Tragedy as Contingency Acknowledgement: Towards a Practical Religious-Scientific Theory

Acknowledgement and the paradox of tragedy

We offer a new answer to the paradox of tragedy. We explain part of the appeal of tragic art in terms of its acknowledgement of sad aspects of life and offer a tentative explanation of why acknowledgement is a source of pleasure.

Towards a Logical Theory of Practical Reasoning

From the very beginning, logicians have counted practical (or action-oriented) reasoning as well as theoretical (or belief-oriented) reasoning as part of their subject. However, despite a tradition that continues to the present, logicians have not produced formalisms that could be considered of any use in designing an agent that needs to act intelligently, or in helping an intelligent agent to ...

Towards a Normative Theory of Scientific Evidence

A scientific reasoning system makes decisions using objective evidence in the form of inde­ pendent experimental trials, propositional ax­ ioms, and constraints on the probabilities of events. As a first step towards this goal, we propose a system that derives probability in­ tervals from objective evidence in those forms. Our reasoning system can manage uncertainty about data and rules in a ru...

Is Scientific Theory-Commitment Doxastic or Practical?

Associated with Bayesianism is the claim that insofar as there is anything like scientific theory-commitment, it is not a doxastic commitment to the truth of the theory or any proposition involving the theory, but is rather an essentially practical commitment to behaving in accordance with a theory. While there are a number of a priori reasons to think that this should be true, there is strong ...

[Nothing as practical as (a) good theory?].