Ceteris Paribus in Conservative Belief Revision PDF Download

Author: Frank Zenker
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631572832
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
This work contrasts conservative or minimally mutilating revisions of empirical theories as they are identified in the presently dominant AGM model of formal belief revision and the structuralist program for the reconstruction of empirical theories. The aim is to make understandable why both approaches only partly succeed in substantially informing and formally restraining the issue. With respect to the rationality of minimal change, the overall result is negative. Readers with an interest in formal epistemology are provided with application cases (mercury anomaly, revision of early thermo-dynamics, introduction of the neutrino), the historically inclined reader is offered a systematic perspective. The discussion can largely be followed without a background in formal logic.

Author: Frank Zenker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319150219
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This volume provides an overview of applications of conceptual spaces theory, beginning with an introduction to the modeling tool that unifies the chapters. The first section explores issues of linguistic semantics, including speakers’ negotiation of meaning. Further sections address computational and ontological aspects of constructing conceptual spaces, while the final section looks at philosophical applications. Domains include artificial intelligence and robotics, epistemology and philosophy of science, lexical semantics and pragmatics, agent-based simulation, perspectivism, framing, contrast, sensory modalities, and music, among others. This collection provides evidence of the wide application range of this theory of knowledge representation. The papers in this volume derive from international experts across different fields including philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, robotics, computer science and geography. Each contributor has successfully applied conceptual spaces theory as a modeling tool in their respective areas of expertise. Graduates as well as researchers in the areas of epistemology, linguistics, geometric knowledge representation, and the mathematical modeling of cognitive processes should find this book of particular interest.

Author: Bob Fischer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331949127X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
This monograph articulates and defends a theory-based epistemology of modality (TEM). According to TEM, someone justifiably believe an interesting modal claim if and only if (a) she justifiably believes a theory according to which that claim is true, (b) she believes that claim on the basis of that theory, and (c) she has no defeaters for her belief in that claim. The book has two parts. In the first, the author motivates TEM, sets out the view in detail, and defends it against a number of objections. In the second, the author considers whether TEM is worth accepting. To argue that it is, the author sets out criteria for choosing between modal epistemologies, concluding that TEM has a number of important virtues. However, the author also concedes that TEM is cautious: it probably implies that we are not justified in believing some interesting modal claims that we might take ourselves to be justified in believing. This raises a question about TEM's relationship to Peter van Inwagen's modal skepticism, which the author explores in detail. As it turns out, TEM offers a better route to modal skepticism than the one that van Inwagen provides. But rather than being a liability, the author argues that this is a further advantage of the view. Moreover, he argues that other popular modal epistemologies do not fare better: they cannot easily secure more extensive modal justification than TEM. The book concludes by clarifying TEM’s relationship to the other modal epistemologies on offer, contending that TEM need not be a rival to those views, but can instead be a supplement to them.

Author: Roman Frydman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691261156
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Posing a major challenge to economic orthodoxy, Imperfect Knowledge Economics asserts that exact models of purposeful human behavior are beyond the reach of economic analysis. Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg argue that the longstanding empirical failures of conventional economic models stem from their futile efforts to make exact predictions about the consequences of rational, self-interested behavior. Such predictions, based on mechanistic models of human behavior, disregard the importance of individual creativity and unforeseeable sociopolitical change. Scientific though these explanations may appear, they usually fail to predict how markets behave. And, the authors contend, recent behavioral models of the market are no less mechanistic than their conventional counterparts: they aim to generate exact predictions of "irrational" human behavior. Frydman and Goldberg offer a long-overdue response to the shortcomings of conventional economic models. Drawing attention to the inherent limits of economists' knowledge, they introduce a new approach to economic analysis: Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE). IKE rejects exact quantitative predictions of individual decisions and market outcomes in favor of mathematical models that generate only qualitative predictions of economic change. Using the foreign exchange market as a testing ground for IKE, this book sheds new light on exchange-rate and risk-premium movements, which have confounded conventional models for decades. Offering a fresh way to think about markets and representing a potential turning point in economics, Imperfect Knowledge Economics will be essential reading for economists, policymakers, and professional investors.

Author: Peter Singer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139496891
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live.

Author: Jack Reynolds
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826424414
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Author: J. Angelo Corlett
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402096526
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Race, Rights, and Justice explores questions of the nature of law and constitutional interpretation, international law and global justice, and the nature, function, and importance of rights each from a perspective that takes seriously the realities of race and racism. After a critical assessment of various contemporary theories of law is provided, a new theory of legal interpretation is set forth and defended. The respective words of Immanuel Kant and H.L.A. Hart on the possibility and desirability of international law are carefully explicated. Following this, Race, Rights, and Justice defends John Rawls' Law of Peoples from the cosmopolitan liberal critique of it. The nature and importance of rights, both individual and collective, are clarified while correcting some political philosophies that have propagated confused rhetoric about rights. And the collective right to humanitarian intervention is investigated philosophically in terms of the recent problems in Colombia, with surprisingly original results. While the methodology of this book is thoroughly analytical, philosophically speaking, some of the conclusions drawn are substantially original, infusing the facts of race and racism into mainstream matters of philosophy of law. "In this collection of essays, J. Angelo Corlett continues his important work of bringing the perspective of indigenous peoples, and more generally of race, into mainstream philosophical debates about justice and rights. Corlett's book also has very valuable insights into the nature of international law that will greatly enrich our contemporary debates." (Larry May, Washington University in St. Louis, USA) "Angelo Corlett is a prolific writer whose work is invariably stimulating, provocative, and insightful. Race, Rights, and Justice is an important addition to the oeuvre. Corlett is not afraid to tackle big problems, and big names. See, for example, his scathing criticisms of Bork and Scalia on constitutional interpretation." (Burleigh T. Wilkins, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

Author: Johan van Benthem
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500465
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
This book develops a view of logic as a theory of information-driven agency and intelligent interaction between many agents - with conversation, argumentation and games as guiding examples. It provides one uniform account of dynamic logics for acts of inference, observation, questions and communication, that can handle both update of knowledge and revision of beliefs. It then extends the dynamic style of analysis to include changing preferences and goals, temporal processes, group action and strategic interaction in games. Throughout, the book develops a mathematical theory unifying all these systems, and positioning them at the interface of logic, philosophy, computer science and game theory. A series of further chapters explores repercussions of the 'dynamic stance' for these areas, as well as cognitive science.

Author: Mark Richard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192580574
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Mark Richard presents an original picture of meaning according to which a word's meaning is analogous to the biological lineages we call species. His primary thesis is that a word's meaning - in the sense of what one needs to track in order to be a competent speaker - is the collection of assumptions its users make in using it and expect their hearers to recognize as being made. Meaning is something that is spread across a population, inherited by each new generation of speakers from the last, and typically evolving in so far as what constitutes a meaning changes in virtue of the interactions of speakers with their (linguistic and social) environment. Meanings as Species develops and defends the analogy between the biological and the linguistic, and includes a discussion of the senses in which the processes of meaning change are and are not like evolution via natural selection. Richard argues that thinking of meanings as species supports Quine's insights about analyticity without rendering talk about meaning theoretically useless. He also discusses the relations between meaning as what the competent speaker knows about her language, meaning as the determinant of reference and truth conditions, and meaning qua what determines what sentence uses say. This book contains insightful discussions of a wide range of topics in the philosophy of language, including: relations between meaning and philosophical analysis, the project of 'conceptual engineering', the senses in which meaning is and is not compositional, the degree to which to which referential meaning is indeterminate, and what such indeterminacy might tells us about propositional attitudes like belief and assertion.

Author: Stefan A. Schirm
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134135211
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
'Globalization' systematically encompasses the debates and the results of research of political scientists on various core aspects of the interrelation between politics and economics in the process of globalisation.