The explanatory criterion of relevance. The ordering of (possible and impossible) worlds by their closeness to actuality is determined by weighing the different similarities they have to actuality. The similarities to actuality that can make a world closer include resemblances in matters of particular fact. (A matter of particular fact is a fact about the history of the universe that is not ent...

Research about the nature of psychology, its subject matter, its level of analysis, its scientific laws, its relationship with other disciplines, and its social relevance has been a matter of great concern and interest during the development of psychology. This problem can be analyzed in terms of the dilemmas of the psychological discipline, which have been choice points, crossroads, alternativ...

The mind of animals, just like the bodies of animals, is shaped by natural selection to best adapt to physical laws. Specifically, the mind is evolved to search for natural resources at low cost. Since entropy provides a universal measure of resources, it is inevitable that information, which we collect for our survival, is represented by the entropy function mathematically. When observing the ...

The handling of user preferences is becoming an increasingly important issue in present-day information systems. Among others, preferences are used for information filtering and extraction to reduce the volume of data presented to the user. They are also used to keep track of user profiles and formulate policies to improve and automate decision making. We propose here a simple, logical framewor...

Ambivalence underlies the U.S. trade policy on government participation in the marketplace. This ambivalence is evidenced by certain trade laws and agreements which are based on competing economic theories that simultaneously sanction free trade principles and government interventionist policies [2]. It is exemplified by certain countervailing duty (CVD) determinations made by the International...

It is often said that the best system account of laws (BSA) needs supplementing with a theory of perfectly natural properties. The ‘strength’ and ‘simplicity’ of a system is language-relative and without a fixed vocabulary it is impossible to compare rival systems. Recently a number of philosophers have attempted to reformulate the BSA in an effort to avoid commitment to natural properties. I a...

There is a puzzle about the truth of counterfactual conditionals in deterministic worlds. It is natural to suppose that if things had gone differently in the recent past—if, say, you had blinked one more time than you actually did while reading the previous sentence—the state of the world in the distant past would still have been exactly as it actually was. It is also natural to suppose that if...

Gottlob Frege is often called a "platonist". In connection with his philosophy we can talk about platonism concerning three kinds of entities: numbers, or logical objects more generally; concepts, or functions more generally; thoughts, or senses more generally. I will only be concerned about the first of these three kinds here, in particular about the natural numbers. I will also focus mostly o...