The psychology of indicative conditionals and conditional bets

There is a new Bayesian, or probabilistic, paradigm in the psychology of reasoning, with new psychological accounts of the indicative conditional of natural language. In psychological experiments in this new paradigm, people judge that the probability of the indicative conditional, P(if A then C), is the conditional probability of C given A, P(C | A). In other experiments, participants respond with what has been called the 'de- fective' truth table: they judge that if A then C is true when A holds and C holds, is false when A holds and C does not, and is neither true nor false when A does not hold. We argue that these responses are not 'defective' in any negative sense, as many psychologists have implied. We point out that a number of normative researchers, including de Finetti, have proposed such a table for various coherent interpretations of the third value. We review the relevant general tables in the normative literature, in which there is a third value for A and C and the logically compound forms of the natural language conditional, negation, conjunction, disjunction, and the material conditional. We describe the results of an experiment on which of these tables best describes ordinary people's judgements when the third value is interpreted as indicating uncertainty

Ab initio atomistic thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of surface properties and functions

Previous and present "academic" research aiming at atomic scale understanding is mainly concerned with the study of individual molecular processes possibly underlying materials science applications. Appealing properties of an individual process are then frequently discussed in terms of their direct importance for the envisioned material function, or reciprocally, the function of materials is somehow believed to be understandable by essentially one prominent elementary process only. What is often overlooked in this approach is that in macroscopic systems of technological relevance typically a large number of distinct atomic scale processes take place. Which of them are decisive for observable system properties and functions is then not only determined by the detailed individual properties of each process alone, but in many, if not most cases also the interplay of all processes, i.e. how they act together, plays a crucial role. For a "predictive materials science modeling with microscopic understanding", a description that treats the statistical interplay of a large number of microscopically well-described elementary processes must therefore be applied. Modern electronic structure theory methods such as DFT have become a standard tool for the accurate description of individual molecular processes. Here, we discuss the present status of emerging methodologies which attempt to achieve a (hopefully seamless) match of DFT with concepts from statistical mechanics or thermodynamics, in order to also address the interplay of the various molecular processes. The new quality of, and the novel insights that can be gained by, such techniques is illustrated by how they allow the description of crystal surfaces in contact with realistic gas-phase environments.Comment: 24 pages including 17 figures, related publications can be found at http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/th/paper.htm

Characterization of heterogeneous catalysts by use of test reactions

10.1007/s10563-005-7553-0Catalysis Surveys from Asia93173-18