The application of probabilistic arguments to rational decisions in a single case is a contentious philosophical issue which arises in various contexts. Some authors (e.g. Horgan, Philos Pap 24:209–222, 1995; Levy, Synthese 158:139–151, 2007) affirm the normative force of probabilistic arguments in single cases while others (Baumann, Am Philos Q 42:71–79, 2005; Synthese 162:265–273, 2008) deny ...

Jean-André Rochoux (1787-1852) can be considered the author, in 1812, of the first clinical and neuropathological description of cerebral hemorrhage and ischemia, based on concepts that underlie current vascular neurology. His biography reveals how his thinking was shaped by materialist philosophy, which was also the basis of his rigorous scientific reasoning. Due to his intransigent defence of...

Introduction Metaphilosophy is all the rage nowadays. Philosophers are becoming increasingly self-conscious about their methodology, as this volume showcases. And rightly so—it is part of our job description to put thinking under the microscope, and that obviously should include our philosophical thinking. Much as we want philosophers of physics, of biology, of mathematics, and so on to scrutin...

in his recognition of being and achievement of truth, man has two instruments in his constitution and two ways before him: intellect and heart; reasoning and intuition. some have opted the way of reasoning and underestimated intuition because of its lack of reasoning, and some have preferred intuition over reasoning because of its being presential (intuitive). with their research on philosophy ...

Contextualism in epistemology is the view that on different occasions of utterance, the English verb know expresses different propositional attitudes—attitudes that vary in the required degree or kind of justification. For terminological convenience, I will distinguish between two contextualist theses. First, there is what Iʼll call linguistic contextualism (LC). By linguistic contextualism, I ...

We discuss Boltzmann’s probabilistic explanation of the second law of thermodynamics, providing a comprehensive presentation of what is called today the typicality account. Countering its misconception as an alternative explanation, we examine the relation between Boltzmann’s H-theorem and the general typicality argument, demonstrating the conceptual continuity between the two. We then discuss ...

If a new piece of information contradicts our previously held beliefs, we have to revise our beliefs. This problem of belief revision arises in a number of areas in Computer Science and Artiicial Intelligence, e.g., in updating logical database, in hypothetical reasoning, and in machine learning. Most of the research in this area is innuenced by work in philosophical logic, in particular by GG ...

For any system with limited statistical knowledge, the combination of evidence and the interpretation of sampling information requires the determination of the right reference class (or of an adequate one). The present note (1) discusses the use of reference classes in evidential reasoning , and (2) discusses a first implementation of Kyburg's rules for reference classes, and what we now know a...

This paper describes the development of a written corpus of argumentative reasoning. Arguments in the corpus have been analysed using state of the art techniques from argumentation theory and have been marked up using an open, reusable markup language. A number of the key challenges enountered during the process are explored, and preliminary observations about features such as intercoder reliab...

This report describes a case-based approach to the generation of the behaviour of conversational agents in virtual environments. A framework called behavioural casebased reasoning is defined to enable the application of case-based techniques in behaviour generation. Based on this framework, a model is designed for case-based generation of textual natural language behaviour. The flexibility of t...