This collection represents the best recent work on the subject and includes essays by Clark Glymour, James H. Fetzer, and Wesley C. Salmon.

Coping with uncertainty is a necessary part of ordinary life and is crucial to an understanding of how the mind works. For example, it is a vital element in developing artificial intelligence that will not be undermined by its own rigidities. There have been many approaches to the problem of uncertain inference, ranging from probability to inductive logic to nonmonotonic logic. Thisbook seeks to provide a clear exposition of these approaches within a unified framework. The principal market for the book (...) will be students and professionals in philosophy, computer science, and AI. Among the special features of the book are a chapter on evidential probability, which has not received a basic exposition before; chapters on nonmonotonic reasoning and theory replacement, matters rarely addressed in standard philosophical texts; and chapters on Mill's methods and statistical inference that cover material sorely lacking in the usual treatments of AI and computer science. (shrink)

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “a Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” The alleged evidence has mounted that ordinary folk are prone to inconsistency, and particularly that they are prone to inconsistency when it comes to probabilistic judgments. I write “alleged,” because it is open to question whether the experiments that provide this evidence are well designed—in particular whether Quine’s principle of logistical charity has been followed. I also do so because (...) in some cases of probability judgments the untutored intuitions of ordinary people seem to be at least as good as, and perhaps better than, the intuitions of those who run the experiments. (shrink)

If someone comes to my house, saying, "Here is a bone; I hope Obrecht likes it," I might answer with a deductive argument: "You may rest assured on that score. Obrecht is a dog, and all dogs like bones; therefore Obrecht will like it." We may formalize this argument as follows: Let G be the bone, O be Obrecht, D be the class of dogs, B be the class of bones, and, finally, let L be the class of ordered pairs (...) such that x likes y. The premises are then: x ∈ D ⋅ y ∈ B ⋅ ⊃ ∈ L) G ∈ B O ∈ D. (shrink)

These essays are characterized by meticulous argument in the analytical tradition. The book concerns matters of metaphysics in a broad sense: philosophy of mind and the problems of subjectivity; questions concerning nomological and statistical laws of nature; and, as we would expect, chance and induction.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “a Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” The alleged evidence has mounted that ordinary folk are prone to inconsistency, and particularly that they are prone to inconsistency when it comes to probabilistic judgments. I write “alleged,” because it is open to question whether the experiments that provide this evidence are well designed—in particular whether Quine’s principle of logistical charity has been followed. I also do so because (...) in some cases of probability judgments the untutored intuitions of ordinary people seem to be at least as good as, and perhaps better than, the intuitions of those who run the experiments. (shrink)

One hears increasingly from philosophers that statistical inference is a technical study that is well in control by statisticians and should be left to them; and one hears, increasingly, from mathematical statisticians that all this talk about interpretations of probability is so much philosophical frosting that is utterly irrelevant to the serious business of producing mathematical statistics. "The more interpretations of probability there are, the wider the scope of applications of our purely mathematical theories." The point of this paper is (...) to present, in detail, a situation in which an individual with given degrees of belief, given evidence, and given values, will have three different and contrary courses of action recommended to him, each according to one of the three most popular interpretations of probability. (shrink)

One hears increasingly from philosophers that statistical inference is a technical study that is well in control by statisticians and should be left to them; and one hears, increasingly, from mathematical statisticians that all this talk about interpretations of probability is so much philosophical frosting that is utterly irrelevant to the serious business of producing mathematical statistics. “The more interpretations of probability there are, the wider the scope of applications of our purely mathematical theories.” The point of this paper is (...) to present, in detail, a situation in which an individual withgivendegrees of belief,givenevidence, andgivenvalues, will have three differentand contrarycourses of action recommended to him, each according to one of the three most popular interpretations of probability. (shrink)

There are a number of reasons for being interested in uncertainty, and there are also a number of uncertainty formalisms. These formalisms are not unrelated. It is argued that they can all be reflected as special cases of the approach of taking probabilities to be determined by sets of probability functions defined on an algebra of statements. Thus, interval probabilities should be construed as maximum and minimum probabilities within a set of distributions, Glenn Shafer's belief functions should be construed as (...) lower probabilities, etc. Updating probabilities introduces new considerations, and it is shown that the representation of belief as a set of probabilities conflicts in this regard with the updating procedures advocated by Shafer. The attempt to make subjectivistic probability plausible as a doctrine of rational belief by making it more flowery -- i.e., by adding new dimensions -- does not succeed. But, if one is going to represent beliefs by sets of distributions, those sets of distributions might as well be based in statistical knowledge, as they are in epistemological or evidential probability. (shrink)

The dominant argument for the introduction of propensities or chances as an interpretation of probability depends on the difficulty of accounting for single case probabilities. We argue that in almost all cases, the "single case" application of probability can be accounted for otherwise. "Propensities" are needed only in theoretical contexts, and even there applications of probability need only depend on propensities indirectly.

BACKGROUND: Serotonin transporter promoter genotype appears to increase risk for depression in the context of stressful life events. However, the effects of this genotype on measures of stress sensitivity are poorly understood. Therefore, this study examined whether 5-HTTLPR genotype was associated with negative information processing biases in early childhood. METHOD: Thirty-nine unselected seven-year-old children completed a negative mood induction procedure and a Self-Referent Encoding Task designed to measure positive and negative schematic processing. Children were also genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR gene. (...) RESULTS: Children who were homozygous for the short allele of the 5-HTTLPR gene showed greater negative schematic processing following a negative mood prime than those with other genotypes. 5-HTTLPR genotype was not significantly associated with positive schematic processing. LIMITATIONS: The sample size for this study was small. We did not analyze more recently reported variants of the 5-HTTLPR long alleles. CONCLUSIONS: 5-HTTLPR genotype is associated with negative information processing styles following a negative mood prime in a non-clinical sample of young children. Such cognitive styles are thought to be activated in response to stressful life events, leading to depressive symptoms; thus, cognitive styles may index the "stress-sensitivity" conferred by this genotype. (shrink)

This collection of previously unpublished essays addresses a number of issues arising out of philosophical controversies over the possibility of genuine moral dilemmas. Issues addressed include the form of a moral dilemma; the paradoxes a moral dilemma is said to entail; the question of whether a moral dilemma must exhibit inconsistency; the role of intractable circumstances in occasioning moral dilemmas; and the plausibility of supposing that there might be rational ways of addressing moral dilemmas in practice. The contributors, writing from (...) a number of widely differing points of view, include Simon Blackburn, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Alan Donagan, Terrance McConnell, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Mary Mothersill, Norman Dahl, David Brink, Peter Railton, Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Christopher Gowans, and H.E. Mason. (shrink)