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  1. Generalized Immodesty Principles in Epistemic Utility Theory.Alejandro Pérez Carballo - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (31):874–907.
    Epistemic rationality is typically taken to be immodest at least in this sense: a rational epistemic state should always take itself to be doing at least as well, epistemically and by its own light, than any alternative epistemic state. If epistemic states are probability functions and their alternatives are other probability functions defined over the same collection of proposition, we can capture the relevant sense of immodesty by claiming that epistemic utility functions are (strictly) proper. In this paper I examine (...)
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  • Reasoning in attitudes.Franz Dietrich & Antonios Staras - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1–31.
    People reason not only in beliefs, but also in intentions, preferences, and other attitudes. They form preferences from existing preferences, or intentions from existing beliefs and intentions, and so on. This often involves choosing between rival conclusions. Building on Broome (Rationality through reasoning, Hoboken, Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118609088, 2013) and Dietrich et al. (J Philos 116:585–614. https://doi.org/10.5840/jphil20191161138, 2019), we present a philosophical and formal analysis of reasoning in attitudes, with or without facing choices in reasoning. We give different accounts of choosing, in (...)
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  • Scientific uncertainty and decision making.Seamus Bradley - 2012 - Dissertation, London School of Economics
    It is important to have an adequate model of uncertainty, since decisions must be made before the uncertainty can be resolved. For instance, flood defenses must be designed before we know the future distribution of flood events. It is standardly assumed that probability theory offers the best model of uncertain information. I think there are reasons to be sceptical of this claim. I criticise some arguments for the claim that probability theory is the only adequate model of uncertainty. In particular (...)
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  • Strategic manipulation in judgment aggregation under higher-level reasoning.Zoi Terzopoulou & Ulle Endriss - 2021 - Theory and Decision 92 (2):363-385.
    We analyse the incentives of individuals to misrepresent their truthful judgments when engaged in collective decision-making. Our focus is on scenarios in which individuals reason about the incentives of others before choosing which judgments to report themselves. To this end, we introduce a formal model of strategic behaviour in logic-based judgment aggregation that accounts for such higher-level reasoning as well as the fact that individuals may only have partial information about the truthful judgments and preferences of their peers. We find (...)
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  • Are non-accidental regularities a cosmic coincidence? Revisiting a central threat to Humean laws.Aldo Filomeno - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5205-5227.
    If the laws of nature are as the Humean believes, it is an unexplained cosmic coincidence that the actual Humean mosaic is as extremely regular as it is. This is a strong and well-known objection to the Humean account of laws. Yet, as reasonable as this objection may seem, it is nowadays sometimes dismissed. The reason: its unjustified implicit assignment of equiprobability to each possible Humean mosaic; that is, its assumption of the principle of indifference, which has been attacked on (...)
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  • How to Believe Long Conjunctions of Beliefs: Probability, Quasi-Dogmatism and Contextualism.Stefano Bonzio, Gustavo Cevolani & Tommaso Flaminio - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):965-990.
    According to the so-called Lockean thesis, a rational agent believes a proposition just in case its probability is sufficiently high, i.e., greater than some suitably fixed threshold. The Preface paradox is usually taken to show that the Lockean thesis is untenable, if one also assumes that rational agents should believe the conjunction of their own beliefs: high probability and rational belief are in a sense incompatible. In this paper, we show that this is not the case in general. More precisely, (...)
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  • Hyperintensionality and Normativity.Federico L. G. Faroldi - 2019 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag.
    Presenting the first comprehensive, in-depth study of hyperintensionality, this book equips readers with the basic tools needed to appreciate some of current and future debates in the philosophy of language, semantics, and metaphysics. After introducing and explaining the major approaches to hyperintensionality found in the literature, the book tackles its systematic connections to normativity and offers some contributions to the current debates. The book offers undergraduate and graduate students an essential introduction to the topic, while also helping professionals in related (...)
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  • Parentheticality, assertion strength, and polarity.Todor Koev - 2019 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (1):113-140.
    Sentences with slifting parentheticals The formal analysis of natural language, Mouton, The Hague, 1973) grammaticalize an intriguing interaction between truth-conditional meaning and speech act function. In such sentences, the assertion strength of the slifted clause is modulated by the parenthetical, which provides evidential support :480–496, 1952; Asher in J Semant 17:31–50, 2000; Rooryck in Glot Int 5:125–133, 2001; Jayez and Rossari in: Corblin, de Swart Handbook of French semantics, CSLI, Stanford, 2004; Davis et al. in Proc Semant Linguist Theory 17:71–88, (...)
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  • How feasible is the rapid development of artificial superintelligence?Kaj Sotala - 2017 - Physica Scripta 11 (92).
    What kinds of fundamental limits are there in how capable artificial intelligence (AI) systems might become? Two questions in particular are of interest: (1) How much more capable could AI become relative to humans, and (2) how easily could superhuman capability be acquired? To answer these questions, we will consider the literature on human expertise and intelligence, discuss its relevance for AI, and consider how AI could improve on humans in two major aspects of thought and expertise, namely simulation and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Imprecise Probabilities.Seamus Bradley - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • (1 other version)The Ethics of Nudge.Luc Bovens - 2008 - In Mats J. Hansson & Till Grüne-Yanoff (eds.), Preference Change: Approaches from Philosophy, Economics and Psychology. Springer, Theory and Decision Library A. pp. 207-20.
    In their recently published book Nudge (2008) Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein (T&S) defend a position labelled as ‘libertarian paternalism’. Their thinking appeals to both the right and the left of the political spectrum, as evidenced by the bedfellows they keep on either side of the Atlantic. In the US, they have advised Barack Obama, while, in the UK, they were welcomed with open arms by the David Cameron's camp (Chakrabortty 2008). I will consider the following questions. What (...)
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  • Credence for conclusions: a brief for Jeffrey’s rule.John R. Welch - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2051-2072.
    Some arguments are good; others are not. How can we tell the difference? This article advances three proposals as a partial answer to this question. The proposals are keyed to arguments conditioned by different degrees of uncertainty: mild, where the argument’s premises are hedged with point-valued probabilities; moderate, where the premises are hedged with interval probabilities; and severe, where the premises are hedged with non-numeric plausibilities such as ‘very likely’ or ‘unconfirmed’. For mild uncertainty, the article proposes to apply a (...)
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  • The psychological representation of modality.Jonathan Phillips & Joshua Knobe - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (1):65-94.
    A series of recent studies have explored the impact of people's judgments regarding physical law, morality, and probability. Surprisingly, such studies indicate that these three apparently unrelated types of judgments often have precisely the same impact. We argue that these findings provide evidence for a more general hypothesis about the kind of cognition people use to think about possibilities. Specifically, we suggest that this aspect of people's cognition is best understood using an idea developed within work in the formal semantics (...)
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  • For True Conditionalizers Weisberg’s Paradox is a False Alarm.Franz Huber - 2014 - Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 1 (1):111-119.
    Weisberg introduces a phenomenon he terms perceptual undermining. He argues that it poses a problem for Jeffrey conditionalization, and Bayesian epistemology in general. This is Weisberg’s paradox. Weisberg argues that perceptual undermining also poses a problem for ranking theory and for Dempster-Shafer theory. In this note I argue that perceptual undermining does not pose a problem for any of these theories: for true conditionalizers Weisberg’s paradox is a false alarm.
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  • Degrees all the way down: Beliefs, non-beliefs and disbeliefs.Hans Rott - 2009 - In Franz Huber & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Degrees of belief. London: Springer. pp. 301--339.
    This paper combines various structures representing degrees of belief, degrees of disbelief, and degrees of non-belief (degrees of expectations) into a unified whole. The representation uses relations of comparative necessity and possibility, as well as non-probabilistic functions assigning numerical values of necessity and possibility. We define all-encompassing necessity structures which have weak expectations (mere hypotheses, guesses, conjectures, etc.) occupying the lowest ranks and very strong, ineradicable ('a priori') beliefs occupying the highest ranks. Structurally, there are no differences from the top (...)
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  • Compact Representations of Extended Causal Models.Joseph Y. Halpern & Christopher Hitchcock - 2013 - Cognitive Science 37 (6):986-1010.
    Judea Pearl (2000) was the first to propose a definition of actual causation using causal models. A number of authors have suggested that an adequate account of actual causation must appeal not only to causal structure but also to considerations of normality. In Halpern and Hitchcock (2011), we offer a definition of actual causation using extended causal models, which include information about both causal structure and normality. Extended causal models are potentially very complex. In this study, we show how it (...)
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  • Expressing Credences.Daniel Rothschild - 2012 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (1pt1):99-114.
    After presenting a simple expressivist account of reports of probabilistic judgements, I explore a classic problem for it, namely the Frege-Geach problem. I argue that it is a problem not just for expressivism but for any reasonable account of ascriptions of graded judgements. I suggest that the problem can be resolved by appropriately modelling imprecise credences.
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  • A new resolution of the Judy Benjamin Problem.Igor Douven & Jan-Willem Romeijn - 2011 - Mind 120 (479):637 - 670.
    A paper on how to adapt your probabilisitc beliefs when learning a conditional.
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  • Degrees of belief.Franz Huber & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.) - 2009 - London: Springer.
    Various theories try to give accounts of how measures of this confidence do or ought to behave, both as far as the internal mental consistency of the agent as ...
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  • Belief and Degrees of Belief.Franz Huber - 2009 - In Franz Huber & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Degrees of belief. London: Springer.
    Degrees of belief are familiar to all of us. Our confidence in the truth of some propositions is higher than our confidence in the truth of other propositions. We are pretty confident that our computers will boot when we push their power button, but we are much more confident that the sun will rise tomorrow. Degrees of belief formally represent the strength with which we believe the truth of various propositions. The higher an agent’s degree of belief for a particular (...)
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  • Varieties of Bayesianism.Jonathan Weisberg - 2011
    Handbook of the History of Logic, vol. 10, eds. Dov Gabbay, Stephan Hartmann, and John Woods, forthcoming.
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  • The Consistency Argument for Ranking Functions.Franz Huber - 2007 - Studia Logica 86 (2):299-329.
    The paper provides an argument for the thesis that an agent’s degrees of disbelief should obey the ranking calculus. This Consistency Argument is based on the Consistency Theorem. The latter says that an agent’s belief set is and will always be consistent and deductively closed iff her degrees of entrenchment satisfy the ranking axioms and are updated according to the ranktheoretic update rules.
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  • Non-Ideal Decision Theory.Sven Neth - 2023 - Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
    My dissertation is about Bayesian rationality for non-ideal agents. I show how to derive subjective probabilities from preferences using much weaker rationality assumptions than other standard representation theorems. I argue that non-ideal agents might be uncertain about how they will update on new information and consider two consequences of this uncertainty: such agents should sometimes reject free information and make choices which, taken together, yield sure loss. The upshot is that Bayesian rationality for non-ideal agents makes very different normative demands (...)
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  • Knowledge representation and acquisition for ethical AI: challenges and opportunities.Vaishak Belle - 2023 - Ethics and Information Technology 25 (1):1-12.
    Machine learning (ML) techniques have become pervasive across a range of different applications, and are now widely used in areas as disparate as recidivism prediction, consumer credit-risk analysis, and insurance pricing. Likewise, in the physical world, ML models are critical components in autonomous agents such as robotic surgeons and self-driving cars. Among the many ethical dimensions that arise in the use of ML technology in such applications, analyzing morally permissible actions is both immediate and profound. For example, there is the (...)
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  • Respecting Evidence: Belief Functions not Imprecise Probabilities.Nicholas J. J. Smith - 2022 - Synthese 200 (475):1-30.
    The received model of degrees of belief represents them as probabilities. Over the last half century, many philosophers have been convinced that this model fails because it cannot make room for the idea that an agent’s degrees of belief should respect the available evidence. In its place they have advocated a model that represents degrees of belief using imprecise probabilities (sets of probability functions). This paper presents a model of degrees of belief based on Dempster–Shafer belief functions and then presents (...)
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  • Preference Change: Approaches From Philosophy, Economics and Psychology.Till Grüne-Yanoff & Sven Ove Hansson - 2009 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer.
    Changing preferencesis a phenomenonoften invoked but rarely properlyaccounted for. Throughout the history of the social sciences, researchers have come against the possibility that their subjects’ preferenceswere affected by the phenomenato be explainedor by otherfactorsnot taken into accountin the explanation.Sporadically, attempts have been made to systematically investigate these in uences, but none of these seems to have had a lasting impact. Today we are still not much further with respect to preference change than we were at the middle of the last (...)
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  • Representing credal imprecision: from sets of measures to hierarchical Bayesian models.Daniel Lassiter - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1463-1485.
    The basic Bayesian model of credence states, where each individual’s belief state is represented by a single probability measure, has been criticized as psychologically implausible, unable to represent the intuitive distinction between precise and imprecise probabilities, and normatively unjustifiable due to a need to adopt arbitrary, unmotivated priors. These arguments are often used to motivate a model on which imprecise credal states are represented by sets of probability measures. I connect this debate with recent work in Bayesian cognitive science, where (...)
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  • Formal Nonmonotonic Theories and Properties of Human Defeasible Reasoning.Marco Ragni, Christian Eichhorn, Tanja Bock, Gabriele Kern-Isberner & Alice Ping Ping Tse - 2017 - Minds and Machines 27 (1):79-117.
    The knowledge representation and reasoning of both humans and artificial systems often involves conditionals. A conditional connects a consequence which holds given a precondition. It can be easily recognized in natural languages with certain key words, like “if” in English. A vast amount of literature in both fields, both artificial intelligence and psychology, deals with the questions of how such conditionals can be best represented and how these conditionals can model human reasoning. On the other hand, findings in the psychology (...)
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  • Decision Theory.Katie Steele & H. Orri Stefánsson - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Formal Representations of Belief.Franz Huber - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. Belief is thus central to epistemology. It comes in a qualitative form, as when Sophia believes that Vienna is the capital of Austria, and a quantitative form, as when Sophia's degree of belief that Vienna is the capital of Austria is at least twice her degree of belief that tomorrow it will be sunny in Vienna. Formal epistemology, as opposed to mainstream epistemology (Hendricks 2006), is epistemology done in a formal way, (...)
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  • Better Foundations for Subjective Probability.Sven Neth - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    How do we ascribe subjective probability? In decision theory, this question is often addressed by representation theorems, going back to Ramsey (1926), which tell us how to define or measure subjective probability by observable preferences. However, standard representation theorems make strong rationality assumptions, in particular expected utility maximization. How do we ascribe subjective probability to agents which do not satisfy these strong rationality assumptions? I present a representation theorem with weak rationality assumptions which can be used to define or measure (...)
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  • A Basis for AGM Revision in Bayesian Probability Revision.Sven Ove Hansson - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (6):1535-1559.
    In standard Bayesian probability revision, the adoption of full beliefs (propositions with probability 1) is irreversible. Once an agent has full belief in a proposition, no subsequent revision can remove that belief. This is an unrealistic feature, and it also makes probability revision incompatible with belief change theory, which focuses on how the set of full beliefs is modified through both additions and retractions. This problem in probability theory can be solved in a model that (i) lets the codomain of (...)
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  • Measure Semantics and Qualitative Semantics for Epistemic Modals.Wesley H. Holliday & Thomas F. Icard - 2013 - Proceedings of SALT 23:514-534.
    In this paper, we explore semantics for comparative epistemic modals that avoid the entailment problems shown to result from Kratzer’s (1991) semantics by Yalcin (2006, 2009, 2010). In contrast to the alternative semantics presented by Yalcin and Lassiter (2010, 2011), based on finitely additive probability measures, we introduce semantics based on qualitatively additive measures, as well as semantics based on purely qualitative orderings, including orderings on propositions derived from orderings on worlds in the tradition of Kratzer (1991). All of these (...)
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  • Acting on belief functions.Nicholas J. J. Smith - 2023 - Theory and Decision 95 (4):575-621.
    The degrees of belief of rational agents should be guided by the evidence available to them. This paper takes as a starting point the view—argued elsewhere—that the formal model best able to capture this idea is one that represents degrees of belief using Dempster–Shafer belief functions. However degrees of belief should not only respect evidence: they also guide decision and action. Whatever formal model of degrees of belief we adopt, we need a decision theory that works with it: that takes (...)
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  • Non-additive degrees of belief.Rolf Haenni - 2009 - In Franz Huber & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Degrees of belief. London: Springer. pp. 121--159.
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  • Non-Classical Probabilities for Decision Making in Situations of Uncertainty.Dominik Klein, Ondrej Majer & Soroush Rafiee Rad - 2020 - Roczniki Filozoficzne 68 (4):315-343.
    Analyzing situations where information is partial, incomplete or contradictory has created a demand for quantitative belief measures that are weaker than classic probability theory. In this paper, we compare two frameworks that have been proposed for this task, Dempster-Shafer theory and non-standard probability theory based on Belnap-Dunn logic. We show the two frameworks to assume orthogonal perspectives on informational shortcomings, but also provide a partial correspondence result. Lastly, we also compare various dynamical rules of the two frameworks, all seen as (...)
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  • Tracking probabilistic truths: a logic for statistical learning.Alexandru Baltag, Soroush Rafiee Rad & Sonja Smets - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9041-9087.
    We propose a new model for forming and revising beliefs about unknown probabilities. To go beyond what is known with certainty and represent the agent’s beliefs about probability, we consider a plausibility map, associating to each possible distribution a plausibility ranking. Beliefs are defined as in Belief Revision Theory, in terms of truth in the most plausible worlds. We consider two forms of conditioning or belief update, corresponding to the acquisition of two types of information: learning observable evidence obtained by (...)
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  • Vagueness in Medicine: On Disciplinary Indistinctness, Fuzzy Phenomena, Vague Concepts, Uncertain Knowledge, and Fact-Value-Interaction.Bjørn Hofmann - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (6):1151-1168.
    This article investigates five kinds of vagueness in medicine: disciplinary, ontological, conceptual, epistemic, and vagueness with respect to descriptive-prescriptive connections. First, medicine is a discipline with unclear borders, as it builds on a wide range of other disciplines and subjects. Second, medicine deals with many indistinct phenomena resulting in borderline cases. Third, medicine uses a variety of vague concepts, making it unclear which situations, conditions, and processes that fall under them. Fourth, medicine is based on and produces uncertain knowledge and (...)
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  • Bisimulation for Conditional Modalities.A. Baltag & G. Cinà - 2018 - Studia Logica 106 (1):1-33.
    We give a definition of bisimulation for conditional modalities interpreted on selection functions and prove the correspondence between bisimilarity and modal equivalence, generalizing the Hennessy–Milner Theorem to a wide class of conditional operators. We further investigate the operators and semantics to which these results apply. First, we show how to derive a solid notion of bisimulation for conditional belief, behaving as desired both on plausibility models and on evidence models. These novel definitions of bisimulations are exploited in a series of (...)
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  • Epistemic justification: its subjective and its objective ways.Wolfgang Spohn - 2018 - Synthese 195 (9):3837-3856.
    Objective standards for justification or for being a reason would be desirable, but inductive skepticism tells us that they cannot be presupposed. Rather, we have to start from subjective-relative notions of justification and of being a reason. The paper lays out the strategic options we have given this dilemma. The paper explains the requirements for this subject-relative notion and how they may be satisfied. Then it discusses four quite heterogeneous ways of providing more objective standards, which combine without guaranteeing complete (...)
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  • Applied Logic without Psychologism.Gregory Wheeler - 2008 - Studia Logica 88 (1):137-156.
    Logic is a celebrated representation language because of its formal generality. But there are two senses in which a logic may be considered general, one that concerns a technical ability to discriminate between different types of individuals, and another that concerns constitutive norms for reasoning as such. This essay embraces the former, permutation-invariance conception of logic and rejects the latter, Fregean conception of logic. The question of how to apply logic under this pure invariantist view is addressed, and a methodology (...)
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  • State-morphism MV-algebras.Antonio Di Nola & Anatolij Dvurečenskij - 2010 - Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 161 (2):161-173.
    We present a stronger variation of state MV-algebras, recently presented by T. Flaminio and F. Montagna, which we call state-morphism MV-algebras. Such structures are MV-algebras with an internal notion, a state-morphism operator. We describe the categorical equivalences of such state MV-algebras with the category of unital Abelian ℓ-groups with a fixed state operator and present their basic properties. In addition, in contrast to state MV-algebras, we are able to describe all subdirectly irreducible state-morphism MV-algebras.
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