Some issues concerning beliefs of agents are discussed. These issues are the general syntactic form of beliefs, the logic underlying beliefs, acquiring beliefs, and reasoning with beliefs. The logical setting is more expressive and aspects of the reasoning and acquisition processes are more general than are usually considered.

Traditional decision theory has assumed that agents have complete, consistent, and readily available beliefs and preferences. Obviously, even if an expert system has complete and consistent beliefs, it cannot have them readily available. Moreover, some beliefs about beliefs are not even approximately computable. It is shown that if all players have complete and consistent beliefs, they can comp...

My theory is a version of foundationalism. Foundationalism says that there are certain beliefs, the so-called "foundational beliefs," which we are justified in holding and which do not depend on any other beliefs for their justification. Perceptual beliefs, in my view, are foundational. Notice that the definition of foundational beliefs does not say that they do not depend on anything else for ...

BACKGROUND Patients' causal beliefs about their mental disorders are important for treatment because they affect illness-related behaviours. However, there are few studies exploring patients' causal beliefs about their mental disorder. OBJECTIVES (a) To qualitatively explore patients' causal beliefs of their mental disorder, (b) to explore frequencies of patients stating causal beliefs, and (...

UNLABELLED Although research has shown that patients' beliefs about their pain are related to pain adjustment and treatment outcomes, little is known about the beliefs of their significant others. The purpose of this study was to develop a measure of pain beliefs in significant others and to examine the correlates of these beliefs. Participants were 104 married couples in which 1 partner report...

Previous work shows that children view group membership and psychological traits in essentialist terms, perceiving them to be both biologically determined and stable across time. To what extent might individuals view mental states such as beliefs similarly? Given that beliefs are often based on experience and can change across time, one hypothesis is that beliefs on the whole do not elicit esse...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the current study is to investigate the relationship between metacognition and obsessive beliefs, and procrastination. METHODS 285 students of Tabriz and Mohaghegh Ardabili Universities, Iran, were selected by random sampling, and completed the metacognition (MCQ-30) questionnaire, obsessive beliefs questionnaire (OBQ-44), and General Procrastination Scale. The research m...

PURPOSE Belief in conspiracy theories about societal events is widespread among citizens. The extent to which conspiracy beliefs about managers and supervisors matter in the micro-level setting of organizations has not yet been examined, however. We investigated if leadership styles predict conspiracy beliefs among employees in the context of organizations. Furthermore, we examined if such orga...

Pain beliefs influence understanding of pain mechanisms and outcomes. This study in rheumatologic conditions sought to determine a relationship between beliefs about pain and functioning. Participants in Arthritis New Zealand's (ANZ) exercise and education programmes were used. Demographic data and validated instruments used included the Arthritis Impact Measurement Scale 2nd version-Short Form...

PURPOSE Although prior research has investigated teachers' beliefs about people who stutter (PWS), this work has not indicated how these beliefs compare with those of the general public or taken into account key demographic variables that may be related to these beliefs. The main purpose of this study was to evaluate whether beliefs about PWS in teachers are different from those in the general ...