I outline four competing probabilistic accounts of contrastive evidential support and consider various considerations that might help arbitrate between these. The upshot of the discussion is that the so-called ‘Law of Likelihood’ is to be preferred to any of the alternatives considered.

Online users tend to select claims that adhere to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Confirmation bias, indeed, plays a pivotal role in viral phenomena. Furthermore, the wide availability of content on the web fosters the aggregation of likeminded people where debates tend to enforce group polarization. Such a configuration might alter the public debate and thus the f...

Con…rmation bias refers to cognitive errors that bias one towards one’s own prior beliefs. A vast empirical literature documents its existence and psychologists identify it as one of the most problematic aspects of human reasoning. In this paper, we present three related scenarios where rational behaviour leads to outcomes that are observationally equivalent to di¤erent types of conformation bi...

Benefit-cost integrated assessment models (BC-IAMs) inform climate policy debates by quantifying the trade-offs between alternative greenhouse gas abatement options. They achieve this by coupling simplified models of the climate system to models of the global economy and the costs and benefits of climate policy. Although these models have provided valuable qualitative insights into the sensitiv...

In various Asian languages, including Chinese, there is no space between words in texts. Thus, most Chinese NLP systems must perform word-segmentation (sentence tokenization). However, successful word-segmentation depends on having a sufficiently large lexicon. On the average, about 3% of the words in text are not contained in a lexicon. Therefore, unknown word identification becomes a bottlene...

Coherentism maintains that coherent beliefs are more likely to be true than incoherent beliefs, and that coherent evidence provides more confirmation of a hypothesis when the evidence is made coherent by the explanation provided by that hypothesis. Although probabilistic models of credence ought to be well-suited to justifying such claims, negative results from Bayesian epistemology have sugges...

In this paper, the problem of endotracheal intubation confirmation is addressed. A review of recent studies which addressed this life-threatening problem is given. The results are analyzed and discussed. Commonly used techniques and some state-of-the-art technologies for correct tube position confirmation are presented, and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. KeywordsAirway manage...

W propose a model to study expectation confirmation in information systems. The proposed model is based on the assimilation-contrast model and prospect theory, and suggests that both are needed to account for the magnitude and direction of the deviations between experiences and expectations. Using the technology acceptance model’s (TAM) primary construct—namely, perceived usefulness—expectation...

Likelihoodists and Bayesians seem to have a fundamental disagreement about the proper probabilistic explication of relational (or contrastive) conceptions of evidential support (or confirmation). In this paper, I will survey some recent arguments and results in this area, with an eye toward pinpointing the nexus of the dispute. This will lead, first, to an important shift in the way the debate ...

The paper explores the material spaces and logics of religious learning processes. A discrepancy between religious educators and the 14-year-old confirmands was evident during a 1 year of ethnographic fieldwork. A material semiotic approach provides important perspectives on the dynamics between material and human actors in religious learning context. The findings suggest that different notions...