A number of theories of causation posit that causes raise the probability of their effects. In this paper, we survey a number of proposals for analyzing causal strength in terms of probabilities. We attempt to characterize just what each one measures, discuss the relationships between the measures, and discuss a number of properties of each measure.
Many contemporary accounts of normative reasons for action accord a single strength value to normative reasons. This paper first uses some examples to argue against such views by showing that they seem to commit us to intransitive or counterintuitive claims about the rough equivalence of the strengths of certain reasons. The paper then explains and defends an alternate account according to which normative reasons for action have two separable dimensions of strength: requiring strength, and justifying strength. (...) Such an account explains our intuitions in the cases that make trouble for single-value views. The justifying/requiring account is compared with two other solutions that have been offered to justify and explain our intuitions about these sorts of cases. These other solutions appeal to the notions of incommensurability of reasons, and to second-order normative entities called `exclusionary permissions'. It is argued that the justifying/requiring distinction provides a superior solution. (shrink)
References to strength of mind, a character trait implying “the prevalence of the calm passions above the violent”, occur in a number of important discussions of motivation in the Treatise and the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Nevertheless, Hume says surprisingly little about what strength of mind is, or how it is achieved. This paper argues that Hume’s theory of the passions can provide an interesting and defensible account of strength of mind. The paper concludes with (...) a brief comparison of Humean strength of mind with autonomy. (shrink)
Does the strength with which we hold a particular belief depend upon the significance we attach to it? Might we move from one context to another, remaining in the same doxastic state concerning p, yet holding a stronger belief that p in one context than we do in the other? In order for that to happen, a doxastic state, a belief state, must have a certain sort of complexity, a context-sensitivity that yields, in the presence of one set of (...) stakes, a belief of one strength, and in the presence of different stakes, a belief of a different strength. So the question is about the nature of belief states, as we understand them, or as we think a theory should model them. I explore the idea that beliefs might have stake-sensitive complexity, and how it relates to work on imprecise probabilities and second-order confidence. (shrink)
In this chapter I review empirical studies directly testing the hypotheses of my 1973 paper "The Strength of Weak Ties" (hereafter "SWT") and work that elaborates those hypotheses theoretically or uses them to suggest new empirical research not discussed in my original formulation. Along the way, I will reconsider various aspects of the theoretical argument, attempt to plug some holes, and broaden its base.
It is often suggested that our desires vary in motivational strength or power. In a paper expressing skepticism about this idea, Irving Thalberg asked what he described, tongue in cheek, as "a disgracefully naive question" (1985, p. 88): "What do causal and any other theorists mean when they rate the strength of our PAs," that is, our "desires, aversions, preferences, schemes, and so forth"? His "guiding question" in the paper seems straightforward (p. 98): "What is it for our (...) motivational states to have some degree of power to generate behavior?" Yet, he argued, ''as soon as we endeavor to clarify what philosophers of action and drive theorists in psychology mean by motivational strength, we run across one obscurity after another" (p. 103). This essay is an attempt to answer a more specific version of Thalberg's question. (shrink)
The standpoint of this paper is the distinguished Ode to Sport from Pierre de Coubertin, specifically the second part of the elegy, the one concerning beauty. Starting with ?O Sport, you are Beauty!?, Pierre de Coubertin mentions, beyond beauty, an assemblage of aesthetic categories such as sublime, abject, balance, proportion, harmony, rhythm and grace. He also mentions strength, power and suppleness. Although the first quoted categories are general categories of aesthetics, it seems quite relevant to emphasize the need of (...) the author to introduce specific categories that fits to body movement and sport, such as strength, power and suppleness. There is no doubt that the first group of categories also fits to sport and body movement, but it equally fits to different forms of art, while strength, power and suppleness can only be literally applied to sport and performing arts. The purpose of this paper is to analyze strength as an aesthetic category of sport, developing three main arguments: the feeling of achievement and its conservation, the fight against gravity and the multiple forms of strength?s expression. It is concluded that strength can improve the communicative power of sport and its emotional appeal. In sports such as gymnastics, diving or synchronized swimming, the appreciation of strength exhibited by the athletes communicates to the observer some king of ease and lightness that enhances the aesthetic judgment. In other sports like weightlifting, sumo or rugby, effort and heaviness are stamped on the athlete's faces, what contributes to a sort of communion between the observer and the athlete that can also improve the aesthetic experience. (shrink)
This study examines the impact of the strength of an accounting firm’s ethical environment (presence and reinforcement vis-à-vis the presence of a code of conduct) on the quality of auditor judgment, across different levels of audit expertise. Using a 2 × 2 full factorial ‹between subjects’ experimental design, with audit managers and audit seniors, the impact of different levels of strength of the ethical environment on auditor judgments was assessed with a realistic audit scenario, requiring participants to make (...) judgments in respect of an inventory writedown. Based on prior research, and as hypothesized, participants possessing greater auditing experience made higher quality technical judgments. While there were no significant differences between the quality of audit judgments made by participants in the stronger ethical environment, over-all results indicate that managers are more sensitive to differences in the strength of the ethical environment than seniors. This is consistent with the hypothesis, and with prior research which suggests that the impact of the code will only be significant if it has been bilaterally internalized by individuals. This has important implications for accounting firms and regulators, given that the International Standard on Quality Control 1, requires the communication and reinforcement of ethical principles as part of firms' quality control processes. It suggests that firms will need to carefully consider the means by which they communicate and reinforce ethical principles, as it is possible to differentially impact auditors of different rank. (shrink)
In this paper I discuss the relation between various properties that have been regarded as important for determining whether or not a belief constitutes a piece of knowledge: its stability, strength and sensitivity to truth, as well as the strength of the epistemic position in which the subject is with respect to this belief. Attempts to explicate the relevant concepts more formally with the help of systems of spheres of possible worlds (à la Lewis and Grove) must take (...) care to keep apart the very different roles that systems of spheres can play. Nozicks sensitivity account turns out to be closer to the stability analysis of knowledge (versions of which I identify in Plato, Descartes, Klein and Lehrer) than one might have suspected. (shrink)
We observe that the facts pertaining to the acceptability of negative polarity items (henceforth, NPIs) in interrogative environments complex than previously noted. Since Klima [Klima, E. (1964). In J. Fodor & J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language. Prentice-Hall], it has been typically assumed that NPIs are grammatical in both matrix and embedded questions, however, on closer scrutiny it turns out that there are differences between root and embedded environments, and between question nucleus and wh-restrictor. While NPIs are always licensed (...) in the nucleus of root questions, their acceptability in the restrictor of wh-phrases and in the nucleus of any embedded question depends on the logical properties of the linguistic environment: its strength in terms of exhaustivity [Groenendijk, J., & Stokhof, M. (1984). Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatic answers. Amserdam (NL), Post-Doctoral Dissertation. Heim, I. (1994). In R. Buchalla & A. Mittwoch (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th annual IATL conference and of the 1993 IATL workshop on discourse (pp. 128–144). Akademon, Jerusalem. Beck, S., & 16 Rullmann, H. (1999). Natural Language Semantics, 7, 249–298. Sharvit, Y (2002). Natural Language Semantics, 10, 97–123] and its monotonicity properties (in the sense of von Fintel [von Fintel, K. (1999). Journal of 19 Semantics, 16, 97-148]). (shrink)
Most axiomatizations of set theory that have been treated metamathematically have been based either entirely on classical logic or entirely on intuitionistic logic. But a natural conception of the settheoretic universe is as an indefinite (or “potential”) totality, to which intuitionistic logic is more appropriately applied, while each set is taken to be a definite (or “completed”) totality, for which classical logic is appropriate; so on that view, set theory should be axiomatized on some correspondingly mixed basis. Similarly, in the (...) case of predicative analysis, the natural numbers are considered to form a definite totality, while the universe of sets (or functions) of natural numbers are viewed as an indefinite totality, so that, again, a mixed semi-constructive logic should be the appropriate one to treat the two together. Various such semiconstructive systems of analysis and set theory are formulated here and their proof-theoretic strength is characterized. Interestingly, though the logic is weakened, one can in compensation strengthen certain principles in a way that could be advantageous for mathematical applications. (shrink)
We present new probabilistic generalizations of Pearl’s entailment in System Z and Lehmann’s lexicographic entailment, called Zλ- and lexλ-entailment, which are parameterized through a value λ ∈ [0,1] that describes the strength of the inheritance of purely probabilistic knowledge. In the special cases of λ = 0 and λ = 1, the notions of Zλ- and lexλ-entailment coincide with probabilistic generalizations of Pearl’s entailment in System Z and Lehmann’s lexicographic entailment that have been recently introduced by the author. We (...) show that the notions of Zλ- and lexλ-entailment have similar properties as their classical counterparts. In particular, they both satisfy the rationality postulates of System P and the property of Rational Monotonicity. Moreover, Zλ-entailment is weaker than lexλ-entailment, and both Zλ- and lexλ-entailment are proper generalizations of their classical counterparts. (shrink)
According to the early versions of the causal theory of action, intentional actions were both produced and explained by a beliefdesire pair. Since the end of the seventies, however, most philosophers consider intentions as an irreducible and indispensable component of any adequate account of intentional action. The aim of this paper is to examine and evaluate some of the arguments that gave rise to the introduction of the concept of intention in action theory. My contention is that none of them (...) is conclusive. To sustain my claim, I first discuss some of the main differentiating functions commonly attributed to intentions. Contrary to the dominant view, I show that many of these functions, especially those attributed to distal intentions, have little to do with the causal character of action theory. I also maintain that many of the allegedly specific functions of intentions can be ascribed to the preeminent motive of the agent. Finally, I argue that the intention thesis cannot be reconciled with the motivational strength thesis, and that the latter is a decisive reason to forsake the former. (shrink)
We consider extensions of Peano arithmetic suitable for doing some of nonstandard analysis, in which there is a predicate N(x) for an elementary initial segment, along with axiom schemes approximating ω 1 -saturation. We prove that such systems have the same proof-theoretic strength as their natural analogues in second order arithmetic. We close by presenting an even stronger extension of Peano arithmetic, which is equivalent to ZF for arithmetic statements.
We study the proof-theoretic strength and effective content of the infinite form of Ramsey's theorem for pairs. Let RT n k denote Ramsey's theorem for k-colorings of n-element sets, and let RT $^n_{ denote (∀ k)RT n k . Our main result on computability is: For any n ≥ 2 and any computable (recursive) k-coloring of the n-element sets of natural numbers, there is an infinite homogeneous set X with X'' ≤ T 0 (n) . Let IΣ n and (...) BΣ n denote the Σ n induction and bounding schemes, respectively. Adapting the case n = 2 of the above result (where X is low 2 ) to models of arithmetic enables us to show that RCA 0 + IΣ 2 + RT 2 2 is conservative over RCA 0 + IΣ 2 for Π 1 1 statements and that $RCA_0 + I\Sigma_3 + RT^2_{ , is Π 1 1 -conservative over RCA 0 + IΣ 3 . It follows that RCA 0 + RT 2 2 does not imply BΣ 3 . In contrast, J. Hirst showed that $RCA_0 + RT^2_{ does imply BΣ 3 , and we include a proof of a slightly strengthened version of this result. It follows that $RT^2_{ is strictly stronger than RT 2 2 over RCA 0. (shrink)
Three studies of human nonmonotonic reasoning are described. The results show that people find such reasoning quite difficult, although being given problems with known subclass-superclass relationships is helpful. The results also show that recognizing differences in the logical strengths of arguments is important for the nonmonotonic problems studied. For some of these problems, specificity – which is traditionally considered paramount in drawing appropriate conclusions – was irrelevant and so should have lead to a “can’t tell” response; however, people could give (...) rational conclusions based on differences in the logical consequences of arguments. The same strategy also works for problems where specificity is relevant, suggesting that in fact specificity is not paramount. Finally, results showed that subjects’ success at responding appropriately to nonmonotonic problems involving conflict relies heavily on the ability to appreciate differences in the logical strength of simple, non-conflicting, statements. (shrink)
In this paper we study the consistency strength of the theory $\mathbf\mathrm{ZFC} + (\exists\kappa \text{strong limit})(\forall\mu , and we prove the consistency of this theory relative to the consistency of the existence of a supercompact cardinal and an inaccessible above it.
The concepts of regulation and homeostasis are of frequent use but lack a single universally accepted definition. Here we propose a definition of theregulatory strength andhomeostatic strength, which allow to assess the importance of a regulatory pathway in a quantitative fashion.
: In Hypatia's (15) 3, issue, Xinyan Jiang describes a failed experiment in sexual equality conducted during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. She believes the lesson to be drawn from it is that males will continue to have an advantage in societies requiring much physical strength. In contrast, I argue here that this failed experiment shows that the Maoist attempt to force women into men's roles was not feminist. American pioneers are cited as a counterexample.
Lennart Åqvist (1992) proposed a logical theory of legal evidence, based on the Bolding-Ekelöf of degrees of evidential strength. This paper reformulates Åqvist's model in terms of the probabilistic version of the kappa calculus. Proving its acceptability in the legal context is beyond the present scope, but the epistemological debate about Bayesian Law isclearly relevant. While the present model is a possible link to that lineof inquiry, we offer some considerations about the broader picture of thepotential of AI & (...) Law in the evidentiary context. Whereas probabilisticreasoning is well-researched in AI, calculations about the threshold ofpersuasion in litigation, whatever their value, are just the tip of theiceberg. The bulk of the modeling desiderata is arguably elsewhere, if one isto ideally make the most of AI's distinctive contribution as envisaged forlegal evidence research. (shrink)
Currently, patients are expected to take control over their health and their life and act as independent users and consumers. Simultaneously, health care policy demands patients are expected to self manage their disease. This article critically questions whether this is a realistic expectation. The paper presents the auto-ethnographic narrative of the first author, which spans a period of 27 years, from 1985 to 2012. In total nine episodes were extracted from various notes, conversations and discussions in an iterative process. Each (...) of these episodes was condensed around a ‘critical moment’ as perceived by the “self”. The critical moments in the illness process vary between newly encountered problems with basic needs and mourning, to renewed strength and the desire to grow, embracing new situations. Being confronted with and living with a chronic illness involves periods of anxiety and self centredness alternating with strength and advocating the interests of peer-patients. These episodes of emotion, confusion and refinding a balance have a cyclic pattern. The narrative illustrates the vulnerability and dependency of a patient with a chronic disease. The discussion relates this to mainstream dominant views on patients ‘in control of their own life’. The narrative illustrates, that the vulnerability and dependency of the patient are key factors to take into account in health care policy. The narrative provides a counter story, challenging current thinking in terms of strength, selfmanagement, patients’ own control and independent role. (shrink)
We prove here that the intuitionistic theory $T_{0}\upharpoonright + UMID_{N}$ , or even $EEJ\upharpoonright + UMID_{N}$ , of Explicit Mathematics has the strength of $\prod_{2}^{1} - CA_{0}$ . In Section I we give a double-negation translation for the classical second-order $\mu-calculus$ , which was shown in [ $M\ddot{o}02$ ] to have the strength of $\prod_{2}^{1}-CA_{0}$ . In Section 2 we interpret the intuitionistic $\mu-calculus$ in the theory $EETJ\upharpoonright + UMID_{N}$ . The question about the strength of monotone (...) inductive definitions in $T_{0}$ was asked by S. Feferman in 1982, and - assuming classical logic - was addressed by M. Rathjen. (shrink)
Jarrod L. Whitaker examines the ritualized poetic construction of male identity in the Rgveda, India's oldest Sanskrit text, arguing that an important aspect of early Vedic life was the sustained promotion and embodiment of what it means to be a true man. The Rgveda contains over a thousand hymns, addressed primarily to three gods: the deified ritual Fire, Agni; the war god, Indra; and Soma, who is none other than the personification of the sacred beverage sóma. The hymns were sung (...) in day-long fire rituals in which poet-priests prepared the sacred drink to empower Indra. The dominant image of Indra is that of a highly glamorized, violent, and powerful Aryan male; the three gods represent the ideals of manhood. -/- Whitaker finds that the Rgvedic poet-priests employed a fascinating range of poetic and performative strategies--some explicit, others very subtle--to construct their masculine ideology, while justifying it as the most valid way for men to live. Poet-priests naturalized this ideology by encoding it within a man's sense of his body and physical self. Rgvedic ritual rhetoric and practices thus encode specific male roles, especially the role of man as warrior, while embedding these roles in a complex network of social, economic, and political relationships. -/- Strong Arms and Drinking Strength is the first book in English to examine the relationship between Rgvedic gods, ritual practices, and the identities and expectations placed on men in ancient India. (shrink)
First, we consider an argument due to Popper for maximal strength in choice of logic. We dispute this argument, taking a lead from some remarks by Susan Haack; but we defend a set of contrary considerations for minimal strength in logic. Finally, we consider the objection that Popper presupposes the distinctness of logic from science. We conclude from this that all claims to logical truth may be in equal epistemological trouble.
This paper deals with: (i) the theory ID # 1 which results from $\widehat{\mathrm{ID}}_1$ by restricting induction on the natural numbers to formulas which are positive in the fixed point constants, (ii) the theory BON(μ) plus various forms of positive induction, and (iii) a subtheory of Peano arithmetic with ordinals in which induction on the natural numbers is restricted to formulas which are Σ in the ordinals. We show that these systems have proof-theoretic strength φω 0.
In this paper, we discuss the problem of communist power in so called totalitarian regimes. Inspired by strategies of explanation in contemporary science studies and by the ethnomethodological conception of social order, we suggest that the power of communists is not to be taken as an unproblematic source of explanation; rather, we take this power as something that is itself in need of being explained. We study personal narratives on political screenings that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1970 and analyze (...) how the power of communists obtained its strength from ordinary and “unremarkable” interactions between participants. The screenings are interpreted, in the terms of Bruno Latour, as “trials of strength.” We show that it was crucial for all the participants that associations, translations or mobilizations involved in making the regime real, remained partial and multiple, and not exclusive and “total” as is often assumed within dominant discourses on totalitarianism. (shrink)
The Maximality Principle $\mathrm{MP_{CCC}}$ is a scheme which states that if a sentence of the language of ZFC is true in some CCC forcing extension $V^\mathbb{P}$ , and remains true in any further CCC-forcing extension of $V^\mathbb{P}$ , then it is true in all CCC-forcing extensions of V , including V itself. A parameterized form of this principle, $\mathrm{MP_{CCC}}(\mathbb{R})$ , makes this assertion for formulas taking real parameters. In this paper, we show that $\mathrm{MP_{CCC}}(\mathbb{R})$ has the same consistency strength (...) as ZFC, solving an open problem of Hamkins. We extend this result further to parameter sets larger than R. (shrink)
We give upper and lower bounds for the strength of ordinal definable determinacy in a small admissible set. The upper bound is roughly a premouse with a measurable cardinal $\kappa$ of Mitchell order $\kappa^{++}$ and $\omega$ successors. The lower bound are models of ZFC with sequences of measurable cardinals, extending the work of Lewis, below a regular limit of measurable cardinals.
We observe that the facts pertaining to the acceptability of negative polarity items (henceforth, NPIs) in interrogative environments are more complex than previously noted. Since Klima [Klima, E. (1964). In J. Fodor & J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language. Prentice-Hall], it has been typically assumed that NPIs are grammatical in both matrix and embedded questions, however, on closer scrutiny it turns out that there are differences between root and embedded environments, and between question nucleus and wh-restrictor. While NPIs are (...) always licensed in the nucleus of root questions, their acceptability in the restrictor of wh-phrases and in the nucleus of any embedded question depends on the logical properties of the linguistic environment: its strength in terms of exhaustivity [Groenendijk, J., & Stokhof, M. (1984). Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatic answers. Amserdam (NL), Post-Doctoral Dissertation. Heim, I. (1994). In R. Buchalla & A. Mittwoch (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th annual IATL conference and of the 1993 IATL workshop on discourse (pp. 128-144). Akademon, Jerusalem. Beck, S., & Rullmann, H. (1999). Natural Language Semantics, 7, 249-298. Sharvit, Y. (2002). Natural Language Semantics, 10, 97-123] and its monotonicity properties (in the sense of von Fintel [von Fintel, K. (1999). Journal of Semantics, 16, 97-148]). (shrink)
This paper presents and analyses a statistical framework for combining projections of future climate from different climate simulators. The framework recognizes explicitly that all currently available simulators are imperfect; that they do not span the full range of possible decisions on the part of the climate modelling community; and that individual simulators have strengths and weaknesses. Information from individual simulators is automatically weighted, alongside that from historical observations and from prior knowledge. The weights for a simulator depend on its internal (...) variability, its expected consensus with other simulators, the internal variability of the real climate and the propensity of simulators collectively to deviate from reality. The framework demonstrates, moreover, that some subjective judgements are inevitable when interpreting multiple climate change projections: by clarifying precisely what those judgements are, it provides increased transparency in the ensuing analyses. Although the framework is straightforward to apply in practice by a user with some understanding of Bayesian methods, the emphasis here is on conceptual aspects illustrated with a simplified artificial example. A ‘poor man's version’ is also presented, which can be implemented straightforwardly in simple situations. (shrink)
Is the thought that having a reason for action can also be the cause of the action for which it is the reason coherent? This is an attempt to say exactly what is involved in such a thought, with special reference to the case of con-reasons, reasons that count against the action the agent eventually choses.
Most recent accounts of will-power have tried to explain it as reducible to the operation of beliefs and desires. In opposition to such accounts, this paper argues for a distinct faculty of will-power. Considerations from philosophy and from social psychology are used in support.
The authors argue, against Frank Jackson, that weakness (and strength) of will involves higher-order mental states. The authors hold that this is compatible with a decision-theoretic belief-desire psychology of human action.
Analyzing the outline of the endless literature on consciousness, the separation between science and philosophy rather than being overcome, seems to come back in different shapes. According to this point of view, the hard problem seems to be how to study consciousness while avoiding a slip back to the old dualism. This article outlines the advantages of the phenomenological method. This method, more than getting over the mind-body separation, anticipates it through an open gaze, able to bring back the human (...) presence as something structurally “ambiguous.” Reintroducing Husserl's scientific project in a complete way, Francisco Varela opened up a research area yet to be explored, which promises to be fertile for neuroscience, provided that we accept that radicalism essential to phenomenology. (shrink)
This paper offers one formal reason why it may often be inappropriate to hold, of two conflicting desires, that the first must be weaker than, stronger than, or of the same strength as the second. The explanation of this fact does not rely on vagueness or epistemological problems in determining the strengths of desires. Nor does it make use of the problematic notion of incommensurability. Rather, the suggestion is that the motivational capacities of many desires might best be characterized (...) by two values, neither of which should be interpreted as strength. (shrink)
Francis of Marchia dealt at length in several different contexts with the nature of the will and willing. Here I examine just one of those discussions: the possibility for the will to go against reason's final judgment, a topic related to weakness of will and the source of sin. Marchia is clearly of a voluntaristic bent, holding that the will can indeed act against the determination of reason. After examining Marchia's argumentation for his position, I explore some of the background (...) to Marchia's view in a distinctively later medieval understanding of the human mind as a system of internal acts and dispositions, with the possibility that several of them belong to the same faculty simultaneously. This increasingly complex conceptualisation of the mind mirrors a new, more complex conceptualization of the "Self". (shrink)
The research Nevin & Grace report is impressive in its integrative power, but it also shows the current limits of operant theory: There is tremendous concentration on understanding how existing behavioral relations are modulated in rate or time allocation, but little on dealing with the origin of the behavioral relations themselves. Specifying what should count as a behavioral unit will require source principles sensitive to the composition of the units being related.
An extreme kind of logic skeptic claims that "the present formal systems used for the foundations of mathematics are artificially strong, thereby causing unnecessary headaches such as the Gödel incompleteness phenomena". The skeptic continues by claiming that "logician's systems always contain overly general assertions, and/or assertions about overly general notions, that are not used in any significant way in normal mathematics. For example, induction for all statements, or even all statements of certain restricted forms, is far too general - mathematicians (...) only use induction for natural statements that actually arise. If logicians would tailor their formal systems to conform to the naturalness of normal mathematics, then various logical difficulties would disappear, and the story of the foundations of mathematics would look radically different than it does today. In particular, it should be possible to give a convincing model of actual mathematical practice that can be proved to be free of contradiction using methods that lie within what Hilbert had in mind in connection with his program”. Here we present some specific results in the direction of refuting this point of view, and introduce the Strict Reverse Mathematics (SRM) program. (shrink)
This paper contributes to the theory of hybrid substructural logics, i.e. weak logics given by a Gentzen-style proof theory in which there is only alimited possibility to use structural rules. Following the literture, we use an operator to mark formulas to which the extra structural rules may be applied. New in our approach is that we do not see this as a modality, but rather as themeet of the marked formula with a special typeQ. In this way we can make (...) the specific structural behaviour of marked formulas more explicit.The main motivation for our approach is that we can provide a nice, intuitive semantics for hybrid substructural logics. Soundness and completeness for this semantics are proved; besides this we consider some proof-theoretical aspects like cut-elimination and embeddings of the strong system in the hybrid one. (shrink)
We use model-theoretic methods described in [3] to obtain ordinal analyses of a number of theories of first- and second-order arithmetic, whose proof-theoretic ordinals are less than or equal to Γ0.
Let j:β → β, where β is an ordinal. Let R ⊆ α x α, where β ≤ α. We define j[R] = {(j(c),j(d)): R(c,d)}. We say that j is a nonidentity function if and only if j is not the..
One of the principal preoccupations of action theory is with the role of intention in the production of action. It should be expected that this role would be important, since an item of behavior appears to count as action just when there is some respect in which it is intended by the agent. This being the case, an account of the function of intention should provide insight into how human action might differ from other sorts of events, what the foundations (...) of human autonomy may be, etc. But the claim that intention plays an important role in action is implicitly opposed to another thesis held by many action theorists: that whenever she acts, an agent always follows her strongest motive or desire. If this is so, there may be no need for special states of intending, since these might just intervene between motive and action. Rather, it can be argued, intention conceived as an independent state should be gotten out of action theory, and its functional role imputed to the agent’s strongest desire. The tension between this reductivist view and views which credit intention with a distinctive functional role in the genesis of action is what I wish to explore in this paper. The first two sections are devoted to showing how the conflict arises. In sections III and IV I shall consider two ways of trying to resolve the conflict, neither of which seems to me adequate. Finally, I shall urge briefly that if the conflict cannot be resolved, we should favor a theory which maintains a nonreductive view of intention. (shrink)
Inferential or epistemic conditional sentences represent a blueprint of someone’s reasoning process from premise to conclusion. Declerck and Reed (2001) make a distinction between a direct and an indirect type. In the latter type the direction of reasoning goes backwards, from the blatant falsehood of the consequent to the falsehood of the antecedent. We first present a modal reinterpretation in terms of Argumentation Schemes of indirect inferential conditionals (IIC’s) in Declerck and Reed (2001). We furthermore argue for a distinction between (...) epistemic-modal strong and deontic-modal weak IIC’s. In addition, we extend the category of the indirect inferential conditionals in order to include several other deontic-modal subtypes. On the basis of the undesirability of the consequent the hearer in these cases infers that the antecedent is also undesirable. In this way the rhetoric-argumentative strategy of Reductio ad Absurdum is extended from the realm of deductive reasoning to that of practical reasoning. (shrink)
This paper develops an analysis of a scalar implicature that is induced by the use of reportative evidentials such as the Cuzco Quechua enclitic = si and the German modal sollen. Reportatives, in addition to specifying the speaker’s source of information for a statement as a report by someone else, also usually convey that the speaker does not have direct evidence for the proposition expressed. While this type of implicature can be calculated using the same kind of Gricean reasoning that (...) underlies other scalar implicatures, it requires two departures from standard assumptions. First, evidential scalar implicatures differ from the more familiar scalar implicatures in that they do not turn on the notion of informativeness but on the notion of evidential strength. Second, the implicature arises on the illocutionary level of meaning. It is argued that a version of Grice’s maxim of quantity in terms of illocutionary strength can account for this evidential scalar implicature as well as for the more typical scalar implicatures. The account developed also proposes some revisions to the taxonomy of speech acts and suggests that the sincerity conditions of assertive speech acts contain an evidential sincerity condition in addition to the belief condition standardly assumed. (shrink)
The rational price of the Pasadena and Altadena games, introduced by Nover and Hájek (2004 ), has been the subject of considerable discussion. Easwaran (2008 ) has suggested that weak expectations — the value to which the average payoffs converge in probability — can give the rational price of such games. We argue against the normative force of weak expectations in the standard framework. Furthermore, we propose to replace this framework by a bounded utility perspective: this shift renders the problem (...) more realistic and accounts for the role of weak expectations. In particular, we demonstrate that in a bounded utility framework, all agents, even if they have different value functions and disagree on the price of an individual game, will finally agree on the rational price of a repeated, averaged game. Thus, we explain the intuitive appeal of weak expectations, while avoiding both trivialization of the original paradox and the drawbacks of previous approaches. (shrink)
Van Fraassen argues that explanatory power cannot be a conformational virtue. In this paper I will show that informational features of scientific theories can be positively relevant to their levels of conformation. Thus, in the cases where the explanatory power of a theory is tied to an informational feature of the theory, it can still be the case that the explanatory power of the theory is positively relevant to its level of confirmation.
Both the traditional Aristotelian and modern symbolic approaches to logic have seen logic in terms of discrete symbol processing. Yet there are several kinds of argument whose validity depends on some topological notion of continuous variation, which is not well captured by discrete symbols. Examples include extrapolation and slippery slope arguments, sorites, fuzzy logic, and those involving closeness of possible worlds. It is argued that the natural first attempts to analyze these notions and explain their relation to reasoning fail, so (...) that ignorance of their nature is profound. (shrink)
Decay gradients are usually drawn facing the wrong direction. Righting them emphasizes the role of stimuli that mark the response, and leads to different inferences concerning the factors controlling response–reinforcer associations. A simple model of the concatenation of stimulus traces provides some insight to the problems of impulse control relevant to ADHD.
I present an alternative account of action centered around the notion of effort. I argue that effort has several unique features: it is attributed directly to agents; it is a causal power that each agent alone possesses and employs; it enables agents causally to initiate, sustain, and control their capacities during the performance of an action; and its presence comes in varying degrees of strength. After defending an effort-based account of action and criticizing what is known as the standard (...) story of action, I apply my account to situations in which an agent displays strength of will, such as when one struggles to perform an action while overcoming a persistent urge to do otherwise. I conclude by offering an explanation of mental action that demonstrates the extent of our powers of agency within the domain of the mental. (shrink)
