Resource managers are increasingly engaging with tribes and first nations and looking for methods to incorporate their perspectives, priorities and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) into public land and resource management. Many initiatives that engage tribes and their TEK holders only seek tribal input, such as biological data, that is most easily integrated into existing management struc...

The psychological capacity to recognize that others may hold and act on false beliefs has been proposed to reflect an evolved, species-typical adaptation for social reasoning in humans; however, controversy surrounds the developmental timing and universality of this trait. Cross-cultural studies using elicited-response tasks indicate that the age at which children begin to understand false beli...

In this paper, we discuss the use of Bayesian belief networks as a tool for enhancing social network analysis. Traditional social network analysis (SNA) primarily uses graph-theoretic algorithms to compute properties of nodes in a network. However, these algorithms assume a degree of completeness and reliability of the social network data, which cannot always be assured. Applying Bayesian belie...

Traditional approaches to non-monotonic reasoning fail to satisfy a number of plausible axioms for belief revision and suffer from conceptual difficulties as well. Recent work on ranked preferential models (RPMs) promises to overcome some of these difficulties. Here we show that RPMs are not adequate to handle iterated belief change. Specifically, we show that RPMs do not always allow for the r...

One of the standard principles of rationality guiding traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change: a reasoner’s belief corpus should be modified in a minimal fashion when assimilating new information. This rationality principle has stood belief change in good stead. However, it does not deal properly with all belief change scenarios. We introduce a novel account of ...

Abstract. In this paper, we propose a new method to generate a continuous belief functions from a multimodal probability distribution function defined over a continuous domain. We generalize Smets’ approach in the sense that focal elements of the resulting continuous belief function can be disjoint sets of the extended real space of dimension n. We then derive the continuous belief function fro...

This paper explores the proposition that traditional belief-system and masquerade act of Igbo south-eastern Nigeria is a demonstration of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. Pragmatism’s central theme only practice or action can validate veracity or meaningfulness any thought or concept. In like manner, masquerade practice in land is, many respects, manifestation belief system (also known as Nd...