When we disagree, we want our disagreements to be substantive. Substantive disagreements require agreement on what the disagreement is about, which in turn requires mutual understanding. Lack of mutual understanding comes from two kinds of defects: hidden differences in how the parties understand some expression, or hidden differences in what they take to be the context in which their views are...

Intelligent systems can be modeled by organizationally closed networks of interacting agents. An interesting step in the evolution from agents to systems of agents is to approach logic itself as a system of autonomous elementary processes called distinctions. Distinction networks are directed acyclic graphs in which links represent logical implication and nodes are autonomous agents which act i...

A comparative analysis of harmonic and biharmonic boundary-value problems for 2D problems on a rectangle is given. Some common features of two types of problems are emphasized and special attention is given to the basic distinction between them. This distinction was thoroughly studied for the first time by L. N. G. Filon with respect to some plane problems in the theory of elasticity. The analy...

The different kinds of communication links that can exist in an interaction among objects pose the question of whether every link is or is not an instance of an association, and whether an association must exist whenever there is a communication path between objects. The distinction between static and dynamic associations is not adequate to solve this problem, since in object-orientation every ...

Probability is a central concept in utilitarian moral theory, almost impossible to do without. I attempt to clarify the role of probability, so that we can be clear about what we are aiming for when we apply utilitarian theory to real cases. I point out the close relationship between utilitarianism and expected-utility theory, a normative standard for individual decision-making. I then argue th...

The role of biology in psychology changes from animals to humans. Biology determines animal behaviour in natural environments. For humans the biological forces changes to an energizing function. They recede in the background and the higher psychological functions govern consciousness and behavior. Humans do not have to obey the instincts or reflexes, but have the option to do what they decide t...

Snoop is an event specification language developed for expressing primitive and composite events that are part of Event-Condition-Action (or ECA) rules. In Snoop, an event was defined to be an instantaneous, atomic (happens completely or not at all) occurrence of interest and the time of occurrence of the last event in an event expression was used as the time of occurrence for the entire event ...

In this paper we consider a region which is divided into serveral subregions. Each region is served by a station with a finite capacity. This means that the station can only serve customers within the limits of its capacity (maximum number of connections simultaneously). In connection with this the following question arises: What is the first occurrence time for this event? More exactly, what i...

Citation: Laricchiuta D (2015) Editorial: Individual differences: from neurobiological bases to new insight on approach and avoidance behavior. Many different labels have been proposed over the years to cover the definition of approach and avoidance. Initially, an Approach-Avoidance distinction was conceptualized in terms of valence-based processes, rather than over behavior. In 1960s, an Appro...

We consider the efficacy of using luminosity distance measurements of deep redshift supernovae to discriminate between two forms of dark energy, quintessence (a scalar field with canonical kinetic terms rolling down a potential) and k-essence (a scalar field whose cosmic evolution is driven entirely by non-linear kinetic terms). The primary phenomenological distinction between the two types of ...