Kripke (1980) famously separates the metaphysical and epistemic modal domains, with supposed necessary a posteriori identity statements such as ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, appearing to create an irreconcilable gap between conceivability and possibility. In response to this problem, David Chalmers (2002, 2004a, 2006) uses two-dimensional modal semantics (2DS) to claim that conceivability entails p...

This kind of category ambiguity has been cited as evidence against the logical possibility of learning grammatical categories from distribution (Pinker 1987). Indeed, if we are to take seriously the many proposals that children may learn which words should be categorized together based on such cues as local co-occurrence (e.g., Redington, Chater & Finch 1998; Mintz 2003), we must address the po...

We develop a mathematical theory for comparative sorites, considered in terms of a system mapping pairs of stimuli into a binary response characteristic whose values supervene on stimulus pairs and are interpretable as the complementary relations ‘are the same’ and ‘are not the same’ (overall or in some respect). Comparative sorites is about hypothetical sequences of stimuli in which every two ...

The new …eld of judgment aggregation aims to …nd collective judgments on logically interconnected propositions. Recent impossibility results establish limitations on the possibility to vote independently on the propositions. I show that, fortunately, the impossibility results do not apply to a wide class of realistic agendas once propositions like “if a then b” are adequately modelled, namely a...

The application of quality function deployment method can meet the customers’ requirement, and optimize the enterprise product design. Based on the house of product design, the paper adopts the interval two-tuple linguistic model and possibility theory, and constructs the correlation matrix of product design and customer requirement for cars, then the important sequence of design elements: engi...

The study of risk aversion of an agent confronted by a risk situations with several parameters is an important topic of risk theory. It is tackled traditionally with probabilistic methods. When these do not offer an appropriate shaping we can use Zadeh’s possibility theory . In this paper a possibilistic model of risk aversion with several parameters is proposed. The notion of possibilistic ris...

The combination of a modal verb and a modal adverb that is similar in modal force (possibility/necessity) and flavor (epistemic/deontic, etc.) allows a concord interpretation in which the two modals somehow ‘fuse’ and communicate just a single modality. This paper presents a case study of modal concord, as it is exemplified in Dutch. It seems that speakers of this language tend to add modal adv...

This article deals with the compact representation of incomplete probabilistic knowledge which can be encountered in risk evaluation problems, for instance in environmental studies. Various kinds of knowledge are considered such as expert opinions about characteristics of distributions or poor statistical information. Our approach is based on probability families encoded by possibility distribu...

An experiment was conducted in order to evaluate what normative framework is pertinent for dealing with confidence judgements in human experts. 24 films were shown to 4 experimented radiologists. A specific apparatus was designed in order to obtain diagnoses and the associated confidence judgements. With regard to methodology, results showed that confidence judgements under the form of a subjec...

Fuzzy relation-based models for handling uncertainty (in a non-probabilistic way) in diagnosis problems have been introduced by Sanchez about twenty years ago, and since then applied and developed by several researchers. The paper first reviews the existing proposals, also including the association-based abductive model proposed by Reggia and his co-workers, which uses non-fuzzy relations. A ne...