An Hawaiian Near-Death Experience

This paper is a case report of an Hawaiian near-death experience (NDE) from the early 1900s, which was uncovered in a turn-of-the-century monograph of Hawaiian folk tales (Thrum, 1907). The account differs from others in the same volume because it appears to be a real-life account rather than a folk tale. I describe similarities and differences from other Pacific area accounts, with particular attention to the only other Polynesian NDE account in the literature, a Maori NDE reported by Michael King in 1985.     

Noninstrumental Rationalizing

A central notion in Donald Davidson's philosophy of mind and action is "rationalization," a species of causal explanation designed in part to reveal the point or purpose of the explananda. An analogue of this notion - noninstrumental rationalization - merits serious attention. I develop an account of this species of rationalization and display its utility in explaining the production of certain desires and of motivationally biased beliefs.     

The Logic of Plausible Reasoning: A Core Theory

The paper presents a core theory of human plausible reasoning based on analysis of people's answers to everyday questions about the world. The theory consists of three parts:

• 1 a formal representation of plausible inference patterns; such as deductions, inductions, and analogies, that are frequently employed in answering everyday questions;
• 2 a set of parameters, such as conditional likelihood, typicality, and similarity, that affect the certainty of people's answers to such questions; and
• 3 a system relating the different plausible inference patterns and the different certainty parameters.

This is one of the first attempts to construct a formal theory that addresses both the semantic and parametric aspects of the kind of everyday reasoning that pervades. all of human discourse.