Indifference, Apathy, and Preparedness

Ignorance and Indifference*

The epistemic state of complete ignorance is not a probability distribution. In it, we assign the same, unique, ignorance degree of belief to any contingent outcome and each of its contingent, disjunctive parts. That this is the appropriate way to represent complete ignorance is established by two instruments, each individually strong enough to identify this state. They are the principle of ind...

Envelopes and Indifference

Stable Marriage and Indifference

It is well known that every instance of the classical stable marriage problem admits at least one stable matching, and that such a matching can be found in O(n’) time by application of the Gale/Shapley algorithm. In the classical version of the problem, each person must rank the members of the opposite sex in strict order of preference. In practical applications, a person may not wish (or be ab...

Conditional indifference and conditional preservation

The idea of preserving conditional beliefs emerged recently as a new paradigm apt to guide the revision of epistemic states. Conditionals are substantially different from propositional beliefs and need specific treatment. In this paper, we present a new approach to conditionals, capturing particularly well their dynamic part as revision policies. We thoroughly axiom-atize a principle of conditi...

Pain and apathy

In this case report we discuss the lack of emotional reactivity and evasive motor motivation to nociceptive stimuli presented by a patient with frontotemporal degenerative disease and apathy as a predominant behavioral symptom.