Three studies were conducted to assess self-serving biases in participants' beliefs about incivility, its antecedents and consequences as well as restitution behaviors and forgiveness as a function of whether a behavior was performed by themselves, strangers or friends. Participants who imagined themselves in the active role not only described their own behavior as more excusable, congruent wit...

A growing literature in economics and philosophy seeks to explain human choice in terms of either multiple selves or multiple layers of preferences, with the intent of explaining anomalies such as self-constraining behavior and time inconsistency. This article challenges the value of such models. While they do not pose unavoidable logical contradictions, they do pose analytical difficulties tha...

Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) are a pow­ erful formalism for reasoning under uncer­ tainty but bear some severe limitations: they require a large amount of information be­ fore any reasoning process can start, they have limited contradiction handling capabil­ ities, and their ability to provide explana­ tions for their conclusion is still controversial. There exists a class of reasoning syste...

the contemporary arab poets live in a very inconsistent conditions and the effects of these conditions can be found in their personality and poems. as the results of important political events, some contradictions such as differences between urban and rural life, individual and social trends, or the contrast of wisdom and sense arose and intensified. badr al-shakir al-siab (1926-1964), one of t...

The unity of opposites in the title is essentially that between logic and geometry, and there are compelling reasons for maintaining that geometry is the leading aspect. At the same lime, in the present joint work with Myles Tierney there are important influences in the other direction: a Grothendieck " topology " appears most naturally as a modal operator, of the nature " it is locally the cas...

Weconsiderpredictionsprovidedby Inductive-Statistical (I-S) inference. It was noted by Hempel that I-S inference is statistically ambiguous. To avoid this problem Hempel introduced the Requirement of Maximal Specificity (RMS). We define the formal notion of RMS in terms of probabilistic logic, and maximally specific rules (MS-rules), i. e. rules satisfying RMS. Then we prove that any set of MS-...

Computation models such as circuits describe sequences of computation steps that are carried out one after the other. In other words, algorithm design is traditionally subject to the restriction imposed by a fixed causal order. We address a novel computing paradigm, replacing this assumption by mere logical consistency: We study non-causal circuits, where a fixed time structure within a gate is...

The governance of privacy and personal information on cloud environments is challenging and complex. Usually many regulatory frameworks intervene to reflect diverse privacy wishes from several stakeholders. This includes data owners, data and services providers and also the end users. Focusing mainly on medical domains, this issue is particularly important due to the sensitivity of health relat...

This contribution aims at showing some of the advantages of taking a novel, broad and systemic view on constitutive rules based on a failure oriented analysis, relying on the notion of impasse. Basically, impasses can descend by two main kinds of causes: either a mismatch between rules (how things should be done) and facts (how things are actually done), or an internal contradiction among rules...

1 The issue The purpose of this essay is to shed some light on a certain type of sentence, which I call a borderline contradiction. A borderline contradiction is a sentence of the form F a ∧ ¬F a, for some vague predicate F and some borderline case a of F , or a sentence equivalent to such a sentence. For example, if Jackie is a borderline case of 'rich', then 'Jackie is rich and Jackie isn't r...