The inverse conjunction fallacy

If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed the inverse conjunction fallacy. Not only did people often express a belief in the more general statement but not in the more specific, but also when they accepted both beliefs, they were inclined to give greater confidence to the more general. It is argued that this effect underlies a number of other demonstrations of fallacious reasoning, particularly in category-based induction. Alternative accounts of the phenomenon are evaluated, and it is concluded that the effect is best interpreted in terms of intensional reasoning [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: the conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293–315.]

Quantum phenomenology of conjunction fallacy

A quantum-like description of human decision process is developed, and a heuristic argument supporting the theory as sound phenomenology is given. It is shown to be capable of quantitatively explaining the conjunction fallacy in the same footing as the violation of sure-thing principle.Comment: LaTeX 8 pages, 2 figure

On Spatial Conjunction as Second-Order Logic

Spatial conjunction is a powerful construct for reasoning about dynamically allocated data structures, as well as concurrent, distributed and mobile computation. While researchers have identified many uses of spatial conjunction, its precise expressive power compared to traditional logical constructs was not previously known. In this paper we establish the expressive power of spatial conjunction. We construct an embedding from first-order logic with spatial conjunction into second-order logic, and more surprisingly, an embedding from full second order logic into first-order logic with spatial conjunction. These embeddings show that the satisfiability of formulas in first-order logic with spatial conjunction is equivalent to the satisfiability of formulas in second-order logic. These results explain the great expressive power of spatial conjunction and can be used to show that adding unrestricted spatial conjunction to a decidable logic leads to an undecidable logic. As one example, we show that adding unrestricted spatial conjunction to two-variable logic leads to undecidability. On the side of decidability, the embedding into second-order logic immediately implies the decidability of first-order logic with a form of spatial conjunction over trees. The embedding into spatial conjunction also has useful consequences: because a restricted form of spatial conjunction in two-variable logic preserves decidability, we obtain that a correspondingly restricted form of second-order quantification in two-variable logic is decidable. The resulting language generalizes the first-order theory of boolean algebra over sets and is useful in reasoning about the contents of data structures in object-oriented languages.Comment: 16 page

Sapphic Modernists - Re-visiting Elizabeth McCausland and Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York

Within our research of female/sapphic collaborations of Modernity, a perpetual process of ‘erasure’ or the ‘writing out of art history’ of female collaborators is exposed. One such example is evident through analysis of the 1939 publication of Berenice Abbott’s photographs in Changing New York which has been acknowledged as a key contribution to urban photographic history. Little or nothing is known of the fact that all of the original captions for Changing New York were deemed not fit for publication and that the innovative spatial text-image design devised by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland was rejected. Instead the publishers insisted on a very conservative approach to design and the blandness of the published captions read activate Berenice Abbott’s photographs much like a guide book to the city. We found the complete set of original captions to the book, written by Elizabeth McCausland, a communist and socially engaged journalist and long-time partner of Berenice Abbott. These highly critical texts act to place the photographs directly into the larger political and social context of the 1930s Depression in USA. The original attempt and idea for the book by Abbott and McCausland was intended to acknowledge both formats, text and photography, as equal in terms of activating meaning production and/or tools for critical reflection. The book was intended as a critical reflection on the harrowing social conditions and inequalities of the 1930s in New York City