Converging data from different disciplines are showing the role of classical conditioning processes in the elaboration of human and animal behavior to be larger than previously supposed. Restricted views of classically conditioned responses as merely secretory, reflexive, or emotional are giving way to a broader conception that includes problem-solving, and other rule-governed behavior thought to be the exclusive province of either operant conditiońing or cognitive psychology. These new views have been accompanied by changes in the way conditioning is conducted (...) and evaluated. Data from a number of seemingly unrelated phenomena such as relapse to drug abuse by postaddicts, the placebo effect, and the immune response appear to involve classical conditioning processes. Classical conditioning, moreover, has been found to occur in simpler and simpler organisms and recently even demonstrated in brain slices and in utero. This target article will integrate the several research areas that have used the classical conditioning process as an explanatory model; it will challenge teleological interpretations of the classically conditioned CR and offer some basic principles for testing conditioning in diverse areas. (shrink)

Reasoning with conditionals is often thought to be non-monotonic, but there is no incompatibility with classical logic, and no need to formalise inference itself as probabilistic. When the addition of a new premise leads to abandonment of a previously compelling conclusion reached by modus ponens, for example, this is generally because it is hard to think of a model in which the conditional and the new premise are true.

In one of their papers, Michael De and Hitoshi Omori observed that the notion of classical negation is not uniquely determined in the context of so-called Belnap-Dunn logic, and in fact there are 16 unary operations that qualify to be called classical negation. These varieties are due to different falsity conditions one may assume for classical negation. The aim of this paper is to observe that there is an interesting way to make sense of classical negation (...) independent of falsity conditions. We discuss two equivalent semantics, and offer a Hilbert-style system that is sound and complete with respect to the semantics. (shrink)

Draft of a paper for the Sinn und Bedeutung 14 conference. Explains how to capture the link between conditionals the probability of indicative conditionals and conditional probability using a classical semantics for conditionals. (Note: some introductory material is shared with a twin paper, "Capturing the Relationship Between Conditionals and Conditional Probability with a Trivalent Semantics".).

The Conditional Probability Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics replaces the abstract notion of time used in standard Quantum Mechanics by the time that can be read off from a physical clock. The use of physical clocks leads to apparent non-unitary and decoherence. Here we show that a close approximation to standard Quantum Mechanics can be recovered from conditional Quantum Mechanics for semi-classical clocks, and we use these clocks to compute the minimum decoherence predicted by the Conditional Probability Interpretation.

The article considers whether tolerance, in the classical liberal sense, should be promoted in public education. The most substantial counter-argument is that it is problematic to uphold the ?objection condition,? explained below, which is an integral part of classical tolerance, while maintaining tolerance as a virtue. As a response to this, I first discuss an alternative interpretation of tolerance ? ?tolerance as being open-minded, unprejudiced and positive towards difference.? I contend that this understanding is not the preferable one (...) in public education, because it lacks sufficient distinctiveness and threatens to marginalize or exclude the classical concept of tolerance. I instead propose a modified version of classical tolerance to be promoted in public education, whereby permissible objections are restricted so as not to disrespect persons. This version allows, however, for pupils to have a wide range of objections while still being candidates for being called tolerant, with the result that promoting tolerance may clash with other important educational objectives. I argue that promoting tolerance is still needed as part of a robust educational approach to plurality in modern democratic states, but that we must be willing to accept that promoting tolerance sometimes assumes the place of a second-best educational alternative. (shrink)

Shors & Matzel somewhat lightly dismiss the evidence that a process like LTP may underlie the learning-induced increase in neuronal activity in the hippocampus in eyeblink conditioning. I provide some 12 lines of evidence supporting this hypothesis and the further hypothesis that this learning-induced LTP-like hippocampal plasticity can play a critical role in certain aspects of learned behavior.

The two-state-vector formalism presents a time-symmetric approach to the standard quantum mechanics, with particular importance in the description of experiments having pre- and post-selected ensembles. In this paper, using the correspondence limit of the quantum harmonic oscillator in the two-state-vector formalism, we produce harmonic oscillators that possess a classical behavior while having a complex-valued position and momentum. This allows us to discover novel effects that cannot be achieved otherwise. The proposed classical behavior does not describe the classical (...) physics in the usual sense since this behavior is subjected to the feature that only after the final measurement is performed, as a boundary condition, the complex-valued classical effects occur between the initial and the final boundary conditions. This classical behavior breaks down if one does not follow the decided boundary conditions during the experiment, since otherwise, one will contradict the impossibility of retrocausality. (shrink)