How mental systems believe.

How Mental Systems Believe

Is there a difference between believing and merely understanding an idea?Descartes thought so. He considered the acceptance and rejection of an idea to be alternative outcomes of an effortful assessment process that occurs subsequent to the automatic comprehension of that idea. This article examined Spinoza's alternative suggestion that (a) the acceptance of an idea is part of the automatic com...

How much do you believe?

This paper responds to a number of criticisms of Dempster-Shafer theory made by Judea Pearl. He criticises Dempster-Shafer belief for not obeying the laws of Bayesian belief," however, these laws lead to well-known problems in the face of ignorance, and seem unreasonably restrictive. It is argued that it is not reasonable to expect a measure of belief to obey Pearl's sandwich principle. The sta...

How to Believe the Impossible

How to Believe a Machine-Checked Proof1

How to Believe a Twelf Proof

Logical systems are represented in LF by giving a full and faithful (adequate) embedding of the deductive apparatus of the logic as canonical forms of certain types and kinds in LF in specified contexts. The collection of contexts over which the representation is adequate is called a world, because it provides generators for the canonical forms in question. Transferring adequacy from one world ...