The subject of Labelled Non-Classical Logics is the development and investigation of a framework for the modular and uniform presentation and implementation of non-classical logics, in particular modal and relevance logics. Logics are presented as labelled deduction systems, which are proved to be sound and complete with respect to the corresponding Kripke-style semantics. We investigate the proof theory of our systems, and show them to possess structural properties such as normalization and the subformula property, which we exploit not only to (...) establish advantages and limitations of our approach with respect to related ones, but also to give, by means of a substructural analysis, a new proof-theoretic method for investigating decidability and complexity of (some of) the logics we consider. All of our deduction systems have been implemented in the generic theorem prover Isabelle, thus providing a simple and natural environment for interactive proof development. Labelled Non-Classical Logics is essential reading for researchers and practitioners interested in the theory and applications of non-classical logics. (shrink)

Recommendation systems (RSs) predict what the user likes and recommend it to them. While at the onset of RSs, the latter was designed to maximize the recommendation accuracy (i.e., accuracy was their only goal), nowadays many RSs models include diversity in recommendations (which thus is a further goal of RSs). In the computer science community, the introduction of diversity in RSs is justified mainly through economic reasons: diversity increases user satisfaction and, in niche markets, profits.I contend that, first, the economic (...) justification of diversity in RSs risks reducing it to an empirical matter of preference; second, diversity is ethically relevant as it supports two autonomy rights of the user: the right to an open present and the right to be treated as an individual. So far, diversity in RSs has been morally defended only in the case of RSs of news and scholarly content: diversity is held to have a depolarizing effect in a democratic society and the scientific community and make the users more autonomous in their news choices. I provide a justification of diversity in RSs that embraces all kinds of RSs (i.e., a holistic moral defense) and is based on a normative principle founded on the agency of the user, which I call the right to be an exception to predictions. Such a right holds that the proper treatment of a RS user qua agent forbids providing them with recommendations based only on their past or similar users’ choices. (shrink)

Other-perspective taking, distancing, time discounting as well as risk and loss aversion highly affect decision-making. Even though they influence each other, so far these cognitive processes have been unrelated or only partly related to each other in neuroscience. This article proposes a philosophical interpretation of these cognitive processes that is elaborated in the updated theory of Adam Smith’s prudence. The UTSP is inspired by Smith’s account of prudence and is in line with the neuroscientific and behavioral studies on OPT, distancing, (...) time discounting as well as risk and loss aversion. The UTSP represents a framework aiming to interpret and connect these cognitive processes and providing a consistent and empirically sound account of a “Smithianly” prudent style of decision-making. The two pillars of the UTSP are the shift of perspective in space and time and loss aversion. On the basis of this theory, a normative updated theory of Smithian prudence is outlined. The latter is useful for moral philosophy for two reasons: firstly, according to preliminary evidence, it is effective in guiding the agent in decisional contexts in which her well-being is at stake and she can affect other people with her actions. Secondly, since the NUTSP is based on neuroscientific findings on decision-making, it has a sound empirical basis that prevents a source of alienation for the agent. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the treatment of prudence by Adam Smith. Smith was one of the few philosophers to conceive of it as a moral virtue. Smithian prudence is the care of one's own happiness that is limited and ennobled, respectively, by the sense of justice and that of self-command. A reconstruction of Smith's view of prudence helps to clarify three central points in his thought: the interaction between the agent's economic and moral dimensions, the relationship between the self and (...) the other, and the dialectical tension between partiality and impartiality. Furthermore, Smithian prudence is important, in itself, as an approach to the above-mentioned points that is still viable. These three points are recurrent crucial issues in the history of ethics. (shrink)

A chi si rivolge l’agile volumetto di Settis? Lungi dall’essere - solo - un saggio per addetti ai lavori, la questione teorica sviluppata in questo percorso di ricognizione di “vita e fortuna” del classico rivela l’intenzione di catturare l’attenzione di un pubblico ben più vasto e non per forza specialistico. In un periodo di riforma del «Codice dei Beni culturali e del paesaggio», recentemente uscito a firma dell’attuale Ministro dei Beni culturali, è bene interrogarsi sul ruolo che hanno g...

Moral dilemmas have long been debated in moral philosophy without reaching a definitive consensus. The majority of value pluralists attribute their origin to the incommensurability of moral values, i.e. the statement that, since moral values are many and different in nature, they may conflict and cannot be compared. Neuroscientific studies on the neural common currency show that the comparison between allegedly incompatible alternatives is a practical possibility, namely it is the basis of the way in which the agent evaluates choice (...) options. Indeed, both in economic and moral decision-making, the value of options is represented and directly compared in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Therefore, we contend that moral dilemmas do not originate from value incommensurability and, on the basis of the neuroscientific discoveries on the neural currency, we derive the implications for the philosophical debate on moral dilemmas. We also provide a possible connection between the experience of moral dilemmas and their neural representation: one of the causes of the individual’s indecision is the neural tie, i.e. the condition in which two options have the same value at neural level, and her regret could be due to the motivational force of the rejected option that is still signalled by affective processes in the brain. We apply this interpretation and the common currency hypothesis to vocational decisions and propose that, although from the agent’s perspective the options are qualitatively different, they may be nevertheless equivalent at neural level. This can be seen as a reason for downgrading the importance commonly attributed to the risk of making the “wrong choice”. (shrink)

In previous work we gave a new proof-theoretical method for establishing upper-bounds on the space complexity of the provability problem of modal and other propositional non-classical logics. Here we extend and refine these results to give an O -space decision procedure for the basic positive relevance logic B+. We compute this upper-bound by first giving a sound and complete, cut-free, labelled sequent system for B+, and then establishing bounds on the application of the rules of this system.

In the initial online publication, the second author’s given name should have been displayed in full and in the running head the names were not properly abbreviated.

Il volume qui raccolto, nella pluralità degli interventi da parte di colleghi ed allievi, costituisce una vera e propria mappa degli interessi e delle relazioni intessute da Francesco Moiso con studiosi e istituzioni italiane e straniere nel corso di questi anni, e rappresenta al contempo uno specchio fedele dei temi di ricerca prediletti con cui lo studioso si è confrontato, come testimonia la bibliografia delle sue opere presente in questo libro. Annotation Supplied by Informazioni Editoriali.

This book investigates the relationship between our present and future selves. It focuses specifically on diachronic self-regarding decisions: choices involving our earlier and later selves, in which the earlier self makes a decision for the later self. The author connects the scientific understanding of the neurobehavioral processes at the core of individuals' perceptions of their future selves with the philosophical reflection on individuals' moral relationship with their future selves. She delineates a descriptive theory of the perception of the future self (...) that is based on empirical evidence and that systematizes and integrates the current theoretical literature. She then argues for the morality of prudence and interprets diachronic self-regarding decisions as decisions between two agents-the earlier and later selves-that belong to the realm of intergenerational ethics, which regulates the relationship between contemporary people and future generations. Finally, the author provides a moral theory of prudence based on respect for one's agency. This theory identifies what the present and the future selves owe to one another in diachronic self-regarding decisions. Moral Choices for Our Future Selves will be of interest to researchers and students working in ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. (shrink)

In his recent article ‘Limits of trust in medical AI,’ Hatherley argues that, if we believe that the motivations that are usually recognised as relevant for interpersonal trust have to be applied to interactions between humans and medical artificial intelligence, then these systems do not appear to be the appropriate objects of trust. In this response, we argue that it is possible to discuss trust in medical artificial intelligence (AI), if one refrains from simply assuming that trust describes human–human interactions. (...) To do so, we consider an account of trust that distinguishes trust from reliance in a way that is compatible with trusting non-human agents. In this account, to trust a medical AI is to rely on it with little monitoring and control of the elements that make it trustworthy. This attitude does not imply specific properties in the AI system that in fact only humans can have. This account of trust is applicable, in particular, to all cases where a physician relies on the medical AI predictions to support his or her decision making. (shrink)

Real engines of the artificial intelligence revolution, machine learning models, and algorithms are embedded nowadays in many services and products around us. As a society, we argue it is now necessary to transition into a phronetic paradigm focused on the ethical dilemmas stemming from the conception and application of AIs to define actionable recommendations as well as normative solutions. However, both academic research and society-driven initiatives are still quite far from clearly defining a solid program of study and intervention. In (...) this contribution, we will focus on selected ethical investigations around AI by proposing an incremental model of trust that can be applied to both human-human and human-AI interactions. Starting with a quick overview of the existing accounts of trust, with special attention to Taddeo’s concept of “e-trust,” we will discuss all the components of the proposed model and the reasons to trust in human-AI interactions in an example of relevance for business organizations. We end this contribution with an analysis of the epistemic and pragmatic reasons of trust in human-AI interactions and with a discussion of kinds of normativity in trustworthiness of AIs. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that transparency of machine learning algorithms, just as explanation, can be defined at different levels of abstraction. We criticize recent attempts to identify the explanation of black box algorithms with making their decisions (post-hoc) interpretable, focusing our discussion on counterfactual explanations. These approaches to explanation simplify the real nature of the black boxes and risk misleading the public about the normative features of a model. We propose a new form of algorithmic transparency, that consists in (...) explaining algorithms as an intentional product, that serves a particular goal, or multiple goals (Daniel Dennet’s design stance) in a given domain of applicability, and that provides a measure of the extent to which such a goal is achieved, and evidence about the way that measure has been reached. We call such idea of algorithmic transparency “design publicity.” We argue that design publicity can be more easily linked with the justification of the use and of the design of the algorithm, and of each individual decision following from it. In comparison to post-hoc explanations of individual algorithmic decisions, design publicity meets a different demand (the demand for impersonal justification) of the explainee. Finally, we argue that when models that pursue justifiable goals (which may include fairness as avoidance of bias towards specific groups) to a justifiable degree are used consistently, the resulting decisions are all justified even if some of them are (unavoidably) based on incorrect predictions. For this argument, we rely on John Rawls’s idea of procedural justice applied to algorithms conceived as institutions. (shrink)

Trust and monitoring are traditionally antithetical concepts. Describing trust as a property of a relationship of reliance, we introduce a theory of trust and monitoring, which uses mathematical models based on two classes of functions, including _q_-exponentials, and relates the levels of trust to the costs of monitoring. As opposed to several accounts of trust that attempt to identify the special ingredient of reliance and trust relationships, our theory characterizes trust as a quantitative property of certain relations of reliance that (...) can be quantified and expressed as a scalar quantity. Our theory is applicable to both human–human and human–artificial agent interactions, as it is agnostic with respect to the concrete realization of trustworthiness properties, and is compatible with many views differing on which properties contribute to trust and trustworthiness. Finally, as our mathematical models make the quantitative features of trust measurable, they provide empirical studies on trust with a rigorous methodology for its measurement. (shrink)

We present a framework for machine implementation of families of non-classical logics with Kripke-style semantics. We decompose a logic into two interacting parts, each a natural deduction system: a base logic of labelled formulae, and a theory of labels characterizing the properties of the Kripke models. By appropriate combinations we capture both partial and complete fragments of large families of non-classical logics such as modal, relevance, and intuitionistic logics. Our approach is modular and supports uniform proofs of soundness, completeness and (...) proof normalization. We have implemented our work in the Isabelle Logical Framework. (shrink)

The Fregean-inspired Principle of Compositionality of Meaning for formal languages asserts that the meaning of a compound expression is analysable in terms of the meaning of its constituents, taking into account the mode in which these constituents are combined so as to form the compound expression. From a logical point of view, this amounts to prescribing a constraint—that may or may not be respected—on the internal mechanisms that build and give meaning to a given formal system. Within the domain of (...) formal semantics and of the structure of logical derivations, the PoC is often directly reflected by metaproperties such as truth-functionality and analyticity, characteristic of computationally well-behaved logical systems. (shrink)

In previous work, we introduced a version of distributed temporal logic that is well-suited both for verifying security protocols and as a metalogic for reasoning about, and relating, different security protocol models. In this paper, we formally investigate the relationship between our approach and strand spaces, which is one of the most successful and widespread formalisms for analyzing security protocols. We define translations between models in our logic and strand-space models of security protocols, and we compare the results obtained with (...) respect to the level of abstraction that is inherent in each of the formalisms. This allows us to clarify different aspects of strand spaces that are often left implicit, as well as pave the way to transfer results, techniques and tools across the two approaches. (shrink)

Effective therapies are now available that can stop the progression of HIV infection and significantly delay the onset of AIDS. The “highly active antiretroviral therapy” (HAART) is a combination of potent antiretroviral drugs such as viral protease inhibitors or nucleoside-analogue reverse-transcriptase inhibitors, that has a variety of serious side effects, including lipodystrophy, a pathology characterized by accumulation of visceral fat, breast adiposity, cervical fat-pads, hyperlipidemia, insulin resistance as well as fat wasting in face and limbs. There is still an open (...) debate that concerns the precise responsibility of HAART as well as metabolic pathways and mechanisms that are involved in the onset of lipodystrophy. The similarities with multiple symmetric lipomatosis (MSL), in which mitochondria impairment plays a crucial role, lead to the hypothesis that drug-induced damages to mitochondrial DNA are able to alter mitochondria functionality to an extent that is similar to what occurs in MSL. In addition, several evidences indicate that HAART is also linked to a deregulated production of tumour necrosis factor-α, which uses mitochondria as intracellular targets. In this paper, we review data concerning the role of mitochondria in the pathogenesis of lipodystrophy, and advance a unifying hypothesis involving either direct or indirect effects of the drugs employed during HAART. BioEssays 23:1070–1080, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Until is a notoriously difficult temporal operator as it is both existential and universal at the same time: A∪B holds at the current time instant w iff either B holds at w or there exists a time instant w' in the future at which B holds and such that A holds in all the time instants between the current one and ẃ. This “ambivalent” nature poses a significant challenge when attempting to give deduction rules for until. In this paper, in (...) contrast, we make explicit this duality of until by introducing a new temporal operator ∇ that allows us to formalize the “history” of until, i.e., the “internal” universal quantification over the time instants between the current one and ẃ. This approach provides the basis for formalizing deduction systems for temporal logics endowed with the until operator. For concreteness, we give here a labeled natural deduction system N(LTL∇) for a linear-time logic LTL∇ endowed with the new history operator. We show that LTL∇ is equivalent to the linear temporal logic LTL with until, which follows by formalizing back and forth translations between the two logics. We also define an indirect translation from LTL∇ into LTL via temporal logics with past operators; such a result provides an upper bound to the problem of satisfiability for LTL∇ formulas. (shrink)

Until is a notoriously difficult temporal operator as it is both existential and universal at the same time: A∪B holds at the current time instant w iff either B holds at w or there exists a time instant w' in the future at which B holds and such that A holds in all the time instants between the current one and ẃ. This “ambivalent” nature poses a significant challenge when attempting to give deduction rules for until. In this paper, in (...) contrast, we make explicit this duality of until by introducing a new temporal operator ∇ that allows us to formalize the “history” of until, i.e., the “internal” universal quantification over the time instants between the current one and ẃ. This approach provides the basis for formalizing deduction systems for temporal logics endowed with the until operator. For concreteness, we give here a labeled natural deduction system N(LTL∇) for a linear-time logic LTL∇ endowed with the new history operator. We show that LTL∇ is equivalent to the linear temporal logic LTL with until, which follows by formalizing back and forth translations between the two logics. We also define an indirect translation from LTL∇ into LTL via temporal logics with past operators; such a result provides an upper bound to the problem of satisfiability for LTL∇ formulas. (shrink)

We introduce a general recipe for presenting non-classical logics in a modular and uniform way as labelled deduction systems. Our recipe is based on a labelling mechanism where labels are general entities that are present, in one way or another, in all logics, namely truth-values. More specifically, the main idea underlying our approach is the use of algebras of truth-values, whose operators reflect the semantics we have in mind, as the labelling algebras of our labelled deduction systems. The “truth-values as (...) labels” approach allows us to give generalized systems for multiple-valued logics within the same formalism: since we can take multiple-valued logics as meaning not only finitely or infinitely many-valued logics but also power-set logics, i.e. logics for which the denotation of a formula can be seen as a set of worlds, our recipe allows us to capture also logics such as modal, intuitionistic and relevance logics, thus providing a first step towards the fibring of these logics with many-valued ones. (shrink)

The notion of individualised evidence holds the key to solve the puzzle of statistical evidence, but there’s still no consensus on how exactly to define it. To make progress on the problem, epistemologists have proposed various accounts of individualised evidence in terms of causal or modal anti-luck conditions on knowledge like appropriate causation, sensitivity and safety. In this paper, I show that each of these fails as satisfactory anti-luck condition, and that such failure lends abductive support to the following conclusion: (...) once the familiar anti-luck intuition on knowledge is extended to individualised evidence, no single causal or modal anti-luck condition on knowledge can succeed as the right anti-luck condition on individualised evidence. This conclusion casts serious doubts on the fruitfulness of the move from anti-luck conditions on knowledge to anti-luck conditions on individualised evidence. I expand on these doubts and point out further aspects where epistemology and the law come apart: epistemic anti- luck conditions on knowledge do not adequately characterise the legal notion of individualised evidence. (shrink)

Moral intuitions are generally understood as automatic strong responses to moral facts. In this paper, I offer a metacognitive account according to which the strength of moral intuitions denotes the level of confidence of a subject. Confidence is a metacognitive appraisal of the fluency with which a subject processes information from a morally salient stimulus. I show that this account is supported by some empirical evidence, explains the main features of moral intuition and is preferable to emotional or quasi-perceptual views (...) of moral intuition. (shrink)

Despite the substantial appeal of the safety condition, Kelp (J Philos Res 34:21–31, 2009; Am Philos Q 53:27–37; Good Thinking. A Knowledge First Virtue Epistemology, Routledge, London, 2018) has raised a difficult challenge for safety-theoretic accounts of knowledge. By combining Gettier-style fake barn cases with epistemic Frankfurt cases, he concludes that no formulation of safety can be strong enough to predict ignorance in the former and weak enough to accommodate knowledge in the latter. In this note, my contribution is two-fold. (...) Firstly, I take up Kelp’s challenge and I show that, once properly understood, safety successfully rises to it. Secondly, I draw a more general lesson on the safety condition: a satisfactory solution to Kelp’s challenge calls for a revision of the standard formulation of safety, which must be indexed to both methods and environments. My conclusion will be that an environment-relative version of safety not only meets Kelp’s challenge, but it also advances our understanding of the safety condition on knowledge. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, one key challenge is ensuring that AI aligns with certain values. However, in the current diverse and democratic society, reaching a normative consensus is complex. This paper delves into the methodological aspect of how AI ethicists can effectively determine which values AI should uphold. After reviewing the most influential methodologies, we detail an intuitionist research agenda that offers guidelines for aligning AI applications with a limited set of reliable moral intuitions, each underlying a (...) refined cooperative view of AI. We discuss appropriate epistemic tools for collecting, filtering, and justifying moral intuitions with the aim of reducing cognitive and social biases. The proposed methodology facilitates a large collective participation in AI alignment, while ensuring the reliability of the considered moral judgments. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has witnessed a substantial opposition between two competing approaches to capturing the notion of non-accidentality in the analysis of knowledge: the explanationist and the modalist. According to the latest advocates of the former, S knows that p if and only if S believes that p because p is true. According to champions of the latter, S knows that p if and only if S's belief that p is true in a relevant set of possible worlds. Because Bogardus and (...) Perrin's explanationism promises to deliver a plausible analysis of knowledge without any need for modal notions, it is an elegant proposal with prima facie appeal. However, such version of explanationism ultimately does not live up to its promises: in this paper, I raise some objections to their explanationist analysis of knowledge while showing that modalism is in much better shape than they think. In particular, I argue that their explanationist condition generates the wrong results in Gettier cases and fake-barn cases. I also offer and defend a novel version of modalism: I introduce a refined safety condition which is shown to successfully handle the same Gettier cases that beset Bogardus and Perrin's version of explanationism. The paper concludes with a reassessment of the explanationist's initial ambition to provide an analysis of knowledge without modal notions. The upshot will be that even if the prospects for such analysis remain dim, our money should be on the modalist, not the explanationist. (shrink)

The imminent deployment of autonomous vehicles requires algorithms capable of making moral decisions in relevant traffic situations. Some scholars in the ethics of autonomous vehicles hope to align such intelligent systems with human moral judgment. For this purpose, studies like the Moral Machine Experiment have collected data about human decision-making in trolley-like traffic dilemmas. This paper first argues that the trolley dilemma is an inadequate experimental paradigm for investigating traffic moral judgments because it does not include agents’ character-based considerations and (...) is incapable of facilitating the investigation of low-stakes mundane traffic scenarios. In light of the limitations of the trolley paradigm, this paper presents an alternative experimental framework that addresses these issues. The proposed solution combines the creation of mundane traffic moral scenarios using virtual reality and the Agent-Deed-Consequences (ADC) model of moral judgment as a moral-psychological framework. This paradigm shift potentially increases the ecological validity of future studies by providing more realism and incorporating character considerations into traffic actions. (shrink)

Dario Martinelli’s compact and enjoyable treatise on zoömusicology, _Of Birds, Whales and Other Musicians_ introduces musicologists, biologists, social scientists, and philosophers to a new theoretical model for studying how animal behavioral patterns relate to sound communication. Organized by musical trait rather than animal species, and drawing upon the work of such esteemed philosophers as Umberto Eco, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Thomas Sebeok, Martinelli’s analyses redefine the boundaries surrounding music and help readers—scholars and amateurs alike—to appreciate the relationship between animals (...) and musicological exchanges. (shrink)

In "My Own Life," Hume writes:1 During my retreat in France, first at Reims, but chiefly at La Fleche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature. After passing three years very agreeably in that country, I came over to London in 1737. In the end of 1738, I published my Treatise, and immediately went down to my mother and my brother, who lived at his country house, and was employing himself very judiciously and successfully in the improvement of (...) his fortune. It is thus "chiefly" at La Flèche that Hume wrote one of the masterpieces of early modern philosophy. Hume's stay in France extended from July 1734 to August 1737. He spent a few weeks in Paris in the summer of 1734, hosted by Chevalier... (shrink)

Dual-process theories of the mind emphasize how reasoning is an interplay between intuitive and reflective thinking. This paper aims to understand how the two types of processing interact in the moral domain. According to a ‘default-interventionist’ model of moral reasoning intuition and reflection are conflicting cognitions: intuitive thinking would elicit heuristic and deontological responses, whereas reflection would favour utilitarian judgements. However, the evidence for the default interventionist view is inconclusive and challenged by a growing amount of counterevidence in recent years. (...) The recent empirical findings favour an interdependent rather than conflicting view of the two types of information processing in the moral domain. In this view, which I call dual-process reflective equilibrium, intuition and reflection cooperate in moral reasoning to reach a reflective goal, which is supposedly normative justification. In sum, on the one hand, the scope of moral intuitions extends to selecting relevant information and calling for reflection whenever a problem presents conflicting aspects; on the other hand, the purpose of moral reflection is to rationalize pre-reflective intuitions to provide articulated and accessible reasons. (shrink)

We present computational modeling results based on a self‐paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k‐fold cross‐validation. We find that our data are better accounted for by an encoding‐based model of agreement attraction, compared to a retrieval‐based model. A novel methodological contribution of our study is the use of comprehension questions with open‐ended responses, so that (...) both misinterpretation of the number feature of the subject phrase and misassignment of the thematic subject role of the verb can be investigated at the same time. We find evidence for both types of misinterpretation in our study, sometimes in the same trial. However, the specific error patterns in our data are not fully consistent with any previously proposed model. (shrink)

Recent experimental epistemology has devoted increasing attention to folk attributions of epistemic justification. Empirical studies have tested whether lay people ascribe epistemic justification in specific lottery-style vignettes (Friedman and Turri 2014, Turri and Friedman 2015, Ebert et al. 2018) and also to more ordinary beliefs (Nolte et al. 2021). In this paper, I highlight three crucial but hitherto uncritically accepted assumptions of these studies, and I argue that they are untenable. Central to my criticism is the observation that epistemic justification (...) is a philosophical term of art mostly foreign to lay people: as such, it is not suitable for direct empirical testing without being previously introduced. This point reveals a folk conceptual gap between the subject matter of these experimental studies and the conceptual repertoire we can reasonably expect lay people to possess. I elaborate on this worry, and I end on a cautiously optimistic note: after suggesting better strategies to survey folk attributions of epistemic justification, I conclude that the challenge raised by the folk conceptual gap remains difficult but can in principle be addressed. (shrink)

We explore a notion of pseudofinite dimension, introduced by Hrushovski and Wagner, on an infinite ultraproduct of finite structures. Certain conditions on pseudofinite dimension are identified that guarantee simplicity or supersimplicity of the underlying theory, and that a drop in pseudofinite dimension is equivalent to forking. Under a suitable assumption, a measure-theoretic condition is shown to be equivalent to local stability. Many examples are explored, including vector spaces over finite fields viewed as 2-sorted finite structures, and homocyclic groups. Connections are (...) made to products of sets in finite groups, in particular to word maps, and a generalization of Tao's Algebraic Regularity Lemma is noted. (shrink)

Ambivalence, i.e., the simultaneous holding of negative and positive evaluations toward the same object, is an empirically well-documented phenomenon and an important aspect of ordinary experience. However, it has not received sufficient philosophical attention. This essay accomplishes two aims: first, a comprehensive and empirically informed account of ambivalence is provided; second, the rationality of ambivalence in practical and nonpractical contexts is defended.

This paper illustrates cognitive modeling constructs designed to make learning by instruction more robust, including (1) flexible grounding of language to execution, (2) inference of implicit instruction knowledge, and (3) interactive clarification of instructions during both learning and execution.

In recent years, the epistemic reliability of moral intuitions has been undermined by substantial empirical data reporting the influence of cognitive biases. This paper discusses and elaborates upon a promising strategy in response to the reliability challenge to moral intuitions. The considered argument appeals to the fact that moral intuitions are experienced with different levels of strength and agents accept only strong intuitions, not vulnerable to bias under realistic circumstances. This essay aims to reconstruct this defense from the reliability challenge (...) in its most promising form and to evaluate the plausibility of the argument in light of the available empirical evidence. What emerges from the discussion is that the vindication of moral intuitions fundamentally depends on two distinct premises: first, the hypothesis that agents accept moral intuitions proportionally to their level of confidence, and second, the hypothesis that intuitive confidence is epistemically reliable. While there is consistent evidence for the first hypothesis, there is still no conclusive evidence for the second. (shrink)

Financial and prosocial biases in favor of attractive adults have been documented in the labor market, in social transactions in everyday life, and in studies involving experimental economic games. According to the taste-based discrimination model developed by economists, attractiveness-related financial and prosocial biases are the result of preferences or prejudices similar to those displayed toward members of a particular sex, racial, ethnic, or religious group. Other explanations proposed by economists and social psychologists maintain that attractiveness is a marker of personality, (...) intelligence, trustworthiness, professional competence, or productivity. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that attractive adults are favored because they are preferred sexual partners. Evidence that stereotypes about attractive people are causally related to financial or prosocial biases toward them is weak or nonexistent. Consistent with evolutionary explanations, biases in favor of attractive women appear to be more consistent or stronger than those in favor of attractive men, and biases are more consistently reported in interactions between opposite-sex than same-sex individuals. Evolutionary explanations also account for increased prosocial behavior in situations in which attractive individuals are simply bystanders. Finally, evolutionary explanations are consistent with the psychological, physiological, and behavioral changes that occur when individuals are exposed to potential mates, which facilitate the expression of courtship behavior and increase the probability of occurrence of mating. Therefore, multiple lines of evidence suggest that mating motives play a more important role in driving financial and prosocial biases toward attractive adults than previously recognized. (shrink)

This study investigated sex differences in interest in infants among children, adolescents, young adults, and older individuals. Interest in infants was assessed with responses to images depicting animal and human infants versus adults, and with verbal responses to questionnaires. Clear sex differences, irrespective of age, emerged in all visual and verbal tests, with females being more interested in infants than males. Male interest in infants remained fairly stable across the four age groups, whereas female interest in infants was highest in (...) childhood and adolescence and declined thereafter, particularly for the responses to visual stimuli. The observed developmental changes in female interest in infants are consistent with the hypothesis that they represent a biological adaptation for parenting. (shrink)

Previous accounts of cognitive skill acquisition have demonstrated how procedural knowledge can be obtained and transformed over time into skilled task performance. This article focuses on a complementary aspect of skill acquisition, namely the integration and reuse of previously known component skills. The article posits that, in addition to mechanisms that proceduralize knowledge into more efficient forms, skill acquisition requires tight integration of newly acquired knowledge and previously learned knowledge. Skill acquisition also benefits from reuse of existing knowledge across disparate (...) task domains, relying on indexicals to reference and share necessary information across knowledge components. To demonstrate these ideas, the article proposes a computational model of skill acquisition from instructions focused on integration and reuse, and applies this model to account for behavior across seven task domains. (shrink)