A theory of human error

Human errors tend to be treated in terms of clinical and anecdotal descriptions, from which remedial measures are difficult to derive. Correction of the sources of human error requires an attempt to reconstruct underlying and contributing causes of error from the circumstantial causes cited in official investigative reports. A comprehensive analytical theory of the cause-effect relationships governing propagation of human error is indispensable to a reconstruction of the underlying and contributing causes. A validated analytical theory of the input-output behavior of human operators involving manual control, communication, supervisory, and monitoring tasks which are relevant to aviation, maritime, automotive, and process control operations is highlighted. This theory of behavior, both appropriate and inappropriate, provides an insightful basis for investigating, classifying, and quantifying the needed cause-effect relationships governing propagation of human error

The Error Theory of Contract

Many people have false beliefs about contract doctrine. That pervasive phenomenon has profound practical, theoretical, and normative implications that neither courts nor scholars have recognized. This Article will make three contributions to fill that gap. First, it will establish just how widespread the phenomenon is among non-lawyers. After synthesizing the existing evidence of false beliefs about contract law, it will contribute a new empirical study showing that between one-third and one-half of people falsely believe specific performance rather than damages is the remedy for breach. The Article will then argue that people’s false beliefs about contract doctrine pose a fundamental challenge to prominent promise- and consent-based theories of contract, which serve as the principal theoretical alternative to law and economics theories of contract. Because people have false beliefs about aspects of contract doctrine that affect the value of the contract, the law enforces a bargain materially different from the one to which people thought they agreed. For example, they pay a contract price they think purchases them a guarantee of performance, but the law ultimately provides them only with money damages for breach. People thus did not actually promise or consent to the bargain the law enforces. For that reason, the normative justification for existing contract doctrine cannot be grounded in promise or consent. Finally, the Article will explore the implications of that conclusion for ongoing doctrinal disputes. First, by removing promise or consent as a potential normative basis for contract doctrine, we may finally have grounds to settle long-standing disputes that ultimately depend on our choice of normative foundations about doctrines like consideration, mitigation, and unconscionability. Second, by failing to recognize the phenomenon of legal ignorance, the current debate about boilerplate misunderstood the problem it poses. If people are ignorant of, and, therefore, do not consent to, both boilerplate contract terms and the background law that would apply if boilerplate were not enforced, then refusing to enforce boilerplate does not solve the problem of lack of consent—it simply moves it from a lack of consent to fine-print terms to a lack of consent to gap-filling background law. The problem of the lack of consent is, therefore, one that banning boilerplate cannot solve. Instead, reform should focus on the remaining problem that boilerplate is substantively biased in favor of the firms that draft it. The solution, then, may be to allow boilerplate, but to regulate its content to ensure it offers terms that are not too slanted in the firms’ favor

A theory of cross-validation error

This paper presents a theory of error in cross-validation testing of algorithms for predicting real-valued attributes. The theory justifies the claim that predicting real-valued attributes requires balancing the conflicting demands of simplicity and accuracy. Furthermore, the theory indicates precisely how these conflicting demands must be balanced, in order to minimize cross-validation error. A general theory is presented, then it is developed in detail for linear regression and instance-based learning

Which Error Theory is Best?

Two recent papers, Harless and Camerer (1994) and Hey and Orme (1994), are both addressed to the same question: which is the `best' theory of decision making under risk? As an essential part of their separate approaches to an answer to this question, both sets of authors had to make an assumption about the underlying stochastic nature of their data. In this context this implied an assumption about the `errors' made by the subjects in the experiments generating the data under analysis. The two different sets of authors adopted different assumptions: the purpose of this current paper is to compare and contrast these two different error stories - in an attempt to discover which of the two is `best'.

Moral Error Theory and the Belief Problem

Moral error theories claim that (i) moral utterances express moral beliefs, that (ii) moral beliefs ascribe moral properties, and that (iii) moral properties are not instantiated. Thus, according to these views, there seems to be conclusive evidence against the truth of our ordinary moral beliefs. Furthermore, many error theorists claim that, even if we accepted moral error theory, we could still in principle keep our first-order moral beliefs. This chapter argues that this last claim makes many popular versions of the moral error theory incompatible with the standard philosophical accounts of beliefs. Functionalism, normative theories of beliefs, representationalism, and interpretationalism all entail that being sensitive to thoughts about evidence is a constitutive feature of beliefs. Given that many moral error theorists deny that moral beliefs have this quality, their views are in a direct conflict with the most popular views about the nature of beliefs

Why Queerness is not enough

Moral error theorists often claim to be strongly anti‑metaphysical in their moral scepticism and atheistic naturalists. This paper argues that pre‑ cisely this becomes a problem for them, when their metaethical and ontologi‑ cal commitments clash. I first outline how the known arguments against error theory face a problematic, yet rarely considered trade‑off : either they are very strong, then they are also very demanding in their assumptions or they are less demanding in their assumptions but rather weak in their conclusions. In re‑ sponse to this challenge I then develop a new argument against error theory that exploits an overlooked inconsistency in the error theorists’ standard line of argumentation. I conclude that the implications of this inconsistency are less of a problem for fictionalist error theorists, but will render any eliminativism based on error theory circular

Moral Error Theory and the Problem of Evil

Moral error theory claims that no moral sentence is (nonvacuously) true. Atheism claims that the existence of evil in the world is incompatible with, or makes improbable, the existence of God. Is moral error theory compatible with atheism? This paper defends the thesis that it is compatible against criticisms by Nicholas Sturgeo