Back to Basics: The Psychoanalytic Conceptualization of Motivation

Reconsideration of motivation, a fundamental concept in psychoanalytic theory, engages us with basic assumptions and postulates of our field and draws us to the borders with neighboring scientific elaborations of the design, structure, and function of the mind. This paper presents a concept of motivation from a perspective in modern conflict theory and correlates this concept with current thinking in evolutionary biology. The challenges that this correlation raises for all psychoanalytic approaches to motivation are discussed. Natural selection has fundamentally organized motivation in accord with the principle of inclusive fitness. Adaptive motivations of self-interest achieved through social success are paramount. In mind sciences there is a growing appreciation of the innately modular mind with mounting evidence for domain and content-specific evolved psychological mechanisms, the modern term for instincts. In regard to motivation in modern conflict theory, evolved mechanisms and predispositions are innately linked to pleasure–unpleasure and include, importantly, motivations of self-interest. The pleasure–unpleasure principle regulates motivation throughout life. Early mother–child interactions are vital to the development and contextualization of motivation; however, these interactions themselves depend on mutually coadapted mechanisms that give vectors and impose constraints on every primary relationship. In evading innate contributions there is a danger of embarking on a new creationist paradigm.     

Mighty Belief Revision

Journal of Philosophical Logic - Belief revision theories standardly endorse a principle of intensionality to the effect that ideal doxastic agents do not discriminate between pieces of information...     

Iterated Belief Revision

This is a discussion of the problem of extending the basic AGM belief revision theory to iterated belief revision: the problem of formulating rules, not only for revising a basic belief state in response to potential new information, but also for revising one’s revision rules in response to potential new information. The emphasis in the paper is on foundational questions about the nature of and motivation for various constraints, and about the methodology of the evaluation of putative counterexamples to proposed constraints. Some specific constraints that have been proposed are criticized. The paper emphasizes the importance of meta-information—information about one’s sources of information—and argues that little of substance can be said about constraints on iterated belief revision at a level of abstraction that lacks the resources for explicit representation of meta-information.

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Infinitary Belief Revision

This paper extends the AGM theory of belief revision to accommodate infinitary belief change. We generalize both axiomatization and modeling of the AGM theory. We show that most properties of the AGM belief change operations are preserved by the generalized operations whereas the infinitary belief change operations have their special properties. We prove that the extended axiomatic system for the generalized belief change operators with a Limit Postulate properly specifies infinite belief change. This framework provides a basis for first-order belief revision and the theory of revising a belief state by a belief state.     

Revocable Belief Revision

Krister Segerberg proposed irrevocable belief revision, to be contrasted with standard belief revision, in a setting wherein belief of propositional formulas is modelled explicitly. This suggests that in standard belief revision is revocable: one should be able to unmake (‘revoke’) the fresh belief in the revision formula, given yet further information that contradicts it. In a dynamic epistemic logical setting for belief revision, for multiple agents, we investigate what the requirements are for revocable belief revision. By this we not merely mean recovering belief in non-modal propositions, as in the recovery principle for belief contraction, but recovering belief in modal propositions: beliefs about beliefs. These requirements are almost never met, a surprising result.     

Back to Basics with Mixed-Effects Models: Nine Take-Away Points

Purpose

Multilevel mixed effects models are widely used in organizational behavior and organizational psychology to test and advance theory. At times, however, the complexity of the models leads researchers to draw erroneous inferences or otherwise use the models in less than optimal ways. We present nine take-away points intended to enhance the theoretical precision and utility of the models.

Approach

We demonstrate our points using two types of simulated data: one in which group membership is irrelevant, and the other in which relationships exist only because of group membership. We then demonstrate that the effects we observe in simulated data replicate in organizational data.

Findings

Little that we address will be new to methodology experts; nonetheless, we draw together a variety of points that we believe will help advance both theory and analytic rigor in multilevel analyses.

Implications

We make two points that run somewhat counter to conventional norms. First, we argue that mixed-effects models are appropriate even when ICC(1) values associated with the outcome data are small and non-significant. Second, we show that high ICC(2) values are not a prerequisite for detecting emergent multilevel relationships.

Originality/Value

The article is designed to be a resource for researchers who are learning about and applying mixed-effects (i.e., multilevel) models.

     

Back to Basics: Problems and Prospects for Applied Philosophy

ABSTRACT This paper is an account of a response to a well-intentioned and genuinely naive question concerning the nature of 'applied philosophy'. It indicates differing points of view concerning the nature of philosophy and what one might or might not expect from it. It tries to synthesise these points of view into a position that sees philosophy as continuous with that attitude of mind that was epitomised by Socrates, an attitude of mind which is directed to every aspect or dimension of human life. The notion of the enquiring activist is borrowed to encapsulate this attitude as a valuable goal of 'applied philosophy'.     

Prolegomena to Dynamic Logic for Belief Revision

In ‘belief revision’ a theory is revised with a formula φ resulting in a revised theory . Typically, is in , one has to give up belief in by a process of retraction, and φ is in . We propose to model belief revision in a dynamic epistemic logic. In this setting, we typically have an information state (pointed Kripke model) for the theory wherein the agent believes the negation of the revision formula, i.e., wherein is true. The revision with φ is a program *φ that transforms this information state into a new information state. The transformation is described by a dynamic modal operator [*φ], that is interpreted as a binary relation [ [*φ] ] between information states. The next information state is computed from the current information state and the belief revision formula. If the revision is successful, the agent believes φ in the resulting state, i.e., Bφ is then true. To make this work, as information states we propose ‘doxastic epistemic models’ that represent both knowledge and degrees of belief. These are multi-modal and multi-agent Kripke models. They are constructed from preference relations for agents, and they satisfy various characterizable multi-agent frame properties. Iterated, revocable, and higher-order belief revision are all quite natural in this setting. We present, for an example, five different ways of such dynamic belief revision. One can also see that as a non-deterministic epistemic action with two alternatives, where one is preferred over the other, and there is a natural generalization to general epistemic actions with preferences.     

Symmetry and Belief Revision

This paper continues the recent tradition of investigating iterated AGM revision by reasoning directly about the dynamics for total pre-order (“implausibility ordering”) representations of AGM revision functions. We reorient discussion, however, by proving that symmetry considerations, almost by themselves, suffice to determine a particular, AGM-friendly implausibility ordering dynamics due to Spohn 1988, which we call “J-revision”. After exploring the connections between implausibility ordering dynamics and the social choice theory of Arrow 1963, we provide symmetry arguments in the social choice-theoretic framework for an interesting generalization of J-revision due to Nayak 1994. We conclude by arguing that the symmetry principles that uniquely favor J-revision and its generalizations are importantly expressive of the purely qualitative framework for representing beliefs that distinguishes the AGM program. Our results therefore comprehensively vindicate Spohn's 1988 conjecture that essentially J-revision is the best that can be done by way of a purely qualitative model of belief revision. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Resource Bounded Belief Revision

The AGM paradigm for belief revision provides a very elegant and powerful framework for reasoning about idealized agents. The paradigm assumes that the modeled agent is a perfect reasoner with infinite memory. In this paper we propose a framework to reason about non-ideal agents that generalizes the AGM paradigm. We first introduce a structure to represent an agent's belief states that distinguishes different status of beliefs according to whether or not they are explicitly represented, whether they are currently active and whether they are fully accepted or provisional. Then we define a set of basic operations that change the status of beliefs and show how these operations can be used to model agents with different capacities. We also show how different operations of belief change described in the literature can be seen as special cases of our theory.     

Truth-Tracking by Belief Revision

Studia Logica - We study the learning power of iterated belief revision methods. Successful learning is understood as convergence to correct, i.e., true, beliefs. We focus on the issue of...     

Belief Revision And Epistemology

Postulational approaches attempt to understand the dynamics of belief revision by appealing to no more than the set of beliefs held by an agent and the logical relations between them. It is argued there that such an approach cannot work. A proper account of belief revision must also appeal to the arguments supporting beliefs, and recognize that those arguments can be defeasible. If we begin with a mature epistemological theory that accommodates this, it can be seen that the belief revision operators on which the postulational theories are based are ill-defined. It is further argued that there is no way to repair the definitions so as to retain the spirit of those theory. Belief revision is better studied from within an independently motivated epistemological theory.     

Bounded Revision: Two-Dimensional Belief Change Between Conservative and Moderate Revision

This paper presents the model of ‘bounded revision’ that is based on two-dimensional revision functions taking as arguments pairs consisting of an input sentence and a reference sentence. The key idea is that the input sentence is accepted as far as (and just a little further than) the reference sentence is ‘cotenable’ with it. Bounded revision satisfies the AGM axioms as well as the Same Beliefs Condition (SBC) saying that the set of beliefs accepted after the revision does not depend on the reference sentence (although the posterior belief state does depend on it). Bounded revision satisfies the Darwiche–Pearl (DP) axioms for iterated belief change. If the reference sentence is fixed to be a tautology or a contradiction, two well-known one-dimensional revision operations result. Bounded revision thus naturally fills the space between conservative revision (also known as natural revision) and moderate revision (also known as lexicographic revision). I compare this approach to the two-dimensional model of ‘revision by comparison’ investigated by Fermé and Rott (Artif Intell 157:5–47, 2004) that satisfies neither the SBC nor the DP axioms. I conclude that two-dimensional revision operations add substantially to the expressive power of qualitative approaches that do not make use of numbers as measures of degrees of belief.     

A Single Counterexample Leads to Moral Belief Revision

What kind of evidence will lead people to revise their moral beliefs? Moral beliefs are often strongly held convictions, and existing research has shown that morality is rooted in emotion and socialization rather than deliberative reasoning. In addition, more general issues—such as confirmation bias—further impede coherent belief revision. Here, we explored a unique means for inducing belief revision. In two experiments, participants considered a moral dilemma in which an overwhelming majority of people judged that it was inappropriate to take action to maximize utility. Their judgments contradicted a utilitarian principle they otherwise strongly endorsed. Exposure to this scenario led participants to revise their belief in the utilitarian principle, and this revision persisted over several hours. This method provides a new avenue for inducing belief revision.     

Contraction in Interrogative Belief Revision

In the paper “On the role of the research agenda in epistemic change”, Olsson and Westlund have suggested that the notion of epistemic state employed in the standard framework of belief revision (Alchourrón et al. 1985; G?rdenfors 1988) should be extended to include a representation of the agent’s research agenda (Olsson and Westlund 2006). The resulting framework will here be referred to as interrogative belief revision. In this paper, I attempt to deal with the problem of how research agendas should change in contraction, a problem largely left open by Olsson and Westlund. Two desiderata of an appropriate solution are suggested: one is a principle of continuity, stating that changes in the research agenda should somehow reflect that certain long term research interests are kept fixed. The other desideratum, which is based on part of Olsson and Westlund’s motivation for adding research agendas to the epistemic states, is that we should be able to account for how contraction may serve to open up new, fruitful hypotheses for investigation. In order to achieve these desiderata, I base my solution on a revised version of Olsson and Westlund’s notion of epistemic state.