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6Time and decision. Economic and psychological perspectives on intertemporal choiceErkenntnis 64 (3): 419-422. 2006.
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31Scopes, Options, and Horizons – Key Issues in Decision StructuringEthical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (2): 259-273. 2018.Real-life decision-making often begins with a disorderly decision problem that has to be clarified and systematized before a decision can be made. This is the process of decision structuring that has largely been ignored both in decision theory and applied decision analysis. In this contribution, ten major components of decision structuring are identified, namely the determination of its scope, subdivision, agency, timing, options, control ascriptions, framing, horizon, criteria and restructurin…Read more
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7Safe DesignTechné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 10 (1): 45-52. 2006.Safety is an essential ethical requirement in engineering design. Strategies for safe design are used not only to reduce estimated probabilities of injuries but also to cope with hazards and eventualities that cannot be assigned meaningful probabilities. The notion of safe design has important ethical dimensions, such as that of determining the responsibility that a designer has for future uses (and misuses) of the designed object.
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28Theory contraction and base contraction unifiedJournal of Symbolic Logic 58 (2): 602-625. 1993.One way to construct a contraction operator for a theory (belief set) is to assign to it a base (belief base) and an operator of partial meet contraction for that base. Axiomatic characterizations are given of the theory contractions that are generated in this way by (various types of) partial meet base contractions
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26Structural reliabilism: Inductive logic as a theory of justificationHistory and Philosophy of Logic 26 (1): 71-72. 2005.
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675In order to avoid the paradoxes of standard deontic logic, we have to give up the semantic construction that identifies obligatory status with presence in all elements of a subset of the set of possible worlds. It is proposed that deontic logic should instead be based on a preference relation, according to the principle that whatever is better than something permitted is itself permitted. Close connections hold between the logical properties of a preference relation and those of the deontic logi…Read more
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Book Review: The Future for Philosophy, ed. by Brian Leiter (review)Disputatio 1 (20): 346-348. 2006.
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756The purpose of this presentation is to introduce both the concept of risk and the precautionary principle, that is a major policy principle in present-day risk management. Since risk has been the subject of many misconceptions I will do this in large part by criticizing seven views on risk that I believe to have caused considerable confusion both among scientists and policy-makers. But before looking at the seven myths of risk, let us begin with the basic issue of defining “risk”. The word “risk…Read more
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3Similarity semantics and minimal changes of beliefErkenntnis 37 (3): 401-429. 1992.Different similarity relations on sets are introduced, and their logical properties are investigated. Close relationships are shown to hold between similarity relations that are based on symmetrical difference and operators of belief contraction that are based on relational selection functions. Two new rationality criteria for minimal belief contraction, the maximizing property and the reducing property, are proposed
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Review of Peter T. Manicas: A history and philosophy of the social sciences (review)Theoria 54 (2): 148. 1988.
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9Repertoire ContractionJournal of Logic, Language and Information 22 (1): 1-21. 2013.The basic assumption of repertoire contraction is that only some of the logically closed subsets of the original belief set are viable as contraction outcomes. Contraction takes the form of choosing directly among these viable outcomes, rather than among cognitively more far-fetched objects such as possible worlds or maximal consistent subsets of the original belief set. In this first investigation of repertoire contraction, postulates for various variants of the operation are introduced. Necess…Read more
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11Past ProbabilitiesNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 51 (2): 207-223. 2010.The probability that a fair coin tossed yesterday landed heads is either 0 or 1, but the probability that it would land heads was 0.5. In order to account for the latter type of probabilities, past probabilities, a temporal restriction operator is introduced and axiomatically characterized. It is used to construct a representation of conditional past probabilities. The logic of past probabilities turns out to be strictly weaker than the logic of standard probabilities
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25Radiation Protection—Sorting Out the ArgumentsPhilosophy and Technology 24 (3): 363-368. 2011.This is a response to an article by Wade Allison in which he argues that we should accept drastically higher doses of ionizing radiation than what we currently do. He employs four arguments in defence of his position: comparisons with background radiation, the positive experiences of radiotherapy, the presence of biological defence mechanisms against radiation, and a concession by Swedish authorities that their approach to reindeer meat after the Chernobyl fallout was unnecessarily strict. It is…Read more
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31Reconstruction of Contraction OperatorsErkenntnis 81 (1): 185-199. 2016.An operator of belief change is reconstructible as another such operator if and only if any outcome that can be obtained with the former can also be obtained with the latter. Two operators are mutually reconstructible if they generate exactly the same set of outcomes. The relations of reconstructibility among fifteen operators of contraction, including the common AGM contraction operators, are completely characterized. Furthermore, the additional such relations are characterized that arise if al…Read more
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2Risk and ethics : three approachesIn Tim Lewens (ed.), Risk: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. 2007.
Areas of Specialization
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Areas of Interest
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