Contextualism about Evidential Support

Flexible Contextualism about Deontic Modals: A Puzzle about Information-Sensitivity

According to a recent challenge to Kratzer’s canonical contextualist semantics for deontic modal expressions, no contextualist view can make sense of cases in which such a modal must be information-sensitive in some way. Here I show howKratzer’s semantics is compatible with readings of the targeted sentences that fit with the data. I then outline a general account of how contexts select paramet...

Symmetry and Evidential Support

This article proves that formal theories of evidential favoring must fail because they are inevitably language dependent. I begin by describing Carnap’s early confirmation theories to show how language dependence problems (like Goodman’s grue problem) arise. I then generalize to show that any formal favoring theory satisfying minimal plausible conditions will yield different judgments about the...

Evidential Support and Instrumental Rationality

Evidential Reasoning about Motives: a Case Study

Motives play an important role at every stage of a criminal investigation. They can be used to search for an explanation of the crime (why was this person killed?), to identify a suspect (who would have killed this person for this reason), and to persuade a jury of a suspect’s guilt (this motive explains why this person committed this crime). We have previously developed an account of motivatio...

Bounded Support and Confidence over Evidential Databases

In this work, we propose a new definition of support and confidence measures based on interval representation. Moreover, a new algorithm, named EBS-Apriori, based on these bounded measures and several pruning strategies is developed. A new associative classifier, named WEvAC, based on fusion and weighting technique is implemented and tested. Experiments are conducted using several database benc...