This paper develops a compositional, type-driven constraint semantic theory for a fragment of the language of subjective uncertainty. In the particular application explored here, the interpretation function of constraint semantics yields not propositions but constraints on credal states as the semantic values of declarative sentences. Constraints are richer than propositions in that constraints can straightforwardly represent assessments of the probability that the world is one way rather than another. The richness of constraints helps us model communicative acts in (...) essentially the same way that we model agents’ credences. Moreover, supplementing familiar truth-conditional theories of epistemic modals with constraint semantics helps capture contrasts between strong necessity and possibility modals, on the one hand, and weak necessity modals, on the other. (shrink)

A successful theory of the language of subjective uncertainty would meet several important constraints. First, it would explain how use of the language of subjective uncertainty affects addressees’ states of subjective uncertainty. Second, it would explain how such use affects what possibilities are treated as live for purposes of conversation. Third, it would accommodate 'quantifying in' to the scope of epistemic modals. Fourth, it would explain the norms governing the language of subjective (...) class='Hi'>uncertainty, and the differences between them and the norms governing the language of subjective certainty. Neither truth conditional nor traditional force modfier theories of the language of subjective uncertainty look adequate to the task of satisfying all four of these constraints. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Modeling Subjects’ Experience While Modeling the Experimental Design: A Mild-Neurophenomenology-Inspired Approach in the Piloting Phase” by Constanza Baquedano & Catalina Fabar. Upshot: The authors show in their pilots how open it is to participants not to obey the instructions during an experiment. Their findings leave us to choose between two options: either we accept that subjective confounds are inevitable and stronger than we think, but in this case, why should we continue trying to (...) measure subjective experience?; or strive at designing better experiments in order to control for these fluctuations. I will argue for option and propose an alternative model to go beyond the first- and third-person data gap, namely “predictive processing.”. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyse the Deweyan account of thinking and subject and discuss the educational consequences that follow from such an account. I argue that despite the grouping of thinking and reflective thought that has largely appeared in the interpretation of Deweyan work, Dewey discloses an inescapable uncertainty at the core of human thinking. This move is even more challenging given Dewey's firm faith in the power of intelligent action, and in education as the means by which human (...) beings grow and create meaningful existence. I argue that throughout his work, Dewey dismantled the understanding of the subject as a detached and self-assured centre of agency. In Deweyan understanding, on one hand, the subject is empowered to reflect on experience and to use this reflection to evolve new ways of acting, thus pushing experience forward. On the other hand, by acting, the subject can create new points of interaction within experience. This understanding of thinking and subject has far-reaching consequences for education, which must be conceived not so much as the attempt to master and control experience but as the means to create new, unpredictable experience by putting new points of interactions into our relationship with the environment, changing our being-embedded-in-the-world. Dewey repositions educational, intentional agency away from control and mastery and in the direction of growth and openness. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyse the Deweyan account of thinking and subject and discuss the educational consequences that follow from such an account. I argue that despite the grouping of thinking and reflective thought that has largely appeared in the interpretation of Deweyan work, Dewey discloses an inescapable uncertainty at the core of human thinking. This move is even more challenging given Dewey's firm faith in the power of intelligent action, and in education as the means by which human (...) beings grow and create meaningful existence. I argue that throughout his work, Dewey dismantled the understanding of the subject as a detached and self-assured centre of agency. In Deweyan understanding, on one hand, the subject is empowered to reflect on experience and to use this reflection to evolve new ways of acting, thus pushing experience forward. On the other hand, by acting, the subject can create new points of interaction within experience. This understanding of thinking and subject has far-reaching consequences for education, which must be conceived not so much as the attempt to master and control experience but as the means to create new, unpredictable experience by putting new points of interactions into our relationship with the environment, changing our being-embedded-in-the-world. Dewey repositions educational, intentional agency away from control and mastery and in the direction of growth and openness. (shrink)

This book is an extensive survey and critical examination of the literature on the use of expert opinion in scientific inquiry and policy making. The elicitation, representation, and use of expert opinion is increasingly important for two reasons: advancing technology leads to more and more complex decision problems, and technologists are turning in greater numbers to "expert systems" and other similar artifacts of artificial intelligence. Cooke here considers how expert opinion is being used today, how an expert's uncertainty is (...) or should be represented, how people do or should reason with uncertainty, how the quality and usefulness of expert opinion can be assessed, and how the views of several experts might be combined. He argues for the importance of developing practical models with a transparent mathematic foundation for the use of expert opinion in science, and presents three tested models, termed "classical," "Bayesian," and "psychological scaling." Detailed case studies illustrate how they can be applied to a diversity of real problems in engineering and planning. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 33-35.

This paper examines the use of scalar adjectives in two contexts that have played a role in discussions of the subjective/objective distinction: ?faultless disagreement? discourses and the nonfinite complement position of the subjective attitude verb find. I argue that the pattern of distribution and interpretation of scalar adjectives in these contexts provides evidence for two sources for subjectivity, which are distinguished from each other in that one affects the grammatical properties of a predicate and one does not. The (...) first kind, which licenses appearance in the complement position of find, is based in the lexical semantics of predicates that encode qualitative assessments. The second kind, which gives rise to faultless disagreement effects, arises from uncertainty about the dimensions of evaluation that are involved in fixing the extension of a predicate in a context of utterance. (shrink)

Modern health data practices come with many practical uncertainties. In this paper, I argue that data subjects’ trust in the institutions and organizations that control their data, and their ability to know their own moral obligations in relation to their data, are undermined by significant uncertainties regarding the what, how, and who of mass data collection and analysis. I conclude by considering how proposals for managing situations of high uncertainty might be applied to this problem. These emphasize increasing organizational (...) flexibility, knowledge, and capacity, and reducing hazard. (shrink)

Defenders of deontological constraints in normative ethics face a challenge: how should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain whether some course of action would violate a constraint? The most common response to this challenge has been to defend a threshold principle on which it is subjectively permissible to act iff the agent's credence that her action would be constraint-violating is below some threshold t. But the threshold approach seems arbitrary and unmotivated: what would possibly determine where (...) the threshold should be set, and why should there be any precise threshold at all? Threshold views also seem to violate ought agglomeration, since a pair of actions each of which is below the threshold for acceptable moral risk can, in combination, exceed that threshold. In this paper, I argue that stochastic dominance reasoning can vindicate and lend rigor to the threshold approach: given characteristically deontological assumptions about the moral value of acts, it turns out that morally safe options will stochastically dominate morally risky alternatives when and only when the likelihood that the risky option violates a moral constraint is greater than some precisely definable threshold (in the simplest case, .5). I also show how, in combination with the observation that deontological moral evaluation is relativized to particular choice situations, this approach can overcome the agglomeration problem. This allows the deontologist to give a precise and well-motivated response to the problem of uncertainty. (shrink)

In this paper we compare different models of vagueness viewed as a specific form of subjective uncertainty in situations of imperfect discrimination. Our focus is on the logic of the operator “clearly” and on the problem of higher-order vagueness. We first examine the consequences of the notion of intransitivity of indiscriminability for higher-order vagueness, and compare several accounts of vagueness as inexact or imprecise knowledge, namely Williamson’s margin for error semantics, Halpern’s two-dimensional semantics, and the system we call (...) Centered semantics. We then propose a semantics of degrees of clarity, inspired from the signal detection theory model, and outline a view of higher-order vagueness in which the notions of subjective clarity and unclarity are handled asymmetrically at higher orders, namely such that the clarity of clarity is compatible with the unclarity of unclarity. (shrink)

Everettian accounts of quantum mechanics entail that people branch; every possible result of a measurement actually occurs, and I have one successor for each result. Is there room for probability in such an account? The prima facie answer is no; there are no ontic chances here, and no ignorance about what will happen. But since any adequate quantum mechanical theory must make probabilistic predictions, much recent philosophical labor has gone into trying to construct an account of probability for branching selves. (...) One popular strategy involves arguing that branching selves introduce a new kind of subjective uncertainty. I argue here that the variants of this strategy in the literature all fail, either because the uncertainty is spurious, or because it is in the wrong place to yield probabilistic predictions. I conclude that uncertainty cannot be the ground for probability in Everettian quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Everettian accounts of quantum mechanics entail that people branch; every possible result of a measurement actually occurs, and I have one successor for each result. Is there room for probability in such an account? The prima facie answer is no; there are no ontic chances here, and no ignorance about what will happen. But since any adequate quantum mechanical theory must make probabilistic predictions, much recent philosophical labor has gone into trying to construct an account of probability for branching selves. (...) One popular strategy involves arguing that branching selves introduce a new kind of subjective uncertainty. I argue here that the variants of this strategy in the literature all fail, either because the uncertainty is spurious, or because it is in the wrong place to yield probabilistic predictions. I conclude that uncertainty cannot be the ground for probability in Everettian quantum mechanics. (shrink)

This paper presents a general-purpose update semantics for expressions of subjective uncertainty in natural language. First, a set of desiderata are established for how expressions of subjective uncertainty should behave in dynamic, update-based semantic systems; then extant implementations of expressions of subjective uncertainty in such models are evaluated and found wanting; finally, a new update semantics is proposed. The desiderata at the heart of this paper center around the contention that expressions of subjective (...) uncertainty express beliefs which are not persistent, whereas propositions express beliefs that are persistent. I argue that if we make the move of treating updates in a dynamic semantics as Bayesian updates, i.e. as conditionalization, then expressions of subjective uncertainty will behave the way we want them to without altering the way propositions behave. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIntellectual historians often make empirical claims, but can never know for certain if these claims are right. Uncertainty is thus inevitable for intellectual historians. But accepting uncertainty is not enough: we should also act on it, by trying to reduce and report it. We can reduce uncertainty by amassing valid data from different sources to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of competing explanations, rather than trying to “prove” an empirical claim by looking for evidence that fits it. (...) Then we should report our degree of certainty in our claims. When we answer empirical questions in intellectual history, we are not telling our readers what happened: we are telling them how strong we think our evidence is—a crucial shift of emphasis. For intellectual historians, then, uncertainty is subjective, as discussed by Keynes and Collingwood; the paper thus explores three differences between subjective and objective uncertainty. Having outlined the theoretical basis of uncertainty, the paper then offers examples from actual research: Noel Malcolm's work shows how to reduce and report uncertainty about composition, and David Wootton's work shows how to reduce and report uncertainty about beliefs. (shrink)

We investigate the conflict between the ex ante and ex post criteria of social welfare in a new framework of individual and social decisions, which distinguishes between two sources of uncertainty, here interpreted as an objective and a subjective source respectively. This framework makes it possible to endow the individuals and society not only with ex ante and ex post preferences, as is usually done, but also with interim preferences of two kinds, and correspondingly, to introduce interim forms (...) of the Pareto principle. After characterizing the ex ante and ex post criteria, we present a first solution to their conflict that extends the former as much possible in the direction of the latter. Then, we present a second solution, which goes in the opposite direction, and is also maximally assertive. Both solutions translate the assumed Pareto conditions into weighted additive utility representations, and both attribute to the individuals common probability values on the objective source of uncertainty, and different probability values on the subjective source. We discuss these solutions in terms of two conceptual arguments, i.e., the by now classic spurious unanimity argument and a novel informational argument labelled complementary ignorance. The paper complies with the standard economic methodology of basing probability and utility representations on preference axioms, but for the sake of completeness, also considers a construal of objective uncertainty based on the assumption of an exogeneously given probability measure. JEL classification: D70; D81. (shrink)

If we think, as Ramsey did, that a degree of belief that P is a stronger or weaker tendency to act as if P, then it is clear that not only uncertainty, but also vagueness, gives rise to degrees of belief. If I like hot coffee and do not know whether the coffee is hot or cold, I will have some tendency to reach for a cup; if I like hot coffee and know that the coffee is borderline hot, (...) I will have some tendency to reach for a cup. Suppose that we take degrees of belief arising from uncertainty to obey the laws of probability and that we model vagueness using degrees of truth. We then encounter a problem: it does not look as though degrees of belief arising from vagueness should obey the laws of probability. One response would be to countenance two different sorts of degrees of belief: degrees of belief arising from uncertainty, which obey the laws of probability; and degrees of belief arising from vagueness, which obey a different set of laws. I argue, however, that if a degree of belief that P is a stronger or weaker tendency to act as if P, then this option is not open. Instead, I propose an account of the behaviour of degrees of belief that integrates subjective probabilities and degrees of truth. On this account, degrees of belief are expectations of degrees of truth. The account explains why degrees of belief behave in accordance with the laws of probability in cases involving only uncertainty, while also allowing degrees of belief to behave differently in cases involving only vagueness, and in mixed cases involving both uncertainty and vagueness. Justifications of the account are given both via Dutch books and in terms of epistemic accuracy. (shrink)

The current study investigates how native speakers of a morphologically complex language handle uncertainty related to linguistic forms that have gaps in their inflectional paradigms. We analyze their strategies of dealing with paradigmatic defectivity and how these strategies are motivated by subjective contemporaneousness, frequency, acceptability, and other lexical and structural characteristics of words. We administered a verb production task with Finnish native speakers using verbs from a small non-productive inflectional type that has many paradigmatic gaps and asked participants (...) to inflect the verbs in a given context. Inflectional uncertainty was measured by the number of different forms the participants produced for each verb. We classified produced forms that were not expected as either synonymous or novel and measured their optimal string alignment distance to expected forms. Our analyses revealed that a usage-based approach to paradigmatic defectivity fits better with the obtained results than a classical approach typically met in dictionaries and descriptive grammars. Thus, we argue, that paradigmatic defectivity can be better described as a dynamic rather than a static system, where gaps represent a continuum of possible inflectional choices rather than a lack of an inflectional variant. (shrink)

This article examines the epistemology of risk assessment in the context of financial modelling for the purposes of making loan underwriting decisions. A financing request for a company in the paper and pulp industry is considered in some detail. The paper and pulp industry was chosen because it is subject to some specific risks that have been identified and studied by bankers, investors and managers of paper and pulp companies and certain features of the industry enable analysts to quantify the (...) impact of specific risk events of a given dimension on a company's future financial performance. While companies in other industries may be subject to similar risk factors, the impact of risk events may be more difficult to gauge in those industries. The ability of financial analysts to model the impact of a risk event, and hence quantify a credit risk, increases the predictive accuracy of the model. I argue that bankers and regulators should recognise the uncertainty associated with unquantifiable credit risk in financial models, and they should view this uncertainty as a credit risk factor in and of itself. Evaluating the relative degree to which credit risk is quantifiable in financial models is a potentially significant yet largely unrecognised tool for credit risk management. I consider some possible applications of this assessment tool for managing risk within the banking industry. (shrink)

People are less willing to accept bets about an event when they do not know the true probability of that event. Such uncertainty aversion has been used to explain certain economic phenomena. This paper considers how far standard private information explanations (with strategic decisions to accept bets) can go in explaining phenomena attributed to uncertainty aversion. This paper shows that if two individuals have different prior beliefs about some event, and two sided private information, then each individual’s willingness (...) to bet will exhibit a bid ask spread property. Each individual is prepared to bet for the event, at sufficiently favorable odds, and against, at sufficiently favorable odds, but there is an intermediate range of odds where each individual is not prepared to bet either way. This is only true if signals are distributed continuously and sufficiently smoothly. It is not true, for example, in a finite signal model. (shrink)

We deal with the design problem of nonfragile state estimator for discrete-time genetic regulatory networks with time-varying delays and randomly occurring uncertainties. In particular, the norm-bounded uncertainties enter into the GRNs in random ways in order to reflect the characteristic of the modelling errors, and the so-called randomly occurring uncertainties are characterized by certain mutually independent random variables obeying the Bernoulli distribution. The focus of the paper is on developing a new nonfragile state estimation method to estimate the concentrations of (...) the mRNA and the protein for considered uncertain delayed GRNs, where the randomly occurring estimator gain perturbations are allowed. By constructing a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, a delay-dependent criterion is obtained in terms of linear matrix inequalities by properly using the discrete-time Wirtinger-based inequality and reciprocally convex combination approach as well as the free-weighting matrix method. It is shown that the proposed method ensures that the estimation error dynamics is globally asymptotically stable and the desired estimator parameter is designed via the solutions to certain LMIs. Finally, we provide two numerical examples to illustrate the feasibility and validity of the proposed estimation results. (shrink)

Again and again utopian hopes are connected with the life sciences (no hunger, health for everyone; life without diseases, longevity), but simultaneously serious research shows uncertain, incoherent, and ambivalent results. It is unrealistic to expect that these uncertainties will disappear. We start by providing a not exhaustive list of five different types of uncertainties end-users of nutrigenomics have to cope with without being able to perceive them as risks and to subject them to risk-analysis. First, genes connected with the human (...) body or nutrients can have different functions in interaction with their environment (for instance, one nutrient can be healthy for the heart, but can also be a high risk in relation to cancer). Secondly, uncertainties are formed by risk analyses. Will it be possible to calculate a certain risk of getting a certain condition with a certain lifestyle? Will it be difficult to separate the genetic component and the lifestyle component? How high will these risks be? How will these risks be handled by the actors? In the case of personal genotyping, it is unclear how frequent an adverse polymorphism will occur. Will every individual have a certain vulnerability to a certain disease or will it only be applicable to a small group of the population or particular populations? Thirdly, dietary advices are subject to uncertainties and still to be developed professional standards: some will have adverse outcomes, some will not delay the disease, and some will assume uncertain associations between nutrients, lifestyle, and genetic vulnerabilities. Fourth, with regard to the usefulness of tests it is uncertain to what extent risks indications about obesity and diabetes and other vulnerabilities really influence people to live healthier and therefore will help to prevent these conditions. Fifth, it is uncertain how and what nutrigenomics products will be developed and used. Will it be possible to develop more effectively health improving products? Or is this too difficult and will nutrigenomics continue to be used in not always justified health claims as a commercial and marketing tool? Present-day ethics and theories of responsibilities presuppose that uncertainties will disappear and concentrate on what seems to be fixed and stable in science. We develop provisional thoughts that assume that the dynamic of science to produce uncertainties and dilemmas is endemic, and we stress the need for consumers to institutionalize value searching, exploring, and deliberating devices in the health and food sector to find out the most important uncertainties and correspondingly socially desirable research priorities. (shrink)

Dogmatism is a claim about a possible epistemic position, not about the metaphysics of what puts us in that position. So, for example, it leaves it open whether the intrinsic nature of a perceiving subject’s state is the same as that of a hallucinating subject’s state.

A question at the intersection of scientific modeling and public choice is how to deal with uncertainty about model predictions. This "high-level" uncertainty is necessarily value-laden, and thus must be treated as irreducibly subjective. Nevertheless, formal methods of uncertainty analysis should still be employed for the purpose of clarifying policy debates. I argue that such debates are best informed by models which integrate objective features with subjective ones. This integrated subjectivism is illustrated with a case (...) study from the literature on monetary policy. The paper concludes with some morals for the use of models in determining climate policy. (shrink)

We recast subjective probabilities by rejecting behaviourist accounts of belief by explicitly distinguishing between judgements of uncertainty and expressions of those judgements. We argue that this entails rejecting that orderings of uncertainty be complete. This in turn leads naturally to several generalizations of the probability calculus. We define probability-like functions over incomplete algebras that reflect a subject’s incomplete judgements of uncertainty. These functions can be further generalized to inner and outer measures that reflect approximate elicitations.

A number of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. They were pulled over by police officers for speeding or caught by random inspection without a driver’s license. For United States government commissions and the press, these brushes with the law were missed opportunities. For some police officers though, they were of personal and professional significance. These officers replayed the incidents of contact with the 19 men, which lay bare the uncertainty of (...) every encounter, whether a traffic stop, or with someone taking photos of a landmark. Representatives from law enforcement began to design policies to include local police in national intelligence, with the idea of capitalizing on what patrol officers already do in dealing with the general public. Several initiatives were launched, among these, the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative. Routine reporting of suspicious activity was developed into steps for gathering, assessing and sharing terrorism-related information with a larger law enforcement and intelligence network. Through empirical analysis of counterterrorism efforts and recent scholarship on it, this chapter discusses prevention, preemption, and anticipation as three technologies of security, focusing on how each deals with uncertainty. The Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, this analysis suggests, is an anticipatory technology which constitutes police officers and intelligence analysts as subjects who work in a mode of uncertainty. (shrink)

The subject of research in this article is the question of the possibility of formalizing the general theory of systems, that is, turning it into a language for describing systems of any nature with unambiguously defined lexical units and rules. To answer this question, the author considers the phenomenon of semantic indeterminacy of languages, which ensures the flexibility of formed lexical constructions due to the multivalence of lexical units. Also the subject of the research is the practice of quoting out (...) of context – a phenomenon, the admissibility of which is conditioned by the isomorphism of lexical constructions, as well as by the creative nature of the cognitive process, in which the result of cognition is unknown in advance, and thus the change of interpretation of the used concepts is inevitable. The conducted research allows us to state that the general theory of systems cannot be exclusively an applied theory, but should be supplemented with an ontological component. In this case, it becomes a philosophical theory, for which full formalization is impossible without loss of functionality. As a result, general systems theory must inevitably retain a certain semantic uncertainty. This uncertainty, however, can be reduced by translation into universality and generalization of concepts. Besides, it is possible and in some cases necessary to formalize separate components of the general theory of systems, in particular, its ontological component - the metaphysics of material existence. (shrink)

Despite Fisher's (1930) psychological intuitions of and the formal treatment given by Yaari (1965, Review of Economic Studies 32, 137), the intertemporal model of choice is mainly a model with certain lifetime. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider this assumption, starting from a very simple two-period model of choice with lifetime uncertainty. We examine the comparative statics of the model at the first two orders and replace the concept of `pure time preference' by taking into account the (...) subjective treatment of the probability of survival. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that descriptive uncertainty is relevant to what we subjectively ought to do. This leads to a further question: is what we subjectively ought to do sensitive to our moral uncertainty as well? Includers say yes—what we subjectively ought to do is sensitive to both descriptive uncertainty and moral uncertainty. Excluders say no—only descriptive uncertainty matters to what we subjectively ought to do (i.e., moral uncertainty is irrelevant). Excluders argue that common motivations (...) for the subjective ought only give us reason to think that descriptive uncertainty matters. This paper focuses on one motivation: accessibility. Excluders argue that accessibility does not motivate the Includers’ view because moral truths are always accessible – unlike descriptive facts which are not always accessible. My goal is to defend the Includers’ view by arguing that moral truths are not always accessible in the relevant sense. (shrink)

Uncertainty is a necessary condition for the sound moral and scientific conduct of research involving human subjects. If the expert scientific communities, medical or otherwise, lacked uncertainty about the interventions under investigation, it would be unethical to knowingly subject individuals to inferior or harmful treatment. Moreover, if the relative merits of the interventions were previously established, as indicated by the lack of uncertainty within the relevant expert community, the results of the trial would be of little, if (...) any, scientific value. Despite the important role that uncertainty plays in the formulation and conduct of research involving human subjects, the concept has received inadequate treatment in the research ethics literature. To the limited extent that uncertainty is addressed, much of the emphasis remains on the ethical, not epistemic, aspects of uncertainty. What is left insufficiently examined is the nature and scope of the uncertainty. Often, uncertainty is glossed as agnosticism, indifference, and conflict. Yet these terms represent distinct types of uncertainty, and the type that obtains impacts the epistemic and ethical justifications for a proposed trial. A failure to recognize and clearly articulate the parameters of uncertainty in particular situations compromises our ability to respond to important moral and scientific concerns in the development and conduct of research. This problem is particularly pronounced in public health research that investigates problems resulting not only from uncertainties in scientific knowledge but from institutional failures, economic and social constraints, and lack of political will. Indeed, the role of research in public health is tied to its capacities to successfully navigate such complex questions. The way in which a study is designed and carried out, as well as ethically and scientifically justified, must reflect a robust and systematic characterization of the uncertainties present. Using an example from a study examining the efficacy of using treated sewage sludgeto remediate lead-contaminated soil, I explore and analyze the aforementioned deficiencies in understanding uncertainty among researchers and ethicists. The case study serves as a vehicle through which to illustrate (1) important considerations in characterizing and addressing uncertainty; (2) the influence of the uncertainty characterization on the formulation of parameters used to evaluate the ethical permissibility of the research; and (3) ways in which these parameters might be operationalized in the context of a particular study. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the rationality of law and legal decision making would be enhanced by a systematic attempt to recognize and respond to the implications of empirical uncertainty for policy making and decision making. Admission of uncertainty about the accuracy of facts and the validity of assumptions relied on to make inferences of fact is commonly avoided in law because it raises the spectre of paralysis of the capacity to decide issues authoritatively. The roots of (...) this short-sighted view are found in primitive mechanical models of relationships in the empirical and social world – those of objective causality and determinism. Insofar as it is believed that if we had sufficient data a clear and unequivocal answer would be available to each question, admission of uncertainty is seen as a sign of insufficiency, incompetence, impotence, and is avoided whenever a decision that must be seen to be based on valid reasons, cannot be avoided. Avoidance of some decisions, duplicity in others, is the result. -/- Decision-making must be restructured to recognize the provisional and context-bound validity and relevance of the models we use to conceptualize and order our understanding of phenomena, and to utilize this awareness as an instrument in the production of legal policies and decisions that will be authoritative precisely because they are honestly accurate and socially responsible. The paper makes a start on such a re-structuring of the legal process by exploring the implications of the observation that if law is to be “just”: 1) legal policy must be based on accurate information and rationally related to social goals; and 2) decisions applying policy to individual fact situations must be based on assumptions that are both relevant and accurate. -/- Reasons for determinations of fact must be given, otherwise the presumption that the trier of fact is “reasonable” is an unconditional licence to use private modes of logic and theories of social and natural science. What is not disclosed cannot be challenged on grounds of invalidity or irrelevance. Use of “objective validity” as a standard to evaluate conclusions made by the trier of fact in contentious cases would only serve to beg all important questions by concealing: 1) fundamental normative conflict, and 2) the limited nature and applicability of many validity claims. -/- Our use of the phrases “undue risk,” “public interest,” “reasonable,” and “necessary,” reflects the weight we choose to give conflicting social values and goals when we must make decisions in relative ignorance of all the consequences. “Objective criteria” are of limited utility in legal decision-making because their social meaning is derivative. Policy generation in the absence of any coherent conceptual-normative framework, use of vague terminology in legislation stating policy, and the absence of rational means to distinguish between individual cases to which decision-makers are required by law to apply policy, make it inevitable that many legal “decisions” made in the guise of determinations of objective fact, are charades, an arbitrary, capricious, intuitive, subjective (and thus private) use of public decision-making power. -/- Law must alter its aspirations and recognize that rational decision-making is a process that can occur only within parameters set by present knowledge and societal preference structures. Only by working with the constraints imposed by these parameters is it possible to achieve “just” decisions. Where no rational basis for differentiating cases exists, “individualized justice” must be avoided and public policy articulated in law applied uniformly to all cases in a class. The terms “reasonable” and “necessary,” used to describe policy and its consequences for specific cases, must be understood to represent provisional societal assessments, attempts to implement societal preference structures in the face of limited knowledge. Heightened awareness of the limited nature of our knowledge can only result in legal policies that have a more explicit normative basis. (shrink)

Communication involves a great deal of uncertainty. Prima facie, it is therefore surprising that biological communication systems—from cellular to human—exhibit a high degree of ambiguity and often leave its resolution to contextual cues. This puzzle deepens once we consider that contextual information may diverge between individuals. In the following we lay out a model of ambiguous communication in iterated interactions between subjectively rational agents lacking a common contextual prior. We argue ambiguity’s justification to lie in endowing interlocutors with means (...) to flexibly adapt language use to each other and the context of their interaction to serve their communicative preferences. Linguistic alignment is shown to play an important role in this process; it foments convergence of contextual expectations and thereby leads to agreeing use and interpretation of ambiguous messages. We conclude that ambiguity is ecologically rational when interlocutors’ contextual expectations are generally in line or they interact multiple times in an informative context, enabling for the alignment of their expectations. In light of these results meaning multiplicity can be understood as an opportunistic outcome enabled and shaped by linguistic adaptation and contextual information. (shrink)

'Uncertainty and chance' is a subject with a broad span, in that there is no academic discipline or walk of life that is not beset by uncertainty and chance. In this book a range of approaches is represented by authors from varied disciplines: natural sciences, mathematics, social sciences and medical sciences. At one extreme, this volume is concerned with the foundations of probability. At the other extreme, we have scholars who acknowledge the concept of chance and uncertainty (...) but do not cope with it by means of systematic measurement or quantative analysis. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology have worked extensively on how we ought best to interpret the probabilities which arise throughout evolutionary theory. In spite of this substantial work, however, much of the debate has remained persistently intractable. I offer the example of Bayesian models of divergence time estimation as a case study in how we might bring further resources from the biological literature to bear on these debates. These models offer us an example in which a number of different sources of (...) class='Hi'>uncertainty are combined to produce an estimate for a complex, unobservable quantity. These models have been carefully analyzed in recent biological work, which has determined the relationship between these sources of uncertainty, both quantitatively and qualitatively. I suggest here that this case shows us the limitations of univocal analyses of probability in evolution, as well as the simple dichotomy between “subjective” and “objective” probabilities, and I conclude by gesturing toward ways in which we might introduce more sophisticated interpretive taxonomies of probability as a path toward advancing debates on probability in the life sciences. (shrink)

The article discusses the theoretical status of the category of uncertainty. Instead of the classical definitions of uncertainty as an ontological or epistemological concept, a composite theoretical construct is proposed. In classical science, the objectivist representation of the subject of research was preferred. With the nonclassical type of rationality, there rises problem of including subjective elements in a theoretical description. Attention to subject-subject-object methodologies is increasing due to the complication of communicative interactions in science and society in (...) the digital era. One of the consequences of active innovative projective activity on a planetary scale and increasing risks is the perception in the public mind of uncertainty as a challenge. The author considers it appropriate to study the uncertainty-certainty as a paired category. The category of uncertainty was considered in philosophy, science, and management. The status of uncertainty as infinity and formlessness was recognized by Greek natural philosophers. Classical science developed the methodology of knowing the “infinite limit” through the construction of theoretical schemes (forms) and types of empirical testing. The paradox served as a means of destroying dogmatic schemes. In the context of increasingly complex communications in science, the importance of cognitive problems in the study of collective thinking and the personal beginning of creativity is increasing. Modern economic positivism is distinguished by its rejection of objective uncertainty, and the installation of the ability to efficiently manage exclusively accurate calculations is brought to extremes. (shrink)

Psychological research on people’s understanding of natural language connectives has traditionally used truth table tasks, in which participants evaluate the truth or falsity of a compound sentence given the truth or falsity of its components in the framework of propositional logic. One perplexing result concerned the indicative conditional if A then C which was often evaluated as true when A and C are true, false when A is true and C is false but irrelevant“ (devoid of value) when A is (...) false (whatever the value of C). This was called the “psychological defective table of the conditional.” Here we show that far from being anomalous the “defective” table pattern reveals a coherent semantics for the basic connectives of natural language in a trivalent framework. This was done by establishing participants’ truth tables for negation, conjunction, disjunction, conditional, and biconditional, when they were presented with statements that could be certainly true, certainly false, or neither. We review systems of three-valued tables from logic, linguistics, foundations of quantum mechanics, philosophical logic, and artificial intelligence, to see whether one of these systems adequately describes people’s interpretations of natural language connectives. We find that de Finetti’s (1936/1995) three-valued system is the best approximation to participants’ truth tables. (shrink)

There is a profound paradox in modern medical knowledge production: The more we know, the more we know that we (still) do not know. Nowhere is this more visible than in diagnostics and early detection of disease. As we identify ever more markers, predictors, precursors, and risk factors of disease ever earlier, we realize that we need knowledge about whether they develop into something experienced by the person and threatening to the person’s health. This study investigates how advancements in science (...) and technology alter one type of uncertainty, i.e., temporal uncertainty of disease diagnosis. As diagnosis is related to anamnesis and prognosis it identifies how uncertainties in all these fields are interconnected. In particular, the study finds that uncertainty in disease diagnosis has become more subject to prognostic uncertainty because diagnosis is more connected to technologically detected indicators and less closely connected to manifest and experienced disease. These temporal uncertainties pose basic epistemological and ethical challenges as they can result in overdiagnosis, overtreatment, unnecessary anxiety and fear, useless and even harmful diagnostic odysseys, as well as vast opportunity costs. The point is not to stop our quest for knowledge about disease but to encourage real diagnostic improvements that help more people in ever better manner as early as possible. To do so, we need to pay careful attention to specific types of temporal uncertainty in modern diagnostics. (shrink)

Soldiers sign contracts to obey lawful orders; they also swear oaths to this end. The enlistment contract for the Armed Forces of the United States combines both elements: -/- '9a. My enlistment is more than an employment agreement. As a member of the Armed Forces of the United States, I will be: (1) Required to obey all lawful orders and perform all assigned duties … (4) Required upon order to serve in combat or other hazardous situations.' -/- We standardly think (...) that these oaths and contracts give soldiers new moral reasons to fight. Many also think that soldiers who are ordered to fight by legitimate states have moral reasons to obey those orders, just in virtue of their provenance. -/- We generate these reasons through our voluntary decisions—to sign the contract or swear the oath; to form the institutions and give the orders. They are therefore additional moral reasons, on top of the reasons that we have prior to those voluntary decisions. Simply because they are additional, these reasons seem limited in force and scope. In particular, they arguably cannot override pre-existing commitments. For example, if I already have a duty not to kill an innocent person, my promising to breach that duty seems irrelevant to whether doing so is permissible. Similarly for orders issued by legitimate states: the citizens of a legitimate state have pre-existing moral reasons not to kill the innocent; by what alchemy could their state's orders allow combatants to override those reasons? If additional reasons could make prohibited acts permissible, as Sidgwick observed, ‘we could evade any moral obligation by promising not to fulfil it, which is clearly absurd’ (Sidgwick 1981). -/- We might conclude that the contracts soldiers sign, the oaths they take and the orders they receive have weight only when they pertain to acts that soldiers are already allowed to do. Perhaps these additional reasons can require actions that would otherwise be merely permissible, but they cannot license otherwise prohibited actions. If this is right, then it radically limits the relevance of contracts, oaths and authority to the ethics of war, since almost all conflicts involve soldiers breaching some pre-existing moral duties. -/- This is obviously true for soldiers fighting on the unjust side in a war, since almost all the killing they do is unjust. But in all actual wars soldiers on the just side also kill at least some innocent victims, whether as part of an unjust subordinate aim, as ‘collateral damage’, or simply because their adversaries are not sufficiently responsible for unjustified threats to be liable to be killed. If additional reasons cannot make otherwise prohibited acts permissible, then they are practically irrelevant to the ethics of killing in war, at least in this sense: if fighting is impermissible without regard to the contract, oath and authority of their state, then fighting is simply impermissible. -/- This is a tempting conclusion. In this paper, however, I argue that even if it is true at the level of objective permissibility, it is false for subjective permissibility. And since subjective permissibility is where (at least some of) the action is in the ethics of war, this is a significant result. I explain first why additional reasons can make otherwise subjectively prohibited acts permissible, then why just war theorists should care more than they seem to about subjective permissibility. Although I focus throughout on the ethics of war, my arguments generalise to all kinds of additional reasons. (shrink)

The concept of equipoise is considered by many to be part of the ethical justification for using human subjects in clinical research. In general, equipoise indicates some uncertainty about the relative merits of the experimental intervention compared to existing treatments. Relieving this uncertainty gives scientific value to an experiment, thereby making the risks to human subjects in the trial acceptable, other considerations notwithstanding. But characterizing equipoise remains controversial since Freedman’s groundbreaking publication on the subject. We offer a new (...) account of equipoise that draws on and extends an option Freedman discarded. After establishing the importance of some account of equipoise as part of ethically justified clinical trials, we revisit Freedman’s distinction between clinical and theoretical equipoise. We raise concerns about Freedman’s preferred clinical equipoise and then rehabilitate theoretical equipoise. In particular, we use a variety of arguments from epistemology to show how Freedman was too hasty in rejecting theoretical equipoise. In addition, we argue that theoretical equipoise is a subspecies of epistemic equipoise, which we characterize as a form of uncertainty that is the result of the possibility of error. This type of uncertainty can best be alleviated by research, which produces beliefs supported by strong statistical evidence, which is a key aim of clinical trials. Further, this type of uncertainty can explain why even clinicians with more firsthand experience with an intervention than their peers, and who may not be in theoretical equipoise, could still justifiably support a trial designed to ameliorate the possibility of error due to cognitive bias. (shrink)

Communication involves a great deal of uncertainty. Prima facie, it is therefore surprising that biological communication systems—from cellular to human—exhibit a high degree of ambiguity and often leave its resolution to contextual cues. This puzzle deepens once we consider that contextual information may diverge between individuals. In the following we lay out a model of ambiguous communication in iterated interactions between subjectively rational agents lacking a common contextual prior. We argue ambiguity’s justification to lie in endowing interlocutors with means (...) to flexibly adapt language use to each other and the context of their interaction to serve their communicative preferences. Linguistic alignment is shown to play an important role in this process; it foments convergence of contextual expectations and thereby leads to agreeing use and interpretation of ambiguous messages. We conclude that ambiguity is ecologically rational when interlocutors’ contextual expectations are generally in line or they interact multiple times in an informative context, enabling for the alignment of their expectations. In light of these results meaning multiplicity can be understood as an opportunistic outcome enabled and shaped by linguistic adaptation and contextual information. 1Meaning Multiplicity in Communication 2Ambiguous Signalling through Pragmatic Inference 2.1Preliminaries 2.2Signalling behaviour 2.3Communicative success 2.4Iterated interactions 3Predictions for Single and Iterated Interactions 3.1Simulations 3.2Exploration and past experience 3.3Preemptive adaptation 4Discussion 5Conclusion Appendix. (shrink)