Causal Bayes nets capture many aspects of causal thinking that set them apart from purely associative reasoning. However, some central properties of this normative theory routinely violated. In tasks requiring an understanding of explaining away and screening off, subjects often deviate from these principles and manifest the operation of an associative bias that we refer to as the rich-get-rich...

The mother lode of criminal responsibility scholarship is a unitary theory of criminal excuses, that is, a persuasive normative account of why the criminal law adjudges actors to be blameless despite their having engaged in prohibited conduct. The law’s other criminal defenses do not readily lend themselves to unitary normative accounts or, if they do, they rest on normative accounts that are s...

Using a sample of Spanish undergraduate students, this research contributes to stakeholder theory by developing empirical testing of normative stakeholder management orientation. It also offers empirical evidence on how the type of higher education received affects how individuals assess stakeholders’ interests. The results show that, in general, business students give less importance to the no...

In the last years, argumentation theory has been exploited to reason about norms, argue about enforced obligations and permissions, and establish the validity of norms seen as argumentative claims. In this paper, we start from the dynamic legal argumentation framework recently proposed by Prakken and Sartor, and we extend their ASPIC-based system by introducing deontic modalities, to include al...

Like any discipline, bioethics is a developing field of academic inquiry; and recent trends in scholarship have been towards more engagement with empirical research. This 'empirical turn' has provoked extensive debate over how such 'descriptive' research carried out in the social sciences contributes to the distinctively normative aspect of bioethics. This paper will address this issue by devel...

Psychological evidence shows that probability theory is not a proper descriptive model of intuitive human judgment. Instead, some heuristics have been proposed as such a descriptive model. This paper argues that probability theory has limitations even as a normative model. A new normative model of judgment under uncertainty is designed under the assumption that the system's knowledge and resour...

In this paper I discuss the kinds of idealisations invoked in normative theories—logic, epistemology, and decision theory. I argue that very often the so-called norms of rationality are in fact mere idealisations invoked to make life easier. As such, these idealisations are not too different from various idealisations employed in scientific modelling. Examples of the latter include: fluids are ...

The study of the formal attributes of legal systems such as consistency, completeness, independence and generality is of special interest in legal philosophy and legal theory. Apart from concern with the content of the law, these formal attributes constitute desiderata without which a legal system is considered deficient. Legisprudence is a relatively new discipline within legal theory that stu...

Caste based endogamy is one of the main characteristics of traditional caste system practiced in rural Pakistan. Members of different quoms do not inter-marry or at least do not prefer to marry out of their quom. While social acceptance for inter quom marriages among different landowning quoms is increasing in Punjabi villages, inter marriages between landowning quoms and service providing quom...