Conditional Probability and Defeasible Inference

We offer a probabilistic model of rational consequence relations (Lehmann and Magidor, 1990) by appealing to the extension of the classical Ramsey–Adams test proposed by Vann McGee in (McGee, 1994). Previous and influential models of non-monotonic consequence relations have been produced in terms of the dynamics of expectations (Gärdenfors and Makinson, 1994; Gärdenfors, 1993).Expectation is a term of art in these models, which should not be confused with the notion of expected utility. The expectations of an agent are some form of belief weaker than absolute certainty. Our model offers a modified and extended version of an account of qualitative belief in terms of conditional probability, first presented in (van Fraassen, 1995). We use this model to relate probabilistic and qualitative models of non-monotonic relations in terms of expectations. In doing so we propose a probabilistic model of the notion of expectation. We provide characterization results both for logically finite languages and for logically infinite, but countable, languages. The latter case shows the relevance of the axiom of countable additivity for our probability functions. We show that a rational logic defined over a logically infinite language can only be fully characterized in terms of finitely additive conditional probability. The research of both authors was supported in part by a grant from NSF, and, for Parikh, also by support from the research foundation of CUNY.     

Cognitive ability and political beliefs in the United States

Recent evidence indicates that cognitive ability has a monotonically positive relation to socially liberal beliefs and some measures of fiscally conservative beliefs, and that it has a non-monotonic relation to other measures of fiscally conservative beliefs. This study examines the relationship between cognitive ability and political beliefs in a recent, nationally representative sample of American adults. It finds that cognitive ability is positively associated with both socially liberal beliefs and fiscally conservative beliefs. The relationships with socially liberal beliefs are monotonically positive. In contrast, some of the relationships with fiscally conservative beliefs are non-monotonic: Americans of highest ability are less fiscally conservative than those of high ability. The association between cognitive ability and a dimension of fiscal conservatism is reduced substantially when controlling for socio-economic position.     

Applied Logic without Psychologism

Logic is a celebrated representation language because of its formal generality. But there are two senses in which a logic may be considered general, one that concerns a technical ability to discriminate between different types of individuals, and another that concerns constitutive norms for reasoning as such. This essay embraces the former, permutation-invariance conception of logic and rejects the latter, Fregean conception of logic. The question of how to apply logic under this pure invariantist view is addressed, and a methodology is given. The pure invariantist view is contrasted with logical pluralism, and a methodology for applied logic is demonstrated in remarks on a variety of issues concerning non-monotonic logic and non-monotonic inference, including Charles Morgan’s impossibility results for non-monotonic logic, David Makinson’s normative constraints for non-monotonic inference, and Igor Douven and Timothy Williamson’s proposed formal constraints on rational acceptance.     

How much behaviour change should we expect from health promotion campaigns targeting cognitions? An approach to pre-intervention assessment

For those planning interventions based on social cognition models, it is usually not clear what impact on behaviour will follow from attempts to change the cognitions specified in these models. We describe a statistical simulation technique to assess the likely impact of health promotion targeting Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA)-based predictors of condom use. We apply regression-based simulation techniques to data from the SHARE project (n?=?756 Scottish adolescents) to assess the potential impact of changes in cognitions on condom use. Results support the predictive utility of TRA-based models of psychological antecedents of condom use but also provide a cautionary warning about the magnitude of behaviour change likely to be achieved by interventions based on such models.     

Psychological laws and non-monotonic logic

In this essay I enter into a recently published debate between Stephen Schiffer and Jerry Fodor concerning whether adequate sense can be made of the ceteris paribus conditions in special science laws, much of their focus being on the case of putative psychological laws. Schiffer argues that adequate sense cannot be made of ceteris paribus clauses, while Fodor attempts to overcome Schiffer's arguments, in defense of special science laws. More recently, Peter Mott has attempted to show that Fodor's response to Schiffer fails, and furthermore that further study shows that the logical framework in which Schiffer and Fodor address their issue is susceptible to inconsistency.In this essay I argue that adequate sense can be made of ceteris paribus conditions. Against Mott, I argue that recent work in the model theory of non-monotonic logic indicates how his problem involving logical inconsistencies can be overcome. Against Schiffer, I argue that the claims that he makes against ceteris paribus clauses would lead to a fatal skepticism concerning indefinitely many of the claims we make about the world (and indeed that his claims would be destructive of the view of the special sciences that Schiffer himself presents in his paper), and that the semantical considerations from non-monotonic logic that I present provide a suitable framework for dealing with his complaints. Thus I come out on the whole on Fodor's side of this debate, although for my own reasons, as I argue against much of Fodor's own argumentation.     

Minimally inconsistent LP

The paper explains how a paraconsistent logician can appropriate all classical reasoning. This is to take consistency as a default assumption, and hence to work within those models of the theory at hand which are minimally inconsistent. The paper spells out the formal application of this strategy to one paraconsistent logic, first-order LP. (See, Ch. 5 of: G. Priest, In Contradiction, Nijhoff, 1987.) The result is a strong non-monotonic paraconsistent logic agreeing with classical logic in consistent situations. It is shown that the logical closure of a theory under this logic is trivial only if its closure under LP is trivial.     

Perspectives on Systems Change Among Local Change Agents: A Comparative Study

Community organizers and activists draw on multiple traditions of community building and collective action in attempts to galvanize change. The diversity of perspectives on social change processes indicates corresponding differences in perspectives on systems and what is required to change them. Twenty‐two in‐depth interviews with community organizers and activists in the Midwestern USA were conducted to identify differences in perspectives on systems change efforts. Four models used by organizers were identified: action/issue‐centric, identity‐centric, relationship‐centric, and organizing‐development. Strategies for recruitment, issue selection, leadership determination, and action were compared across models. Analyses revealed that some models might be better suited to action on certain issues (e.g. identity‐centric models when organizing around homelessness), whereas others may have advantages for use in certain settings (e.g. relationship‐centric models in congregations). These findings suggest that practitioners and scholars should pay close attention to contextual factors and focal issues when determining strategies for creating systems change. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inducing and modulating intrusive emotional memories: a review of the trauma film paradigm

Highly affect-laden memory intrusions are a feature of several psychological disorders with intrusive images of trauma especially associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The trauma film paradigm provides a prospective experimental tool for investigating analogue peri-traumatic cognitive mechanisms underlying intrusion development. We review several historical papers and some more recent key studies that have used the trauma film paradigm. A heuristic diagram is presented, designed to simplify predictions about analogue peri-traumatic processing and intrusion development, which can also be related to the processing elements of recent cognitive models of PTSD. Results show intrusions can be induced in the laboratory and their frequency amplified/attenuated in line with predictions. Successful manipulations include competing task type (visuospatial vs. verbal) and use of a cognitive coping strategy. Studies show that spontaneous peri-traumatic dissociation also affects intrusion frequency although attempts to manipulate dissociation have failed. It is hoped that further use of this paradigm may lead to prophylactic training for at risk groups and an improved understanding of intrusions across psychopathologies.     

Thirteen Years: An Editor's Valedictory

The essay that follows is in two parts. The first is a valediction; the second attempts to use some recent events at the Journal as a text for discussion of the current state of the field of family therapy.     

A logical expression of reasoning

A non-monotonic logic, the Logic of Plausible Reasoning (LPR), capable of coping with the demands of what we call complex reasoning, is introduced. It is argued that creative complex reasoning is the way of reasoning required in many instances of scientific thought, professional practice and common life decision taking. For managing the simultaneous consideration of multiple scenarios inherent in these activities, two new modalities, weak and strong plausibility, are introduced as part of the Logic of Plausible Deduction (LPD), a deductive logic specially designed to serve as the monotonic support for LPR. Axiomatics and semantics for LPD, together with a completeness proof, are provided. Once LPD has been given, LPR may be defined via a concept of extension over LPD. Although the construction of LPR extensions is first presented in standard style, for the sake of comparison with existing non-monotonic formalisms, alternative more elegant and intuitive ways for constructing non-monotonic LPR extensions are also given and proofs of their equivalence are presented.     

Time and defeasibility in FIPA ACL semantics

Inferences about speech acts are often conditional, non-monotonic, and involve the issue of time. Most agent communication languages, however, ignore these issues, due to the difficulty to combine them in a single formalism. This paper addresses such issues in defeasible logic, and shows how to express a semantics for ACLs in order to make non-monotonic inferences on the basis of speech acts.     

Excogitating Bion's Cogitations: further implications for technique

The author takes up a number of Bion's musings posthumously published as Cogitations (1992) and attempts to demonstrate the clinical usefulness of Bion's thoughts. She offers some new models and some points of technique that might be derived from following the trail of these selected fragments of Bion's thinking. Several detailed clinical examples are offered for clarification and illustration.     

Training Implications of Salesperson Influence Strategy

Abstract

Salespeople attempt to influence their customers in different ways. Depending upon the situation, some of their influence attempts are more successful than others. Therefore, salespeople should be trained to recognize key differences in the situations they face and to use those influence strategies which seem to be the most effective in dealing with the particular situations. This article identifies several types of influences used by salespeople, empirically validates their use, suggests some specific training implications related to influence attempts, and offers an operational framework within which the training may be conducted.     

Conditionals in reasoning

The paper presents a non-monotonic inference relation on a language containing a conditional that satisfies the Ramsey Test. The logic is a weakening of classical logic and preserves many of the ‘paradoxes of implication’ associated with the material implication. It is argued, however, that once one makes the proper distinction between supposing that something is the case and accepting that it is the case, these ‘paradoxes’ cease to be counterintuitive. A representation theorem is provided where conditionals are given a non-bivalent semantics and epistemic states are represented via preferential models.     

Effects of bilateral alternation on perceived temporal uniformity of auditory and somesthetic pulse trains

Certain attempts to account for the apparent loss of information when stimuli are presented in rapid alternation between the two sides of the body imply that some elements of the alternatingstimulus train are deleted. This implication forces the prediction that the train of surviving stimuli will be nonuniformly spaced. Yet observers do not report such temporal nonuniformity. The perceptibility of actual nonuniformity in stimulus trains was here found to be strikingly poorer for bilaterally alternating than for unilateral pulses, a finding qualitatively consonant with deletion models. Quantitatively, however, thresholds for perceived nonuniformity were so low as to require that deletion models include a mechanism allowing central respacing of the surviving train. “Stream segregation” is considered as an alternative to deletion models.     

Constraining bridges between levels of analysis: A computational justification for locally Bayesian learning

Different levels of analysis provide different insights into behavior: computational-level analyses determine the problem an organism must solve and algorithmic-level analyses determine the mechanisms that drive behavior. However, many attempts to model behavior are pitched at a single level of analysis. Research into human and animal learning provides a prime example, with some researchers using computational-level models to understand the sensitivity organisms display to environmental statistics but other researchers using algorithmic-level models to understand organisms’ trial order effects, including effects of primacy and recency. Recently, attempts have been made to bridge these two levels of analysis. Locally Bayesian Learning (LBL) creates a bridge by taking a view inspired by evolutionary psychology: Our minds are composed of modules that are each individually Bayesian but communicate with restricted messages. A different inspiration comes from computer science and statistics: Our brains are implementing the algorithms developed for approximating complex probability distributions. We show that these different inspirations for how to bridge levels of analysis are not necessarily in conflict by developing a computational justification for LBL. We demonstrate that a scheme that maximizes computational fidelity while using a restricted factorized representation produces the trial order effects that motivated the development of LBL. This scheme uses the same modular motivation as LBL, passing messages about the attended cues between modules, but does not use the rapid shifts of attention considered key for the LBL approximation. This work illustrates a new way of tying together psychological and computational constraints.     

Building theories of reading ability: On the relation between individual differences in cognitive skills and reading comprehension

To date most theories of reading ability have emphasized a single factor as the major source of individual differences in performance. However there has been little agreement on what that factor is. However, candidates have included visual discrimination, phonological and semantic recoding, short-term memory, and utilization of linguistic knowledge and context. The single- factor theories are summarized. Literature is then reviewed to show that no single-factor theory is likely to be right, because a very wide range of component skills and abilities has in fact been shown to correlate with reading success. Among them are discrimination of letter location and letter order during perceptual recognition, use of orthographic regularity as an aid to visual code formation, use of spelling-to-sound regularity in phonological recoding, memory for word order, spontaneous identification of syntactic relations, flexibility in prediction from syntactic and semantic context, and context-specificity in semantic encoding. It is concluded that more complex, multifactor models of reading ability are required, and some recent attempts to collect data conducive to such a model are described. In the process, three different approaches to identifying factors relevant to reading success are delineated. These are general abilities assessment, learning potential assessment, and component skills analysis. Two methods of conducting component skills analysis are presented, and it is recommended that they be used as converging operations. Finally, the results of a component skills analysis are used to construct a tentative example of a class of hierarchical models of reading ability that can be pursued developmentally.