While natural law theory plays an important role for Catholic moral theology, it is true that Orthodox ethics has not endeavoured to develop its own theory of natural law. This article demonstrates the existence of the concept of natural law in Eastern Orthodox theology and argues that the main reason for this neglect is Eastern Christianity's traditional focus on faith rather than reason. In addition, the author, based on biblical and patristic grounds, highlights the necessity for a balance between the (...) two to be found and provides a way in which Orthodox moral theology could develop a natural law theory, should it ever feel the need to do so, by first redefining its relationship with the science of philosophy, after so many years of disregard. (shrink)

The commitment of transplant physicians to protect the physical and psychological health of potential donors is fundamental to the process of living donor organ transplantation. It is appropriate that strict regulations to govern an individual’s decision to donate have been developed. Some may argue that adherence to such regulations creates a doctor-patient relationship that is rooted in paternalism, which is in drastic contrast with a doctor-patient relationship that is rooted in patients’ autonomy, characteristic of most other operative interventions.In this article (...) we analyze the similarities between cosmetic plastic surgery and living donor surgery as examples of surgeries governed by different ethical principles. It is interesting that, while the prevailing ethical approach in living donor surgery is based on paternalism, the ethical principle guiding cosmetic surgery is respect for patients’ autonomy. The purpose of this article is not to criticize either practice, but to suggest that, given the similarities between the two procedures, both operative interventions should be guided by the same ethical principle: a respect for patients’ autonomy. We further suggest that if living organ donation valued donors’ autonomy as much as cosmetic plastic surgery does, we might witness a wider acceptance of and increase in living organ donation. (shrink)

This article investigates the concept of sound, in relation to the new means and sciences from different perspectives, ultimately providing an analysis of the newborn artistic movement of bioart. It is divided into two parts. The first part of the study is based upon reference, investigating the interconnection between art and science. This mechanism is characterized by transformation processes in the interdisciplinary practices that are applied mainly by various artists and movements of the post-Second World War period. The expressive element (...) seeks an unworldly explanation through audio and visual conjunctions. This nature is obvious in Paul Klee’s reflections of musical elements in his paintings, and Rimmington’s attempts to marry audio-visual influences in his ‘colour organs’. The experimentations of composers such as Xenakis and Stockhausen at various locations with light and colour illustrate the continuous quest to render sound by the use of new means. Technology is a vital component of transformation as it enhances syncretic creativity for various art domains such as those that Fluxus deployed. Nam Jun Paik and Dick Higgins introduce radical techniques in their performances as they detach their selves from the parameters that define composition, and use the mind and power of sentiment in order to identify reality aurally and optically. Towards the end of the twentieth century, we witnessed the appearance of new art forms such as bioart. The human body, host of material and immaterial functions, comes to the forefront of art prac¬tice. Its relation to elements such as oscillations and vibrations that express the energy flow is analysed through the model of spiritualism that came from eastern thought. The notion of digital embodiment is presented as a reminder, highlight¬ing the importance of technology in biotechnology and genetics. The second part of the article involves an experiment. This describes how the concept of biomusic is applied with the use of electrocardiography (ECG) data from the MIT PhysioNet database. As sound penetrates the entire human body, it can be analysed in all of its phasma. Using this information, we attempt to translate/transform these biological sound phenomena into music. The sound produced by the elaboration of data that result from biological functions can be described as biomusic. It can be transformed into frequencies related to time and can be expressed in musical themes. Sonification plays an important role in this research as it constitutes a rapid and precise rendering of polymorphic information (in this case the ECG) in musical notes. This modelling and musical attribution leads to two distinguishable results, each concerning different clinical cases (all data belong to a normal heart function and a pathological one). The invention of this novel system is suggested for scientific as well as musical disciplines. It has the ability to be implemented in an experimental form and obtain an educational character. The transformation process avoids compensation throughout the matching process between ECG functions and music, while focusing on the aesthetic factor at the same time. Sound meets art in the world of biomusic as it takes shape through technology, constituting a new medium to further evolve the model of ‘biology into art’ transformation. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease pandemic fundamentally disrupted humans’ social life and behavior. Public health measures may have inadvertently impacted how people care for each other. This study investigated prosocial behavior, its association well-being, and predictors of prosocial behavior during the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and sought to understand whether region-specific differences exist. Participants from eight regions clustering multiple countries around the world responded to a cross-sectional online-survey investigating the psychological consequences of the first upsurge of lockdowns in spring 2020. Prosocial behavior (...) was reported to occur frequently. Multiple regression analyses showed that prosocial behavior was associated with better well-being consistently across regions. With regard to predictors of prosocial behavior, high levels of perceived social support were most strongly associated with prosocial behavior, followed by high levels of perceived stress, positive affect and psychological flexibility. Sociodemographic and psychosocial predictors of prosocial behavior were similar across regions. (shrink)

Considering the high impact strain that the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 pandemic has put on medical personnel worldwide, identifying means to alleviate stress on healthcare professionals and to boost their subjective and psychological wellbeing is more relevant than ever. This study investigates the extent to which the relationships between the status of working in healthcare and the subjective and psychological wellbeing are serially mediated by work recovery experiences and the need for recovery. Data were collected from 217 Romanian (...) employees using a cross-sectional design with self-report instruments, during the first stage of the nationwide lockdown. The results of the serial mediation analyses revealed that working in the medical field is indirectly related to subjective and psychological wellbeing through the following: mastery experiences and mastery experiences as an antecedent of the need for recovery. As such, our findings indicate that working in the medical field is, in fact, linked to healthcare professionals’ subjective and psychological wellbeing, and they provide some input on how recovery experiences and the need for recovery intervene in these relationships. Based on these findings, theoretical, methodological, and practical implications were suggested, and future research directions were proposed to maximize healthcare professionals’ wellbeing. (shrink)

The authors present the preliminary publication of seven hitherto unpublished inscriptions from the Roman colony at Philippi in the province of Macedonia. These inscriptions make known a number of new notables who were active in the colony during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Amongst them is a soldier from Philippi who had pursued a career in the cohortes vigilae in Rome, as well as several municipal magistrates and seviri augusti from Philippi. All the inscriptions connected with the institutions of (...) the colony, and also those mentioning members of the senatorial and equestrian orders and soldiers, will shortly be included in the first volume of the Corpus of Greek and Latin Inscriptions of Philippi. The assembling of the epigraphic material relating to the municipal and imperial administration of Philippi, enriched by numerous unpublished inscriptions, will enable us to renew our acquaintance with the social and political structures of the colony. (shrink)

The standard view in social science and philosophy is that lying does not require the liar’s assertion to be false, only that the liar believes it to be false. We conducted three experiments to test whether lying requires falsity. Overall, the results suggest that it does. We discuss some implications for social scientists working on social judgments, research on lie detection, and public moral discourse.

Researchers have debated whether there is a relationship between a statement’s truth-value and whether it counts as a lie. One view is that a statement being objectively false is essential to whether it counts as a lie; the opposing view is that a statement’s objective truth-value is inessential to whether it counts as a lie. We report five behavioral experiments that use a novel range of behavioral measures to address this issue. In each case, we found evidence of a relationship. (...) A statement’s truth-value affects how quickly people judge whether it is a lie. When people consider the matter carefully and are told that they might need to justify their answer, they are more likely to categorize a statement as a lie when it is false than when it is true. When given options that inhibit perspective-taking, people tend to not categorize deceptively motivated statements as lies when they are true, even though they still categorize them as lies when they are false. Categorizing a speaker as “lying” leads people to strongly infer that the speaker’s statement is false. People are more likely to spontaneously categorize a statement as a lie when it is false than when it is true. We discuss four different interpretations of relevant findings to date. At present, the best supported interpretation might be that the ordinary lying concept is a prototype concept, with falsity being a centrally important element of the prototypical lie. (shrink)

Interest in the demarcation problem is undergoing a boom after being shelved and even given up for dead. Nevertheless, despite current philosophical discussions, there are no substantial advances i...

Limited health literacy is a pervasive and independent risk factor for poor health outcomes. Despite decades of reports exhibiting that the healthcare system is overly complex, unneeded complexity remains commonplace and endangers the lives of patients, especially those with limited health literacy. In this article, we define health literacy and describe the empirical evidence associating health literacy and poor health outcomes. We recast the issue of poor health literacy from within the ethical perspective of the least well-off and argue that (...) poor health outcomes deriving from limited health literacy ought to be understood as a fundamental injustice of the healthcare system. We offer three proposals that attempt to rectify this injustice, including: universal precautions that presume limited health literacy for all healthcare users; expanded use of technology supported communication; and clinical incentives that account for limited health literacy. (shrink)

Thomas Sankara was 33 years old when he seized power in a bloodless coup. During the four years of his governance, he organized adult literacy campaigns and mass vaccination of children, promoted women's rights and fought corruption as well as desertification caused by inappropriate agricultural practices introduced during the colonial period. Within two years, child mortality and illiteracy dropped significantly and vaccination coverage increased. Beyond these quantitative results, Sankara firmly believed that the decolonization of his country started from the formation (...) of the conscience of citizens, from learning to “rely on themselves” – materially and psychologically – and from the abandonment of a logic of technological and financial dependence that generated hunger and debt. To achieve his goals, he launched campaigns to “consume Burkinabè,” to plant trees and preserve rainwater in areas affected by desertification. (shrink)

En este artículo analizaremos los posibles criterios epistemológicos que, en el contexto de la filosofía hegeliana de la historia mundial, circunscriben el largo proceso revolucionario haitiano en un no-lugar narrativo. Contrario al imaginario político, económico y cultural europeo de fines del siglo XVIII y comienzos del siglo XIX, que vio en la Revolución haitiana un acontecimiento que directa o indirectamente repercute en las transformación geopolítica global, en los discursos abolicionistas y en la flujos comerciales a través del Atlántico, Hegel parece (...) en principio desatender la especificidad del proceso, aunque, como sostenemos en este contexto, es posible rastrear los motivos de una exclusión deliberada que responder a una ideas precisas de libertad y terror que anteceden, y por tanto determinan, el lugar de la Revolución haitiana en la historia mundial. (shrink)

In this paper we consider conditional random quantities (c.r.q.’s) in the setting of coherence. Based on betting scheme, a c.r.q. X|H is not looked at as a restriction but, in a more extended way, as \({XH + \mathbb{P}(X|H)H^c}\) ; in particular (the indicator of) a conditional event E|H is looked at as EH + P(E|H)H c . This extended notion of c.r.q. allows algebraic developments among c.r.q.’s even if the conditioning events are different; then, for instance, we can give a (...) meaning to the sum X|H + Y|K and we can define the iterated c.r.q. (X|H)|K. We analyze the conjunction of two conditional events, introduced by the authors in a recent work, in the setting of coherence. We show that the conjoined conditional is a conditional random quantity, which may be a conditional event when there are logical dependencies. Moreover, we introduce the negation of the conjunction and by applying De Morgan’s Law we obtain the disjoined conditional. Finally, we give the lower and upper bounds for the conjunction and disjunction of two conditional events, by showing that the usual probabilistic properties continue to hold. (shrink)

This text is a reflection in action of an artistic process based on a scientific research. ENSAIO is the choreographic project that resulted from the translation mechanisms of laboratory concepts to a bodily approach, where it proposes a possible mainstreaming of artistic and scientific processes combined. This project joined artistic higher education schools in dance and scenic arts (ESD and FCSH) and Polavieja lab, a neuroscience research lab in Champalimaud Foundation – Center for the Unknown. This text aims to reveal (...) the creative choreographic and performative potentials hidden in this scientific research concerning neurosciences. Identifying cross materials to artistic and scientific processes, it was possible to design a structure of the creation process and the construction of a choreographic performance. The common platform has been found in the process of translation and the definition of the same concept substrate, which made possible the approach of the two instances: studio and laboratory. One of its key features is the promotion of the communication among its agents: scientists and dancers. And the possibility of modelling and absorption from what it comes from this sharing and collaboration. The methods and the choreographic procedures mirrored and promoted this sharing and, therefore, the involvement of the body. Where, the body is the agent able to reflect and trigger this process, a body as an essay that is constantly in research. A body able to coordinate between various media and to expand the reflection on itself. Although science and art are individual instances that inevitably specialise and segregated away. Therefore, this text focuses on examples of cross-thinking of both scientific and artistic cultures, and the articulation of the theoretical and practical bodies in a practice-as-research on the development of the ENSAIO creative process. (shrink)

El presente artículo se propone ofrecer al lector una visión panorámica de las principales adquisiciones críticas relativas a la formación juvenil de Dante Alighieri. A lo largo de siete siglos de estudios, las fuentes de las que bebió el futuro autor de la Comedia siguen siendo en buena medida conjeturales, lo cual no quita que los análisis de archivo más recientes y algunos proyectos de investigación en continuo desarrollo han permitido ampliar al respecto nuestros horizontes de conocimientos.

ABSTRACT In the following pages we will address the internal and external dimensions of the Hegelian conceptualization of political economy in the analytical context of the Rechstphilosophie of 1820. We will understand by internal dimensions the moments proper to the Hegelian argument in its logical coherence and consistency and, by external dimensions, the validity and representativeness of that same argument in relation to the problems of political economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To this end, we will (...) focus especially on the relationship between capitalism and mercantilism in its physiocratic and cameralist forms in order to establish the logical and historical horizon of the Hegelian exposition. Finally, on the basis of this relationship and its conceptualization, we will summarily address the limits of the meaning of political economy as a representation of the present in Rechtsphilosophie. (shrink)

A central goal in Cognitive Science is understanding the mechanisms that underlie cognition. Here, we contend that Cognitive Science, despite intense multidisciplinary efforts, has furnished surprisingly few mechanistic insights. We attribute this slow mechanistic progress to the fact that cognitive scientists insist on performing underdetermined exercises, deriving overparametrized mechanistic theories of complex behaviors and seeking validation of these theories to the elusive notions of optimality and biological plausibility. We propose that mechanistic progress in Cognitive Science will accelerate once cognitive scientists (...) start focusing on simpler explananda that will enable them to chart an atlas of elementary cognitive operations. Looking forward, the next challenge for Cognitive Science will be to understand how these elementary cognitive processes are pieced together to explain complex behavior. (shrink)

Opinion is divided about the certainty of the evidence base for gender-affirming medical interventions in youth. Proponents claim that these treatments are well supported, while critics claim the poor-quality evidence base warrants extreme caution. Psychotherapy is one of the only available alternatives to the gender-affirming approach. Discussion of the treatment of gender dysphoria in young people is generally framed in terms of two binary approaches: affirmation or conversion. Psychotherapy/exploratory therapy offers a treatment option that lies outside this binary, although it (...) is mistakenly conflated with conversion therapies. Psychotherapy does not impose restrictive gender stereotypes, as is sometimes claimed, but critically examines them. It empowers young people to develop creative solutions to their difficulties and promotes agency and autonomy. Importantly, an exploratory psychotherapeutic process can help to clarify whether gender dysphoria is a carrier for other psychological or social problems that may not be immediately apparent. Psychotherapy can therefore make a significant contribution to the optimal, ethical care of gender-dysphoric young people by ensuring that patients make appropriate, informed decisions about medical interventions which carry risks of harm and have a contested evidence base. (shrink)

In diesem Band deckt Diego D'Angelo semiotische Strukturen in der Husserl’schen Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung auf. Ist es der Phänomenologie darum zu tun, die Erfahrung von Dingen in unserer Umwelt zu beschreiben, so ist dabei der Begriff des Horizontes von zentraler Bedeutung: Was wir unmittelbar wahrnehmen, verweist immer schon auf anderes, was nur „mitgegeben“ ist. Wenn wir Dinge wahrnehmen, haben wir nur eine bestimmte Perspektive, d.h. wir sehen lediglich einen Aspekt. Aber wir nehmen immer ganze Gegenstände wahr (wir sehen Tische und (...) Stühle und andere Menschen). Jeder dieser Gegenstände erscheint in einem Feld weiterer Gegenstände, und es ist der Horizontbegriff, der es erlaubt, das Verhältnis zwischen Selbstgegebenheit und Mitgegebenheit zu explizieren. Dieses Buch stellt den ersten detaillierten Versuch dar, die Ursprünge solcher horizontaler Felder in semiotischen Strukturen zu suchen. Aus der Verbindung zwischen Husserls eigener Semiotik und seiner Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung ergibt sich, dass das wahrgenommene Phänomen als Zeichen verstanden werden muss. Das Zeichen wiederum bezeichnet etwas, was in leiblicher Bewegung eingeholt werden kann. Mit der Verbindung von Leiblichkeit, Semiotik und Wahrnehmung thematisiert diese Monographie das Verhältnis zwischen folgenden phänomenologischen Forschungsgebieten: • Husserls Semiotik der Wahrnehmung in den Logischen Untersuchungen • Phänomenologische Raumanalyse – kinästhetische Indikation • Horizont und Noema • Passive Anzeige • Zeichen und Leiblichkeit als Grundlagen der Fremderfahrung • Genetische Phänomenologie und Semiotik der Erfahrung • Protentionen und teleologische Semiose • Induktion und Ursprung des menschlichen Ichs Das Buch eröffnet die Möglichkeit, Husserls Phänomenologie jenseits einer Metaphysik der Präsenz zu verstehen. Zudem leisten D'Angelos Einzeluntersuchungen einen Beitrag zu aktuellen Diskussionen in der Philosophie der leiblichen Kognition. – Eine hilfreiche Leseempfehlung für • Interessierte Themenneulinge • Bachelor- und Masterstudenten der Geisteswissenschaften • Hochschulabsolventen sowie Forschungswissenschaftler. (shrink)

Kafka's work has exercised immense influence on cinema and his reflections on diminished human agency in modernity and the dominance of oppressive institutions that perpetuate individual or social alienation and political repression have been the subject of debates by philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Alexander Kluge. Informed by a world-systems approach and taking a cue from Jorge Luis Borges’ point that Kafka has modified our conception of the future, and André Bazin's suggestion that (...) literary concepts, characters and styles can exceed “novels from which they emanate”, I understand the Kafkaesque as an elastic term that can refer to diverse films that might share thematic preoccupations, but also aesthetic and formal differences. In this article, I explore the politics of humour in Kafkaesque cinema with reference to the following films: The Overcoat ( Шинель, 1926, Gregor Koznitzev and Leo Trauberg), The Shop on Main Street ( Obchod na korze, 1965, Ján Kadár), and Death of a Bureaucrat ( La muerte de un burócrata, 1966, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea). I draw attention to the dialectics of humour and the connection between the Kafkaesque and slapstick so as to show how humour is deployed as a means of political critique. (shrink)

Starting from a recent paper by S. Kaufmann, we introduce a notion of conjunction of two conditional events and then we analyze it in the setting of coherence. We give a representation of the conjoined conditional and we show that this new object is a conditional random quantity, whose set of possible values normally contains the probabilities assessed for the two conditional events. We examine some cases of logical dependencies, where the conjunction is a conditional event; moreover, we give the (...) lower and upper bounds on the conjunction. We also examine an apparent paradox concerning stochastic independence which can actually be explained in terms of uncorrelation. We briefly introduce the notions of disjunction and iterated conditioning and we show that the usual probabilistic properties still hold. (shrink)

The theme of the relationship between art and society is certainly not a central topic in the aesthetic reflection of Italian neo-idealism. Neither in Croce nor in Gentile it is ever discussed at length, and the few writings in which it is addressed are brief and polemically oriented. This essay, however, proposes to discuss the few hints present in Croce and Gentile on this subject. First, the debate on the materialistic interpretation of history will be examined, to which both Croce (...) and Gentile made important contributions at the end of the 19th century. Secondly, Croce’s own way of doing the history of literature will be discussed, showing the differences that distance him from the Desanctisian model and also from the model derived from the Hegelian Aesthetics. Croce’s way of making history of literature, indeed, aroused harsh criticism after World War II and provoked a request for a “return to De Sanctis”.Finally, but the theme will be only hinted at in the essay, a brief reference will be proposed to the opinions of Antonio Gramsci and his reading of Croce. (shrink)

Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) has been a growing point of interest in medical education yet has not been assessed in the field of bioethics. This study evaluated the accuracy of ChatGPT-3.5 (April 2023 version) in answering text-based, multiple choice bioethics questions at the level of US third-year and fourth-year medical students. A total of 114 bioethical questions were identified from the widely utilised question banks UWorld and AMBOSS. Accuracy, bioethical categories, difficulty levels, specialty data, error analysis and character count (...) were analysed. We found that ChatGPT had an accuracy of 59.6%, with greater accuracy in topics surrounding death and patient–physician relationships and performed poorly on questions pertaining to informed consent. Of all the specialties, it performed best in paediatrics. Yet, certain specialties and bioethical categories were under-represented. Among the errors made, it tended towards content errors and application errors. There were no significant associations between character count and accuracy. Nevertheless, this investigation contributes to the ongoing dialogue on artificial intelligence’s (AI) role in healthcare and medical education, advocating for further research to fully understand AI systems’ capabilities and constraints in the nuanced field of medical bioethics. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate around the life in the contemporary society, characterized by risks and catastrophes. What does mean to live fearing that in any moment a catastrophe could happen (a tsunami, an earthquake, a nuclear explosion)? Despite of the failure of science and public institutions in the prevention of the catastrophes, the question is the following: Can we use the catastrophe as a paradigm of the contemporary uncertain life, trying to mean it as a theme (...) of mediation? Can we use the catastrophe for developing a philosophy of the recognition of the other who has been involved in the same tragedy? (shrink)

Laspro et al. (2024) have articulated a number of important considerations in order for the first-in-human whole-eye transplant (WET) to be an ethically acceptable endeavor. These authors have clea...

For Nicole Belayche, χαριστήριον καὶ φιλίας χάριν This issue of the EBGR presents epigraphic corpora and new epigraphic finds published in 2020 as well as additions to earlier issues. As in previous years, Asia Minor has the lion’s share on new inscriptions pertaining to cults and religious mentality, but there are also some very important texts from ‘old’ Greece, e.g. a stele from Epidauros (58) that records the punishment of fraudulent and incompetent architects and a metrical text from Lar...

This chapter proposed a novel design methodology called Value-Sensitive Design and its potential application to the field of artificial intelligence research and design. It discusses the imperatives in adopting a design philosophy that embeds values into the design of artificial agents at the early stages of AI development. Because of the high risk stakes in the unmitigated design of artificial agents, this chapter proposes that even though VSD may turn out to be a less-than-optimal design methodology, it currently provides a (...) framework that has the potential to embed stakeholder values and incorporate current design methods. The reader should begin to take away the importance of a proactive design approach to intelligent agents. (shrink)

In this study, we explore the relation between scientific literacy and unwarranted beliefs. The results show heterogeneous interactions between six constructs: conspiracy theories poorly interact with scientific literacy; there are major differences between attitudinal and practical dimensions of critical thinking; paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs show similar associations ; and, only scientific knowledge interacts with other predictor of unwarranted beliefs, such as ontological confusions. These results reveal a limited impact: science educators must take into account the complex interactions between the dimensions (...) of scientific literacy and different types of unwarranted beliefs to improve pedagogical strategies. (shrink)

En este artículo se aborda la relación entre la demolición y el embellecimiento de París durante el siglo xix desde diferentes perspectivas literarias y filosóficas que permitan situar en diferentes contextos narrativos la interpretación de la ciudad como un espacio metropolitano signado por la autopercepción como capitale du xixe siècle. Desde los primeros planos trigonométricos hasta la noción de transformación, la imagen de la ciudad como un espacio privilegiado y representativo de la transformación del presente aparece con diferentes matices en (...) las obras de Voltaire, Verne, Hugo y Baudelaire, no solamente como una dimensión expresiva común, sino también como un espacio de conflicto de posición política, estética e ideológica. En este sentido, este trabajo se propone rastrear esas inflexiones, insistencias y resistencias a las formas concretas de la relación demolición/embellecimiento institucional. (shrink)

Entre la creación poética y la reflexión especulativa, Dedizioni traza un itinerario de lugares, memorias y textos buscando las motivaciones que animan la experiencia de escribir, la relación que los poetas tienen con el lenguaje y el contenido más esquivo de ese gesto primordial que es el nombrar. El autor convoca a algunos de sus amigos insustituibles, entre ellos la escritora francesa Hélène Cixous, la poeta quebequense Nicole Brossard, los poetas italianos Giovanni Raboni y Francesco Scarabicchi, los escritores italianos Dolores (...) Prato y Alberto Savinio. (shrink)

We study probabilistically informative (weak) versions of transitivity by using suitable definitions of defaults and negated defaults in the setting of coherence and imprecise probabilities. We represent p-consistent sequences of defaults and/or negated defaults by g-coherent imprecise probability assessments on the respective sequences of conditional events. Moreover, we prove the coherent probability propagation rules for Weak Transitivity and the validity of selected inference patterns by proving p-entailment of the associated knowledge bases. Finally, we apply our results to study selected probabilistic (...) versions of classical categorical syllogisms and construct a new version of the square of opposition in terms of defaults and negated defaults. (shrink)

We generalize, by a progressive procedure, the notions of conjunction and disjunction of two conditional events to the case of n conditional events. In our coherence-based approach, conjunctions and disjunctions are suitable conditional random quantities. We define the notion of negation, by verifying De Morgan’s Laws. We also show that conjunction and disjunction satisfy the associative and commutative properties, and a monotonicity property. Then, we give some results on coherence of prevision assessments for some families of compounded conditionals; in particular (...) we examine the Fréchet-Hoeffding bounds. Moreover, we study the reverse probabilistic inference from the conjunction Cn+1 of n + 1 conditional events to the family {Cn,En+1|Hn+1}. We consider the relation with the notion of quasi-conjunction and we examine in detail the coherence of the prevision assessments related with the conjunction of three conditional events. Based on conjunction, we also give a characterization of p-consistency and of p-entailment, with applications to several inference rules in probabilistic nonmonotonic reasoning. Finally, we examine some non p-valid inference rules; then, we illustrate by an example two methods which allow to suitably modify non p-valid inference rules in order to get inferences which are p-valid. (shrink)