When it comes to belief dynamics Y how a rational agent ought to change her full-beliefs after learning something new Y doxastic conservatism seems to have a lot going for it. Information is not gratuitous, the slogan goes, and so changes in view should always be minimal changes in view. This is the core of conservatism, and looks like just the kind of constraint that rationality imposes on bel...

This paper examines the persuasiveness of assertive language (as in Nike’s slogan “Just do it”) as compared to nonassertive language (as in Microsoft’s slogan “Where do you want to go today?”). Previous research implies that assertive language should reduce consumer compliance. Two experiments show that assertiveness is more effective in communications involving hedonic products, as well as hed...

Fast and efficient learning over large bodies of commonsense knowledge is a key requirement for cognitive systems. Semantic web knowledge bases provide an important new resource of ground facts from which plausible inferences can be learned. This paper applies structured logistic regression with analogical generalization (SLogAn) to make use of structural as well as statistical information to a...