The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (forthcoming) report that a non trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, ...

Griffiths, Chater, Norris, and Pouget (2012) argue that we have misunderstood the Bayesian approach. In their view, it is rarely the case that researchers are making claims that performance in a given task is near optimal, and few, if any, researchers adopt the theoretical Bayesian perspective according to which the mind or brain is actually performing (or approximating) Bayesian computations. ...

2 James, Brown and " The Will to Believe " First of all, I just want to say that in my opinion this is an interesting and thought-provoking book, and a badly needed corrective to certain mistaken assumptions about James. I find myself very much in sympathy with many of its main points. Some of the things I have to say in the following may— or perhaps may not—be thought to disagree with some of ...

I will first explain the issue of social influence and illustrate the importance of evidence and trust relation between agents. Then I will introduce a new logic language that can be used to reason about an agents belief formation and dynamical change, due to evidences provided by other agents in the society. Some interesting features of social structure can be represented eventually as a updat...

Logical systems are represented in LF by giving a full and faithful (adequate) embedding of the deductive apparatus of the logic as canonical forms of certain types and kinds in LF in specified contexts. The collection of contexts over which the representation is adequate is called a world, because it provides generators for the canonical forms in question. Transferring adequacy from one world ...

Word sense disambiguation assumes word senses. Within the lexicography and linguistics literature, they are known to be very slippery entities. The paper looks at problems with existing accounts of ‘word sense’ and describes the various kinds of ways in which a word’s meaning can deviate from its core meaning. An analysis is presented in which word senses are abstractions from clusters of corpu...

The French verb croire [“to believe”]1 is paradoxical in that it expresses doubt as well as assurance. To believe [croire] is to state a conviction; it is also to add a nuance to that conviction: “I believe” [je crois] often signifies “I’m not sure.” This ambiguity involves the subjective side of belief [croyance]. As regards its object, the situation is no less equivocal, since the complement ...

The climate response to anthropogenic forcing has long been one of the dominant uncertainties in predicting future climate change [Houghton et al., 2001]. Many observationally-based estimates of climate sensitivity (S) have been presented in recent years, with most of them assigning significant probability to extremely high sensitivity, such as P (S > 6C) > 5%. However, closer examination revea...