353 Received: 12/1/04. Revision requested: 5/23/05. Accepted: 5/25/05. 1Behavioral Toxicology Laboratory, Experimental Psychology, 226 Thach Auburn University, Alabama 36849, 2Department of Psychology, Alabama State University Montgomery, Alabama 36101, 3Department of Pathobiology, 166 Greene Hall, College of Veterinary Medicine, Auburn University, Alabama 36849, 4Laboratory Animal Health, 311 ...

In modeling the knowledge processing structure of an Agent in a Multi-Agent world it becomes necessary to enlarge the traditional concept of Belief Revision. For detecting contradictions and identifying their sources it is sufficient to maintain informations about what has been told; but to "solve" a contradiction it is necessary to keep informations about who said it or, in general, about the ...

This paper extends the framework of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) to multi-agent settings by incorporating the notion of agent models into the state space. Agents maintain beliefs over physical states of the environment and over models of other agents, and they use Bayesian update to maintain their beliefs over time. The solutions map belief states to actions. Models o...

During the last decade, the computational paradigms known as inflzcence diagrams and belief networks have become to dominate the diagnostic expert systems field. Using elaborate collections of nodes and arcs, these representations describe how propositions of interest interact with each other through a variety of causal and predictive links. The links are parameterized with inexact degrees of s...

Belief is very often analysed in terms of degrees, and since most human beings experience belief as a matter of degree, this kind of analysis has strong support. Much more controversial is the claim that knowledge, too, may be a matter of degree. The two questions are linked—after all, knowledge is, according to the traditional analyses, a special kind of belief. Many philosophers have analysed...

How do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is...

Models based on signal detection theory (SDT) have occupied a prominent role in domains such as perception, categorization, and memory. Recent work by Dube et al. (2010) suggests that the framework may also offer important insights in the domain of deductive reasoning. Belief bias in reasoning has traditionally been examined using indices based on raw endorsement rates-indices that critics have...

Belief in God's control of the world is common to many of the world's religions, but there are conflicting predictions regarding its role in shaping attitudes toward the welfare state. While the devout are expected to support pro-social values like helping others, and thus might be supportive of the welfare state, the possibility of taking action is undermined by the belief in God's absolute co...

The purpose of this paper is to integrate a number of ideas from knowledge representation, with ideas from the semantics of progamming languagse, in a basic logical system for belief. A knowledge-based system can be considered as, in a simpliied way, an agent which, based on its current state of information, makes inference for purposes such as planning or taking an action that best suits the a...

Known constructions of UC secure protocols are based on the premise that different parties collectively agree on some trusted setup. In this paper, we consider the following two intriguing questions: Is it possible to achieve UC if the parties do not want to put all their trust in one entity (or more generally, in one setup)? What if the parties have a difference of opinion about what they are ...