This position paper advocates combining formal epistemology and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning in the studies of conditionals and reasoning with uncertainty. The new paradigm psychology of reasoning is characterized by the use of probability theory as a rationality framework instead of classical logic, used by more traditional approaches to the psychology of reasoning. This paper presents a new interdisciplinary research program which involves both formal and experimental work. To illustrate the program, the paper discusses recent work on the (...) paradoxes of the material conditional, nonmonotonic reasoning, and Adams’ Thesis. It also identifies the issue of updating on conditionals as an area which seems to call for a combined formal and empirical approach. (shrink)

In this article the key aspects of logistical support of the airline’s innovation activity on the market of air transport services have been defined, the structure of the airline’s innovation system, logistics approach to managing the innovation activity of an airline enterprise have been considered and the main objectives of logistical activity in the context of innovation activity support of airlines have been clarified. The importance and peculiarities of logistical support of the airline’s innovation activity as an innovation flow control (...) system have been studied. The algorithm of formation of the logistical support mechanism for the airline’s innovation activity has been elaborated and specified. The objectives tree for improving the efficiency of logistical support of the airline’s innovation activity has been created. (shrink)

In this work, we illustrate applications of a semantic framework for non-congruential modal logic based on hyperintensional models. We start by discussing some philosophical ideas behind the approach; in particular, the difference between the set of possible worlds in which a formula is true (its intension) and the semantic content of a formula (its hyperintension), which is captured in a rigorous way in hyperintensional models. Next, we rigorously specify the approach and provide a fundamental completeness theorem. Moreover, we analyse examples (...) of non-congruential systems that can be semantically characterized within this framework in an elegant and modular way. Finally, we compare the proposed framework with some alternatives available in the literature. In the light of the results obtained, we argue that hyperintensional models constitute a basic, general and unifying semantic framework for (non-congruential) modal logic. (shrink)

Resumo Este artigo analisa parte do discurso que a Igreja Católica teceu sobre as mulheres, enfatizando o tema da maternidade durante o século XIX. O enfoque parte da Bulla Sylabus (1864), expedida no pontificado de Pio IX, e da encíclica Rerum Novarum (1891), do Papa Leão XIII. Entre a segunda metade do século XIX e a Primeira Guerra Mundial, a Igreja passou pelo processo conhecido como "romanização", caracterizado pela preocupação moral e disciplinar do clero diante de críticas do laicado, além (...) da promoção de ordens e congregações religiosas. O objetivo deste artigo é, portanto, discutir como aquela instituição definiu um papel social feminino vinculado à ideia do amor materno, divulgado como natural e incondicional. A partir da contribuição dos estudos de gênero, aborda a atribuição de características masculinas e femininas para a distinção não apenas biológica entre homens e mulheres. Concluiu-se que, na longa duração, o discurso católico passou de uma postura misógina - de recusa do sexo feminino - à incorporação das mulheres como público essencial para a sustentação do catolicismo diante das propostas de laicização da sociedade ocidental contemporânea. Palavras-chave: Mulheres; Discurso católico; Maternidade; Gênero.This paper discusses part of the discourse that the Catholic Church built in order to define woman's role in the 19th century, emphasizing representations of motherhood. The focus starts with Pius IX's Bulla Sylabus (1864) and Pope Lion XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891). Between the second half of the 19th century and World War I, the Catholic Church underwent a process known as "Romanization", characterized by the clergy's moral and disciplinary concern in face of the laity's criticism, and by the promotion of new religious orders and congregations. The paper considers, therefore, how the Catholic Church defined a social female role linked to the idea of maternal love, diffused as natural and unconditional. With basis on the contribution of cultural history and gender studies, it demonstrates how that Church attributed male and female characteristics to the distinction not merely biological between men and women, associating the latter with the idea of motherhood and natural love for their children. It concludes that, through time, the Church has changed its misogyny discourse - refusing the female sex - into one that incorporates women as essential to support Catholicism in facing the laicization of contemporary western society. Key words: Women; Catholic discourse; Motherhood; Gender. (shrink)

This paper reports a study of the main key components of influence on the stability of transportation enterprises in the market. A model for evaluating the effectiveness of innovation activity in the transport industry, which takes into account indicators of expenditures on innovations, has been built. It makes it possible to determine the effectiveness of introduced innovations, which indicates the appropriate level of innovation potential and the ways that the enterprise must take to increase it. The main directions of innovative (...) development of transportation enterprises were investigated. The assessment of the economic stability of transportation enterprises in the market has established that the current state of development of enterprises is characterized by a weak level of their innovative activity. A systematic approach to the introduction of innovative technologies by a transportation enterprise in the market has been devised. This approach makes it possible to determine the required level of enterprise stability and to form a relationship between the level of innovative technologies and their stages of implementation under conditions of environmental variability. This makes it possible to increase competitive advantages, improve the efficiency of production and economic activity of enterprises. The practical implementation of the proposed model for evaluating the effectiveness of innovation activity in the transport industry has been carried out, which made it possible to allocate the most important indicators of innovation activity for the enterprise. These include specific efficiency of innovation; unit costs of innovation; innovative potential of the enterprise (defined as the proportion of own innovative developments). According to the study results, it is determined that the specific efficiency of innovations (SEI) exerts the greatest influence, which, with an increase by 1 %, provides an increase in financial stability by 1.48 %. (shrink)

This article compares inference to the best explanation with Bayes’s rule in a social setting, specifically, in the context of a variant of the Hegselmann–Krause model in which agents not only update their belief states on the basis of evidence they receive directly from the world, but also take into account the belief states of their fellow agents. So far, the update rules mentioned have been studied only in an individualistic setting, and it is known that in such a setting (...) both have their strengths as well as their weaknesses. It is shown here that in a social setting, inference to the best explanation outperforms Bayes’s rule according to every desirable criterion. 1 What Is Inference to the Best Explanation?2 Judging the Rules—By Which Lights?3 From an Individualistic to a Social Perspective 3.1 The Hegselmann–Krause model 3.2 A probabilistic extension of the Hegselmann–Krause model 3.3 Simulations4 Results and Discussion5 Interpretation6 Conclusion. (shrink)

Ifeel that Iam apartof, but separatefrom an 'out there' world. 2. Ifeel that my perception of the world mingles with feelings of past experience. 3. My experienceof the world is selective and purposeful. 4. I am thinking ahead allthe timeintrying ...

Conditionals are sentences of the form 'If A, then B', and they play a central role in scientific, logical, and everyday reasoning. They have been in the philosophical limelight for centuries, and more recently, they have been receiving attention from psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists. In spite of this, many key questions concerning conditionals remain unanswered. While most of the work on conditionals has addressed semantical questions - questions about the truth conditions of conditionals - this book focuses on the (...) main epistemological questions that conditionals give rise to, such as: what are the probabilities of conditionals? When is a conditional acceptable or assertable? What do we learn when we receive new conditional information? In answering these questions, this book combines the formal tools of logic and probability theory with the experimental approach of cognitive psychology. It will be of interest to students and researchers in logic, epistemology, and psychology of reasoning. (shrink)

Mindwandering is associated with both positive and negative outcomes. Among the latter, negative mood and negative cognitions have been reported. However, the underlying mechanisms linking mindwandering to negative mood and cognition are still unclear. We hypothesized that MW could either directly enhance negative thinking or indirectly heighten the accessibility of negative thoughts. In an undergraduate sample we measured emotional thoughts during the Sustained Attention on Response Task which induces MW, and accessibility of negative cognitions by means of the Scrambled Sentences (...) Task after the task. We also measured depressive symptoms and rumination. Results show that in individuals with elevated levels of depressive symptoms MW during SART predicts higher accessibility of negative thoughts after the task, rather than negative thinking during the task. These findings contribute to our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of MW and provide insight into the relationship between task-involvement and affect. (shrink)

The article analyzes the effectiveness of quantum theories of mental experience in relation to two ontological problems - the problem of the existence of consciousness in the material world and the problem of the interaction of consciousness and body. A critical analysis of the quantum theories of consciousness by Penrose-Hameroff, M. Tegmark, G. Stapp, M. Fischer and M.B. Mensky shows that they fail to fully explain how complex physical systems generate mental experience without violating the principle of causal closure of (...) the physical world and the principle of epistemological completeness of physics. Quantum mechanics provides specific processes that are the physical basis of the psyche, but do not explain the phenomenal aspect of subjective reality. Nevertheless, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle gives an understanding of how the interaction of consciousness and body within the scientific picture of the world can be carried out without violating the law of energy conservation. It is shown that the quantum theories of consciousness currently being developed have a predominantly panprotopsychic character, which faces a problem due to the fact that the protomental property of physical systems must be expressed quantitatively and correspond to the value included in the physical equations. As a result, it is concluded that in order to develop quantum theories of consciousness more effectively, it is necessary to give an emergent character, not jumping from the quantum level to the psychic, but explaining the mechanism of the emergence of systemic properties during the sequential transition between different ontological regions of existence, including physical, chemical, biological, neurophysiological and psychic. (shrink)

There has been a probabilistic turn in contemporary cognitive science. Far and away, most of the work in this vein is Bayesian, at least in name. Coinciding with this development, philosophers have increasingly promoted Bayesianism as the best normative account of how humans ought to reason. In this paper, we make a push for exploring the probabilistic terrain outside of Bayesianism. Non-Bayesian, but still probabilistic, theories provide plausible competitors both to descriptive and normative Bayesian accounts. We argue for this general (...) idea via recent work on explanationist models of updating, which are fundamentally probabilistic but assign a substantial, non-Bayesian role to explanatory considerations. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the notion of coherence by explicating in probabilistic terms, step by step, what seem to be our most basic intuitions about that notion, to wit, that coherence is a matter of hanging or fitting together, and that coherence is a matter of degree. A qualitative theory of coherence will serve as a stepping stone to formulate a set of quantitative measures of coherence, each of which seems to capture well the aforementioned (...) intuitions. Subsequently it will be argued that one of those measures does better than the others in light of some more specific intuitions about coherence. This measure will be defended against two seemingly obvious objections. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with formal solutions to the lottery paradox on which high probability defeasibly warrants acceptance. It considers some recently proposed solutions of this type and presents an argument showing that these solutions are trivial in that they boil down to the claim that perfect probability is sufficient for rational acceptability. The argument is then generalized, showing that a broad class of similar solutions faces the same problem. An argument against some formal solutions to the lottery paradox The (...) argument generalized Some variations Adding modalities Anticipated objections. (shrink)

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is not to try to formulate the meaning the word ‘terrorism’has in ordinary use; the word is used in so many different, even incompatible ways, that such an enterprise would quickly prove futile. My aim is rather to try for a definition that captures the trait, or traits, of terrorism which cause most of us to view it with moral repugnance. I discuss the following questions: Is the historical connection of terrorism with terror to (...) be preserved on the conceptual level, or relegated to the psychology and sociology of terrorism? Does mere infliction of terror qualify as terrorism, so that we can speak of non‐violent terrorism? If terrorism is a type of violence, does it have to be against persons, or should violence against property also count? In what sense can terrorism be described as indiscriminate violence? Should we use the word only in a political context? In such a context, can we speak of ‘state terrorism’, or should the word be restricted to actions not sanctioned by law? Is the terrorist necessarily oblivious to moral considerations, as those who define terrorism in terms of antinomianism imply? My answers to these questions lead up to the following definition: terrorism is the deliberate use of violence, or threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating them, or other people, into a course of action they otherwise would not take. (shrink)

Various authors have recently argued that you cannot rationally stick to your belief in the face of known disagreement with an epistemic peer, that is, a person you take to have the same evidence and judgmental skills as you do. For, they claim, because there is but one rational response to any body of evidence, a disagreement with an epistemic peer indicates that at least one of you is not responding rationally to the evidence. Given that you take your peer (...) to have the same judgmental skills as you do, and thus regard her to be equally good at assessing the evidence as you are, you will have as much reason for thinking that it is you who is not responding rationally to the evidence as for thinking that it is her. You thus have reason for thinking that your belief on the disputed matter is not a rational response to the evidence. Hence, you cannot rationally stick to your belief. (shrink)

Bayesians have traditionally taken a dim view of the Inference to the Best Explanation, arguing that, if IBE is at variance with Bayes ' rule, then it runs afoul of the dynamic Dutch book argument. More recently, Bayes ' rule has been claimed to be superior on grounds of conduciveness to our epistemic goal. The present paper aims to show that neither of these arguments succeeds in undermining IBE.

A number of philosophers and legal scholars have pointed out a fact about punishment that had not been sufficiently appreciated by many traditional accounts, utilitarian, retributive, or ‘mixed’: that evil inflicted on the person punished is not an evil simpliciter , but rather the expression of an important social message—that punishment is a kind of language. The message which it is seen to communicate can broadly be described as condemnation by society of the crime committed. In what is still the (...) only attempt at a general and critical discussion— Anthony Skillen's ‘How to say Things with Walls’—this way of understanding punishment is termed ‘expressionism’. In this paper I propose to sort out the main varieties of expressionism in the philosophy of punishment, and to discuss some of their pros and cons. (shrink)

The sequent system LDJ is formulated using the same connectives as Gentzen's intuitionistic sequent system LJ, but is dual in the following sense: (i) whereas LJ is singular in the consequent, LDJ is singular in the antecedent; (ii) whereas LJ has the same sentential counter-theorems as classical LK but not the same theorems, LDJ has the same sentential theorems as LK but not the same counter-theorems. In particular, LDJ does not reject all contradictions and is accordingly paraconsistent. To obtain a (...) more precise mapping, both LJ and LDJ are extended by adding a "pseudo-difference" operator which is the dual of intuitionistic implication. Cut-elimination and decidability are proved for the extended systems and , and a simply consistent but -inconsistent Set Theory with Unrestricted Comprehension Schema based on LDJ is sketched. (shrink)

This paper argues that pragmatic considerations similar to the ones that Grice has shown pertain to assertability pertain to acceptability. It further shows how this should affect some widely held epistemic principles. The idea of a pragmatics of belief is defended against some seemingly obvious objections.

It is undeniable that inductive reasoning has brought us much good. At least since Hume, however, philosophers have wondered how to justify our reliance on induction. In important recent work, Schurz points out that philosophers have been wrongly assuming that justifying induction is tantamount to showing induction to be reliable. According to him, to justify our reliance on induction, it is enough to show that induction is optimal. His optimality approach consists of two steps: an analytic argument for meta-induction (that (...) is, induction over inductive methods) and an application of meta-induction to empirical findings concerning the predictive accuracy of our actual inductive practices as compared to various non-inductive methods. The present article agrees with Schurz’s general conclusion but also argues that it leaves an important aspect of our inductive practices unaccounted for, to wit, that these practices have so far been highly successful; to satisfy the optimality requirement, induction only needs to be as successful as random guessing. To explain the success of induction, I turn to insights from social epistemology, also highlighted in Schurz’s work, and make these formally explicit in a framework that combines the Hegselmann–Krause model for opinion dynamics and Carnap’s system of λ rules. Within this framework, I use a standard evolutionary algorithm to show how communities of interacting agents may, through variation and selection, come to consist of highly successful inductive reasoners. (shrink)

Van Fraassen (1989) argues that Inference to the Best Explanation is incoherent in the sense that adopting it as a rule for belief change will make one susceptible to a dynamic Dutch book. The present paper argues against this. A strategy is described that allows us to infer to the best explanation free of charge.

The conceptual spaces approach has recently emerged as a novel account of concepts. Its guiding idea is that concepts can be represented geometrically, by means of metrical spaces. While it is generally recognized that many of our concepts are vague, the question of how to model vagueness in the conceptual spaces approach has not been addressed so far, even though the answer is far from straightforward. The present paper aims to fill this lacuna.

Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent are not somehow internally connected tend to strike us as odd. The received doctrine is that this felt oddness is to be explained pragmatically. Exactly how the pragmatic explanation is supposed to go has remained elusive, however. This paper discusses recent philosophical and psychological work that attempts to account semantically for the apparent oddness of conditionals lacking an internal connection between their parts.

Conceptual spaces have become an increasingly popular modeling tool in cognitive psychology. The core idea of the conceptual spaces approach is that concepts can be represented as regions in similarity spaces. While it is generally acknowledged that not every region in such a space represents a natural concept, it is still an open question what distinguishes those regions that represent natural concepts from those that do not. The central claim of this paper is that natural concepts are represented by the (...) cells of an optimally designed similarity space. (shrink)

In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor false. In this article, we re-analyse the data from our previous research, now focussing on (...) the semantics of conditionals rather than on how they are processed. Specifically, we use those data to compare the main extant semantics with each other and with inferentialism, a semantics according to which the truth of a conditional requires the presence of an inferential connection between the conditional’s component parts. (shrink)

In this paper (a sequel to ‘What Is Terrorism?’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 7 [ 1990]) I discuss both consequentialist and deontological justifications of terrorism. In the consequentialist context, I look in particular into Leon Trotsky’s classic defence of the ‘red terror’, based on the argument of continuity of war, revolution, and terrorism, and the claim that the distinction between the guilty and the innocent, combatants and noncombatants, is not relevant to modern warfare. On the deontological side, I discuss (...) Virginia Held’s recent attempt at justifying terrorism in terms of basic human rights and distributive justice. The conclusion reached is that terrorism remains almost absolutely morally impermissible. (shrink)

The aim was to investigate the relationships between landscape-related personal and collective identity and well-being of residents living in a Swedish mountain county ( N = 850). It was shown that their most valued mountain activities were viewing and experiencing nature and landscape, outdoor recreation, rest and leisure, and socializing with friends/family. Qualitative analyses showed that the most valued aspects of the sites were landscape and outdoor restoration for personal favorite sites, and tourism and alpine for collective favorite sites. According (...) to quantitative analyses the stronger the attachment/closeness/belonging (emotional component of place identity) residents felt to favorite personal and collective sites the more well-being they perceived when visiting these places. Similarly, the more remembrance, thinking and mental travel (cognitive component of place identity) residents directed to these sites the more well-being they perceived in these places. In both types of sites well-being was more strongly predicted by emotional than cognitive component of place-identity. All this indicates the importance of person-place bonds in beneficial experiences of the outdoors, over and above simply being in outdoor environments. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature, the term “abduction” is used in two related but different senses. In both senses, the term refers to some form of explanatory reasoning. However, in the historically first sense, it refers to the place of explanatory reasoning in generating hypotheses, while in the sense in which it is used most frequently in the modern literature it refers to the place of explanatory reasoning in justifying hypotheses. In the latter sense, abduction is also often called “Inference to (...) the Best Explanation.” -/- This entry is exclusively concerned with abduction in the modern sense, although there is a supplement on abduction in the historical sense, which had its origin in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce—see the Supplement: Peirce on Abduction. See also the entry on scientific discovery, in particular the section on discovery as abduction. -/- Most philosophers agree that abduction (in the sense of Inference to the Best Explanation) is a type of inference that is frequently employed, in some form or other, both in everyday and in scientific reasoning. However, the exact form as well as the normative status of abduction are still matters of controversy. This entry contrasts abduction with other types of inference; points at prominent uses of it, both in and outside philosophy; considers various more or less precise statements of it; discusses its normative status; and highlights possible connections between abduction and Bayesian confirmation theory. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the rule of inference proposed by Kuipers under the name of Inference to the Best Theory. In particular, I argue that the rule needs to be strengthened if it is to serve realist purposes. I further describe a method for testing, and perhaps eventually justifying, a suitably strengthened version of it.

In this short paper, we investigate the problems with the employment of the notion of freedom and voluntariness in libertarianism. We pretend to demonstrate that these two, as conceived of by libertarians, figure in as the main issue when it comes to justifying its major institutions, say: bequeathing, gifts, transactions (or what they label as “voluntary transfer”). The difficulty here boils down to the fact that a purely rights-based idea of freedom and voluntariness, the pretentions of Nozick notwithstanding, cannot do (...) alone, since it is the consideration whether we do something (e.g. bequeath, donate etc.) voluntarily (or freely) (in a non-moralized sense) that could account for the rights redistribution. Therefore, it seems that – at least sometimes – the notion of voluntariness (or freedom) is prior to the notion of rights. (shrink)

The article introduces extended models for the propositional dynamic logic PDL. In extended models, valuation assigns to every state a set of atomic formulas and a PDL program. The program is informally construed as an action preferred by a contextually fixed agent. PDL is then extended by introducing a conditional connective expressing partial correctness claims. The main contribution of the article is the observation that the partial correctness conditional is in fact a substructural implication. It is shown that a variant (...) of the minimal distributive substructural logic DB is a fragment of PDLS, an extension of PDL that contains the partial correctness conditional and fusion. It is also shown that the main results can be extended to a specific class of positive substructural logics. (shrink)

We introduce a general representation of unary hyperintensional modalities and study various hyperintensional modal logics based on the representation. It is shown that the major approaches to hyperintensionality known from the literature, that is state-based, syntactic and structuralist approaches, all correspond to special cases of the general framework. Completeness results pertaining to our hyperintensional modal logics are established.

In recent years, various computational models have been developed for studying the dynamics of belief formation in a population of epistemically interacting agents that try to determine the numerical value of a given parameter. Whereas in those models, agents’ belief states consist of single numerical beliefs, the present paper describes a model that equips agents with richer belief states containing many beliefs that, moreover, are logically interconnected. Correspondingly, the truth the agents are after is a theory (a set of sentences (...) of a given language) rather than a numerical value. The agents epistemically interact with each other and also receive evidence in varying degrees of informativeness about the truth. We use computer simulations to study how fast and accurately such populations as wholes are able to approach the truth under differing combinations of settings of the key parameters of the model, such as the degree of informativeness of the evidence and the weight the agents give to the evidence. (shrink)

Zwei Philosophen, denen Kant am meisten zu verdanken hat, wie man mit dem Recht nimmt, sind Hume und Rousseau. W?hrend man?ber den Hume?s Einfluss einfach und eindeutig antworten kann, ist es mit dem Rousseau?s Einfluss viel mehr kompliziert. Der Haupteinfluss auf Kant hat Rousseau in der Ethik und auf der Ansicht der Menschen gemacht, deshalb es einen Anfangspunkt ist, durch welchem die Antwort auf diese Frage gesucht wird. Nach dieser Analyse wird eine einfache und eindeutige Antwort zu geben versucht, die?hnlich (...) wie diese, die man auf dem Hume?s Einfluss geben kann, ist: welchen Einfluss hat Rousseau auf dem ganzen Kritische System gemacht. Dva filozofa kojima Kant najvise duguje su, kako se obicno s pravom tvrdi, Hjum i Ruso. Dok se o Hjumovom uticaju moze jednoznacno i jednostavno odgovoriti, sa Rusoovim uticajem situacija je vidno komplikovanija. Osnovni uticaj na Kanta Ruso je imao u sferi etike i posmatranja coveka, tako da ce to biti polazna tacka preko koje ce se traziti odgovor na ovo pitanje, da bi se posle te analize pokusao dati jedan jednostavan i jednoznacan odgovor, slican onome koji se moze dati za Hjuma, o tome kakav uticaj je Ruso ostavio na celokupan sistem kriticke filozofije. (shrink)