BackgroundIn Parkinson's disease, the side of motor symptoms onset may influence disease progression, with a faster motor symptom progression in patients with left side lateralization. Moreover, worse neuropsychological outcomes after subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation have been described in patients with predominantly left-sided motor symptoms. The objective of this study was to evaluate if the body side of motor symptoms onset may predict motor outcome of bilateral STN-DBS.MethodsThis retrospective study included all consecutive PD patients treated with bilateral STN-DBS at Grenoble (...) University Hospital from 1993 to 2015. Demographic, clinical and neuroimaging data were collected before and 1 year after surgery. The predictive factors of motor outcome at one-year follow-up, measured by the percentage change in the MDS-UPDRS-III score, were evaluated through univariate and multivariate linear regression analysis.ResultsA total of 233 patients were included with one-year follow-up after surgery [143 males ; 121 right body onset; 112 left body onset; mean age at surgery, 55.31 ± 8.44 years; mean disease duration, 11.61 ± 3.87]. Multivariate linear regression analysis showed that the left side of motor symptoms onset did not predict motor outcome.ConclusionsIn this retrospective study, the body side of motor symptoms onset did not significantly influence the one-year motor outcome in a large cohort of PD patients treated with bilateral STN-DBS. (shrink)

Bayes nets are a powerful tool for researchers in statistics and artificial intelligence. This chapter demonstrates that they are also of much use for philosophers and psychologists interested in (Bayesian) rationality. To do so, we outline the general methodology of Bayes nets modeling in rationality research and illustrate it with several examples from the philosophy and psychology of reasoning and argumentation. Along the way, we discuss the normative foundations of Bayes nets modeling and address some of the methodological problems it (...) raises. (shrink)

The elucidations and regimentations of grounding offered in the literature standardly take it to be a necessary connection. In particular, authors often assert, or at least assume, that if some facts ground another fact, then the obtaining of the former necessitates the latter; and moreover, that grounding is an internal relation, in the sense of being necessitated by the existence of the relata. In this article, I challenge the necessitarian orthodoxy about grounding by offering two prima facie counterexamples. First, some (...) physical facts may ground a certain phenomenal fact without necessitating it; and they may co-exist with the latter without grounding it. Second, some instantiations of categorical properties may ground the instantiation of a dispositional one without necessitating it; and they may co-exist without grounding it. After arguing that these may be genuine counterexamples, I ask whether there are modal constraints on grounding that are not threatened by them. I propose two: that grounding supervenes on what facts there are, and that every grounded fact supervenes on what grounds there are. Finally, I attempt to provide a rigorous formulation of the latter supervenience claim and discuss some technical questions that arise if we allow descending grounding chains of transfinite length. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy is once again in a methodological frame of mind. Nowhere is this more evident than in metaphysics, whose practitioners and historians are actively reflecting on the nature of ontological questions, the status of their answers, and the relevance of contributions both from other areas within philosophy and beyond. Such reflections are hardly new: the debate between Willard van Orman Quine and Rudolf Carnap about how to understand and resolve ontological questions is widely seen as a turning point in (...) twentieth-century analytic philosophy. And indeed, this volume is occasioned by the fact that the deflationary approach to metaphysics advocated by Carnap in that debate is once again attracting considerable interest and support. Eleven original essays by many of today's leading voices in metametaphysics aim to deepen our understanding of Carnap's contributions to metaontology and to explore how this legacy might be mined for insights into the contemporary debate. (shrink)

Fundamentality plays a pivotal role in discussions of ontology, supervenience, and possibility, and other key topics in metaphysics. However, there are two different ways of characterising the fundamental: as that which is not grounded, and as that which is the ground of everything else. I show that whether these two characterisations pick out the same property turns on a principle—which I call “Dichotomy”—that is of independent interest in the theory of ground: that everything is either fully grounded or not even (...) partially grounded. I then argue that Dichotomy fails: some facts have partial grounds that cannot be complemented to a full ground. Rejecting Dichotomy opens the door to recognising a bifurcation in our notion of fundamentality. I sketch some of the far-reaching metaphysical consequences this might have, with reference to big-picture views such as Humeanism. Since Dichotomy is entailed by the standard account of partial ground, according to which partial grounds are subpluralities of full grounds, a non-standard account is needed. In a technical “Appendix”, I show that truthmaker semantics furnishes such an account, and identify a semantic condition that corresponds to Dichotomy. (shrink)

Cross-sector development partnerships are project-based collaborative arrangements between business, government, and civil society organizations in support of international development goals such as sustainability, health education, and economic development. Focusing on public private partnerships in development cooperation, we examine different constellations of bridging agents and their effects in the formation of single CSDP projects and longer-term alliances. We conceptualize bridging agency as a collective process involving both internal partner representatives and external intermediaries in initiating and/or supporting roles. We find that the (...) involvement of external intermediaries eases the formation of single projects and longer-term alliances. However, when projects are initiated by external intermediaries they tend to be repetitive and narrow in scope, whereas projects initiated by internal partner representatives often explore novel agendas and embody a greater potential for social innovation. Yet, the longer-term pursuit of these agendas beyond single projects may require external intermediaries in supporting roles. Findings help better understand micro-processes and collective practices of brokerage and alliance formation in transnational governance contexts and beyond. (shrink)

Conditionals and conditional reasoning have been a long-standing focus of research across a number of disciplines, ranging from psychology through linguistics to philosophy. But almost no work has concerned itself with the question of how hearing or reading a conditional changes our beliefs. Given that we acquire much—perhaps most—of what we believe through the testimony of others, the simple matter of acquiring conditionals via others’ assertion of a conditional seems integral to any full understanding of the conditional and conditional reasoning. (...) In this paper we detail a number of basic intuitions about how beliefs might change in response to a conditional being uttered, and show how these are backed by behavioral data. In the remainder of the paper, we then show how these deceptively simple phenomena pose a fundamental challenge to present theoretical accounts of the conditional and conditional reasoning – a challenge which no account presently fully meets. (shrink)

The emerging consensus in the philosophy of cognition is that cognition is situated, i.e., dependent upon or co-constituted by the body, the environment, and/or the embodied interaction with it. But what about emotions? If the brain alone cannot do much thinking, can the brain alone do some emoting? If not, what else is needed? Do (some) emotions (sometimes) cross an individual's boundary? If so, what kinds of supra-individual systems can be bearers of affective states, and why? And does that make (...) emotions ?embedded? or ?extended? in the sense cognition is said to be embedded and extended? Section 2 shows why it is important to understand in which sense body, environment, and our embodied interaction with the world contribute to our affective life. Section 3 introduces some key concepts of the debate about situated cognition. Section 4 draws attention to an important disanalogy between cognition and emotion with regard to the role of the body. Section 5 shows under which conditions a contribution by the environment results in non-trivial cases of ?embedded? emotions. Section 6 is concerned with affective phenomena that seem to cross the organismic boundaries of an individual, in particular with the idea that emotions are ?extended? or ?distributed.? (shrink)

We define a notion of difference-making for partial grounds of a fact in rough analogy to existing notions of difference-making for causes of an event. Using orthodox assumptions about ground, we show that it induces a non-trivial division with examples of partial grounds on both sides. We then demonstrate the theoretical fruitfulness of the notion by applying it to the analysis of a certain kind of putative counter-example to the transitivity of ground recently described by Jonathan Schaffer. First, we show (...) that our conceptual apparatus of difference-making enables us to give a much clearer description than Schaffer does of what makes the relevant instances of transitivity appear problematic. Second, we suggest that difference-making is best seen as a mark of good grounding-based explanations rather than a necessary condition on grounding, and argue that this enables us to deal with the counter-example in a satisfactory way. Along the way, we show that Schaffer's own proposal for salvaging a form of transitivity by moving to a contrastive conception of ground is unsuccessful. We conclude by sketching some natural strategies for extending our proposal to a more comprehensive account of grounding-based explanations. (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)

Many historians of philosophy, with all their intended praise, let the philosophers speak mere nonsense. They do not guess the purpose of the philosophers.… They cannot see beyond what the philosophers actually said, to what they really meant to say.Mou Zongsan (1909–1995) is one of the key figures of contemporary New Confucianism (當代新儒家) who to this day remains largely unknown and grossly understudied in the West.1 This neglect by the Western academy contrasts sharply with the ever-growing output of literature by (...) Chinese and Taiwanese scholars in which Mou Zongsan emerges as one of the most discussed and most controversial Chinese philosophers of the twentieth century. Given this unfortunate East-West divide—as .. (shrink)

More and more organisations formulate a code of conduct in order to stimulate responsible behaviour among their members. Much time and energy is usually spent fixing the content of the code but many organisations get stuck in the challenge of implementing and maintaining the code. The code then turns into nothing else than the notorious "paper in the drawer", without achieving its aims. The challenge of implementation is to utilize the dynamics which have emerged from the formulation of the code. (...) This will support a continuous process of reflection on the central values and standards contained in the code. This paper presents an assessment method, based on the EFQM model, which intends to support this implementation process. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to examine moods, mostly in comparison to emotions. Nearly all of the features that allegedly distinguish moods from emotions are disputed though. In a first section I comment on duration, intentionality, and cause in more detail, and develop intentionality as the most promising distinguishing characteristic. In a second section I will consider the huge variety of moods, ranging from shallow environmentally triggered transient moods to deep existential moods that last much longer. I will explore (...) what their sources are, and how they impact one another, other affective processes, and our being in the world. I follow several eminent emotion researchers and try to carve out their insights, many seemingly mutually excluding each other. As it will turn out, most of them are, in fact, not excluding each other, but contribute to a layered picture of moods that fits well in between emotions and personality traits. Eventually, I will shortly discuss what we can do with our moods. (shrink)

We propose an action-oriented understanding of emotion. Emotions are modifications of a basic form of goal-oriented striving characteristic of human life. They are appetitive orientations: pursuits of the good, avoidances of the bad. Thus, emotions are not truly distinct from, let alone opposed to, actions -- as erroneously suggested by the classical understanding of emotions as 'passions'. In the present paper, we will outline and defend this broadly enactive approach and motivate its main claims. Our proposal gains plausibility from a (...) literature- and interview-based investigation of emotional changes characteristic of clinical depression. Much narrative evidence from patient reports points towards the conclusion that many of those changes might result from a catastrophic alteration of the basic form of goal-pursuit at the root of human emotionality. The experience of profound depression could in this respect be a kind of inverted image of non-pathological emotionality--a highly unnatural passivity, giving rise to a profound -- and quite horrifying -- sense of incapacity. (shrink)

This paper is an essay review of Steven French and Harmke Kamminga (eds.), Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics. Essays in Honour of Heinz Post (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993). I distinguish a varity of correspondence relations between scientific theories (exemplified by cases from the book under review) and examine how one can make sense of the the prevailing continuity in scientific theorizing.

Angesichts der gegenwärtigen ökonomischen, ökologischen und sozialen Krisen zeichnet sich ab, dass die Wachstumsdynamik moderner Gesellschaften nicht mehr stabilisierend wirkt, sondern selbst zum Krisentreiber geworden ist. In diesem Band diskutieren die Philosophin Nancy Fraser und die Soziologen Klaus Dörre, Stephan Lessenich und Hartmut Rosa, was dies für die Gegenwart und die Zukunft der Demokratie bedeutet und welche Konzeptionen und Wege hin zu einer demokratischen Transformation vorstellbar sind. Aus ihrer demokratietheoretischen Perspektive intervenieren Viviana Asara, Banu Bargu, Ingolfur Blühdorn, Robin Celikates, (...) Lisa Herzog, Brian Milstein, Michelle Williams und Christos Zografos. (shrink)

This paper explores various functions of idealizations in quantum field theory. To this end it is important to first distinguish between different kinds of theories and models of or inspired by quantum field theory. Idealizations have pragmatic and cognitive functions. Analyzing a case-study from hadron physics, I demonstrate the virtues of studying highly idealized models for exploring the features of theories with an extremely rich structure such as quantum field theory and for gaining some understanding of the physical processes in (...) the system under consideration. (shrink)

Under the standard modal explication of consequence, a conclusion is a consequence of some premises just in case necessarily, if the latter are true, so is the former. Notoriously, this explication yields some results that at first glance are counter-intuitive. In particular, a necessary truth is a consequence of arbitrary premises, and premises that cannot all be true together entail arbitrary conclusions. In his paper ‘On Ground and Consequence’ (Synthese, 2021), Benjamin Schnieder introduces a novel notion of web consequence, defined (...) on the basis of the concept of ground, which, he argues, fits our intuitive conception better. Building on his idea, the present paper examines the concept of web consequence in more detail. In particular, I provide three alternative, and simpler semantic characterizations of Schnieder’s propositional logic of web consequence, two within a form of truthmaker semantics, one within a many-valued setting. I then consider some natural variations on that logic and establish their connections to well-known subclassical logics such as FDE, $$\hbox {K}_3$$ K 3, and LP. Finally, I provide sound and complete tableaux-based proof systems for each of the logics of web consequence so obtained. (shrink)

The life sciences are said to be in the midst of a replication crisis because a majority of published results are irreproducible, and scientists rarely replicate existing data. Here I argue that point 2 of this assessment is flawed because there is a hitherto unidentified form of replication in the experimental life sciences, which I call ‘microreplications’. Using a case study from biochemistry, I illustrate how MRs depend on a key element of experimentation, namely, experimental controls. I end by reflecting (...) on what MRs mean for the broader debate about the replication crisis. (shrink)

There are various ways to reach a group decision on a factual yes–no question. One way is to vote and decide what the majority votes for. This procedure receives some epistemological support from the Condorcet Jury Theorem. Alternatively, the group members may prefer to deliberate and will eventually reach a decision that everybody endorses—a consensus. While the latter procedure has the advantage that it makes everybody happy, it has the disadvantage that it is difficult to implement, especially for larger groups. (...) Besides, the resulting consensus may be far away from the truth. And so we ask: Is deliberation truth-conducive in the sense that majority voting is? To address this question, we construct a highly idealized model of a particular deliberation process, inspired by the movie Twelve Angry Men, and show that the answer is ‘yes’. Deliberation procedures can be truth-conducive just as the voting procedure is. We then explore, again on the basis of our model and using agent-based simulations, under which conditions it is better epistemically to deliberate than to vote. Our analysis shows that there are contexts in which deliberation is epistemically preferable and we will provide reasons for why this is so. (shrink)

This entry sketches the theory of personal identity that has come to be known as animalism. Animalism’s hallmark claim is that each of us is identical with a human animal. Moreover, animalists typically claim that we could not exist except as animals, and that the (biological) conditions of our persistence derive from our status as animals. Prominent advocates of this view include Michael Ayers, Eric Olson, Paul Snowdon, Peter van Inwagen, and David Wiggins.

Conditionals pervade every aspect of our thinking, from the mundane and everyday such as ‘if you eat too much cheese, you will have nightmares’ to the most fundamental concerns as in ‘if global warming isn’t halted, sea levels will rise dramatically’. Many decades of research have focussed on the semantics of conditionals and how people reason from conditionals in everyday life. Here it has been rather overlooked how we come to such conditionals in the first place. In many cases, they (...) are learned through testimony: someone warns us about the ill-effects of cheese. Any full account of the conditional must consequently incorporate such learning. Here, we provide a new formal account of belief change in response to a testimonial conditional. (shrink)

There has been much concern with the abundance of misinformation in public discourse. Although misinformation has always played a role in political debate, its character has shifted from support fo...

De se attitudes seem to play a special role in action and cognition. This raises a challenge to the traditional way in which mental attitudes have been understood. In this chapter, we review the case for thinking that de se attitudes require special theoretical treatment and discuss various ways in which the traditional theory can be modified to accommodate de se attitudes.

An argument with roots in ancient Greek philosophy claims that only humans are capable of a certain class of thought termed conceptual, as opposed to perceptual thought, which is common to humans, the higher animals, and some machines. We outline the most detailed modern version of this argument due to Mortimer Adler, who in the 1960s argued for the uniqueness of the human power of conceptual thought. He also admitted that if conceptual thought were ever manifested by machines, such an (...) achievement would contradict his conclusion. We revisit Adler’s criterion in the light of the past five decades of artificial-intelligence research, and refine it in view of the classical definitions of perceptual and conceptual thought. We then examine two well-publicized examples of creative works produced by AI systems and show that evidence for conceptual thought appears to be lacking in them. Although clearer evidence for conceptual thought on the part of AI systems may arise in the near future, especially if the global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness prevails over its rival, integrated information theory, the question of whether AI systems can engage in conceptual thought appears to be still open. (shrink)

Presents the basic words, definitions, and doctrinal systems of four wisdom teachings of the East.

This chapter provides a critical overview of various influential accounts of de se attitudes including those proposed by Frege, Lewis and Perry. It also addresses the charge that there is nothing distinctive about de se attitudes. The second half outlines a widely accepted and influential model of communication and various complications that arise in applying this model to the communication of de se thoughts. The final section provides an overview of the papers in this volume.

Often, the behavior of animals can be better explained and predicted, it seems, if we ascribe the capacity to have beliefs, intentions, and concepts to them. Whether we really can do so, however, is a debated issue. Particularly, Donald Davidson maintains that there is no basis in fact for ascribing propositional attitudes or concepts to animals. I will consider his and rival views, such as Colin Allen's three-part approach, for determining whether animals possess concepts. To avoid pure theoretical debate, however, (...) I will test these criteria using characteristic examples from ethology that depict a broad range of animal behavior. This will allow us to detect a series of gradations in animals' capacities, in the course of which we can think over what would count for or against an attribution of concepts and propositional attitudes to them in each single case. Self-conceit is our natural hereditary disease. Of all creatures man is the most wretched and fragile, and at once the most supercilious. ... It is by this conceit that man arrogates to himself ... divine properties, that he segregates himself from the mass of other creatures and raises himself above them .. (shrink)

Theoretical models are an important tool for many aspects of scientific activity. They are used, i.a., to structure data, to apply theories or even to construct new theories. But what exactly is a model? It turns out that there is no proper definition of the term "model" that covers all these aspects. Thus, I restrict myself here to evaluate the function of models in the research process while using "model" in the loose way physicists do. To this end, I distinguish (...) four kinds of models. These are (1) models as special theories, (2) models as a substitute for a theory, (3) toy models and (4) developmental models. I argue that models of the types (3) and (4) are considerably useful in the process of theory construction. This will be demonstrated in an extended case-study from High-Energy Physics. (shrink)

The parts-based engineering approach in synthetic biology aims to create pre-characterised biological parts that can be used for the rational design of novel functional systems. Given the context-sensitivity of biological entities, a key question synthetic biologists have to address is what properties these parts should have so that they give a predictable output even when they are used in different contexts. In the first part of this paper I will analyse some of the answers that synthetic biologists have given to (...) this question and claim that the focus of these answers on parts and their properties does not allow us to tackle the problem of context-sensitivity. In the second part of the paper, I will argue that we might have to abandon the notions of parts and their properties in order to understand how independence in biology could be achieved. Using Robert Cummins’ account of functional analysis, I will then develop the notion of a capacity and its condition space and show how these notions can help to tackle the problem of context-sensitivity in biology. (shrink)

Combining testimonial reports from independent and partially reliable information sources is an important epistemological problem of uncertain reasoning. Within the framework of Dempster–Shafer theory, we propose a general model of partially reliable sources, which includes several previously known results as special cases. The paper reproduces these results on the basis of a comprehensive model taxonomy. This gives a number of new insights and thereby contributes to a better understanding of this important application of reasoning with uncertain and incomplete information.

In many scientific, economic and policy-related problems, pieces of information from different sources have to be aggregated. Typically, the sources are not equally competent. This raises the question of how the relative weights and competences should be related to arrive at an optimal final verdict. Our paper addresses this question under a more realistic perspective of measuring the practical loss implied by an inaccurate verdict.

Meijs and Douven (2005) present an interesting pair of alleged counterexamples and an algorithm to generate such counter-examples to our criterion for a coherence quasi-ordering over information sets as outlined in our 2003a and 2003b accounts. We agree that our criterion does not always provide an ordering when we would intuitively say that one set is more coherent than the other. Nonetheless, we think that our criterion can be salvaged.

Deliberation is a standard procedure to make decisions in not too large groups. It has the advantage that the group members can learn from each other and that, at the end, often a consensus emerges that everybody endorses. But a deliberation procedure also has a number of disadvantages. E.g., what consensus is reached usually depends on the order in which the different group members speak. More specifically, the group member who speaks first often has an unproportionally high impact on the (...) final decision: She anchors the deliberation process. While the anchoring effect undoubtably appears in real deliberating groups, we ask whether it also appears in groups whose members are truth-seeking and rational in the sense that they take the information provided by their fellow group members properly into account by updating their beliefs according to plausible rules. To answer this question and to make some progress towards explaining the anchoring effect, a formal model is constructed and analyzed. Using this model, we study the anchoring effect in homogenous groups, for which we provide analytical results, and in inhomogeneous groups, for which we provide simulation results. (shrink)

The introduction of Philosophy and Ethics to the Western Australian Certificate of Education courses in 2008 brought philosophy into the Western Australian secondary school curriculum for the first time. How philosophy came to be included is part of a larger story about the commitment and perseverance of a relatively small number of Australian educators and their belief in the value of introducing philosophical communities of inquiry into school classrooms through a revised pedagogy which could sit comfortably with an outcomes-based education (...) system. (shrink)

Determining the knowledge that guides human judgments is fundamental to understanding how people reason, make decisions, and form predictions. We use an experimental procedure called ‘‘iterated learning,’’ in which the responses that people give on one trial are used to generate the data they see on the next, to pinpoint the knowledge that informs people's predictions about everyday events (e.g., predicting the total box office gross of a movie from its current take). In particular, we use this method to discriminate (...) between two models of human judgments: a simple Bayesian model (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2006) and a recently proposed alternative model that assumes people store only a few instances of each type of event in memory (MinK; Mozer, Pashler, & Homaei, 2008). Although testing these models using standard experimental procedures is difficult due to differences in the number of free parameters and the need to make assumptions about the knowledge of individual learners, we show that the two models make very different predictions about the outcome of iterated learning. The results of an experiment using this methodology provide a rich picture of how much people know about the distributions of everyday quantities, and they are inconsistent with the predictions of the MinK model. The results suggest that accurate predictions about everyday events reflect relatively sophisticated knowledge on the part of individuals. (shrink)

François Jullien’s idea of landscape in Chinese philosophy and art is taken from the refinement of highly literate writers and artists, unrelated to the techniques of location that find good sites and make places in landscape. This article is based on a study of fengshui (Chinese geomancy). It argues that fengshui is a practice of identifying not things or beings but moments and circumstances of a client. It works with an epistemology of pattern recognition, which is based on observation and (...) experience but does not test the truth of the signs that are the means of recognizing patterns. This epistemology of pattern recognition is not peculiarly Chinese but can also be found in building, urban planning, and the art of medical diagnosis. (shrink)

Social epistemology is a relatively new and booming field of research. It studies the social dimension of the pursuit of acquiring true beliefs and requires philosophical as well as sociological and economic expertise. The insights gained in social epistemology are not only of theoretical interest; they also improve our understanding of social and political processes, as the field includes the analysis of group deliberation and group decision-making. However, surprisingly little work has so far been done on the epistemic properties of (...) group deliberation, belief aggregation, and decision-making procedures. To close this gap, the construction and analysis of formal models are especially promising as formal modeling combines representational adequacy with instructive analytical results. This special issue collects papers that follow this strategy from the point of view of different disciplines. (shrink)

Suppose that we acquire various items of information from various sources and that our degree of confidence in the content of the information set is sufficiently high to believe the information. Now a new item of information is being presented by a new information source. Are we justified to add this new item of information to what we already believe? Consider the following parable: “I go to a lecture about wildlife in Greenland which was supposed to be delivered by an (...) expert in the field. When I arrive I notice that the expert has excused himself and that the biology department has sent a newcomer to fill in for him. I have no beliefs about wildlife in Greenland, but I do have some beliefs about Greenland’s climate and about the kinds of climate conditions that various types of wildlife favor. Suppose that our newcomer proclaims that large colonies of elk roam in a particular valley on the southern tip of Greenland. Then I would certainly be willing to accept this item of information. But suppose that he proclaims that large colonies of armadillos roam in the same valley. Then I would not be willing to accept this item of information. Why do I accept the former but not the latter item of information? Let us suppose that neither item of information is logically inconsistent with what I already believe. Clearly, the former item of information is not inconsistent. But also the latter item is not: after all, there may be small pockets of Greenland with special climatological conditions and some Texan sailors may have set loose a pair of armadillos as a practical joke. But whereas the former item of information is quite plausible given my previous beliefs, the latter item of information is not. And this is what makes for the difference. Now suppose that our newcomer proclaims that large colonies of wild boars roam this valley in Greenland. I am not that sure anymore. Given everything I believe, I find wild boars in Greenland more plausible than armadillos in Greenland, but certainly less plausible than elk in Greenland. Had our expert presented the lecture and provided precisely the 2 same information, then I would have been willing to adopt the belief that there are wild boars in Greenland, but, with our newcomer delivering the lecture, I am not willing to do so. It is not that I would believe anything out of the expert’s mouth: also he could not have convinced me that there are armadillos in Greenland. But when it comes to wild boars, the difference between the expert’s and the newcomer’s credentials simply makes for the difference.” What we learn from this story is that the question of belief expansion has something to do with the reliability of the information source as well as with the plausibility of the new information, given what I already believe. The more reliable the information source is, the less plausible the new information needs to be given what I already believe, for me to be justified to add the belief to our belief set. The more plausible the new information is given what I already believe, the less reliable the information source needs to be given what I already believe, for me to be justified to add the belief to my belief set. The challenge is: can a precise account of this relationship be provided? (shrink)

Der bedeutende amerikanische Logiker und Philosoph W.V.O. Quine hat die folgende Frage ins Zentrum seines Schaffens gestellt: "Wie kommen wir von unseren Sinnesdaten zu Theorien über die Welt?“ Bei der Beantwortung dieser Frage tritt ein grundlegendes Problem auf, das damit zusammenhängt, dass uns immer nur ein endlicher Satz an Informationen über die Welt zugänglich ist. Jedes Experiment liefert z. B. nur eine endliche Anzahl von Messpunkten.

The choice of a social decision rule for a federal assembly affects the welfare distribution within the federation. But which decision rules can be recommended on welfarist grounds? In this paper, we focus on two welfarist desiderata, viz. (i) maximizing the expected utility of the whole federation and (ii) equalizing the expected utilities of people from dif- ferent states in the federation. We consider the European Union as an example, set up a probabilistic model of decision making and explore how (...) different decision rules fare with regard to the desiderata. We start with a default model, where the interests, and therefore the votes of the different states are not correlated. This default model is then abandoned in favor of models with correlations. We perform computer simulations and find that decision rules with a low acceptance threshold do generally better in terms of desideratum (i), whereas the rules presented in the Accession Treaty and in the (still unratified) Constitution of the Euro- pean Union tend to do better in terms of desideratum (ii). The ranking obtained regarding desideratum (i) is fairly stable across different corre- lation patterns. (shrink)

A central question for psychologists, economists, and philosophers is how human lives should be valued. Whereas egalitarian considerations give rise to models emphasizing that every life should be valued equally, empirical research has demonstrated that valuations of lives depend on a variety of factors that often do not conform to specific normative expectations. Such factors include emotional reactions to the victims and cognitive considerations leading to biased perceptions of lives at risk (e.g., attention, mental imagery, pseudo-inefficacy, and scope neglect). They (...) can lead to a valuation function with decreasing marginal value and sometimes even decreasing absolute value as the number of victims increases. As a result, people spend more money to save an individual while at the same time being insensitive and apathetic to large losses of life, despite endorsing egalitarian norms. In this conceptual paper, we propose a descriptive model highlighting the role of different motivations and the conditions under which cognitions and emotions result in deviations from egalitarian normative valuations of human lives. (shrink)