Reason Maintenance - State of the Art

This paper describes state of the art in reason maintenance with a focus on its future usage in the KiWi project. To give a bigger picture of the field, it also mentions closely related issues such as non-monotonic logic and paraconsistency. The paper is organized as follows: first, two motivating scenarios referring to semantic wikis are presented which are then used to introduce the different reason maintenance techniques

The polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir: a behavioral profile analysis

This study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verb sentir (‘feel’) which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbs ver (‘see’) and mirar (‘look’), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy of sentir, the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished – i.e. which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosyntactic variables make them more or less distinguishable? The results show that two significant meaning clusters can be distinguished, which coincide with the division between the middle voice uses (sentirse) and the other uses (sentir). Within these clusters, a number of meaningful subclusters emerge, which seem to coincide largely with the more general semantic categories of physical, cognitive and emotional perception

Towards a belief revision based adaptive and context sensitive information retrieval system

In an adaptive information retrieval (IR) setting, the information seekers' beliefs about which terms are relevant or nonrelevant will naturally fluctuate. This article investigates how the theory of belief revision can be used to model adaptive IR. More specifically, belief revision logic provides a rich representation scheme to formalize retrieval contexts so as to disambiguate vague user queries. In addition, belief revision theory underpins the development of an effective mechanism to revise user profiles in accordance with information seekers' changing information needs. It is argued that information retrieval contexts can be extracted by means of the information-flow text mining method so as to realize a highly autonomous adaptive IR system. The extra bonus of a belief-based IR model is that its retrieval behavior is more predictable and explanatory. Our initial experiments show that the belief-based adaptive IR system is as effective as a classical adaptive IR system. To our best knowledge, this is the first successful implementation and evaluation of a logic-based adaptive IR model which can efficiently process large IR collections

Learning, conditionals, causation

This dissertation is on conditionals and causation. In particular, we (i) propose a method of how an agent learns conditional information, and (ii) analyse causation in terms of a new type of conditional. Our starting point is Ramsey's (1929/1990) test: accept a conditional when you can infer its consequent upon supposing its antecedent. Inspired by this test, Stalnaker (1968) developed a semantics of conditionals. In Ch. 2, we define and apply our new method of learning conditional information. It says, roughly, that you learn conditional information by updating on the corresponding Stalnaker conditional. By generalising Lewis's (1976) updating rule to Jeffrey imaging, our learning method becomes applicable to both certain and uncertain conditional information. The method generates the correct predictions for all of Douven's (2012) benchmark examples and Van Fraassen's (1981) Judy Benjamin Problem. In Ch. 3, we prefix Ramsey's test by suspending judgment on antecedent and consequent. Unlike the Ramsey Test semantics by Stalnaker (1968) and Gärdenfors (1978), our strengthened semantics requires the antecedent to be inferentially relevant for the consequent. We exploit this asymmetric relation of relevance in a semantic analysis of the natural language conjunction 'because'. In Ch. 4, we devise an analysis of actual causation in terms of production, where production is understood along the lines of our strengthened Ramsey Test. Our analysis solves the problems of overdetermination, conjunctive scenarios, early and late preemption, switches, double prevention, and spurious causation -- a set of problems that still challenges counterfactual accounts of actual causation in the tradition of Lewis (1973c). In Ch. 5, we translate our analysis of actual causation into Halpern and Pearl's (2005) framework of causal models. As a result, our analysis is considerably simplified on the cost of losing its reductiveness. The upshot is twofold: (i) Jeffrey imaging on Stalnaker conditionals emerges as an alternative to Bayesian accounts of learning conditional information; (ii) the analyses of causation in terms of our strengthened Ramsey Test conditional prove to be worthy rivals to contemporary counterfactual accounts of causation

The emerging structure of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: where does Evo-Devo fit in?

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) debate is gaining ground in contemporary evolutionary biology. In parallel, a number of philosophical standpoints have emerged in an attempt to clarify what exactly is represented by the EES. For Massimo Pigliucci, we are in the wake of the newest instantiation of a persisting Kuhnian paradigm; in contrast, Telmo Pievani has contended that the transition to an EES could be best represented as a progressive reformation of a prior Lakatosian scientific research program, with the extension of its Neo-Darwinian core and the addition of a brand-new protective belt of assumptions and auxiliary hypotheses. Here, we argue that those philosophical vantage points are not the only ways to interpret what current proposals to ‘extend’ the Modern Synthesis-derived ‘standard evolutionary theory’ (SET) entail in terms of theoretical change in evolutionary biology. We specifically propose the image of the emergent EES as a vast network of models and interweaved representations that, instantiated in diverse practices, are connected and related in multiple ways. Under that assumption, the EES could be articulated around a paraconsistent network of evolutionary theories (including some elements of the SET), as well as models, practices and representation systems of contemporary evolutionary biology, with edges and nodes that change their position and centrality as a consequence of the co-construction and stabilization of facts and historical discussions revolving around the epistemic goals of this area of the life sciences. We then critically examine the purported structure of the EES—published by Laland and collaborators in 2015—in light of our own network-based proposal. Finally, we consider which epistemic units of Evo-Devo are present or still missing from the EES, in preparation for further analyses of the topic of explanatory integration in this conceptual framework