adopt a hybrid approach. Instead of strictly aligning with one methodology, teachers should define and adapt their practices to meet the goals of their classrooms and the needs of their students