The essay argues that the content of constitutions should derive from its political functions: granting stability and legitimacy to government. There are three main candidates for inclusion in constitutions: regime arrangements, human rights, and general credo. All constitutions must include institutional arrangements. The level of detail and entrenchment may vary. There are important reasons f...

Recent work in the domain of the validation of complex computational models reveals that modelers of complex systems, particularly modelers of the earth’s climate, face a deeply entrenched form of confirmation holism. Confirmation holism, as it is traditionally understood, is the thesis that a single hypothesis cannot be tested in isolation, but that such tests always depend on other theories o...

The Possible Models Approach (PMA) introduced by Winslett, proposes, among other things, a domain-independent criterion for measuring the similarity between the diierent states of a dynamic system. Based on this criterion of similarity, the PMA makes inferences about the eeects of events in the system. The concept of similarity between states (possible worlds) appears also in the area of Belief...

7. Introduction LI, Representation of beliefs OUR MODEL OF belief wil l be a simple one. A belief is represented by a sentence in some (regimented) language. Research done in Art if icial Intelligence has recently lead to a revival of the logic of belief. It was felt that a clear distinction should be drawn between the explicit and the implicit beliefs of a reasoner [15, 19]. The former ones ar...