: Our paper discusses the epistemic attitudes of particle physicists on the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. It is based on questionnaires and interviews made shortly before and shortly after the discovery in 2012. We show, to begin with, that the discovery of a Standard Model Higgs boson was less expected than is sometimes assumed. Once the new particle was shown to have properties consistent with SM expectations – albeit with significant experimental uncertainties –, (...) there was a broad agreement that ‘a’ Higgs boson had been found. Physicists adopted a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, they treated the particle as a SM Higgs boson and tried to establish its properties with higher precision; on the other hand, they searched for any hints of physics beyond the SM. This motivates our first philosophical thesis: the Higgs discovery, being of fundamental importance and establishing a new kind of particle, represented a crucial experiment if one interprets this notion in an appropriate sense. By embedding the LHC into the tradition of previous precision experiments and the experimental strategies thus established, underdetermination and confirmational holism are kept at bay. Second, our case study suggests that criteria of theory preference should be understood as epistemic and pragmatic values that have to be weighed in factual research practice. The Higgs discovery led to a shift from pragmatic to epistemic values as regards the mechanisms of electroweak symmetry breaking. Complex criteria, such as naturalness, combine epistemic and pragmatic different values, but are coherently applied by the community. (shrink)

The options in a decision problem generally have outcomes with common features. Putting aside the common features simplifies deliberations, but the simplification requires a philosophical justification that this book provides.

Choice modellers are frequently criticized for failing to provide accurate representations of the neuro-psychological substrates of decisions. Several authors maintain that recent neuro-psychological findings enable choice modellers to overcome this alleged shortcoming. Some advocate a realistic interpretation of neuro-psychological models of choice, according to which these models posit sub-personal entities with specific neuro-psychological counterparts and characterize those entities accurately. In this article, I articulate and defend three complementary arguments to demonstrate that, contrary to emerging consensus, even the (...) best available neuro-psychological models of choice cannot be justifiably given this realistic interpretation. Moreover, I explicate what challenges will continue to hamper neuro-psychological modellers’ attempts to substantiate a realistic interpretation of their models. In doing so, I draw on the literature on scientific modelling to advance the ongoing philosophical discussion concerning the ontological status of the sub-personal entities posited in distinct decision sciences, the resemblance relations that supposedly connect choice models and the neuro-psychological substrates of decisions, and what conditions these models must satisfy to be regarded as realistic representations of their target systems. (shrink)

People often face preferential decisions under risk. To further our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying these preferential choices, two prominent cognitive models, decision field theory (DFT; Busemeyer & Townsend, 1993) and the proportional difference model (PD; González‐Vallejo, 2002), were rigorously tested against each other. In two consecutive experiments, the participants repeatedly had to choose between monetary gambles. The first experiment provided the reference to estimate the models’ free parameters. From these estimations, new gamble pairs were generated for the (...) second experiment such that the two models made maximally divergent predictions. In the first experiment, both models explained the data equally well. However, in the second generalization experiment, the participants’ choices were much closer to the predictions of DFT. The results indicate that the stochastic process assumed by DFT, in which evidence in favor of or against each option accumulates over time, described people’s choice behavior better than the trade‐offs between proportional differences assumed by PD. (shrink)

The standard economic choice model assumes that the decision maker chooses from sets of alternatives. In contrast, we analyze a choice model in which the decision maker encounters the alternatives in the form of a list. We present two axioms similar in nature to the classical axioms of choice from sets. We show that they characterize all the choice functions from lists that involve the choice of either the first or the last optimal (...) alternative in the list according to some preference relation. We then relate choice functions from lists to the classical notions of choice correspondences and random choice functions. (shrink)

The mesostriatal dopamine system is prominently implicated in model-free reinforcement learning, with fMRI BOLD signals in ventral striatum notably covarying with model-free prediction errors. However, latent learning and devaluation studies show that behavior also shows hallmarks of model-based planning, and the interaction between model-based and model-free values, prediction errors, and preferences is underexplored. We designed a multistep decision task in which model-based and model-free influences on human choice behavior could be distinguished. By (...) showing that choices reflected both influences we could then test the purity of the ventral striatal BOLD signal as a model-free report. Contrary to expectations, the signal reflected both model-free and model-based predictions in proportions matching those that best explained choice behavior. These results challenge the notion of a separate model-free learner and suggest a more integrated computational architecture for high-level human decision-making. (shrink)

Grace's contextual-choice model can account for the results from many studies on choice under concurrent-chain schedules. However, other models, including one that I call the “hyperbolic value-added model,” can also account for these results. Preference and resistance to change may indeed be related, but the best model of preference remains to be determined.

Computational modelling has proven to be a valuable approach in developing theories of spoken-word processing. In this paper, we focus on a particular class of theories in which it is assumed that the spoken-word recognition process consists of two consecutive stages, with an `abstract' discrete symbolic representation at the interface between the stages. In evaluating computational models, it is important to bring in independent arguments for the cognitive plausibility of the algorithms that are selected to compute the processes in a (...) theory. This paper discusses the relation between behavioural studies, theories, and computational models of spoken-word recognition. We explain how computational models can be assessed in terms of the goodness of fit with the behavioural data and the cognitive plausibility of the algorithms. An in-depth analysis of several models provides insights into how computational modelling has led to improved theories and to a better understanding of the human spoken-word recognition process. (shrink)

For decades, discrete choice modelling was practically dominated by only two models: multinomial probit and logit. This paper presents a novel alternative—harmonic choice model. It is qualitatively similar to multinomial probit and logit: if one choice alternative greatly exceeds all (falls below at least one of) other alternatives in terms of utility then it is chosen with probability close to one (zero). Compared to probit and logit, the new model has relatively flat tails and it (...) is steeper in the neighborhood of zero (when all alternatives yield the same utility and the decision maker chooses among them at random). (shrink)

A question at the intersection of scientific modeling and public choice is how to deal with uncertainty about model predictions. This "high-level" uncertainty is necessarily value-laden, and thus must be treated as irreducibly subjective. Nevertheless, formal methods of uncertainty analysis should still be employed for the purpose of clarifying policy debates. I argue that such debates are best informed by models which integrate objective features with subjective ones. This integrated subjectivism is illustrated with a case study from the (...) literature on monetary policy. The paper concludes with some morals for the use of models in determining climate policy. (shrink)

Psychiatric researchers typically assume that the modelling of psychiatric symptoms is not influenced by psychiatric categories; symptoms are modelled and then grouped into a psychiatric category. I highlight this primarily through analysing research domain criteria. RDoC’s importance makes it worth scrutinizing, and this assessment also serves as a case study with relevance for other areas of psychiatry. RDoC takes inadequacies of existing psychiatric categories as holding back causal investigation. Consequently, RDoC aims to circumnavigate existing psychiatric categories by directly investigating the (...) causal basis of symptoms. The unique methodological approach of RDoC exploits the supposed lack of influence of psychiatric categories on symptom modelling, taking psychiatric symptoms as the same regardless of which psychiatric category is employed or if no psychiatric category is employed. But this supposition is not always true. I will show how psychiatric categories can influence symptom modelling, whereby identical behaviours can be considered as different symptoms based on an individual’s psychiatric diagnosis. If the modelling of symptoms is influenced by psychiatric categories, then psychiatric categories will still play a role, a situation which RDoC researchers explicitly aim to avoid. I discuss four ways RDoC could address this issue. This issue also has important implications for factor analysis, cluster analysis, modifying psychiatric categories, and symptom based approaches. (shrink)

_Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory_, a book written by Donald Green and Ian Shapiro and published in 1994, excited much controversy among political scientists and promoted a dialogue among them that was printed in a double issue of the journal Critical Review in 1995. This new book reproduces thirteen essays from the journal written by senior scholars in the field, along with an introduction by the editor of the journal, Jeffrey Friedman, and a rejoinder to the essays by Green (...) and Shapiro. The scholars—who include John Ferejohn, Morris P. Fiorina, Stanley Kelley, Jr., Robert E. Lane, Peter C. Ordeshook, Norman Schofield, and Kenneth A. Shepsle—criticize, agree with, or build on the issues raised by Green and Shapiros critique. Together the essays provide an interesting and accessible way of focusing on competing approaches to the study of politics and the social sciences. (shrink)

Most theories of affective influences on judgement and choice take a valence-based approach, contrasting the effects of positive versus negative feeling states. These approaches have not specified if and when distinct emotions of the same valence have different effects on judgement. In this article, we propose a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. We posit that each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive new events and objects in ways that are consistent with the (...) original cognitive-appraisal dimensions of the emotion. To pit the valence and appraisal-tendency approaches against one another, we present a study that addresses whether two emotions of the same valence but differing appraisals—anger and fear—relate in different ways to risk perception. Consistent with the appraisal-tendency hypothesis, fearful people made pessimistic judgements of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgements. In the Discussion we expand the proposed model and review evidence supporting two social moderators of appraisal-tendency processes. (shrink)

Biologists have proposed a variety of explanations for extravagant sexual displays, and controversies over explanations define the history of sexual selection research. Recently, Richard Prum has d...

The notion of group responsibility has received some very fruitful examination in recent years. But there still remains an important commonsense objection to this notion. Moral responsibility for an action is ordinarily linked to and held to depend upon the action's being the product of an act of choice on the part of the agent. The thrust of the objection here is that it is extremely difficult to understand how intentional acts like acts of choice can be properly (...) attributed to a group. The notion of a group "consciousness" does not seem a very satisfactory resolution of this problem. In this paper I shall propose that there are actually three distinct processes, as well as many hybrid combinations of them there, by which groups "make choices." That is, when we look at the activities of groups, we discover three different kinds of analogues to the act of choice of the individual person. I shall be illustrating each of these models with examples of health care decisions. In addition, I shall also try to illustrate how the level of personal moral responsibility of each of the individuals making up the group, i.e., each one's responsibility for the group's action, can be seen to flow from the particular role that an individual plays within the process of "group choice" that is involved. In this way, I hope to shed light not only on the topics of group choice, group responsibility, and the interplay of personal and group responsibility, but also to show concretely the valuable role that these themes can play in our understanding of the moral elements of the health care setting. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The article comments on the supposed need for a paradigm for the theory of contract, primarily by way of engaging with the most prominent source of late of calls for a paradigm shift in contract theory, the relational theory of contract. The article distinguishes between an empirical, a doctrinal-prescriptive and a theoretical–analytical line of argument as offered by relational theory. With regard to the first line of argument, the article argues that the thought that contract law already is ‘relationally constituted’ (...) is informed by a misunderstanding of the available alternatives to relational theory. With regard to the second line of argument, the article argues that the incorporation of relational norms into the law, although occasionally desirable, is not the only way nor always the best way to sustain the relational contract, and explores the proposition that, at times, the law best supports valuable social practices by refraining from absorbing their constitutive norms. Finally, by way of drawing an analogy with a putative relational theory of promise, the article offers an objection to the thesis that the key to a sound theoretical grasp of the nature of contract and its social role lies in the adoption of the relational paradigm. (shrink)

This article explores the extent to which multiple-choice history/social studies exams measure student knowledge of social studies content. This article presents descriptive statistics that quantify the findings from a qualitative study. Data for this study were collected from 13 tenth-grade world history students in an urban classroom in New York State. Each participant answered 15 multiple-choice questions that had appeared on previous versions of the Global History and Geography Regents exam, the high-stakes exam they would have to take (...) at the end of the school year. As a small-scale exploratory study, the findings are not what quantitative researchers would call generalizable. Nevertheless, the findings raise questions about what tests measure, their effectiveness, and what constitutes social-studies knowledge. (shrink)

Cognitive diagnostic models show great promise in language assessment for providing rich diagnostic information. The lack of a full understanding of second language listening subskills made model selection difficult. In search of optimal CDM that could provide a better understanding of L2 listening subskills and facilitate accurate classification, this study carried a two-layer model selection. At the test level, A-CDM, LLM, and R-RUM had an acceptable and comparable model fit, suggesting mixed inter-attribute relationships of L2 listening subskills. (...) At the item level, Mixed-CDMs were selected and confirmed the existence of mixed relationships. Mixed-CDMs had better model and person fit than G-DNIA. In addition to statistical approaches, the content analysis provided theoretical evidence to confirm and amend the item-level CDMs. It was found that semantic completeness pertaining to the attributes and item features may influence the attribute relationships. Inexplicable attribute conflicts could be a signal of suboptimal model choice. Sample size and the number of multi-attribute items should be taken into account in L2 listening cognitive diagnostic modeling studies. This study provides useful insights into the model selection and the underlying cognitive process for L2 listening tests. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper examines the interaction between economic models and policy advice through a case study of the U.K. government's Panel of Independent Forecasters. The Panel, which met for the first time in February 1993, was part of the government's response to the policy vacuum created by its departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The paper focuses on the policy recommendations made by the Panel and their foundation in economic models. It is argued that, because of their ambiguity, economic (...) models do not provide an “objective” basis for policy making. Rather, they provide a level epistemological basis for debating the various social, political, and moral theories that can be used to frame economic policy. The paper concludes that although economic models often serve to depoliticize economic issues, they also have the potential to do exactly the opposite — namely, repoliticize them by connecting economics to wider social and moral debates. (shrink)

We prove Łos conjecture = Morley theorem in ZF, with the same characterization, i.e., of first order countable theories categorical in $N_\alpha $ for some (equivalently for every ordinal) α > 0. Another central result here in this context is: the number of models of a countable first order T of cardinality $N_\alpha $ is either ≥ |α| for every α or it has a small upper bound (independent of α close to Ð₂).

This article analyzes approaches to nondeterminacy that suggest that one can make justified choices when primary criteria fail to fully determine a best alternative by introducing a secondary criterion. It is shown that these approaches risk violating Basic Contraction Consistency. Some ways of adjusting two-step models in order to protect against this are addressed, and it is suggested that proponents of two-step models should adopt formal conditions which qualify what counts as a permissible secondary criterion that resemble supervaluationist conditions that (...) qualify what counts as admissible precisifications of vague terms. (shrink)

A growing body of empirical evidence suggests the existence of a Paradox of Choice, whereby a larger choice set leads to a lower expected payoff to the decisionmaker. These empirical findings contradict traditional choice-theoretic results in microeconomics and even social psychology, suggesting profound yet unexplained aspects of choice settings/behavior. The Paradox remains largely as a theoretically-rootless empirical phenomenon. We neither understand the mechanisms and conditions that generate it, nor whether the Paradox stems from choice behavior, (...) choice setting, or both. We present a general search model of consumer choice under incomplete information to examine the theoretical existence and conditions for the Paradox. The model departs from traditional microeconomic choice theory in assuming no “cognitive free lunches.” Search and evaluative efforts require time, focus, and opportunity cost in the model, as in real life. The model shows that conditions for Paradox readily exist, diminishing returns to potential value of the choice in choice set size is a necessary condition for a Paradox outcome, that a Paradox outcome can occur with or without a “choice overload” response by the decisionmaker, and that avoidance of a Paradox outcome is an impossibility in some choice settings (primitive to setting regardless of choice behavior). Lastly, we develop a pareto-improving choice set reduction algorithm that eliminates weakly dominated choice set elements and presents the restricted choice set to the decisionmaker. As such, it is shown that the algorithm acts to treat or mitigate the Paradox of Choice, as well as to pareto-improve choice-supporting evaluation more generally. Like established AI recommender systems, the novel algorithm filters choices. In the present case, the filtering is based upon identification of weakly dominated choice set elements. (shrink)

Individuals make decisions under uncertainty every day based on incomplete information concerning the potential outcome of the choice or chance levels. The choices individuals make often deviate from the rational or mathematically objective solution. Accordingly, the dynamics of human decision-making are difficult to capture using conventional, linear mathematical models. Here, we present data from a two-choice task with variable risk between sure loss and risky loss to illustrate how a simple nonlinear dynamical system can be employed to capture (...) the dynamics of human decision-making under uncertainty (i.e., multi-stability, bifurcations). We test the feasibility of this model quantitatively and demonstrate how the model can account for up to 86% of the observed choice behavior. The implications of using dynamical models for explaining the nonlinear complexities of human decision-making are discussed, as well as the degree to which nonlinear dynamical systems theory might offer an alternative framework for understanding human decision-making processes. (shrink)

Applying Weglorz' mode s of set theory without the axiom of choice, we investigate Arrow-type social we fare functions for infinite societies with restricted coalition algebras. We show that there is a reasonable, nondictatorial social welfare function satisfying “finite discrimination”, if and only if in Weglorz' mode there is a free ultrafilter on a set representing the individuals.