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69I'm OK if you're OK: On the notion of trusting communication (review)Journal of Philosophical Logic 17 (4). 1988.We consider the issue of what an agent or a processor needs to know in order to know that its messages are true. This may be viewed as a first step to a general theory of cooperative communication in distributed systems. An honest message is one that is known to be true when it is sent (or said). If every message that is sent is honest, then of course every message that is sent is true. Various weaker considerations than honesty are investigated with the property that provided every message sent…Read more
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92Reasoning About UncertaintyMIT Press. 2003.Using formal systems to represent and reason about uncertainty.
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80On definability in multimodal logicReview of Symbolic Logic 2 (3): 451-468. 2009.Three notions of definability in multimodal logic are considered. Two are analogous to the notions of explicit definability and implicit definability introduced by Beth in the context of first-order logic. However, while by Beth’s theorem the two types of definability are equivalent for first-order logic, such an equivalence does not hold for multimodal logics. A third notion of definability, reducibility, is introduced; it is shown that in multimodal logics, explicit definability is equivalent …Read more
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11Erratum to “Zero-one laws for modal logic” [Ann. Pure Appl. Logic 69 (1994) 157–193]Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 121 (2-3): 281-283. 2003.
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First-order conditional logic for default reasoning revisitedAcm Trans. Comput. Logic 1 (2): 175--207. 2000.
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55Taken by surprise: The paradox of the surprise test revisited (review)Journal of Philosophical Logic 15 (3). 1986.A teacher announced to his pupils that on exactly one of the days of the following school week (Monday through Friday) he would give them a test. But it would be a surprise test; on the evening before the test they would not know that the test would take place the next day. One of the brighter students in the class then argued that the teacher could never give them the test. "It can't be Friday," she said, "since in that case we'll expect it on Thurday evening. But then it can't be Thursday, sin…Read more
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57Presburger arithmetic with unary predicates is Π11 completeJournal of Symbolic Logic 56 (2). 1991.We give a simple proof characterizing the complexity of Presburger arithmetic augmented with additional predicates. We show that Presburger arithmetic with additional predicates is Π 1 1 complete. Adding one unary predicate is enough to get Π 1 1 hardness, while adding more predicates (of any arity) does not make the complexity any worse
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45Intransitivity and vagueness - corrigendumReview of Symbolic Logic 2 (3): 591-591. 2009.doi: 10.1017/S1755020308090084, Published by Cambridge University Press 31 March 2009 in Volume 1, Number 4 of The Review of Symbolic Logic . On page 541, in the 4 th paragraph, in line 7, an error occurred. The sentence should correctly read: “For all worlds w , if there is more than one grain of sand in the pile in w , then there is still more than one grain of sand after removing one grain of sand.”
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Characterizing and reasoning about probabilistic and non-probabilistic expectationJ. Acm 54 (3): 15. 2007.
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13The bottleneck may be the solution, not the problemBehavioral and Brain Sciences 39. 2016.As a highly consequential biological trait, a memory “bottleneck” cannot escape selection pressures. It must therefore co-evolve with other cognitive mechanisms rather than act as an independent constraint. Recent theory and an implemented model of language acquisition suggest that a limit on working memory may evolve to help learning. Furthermore, it need not hamper the use of language for communication.
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59Reasoning about Knowledge: A Response by the Authors (review)Minds and Machines 7 (1): 113-113. 1997.
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3Sleeping Beauty Reconsidered: Conditioning and Reflection in Asynchronous SystemsIn Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 111-142. 2004.
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46On the unusual effectiveness of logic in computer scienceBulletin of Symbolic Logic 7 (2): 213-236. 2001.In 1960, E. P. Wigner, a joint winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics, published a paper titled On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences [61]. This paper can be construed as an examination and affirmation of Galileo's tenet that “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics”. To this effect, Wigner presented a large number of examples that demonstrate the effectiveness of mathematics in accurately describing physical phenomena. Wigner viewed th…Read more
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32Evidence with uncertain likelihoodsSynthese 171 (1): 111-133. 2009.An agent often has a number of hypotheses, and must choose among them based on observations, or outcomes of experiments. Each of these observations can be viewed as providing evidence for or against various hypotheses. All the attempts to formalize this intuition up to now have assumed that associated with each hypothesis h there is a likelihood function μ h , which is a probability measure that intuitively describes how likely each observation is, conditional on h being the correct hypothesis.…Read more
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290Asymptotic conditional probabilities: The non-unary caseJournal of Symbolic Logic 61 (1): 250-276. 1996.Motivated by problems that arise in computing degrees of belief, we consider the problem of computing asymptotic conditional probabilities for first-order sentences. Given first-order sentences φ and θ, we consider the structures with domain {1,..., N} that satisfy θ, and compute the fraction of them in which φ is true. We then consider what happens to this fraction as N gets large. This extends the work on 0-1 laws that considers the limiting probability of first-order sentences, by considering…Read more
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100The Role of the Protocol in Anthropic ReasoningErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2 195-206. 2015.I show how thinking in terms of the protocol used can help clarify problems related to anthropic reasoning and self-location, such as the Doomsday Argument and the Sleeping Beauty Problem.
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90Great Expectations. Part I: On the Customizability of Generalized Expected Utility (review)Theory and Decision 64 (1): 1-36. 2008.We propose a generalization of expected utility that we call generalized EU (GEU), where a decision maker’s beliefs are represented by plausibility measures and the decision maker’s tastes are represented by general (i.e., not necessarily real-valued) utility functions. We show that every agent, “rational” or not, can be modeled as a GEU maximizer. We then show that we can customize GEU by selectively imposing just the constraints we want. In particular, we show how each of Savage’s postulates c…Read more
Ithaca, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |