Mr. Bayfield on Conditions ‘Contrary to Fact’

Functional connectivity MR imaging: fact or artifact?

On the road toward formal reasoning: reasoning with factual causal and contrary-to-fact causal premises during early adolescence.

Understanding the development of conditional (if-then) reasoning is critical for theoretical and educational reasons. Here we examined the hypothesis that there is a developmental transition between reasoning with true and contrary-to-fact (CF) causal conditionals. A total of 535 students between 11 and 14 years of age received priming conditions designed to encourage use of either a true or CF...

Contrary-to-Duty Obligations

We investigate under what conditions contrary-to-duty (CTD) structures lacking temporal and action elements can be given a coherent reading. We argue, contrary to some recent proposals, that CTD is not an instance of defeasible reasoning, and that methods of nonmonotonic logics are inadequate since they are unable to distinguish between defeasibility and violation of primary obligations. We pro...

Contrary-To-Duties in Games

The aim of the paper is to bring to the realm of game theory the well-known deontic notion of contrary-to-duty (CTD) obligation, so far not investigated in relation to optimality of strategic decisions. We maintain that, under a game-theoretical semantics, CTDs are well-suited to treat sub-ideal decisions. We also argue that, in a wide class of interactions, CTDs can used as a compact represent...

A Conflict Between Some Semantic Conditions of Carmo and Jones for Contrary-to-Duty Obligations

We show that Carmo and Jones’ condition 5(e) conflicts with the other conditions on their models for contrary-to-duty obligations. We then propose a resolution to the conflict.