Notes on conditional logic

This paper consists of some lecture notes in which conditional logic is treated as an extension of modal logic. Completeness and filtration theorems are provided for some basis systems. These notes were originally drafted for a course given at the University of Auckland in 1987 (Philosophy 29.308). The work reported in Section 5 is due to Michael Strevens, who took the course and presented his conception of a filtration in a term paper [5]. The author wishes to thank Strevens for many stimulating discussions and for permission to include his results here     

Regional blood flow changes in the left cerebral hemisphere during word pair learning and recall

Regional cerebral blood flow measurements were made in the left hemisphere of 11 young healthy volunteers during learning and during recalling of word pair associates. Compared to the resting baseline, both tasks caused significant increases of average hemispheric flow, indicating an elevated neuronal activity level. Regionally both tasks were accompanied by considerable activation of parietal and occipital regions. The main difference between learning and recalling was that only the former task activated the prefrontal regions.     

THE WARTEGG DRAWING COMPLETION TEST AS A PREDICTOR OFADJUSTMENT AND SUCCESS IN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL

Mellberg K. The Wartegg Drawing Completion Test as a predictor of adjustment and success in industrial school. Scand. J. Psychol ., 1972, 13 , 34–38.—The WDCT, a projective personality test, was administered to 284 elementary-school boys when they were seeking entry to the industrial school. Two years later, their school performance and teacher-rated adjustment were recorded. The validity of the prediction from the WDCT relative to these criteria was tested on the basis of analytical and intuitive interpretations of the WDCT. The analytical interpretations showed only slight predictive validity. Even intuitive interpretations had a low validity. In the intuitive interpretations trained psychologists used only 4 of 53 analytical WDCT-variables.     

Failure to induce aggression in inhibited and in genetically non-aggressive mice through injections of ethyl alcohol

Two kinds of nonaggressive mice were used as subjects: 1) males from a strain selectively bred for nonaggressiveness (TNA) and 2) males from a strain selectively bred for aggressiveness (TA) but made nonaggressive by defeats in fights. The aggressiveness of neither type of animal was increased by injections of ethyl alcohol in concentrations of 1 gm/kg and 1.5 gm/kg. Three series of experiments were performed. The results were incompatible with the assumption of a general physiological aggression-heightening effect of ethanol, and also with an assumption of removal by alcohol of learned inhibitions against aggression.     

Dynamic doxastic logic: why,how, and where to?

We investigate the research programme of dynamic doxastic logic (DDL) and analyze its underlying methodology. The Ramsey test for conditionals is used to characterize the logical and philosophical differences between two paradigmatic systems, AGM and KGM, which we develop and compare axiomatically and semantically. The importance of Gärdenfors’s impossibility result on the Ramsey test is highlighted by a comparison with Arrow’s impossibility result on social choice. We end with an outlook on the prospects and the future of DDL.     

The Benefits of Coming into Existence

This paper argues that we can benefit or harm people by creating them, but only in the sense that we can create things that are good or bad for them. What we cannot do is to confer comparative benefits and harms to people by creating them or failing to create them. You are not better off (or worse off) created than you would have been had you not been created, for nothing has value for you if you do not exist, not even neutral value.     

A topological logic of action

We consider a quantifier-free language in which there are terms as well as formulas. The proposition-forming propositional operators are the usual ones, and the term-making term operators are the usual lattice theoretical ones. In addition there is a formula-making term operator, does. We study a new logic in which does is claimed to approximate some features of the informal concept the agent performs the action .     

A deontic logic of action

The formal language studied in this paper contains two categories of expressions, terms and formulas. Terms express events, formulas propositions. There are infinitely many atomic terms and complex terms are made up by Boolean operations. Where and are terms the atomic formulas have the form = ( is the same as ), Forb ( is forbidden) and Perm ( is permitted). The formulae are truth functional combinations of these. An algebraic and a model theoretic account of validity are given and an axiomatic system is provided for which they are characteristic.The closure principle, that what is not forbidden is permitted is shown to hold at the level of outcomes but not at the level of events. In the two final sections some other operators are considered and a semantics in terms of action games.     

Actual truth,possible knowledge

The well-known argument of Frederick Fitch, purporting to show that verificationism (= Truth implies knowability) entails the absurd conclusion that all the truths are known, has been disarmed by Dorothy Edgington's suggestion that the proper formulation of verificationism presupposes that we make use of anactuality operator along with the standardly invoked epistemic and modal operators. According to her interpretation of verificationism, the actual truth of a proposition implies that it could be known in some possible situation that the proposition holds in theactual situation. Thus, suppose that our object language contains the operatorA — it is actually the case that ... — with the following truth condition: _vA iff _w0, wherew ₀ stands for the designated world of the model — the actual world. Then we can formalize the verificationist claim as follows: