This paper concerns the question of how to draw inferences common sensically from uncertain knowledge. Since the early work of Shore and Johnson (1980), Paris and Vencovská (1990), and Csiszár (1989), it has been known that the Maximum Entropy Inference Process is the only inference process which obeys certain common sense principles of uncertain reasoning. In this paper we consider the present status of this result and argue that within the rather narrow context in which we work this complete (...) and consistent mode of uncertain reasoning is actually characterised by the observance of just a single common sense principle (or slogan). (shrink)

The logical consequence relations η▹η provide a very attractive way of inferring new facts from inconsistent knowledge bases without compromising standards of credibility. In this short note we provide proof theories and completeness theorems for these consequence relations which may have some applicability in small examples.

This paper corrects three widely held misunderstandings about Maxent when used in common sense reasoning: That it is language dependent; That it produces objective facts; That it subsumes, and so is at least as untenable as, the paradox-ridden Principle of Insufficient Reason.

Can one extend crisp Peano arithmetic PA by a possibly many-valued predicate Tr(x) saying "x is true" and satisfying the "dequotation schema" $\varphi \equiv \text{Tr}(\bar{\varphi})$ for all sentences φ? This problem is investigated in the frame of Lukasiewicz infinitely valued logic.

We consider two formalizations of the notion of irrelevance as a rationality principle within the framework of (Carnapian) Inductive Logic: Johnson's Sufficientness Principle, JSP, which is classically important because it leads to Carnap's influential Continuum of Inductive Methods and the recently proposed Weak Irrelevance Principle, WIP. We give a complete characterization of the language invariant probability functions satisfying WIP which generalizes the Nix-Paris Continuum. We argue that the derivation of two very disparate families of inductive methods from alternative perceptions (...) of 'irrelevance' is an indication that this notion is imperfectly understood at present. (shrink)

A necessary and sufficient condition in terms of a de Finetti style representation is given for a probability function in Polyadic Inductive Logic to satisfy being part of a Language Invariant family satisfying Spectrum Exchangeability. This theorem is then considered in relation to the unary Carnap and Nix–Paris Continua.

Can one extend crisp Peano arithmetic PA by a possibly many-valued predicate Tr(x) saying “xis true” and satisfying the “dequotation schema”for all sentences φ? This problem is investigated in the frame of Łukasiewicz infinitely valued logic.

Rational Pavelka logic extends Lukasiewicz infinitely valued logic by adding truth constants r̄ for rationals in [0, 1]. We show that this is a conservative extension. We note that this shows that provability degree can be defined in Lukasiewicz logic. We also give a counterexample to a soundness theorem of Belluce and Chang published in 1963.

We investigate uncertain reasoning with quantified sentences of the predicate calculus treated as the limiting case of maximum entropy inference applied to finite domains.

Rational Pavelka logic extends Lukasiewicz infinitely valued logic $by adding truth constants \bar{r} for rationals in [0, 1].$ We show that this is a conservative extension. We note that this shows that provability degree can be defined in Lukasiewicz logic. We also give a counterexample to a soundness theorem of Belluce and Chang published in 1963.

This paper investigates the quantifier "there exist unboundedly many" in the context of first-order arithmetic. An alternative axiomatization is found for Peano arithmetic based on an axiom schema of regularity: The union of boundedly many bounded sets is bounded. We also obtain combinatorial equivalents of certain second-order theories associated with cuts in nonstandard models of arithmetic.

We argue in favour of identifying one aspect of rational choice with the tendency to conform to the choice you expect another like-minded, but non-communicating, agent to make and study this idea in the very basic case where the choice is from a non-empty subset K of 2 A and no further structure or knowledge of A is assumed.

We give a brief account of some de Finetti style representation theorems for probability functions satisfying Spectrum Exchangeability in Polyadic Inductive Logic, together with applications to Non-splitting, Language Invariance, extensions with Equality and Instantial Relevance.

We prove that: • if there is a model of I∆₀ + ¬ exp with cofinal Σ₁-definable elements and a Σ₁ truth definition for Σ₁ sentences, then I∆₀ + ¬ exp +¬BΣ₁ is consistent, • there is a model of I∆₀ Ω₁ + ¬ exp with cofinal Σ₁-definable elements, both a Σ₂ and a ∏₂ truth definition for Σ₁ sentences, and for each n > 2, a Σ n truth definition for Σ n sentences. The latter result is obtained by (...) constructing a model with a recursive truth-preserving translation of Σ₁ sentences into boolean combinations of $\exists \sum {\begin{array}{*{20}{c}} h \\ 0 \\ \end{array} } $ sentences. We also present an old but previously unpublished proof of the consistency of I∆₀ + ¬ exp + ¬BΣ₁ under the assumption that the size parameter in Lessan's ∆₀ universal formula is optimal. We then discuss a possible reason why proving the consistency of I∆₀ + ¬ exp + ¬BΣ₁ unconditionally has turned out to be so difficult. (shrink)

“A great story, full of twists and turns.... Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.” —Stanley Fish, _Think Again, New York Times_ “In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is (...) fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the reference on both sides of the Atlantic.” —Jacques Derrida “The Atlantic Ocean has two sides, and so does French Theory. Reinvented in America and betrayed in its own country, it has become the most radical intellectual movement in the West with global reach, rewriting Marx in light of late capitalism. Breathtakingly moving back and forth between the two cultures, Francois Cusset takes us through a dazzling intellectual adventure that illuminates the past thirty years, and many more decades to come.” —Sylvere Lotringer During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation. Outside the academy, “French theory” had a profound impact on the era’s emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America’s cultural and intellectual fabric. French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today-showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life. François Cusset, a writer and intellectual historian, teaches contemporary French thought in Paris at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and at Columbia University’s Reid Hall. His books include Queer Critics and La Décennie. Jeff Fort is assistant professor of French at the University of California, Davis. He has translated works by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, and Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

A Russian in Paris -- Russian contexts -- Madmen -- The possessed -- Godmen -- The Hegel lectures -- The last revolution -- Time no more -- The book of the dead -- The later writings -- Nobodies -- Roads or ruins? -- Why finality? -- The grand inquisitor.

The commonplace image of Heidegger is of a philosopher firmly rooted, not in the city of Freiburg in which much of his life was spent, but in the Alemannic-Schwabian countryside around the village of Messkirch in which he was born. It would seem that the distance between Heidegger and Benjamin, between Messkirch and Berlin or Paris could not be greater. But to what extent are Heidegger's own personal predilections for the provincial and the bauerlich actually tied to the philosophical (...) positions that he developed? Might it be the case that the city, perhaps even more than the countryside, has to play a central role in any serious attempt to think through the implications of Heidegger's thought of being? This presentation will explore how Heidegger might find h imself in Benjamin's city, and of the place of the city in Heidegger's own thought, with the aim of shedding light, not only on Heidegger's thought, but also on that of Benjamin himself. (shrink)

O lugar comum, no que tange à imagem de Heidegger, é a de um filósofo firmemente enraizado, não na cidade de Freiburg, na qual passou grande parte de sua vida, mas na região rural alemânico-suábia, nos arredores do povoado de Messkirch, onde nasceu. Poderia parecer que a distância entre Heidegger e Benjamin, entre Messkirch e Berlim, ou Paris, não poderia ser maior. Mas até que ponto estão as predileções pessoais de Heidegger pelo provinciano e o bauerlich de fato ligadas (...) às posições filosóficas que ele desenvolveu? Poderia ser este o caso, de que a cidade, talvez ainda mais do que o campo, devesse desempenhar um papel central em qualquer tentativa séria de se pensar até o fim as implicações do pensamento de Heidegger sobre o ser? Esta apresentação investigará como Heidegger se sentiria na cidade de Benjamin, bem como o lugar da cidade no pensamento do próprio Heidegger, com o propósito de lançar luz não apenas sobre o pensamento de Heidegger, mas também sobre o do próprio Benjamin.The commonplace image of Heidegger is of a philosopher firmly rooted, not in the city of Freiburg in which much of his life was spent, but in the Alemannic-Schwabian countryside around the village of Messkirch in which he was born. It would seem that the distance between Heidegger and Benjamin, between Messkirch and Berlin or Paris could not be greater. But to what extent are Heidegger's own personal predilections for the provincial and the bauerlich actually tied to the philosophical positions that he developed? Might it be the case that the city, perhaps even more than the countryside, has to play a central role in any serious attempt to think through the implications of Heidegger's thought of being? This presentation will explore how Heidegger might find himself in Benjamin's city, and of the place of the city in Heidegger's own thought, with the aim of shedding light, not only on Heidegger's thought, but also on that of Benjamin himself. (shrink)

Jeff Paris proves a generalized Dutch Book theorem. If a belief state is not a generalized probability then one faces ‘sure loss’ books of bets. In Williams I showed that Joyce’s accuracy-domination theorem applies to the same set of generalized probabilities. What is the relationship between these two results? This note shows that both results are easy corollaries of the core result that Paris appeals to in proving his dutch book theorem. We see that every point of (...) accuracy-domination defines a dutch book, but we only have a partial converse. (shrink)

Gödel’s first incompleteness result from 1931 states that there are true assertions about the natural numbers which do not follow from the Peano axioms. Since 1931 many researchers have been looking for natural examples of such assertions and breakthroughs were obtained in the seventies by Jeff Paris [Some independence results for Peano arithmetic. J. Symbolic Logic 43 725–731] , Handbook of Mathematical Logic, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1977] and Laurie Kirby [L. Kirby, Jeff Paris, Accessible independence results for (...) Peano Arithmetic, Bull. of the LMS 14 285–293]) and Harvey Friedman [S.G. Simpson, Non-provability of certain combinatorial properties of finite trees, in: Harvey Friedman’s Research on the Foundations of Mathematics, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1985, pp. 87–117; R. Smith, The consistency strength of some finite forms of the Higman and Kruskal theorems, in: Harvey Friedman’s Research on the Foundations of Mathematics, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1985, pp. 119–136] who produced the first mathematically interesting independence results in Ramsey theory and well-order and well-quasi-order theory .In this article we investigate Friedman-style principles of combinatorial well-foundedness for the ordinals below ε0. These principles state that there is a uniform bound on the length of decreasing sequences of ordinals which satisfy an elementary recursive growth rate condition with respect to their Gödel numbers.For these independence principles we classify their phase transitions, i.e. we classify exactly the bounding conditions which lead from provability to unprovability in the induced combinatorial well-foundedness principles.As Gödel numbering for ordinals we choose the one which is induced naturally from Gödel’s coding of finite sequences from his classical 1931 paper on his incompleteness results.This choice makes the investigation highly non-trivial but rewarding and we succeed in our objectives by using an intricate and surprising interplay between analytic combinatorics and the theory of descent recursive functions. For obtaining the required bounds on count functions for ordinals we use a classical 1961 Tauberian theorem of Parameswaran which apparently is far remote from Gödel’s theorem. (shrink)

LetTbe a recursive theory in the language of first order Arithmetic. We prove that ifTextends: (a) the scheme of parameter free Δ1-minimization (plusexp). or (b) the scheme of parameter free Π1-induction, then there are no Σ1-maximal models with respect toT. As a consequence, we obtain a new proof of an unpublished theorem of Jeff Paris stating that Σ1-maximal models with respect toIΔ0+expdo not satisfy the scheme of Σ1-collectionBΣ1.

For more than a quarter of a century, Hubert L. Dreyfus has been the leading voice in American philosophy for the continuing relevance of phenomenology, particularly as developed by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Dreyfus has influenced a generation of students and a wide range of colleagues, and these volumes are an excellent representation of the extent and depth of that influence.In keeping with Dreyfus's openness to others' ideas, many of the essays in this volume take the form (...) of arguments with various of his positions. The essays focus on the dialogue with the continental philosophical tradition, in particular the work of Heidegger, that has played a foundational role in Dreyfus's thinking. The sections are Philosophy and Authenticity; Modernity, Self, and the World; and Heideggerian Encounters. The book concludes with Dreyfus's responses to the essays.Contributors : William D. Blattner, Taylor Carman, David R. Cerbone, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Charles Guignon, Michel Haar, Beatrice Han, Alastair Hannay, John Haugeland, Randall Havas, Jeff Malpas, Mark Okrent, Richard Rorty, Julian Young, Michael E. Zimmerman. (shrink)

Four experiments examined how accurately participants can report the times of their own decisions. Within an auditory reaction time task, participants reported the time at which the tone was presented, they decided on the response, or the response key was pressed. Decision time reports were checked for plausibility against the actual RTs, and we compared the effects of experimental manipulations on these two measures to see whether the reported decision times showed appropriate effects. In addition, we estimated the amount of (...) error associated with individual decision time reports by checking how often participants’ decision time reports were implausibly early or late , and by using several quantitative models. Overall, the results suggest that decision time reports are not very accurate but they may be usable for some purposes. (shrink)

The article argues that historical materialism is not only a theory of historical change but more generally a mediation between the natural foundations of human life and its meaningful symbolic expressions. The article begins with an interpretation of the general philosophical significance of the basic premises of historical materialism as they are sketched in the German Ideology. I argue that these premises point us in two different directions: down, towards a scientific understanding of the natural world, and up, towards interpretations (...) of meaningful human expressions. Reductionist scientific models are appropriate for the understanding of natural forces, but these reveal their own limitations when applied to social life. Social life cannot be understood outside its symbolic expressions, but these are not free floating ideal abstractions, but remain connected to fundamental human purposes and must be understood as such. (shrink)

The paper describes and proves completeness theorems for a series of proof systems formalizing common sense reasoning about uncertain knowledge in the case where this consists of sets of linear constraints on a probability function.

Review of Donald Davidson ed. Kirk Ludwig (CUP 2003).

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1987, the Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky argued that aesthetics is the mother of ethics. However, there is an ambiguity in his use of the term aesthetics. In the first part of this article, I distinguish between Brodsky’s narrow use of aesthetics, which refers to problems of beauty, and the broader sense, which refers to the cognitive function of sensibility and feeling. I then suggest that good sense can be made of the claim (...) about the origins of ethics only if we employ the broader sense of aesthetics. The second part draws on examples from Brodsky and the American poet Jorie Graham to illustrate the ways in which the feelings generated by human sensuous receptivity transform the world from a meaningless physical system into meaningful sets of life-valuable relationships. The third part sharpens this conclusion by considering the conditions under which the world can appear to be meaningless. In the final section I link Brodsky’s poetic responsiveness to the world to John McMurtry’s philosophical analysis of “the felt side of being.” Poetic evocation and philosophical argument are two approaches to the same problem which, when brought together, provide a comprehensive explanation of why aesthetics is the mother of ethics. (shrink)

This paper is a review essay of two collections of essays focused on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. The review focuses on three core themes. First, it discusses those papers that explore the central role that the relationship between practices and institutions plays in MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. Second, it turns to those papers that examine the foundational role that human needs play in MacIntyre’s ethics. Third, it places in dialogue those papers that defend MacIntyre’s politics as a form of (...) ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’ with those that contest the soundness of this categorization. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The essay argues that the most influential liberal accounts of moral theory (utilitarianism and deontology) assume that human material nature is the seat of desire, and that desire is essentially unsociable. Moral systems are then interpreted as a means of counteracting the essentially self-interested desires that are assumed to ordinarily drive human beings. The essay challenges the normative presuppositions of these arguments. It maintains that liberal moral philosophy must be interpreted in the historical context of the rise of a competitive (...) market society. It then contends that contra liberal moral theory, human beings are neither essentially egoistic nor altruistic, but interdependent. Moral theory is better seen as following from a recognitions of this material interdependence than as an ideal limit on ?naturally? self-interested and competitive behaviour. (shrink)