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22A note on the existence of ratifiable actsReview of Symbolic Logic 13 (3): 503-508. 2020.Sufficient conditions are given under which ratifiable acts exist.
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56Graded Causation and DefaultsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (2): 413-457. 2015.Recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has shown that judgments of actual causation are often influenced by consideration of defaults, typicality, and normality. A number of philosophers and computer scientists have also suggested that an appeal to such factors can help deal with problems facing existing accounts of actual causation. This article develops a flexible formal framework for incorporating defaults, typicality, and normality into an account of actual causation. The resu…Read more
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4Updating Probability: Tracking Statistics as CriterionBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2016.ABSTRACT For changing opinion, represented by an assignment of probabilities to propositions, the criterion proposed is motivated by the requirement that the assignment should have, and maintain, the possibility of matching in some appropriate sense statistical proportions in a population. This ‘tracking’ criterion implies limitations on policies for updating in response to a wide range of types of new input. Satisfying the criterion is shown equivalent to the principle that the prior must be a …Read more
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7Reasoning about knowledgeMIT Press. 2003.Reasoning About Knowledge is the first book to provide a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed ...
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1Actual causation and the art of modelingIn Halpern Joseph & Hitchcock Christopher (eds.), Causality, Probability, and Heuristics: A Tribute to Judea Pearl, College Publications. pp. 383-406. 2010.
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18Compact Representations of Extended Causal ModelsCognitive Science 37 (6): 986-1010. 2013.Judea Pearl (2000) was the first to propose a definition of actual causation using causal models. A number of authors have suggested that an adequate account of actual causation must appeal not only to causal structure but also to considerations of normality. In Halpern and Hitchcock (2011), we offer a definition of actual causation using extended causal models, which include information about both causal structure and normality. Extended causal models are potentially very complex. In this study…Read more
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56Appropriate causal models and the stability of causationReview of Symbolic Logic 9 (1): 76-102. 2016.
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30Sufficient conditions for causality to be transitivePhilosophy of Science 83 (2): 213-226. 2016.Natural conditions are provided that are sufficient to ensure that causality as defined by approaches that use counterfactual dependence and structural equations will be transitive.
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21Actual CausalityMIT Press. 2016.A new approach for defining causality and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degrees of blame, and causal explanation. Causality plays a central role in the way people structure the world; we constantly seek causal explanations for our observations. But what does it even mean that an event C "actually caused" event E? The problem of defining actual causation goes beyond mere philosophical speculation. For example, in many legal arguments, it is precisely what needs to be establish…Read more
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Presburger arithmetic with uninterpreted function symbols is 1 1-completeJournal of Symbolic Logic 56 637-642. 1991.
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83Minimizing regret in dynamic decision problemsTheory and Decision 81 (1): 123-151. 2016.The menu-dependent nature of regret-minimization creates subtleties when it is applied to dynamic decision problems. It is not clear whether forgone opportunities should be included in the menu. We explain commonly observed behavioral patterns as minimizing regret when forgone opportunities are present. If forgone opportunities are included, we can characterize when a form of dynamic consistency is guaranteed.
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14Defining knowledge in terms of belief: The modal logic perspectiveReview of Symbolic Logic 2 (3): 469-487. 2009.The question of whether knowledge is definable in terms of belief, which has played an important role in epistemology for the last 50 years, is studied here in the framework of epistemic and doxastic logics. Three notions of definability are considered: explicit definability, implicit definability, and reducibility, where explicit definability is equivalent to the combination of implicit definability and reducibility. It is shown that if knowledge satisfies any set of axioms contained in S5, the…Read more
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25What is an inference rule?Journal of Symbolic Logic 57 (3): 1018-1045. 1992.What is an inference rule? This question does not have a unique answer. One usually finds two distinct standard answers in the literature; validity inference $(\sigma \vdash_\mathrm{v} \varphi$ if for every substitution $\tau$, the validity of $\tau \lbrack\sigma\rbrack$ entails the validity of $\tau\lbrack\varphi\rbrack)$, and truth inference $(\sigma \vdash_\mathrm{t} \varphi$ if for every substitution $\tau$, the truth of $\tau\lbrack\sigma\rbrack$ entails the truth of $\tau\lbrack\varphi\rbr…Read more
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16Should knowledge entail belief?Journal of Philosophical Logic 25 (5). 1996.The appropriateness of S5 as a logic of knowledge has been attacked at some length in the philosophical literature. Here one particular attack based on the interplay between knowledge and belief is considered: Suppose that knowledge satisfies S5, belief satisfies KD45, and both the entailment property (knowledge implies belief) and positive certainty (if the agent believes something, she believes she knows it) hold. Then it can be shown that belief reduces to knowledge: it is impossible to have …Read more
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5Probability and conditionals: Belief revision and rational decisionPhilosophical Review 109 (2): 277-281. 2000.
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10From causal models to counterfactual structuresReview of Symbolic Logic 6 (2): 305-322. 2013.Galles & Pearl (l998) claimed that s [possible-worlds] framework.s framework. Recursive models are shown to correspond precisely to a subclass of (possible-world) counterfactual structures. On the other hand, a slight generalization of recursive models, models where all equations have unique solutions, is shown to be incomparable in expressive power to counterfactual structures, despite the fact that the Galles and Pearl arguments should apply to them as well. The problem with the Galles and Pea…Read more
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30Causes and explanations: A structural-model approach. Part I: CausesBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (4): 843-887. 2005.We propose a new definition of actual causes, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. We show that the definition yields a plausible and elegant account of causation that handles well examples which have caused problems for other definitions and resolves major difficulties in the traditional account.
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4Weighted sets of probabilities and minimax weighted expected regret: a new approach for representing uncertainty and making decisionsTheory and Decision 79 (3): 415-450. 2015.We consider a setting where a decision maker’s uncertainty is represented by a set of probability measures, rather than a single measure. Measure-by-measure updating of such a set of measures upon acquiring new information is well known to suffer from problems. To deal with these problems, we propose using weighted sets of probabilities: a representation where each measure is associated with a weight, which denotes its significance. We describe a natural approach to updating in such a situation …Read more
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9Maxmin weighted expected utility: a simpler characterizationTheory and Decision 80 (4): 581-610. 2016.Chateauneuf and Faro axiomatize a weighted version of maxmin expected utility over acts with nonnegative utilities, where weights are represented by a confidence function. We argue that their representation is only one of many possible, and we axiomatize a more natural form of maxmin weighted expected utility. We also provide stronger uniqueness results.
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5Decision Theory with Resource‐Bounded AgentsTopics in Cognitive Science 6 (2): 245-257. 2014.There have been two major lines of research aimed at capturing resource-bounded players in game theory. The first, initiated by Rubinstein (), charges an agent for doing costly computation; the second, initiated by Neyman (), does not charge for computation, but limits the computation that agents can do, typically by modeling agents as finite automata. We review recent work on applying both approaches in the context of decision theory. For the first approach, we take the objects of choice in a d…Read more
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18Belief revision: A critique (review)Journal of Logic, Language and Information 8 (4): 401-420. 1999.We examine carefully the rationale underlying the approaches to belief change taken in the literature, and highlight what we view as methodological problems. We argue that to study belief change carefully, we must be quite explicit about the ontology or scenario underlying the belief change process. This is something that has been missing in previous work, with its focus on postulates. Our analysis shows that we must pay particular attention to two issues that have often been taken for granted: …Read more
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3Probability and Conditionals: Belief Revision and Rational DecisionPhilosophical Review 109 (2): 277. 2000.
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14Intransitivity and vaguenessReview of Symbolic Logic 1 (4): 530-547. 2008.There are many examples in the literature that suggest that indistinguishability is intransitive, despite the fact that the indistinguishability relation is typically taken to be an equivalence relation (and thus transitive). It is shown that if the uncertainty perception and the question of when an agent reports that two things are indistinguishable are both carefully modeled, the problems disappear, and indistinguishability can indeed be taken to be an equivalence relation. Moreover, this mode…Read more
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22Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach. Part II: ExplanationsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (4): 889-911. 2005.We propose new definitions of (causal) explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion article. Essentially, an explanation is a fact that is not known for certain but, if found to be true, would constitute an actual cause of the fact to be explained, regardless of the agent's initial uncertainty. We show that the definition handles well a number of problematic examples from the liter…Read more
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15I'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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1Zero-one laws for modal logicAnnals of Pure and Applied Logic 69 (2-3): 157-193. 1994.We show that a 0–1 law holds for propositional modal logic, both for structure validity and frame validity. In the case of structure validity, the result follows easily from the well-known 0–1 law for first-order logic. However, our proof gives considerably more information. It leads to an elegant axiomatization for almost-sure structure validity and to sharper complexity bounds. Since frame validity can be reduced to a Π11 formula, the 0–1 law for frame validity helps delineate when 0–1 laws ex…Read more
Ithaca, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |