Theism, Blame And Perfection

Blame and also punishment do not reach many agents in the sense that many agents are not motivated to ethically self-correct, and in fact, may be worsened by these practices. The main reasons agents may not be reached by them are that (on the most plausible secular or naturalistic ethical theory) (a) the agent's second nature may make inaccessible to him a sound appreciation of ethical considerations, and (b) the fixity of mature character may make ethical self-correction practically impossible. Still, when they are ethically rationalized, blame and punishment seem to be requirements. Even the most plausible secular or naturalistic ethics involves an important kind of incompleteness and unclarity concerning this issue. The Jewish and Christian traditions involve conceptions of the accessibility of ethical considerations and also the possibility of character change (both ultimately grounded in grace) in ways that enable us to overcome the perplexity about blame and punishment. They are not 'good for nothing' even when they fail to improve agents. The religious traditions' conceptions of moral agency and the possibility of perfection enable us to see why there are reasons not to ethically 'write off' even persistently vicious agents. Moreover, we can see that the fulfilling of ethical requirements is an enabling condition for perfection that is not merely ethical. To highlight the contrast between the naturalistic view and the theistic view, Aristotle's moral psychology and moral epistemology are contrasted with those of Maimonides and Aquinas, both of whom borrow heavily from Aristotle, but fundamentally transform what they borrow.     

社会群体中的偏好逻辑

在许多多主体偏好逻辑系统中,主体之间是没有联系的,因而无法描述主体间的偏好互动。借鉴＂The Logic in the Community＂一文中称为＂群体压力＂的例子对偏好的影响,本文在＂The Logic in the Community＂所提出的系统构架上,加入偏好算子和两个动态算子,通过构造归约公理说明这些算子可以被无偿添加,并借助这些规约公理证明了系统的完全性。     

predicting insurance agent turnover using a video-based situational judgment test

High turnover of newly contracted insurance agents is a wide-spread problem faced by many insurance companies. The objective of the present study was to examine the usefulness of a video-based selection test in the prediction of turnover for insurance agents. Newly contracted insurance agents (N=677) responded to items presented on a video-based situational judgment test. Each item presented a videotaped situation showing an agent interacting with client. Following the situation, the agents responded to a multiple-choice question indicating how they would handle the situation. Turnover information was gathered on the agents one year after contract. Using an empirical scoring method, data analyses indicated a significant relationship between test scores and the turnover criterion.This research was completed while the author was at LIMRA, International, Farmington, CT.     

Global Constraints on Imprecise Credences: Solving Reflection Violations,Belief Inertia,and Other Puzzles

The move to imprecise credence models leaves many formal norms of rationality surprisingly intact, as rational constraints on precise credences are often reinterpreted as constraints on individual elements of a rational agent’s representor. However, constraints on imprecise credences needn’t take this form. Whether an imprecise agent is rational might just as easily depend on global features of her representor. This paper is an extended investigation of global rules of rationality. I begin by distinguishing and defining multiple notions of globalness. Then I use these notions to solve several problems faced by fans of imprecise credences. On behalf of fans of imprecise credences, I respond to the problem of belief inertia, according to which certain imprecise agents are unable to engage in inductive learning. In addition, I answer the objection that that imprecise agents are doomed to violate the rational principle of Reflection.     

Sex differences in pain

Are there sex differences in pain? For experimentally delivered somatic stimuli, females have lower thresholds, greater ability to discriminate, higher pain ratings, and less tolerance of noxious stimuli than males. These differences, however, are small, exist only for certain forms of stimulation and are affected by many situational variables such as presence of disease, experimental setting, and even nutritive status. For endogenous pains, women report more multiple pains in more body regions than men. With no obvious underlying rationale, some painful diseases are more prevalent among females, others among males and, for many diseases, symptoms differ between females and males. Sex differences in attitudes exist that affect not only reporting, coping, and responses to treatment, but also measurement and treatment. So many variables are operative, however, that the most striking feature of sex differences in reported pain experience is the apparent overall lack of them. On the other hand, deduction from known biological sex differences suggests that these are powerful sex differences in the operation of pain mechanisms. First, the vaginal canal provides an additional route in women for internal trauma and invasion by pathological agents that puts them at greater risk for developing hyperalgesia in multiple body regions. Second, sex differences in temporal patterns are likely to give rise to sex differences in how pain is "learned" and stimuli are interpreted, a situation that could lead to a greater variability and wider range of pains without obvious peripheral pathology among females. Third, sex differences in the actions of sex hormones suggest pain-relevant differences in the operation of many neuroactive agents, opiate and nonopiate systems, nerve growth factor, and the sympathetic system. Thus, while inductive analysis of existing data demonstrate more similarities than differences in pain experience between females and males, deductive analysis suggests important operational sex differences in its production.     

Towards refinement of abductive or inductive hypotheses through propagation

In this paper we address the problem of distributed sources of information, or agents, that observe the environment locally and have to communicate in order to refine their hypothesis regarding the actual state of this environment. One way to address the problem would be to centralize all the collected observations and knowledge, and to centrally compute the resulting theory. In many situations however, it would not be possible to adopt this centralized approach (e.g. for practical reasons, or privacy concerns). In this paper, we assume that agents individually face abductive or inductive tasks in a globally coherent environment, and we show that general mechanisms can be designed that abstractly regard both cases as special instances of a problem of hypothesis refinement through propagation. Assuming that agents are equipped with some individual revision machinery, our concern will be to investigate how (under what conditions) convergence to a consistent state can be guaranteed at more global levels: (i) between two agents; (ii) in a clique of agents; and (iii) in general in a connected society of agents.     

在动态认知逻辑中融合观察与内省

一直以来,我们使用逻辑系统来描述数学的证明、结构的计算以及语言的意义。近年来,逻辑系统却越来越多地被用来研究理性行动者的很多方面。例如,如何接受单一的信息,多主体间的交流行为,以及更为一般的受目标驱动的主体间的互动。特别是,对观察和交流中的信息流的研究,大家使用所谓的知识更新、信念修正和偏好改变的动态认知逻辑。当新信息进来时,这些逻辑使用信息的“语义意义”作为被更新状态的选择范围。 然而,同样重要的是,理性主体的行动也会基于其他信息,譬如,由推理和反省得到的信息。对这些问题的研究实际上是对信息在更为语法的意义上进行理解的,即,把信息看作是可以由主体阐明的东西。也许有些奇怪,尽管在这一领域已经存在不少的研究方案,但是大家对什么是信息,信息的关键机制是什么等问题更少有一致的意见。可以看出,对“信息”的意义在逻辑中确实有很多不同的理解。 本文基于可能世界的语义,给出一个一致的信息模型,同时也赋予可能世界语法的“可及通路”。这样,我们就能把外部的“更新信息”和内部的“阐明信息”放在同一个动态逻辑系统中。特别是,我们提出了两个基本的信息行动：纯粹的基于观察的更新（“单纯的看”）和把不明显的知识变为明显知识的“知觉实现”。我们阐明为什么这些行动是自然的,同时我们也提出了一些新的研究问题。其中,很多问题探讨如何使其他的逻辑传统,包括信念修正理论、情景语义学和弗协调逻辑等适用于信息一驱使的理性行动者的图景。     

A logic of intentions and beliefs

Intentions are an important concept in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We present a formal theory of intentions and beliefs based on Discourse Representation Theory that captures many of their important logical properties. Unlike possible worlds approaches, this theory does not assume that agents are perfect reasoners, and gives a realistic view of their internal architecture; unlike most representational approaches, it has anobjective semantics, and does not rely on anad hoc labeling of the internal states of agents. We describe a minimal logic for intentions and beliefs that is sound and complete relative to our semantics. We discuss several additional axioms, and the constraints on the models that validate them.     

Security of multi-agent systems: A case study on comparison shopping

The multi-agent-systems paradigm is becoming more and more popular as a basis for realizing net-based solutions. This development is accompanied by an increasing relevance of security issues. For instance, the potential loss of privacy and other assets is a major concern for, both merchants and customers, in Internet-based commerce and, without being properly addressed, such very legitimate concerns hamper the growth of e-commerce.This article uses a comparison-shopping scenario to introduce a general methodology for formally verifying the security of multi-agent systems. Following the approach of possibilistic information flow security, the flow of information between and within agents is restricted in order to ensure that secrets will not be disclosed to unauthorized meddlers. The security requirements for the overall system are then decomposed into requirements for the individual agents that can be verified independently from each other. Exploiting the modular structure of a multi-agent system considerably reduces the complexity of the overall security analysis. The techniques for decomposing security requirements, for verifying individual agents, and for deriving global security guarantees for the entire system from locally verified properties are all generic in the sense that they apply also to many other systems and security requirements than the ones that appear in the example scenario.     

Adaptations to avoid victimization

From an evolutionary perspective, victims are individuals who incur fitness costs as the result of the actions of external agents. The external agents that inflict the costs are often other humans. In the evolutionary past, there were recurrent contexts of conflict in the fitness interests of different individuals. Evidence suggests that many instances of the infliction of costs on conspecifics are the evolved products of adaptations that function to acquire and control fitness-enhancing resources and goals. We propose that an antagonistic, coevolutionary arms race that has churned through the deep time of human evolutionary history has produced adaptations to strategically exploit others and defenses to avoid the costs of victimization.     

Integration and authority: rescuing the ‘one thought too many’ problem

Four decades ago, Bernard Williams accused Kantian moral theory of providing agents with ‘one thought too many’. The general consensus among contemporary Kantians is that this objection has been decisively answered. In this paper, I reconstruct the problem, showing that Williams was not principally concerned with how agents are to think in emergency situations, but rather with how moral theories are to be integrated into recognizably human lives. I show that various Kantian responses to Williams provide inadequate materials for solving this ‘integration problem’, and that they are correspondingly ill-positioned to account for the authority of morality, as Williams suspected all along.     

Confronting Many‐Many Problems: Attention and Agentive Control

I argue that when perception plays a guiding role in intentional bodily action, it is a necessary part of that action. The argument begins with a challenge that necessarily arises for embodied agents, what I call the Many‐Many Problem. The Problem is named after its most common case where agents face too many perceptual inputs and too many possible behavioral outputs. Action requires a solution to the Many‐Many Problem by selection of a specific linkage between input and output. In bodily action the agent perceptually selects, and in this way perceptually attends to, relevant information so as to guide the execution of specific movements. Since perceptual attention is a necessary part of solving the Many‐Many Problem, it is a necessary part of bodily action. Indeed, the process of implementing a solution to the Many‐Many Problem, as constrained by the agent's motivational state, just is the agent's performing an intentional bodily action in the relevant way.     

临床肿瘤免疫的研究近况

免疫系统具有特异性破坏肿瘤而不损伤正常组织的能力,并且可以产生长久记忆从而阻止肿瘤复发。过去30年的肿瘤免疫研究充分证明肿瘤可以被免疫系统识别,并且机体免疫监视可以阻止肿瘤的发展或长期控制。目前的临床试验提示免疫治疗可能成为肿瘤治疗非常重要的一部分,试验中发现免疫相关的毒性、疗效评价标准以及观察终点与传统的细胞毒药物及靶向治疗均存在很大的差别。为了充分发挥免疫治疗的疗效,研究者需要更深入地了解肿瘤与宿主免疫反应之间动力学关系以及肿瘤的免疫逃逸机制,识别、评价及处理免疫相关反应。     

Probabilistic Regresses and the Availability Problem for Infinitism

Recent work by Peijnenburg, Atkinson, and Herzberg suggests that infinitists who accept a probabilistic construal of justification can overcome significant challenges to their position by attending to mathematical treatments of infinite probabilistic regresses. In this essay, it is argued that care must be taken when assessing the significance of these formal results. Though valuable lessons can be drawn from these mathematical exercises (many of which are not disputed here), the essay argues that it is entirely unclear that the form of infinitism that results meets a basic requirement: namely, providing an account of infinite chains of propositions qua reasons made available to agents.     

Decisions and Higher‐Order Knowledge

A knowledge‐based decision theory faces what has been called the prodigality problem (Greco, 2013): given that many propositions are assigned probability 1, agents will be inclined to risk everything when betting on propositions which are known. In order to undo probability 1 assignments in high risk situations, the paper develops a theory which systematically connects higher level goods with higher‐order knowledge.     

Ethical objectivity: The test of time

According to many, evolutionary accounts of ethics undermine the prospects of its objective foundation. By contrast, this paper argues that such evolutionary accounts discredit only the absolutist construal of moral truths as timeless but supports other conceptions of objectivity as tested by time. Insofar as Kantian constructivism addresses the problem of ethical objectivity from the standpoint of temporal rational agents, it is not vulnerable to debunking arguments based on evolutionary explanations. In fact, recent work on evolutionary accounts of reasoning and inferences not only coheres with but it also reinforces the constructivist conception of practical reason as a problem‐solving cooperative device apt to temporal and interdependent rational agents.     

Epistemic control without voluntarism

It is tempting to think (though many deny) that epistemic agents exercise a distinctive kind of control over their belief-like attitudes. My aim here is to sketch a “bottom-up” model of epistemic agency, one that draws on an analogous model of practical agency, according to which an agent's conditional beliefs are reasons-responsive planning states that initiate and sustain mental behavior so as to render controlled.     

Improving Arguments for Local Carbon Rights: The Case of Forest-Based Sequestration

Land-based climate mitigation schemes such as REDD+ imply the creation of ‘rights to carbon’ for actions that enhance carbon sinks. In many cases, the legal and normative foundations of such rights are unclear. This article focuses on special rights on the basis of improvement. Considering improvement in relation to carbon sinks requires asking what it means to ‘improve’ an environmental resource. Our answer departs in two significant respects from the standard conception of improvement, namely by reconceiving action in relation to ecosystem services, and accordingly, making the case for a counterfactual baseline to be used to compare an improved and unimproved state. Our modifications potentially allow for a variety of agents to claim special carbon rights on the basis of beneficial interactions with land-based carbon sinks. We give three archetypical examples of agents who may claim pro tanto special rights to carbon based on their interaction with carbon sinks.     

Moral Agency in Other Animals

Some philosophers have argued that moral agency is characteristic of humans alone and that its absence from other animals justifies granting higher moral status to humans. However, human beings do not have a monopoly on moral agency, which admits of varying degrees and does not require mastery of moral principles. The view that all and only humans possess moral agency indicates our underestimation of the mental lives of other animals. Since many other animals are moral agents (to varying degrees), they are also subject to (limited) moral obligations, examples of which are provided in this paper. But, while moral agency is sufficient for significant moral status, it is by no means necessary.     

Monotone Quantifiers Emerge via Iterated Learning

Natural languages exhibit many semantic universals, that is, properties of meaning shared across all languages. In this paper, we develop an explanation of one very prominent semantic universal, the monotonicity universal. While the existing work has shown that quantifiers satisfying the monotonicity universal are easier to learn, we provide a more complete explanation by considering the emergence of quantifiers from the perspective of cultural evolution. In particular, we show that quantifiers satisfy the monotonicity universal evolve reliably in an iterated learning paradigm with neural networks as agents.