Recent studies of political attitudes have documented increasing support for women political candidates among college students and adults. This study examined junior and senior high school student's attitudes toward women in politics and analyzed the effect of gender and race on their attitudes. We found that adolescent girls had very positive and optimistic views of the role of women in politics; adolescent boys, particularly blacks, had more negative and pessimistic views.

"A Survey of Ranking Theory": The paper gives an up-to-date survey of ranking theory. It carefully explains the basics. It elaborates on the ranking theoretic explication of reasons and their balance. It explains the dynamics of belief statable in ranking terms and indicates how the ranks can thereby be measured. It suggests how the theory of Bayesian nets can be carried over to ranking theory. It indicates what it might mean to objectify ranks. It discusses the formal and the philosophical (...) aspects of the tight relation and the complementarity of ranks and probabilities. It closes with comparative remarks on predecessors and other philosophical proposals as well as formal models developed in AI. (shrink)

And this paper is an attempt to say precisely how, thus addressing a philosophical problem which is commonly taken to be a serious one. It does so, however, in quite an idiosyncratic way. It is based on the account of inductive schemes I have given in (1988) and (1990a) and on the conception of causation I have presented in (1980), (1983), and (1990b), and it intends to fill one of many gaps which have been left by these papers. Still, I (...) have tried to make this paper self-contained. Section 1 explains the philosophical question this paper is about; in more general terms it asks what might be meant by objectifying epistemic states or features of them and to which extent epistemic states can be objectified. The next sections introduce the basis I rely on with formal precision and some explanation; section 2 deals with induction and section 3 with causation. Within these confines, section 4 attempts to give an explication of the relevant sense of objectification and section 5 investigates the extent to which various features of epistemic states are objectifiable. The two most salient results are roughly that the relation "A is a reason for B" cannot be objectified at all and that the relation "A is a cause of B" can be objectified only under substantial, though reasonable restrictions. What has all of this to do with probability? A lot. The paper trades on a pervasive duality between probabilistic and deterministic epistemology, between a probabilistic representation of epistemic states together with a theory of probabilistic causation and another representation of epistemic states which I call deterministic because it lends itself, in a perfectly parallel fashion, to a theory of deterministic causation. Here I explicitly deal only with the deterministic side, but the duality should pave the way for further conclusions concerning objective probabilities and statistical laws. This outlook is briefly expanded in the final section 6. (shrink)

This paper is about time preferences, the phenomenon that the very same things are usually considered the less valuable the farther in the future they are obtained. The utilities of those things are discounted at a certain rate. The paper presents a novel normative argument for exponential discount rates, whatever their empirical adequacy. It proposes to take indexical utility seriously, i.e. utilities referring to indexical propositions (that speak of ‘I’, ‘now’, etc.) as opposed to non-indexical propositions. Economic focus is only (...) on the latter, while the former are neglected. The potential ignorance of when is now generates a difference between indexical and non-indexical utility that can be exploited for a novel argument in favour of exponential discount rates. (shrink)

The Meno problem, asking for the surplus value of knowledge beyond the value of true justified belief, was recently much treated within reliabilist and virtue epistemologies. The answers from formal epistemology, by contrast, are quite poor. This paper attempts to improve the score of formal epistemology by precisely explicating Timothy Williamson's suggestion that ‘present knowledge is less vulnerable than mere present true belief to rational undermining by future evidence’. It does so by combining Nozick's sensitivity analysis of knowledge with (...) class='Hi'>Spohn's fact‐asserting epistemic interpretation of conditionals. Accordingly, the surplus value of knowledge lies in a specific kind of stability of knowledge, which differs, though, from that claimed by other so‐called stability analyses of knowledge. (shrink)

Putnam (1975) and Burge (1979) have made a convincing case that neither mea- nings nor beliefs are in the head. Most philosophers, it seems, have accepted their argument. Putnam explained that a subject.

A sociedade foi construída a partir de relações de poder que trataram de segregar e marginalizar alguns grupos. A escola, coexistindo nesse contexto, pode mover-se para a ruptura das desigualdades. Dessa maneira, viabilizar a temática de gênero e sexualidade no cotidiano escolar colabora com uma educação transformadora, voltada ao respeito, à valorização das inúmeras vivências de gênero e sexualidade e ao combate à violência. Frente à possibilidade de intervenção e sem adotar uma postura ingênua de que a instituição escolar é (...) capaz de mudar toda uma sociedade, pode-se afirmar que ela detém poder de transformação na vida dos indivíduos? Para fundamentar essa discussão, contamos com o apoio teórico de autores como Louro, Freire, Hooks, Moreno, entre outros. A fim de alcançar os objetivos desta investigação, foi realizada uma pesquisa de caráter qualitativo, por meio de livros, artigos e dados. Entre outras questões, a pesquisa evidenciou a historicidade presente nos assuntos de gênero e sexualidade nas escolas brasileiras e no currículo formativo, refletindo sobre a responsabilidade do fazer educacional diante do compromisso de uma educação não discriminatória e transformadora. (shrink)

The contemporary interest in spiritual experience has some theological and ethical ambiguity. To what extent does it reflect genuine engagement with the sacred, to what extent is it dabbling in experience without adequate interpretation or moral commitment? Jonathan Edwards faced similar challenges in his sermons on 1 Cor 13, "Charity and Its Fruits". Alasdair Maclntyre and Pierre Hadot have explored the constitutive role of practices in forming of virtues and transmitting a way of life. Their writings help show the continuing (...) relevance of the spiritual practices that Edwards advocated, particularly self-examination, healing by contraries, and solidarity. (shrink)

This collection of essays is dedicated to 'Joe' Karel Lambert. The contributors are all personally affected to Joe in some way or other, but they are definitely not the only ones. Whatever excuses there are - there are some -, the editors apologize to whomever they have neglected. But even so the collection displays how influential Karel Lambert has been, personally and through his teaching and his writings. The display is in alphabetical order - with one exception: Bas van Fraassen, (...) being about the earliest student of Karel Lambert, opens the collection with some reminiscences. Naturally, one of the focal points of this volume is Lambert's logical thinking and (or: freed of) ontological thinking. Free logic is intimately connected with description theory. Bas van Fraassen gives a survey of the development of the area, and Charles Daniels points to difficulties with definite descriptions in modal contexts and stories. Peter Woodruff addresses the relation between free logic and supervaluation semantics, presenting a novel condition which recovers desirable metatheoretic properties for free logic under that semantics. Terence Parsons shows how free logic can be utilized in interpreting sentences as purporting to denote events (true ones succeed and false ones fail) and how this helps to understand natural language. (shrink)

The first reference on rationality that integrates accounts from psychology and philosophy, covering descriptive and normative theories from both disciplines. Both analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology have made dramatic advances in understanding rationality, but there has been little interaction between the disciplines. This volume offers the first integrated overview of the state of the art in the psychology and philosophy of rationality. Written by leading experts from both disciplines, The Handbook of Rationality covers the main normative and descriptive theories of (...) rationality—how people ought to think, how they actually think, and why we often deviate from what we can call rational. It also offers insights from other fields such as artificial intelligence, economics, the social sciences, and cognitive neuroscience. The Handbook proposes a novel classification system for researchers in human rationality, and it creates new connections between rationality research in philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines. Following the basic distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, the book first considers the theoretical side, including normative and descriptive theories of logical, probabilistic, causal, and defeasible reasoning. It then turns to the practical side, discussing topics such as decision making, bounded rationality, game theory, deontic and legal reasoning, and the relation between rationality and morality. Finally, it covers topics that arise in both theoretical and practical rationality, including visual and spatial thinking, scientific rationality, how children learn to reason rationally, and the connection between intelligence and rationality. (shrink)

Wolfgang Spohn presents the first full account of the dynamic laws of belief, by means of ranking theory. This book is his long-awaited presentation of ranking theory and its ramifications.

Dissertação de Mestrado. OLIVEIRA, Cássia Cristina Costa de. Se Deus não existe tudo é permitido? Niilismo e religião. Estudo a partir de Dostoievski e Nietzsche. 2012. 144 folhas. Dissertação (Mestrado) – Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciências da Religião, Belo Horizonte. Palavras-chave : Niilismo. Religião. Nietzsche. Dostoiévski. Key words : Nihilism. Religion. Nietzsche. Dostoiévski.

O artigo traz uma discussão acerca da utilização do conceito de identificação por Adorno. A partir disso procuramos dar ênfase para o tema da crítica e da negação da cultura possibilitadas pela apropriação da psicanálise realizada pelo autor. A aplicação do conceito permite analisar o processo de assimilação do indivíduo no capitalismo tardio. Uma vez que a cultura é transformada em mercadoria, e assim absorve o ritmo idêntico e repetitivo da produção mecanizada, que transmite aos indivíduos através dos produtos que (...) consomem e das celebridades com as quais se identificam. Nesse contexto, cresce o sentimento de impotência individual gerado por um modelo de organização social que dissimula suas contradições a partir da identidade do indivíduo com a cultura. E revela a união entre progresso e barbárie que promove o declínio do indivíduo como foi exposto na Dialética do Esclarecimento. Como sugere Adorno, diante da irracionalidade da cultura moderna, cabe à educação a tarefa de autorreflexão crítica e de esclarecimento dos indivíduos. De maneira a convidá-los a pensar na falsa realidade em que estão inseridos e de contrapor impotência com autonomia. (shrink)

It is natural and important to have a formal representation of plain belief, according to which propositions are held true, or held false, or neither. (In the paper this is called a deterministic representation of epistemic states). And it is of great philosophical importance to have a dynamic account of plain belief. AGM belief revision theory seems to provide such an account, but it founders at the problem of iterated belief revision, since it can generally account only for one step (...) of revision. The paper discusses and rejects two solutions within the confines of AGM theory. It then introduces ranking functions (as I prefer to call them now; in the paper they are still called ordinal conditional functions) as the proper (and, I find, still the best) solution of the problem, proves that conditional independence w.r.t. ranking functions satisfies the so-called graphoid axioms, and proposes general rules of belief change (in close analogy to Jeffrey's generalized probabilistic conditionalization) that encompass revision and contraction as conceived in AGM theory. Indeed, the parallel to probability theory is amazing. Probability theory can profit from ranking theory as well since it is also plagued by the problem of iterated belief revision even if probability measures are conceived as Popper measures (see No. 11). Finally, the theory is compared with predecessors which are numerous and impressive, but somehow failed to explain the all-important conditional ranks in the appropriate way. (shrink)

We shall defend two theses: (a) if a decision situation exhibits a certain causal structure, then decision theory is in trouble, because the derivation of expected utilities fails; (b) this causal structure in fact obtains in a specific, but very common kind of situation, namely, when the intrinsically evaluated psychological states are in the domain of the utility function. It will be apparent that the problem is but a variant of Joseph Butler's criticism of hedonism. Thus, in a sense, the (...) point of our paper is that modern theorizing about practical deliberation has not dealt seriously with Butler's criticism. (shrink)

Resumo: Este artigo resulta de pesquisa que mapeou programas e atores privados que incidiam em redes públicas de educação dos 26 estados e Distrito Federal entre 2005 e 2018. Além do mapeamento, a pesquisa analisa programas educacionais operados por atores privados em cada uma das três dimensões da política - oferta educativa, currículo e gestão - conforme ADRIÃO (2018). Neste trabalho, analisa-se o Programa Acelera Brasil, criado pelo Instituto Ayrton Senna e selecionado por sua capilaridade, institucionalidade e longevidade na dimensão (...) da privatização do currículo no estado de Goiás. Consideramos as características do programa nas escolas estaduais e as implicações para o Direito Humano à Educação (DHE), com base em Tomasevski (2004). O artigo deriva de estudos bibliográficos e documentais. Os resultados identificam consequências negativas para o DHE, dentre as quais: falta de transparência acerca do Programa e seus resultados, dificultando o Controle Social, segregação dos alunos participantes do Acelera em salas separadas das turmas regulares e a ausência de monitoramento dos alunos egressos do Programa ou a não divulgação de seus resultados, desrespeitando as características fundamentais do DHE, quais sejam disponibilidade, acessibilidade, adaptabilidade e aceitabilidade. Palavras-chave: Privatização; Currículo; Programa Acelera Brasil; Direito Humano The “Acelera Brasil” Program in the state of Goiás: implications for the Human Right Education (HRE) Abstract: This article is the results of research that mapped programs and private actors that focused on public education networks in the 26 states and the Federal District between2005 and 2018. In addition to mapping, the research analyzes educational programs operated by private actors in the period, in each of the three dimensions of the policy - educational offer, curriculum and management - according to ADRIÃO (2018). In this work, we analyze the “Acelera Brasil” Program, created by the Ayrton Senna Institute and selected for its capillarity, institutionality and longevity in the dimension of privatization of the curriculum in the state of Goiás. We consider the characteristics of the program in state schools and the implications for the Human Right to Education (HRE), based on Tomasevski (2004). The article derives from bibliographic and documentary studies. The results identify negative consequences for the HRE, among which: lack of transparency about the Program and its results, hindering Social Control, segregation of students participating in “Acelera” in separate rooms from regular classes and the absence of monitoring of students who graduated from the Program or the non-disclosure of its results, disregarding the fundamental characteristics of HRE, wich are availability, accessibility, adaptaptability and acceptability. Key-words: Privatization; Curriculum; Acelera Brasil Program; Human Right El Programa “Acelera Brasil” en el estado de Goiás: implicaciones para el Derecho Humano a la Educación (DHE) Resumen: Este artículo es el resultado de una investigación que mapeó programas y actores privados que se enfocaron en redes de educación pública en los 26 estados y el Distrito Federal entre 2005 y 2018. Además del mapeo, la investigación analiza programas educativos operados por actores privados en el período, en cada una de las tres dimensiones de la política - oferta educativa, currículo y gestión - según ADRIÃO (2018). En este trabajo, analizamos el Programa “Acelera Brasil”, creado por el Instituto Ayrton Senna y seleccionado por su capilaridad, institucionalidad y longevidad en la dimensión de privatización del currículo en el estado de Goiás. Consideramos las características del programa en las escuelas públicas y las implicaciones para el Derecho Humano a la Educación (DHE), con base en Tomasevski (2004). El artículo deriva de estudios bibliográficos y documentales. Los resultados identifican consecuencias negativas para la DHE, entre las cuales: la falta de transparencia sobre el Programa y sus resultados, dificultando el Control Social, la segregación de los estudiantes participantes de “Acelera” en salones separados de las clases regulares y la ausencia de seguimiento de los estudiantes egresados ​​de el Programa o la no divulgación de sus resultados, lesionando las características fundamentales lo DHE, que son la disponibilidad, accesibilidad, adaptaptabilidad y la aceptabilidad Palabras clave: Privatización; Plan de estudios; Programa Acelera Brasil; Derecho Humano Data de registro: 31/05/2022 Data de aceite: 26/10/2022. (shrink)

Conditionals somehow express conditional beliefs. However, conditional belief is a bi-propositional attitude that is generally not truth-evaluable, in contrast to unconditional belief. Therefore, this article opts for an expressivistic semantics for conditionals, grounds this semantics in the arguably most adequate account of conditional belief, that is, ranking theory, and dismisses probability theory for that purpose, because probabilities cannot represent belief. Various expressive options are then explained in terms of ranking theory, with the intention to set out a general interpretive scheme (...) that is able to account for the most variegated usage of conditionals. The Ramsey test is only the first option. Relevance is another, familiar, but little understood item, which comes in several versions. This article adds a further family of expressive options, which is able to subsume also counterfactuals and causal conditionals, and indicates at the end how this family allows for partial recovery of truth conditions for conditionals. (shrink)

This article is part of my doctoral research in discuss I the complexity of putting myself in the Other's shoes in order to understand him. It shows the traditional community of Sambaíba, in Caetité-BA, it know how and problematizes the construction of changing and / or fragmented identities based on the interpretation of symbolic elements that are presents in the participants' narratives and face-body expressions. An ethnography about / with the Other in my experience with the body. I've been thinking (...) and observing the community and, simultaneously, being thought and observed by people of African descent is the construction of an episteme for academic and human life. Keywords: Quilombo Sambaíba; Know how; Changing identities. (shrink)

Durante a formação, estudantes são constantemente expostos a estressores que, se persistentes, podem ocasionar a Síndrome de Burnout (SB). Considerando a importância dessa demanda, este estudo teve como objetivo identificar diferenças nas dimensões da SB em relação ao ano e turno em estudantes de Ps..

The paper takes an expressivistic perspective, i.e., it takes conditionals of all sorts to primarily express conditional beliefs. Therefore it is based on what it takes to be the best account of conditional belief, namely ranking theory. It proposes not to start looking at the bewildering linguistic phenomenology, but first to systematically study the various options of expressing features of conditional belief. Those options by far transcend the Ramsey test and include relevancies of various kinds and in particular the so-called (...) “circumstances are such that” reading, under which also all conditionals representing causal relations can be subsumed. In this way a unifying perspective on the many kinds of conditionals is offered. The final section explains the considerable extent to which truth conditions for conditionals, which may seem lost in the expressivistic or epistemic perspective, may be recovered. (shrink)

The paper builds on the basically Humean idea that A is a cause of B iff A and B both occur, A precedes B, and A raises the metaphysical or epistemic status of B given the obtaining circumstances. It argues that in pursuit of a theory of deterministic causation this ‘status raising’ is best explicated not in regularity or counterfactual terms, but in terms of ranking functions. On this basis, it constructs a rigorous theory of deterministic causation that successfully deals (...) with cases of overdetermination and pre-emption. It finally indicates how the account's profound epistemic relativization induced by ranking theory can be undone. Introduction Variables, propositions, time Induction first Causation Redundant causation Objectivization. (shrink)

Ranking theory delivers an account of iterated contraction; each ranking function induces a specific iterated contraction behavior. The paper shows how to reconstruct a ranking function from its iterated contraction behavior uniquely up to multiplicative constant and thus how to measure ranks on a ratio scale. Thereby, it also shows how to completely axiomatize that behavior. The complete set of laws of iterated contraction it specifies amend the laws hitherto discussed in the literature.

The paper displays the similarity between the theory of probabilistic causation developed by Glymour et al. since 1983 and mine developed since 1976: the core of both is that causal graphs are Bayesian nets. The similarity extends to the treatment of actions or interventions in the two theories. But there is also a crucial difference. Glymour et al. take causal dependencies as primitive and argue them to behave like Bayesian nets under wide circumstances. By contrast, I argue the behavior of (...) Bayesian nets to be ultimately the defining characteristic of causal dependence. (shrink)

Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excellent, if not the best available account of inductive reasoning. This is so because there are general and definite rules for the change of subjective probabilities through information or experience; induction and belief change are one and same topic, after all. The most basic of these rules is simply to conditionalize with respect to the information received; and there are similar and more general rules. 1 Hence, a fundamental reason for the epistemological success of (...) probability theory is that there at all exists a well-behaved concept of conditional probability. Still, people have, and have reasons for, various concerns over probability theory. One of these is my starting point: Intuitively, we have the notion of plain belief; we believe propositions2 to be true (or to be false or neither). Probability theory, however, offers no formal counterpart to this notion. Believing A is not the same as having probability 1 for A, because probability 1 is incorrigible3; but plain belief is clearly corrigible. And believing A is not the same as giving A a probability larger than some 1 - c, because believing A and believing B is usually taken to be equivalent to believing A & B.4 Thus, it seems that the formal representation of plain belief has to take a non-probabilistic route. Indeed, representing plain belief seems easy enough: simply represent an epistemic state by the set of all propositions believed true in it or, since I make the common assumption that plain belief is deductively closed, by the conjunction of all propositions believed true in it. But this does not yet provide a theory of induction, i.e. an answer to the question how epistemic states so represented are changed tbrough information or experience. There is a convincing partial answer: if the new information is compatible with the old epistemic state, then the new epistemic state is simply represented by the conjunction of the new information and the old beliefs. This answer is partial because it does not cover the quite common case where the new information is incompatible with the old beliefs. It is, however, important to complete the answer and to cover this case, too; otherwise, we would not represent plain belief as conigible. The crucial problem is that there is no good completion. When epistemic states are represented simply by the conjunction of all propositions believed true in it, the answer cannot be completed; and though there is a lot of fruitful work, no other representation of epistemic states has been proposed, as far as I know, which provides a complete solution to this problem. In this paper, I want to suggest such a solution. In [4], I have more fully argued that this is the only solution, if certain plausible desiderata are to be satisfied. Here, in section 2, I will be content with formally defining and intuitively explaining my proposal. I will compare my proposal with probability theory in section 3. It will turn out that the theory I am proposing is structurally homomorphic to probability theory in important respects and that it is thus equally easily implementable, but moreover computationally simpler. Section 4 contains a very brief comparison with various kinds of logics, in particular conditional logic, with Shackle's functions of potential surprise and related theories, and with the Dempster - Shafer theory of belief functions. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to explicate the concept of causal independence between sets of factors and Reichenbach's screening-off-relation in probabilistic terms along the lines of Suppes' probabilistic theory of causality (1970). The probabilistic concept central to this task is that of conditional stochastic independence. The adequacy of the explication is supported by proving some theorems about the explicata which correspond to our intuitions about the explicanda.

The characteristic difference between laws and accidental generalizations lies in our epistemic or inductive attitude towards them. This idea has taken various forms and dominated the discussion about lawlikeness in the last decades. Likewise, the issue about ceteris paribus conditions is essentially about how we epistemically deal with exceptions. Hence, ranking theory with its resources of defeasible reasoning seems ideally suited to explicate these points in a formal way. This is what the paper attempts to do. Thus it will turn (...) out that a law is simply the deterministic analogue of a sequence of independent, identically distributed random variables. This entails that de Finetti's representation theorems can be directly transformed into an account of confirmation of laws thus conceived. (shrink)

The paper will show how one may rationalize one-boxing in Newcomb's problem and drinking the toxin in the Toxin puzzle within the confines of causal decision theory by ascending to so-called reflexive decision models which reflect how actions are caused by decision situations (beliefs, desires, and intentions) represented by ordinary unreflexive decision models.

It is important to re-engage public health professionals, after an absence of almost a half a century, in the issues of land development and community design. Resources should be devoted to processes that directly engaged diverse communities in defining their idea of good public health. In Michigan, within demographic communities, the idea or definition is slightly different, but an agreement was reached that activities should be developed around four basic environmental areas: food, air, water, and land use. Resource teams were (...) developed around each of these areas, and an attempt was made to describe the current status of environmental conditions and identify major health problems. The community was engaged in a dialogue and a strategy for improvements was developed. The Michigan Land Use Resource Team identified land trends, described water and air quality, and even mapped automobile injuries, including pedestrian injuries and deaths. (shrink)

It is important to re-engage public health professionals, after an absence of almost a half a century, in the issues of land development and community design. Resources should be devoted to processes that directly engaged diverse communities in defining their idea of good public health. In Michigan, within demographic communities, the idea or definition is slightly different, but an agreement was reached that activities should be developed around four basic environmental areas: food, air, water, and land use. Resource teams were (...) developed around each of these areas, and an attempt was made to describe the current status of environmental conditions and identify major health problems. The community was engaged in a dialogue and a strategy for improvements was developed. The Michigan Land Use Resource Team identified land trends, described water and air quality, and even mapped automobile injuries, including pedestrian injuries and deaths. (shrink)

Selected papers from the sections of the eighth international conference organized by the Society for Analytic Philosophy (GAP), Constance, Germany, September 17-20, 2012. The overall theme of the conference was "What may we believe? What ought we to do?", but the papers published here address a wide variety of questions from many fields of philosophy.

O trabalho, em sua íntegra, foi realizado tendo como entrevistado um jovem que se autodenomina gay e negro, oriundo do Rio de Janeiro, de classe social baixa, estudante de uma escola pública do ensino médio regular, situada em uma periferia de um município localizado no interior da Bahia. Na tessitura que segue, enfatizamos os marcadores sociais de gênero/sexualidade e raça/etnia. Esses marcadores apresentaram-se como desconforto para o sujeito entrevistado, visto que não atendem às caracterizações e práticas determinadas pela heteronormatividade. Assim, (...) constatamos que há um olhar hierarquizante e verticalizado envolvendo identidades outras assim como possibilidades de vivências afetivas e sexuais diferentes daquelas determinadas pelas normas sociais. Palavras-chave: gênero; marcadores étnicos; diversidade sexual; estudante. (shrink)