The inaugural southwest medical debate, between Exeter and Plymouth medical schools and respective health services, was held on the 3rd December 2014. Plymouth proposed the motion "This house believes the NHS should be privatised?" In an increasingly political climate, the National Health Service (NHS) has become a constant topic for discussion in the media. On this occasion, all those debating...

Each society is characterized by its own belief system that takes roots from its cultural identity. This belief system affects all factors of human life including health. Tribals are no exception to it. The tribal societies of India have their distinctive sets of taboo and socio-cultural practices regarding health culture. This papers deals the socio-religious believe and taboo related aspects ...

The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous believes and the emergence of democratic or dictatorial extremism is studied extending our former two state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural class. At each step they are distributed randomly in different groups within their respective class to evolve locally by majority rule. In case of a tie the ...

According to contemporary representationalism, phenomenal qualia—of specifically sensory experiences—supervene on representational content. Most arguments for representationalism share a common, phenomenological premise: the so-called ‘‘transparency thesis.’’ According to the transparency thesis, it is difficult—if not impossible—to distinguish the quality or character of experiencing an object...

Correlations arise naturally in non-cooperative games, e.g., in the equivalence between undominated and optimal strategies in games with more than two players. But the non-cooperative assumption is that players do not coordinate their strategy choices, so where do these correlations come from? The epistemic view of games gives an answer. Under this view, the players’ hierarchies of beliefs (bel...

Psychological research indicates that people have a cognitive bias that leads them to misinterpret new information as supporting previously held hypotheses. We model such confirmatory bias in a symmetric model in which exactly one of two hypotheses is true. We show that the confirmatory bias induces overconfidence: Given any probabilistic assessment by an agent that one of the hypotheses is pro...

We define an interactional trap as a situation in an interaction in which a user believes that their objective is not achievable even though it is or, conversely, believes that it is when it is not. Interactional traps are not solely a consequence of computer system design, or just a result of user actions, but arise through the interaction between the agents. We present an interaction framewor...

Shapiro et al. [2005; 2006], presented a framework for representing goal change in the situation calculus. In that framework, agents adopt a goal when requested to do so (by some agent reqr ), and they remain committed to the goal unless the request is cancelled by reqr . A common assumption in the agent theory literature, e.g., [Cohen and Levesque, 1990; Rao and Georgeff, 1991], is that achiev...