Some philosophers have replied to Leibniz’s “shift” argument against the reality of absolute space by appealing to anti-haecceitist doctrines about possible worlds, influenced especially by David Lewis’s counterpart theory. But separated from Lewis’s distinctive views about what possible worlds are, it is difficult to understand what those doctrines really amount to, and why they are relevant t...

We examine four approaches for dealing with the logical omniscience problem and their potential applicability: the syntactic approach, awareness, algorithmic knowledge, and impossible possible worlds. Although in some settings these approaches are equiexpressive and can capture all epistemic states, in other settings of interest (especially with probability in the picture), we show that they ar...

The notion of a proposition as a set of possible worlds or states occupies central stage in probability theory, semantics and epistemology, where it serves as the fundamental unit both of information and meaning. But this fact should not blind us to the existence of prospects with a di¤erent structure. In the paper I examine the use of random variables in particular, proposition-valued random v...

The view that chances are relative frequencies of occurrence within actual, finite reference classes has long been written off. I argue that it ought to be reconsidered. Focussing on non-deterministic chance, I defend a version of finite frequentism in which reference classmates are required to have qualitatively identical pasts. While my analysis can evade or resist several standard objections...

In this paper I present a precise version of Stalnaker’s thesis and show that it is both consistent and predicts our intuitive judgments about the probabilities of conditionals. The thesis states that someone whose total evidence is E should have the same credence in the proposition expressed by ‘if A then B’ in a context where E is salient as they have conditional credence in the proposition B...

Based on the author’s work as general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, the essay develops an approach to world literature centered on world creation. The creation of literary worlds can be understood within the framework of possible worlds theory as developed by Thomas Pavel, Lubomir Dolezel and others. Taking its point of departure from possible worlds theory, the essay then...

This paper discusses the problems of representing and reasoning with information about knowledge and action. The first section discusses the importance of having systems that understand the concept of knowledge, and how knowledge is related to action. Section 2 points out some of the special problems that are involved in reasoning about knowledge, and section S presents a logic of knowledge bas...

We study the problem of data integration from sources that contain probabilistic uncertain information. Data is modeled by possible-worlds with probability distribution, compactly represented in the probabilistic relation model. Integration is achieved efficiently using the extended probabilistic relation model. We study the problem of determining the probability distribution of the integration...

This paper addresses the problem of distributing goals to individual agents inside a team of cooperative agents. It shows that several parameters determine the goals of particular agents. The first parameter is the set of goals allocated to the team; the second parameter is the description of the real actual world; the third parameter is the description of the agents’ ability and commitments. T...