The hazard of asking survey participants hypothetical questions is that most often, responses are only an inferential vehicle for understanding preference and may not reflect the truth. Often it necessary to make a reasoned assumption about alignment individual's attitudes behaviors. In this paper, we discuss results from Survey Doctorate Recipients (SDR) pilot study experiment found significan...

Sometimes, scientific models are either intended to or plausibly interpreted as representing nonactual but possible targets. Call this “hypothetical modeling”. This paper raises two epistemological challenges concerning hypothetical modeling. To begin with, I observe that given common philosophical assumptions about the scope of objective possibility, fallible with respect what is objectively p...

We present an extension of Horn-clause logic which can hypothetically add and delete tuples from a database. Such logics have been discussed in the literature, but their complexities and expressibilities have remained an open question. This paper examines two such logics in the function-free, predicate case. It is shown, in particular, that augmenting Horn-clause logic with hypothetical additio...

Suppose that HY P is a set of hypotheses which we currently entertain about some state of aaairs represented by a propositional sentence. In a diagnostic setting, HY P might consist of all the diagnoses of some device whose description is given by , although our analysis is not restricted to diagnosis. Our concern is with experiments { how they can be designed, and what conclusions can be drawn...

Serum sodium concentration and thus serum osmolality are closely controlled by water homeostasis, which is mediated by thirst, arginine vasopressin (AVP, also known as vasopressin or antidiuretic hormone (ADH)), and the kidneys. Thirst and ADH act in parallel to control plasma osmolality and sodium concentration. The physiology of thirst is a highly complex process that must be controlled by a ...

the value of good X (x-axis) and such that the response is menu dependent (red when X is offered against Y, blue when X is offered against Z). Transitivity violations (i.e., cases where x-axis orderings are not conserved on the y-axis) are possible, as for X1, X2, X3. However, if the representation is menu invariant (i.e., if red and blue lines coincide), transitivity violations cannot occur. I...

This paper considers the problem of posing and answering hypothetical temporal queries to databases. The queries are hypothetical in the sense that we pose a query to a virtually updated database, and the query is answered on the basis of the initial, physical database and the list of transactions that virtually update the database. The queries are temporal in the sense that they refer to possi...

This paper shows that classical logic is inappropriate for hypothetical reasoning and develops an alternative logic for this purpose. The paper focuses on a form of hypothetical reasoning which appears computationally tractable. Specifically, Horn-clause logic is augmented with rules, called embedded implications, which can hypothetically add atomic formulas to a rulebase. By introducing the no...