Materialism is the idea that human beings are material objects—brains, perhaps, or some part of the brain—without immaterial selves or souls. I give two arguments against materialism. The first is an argument from possibility: it is possible that I should exist when no part of my body exists, in which case I am not identical with my body or any part of my body. The second is an argument from im...

This paper presents the extension of results on reasoning with totally ordered belief bases to the partially ordered case. The idea is to reason from logical bases equipped with a partial order expressing relative certainty and to construct a partially ordered deductive closure. The difficult point lies in the fact that equivalent definitions in the totally ordered case are no longer equivalent...

In spite of an evolving contemporary debate over the concept of “epistemic possibility,” nearly every philosopher assumes that the concept is equivalent to a mere absence of epistemic impossibility, that a proposition is epistemically possible as long as it is not inconsistent with some relevant body of knowledge. I suggest that we challenge this deeply entrenched assumption. I assemble an arra...

The charter of SRC is to advance both the state of knowledge and the state of the art in computer systems. From our establishment in 1984, we have performed basic and applied research to support Digital's business objectives. Our current work includes exploring distributed personal computing on multiple platforms, networking, programming technology, system modelling and management techniques, a...

It often happens that different references (i.e. data descriptions), possibly coming from different heterogeneous data sources, concern the same real world entity. In such cases, it is necessary: (i) to detect, through reconciliation methods, whether different data descriptions refer to the same real world entity and (ii) to fuse them into a unique representation. Here we assume the reference r...

In this paper, we study the semantics for the logics of preference based on possibility theory. Possibility distributions representing the preference between worlds are associated with the possible world models for dynamic logics. Then the preference between actions are determined by comparing some measures of their consequences. We will define different logics of preference by considering the ...

There is a marked gap between the demands on forecasting and the results that numerical forecasting techniques usually can provide. It is suggested that this gap can be closed by the implementation of experts' qualitative predictions into numerical forecasting systems. A formal analysis of these predictions can then be integrated into quantitative forecasts. In the framework of possibility theo...