Knowledge and Luck

Nearly all success is due to some mix of ability and luck. But some successes we attribute to the agent’s ability, whereas others we attribute to luck. To better understand the criteria distinguishing credit from luck, we conducted a series of four studies on knowledge attributions. Knowledge is an achievement that involves reaching the truth. But many factors affecting the truth are beyond our control and reaching the truth is often partly due to luck. Which sorts of luck are compatible with knowledge? We find that knowledge attributions are highly sensitive to lucky events that change the explanation for why a belief is true. By contrast, knowledge attributions are surprisingly insensitive to lucky events that threaten but ultimately fail to change the explanation for why a belief is true. These results shed light on our concept of knowledge, help explain apparent inconsistencies in prior work on knowledge attributions, and constitute progress toward a general understanding of the relation between success and luck

Gettier Cases: A Taxonomy

The term “Gettier Case” is a technical term frequently applied to a wide array of thought experiments in contemporary epistemology. What do these cases have in common? It is said that they all involve a justified true belief which, intuitively, is not knowledge, due to a form of luck called “Gettiering.” While this very broad characterization suffices for some purposes, it masks radical diversity. We argue that the extent of this diversity merits abandoning the notion of a “Gettier case” in a favour of more finely grained terminology. We propose such terminology, and use it to effectively sort the myriad Gettier cases from the theoretical literature in a way that charts deep fault lines in ordinary judgments about knowledge

A Dynamic Account of the Structure of Concepts

Concepts are widely agreed to be the basic constituents of thought. Amongst philosophers and psychologists, however, the question of how concepts are structured has been a longstanding problem and a locus of disagreement. I draw on recent work describing how representational content is ascribed to populations of neurons to develop a novel solution to this problem. Because disputes over the structure of concepts often reflect divergent explanatory goals, I begin by arguing for a set of six criteria that a good theory ought to accommodate. These criteria address philosophical concerns related to content, reference, scope, publicity, and compositionality, and psychological concerns related to categorization phenomena and neural plausibility. Next, I evaluate a number of existing theoretical approaches in relation to these six criteria. I consider classical views that identify concepts with definitions, similarity-based views that identify concepts with prototypes or exemplars, theory-based views that identify concepts with explanatory schemas, and atomistic views that identify concepts with unstructured mental symbols that enter into law-like relations with their referents. I conclude that none of these accounts can satisfactorily accommodate all of the criteria. I then describe the theory of representational content that I employ to motivate a novel account of concept structure. I briefly defend this theory against competitors, and I describe how it can be scaled from the level of basic perceptual representations to the level of highly complex conceptual representations. On the basis of this description, I contend that concepts are structured dynamically through sets of transformations of single source representation, and that the content of a given concept specifies the set of potential transformations it can enter into. I conclude by demonstrating that the ability of this account to meet all of the criteria introduced beforehand. I consider objections to my views throughout

Inferential Role Semantics for Natural Language

The most general goal of semantic theory is to explain facts about language use. In keeping with this goal, I introduce a framework for thinking about linguistic expressions in terms of (a) the inferences they license, (b) the behavioral predictions that their uses thereby sustain, and (c) the affordances that they provide to language users in virtue of these inferential and predictive involvements. Within this framework, linguistic expressions acquire meanings by regulating social practices that involve “intentional interpretation,” wherein people explain and predict one another’s behavior through linguistically specified mental state attributions. Developing a theory of meaning therefore requires formalizing the inferential roles that determine how linguistic expressions license predictions in the context intentional interpretation. Accordingly, the view I develop is an inferential role semantics for natural language. To describe this semantics, I take advantage of recently developed techniques in the field of natural language processing. I introduce a model that assigns inferential roles to arbitrary linguistic expressions by learning from examples of how sentences are distributed as premises and conclusions in a space of possible inferences. I then empirically evaluate the model’s ability to generate accurate entailments for novel sentences not used as training examples. I argue that this model takes a small but important step towards codifying the meanings of the expressions it manipulates. Next, I examine the theoretical implications of this work with respect to debates about the compositionality of language, the relationship between language and cognition, and the relationship between language and the world. With respect to compositionality, I argue that the debate is really about generalization in language use, and that the required sort of generalization can be achieved by “interpolating” between familiar examples of correct inferential transitions. With respect to the relationship between thought and language, I argue that it is a mistake to try to derive a theory of natural language semantics from a prior theory of mental representation because theories of mental representation invoke the sort of intentional interpretation at play in language use from the get-go. With respect to the relationship between language and the world, I argue that questions about truth conditions and reference relations are best thought of in terms of questions about the norms governing language use. These norms, in turn, are best characterized in primarily inferential terms. I conclude with an all-things-considered evaluation of my theory that demonstrates how it overcomes a number of challenges associated with semantic theories that take inference, rather than reference, as their starting point

The impact of delivery performance for a selected part of General Motors South Africa (GMSA)

Today‘s customers expect zero defects with just-in-time (JIT) delivery from their suppliers, for the specified quantities, as a matter of standard practice. More importantly, customers expect companies to help them know what they need in terms of quantities and quality now, and for the future. No other change process adds long-term value as quickly as zero defects. Companies failing to embrace this quality culture face difficult challenges. To achieve this level of performance requires tremendous focus in an organisation and throughout its supply base. Business models around the world are changing dramatically from the "Source Local" to the "Source Anywhere and Build Anywhere" model (Cummins, 2008: 19). Companies have shifted away from a hierarchical, one-dimensional, supply chain entity to a fragmented network in favor of strategic partnerships with external entities. Many businesses facing such models are experiencing challenges and, if not managed correctly, can find themselves struggling to compete in this new landscape. Thus, when price concessions are so stringent, quality has to suffer. To reduce costs, suppliers are forced to seek less expensive ways to produce parts and components. Does this mean the use of different, less expensive materials? Does this mean less skilled labor? Does this mean production shortcuts? Or does this mean that suppliers just bite the bullet and pay the price? Once all the costs have been extracted from the supply chain, the only thing left to suffer is quality. The underlying objective of this research is to investigate the impact of delivery performance for a selected part at General Motors South Africa. In order to develop a research strategy to deal with, and solve, the main problem, the following research questions have been identified: a) What can be learned from literature about the impact of quality costs? b) Why is this specific part a suitable candidate for a cost investigation? c) What are the processes involved if a defect occurs? d) How can the cost be estimated? e) What effect does poor supplier quality have on productivity? This dissertation aims to investigate the problems and challenges General Motors South Africa are facing pertaining to the delivery performance of a selected part. The dissertation will also strive to highlight the impact of poor supplier quality on productivity and the related cost implications. Conclusions and recommendations will furthermore be outlined