Suppose a committee or a jury confronts a complex question, the answer to which requires attending to several sub-questions. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the voting results are used as premises for the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure can be contrasted with the conclusion-based approach, which requires the members to directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of each member (...) being guided by her views on the relevant sub-questions. The two procedures are not equivalent: There may be a majority of voters supporting each of the premises, but if these majorities do not significantly overlap, there will be a majority against the conclusion. Pettit (2001) connects the choice between the two procedures with the discussion of deliberative democracy. The problem we want to examine instead concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. Which of them is better when it comes to tracking truth? As it turns out, the answer is not univocal. On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem, the premise-based procedure can be shown to be superior if the objective is reach truth for the right reasons, without making any mistakes on the way. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable, even though, for the most part, the premise-based procedure will retain its superiority. (shrink)

Four experiments investigated uncertainty about a premise in a deductive argument as a function of the expertise of the speaker and of the conversational context. The procedure mimicked everyday reasoning in that participants were not told that the premises were to be treated as certain. The results showed that the perceived likelihood of a conclusion was greater when the major or the minor premise was uttered by an expert rather than a novice (Experiment 1). The results also (...) showed that uncertainty about the conclusion was higher when the major premise was uttered by a novice and an alternative premise by an expert, compared to when the major premise was uttered by an expert and the alternative by a novice (Experiment 2). Similarly, the believability of a conclusion was considerably lower when the minor premise was uttered by a novice and denied by an expert, as opposed to when an expert uttered the minor premise and a novice denied it (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 showed that the nature of the uncertainty induced by a denial of the minor premise depended on whether or not the context was a conversation. These results pose difficult problems for current theories of reasoning, as current theories are based on the results of experiments in which the premises are treated as certain. Our discussion of the results emphasises the importance of pragmatics in reasoning, namely, the role of general knowledge about the world in assessing the probability of a premise uttered by an expert or a novice and the role of interpretations of the premise based on pragmatic inferences in revising these initial probabilities. (shrink)

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically connected issues often leads to collective inconsistency. This study examines two collective decision-making procedures designed to avoid such inconsistency—one premise-based and the other conclusion-based. While the relative desirability of the two procedures has been studied extensively from a theoretical perspective, the preference of individuals regarding the two procedures has been less studied empirically. In the present study, a scenario-based questionnaire survey of participant preferences for the two procedures was conducted, (...) taking into consideration prevailing social norms in the society to which the participants belong and the heterogeneity of the participants’ past experiences. Results show that a minority opinion not matching a prevailing social norm is more likely to be supported when the conclusion-based procedure is used. This can be explained by a basic property of the conclusion-based procedure: The procedure does not require voters to reveal their reasons for reaching a particular conclusion. This property proves appealing for participants who have a minority opinion. Such a finding is highly relevant to future studies on strategic behaviors in choosing a collective decision-making procedure. (shrink)

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions is called judgment aggregation. Literature in social choice and political theory has claimed that judgment aggregation raises serious concerns. For example, consider a set of premises and a conclusion where the latter is logically equivalent to the former. When majority voting is applied to some propositions (the premises) it may give a different outcome than majority voting applied to another set of propositions (the (...) conclusion). This problem is known as the discursive dilemma (or paradox). The discursive dilemma is a serious problem since it is not clear whether a collective outcome exists in these cases, and if it does, what it is like. Moreover, the two suggested escape-routes from the paradox—the so-called premise-based procedure and the conclusion-based procedure—are not, as I will show, satisfactory methods for group decision-making. In this paper I introduce a new aggregation procedure inspired by an operator defined in artificial intelligence in order to merge belief bases. The result is that we do not need to worry about paradoxical outcomes, since these arise only when inconsistent collective judgments are not ruled out from the set of possible solutions. (shrink)

Suppose a committee has to take a stand on a complex issue, where the decision presupposes answering a number of sub-questions. There is an agreement within the committee which sub-questions should be posed. All questions are of the ”yes or no?”-type and the main question is to be given the yes-answer if and only if each sub-question is answered with “yes”. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one procedure, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the (...) voting results then determine the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure (or pbp, for short) can be contrasted with the conclusion-based procedure (cbp), on which the members directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of each member being guided by her views on the relevant sub-questions. The problem we want to examine concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. In some cases one can assume that the question before the committee has a right answer, which the committee is trying to reach. Is one of the two procedures better when it comes to tracking the truth? As it turns out, the answer to this query is not univocal: On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem we shall show that the premise-based procedure is clearly superior if we want to reach truth for the right reasons, i.e. without making any mistakes on the road to the conclusion. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be special cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable. But for the most part, the premise-based procedure will still retain its superiority. In this respect, our results disconfirm the tentative conjectures that have been put forward in Pettit and Rabinowicz (2001). (shrink)

According to Sperber and Wilson, relevance theory’s comprehension/interpretation procedure for metaphorical utterances does not require details specific to metaphor (or nonliteral discourse); instead, the same type of comprehension procedure as that in place for literal utterances covers metaphors as well. One of Sperber and Wilson’s central reasons for holding this is that metaphorical utterances occupy one end of a continuum that includes literal, loose and hyperbolic utterances with no sharp boundaries in between them. Call this the continuum argument (...) about interpreting metaphors. My aim is to show that this continuum argument doesn’t work. For if it were to work, it would have an unwanted consequence: it could be converted into a continuum argument about interpreting linguistic errors, including slips of the tongue, of which malaprops are a special case. In particular, based on the premise that the literal–loose–metaphorical continuum extends to malaprops also, we could conclude that the relevance theoretic comprehension procedure for malaprops does not require details specific to linguistic errors, that is, details beyond those already in place for interpreting literal utterances. Given that we have good reason to reject this conclusion, we also have good reason to rethink the conclusion of the continuum argument about interpreting metaphors. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments, generally referred to as argument scheme. After outlining our approach, denominated Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT, see Rigotti and Greco Morasso 2006, 2009; Rigotti 2006, 2008, 2009), we compare it to other modern and contemporary approaches, to eventually illustrate some advantages offered by it. In spite of the evident connection with the tradition of topics, emerging also from AMT’s denomination, its involvement in the contemporary dialogue on argument schemes should not be (...) overlooked. The model builds in particular on the theoretical and methodological perspective of pragma-dialectics in its extended version, reconciling dialectic and rhetoric; nevertheless, it also takes into account numerous other contributions to the study of argument schemes. Aiming at a representation of argument schemes able to monitor the inferential cohesion and completeness of arguments, AMT focuses on two components of argument scheme that could be distinguished, readapting pragma-dialectical terms, as procedural and material respectively. The procedural component is based on the semantic-ontological structure, which generates the inferential connection from which the logical form of the argument is derived. The material component integrates into the argument scheme the implicit and explicit premises bound to the contextual common ground (Rigotti 2006). In this paper, the comparison of the AMT to other approaches focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments and not on the typologies of argument schemes and on the principles they are based on, which the authors intend to tackle in a further paper. (shrink)

Which rules for aggregating judgments on logically connected propositions are manipulable and which not? In this paper, we introduce a preference-free concept of non-manipulability and contrast it with a preference-theoretic concept of strategy-proofness. We characterize all non-manipulable and all strategy-proof judgment aggregation rules and prove an impossibility theorem similar to the Gibbard--Satterthwaite theorem. We also discuss weaker forms of non-manipulability and strategy-proofness. Comparing two frequently discussed aggregation rules, we show that “conclusion-based voting” is less vulnerable to manipulation than “ (...) class='Hi'>premise-based voting”, which is strategy-proof only for “reason-oriented” individuals. Surprisingly, for “outcome-oriented” individuals, the two rules are strategically equivalent, generating identical judgments in equilibrium. Our results introduce game-theoretic considerations into judgment aggregation and have implications for debates on deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Introduction: There is significant overlap in the type of structural language impairments exhibited by children with autism spectrum disorder and children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This similarity suggests that the cognitive impairment contributing to the structural language deficits in ASD and ADHD may be shared. Previous studies have speculated that procedural memory deficits may be the shared cognitive impairment. The procedural deficit hypothesis argues that language deficits can be explained by differences in the neural structures underlying the procedural memory (...) network. This hypothesis is based on the premise that the neural structures comprising the procedural network support language learning. In this study, we aimed to test the PDH in children with ASD, ADHD, and typical development.Methods: One hundred and sixty-three participants : 91 with ASD, 26 with ADHD, and 46 with TD, completed standardized measures of cognitive and language ability as well as structural magnetic resonance imaging. We compared the structural language abilities, the neural structures underlying the procedural memory network, and the relationship between structural language and neural structure across diagnostic groups.Results: Our analyses revealed that while the structural language abilities differed across ASD, ADHD, and TD groups, the thickness, area, and volume of the structures supporting the procedural memory network were not significantly different between diagnostic groups. Also, several neural structures were associated with structural language abilities across diagnostic groups. Only two of these structures, the inferior frontal gyrus, and the left superior parietal gyrus, are known to be linked to the procedural memory network.Conclusions: The inferior frontal gyrus and the left superior parietal gyrus, have well-established roles in language learning independent of their role as part of the procedural memory system. Other structures such as the caudate and cerebellum, with critical roles in the procedural memory network, were not associated with structural language abilities across diagnostic groups. It is unclear whether the procedural memory network plays a fundamental role in language learning in ASD, ADHD, and TD. (shrink)

The aggregation of individual judgments over interrelated propositions is a newly arising field of social choice theory. I introduce several independence conditions on judgment aggregation rules, each of which protects against a specific type of manipulation by agenda setters or voters. I derive impossibility theorems whereby these independence conditions are incompatible with certain minimal requirements. Unlike earlier impossibility results, the main result here holds for any (non-trivial) agenda. However, independence conditions arguably undermine the logical structure of judgment aggregation. I therefore (...) suggest restricting independence to premises, which leads to a generalised premise-based procedure. This procedure is proven to be possible if the premises are logically independent. (shrink)

The aggregation of consistent individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective judgment on those propositions has recently drawn much attention. Seemingly reasonable aggregation procedures, such as propositionwise majority voting, cannot ensure an equally consistent collective conclusion. The literature on judgment aggregation refers to that problem as the discursive dilemma. In this paper, we motivate that many groups do not only want to reach a factually right conclusion, but also want to correctly evaluate the reasons for that conclusion. In (...) other words, we address the problem of tracking the true situation instead of merely selecting the right outcome. We set up a probabilistic model analogous to Bovens and Rabinowicz (2006) and compare several aggregation procedures by means of theoretical results, numerical simulations and practical considerations. Among them are the premise-based, the situation-based and the distance-based procedure. Our findings confirm the conjecture in Hartmann, Pigozzi and Sprenger (2008) that the premise-based procedure is a crude, but reliable and sometimes even optimal form of judgment aggregation. (shrink)

Fundamental questions in value sensitive design include whether and how high-tech products/artefacts could embody values and ethical ideals, and how plural and incommensurable values of ethical and social importance could be chosen rationally and objectively at a collective level. By using a humanitarian cargo drone study as a starting point, this paper tackles the challenges that VSD’s lack of commitment to a specific ethical theory generates in practical applications. Besides, it highlights how mainstream ethical approaches usually related to VSD are (...) incapable of solving main ethical dilemmas raised by technological design for well-being in democratic settings. Accordingly, it is argued that VSD’s ethical-democratic import would substantially be enhanced by the espousal of a procedural ethics stance and the deliberative approach to value and welfare entailed by Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Differently from rival ethical–political theories, its normative and meta-ethical foundations better handle human diversity, value-goal pluralism, conflicting vested interests as well as the epistemic-moral disagreements typical of contemporary complex democracies. Particularly, Sen’s capability approach procedural-deliberative tenets result in an “objective-impartial” choice procedure selecting a “hierarchy” of plural incommensurable values and rational goals thus, suitable to validate an applied science such as welfare-oriented technological design in concrete social environments. Conclusions suggest that refining VSD with a capability-based procedural approach to ethics fosters the concern for democracy and social justice while preserving vital scientific-technical standards. Major advantages are at an applied level to delivering ethically and socially justified, but yet highly functional technologies and high-tech products/artefacts. (shrink)

How can different individuals' probability functions on a given sigma-algebra of events be aggregated into a collective probability function? Classic approaches to this problem often require 'event-wise independence': the collective probability for each event should depend only on the individuals' probabilities for that event. In practice, however, some events may be 'basic' and others 'derivative', so that it makes sense first to aggregate the probabilities for the former and then to let these constrain the probabilities for the latter. We formalize (...) this idea by introducing a 'premise-based' approach to probabilistic opinion pooling, and show that, under a variety of assumptions, it leads to linear or neutral opinion pooling on the 'premises'. This paper is the second of two self-contained, but technically related companion papers inspired by binary judgment-aggregation theory. (shrink)

Suppose a committee or a jury confronts a complex question, the answer to which requires attending to several sub-questions. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the voting results are used as premises for the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure can be contrasted with the conclusion-based approach, which requires the members to directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of each member (...) being guided by her views on the relevant sub-questions. The two procedures are not equivalent: There may be a majority of voters supporting each of the premises, but if these majorities do not significantly overlap, there will be a majority against the conclusion. Pettit (2001) connects the choice between the two procedures with the discussion of deliberative democracy. The problem we want to examine instead concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. Which of them is better when it comes to tracking truth? As it turns out, the answer is not univocal. On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem, the premise-based procedure can be shown to be superior if the objective is reach truth for the right reasons, without making any mistakes on the way. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable, even though, for the most part, the premise-based procedure will retain its superiority. (shrink)

A committee has to address a complex question, the answer to which requires answering several sub-questions. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one procedure, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the voting results then are used as premises for the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure can be contrasted with the conclusion-based procedure. On that procedure, the members directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of (...) each member being guided by her views on the relevant sub-questions. These procedures are by no means equivalent, which has been pointed out in legal theory in connection with jury votes. There may be a majority of voters supporting each premise, but if these majorities do not significantly overlap, there will be a majority against the conclusion. Pettit connects the choice between the two procedures with general political theory, in particular, with the discussion of deliberative democracy. However, the problem we want to examine concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. In some cases one can assume that the question before the committee has the right answer. In cases like this, is one of the two procedures better when it comes to tracking the truth? As it turns out, the answer to this query is not univocal. On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem, we show that the premise-based procedure is clearly superior if the objective is reach truth for the right reasons, i.e. without making any mistakes on the way. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable, even though, for the most part, the premise-based procedure will retain its superiority. Our results partly confirm and partly disconfirm the tentative conjectures that have been put forward in Pettit and Rabinowicz. (shrink)

Suppose a committee or a jury confronts a complex question, the answer to which requires attending to several sub-questions. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the voting results are used as premises for the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure can be contrasted with the conclusion-based approach, which requires the members to directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of each member (...) being guided by her views on the relevant sub-questions. The two procedures are not equivalent: There may be a majority of voters supporting each of the premises, but if these majorities do not significantly overlap, there will be a majority against the conclusion. Pettit (2001) connects the choice between the two procedures with the discussion of deliberative democracy. The problem we want to examine instead concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. Which of them is better when it comes to tracking truth? As it turns out, the answer is not univocal. On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem, the premise-based procedure can be shown to be superior if the objective is reach truth for the right reasons, without making any mistakes on the way. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable, even though, for the most part, the premise-based procedure will retain its superiority. (shrink)

The combination of individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions is called judgment aggregation. Literature in social choice and political theory has claimed that judgment aggregation raises serious concerns. For example, consider a set of premises and a conclusion in which the latter is logically equivalent to the former. When majority voting is applied to some propositions (the premises) it may give a different outcome than majority voting applied to another set of propositions (...) (the conclusion). This problem is known as the doctrinal paradox. The doctrinal paradox is a serious problem since it is not clear whether a collective outcome exists in these cases, and if it does, what it is like. Moreover, the two suggested escape-routes from the paradox - the so-called premise-based procedure and the conclusion-based procedure - are not, as I will show, satisfactory methods for group decision-making. In this paper I introduce a new aggregation procedure inspired by an operator defined in artificial intelligence in order to merge knowledge bases. The result is that we do not need to worry about paradoxical outcomes, since these arise only when inconsistent collective judgments are not ruled out from the set of possible solutions. (shrink)

Many groups make decisions over multiple interconnected propositions. The “doctrinal paradox” or “discursive dilemma” shows that propositionwise majority voting can generate inconsistent collective sets of judgments, even when individual sets of judgments are all consistent. I develop a simple model for determining the probability of the paradox, given various assumptions about the probability distribution of individual sets of judgments, including impartial culture and impartial anonymous culture assumptions. I prove several convergence results, identifying when the probability of the paradox converges to (...) 1, and when it converges to 0, as the number of individuals increases. Drawing on the Condorcet jury theorem and work by Bovens and Rabinowicz , I use the model to assess the “truth-tracking” performance of two decision procedures, the premise- and conclusion-based procedures. I compare the present results with existing results on the probability of Condorcet’s paradox. I suggest that the doctrinal paradox is likely to occur under plausible conditions. (shrink)

The problem of the aggregation of consistent individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective judgment on the same propositions has recently drawn much attention. The dificulty lies in the fact that a seemingly reasonable aggregation procedure, such as propositionwise majority voting, cannot ensure an equally consistent collective outcome. The literature on judgment aggregation refers to such dilemmas as the discursive paradox. So far, three procedures have been proposed to overcome the paradox: the premise-based and conclusion- (...) class='Hi'>based procedures on the one hand, and the merging approach on the other hand. In this paper we assume that the decision which the group is trying to reach is factually right or wrong. Hence, the question is how good the merging approach is in tracking the truth, and how it compares with the premise-based and conclusion-based procedures. (shrink)

The increasing application of artificial intelligence (AI) to healthcare raises both hope and ethical concerns. Some advanced machine learning methods provide accurate clinical predictions at the expense of a significant lack of explainability. Alex John London has defended that accuracy is a more important value than explainability in AI medicine. In this article, we locate the trade-off between accurate performance and explainable algorithms in the context of distributive justice. We acknowledge that accuracy is cardinal from outcome-oriented justice because it helps (...) to maximize patients’ benefits and optimizes limited resources. However, we claim that the opaqueness of the algorithmic black box and its absence of explainability threatens core commitments of procedural fairness such as accountability, avoidance of bias, and transparency. To illustrate this, we discuss liver transplantation as a case of critical medical resources in which the lack of explainability in AI-based allocation algorithms is procedurally unfair. Finally, we provide a number of ethical recommendations for when considering the use of unexplainable algorithms in the distribution of health-related resources. (shrink)

Transitive inference is claimed to be “deductive”. Yet every group/species ever reported apparently uses it. We asked 58 adults to solve five-term transitive tasks, requiring neither training nor premise learning. A computer-based procedure ensured all premises were continually visible. Response accuracy and RT (non-discriminative nRT ) were measured as is typically done. We also measured RT confined to correct responses ( cRT ). Overall, very few typical transitive phenomena emerged. The symbolic distance effect never extended to (...) class='Hi'>premise recall and was not at all evident for nRT ; suggesting the use of non-deductive end-anchor strategies. For overall performance, and particularly the critical B ? D inference, our findings indicate that deductive transitive inference is far more intellectually challenging than previously thought. Contrasts of our present findings against previous findings suggest at least two distinct transitive inference modes, with most research and most computational models to date targeting an associative mode rather than their desired deductive mode. This conclusion fits well with the growing number of theories embracing a “dual process” conception of reasoning. Finally, our differing findings for nRT versus cRT suggest that researchers should give closer consideration to matching the RT measure they use to the particular conception of transitive inference they pre-held. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Embodied Knowledge in Ensemble Performance by J. Murphy McCalebEric C. Melley, D.M.A.J. Murphy McCaleb, Embodied Knowledge in Ensemble Performance (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2014)J. Murphy McCaleb’s Embodied Knowledge in Ensemble Performance explores how musicians interact and share information while performing, specifically within unconducted chamber ensembles. The book is a direct outgrowth of the author’s doctoral dissertation and follows a similar format. Beginning with a presentation of four essential research (...) questions, McCaleb continues with an overview and justification for his methodology, followed by case studies, conclusions, and foundations for further research. The four questions McCaleb seeks to answer with this volume are: How do musicians interact and share information with each other while performing? What is the nature of the information being shared in ensemble performance? To what extent does the musical content being performed affect the ways it has to be physically created by musicians? How does the physical relationship between the performers and their instruments relate to communicative and interactive processes of ensemble performance? After an explanation of methodology, McCaleb devotes a chapter to each of the four questions. The substantial and excellent review of literature is distributed throughout the comprising six chapters, providing a natural connection between case studies, previous research, and resultant conclusions. While the author suggests the book [End Page 103] has value for both researchers and practitioners, the most prominent result of the discourse provides a new paradigm with which to study ensemble interaction, but contains few practical suggestions for performers, leaning heavily on previous research. McCaleb’s work will most directly benefit other researchers and music education theorists.The volume spans 140 pages, including an index and bibliography, as well as an accompanying DVD. The DVD includes video examples of rehearsals and performances for two ensembles that served as subjects of the research case studies: the Boult String Quartet, the premiere student quartet at the Birmingham Conservatoire (where the author was completing his doctorate), and The Supergroup, an ensemble that performs free group improvisations. The author is himself a member of The Supergroup and serves as “a reflective practitioner, assuming the roles of researcher and musician” (p.16). While his research methodology is pluralistic (though decidedly qualitative in nature), the employment of action research, wherein the “people being studied become part of the knowledge creation process,” is a prominent element in his method (p. 13). This is one area where McCaleb’s perspective is both powerful and open to debate. One of the central and strongest premises of McCaleb’s work is that music is a singular form of procedural knowledge. Because the nature of procedural knowledge at some level defies linguistic translation, the perspective of performing musicians is a critical element to any phenomenological study of musical performance. The author acknowledges that this raises questions of subjectivity and works to incorporate empirical methods such as “observation, interviews, literature review, and case studies” to counter the more subjective methodology (p.15). McCaleb’s multifaceted approach to research is for the most part highly effective, but at times the anecdotal tone of his first-hand descriptions of musical experiences can soften the force of his premise.Based on the concept that music is a form of procedural knowledge, McCaleb posits that communication among ensemble musicians is first and foremost musical. In order to illustrate this, the author explores other common models used to study interaction between musicians. In this review of other research studies, McCaleb is most effective in pointing out the inadequacies of applying other models to musical ensemble interaction. The linguistic model, which seeks to correlate physical gestures with speech patterns, remains inadequate to study communication between instrumental musicians. Previous research investigating the gestural model, while focusing on instrumental music, is preoccupied with emotional content, primarily between performer and audience, and does not approach the question of what and how communication occurs between performing musicians (pp. 27–28). Based on the inadequacies of other research [End Page 104] models, McCaleb seeks to establish a new paradigm of interaction entirely independent of social models and based solely in musical performance (p. 7).This points to an important area of research that McCaleb largely neglects: the neuroscience... (shrink)

We develop a conceptually clear, intuitive, and feasible decision procedure for testing satisfiability in the full multi\-agent epistemic logic \CMAELCD\ with operators for common and distributed knowledge for all coalitions of agents mentioned in the language. To that end, we introduce Hintikka structures for \CMAELCD\ and prove that satisfiability in such structures is equivalent to satisfiability in standard models. Using that result, we design an incremental tableau-building procedure that eventually constructs a satisfying Hintikka structure for every satisfiable input (...) set of formulae of \CMAELCD\ and closes for every unsatisfiable input set of formulae. (shrink)

We describe BDD-based decision procedures for the modal logic K. Our approach is inspired by the automata-theoretic approach, but we avoid explicit automata construction. Instead, we compute certain fixpoints of a set of types — which can be viewed as an on-the-fly emptiness of the automaton. We use BDDs to represent and manipulate such type sets, and investigate different kinds of representations as well as a “level-based” representation scheme. The latter turns out to speed up construction and reduce (...) memory consumption considerably. We also study the effect of formula simplification on our decision procedures. To prove the viability of our approach, we compare our approach with a representative selection of other approaches, including a translation of K to QBF. Our results indicate that the BDD-based approach dominates for modally heavy formulae, while search-based approaches dominate for propositionally heavy formulae. (shrink)

This methodological discussion invites critical reflection about the procedures used to analyze the contribution of qualitative and mixed methods research to nursing trials by mounting an argument that these should rest on multiple publications produced about a project, rather than a single article. We illustrate the value‐added of this approach with findings from a qualitative, cross‐case analysis of three critical case exemplars from nursing researchers that each used a qualitative approach with a mixed method phase. The holistic lens afforded by (...) a case‐based approach informs nursing inquiry by documenting that the critical case exemplars presented evidence of (a) a sustained commitment of resources and expertise for the qualitative methods that extended across more than one phase of the trial, (b) the impact of the qualitative methods on the trial or its aftermath, (c) deploying a theoretical or conceptual framework for a variety of purposes, and (d) integrating qualitative and quantitative data for purposes of extending explanatory power. Findings challenge the practice of linking purposes served by qualitative and mixed methods to a single trial phase. (shrink)

Despite being fairly powerful, finite non-deterministic matrices are unable to characterize some logics of formal inconsistency, such as those found between mbCcl and Cila. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose here restricted non-deterministic matrices (in short, RNmatrices), which are non-deterministic algebras together with a subset of the set of valuations. This allows us to characterize not only mbCcl and Cila (which is equivalent, up to language, to da Costa's logic C_1) but the whole hierarchy of da Costa's calculi (...) C_n. This produces a novel decision procedure for these logics. Moreover, we show that the RNmatrix semantics proposed here induces naturally a labelled tableau system for each C_n, which constitutes another decision procedure for these logics. This new semantics allows us to conceive da Costa's hierarchy of C-systems as a family of (non deterministically) (n+2)-valued logics, where n is the number of "inconsistently true" truth-values and 2 is the number of "classical" or "consistent" truth-values, for every C_n. (shrink)

This paper focuses on an explanation in a newspaper article: why new European Union citizens will come to the UK from Eastern Europe (e.g., because of available jobs). Using a corpus-based method of analysis, I show how regular target readers have been positioned to generate premises in dialogue with the explanation propositions, and thus into an understanding of the explanation as an argument, one which contains a biased conclusion not apparent in the text. Employing this method, and in particular (...) ‘corpus comparative statistical keywords’, I show how two issues can be freshly looked at: implicit premise recovery; the argument/explanation distinction. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper follows on previous papers which present and evaluate various decision procedures for modal logics. We consider new test sets and systems that have been recently proposed in the literature. This new experimental analysis confirm previous experimental results in showing that SAT based decision procedures, i.e., the procedures built on top of decision procedures for propositional satisfiability, are more efficient than tableau based decision procedures. They also confirm previous evidence of an easy-hard-easy pattern in the satisfiability (...) curve for modal K. Finally, on these tests, SAT based decision procedures are also more efficient than the recently proposed decision procedures based on translation methods. These results contradict some of the claims presented in previous papers by other authors. (shrink)

In “Risk Based Passenger Screening in Aviation Security: Implications and Variants of a New Paradigm”, Sebastian Weydner-Volkmann describes the current paradigm shift from ‘traditional’ forms of screening to ‘risk based passenger screening’ (RBS) in aviation security. This paradigm shift is put in the context of the wider historical development of risk management approaches. Through a discussion of Michel Foucault, Herfried Münkler and Ulrich Beck, Weydner-Volkmann analyses the shortcomings of such approaches in public security policies, which become especially evident (...) in the aviation security context. As he shows, the turn towards methods of RBS can be seen as an attempt to address a trade-off ‘trilemma’ between the effective provision of security, the implied costs for industry and passengers, and the ethical, legal and societal implications of the screening procedures. In order to analyse foreseeable outcomes of embracing RBS, he differentiates three prototypical variants of the new paradigm on the basis of their main referent and rationale. For each variant, he then subsequently assesses the implications for the ‘trilemma’, after having unveiled the criteria of analysis that will necessarily have to be followed within a serious appraisal of RBS methods. (shrink)

We consider fragments of the relational logic RL(1) obtained by posing various constraints on the relational terms involving the operator of composition of relations. These fragments allow to express several non classical logics including modal and description logics. We show how relational dual tableaux can be employed to provide decision procedures for each of them.

Max Wertheimer, in his classic Productive Thinking, linked understanding to transfer: Understanding is important because it provides the ability to generalize the solution of one problem to apply to another. Recent work in human and machine learning has led to the development of a new class of generalization mechanism, called here analysis‐based generalization, which can be used to provide a concrete account of the linkage Wertheimer suggested: these mechanisms all, in different ways, use understanding of examples in the generalization (...) process. In this paper I review this class of mechanism, and describe a method for causal attribution that can produce the analyses of examples that the generalization methods require, in the domain of simple procedures in human‐computer interaction. This causal analysis method is linked with analysis‐based generalization to form EXPL, an implemented model which is a concrete, though limited, instontiation of Wertheimer s scheme. EXPL constructs an understanding of an example procedure and generalizes it on the basis of that understanding. Results of an empirical study suggest that some of EXPL's attribution heuristics are used by people, and that while a subclass of analysis‐based methods, called superstitious methods, seem to provide a more plausible account of people's generalization under the conditions of the study than a contrasting class of rationalistic methods, at least some participants appear to use methods from both classes. The results also show that explanation‐based methods, which rely on comprehensive domain theories, must be used in conjunction with a means for extending the domain theory. If thus enhanced, explanation‐based methods are able to mimic the effects of other analysis‐based methods, and can provide a good account of the data, though combinations of other methods must also be considered. Finally, I return to Wertheimer s ideas to argue that none of the current analysis‐based generalization methods fully captures Wertheimer s notion of understanding. Proper choice among different possible analyses of an example is crucial for Wertheimer, but I argue that this problem may be beyond the reach of learning systems. (shrink)

Our study provides a review of argument-based scientific literature to address conscientious objections to end-of-life procedures. We also proposed a taxonomy based on this study that might facilitate clarification of this discussion at a basic level. The three clusters of our taxonomy include (1) nonconventional compatibilists that claim that conscientious objection against morally repugnant social conventions is compatible with professional obligation, (2) conventional compatibilists that suggest that conscientious objection against social convention is permissible under certain terms of compromise, (...) and (3) conventional incompatibilists that aver that conscientious objection is incompatible with the privileges and obligations of a health care provider. We conclude with three moments of reflective pause. The first pause reflects on the question of the health of a society's pluralism. The second pause results in suggested practice guidelines for conscientious objection to facilitate cooperation. The final pause reveals the need for further research to uncover a global perspective. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, technical advances have taken place in medicine that have greatly increased the possibilities of life-prolonging intervention. The increased possibilities of intervening have brought along new ethical questions. Not everything that is technically possible is appropriate in a specific case: not everything that could be done should be done. In the 1980s, a new term was coined to indicate a class of inappropriate interventions: “medically futile treatment”. A debate followed, with contributions from the USA and several (...) western European countries. A similar debate later took place in Mediterranean countries, although with a different terminology. The purpose of this article is to provide an up-to-date and systematic analysis of the concept of futility, and to draw some conclusions on its operationalisation in medical practice. While the concept of “medical futility” in theory applies to all kinds of medical intervention that might be performed without being medically indicated—things such as certain medical screenings and cosmetic surgery—in practice the literature on “futility” deals only with life-saving and life-sustaining medical interventions. This article deals with this more limited application of the concept of “futility”. (shrink)

"Procedural Justice" offers a theory of procedural fairness for civil dispute resolution. The core idea behind the theory is the procedural legitimacy thesis: participation rights are essential for the legitimacy of adjudicatory procedures. The theory yields two principles of procedural justice: the accuracy principle and the participation principle. The two principles require a system of procedure to aim at accuracy and to afford reasonable rights of participation qualified by a practicability constraint. The Article begins in Part I, Introduction, with (...) two observations. First, the function of procedure is to particularize general substantive norms so that they can guide action. Second, the hard problem of procedural justice corresponds to the following question: How can we regard ourselves as obligated by legitimate authority to comply with a judgment that we believe (or even know) to be in error with respect to the substantive merits? The theory of procedural justice is developed in several stages, beginning with some preliminary questions and problems. The first question - what is procedure? - is the most difficult and requires an extensive answer: Part II, Substance and Procedure, defines the subject of the inquiry by offering a new theory of the distinction between substance and procedure that acknowledges the entanglement of the action-guiding roles of substantive and procedural rules while preserving the distinction between two ideal types of rules. The key to the development of this account of the nature of procedure is a thought experiment, in which we imagine a world with the maximum possible acoustic separation between substance and procedure. Part III, The Foundations of Procedural Justice, lays out the premises of general jurisprudence that ground the theory and answers a series of objections to the notion that the search for a theory of procedural justice is a worthwhile enterprise. Sections II and III set the stage for the more difficult work of constructing a theory of procedural legitimacy. Part IV, Views of Procedural Justice, investigates the theories of procedural fairness found explicitly or implicitly in case law and commentary. After a preliminary inquiry that distinguishes procedural justice from other forms of justice, Part IV focuses on three models or theories. The first, the accuracy model, assumes that the aim of civil dispute resolution is correct application of the law to the facts. The second, the balancing model, assumes that the aim of civil procedure is to strike a fair balance between the costs and benefits of adjudication. The third, the participation model, assumes that the very idea of a correct outcome must be understood as a function of process that guarantees fair and equal participation. Part IV demonstrates that none of these models provides the basis for a fully adequate theory of procedural justice. In Part V, The Value of Participation, the lessons learned from analysis and critique of the three models are then applied to the question whether a right of participation can be justified for reasons that are not reducible to either its effect on the accuracy or its effect on the cost of adjudication. The most important result of Part V is the Participatory Legitimacy Thesis: it is (usually) a condition for the fairness of a procedure that those who are to be finally bound shall have a reasonable opportunity to participate in the proceedings. The central normative thrust of Procedural Justice is developed in Part VI, Principles of Procedural Justice. The first principle, the Participation Principle, stipulates a minimum (and minimal) right of participation, in the form of notice and an opportunity to be heard, that must be satisfied (if feasible) in order for a procedure to be considered fair. The second principle, the Accuracy Principle, specifies the achievement of legally correct outcomes as the criterion for measuring procedural fairness, subject to four provisos, each of which sets out circumstances under which a departure from the goal of accuracy is justified by procedural fairness itself. In Part VII, The Problem of Aggregation, the Participation Principle and the Accuracy Principle are applied to the central problem of contemporary civil procedure - the aggregation of claims in mass litigation. Part VIII offers some concluding observations about the point and significance of Procedural Justice. (shrink)

Background: Medical decision making is based on patient autonomy and informed consent, which is an integral part of medical ethics, risk management and clinical governance. Consent to treatment has been extensively discussed, but the viewpoint of patients is not well represented. A new consent form was introduced by the Department of Health in 2001.Aims: To determine the information most important to patients, to facilitate evidence-based guidelines and to provide a valid and reliable consent-procedure-satisfaction questionnaire.Methods: An anonymous quantitative (...) survey was carried out, asking 100 patients 15 questions regarding procedures they may need to undergo, using a Visual Analogue Scale to test the importance of each question.Results and discussion: In total there were 77 respondents and the mean age was 48.8 years. There were 52% women and 48% men. Major complications, such as not undergoing the procedure, future management and long-term effect on work, all scored a median of 95%. Least concerns were related to technical details of the procedure and minor complications . All other questions were still considered important . No significant differences were observed between sex, age and professional groups, but a significant difference was observed between the education groups. Qualifications of the doctor did not correlate to any other question.Conclusions: This questionnaire is proposed as a basis for informed consent guidelines to health workers and for measures of satisfaction with the consent procedure. (shrink)

Workplace procedural justice is an important motivator for employee work attitude and performance. This research examines how procedural justice affects employee engagement. We developed three propositions. First, based on the group engagement model, we hypothesized that procedural justice enhances employee engagement through employee organizational identification. Second, employees with stronger moral identity centrality are more likely to be engaged in their jobs. Third, procedural justice compensates for the effect of moral identity centrality on employee engagement. Specifically, when procedural justice is (...) higher, employee moral identity centrality plays a less significant role in employee engagement; whilst when procedural justice is lower, the effect of moral identity centrality on employee engagement is stronger. Research findings based on an employee survey in a leading financial service organization provide support for the above propositions. (shrink)

The paper is inspired by and explicitly presupposes the readers’ knowledge of the Kürbis normalization procedure for the Milne tree-like natural deduction system _C_ for classical propositional logic. The novelty of _C_ is that for each conventional connective, it has only _general_ introduction and elimination rules, whose paradigm is the rule of proof by cases. The present paper deals with the Milne–Kürbis troublemaker—adding universal quantifier—caused by extending the normalization procedure to \(\mathbf {C^{\exists }_{\forall }} \), the first-order variant (...) of _C_. For both quantifiers, \( \mathbf {C^{\exists }_{\forall }}\) has only general quantifier rules, whose paradigm is the indirect rule of existential elimination. We propose the classical first-order tree-like natural deduction system \( \mathbf {NC^{\exists }_{\forall }}\) such that it contains all the propositional and half the quantifier rules of \(\mathbf {C^{\exists }_{\forall }}\) and differs from it with respect to the other half of the quantifier rules and the notion of a deduction. We show that in the case of \(\mathbf {NC^{\exists }_{\forall }} \), whose specifics is based on the Quine treatment of _flagged_ variables in the linear-style natural deduction system as well as on the Aguilera-Baaz treatment of _characteristic_ and _side_ variables for sequent-style calculi, the troublemaker doesn’t occur. In order to handle another specifics of \(\mathbf {NC^{\exists }_{\forall }}\) —an auxiliary notion of a _finished_ deduction that makes deductions _nonhereditary_—we show soundness and completeness of \( \mathbf {NC^{\exists }_{\forall }} \). While emphasizing the former with the help of the Smirnov technique, we additionally indicate a fixable gap in the Quine soundness argument. At last, the philosophical significance of the main result of this paper is developed in more detail. (shrink)

In professional settings, people often have diverse and competing conceptions of responsibility and of when it is fair to hold someone responsible. This may lead to undesirable gaps in the distribution of responsibilities. In this paper, a procedural model is developed for alleviating the tension between diverging responsibility conceptions. The model is based on the Rawlsian approach of wide reflective equilibrium and overlapping consensus. The model is applied to a technological project, which concerned the development of an in-house monitoring (...) system based on ambient technology. The development of this innovative technology raised questions among the technological researchers about its social acceptance and the way issues related to privacy and security should be addressed. The case is analyzed in terms of two procedural norms (reflective learning and inclusiveness), which are based on literature on policy and innovation networks. Analysis of the case shows that, in a pluralist setting, a procedural approach can be useful for encouraging discussion on the legitimacy of different responsibility conceptions and the question what a fair responsibility distribution amounts to. (shrink)

Institutional discrimination matters. The purpose of this longitudinal community‐based participatory research study was to examine institutional procedural discrimination, institutional racism, and other institutional discrimination, and their relationships with participants' health during a maternal and child health program in a municipal initiative. Twenty participants from nine multilingual, multicultural community‐based organizations were included. Overall reported incidences of institutional procedural discrimination decreased from April 2019 (18.6%) to November 2019 (11.8%) although changes were not statistically significant and participants reporting incidences remained high (...) (n = 15 in April and n = 14 in November). Participants reported experiencing significantly less “[when] different cultural ways of doing things were shared, the project did not support my way” from April 2019 (23.5%, n = 4) to November 2019 (0%, n = 0), Wilcoxon signed‐rank test Z = −2.00, p < 0.05. Some participants reported experiencing institutional racism (29.4%, n = 5) and other institutional discrimination (5.9%, n = 1). Participants experiencing institutional racism, compared to those who did not, reported a higher impact of the Initiative's program on their quality of life (t = 3.62, p < 0.01). Participatory survey designs enable nurse researchers to identify hidden pathways of institutional procedural discrimination, describe the impacts experienced, and examine types of institutional discrimination in health systems. (shrink)

Computational models of relevance in case-based legal reasoning have traditionallybeen based on algorithms for comparing the facts and substantive legal issues of aprior case to those of a new case. In this paper we argue that robust models ofcase-based legal reasoning must also consider the broader social and jurisprudentialcontext in which legal precedents are decided. We analyze three aspects of legalcontext: the teleological relations that connect legal precedents to the socialvalues and policies they serve, the temporal relations (...) between prior andsubsequent cases in a legal domain, and the procedural posture of legal cases,which defines the scope of their precedential relevance. Using real examples drawnfrom appellate courts of New York and Massachusetts, we show with the courts' ownarguments that the doctrine of stare decisis (i.e., similar facts should lead to similar results) is subject to contextual constraints and influences. For each of the three aspects of legal context, we outline an expanded computational framework for case-based legal reasoning that encompasses the reasoning of the examples, and provides a foundation for generating a more robust set of legal arguments. (shrink)