Individuals’ belief about the controllability of what happens to them is a core element of their understanding of how they live in the world. Those who attribute their successes to internal causes have a greater degree of achievement motivation than those who attribute their successes to external causes. Those who attribute their failure to external causes, rather than to internal causes have s...

Two experiments pitted the default-interventionist account of belief bias against a parallel-processing model. According to the former, belief bias occurs because a fast, belief-based evaluation of the conclusion pre-empts a working-memory demanding logical analysis. In contrast, according to the latter both belief-based and logic-based responding occur in parallel. Participants were given dedu...

Dissertation for the award of the degree " Doctor of Philosophy " (Ph. Declaration: I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no materials previously published or written by another person nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree of the university or other institute of ...

In this paper, I discuss whether different interpretations of the aim belief – both teleological and normative have resources to explain certain descriptive features suspended belief, or suspension. argue that despite recent efforts theorists extend these theories account for suspension, they ultimately fail. The implication is we must either develop alternative can abandon assumption ought be ...

There is a small but growing interest in traveller behaviour research on investigating ways to identify and quantify degrees of belief (as subjective probabilities or other propositions) associated with behavioural responses, especially in the context of popular travel choice methods such as stated choice experiments, as a way of adding to our understanding of decision making in real-world cont...

We develop clausal tableau calculi for seven multimodal logics variously designed for reasoning about multi-degree belief, reasoning about distributed systems of belief and for reasoning about epistemic states of agents in multi-agent systems. Our tableau calculi are sound, complete, cut-free and have the analytic superformula property, thereby giving decision procedures for all of these logics...

This paper argues that navigating insects and spiders possess a degree of mindedness that makes them appropriate (in the sense of ‘‘possible’’) objects of sympathy and moral concern. For the evidence suggests that many invertebrates possess a belief-desire-planning psychology that is in basic respects similar to our own. The challenge for ethical theory is find some principled way of demonstrat...

Objective Bayesianism has been criticised for not allowing learning from experience: it is claimed that an agent must give degree of belief 2 to the next raven being black, however many other black ravens have been observed. I argue that this objection can be overcome by appealing to objective Bayesian nets, a formalism for representing objective Bayesian degrees of belief. Under this account, ...