The approach of Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson to belief contraction is treated algebraically. This is then used to give an algebraic treatment of nonmonotonic entailment in the context of a belief set. The algebra used is a preboolean algebra whose elements are sets of sentences and whose order relation is restricted entailment. Under plausible assumptions restricted entailment is computa...

Under what conditions do people automatically encode and track the mental states of others? A recent investigation showed that when subjects are instructed to track the location of an object but are not instructed to track a belief about that location in a non-verbal false-belief task, they respond more slowly to questions about an agent's belief, suggesting that belief information was not enco...

Three studies tested the hypothesis that the mere belief in having a social interaction with someone improves learning, more attention and higher arousal. Participants studied a passage on fever mechanisms. They entered a virtual reality (VR) environment and met an embodied agent. The participant either read aloud or silently, scripted questions on the fever passage. In the avatar-aloud and ava...

Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to reason about other people's thoughts and beliefs, has been traditionally studied in behavioral and neuroimaging experiments by comparing performance in "false belief" and "false photograph" (control) stories. However, some evidence suggests that these stories are not matched in difficulty, complicating the interpretation of results. Here, we more fully evalu...

Several philosophers and psychologists have characterized belief in conspiracy theories as a product of irrational reasoning. Proponents apparently resist revising their beliefs given disconfirming evidence tend to believe more than one conspiracy, even when the relevant are mutually inconsistent. In this paper, we bring leading views on theoretic closer together by exploring rationality under ...

Knowledge requires more than mere true belief, and we also tend to think it is more valuable. I explain the added value that knowledge contributes if its extra ingredient beyond true belief is tracking. I show that the tracking conditions are the unique conditions on knowledge that achieve for those who fulfill them a strict Nash Equilibrium and an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy in what I call ...

The truth conditions for conditional sentences have been well-studied, but few compelling attempts have been made to define means of evaluating iterated or nested conditionals. In particular , most approaches impose very few constraints on the set of conditionals an agent can hold after revision of its belief set. In this paper we describe the method of natural revision that ensures the preserv...