Trust as a precursor to belief revision

Belief revision is concerned with incorporating new information into a pre-existing set of beliefs. When the new information comes from another agent, we must first determine if that agent should be trusted. In this paper, we define trust as a pre-processing step before revision. We emphasize that trust in an agent is often restricted to a particular domain of expertise. We demonstrate that this form of trust can be captured by associating a state partition with each agent, then relativizing all reports to this partition before revising. We position the resulting family of trust-sensitive revision operators within the class of selective revision operators of Ferme and Hansson, and we prove a representation result that characterizes the class of trust-sensitive revision operators in terms of a set of postulates. We also show that trust-sensitive revision is manipulable, in the sense that agents can sometimes have incentive to pass on misleading information

Trust-sensitive belief revision

Belief revision is concerned with incorporating new information into a pre-existing set of beliefs. When the new information comes from another agent, we must first determine if that agent should be trusted. In this paper, we define trust as a pre-processing step before revision. We emphasize that trust in an agent is often restricted to a particular domain of expertise. We demonstrate that this form of trust can be captured by associating a state partition with each agent, then relativizing all reports to this partition before revising. We position the resulting family of trust-sensitive revision operators within the class of selective revision operators of Fermé and Hansson, and we examine its properties. In particular, we show how trust-sensitive revision is manipulable, in the sense that agents can sometimes have incentive to pass on misleading information. When multiple reporting agents are involved, we use a distance function over states to represent differing degrees of trust; this ensures that the most trusted reports will be believed

Dispute Resolution Using Argumentation-Based Mediation

Mediation is a process, in which both parties agree to resolve their dispute by negotiating over alternative solutions presented by a mediator. In order to construct such solutions, mediation brings more information and knowledge, and, if possible, resources to the negotiation table. The contribution of this paper is the automated mediation machinery which does that. It presents an argumentation-based mediation approach that extends the logic-based approach to argumentation-based negotiation involving BDI agents. The paper describes the mediation algorithm. For comparison it illustrates the method with a case study used in an earlier work. It demonstrates how the computational mediator can deal with realistic situations in which the negotiating agents would otherwise fail due to lack of knowledge and/or resources.Comment: 6 page

Worthy of faith?: Authors and readers in early modernity

This chapter will consider how the traditional (classical Roman and Europeanmedieval) definition of the “author” as “one worthy of faith” (the faith of thereader, obviously) is put increasingly to the test during the early modern period, as the notion of literary writing gradually moves from epistemological (vatic) and/or ethical-rhetorical models toward what Terry Eagleton has called “the ideology of the aesthetic” – that is, toward suspension of readerly belief in the moral fidelity and intellectual credibility of the literary writer. In a classic formulation, the literary author as a distinctive “personal” and individual presence, indeed as willful demideity “making worlds,” first emerges in what we sometimes still call the Renaissance: first in the Italy of Dante and Petrarch, and then, gradually, spreads throughout the nascent vernacular traditions of western Europe. What follows will rehearse some clichés of the topic, one hopes in an appealing way, and lay out to shift the terms of the discussion in others. In particular, I will focus on the intuitively obvious, yet not always thoroughly explored, point that any notion of authorship is intricately tied to ideas, and realities, of readership. More especially, I will explore, on the one hand, the question of authorial control over the meaning of a text as this takes shape in the experience of its readers and, on the other, how such readers may either trustingly embrace the offered sense of the text or willfully recast it

Metacognitive Development and Conceptual Change in Children

There has been little investigation to date of the way metacognition is involved in conceptual change. It has been recognised that analytic metacognition is important to the way older children acquire more sophisticated scientific and mathematical concepts at school. But there has been barely any examination of the role of metacognition in earlier stages of concept acquisition, at the ages that have been the major focus of the developmental psychology of concepts. The growing evidence that even young children have a capacity for procedural metacognition raises the question of whether and how these abilities are involved in conceptual development. More specifically, are there developmental changes in metacognitive abilities that have a wholescale effect on the way children acquire new concepts and replace existing concepts? We show that there is already evidence of at least one plausible example of such a link and argue that these connections deserve to be investigated systematically

Individual Factors As Antecedents of Mobile Payment Usage

The aim of this research was to discover the stances of individual elements as antecedents of mobile payment usage. Data was gathered by distributing a questionnaire, which in latter steps was analyzed quantitatively. This research collected 90 samples, of whom represented users of a mobile payment service in Indonesia. The collected dataset was statistically analyzed, by employing partial least square structural equational modelling (PLS-SEM), aided with SmartPLS3.0. The results showed that two types of individual factors, namely individual difference and behavioral belief played significant roles in shaping users' intention to use mobile payments. Individual differences, consisting of mobile payment knowledge and compatibility significantly influenced perceived ease of use. Behavioral belief, such as trust, was shown to significantly influenced perceived usefulness. Finally, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness concertedly affected mobile payment users' intention to use

Roots and reassessment of the Cuban 'guerrilla ethos' : from the armed imperative to the end of foquismo

Based on original interviews and rare archival sources, the central thread of this article is the origin, rise and reassessment of the Cuban Revolution’s «guerrilla ethos» that shaped the political creed of the first revolutionary generation. During the anti-Fulgencio Batista insurrection (1952-1959), the belief that only violence could lead to the ousting of the dictator steadily gained traction among the opposition as the right path to revolution. This radical approach was already voiced by a number of movements prior to the Moncada attack (July 1953), when Fidel Castro became a public national figure, and was crowned by the advent of the revolution in 1959. The revolutionary administration established an insurrectional doctrine – sometimes known as foquismo – that stemmed from the «lessons » of the anti-Batista fight and guided the island’s external involvements throughout the sixties. However, the «guerrilla mentality» confronted major challenges in the second half of the decade (guerrilla’s defeats, Soviet pressures). This article stresses an additional and often forgotten component that, nonetheless, exerted a powerful effect on Cuba’s reconsideration of its previous revolutionary principles: the unfolding of the Juan Velasco Alvarado military government (1968-1975) in Peru, promptly labelled in Havana as a viable route to «revolution», which resulted in a partial revision of the «guerrilla ethos» that emerged in fifties