Synthese

  In his recent book, Bernecker (Memory, 2010) has attacked the following prominent view: (RK) S remembers that p only if S knows that p. An attack on RK is also an attack on Timothy Williamson's view that knowledge is the most general factive stative attitude.
 In this paper, I defend RK against Bernecker's attacks and also advance new arguments in favor of it. In Sect. 2, I provide
 some background on memory. In Sect 3, I respond to Bernecker's attacks on RK and develop a new argument for RK. In Sects.
 4 and 5, I develop two more new arguments for RK.
 
 
	

  This paper offers a novel way of reconstructing conceptual change in empirical theories. Changes occur in terms of the structure
 of the dimensions'that is to say, the conceptual spaces'underlying the conceptual framework within which a given theory is
 formulated. Five types of changes are identified: (1) addition or deletion of special laws, (2) change in scale or metric,
 (3) change in the importance of dimensions, (4) change in the separability of dimensions, and (5) addition or deletion of
 dimensions. Given this classification, the conceptual development of empirical theories becomes more gradual and rationalizable.
 Only the most extreme type'replacement of dimensions'comes close to a revolution. The five types are exemplified and applied
 in a case study on the development within physics from the original Newtonian mechanics to special relativity theory.
 
 
	

Erratum to: Between proof and truth
	

  The metaphor of a branching tree of future possibilities has a number of important philosophical and logical uses. In this
 paper we trace this metaphor through some of its uses and argue that the metaphor works the same way in physics as in philosophy.
 We then give an overview of formal systems for branching possibilities, viz., branching time and (briefly) branching space-times.
 In a next step we describe a number of different notions of possibility, thereby sketching a landscape of possibilities. In
 the final section of the paper we look at the place of branching-based possibilities in that larger landscape of possibilities.
 Our main message is that far from being an outlandish metaphysical extravagancy, branching-based possibilities are epistemically
 as well as metaphysically basic.
 
 
	

  An influential tradition in the philosophy of causation has it that all token causal facts are, or are reducible to, facts
 about difference-making. Challenges to this tradition have typically focused on pre-emption cases, in which a cause apparently
 fails to make a difference to its effect. However, a novel challenge to the difference-making approach has recently been issued
 by Alyssa Ney. Ney defends causal foundationalism, which she characterizes as the thesis that facts about difference-making
 depend upon facts about physical causation. She takes this to imply that causation is not fundamentally a matter of difference-making.
 In this paper, I defend the difference-making approach against Ney's argument. I also offer some positive reasons for thinking,
 pace Ney, that causation is fundamentally a matter of difference-making.
 
 
	

  In his final notebooks, published as On Certainty, Wittgenstein offers a distinctive conception of the nature of reasons. Central to this conception is the idea that at the
 heart of our rational practices are essentially arational commitments. This proposal marks a powerful challenge to the standard
 picture of the structure of reasons. In particular, it has been thought that this account might offer us a resolution of the
 traditional scepticism/anti-scepticism debate. It is argued, however, that some standard ways of filling out the details of
 this proposal ultimately lead to an epistemology which is highly problematic. The goal here is to present a more compelling
 version of Wittgenstein's account of the structure of reasons which can evade these difficulties.
 
 
	

  Set-valued choice functions provide a framework that is general enough to encompass a wide variety of theories that are significant
 to the study of rationality but, at the same time, offer enough structure to articulate consistency conditions that can be
 used to characterize some of the theories within this encompassed variety. Nonetheless, two-tiered choice functions, such
 as those advocated by Isaac Levi, are not easily characterized within the framework of set-valued choice functions. The present
 work proposes conditional choice functions as the proper carriers of synchronic rationality. The resulting framework generalizes the familiar one mentioned above without
 emptying it and, moreover, provides a natural setting for two-tiered choice rules.
 
 
	

  Sometimes we get what seem to be good reasons for believing that we've misevaluated our evidence for a proposition P. In those
 cases, can we use our evidence for P itself to show that we haven't misevaluated our evidence for P? I show why doing so appears
 to employ viciously circular reasoning. However, I then argue that this appearance is illusory in certain cases and that we
 sometimes can legitimately reason in that way. This claim sheds new light on the nature of epistemic undermining and epistemic circularity.
 In addition, it has implications for the current debate about the epistemic significance of disagreement. An important and
 influential position in that debate says that disagreement with others dramatically undermines our justification for a wide
 range of our opinions (e.g., political, religious, moral, economic, and philosophical opinions). My view on undermining and
 circularity implies that this position on disagreement rests on a mistake.
 
 
	

  Claims pertaining to understanding are made in a variety of contexts and ways. As a result, few in the philosophical literature
 have made an attempt to precisely characterize the state that is y understanding x. This paper builds an account that does
 just that. The account is motivated by two main observations. First, understanding x is somehow related to being able to manipulate
 x. Second, understanding is a mental phenomenon, and so what manipulations are required to be an understander must only be
 mental manipulations. Combining these two insights, the paper builds an account (URM) of understanding as a certain representational
 capacity'specifically, understanding x involves possessing a representation of x that could be manipulated in useful ways.
 By tying understanding to representation, the account correctly identifies that understanding is a fundamentally cognitive
 achievement. However, by also demanding that which representations count as understanding-conferring be determined by their
 practical effects, URM captures the insight that understanding is vitally connected to practice. URM is fully general, and
 can apply equally well to understanding states of affairs, understanding events, and even understanding people and works of
 art. The ultimate test of URM is its applicability in actual scientific and philosophical discourse. To that end the paper
 discusses the importance of understanding in the philosophy of science, psychology, and computer science.
 
 
	

  The Sleeping Beauty puzzle has dramatized the divisive question of how de se beliefs should be integrated into formal theories of rational belief change. In this paper, I look ahead to a related question:
 how should de se beliefs be integrated into formal theories of rational choice? I argue that standard decision theoretic frameworks fail in
 special cases of de se uncertainty, like Sleeping Beauty. The nature of the failure reveals that sometimes rational choices are determined independently
 of one's credences in the kinds of ˜narrow' de se propositions that Sleepy Beauty has set in relief. Consequently, in addition to pinpointing a failure of standard decision
 theoretic frameworks, this result casts doubt on a large class of strategies for determining principles for the rationally
 updating de se beliefs in cases like Sleeping Beauty, and also calls into question the importance of making such a determination at all.
 
 
	

  Kyburg's opposition to the subjective Bayesian theory, and in particular to its advocates' indiscriminate and often questionable
 use of Dutch Book arguments, is documented and much of it strongly endorsed. However, it is argued that an alternative version,
 proposed by both de Finetti at various times during his long career, and by Ramsey, is less vulnerable to Kyburg's misgivings.
 This is a logical interpretation of the formalism, one which, it is argued, is both more natural and also avoids other, widely-made
 objections to Bayesianism.
 
 
	

  This article generalizes the explanationist account of inference to the best explanation (IBE). It draws a clear distinction
 between IBE and abduction and presents abduction as the first step of IBE. The second step amounts to the evaluation of explanatory
 power, which consist in the degree of explanatory virtues that a hypothesis exhibits. Moreover, even though coherence is the
 most often cited explanatory virtue, on pain of circularity, it should not be treated as one of the explanatory virtues. Rather,
 coherence should be equated with explanatory power and considered to be derivable from the other explanatory virtues: unification,
 explanatory depth and simplicity.
 
 
	

  Social cooperation often relies on individuals' spontaneous norm obedience when there is no punishment for violation or reward
 for compliance. However, people do not consistently follow pro-social norms. Previous studies have suggested that an individual's
 tendency toward norm conformity is affected by empirical information (i.e., what others did or would do in a similar situation)
 as well as by normative information (i.e., what others think one ought to do). Yet little is known about whether people have
 an intrinsic desire to obtain norm-revealing information. In this paper, we use a dictator game to investigate whether dictators
 actively seek norm-revealing information and, if so, whether they prefer to get empirical or normative information. Our data
 show that although the majority of dictators choose to view free information before making decisions, they are equally likely
 to choose empirical or normative information. However, a large majority (more than 80%) of dictators are not willing to incur
 even a very small cost for getting information. Our findings help to understand why norm compliance is context-dependent,
 and highlight the importance of making norm-revealing information salient in order to promote conformity.
 
 
	

  One of the chief concerns of the young Descartes was with what he, and others, termed physico-mathematics'. This signalled
 a questioning of the Scholastic Aristotelian view of the mixed mathematical sciences as subordinate to natural philosophy,
 non explanatory, and merely instrumental. Somehow, the mixed mathematical disciplines were now to become intimately related
 to natural philosophical issues of matter and cause. That is, they were to become more 'physicalised', more closely intertwined
 with natural philosophising, regardless of which species of natural philosophy one advocated. A curious, short-lived yet portentous
 epistemological conceit lay at the core of Descartes' physico-mathematics'the belief that solid geometrical results in the
 mixed mathematical sciences literally offered windows into the realm of natural philosophical causation'that in such cases
 one could literally see the causes'. Optics took pride of place within Descartes' physico-mathematics project, because he
 believed it offered unique possibilities for the successful vision of causes. This paper traces Descartes' early physico-mathematical
 program in optics, its origins, pitfalls and its successes, which were crucial in providing Descartes resources for his later
 work in systematic natural philosophy. It explores how Descartes exploited his discovery of the law of refraction of light'an
 achievement well within the bounds of traditional mixed mathematical optics'in order to derive'in the manner of physico-mathematics'causal
 knowledge about light, and indeed insight about the principles of a dynamics' that would provide the laws of corpuscular
 motion and tendency to motion in his natural philosophical system.
 
 
	

  In this paper I assess the prospects for combining contemporary Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM) with branching-time semantics
 in the tradition of Kripke, Prior, Thomason and Belnap. I begin by outlining the salient features of ˜decoherence-based' EQM,
 and of the ˜consistent histories' formalism that is particularly apt for conceptual discussions in EQM. This formalism permits
 of both ˜branching worlds' and ˜parallel worlds' interpretations; the metaphysics of EQM is in this sense underdetermined
 by the physics. A prominent argument due to Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds, 1986) supports the non-branching interpretation. Belnap et al. (Facing the Future: Agents and Choices in Our Indeterministic World,
 2001) refer to Lewis' argument as the ˜Assertion problem', and propose a pragmatic response to it. I argue that their response
 is unattractively ad hoc and complex, and that it prevents an Everettian who adopts branching-time semantics from making clear
 sense of objective probability. The upshot is that Everettians are better off without branching-time semantics. I conclude
 by discussing and rejecting an alternative possible motivation for branching time.
 
 
	

  According to Cantor (Mathematische Annalen 21:545“586, 1883; Cantor's letter to Dedekind, 1899) a set is any multitude which can be thought of as one (jedes Viele, welches sich als Eines denken läßt') without contradiction'a
 consistent multitude. Other multitudes are inconsistent or paradoxical. Set theoretical paradoxes have common root'lack of
 understanding why some multitudes are not sets. Why some multitudes of objects of thought cannot themselves be objects of
 thought? Moreover, it is a logical truth that such multitudes do exist. However we do not understand this logical truth so
 well as we understand, for example, the logical truth 

"x  x = x
 . In this paper we formulate a logical truth which we call the productivity principle. Rusell (Proc Lond Math Soc 4(2):29“53,
 1906) was the first one to formulate this principle, but in a restricted form and with a different purpose. The principle explicates
 a logical mechanism that lies behind paradoxical multitudes, and is understandable as well as any simple logical truth. However,
 it does not explain the concept of set. It only sets logical bounds of the concept within the framework of the classical two
 valued 

 ÃŽ 
 -language. The principle behaves as a logical regulator of any theory we formulate to explain and describe sets. It provides
 tools to identify paradoxical classes inside the theory. We show how the known paradoxical classes follow from the productivity
 principle and how the principle gives us a uniform way to generate new paradoxical classes. In the case of ZFC set theory the productivity principle shows that the limitation of size principles are of a restrictive nature and that they
 do not explain which classes are sets. The productivity principle, as a logical regulator, can have a definite heuristic role
 in the development of a consistent set theory. We sketch such a theory'the cumulative cardinal theory of sets. The theory
 is based on the idea of cardinality of collecting objects into sets. Its development is guided by means of the productivity
 principle in such a way that its consistency seems plausible. Moreover, the theory inherits good properties from cardinal
 conception and from cumulative conception of sets. Because of the cardinality principle it can easily justify the replacement
 axiom, and because of the cumulative property it can easily justify the power set axiom and the union axiom. It would be possible
 to prove that the cumulative cardinal theory of sets is equivalent to the Morse“Kelley set theory. In this way we provide
 a natural and plausibly consistent axiomatization for the Morse“Kelley set theory.
 
 
	

  String theory promises to be able to provide us with a working theory of quantum gravity and a unified description of all
 fundamental forces. In string theory there are so called ˜dualities'; i.e. different theoretical formulations that are physically
 equivalent. In this article these dualities are investigated from a philosophical point of view. Semantic and epistemic questions
 relating to the problem of underdetermination of theories by data and the debate on realism concerning scientific theories
 are discussed. Depending on ones views on semantic issues and realism different interpretations are possible of the dualities.
 
 
	

  Theories of truth and vagueness are closely connected; in this article, I draw another connection between these areas of research.
 Gupta and Belnap's Revision Theory of Truth is converted into an approach to vagueness. I show how revision sequences from
 a general theory of definitions can be used to understand the nature of vague predicates. The revision sequences show how
 the meaning of vague predicates are interconnected with each other. The approach is contrasted with the similar supervaluationist
 approach.
 
 
	

  This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority
 voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment
 aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates
 judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and
 probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers who are new to
 the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area.
 
 
	

  Crispin Wright's Unified Strategy' for addressing some familiar sceptical paradoxes exploits a subtle distinction between
 two different ways in which we can be related to a proposition: (full-blown) belief and (mere) acceptance. The importance
 of the distinction for his strategy stems from his conviction that we cannot acquire any kind of evidence, either empirical
 or a priori, for the cornerstones' of our cognitive projects, i.e., for those basic presuppositions of our inquiries that
 we must be warranted to endorse if we are to claim warrant for any of the beliefs formed as a result of such inquiries: regarding
 the idea of a non-evidential warrant to believe a proposition as a kind of conceptual solecism', he doesn't set himself the
 task of showing that we are evidentially warranted to believe such presuppositions, but only that of showing that we are non-evidentially warranted to accept them. In the present paper, I argue that such choice involves a fatal departure from a basic principle governing doxastic
 commitment'a principle that requires that we regard cornerstones propositions as propositions we are rationally committed
 to believe, not just entitled to accept. I press the point by presenting the Acceptance Argument, a sceptical paradox whose
 consideration leads to the conclusion that the Unified Strategy is caught between the Scylla of incoherently invoking a rather
 dubious form of epistemic alchemy and the Charybdis of placing an unexpected and apparently ad hoc restriction on the doxastic
 commitments we undertake by believing the things we believe. My final suggestion is that the Unified Strategy might be spared
 this dilemma only by undergoing a rather radical revision'a revision that would require setting aside the distinction between
 belief and acceptance to re-conceptualise its goal unabashedly in terms of (non-evidentially) warranted belief.
 
 
	

  The scandal to philosophy and human reason, wrote Kant, is that we must take the existence of material objects on mere faith. In contrast, the skeptical paradox that has scandalized recent philosophy is not formulated in terms of faith, but rather
 in terms of justification, warrant, and entitlement. I argue that most contemporary approaches to the paradox (both dogmatist/liberal
 and default/conservative) do not address the traditional problem that scandalized Kant, and that the status of having a warrant
 (or justification) that is derived from entitlement is irrelevant to whether we take our beliefs on mere faith. For, one can
 have the sort of warrant that most contemporary anti-skeptics posit while still taking one's belief on mere faith. An alternative
 approach to the traditional problem is sketched, one that still makes use of contemporary insights about entitlement.'
 
 
	

  This paper assesses branching spacetime theories in light of metaphysical considerations concerning time. I present the A, B, and C series in terms of the temporal structure they impose on sets of events, and raise problems for two elements of extant branching
 spacetime theories'McCall's ˜branch attrition', and the ˜no backward branching' feature of Belnap's ˜branching space“time''in
 terms of their respective A- and B-theoretic nature. I argue that McCall's presentation of branch attrition can only be coherently formulated on a model with
 at least two temporal dimensions, and that this results in severing the link between branch attrition and the flow of time.
 I argue that ˜no backward branching' prohibits Belnap's theory from capturing the modal content of indeterministic physical
 theories, and results in it ascribing to the world a time-asymmetric modal structure that lacks physical justification.
 
 
	

  I present a simple model of Grünbaum's staccato run in classical mechanics, the staccato roller coaster. It consists of a
 bead sliding on a frictionless wire shaped like a roller coaster track with infinitely many hills of diminishing size, each
 of which is a one-dimensional variant of the so-called Norton dome. The staccato roller coaster proves beyond doubt the dynamical
 (and hence logical) possibility of supertasks in classical mechanics if the Norton dome is a proper system of classical mechanics
 with metaphysical import. If not, challenges raised against the metaphysical significance of the Norton dome are shown to
 be challenges against various arguments for the dynamical possibility of supertasks, and the staccato roller coaster clearly
 shows the importance of meeting these challenges. And the staccato roller coaster can provide, as well as interesting lessons,
 illuminating analyses of Burke's (Mod Schoolman 78:1“8, 2000) attempt to refute the dynamical possibility of the staccato run and Pérez Laraudogoitia's (Synthese 148:433“441, 2006) rebuttal of it.
 
 
	

Erratum to: Local axioms in disguise: Hilbert on Minkowski diagrams
	

  The last 20 years or so has seen an intense search carried out within Dempster“Shafer theory, with the aim of finding a generalization
 of the Shannon entropy for belief functions. In that time, there has also been much progress made in credal set theory'another
 generalization of the traditional Bayesian epistemic representation'albeit not in this particular area. In credal set theory,
 sets of probability functions are utilized to represent the epistemic state of rational agents instead of the single probability
 function of traditional Bayesian theory. The Shannon entropy has been shown to uniquely capture certain highly intuitive properties
 of uncertainty, and can thus be considered a measure of that quantity. This article presents two measures developed with the
 purpose of generalizing the Shannon entropy for (1) unordered convex credal sets and (2) possibly non-convex credal sets ordered
 by second order probability, thereby providing uncertainty measures for such epistemic representations. There is also a comparison
 with the results of the measure AU developed within Dempster“Shafer theory in a few instances where unordered convex credal
 set theory and Dempster“Shafer theory overlap.
 
 
	

  The technique of minimizing information (infomin) has been commonly employed as a general method for both choosing and updating
 a subjective probability function. We argue that, in a wide class of cases, the use of infomin methods fails to cohere with
 our standard conception of rational degrees of belief. We introduce the notion of a deceptive updating method and argue that non-deceptiveness is a necessary condition for rational coherence. Infomin has been criticized
 on the grounds that there are no higher order probabilities that ˜support' it, but the appeal to higher order probabilities
 is a substantial assumption that some might reject. Our elementary arguments from deceptiveness do not rely on this assumption.
 While deceptiveness implies lack of higher order support, the converse does not, in general, hold, which indicates that deceptiveness
 is a more objectionable property. We offer a new proof of the claim that infomin updating of any strictly-positive prior with
 respect to conditional-probability constraints is deceptive. In the case of expected-value constraints, infomin updating of
 the uniform prior is deceptive for some random variables but not for others. We establish both a necessary condition and a
 sufficient condition (which extends the scope of the phenomenon beyond cases previously considered) for deceptiveness in this
 setting. Along the way, we clarify the relation which obtains between the strong notion of higher order support, in which
 the higher order probability is defined over the full space of first order probabilities, and the apparently weaker notion,
 in which it is defined over some smaller parameter space. We show that under certain natural assumptions, the two are equivalent.
 Finally, we offer an interpretation of Jaynes, according to which his own appeal to infomin methods avoids the incoherencies
 discussed in this paper.
 
 
	

  The mathematical nature of modern science is an outcome of a contingent historical process, whose most critical stages occurred
 in the seventeenth century. ˜The mathematization of nature' (Koyré  1957, From the closed world to the infinite universe, 5) is commonly hailed as the great achievement of the ˜scientific revolution', but for the agents affecting this development
 it was not a clear insight into the structure of the universe or into the proper way of studying it. Rather, it was a deliberate
 project of great intellectual promise, but fraught with excruciating technical challenges and unsettling epistemological conundrums.
 These required a radical change in the relations between mathematics, order and physical phenomena and the development of
 new practices of tracing and analyzing motion. This essay presents a series of discrete moments in this process. For mediaeval
 and Renaissance philosophers, mathematicians and painters, physical motion was the paradigm of change, hence of disorder,
 and ipso facto available to mathematical analysis only as idealized abstraction. Kepler and Galileo boldly reverted the traditional presumptions:
 for them, mathematical harmonies were embedded in creation; motion was the carrier of order; and the objects of mathematics
 were mathematical curves drawn by nature itself. Mathematics could thus be assigned an explanatory role in natural philosophy,
 capturing a new metaphysical entity: pure motion. Successive generations of natural philosophers from Descartes to Huygens
 and Hooke gradually relegated the need to legitimize the application of mathematics to natural phenomena and the blurring
 of natural and artificial this application relied on. Newton finally erased the distinction between nature's and artificial
 mathematics altogether, equating all of geometry with mechanical practice.
 
 
	

  Instances of negative causation'preventions, omissions, and the like'have long created philosophical worries. In this paper,
 I argue that concerns about negative causation can be addressed in the context of causal explanation generally, and mechanistic
 explanation specifically. The gravest concern about negative causation is that it exacerbates the problem of causal promiscuity'that
 is, the problem that arises when a particular account of causation identifies too many causes for a particular effect. In
 the explanatory context, the problem of promiscuity can be solved by characterizing the phenomenon to be explained as a contrast
 between two or more events or non-events. This contrastive strategy also can solve other problems that negative causation
 presents for the leading accounts of mechanistic explanation. Along the way, I argue that to be effective, accounts of causal
 explanation must incorporate negative causation. I also develop a taxonomy of negative causation and incorporate each variety
 of negative causation into the leading accounts of mechanistic explanation.
 
 
	

  In this paper, I investigate whether we can use a world-involving framework to model the epistemic states of non-ideal agents.
 The standard possible-world framework falters in this respect because of a commitment to logical omniscience. A familiar attempt
 to overcome this problem centers around the use of impossible worlds where the truths of logic can be false. As we shall see,
 if we admit impossible worlds where anything goes' in modal space, it is easy to model extremely non-ideal agents that are
 incapable of performing even the most elementary logical deductions. A much harder, and considerably less investigated challenge
 is to ensure that the resulting modal space can also be used to model moderately ideal agents that are not logically omniscient
 but nevertheless logically competent. Intuitively, while such agents may fail to rule out subtly impossible worlds that verify
 complex logical falsehoods, they are nevertheless able to rule out blatantly impossible worlds that verify obvious logical
 falsehoods. To model moderately ideal agents, I argue, the job is to construct a modal space that contains only possible and
 non-trivially impossible worlds where it is not the case that anything goes'. But I prove that it is impossible to develop
 an impossible-world framework that can do this job and that satisfies certain standard conditions. Effectively, I show that
 attempts to model moderately ideal agents in a world-involving framework collapse to modeling either logical omniscient agents,
 or extremely non-ideal agents.
 
 
	

  Although the current literature on supertasks concentrates largely on their supposed physical implications (extending the
 tradition of Zeno's classical paradoxes of movement), in this study I propose a new model of supertask that explores for the
 first time some of their information-related consequences and I defend these consequences from a possible criticism.
 
 
	

  The paper shows why and how an empirical study of fast-and-frugal heuristics can provide norms of good reasoning, and thus
 how (and how far) rationality can be naturalized. We explain the heuristics that humans often rely on in solving problems,
 for example, choosing investment strategies or apartments, placing bets in sports, or making library searches. We then show
 that heuristics can lead to judgments that are as accurate as or even more accurate than strategies that use more information
 and computation, including optimization methods. A standard way to defend the use of heuristics is by reference to accuracy-effort
 trade-offs. We take a different route, emphasizing ecological rationality (the relationship between cognitive heuristics and
 environment), and argue that in uncertain environments, more information and computation are not always better (the less-can-be-more'
 doctrine). The resulting naturalism about rationality is thus normative because it not only describes what heuristics people
 use, but also in which specific environments one should rely on a heuristic in order to make better inferences. While we desist
 from claiming that the scope of ecological rationality is unlimited, we think it is of wide practical use.
 
 
	

More foundations of the decision sciences: introduction
	

  The paper will show how one may rationalize one-boxing in Newcomb's problem and drinking the toxin in the Toxin puzzle within
 the confines of causal decision theory by ascending to so-called reflexive decision models which reflect how actions are caused
 by decision situations (beliefs, desires, and intentions) represented by ordinary unreflexive decision models.
 
 
	

  Andy Egan has recently produced a set of alleged counterexamples to causal decision theory (CDT) in which agents are forced
 to decide among causally unratifiable options, thereby making choices they know they will regret. I show that, far from being counterexamples, CDT gets Egan's
 cases exactly right. Egan thinks otherwise because he has misapplied CDT by requiring agents to make binding choices before
 they have processed all available information about the causal consequences of their acts. I elucidate CDT in a way that makes
 it clear where Egan goes wrong, and which explains why his examples pose no threat to the theory. My approach has similarities
 to a modification of CDT proposed by Frank Arntzenius, but it differs in the significance that it assigns to potential regrets.
 I maintain, contrary to Arntzenius, that an agent facing Egan's decisions can rationally choose actions that she knows she
 will later regret. All rationality demands of agents it that they maximize unconditional causal expected utility from an epistemic
 perspective that accurately reflects all the available evidence about what their acts are likely to cause. This yields correct
 answers even in outlandish cases in which one is sure to regret whatever one does.
 
 
	

  Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of
 properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological
 puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities.
 Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members are, or where their designated offices are? Organizations
 depend on their members for their existence, but the members of an organization can be where the organization is not. The
 designated office of an organization, however, need be little more than a mailbox. I argue that the problem can be solved
 by conceptualizing the relation between social entities and non-social entities as one of constitution, a relation of unity
 without identity. Constituted objects have properties that cannot be reduced to properties of the constituting objects. Thus,
 my attempt to solve the Location Problem results in an argument in favor of a kind of non-reductive materialism about the
 social.
 
 
	

  
 Inference versus consequence, an invited lecture at the LOGICA 1997 conference at Castle Liblice, was part of a series of articles for which I did research
 during a Stockholm sabbatical in the autumn of 1995. The article seems to have been fairly effective in getting its point
 across and addresses a topic highly germane to the Uppsala workshop. Owing to its appearance in the LOGICA Yearbook 1997, Filosofia Publishers, Prague, 1998, it has been rather inaccessible. Accordingly it is republished here with only bibliographical
 changes and an afterword.
 
 
	

  The aggregation of consistent individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective judgment on
 those propositions has recently drawn much attention. Seemingly reasonable aggregation procedures, such as propositionwise
 majority voting, cannot ensure an equally consistent collective conclusion. In this paper, we motivate that quite often, we
 do not only want to make a factually right decision, but also to correctly evaluate the reasons for that decision. In other words, we address the problem of tracking the truth. We set up a probabilistic model that generalizes the analysis of Bovens and Rabinowicz (Synthese 150: 131“153, 2006) and use it to compare several aggregation procedures. Demanding some reasonable adequacy constraints, we demonstrate that
 a reasons- or premise-based aggregation procedure tracks the truth better than any other procedure. However, we also illuminate
 that such a procedure is not in all circumstances easy to implement, leaving actual decision-makers with a tradeoff problem.
 
 
	

  Most investigations into how people make risky choices have employed a simple drosophila: monetary gambles involving stated
 outcomes and probabilities. People are asked to make decisions from description. When people decide whether to back up their computer hard drive, cross a busy street, or go out on a date, however, they
 do not enjoy the convenience of stated outcomes and probabilities. People make such decisions either in the void of ignorance
 or in the twilight of their own often limited experience of such real-world options. In the latter case, they make decisions from experience. Recent research has consistently documented that decisions from description and decisions from experience can lead to substantially
 different choices. Key in this description“experience gap is people's treatment of rare events. In this paper, I briefly review
 studies that have documented the description“experience gap, offer several explanations for this gap, and discuss to what
 extent people's decisions from experience are in conflict with benchmarks of rationality.
 
 
	

  We argue that there is no general theory of explanation that spans the sciences, mathematics, and ethics, etc. More specifically,
 there is no good reason to believe that substantive and domain-invariant constraints on explanatory information exist. Using
 Nickel (Noûs 44(2):305“328, 2010) as an exemplar of the contrary, generalist position, we first show that Nickel's arguments rest on several ambiguities,
 and then show that even when these ambiguities are charitably corrected, Nickel's defense of general theories of explanation
 is inadequate along several different dimensions. Specifically, we argue that Nickel's argument has three fatal flaws. First,
 he has not provided any compelling illustrations of domain-invariant constraints on explanation. Second, in order to fend
 off the most vehement skeptics of domain-invariant theories of explanation, Nickel must beg all of the important questions.
 Third, Nickel's examples of explanations from different domains with common explanatory structure rely on incorrect formulations
 of the explanations under consideration, circular justifications, and/or a mischaracterization of the position Nickel intends
 to critique. Given that the best and most elaborate defense of the generalist position fails in so many ways, we conclude
 that the standard practice in philosophy (and in philosophy of science in particular), which is to develop theories of explanation
 that are tailored to specific domains, still is justified. For those who want to buy into a more ambitious project: beware
 of the costs!
 
 
	

  Economic theory reduces the concept of rationality to internal consistency. As far as beliefs are concerned, rationality is
 equated with having a prior belief over a Grand State Space', describing all possible sources of uncertainties. We argue
 that this notion is too weak in some senses and too strong in others. It is too weak because it does not distinguish between
 rational and irrational beliefs. Relatedly, the Bayesian approach, when applied to the Grand State Space, is inherently incapable
 of describing the formation of prior beliefs. On the other hand, this notion of rationality is too strong because there are
 many situations in which there is not sufficient information for an individual to generate a Bayesian prior. It follows that
 the Bayesian approach is neither sufficient not necessary for the rationality of beliefs.
 
 
	

  In recent decades, experimental mathematics has emerged as a new branch of mathematics. This new branch is defined less by
 its subject matter, and more by its use of computer assisted reasoning. Experimental mathematics uses a variety of computer
 assisted approaches to verify or prove mathematical hypotheses. For example, there is number crunching' such as searching
 for very large Mersenne primes, and showing that the Goldbach conjecture holds for all even numbers less than 2 Ã 1018. There
 are verifications' of hypotheses which, while not definitive proofs, provide strong support for those hypotheses, and there
 are proofs involving an enormous amount of computer hours, which cannot be surveyed by any one mathematician in a lifetime.
 There have been several attempts to argue that one or another aspect of experimental mathematics shows that mathematics now
 accepts empirical or inductive methods, and hence shows mathematical apriorism to be false. Assessing this argument is complicated
 by the fact that there is no agreed definition of what precisely experimental mathematics is. However, I argue that on any
 plausible account of 'experiment' these arguments do not succeed.
 
 
	

  The Nash-Harsanyi theory of bargaining is usually taken as the correct theory of rational bargaining, and, as such, as the
 correct theory for the basic political contract for a society. It grafts a theory of cooperation to a base that essentially
 articulates the perspective of non-cooperative interaction. The resultant theory is supposed make clear how rational bargaining
 can fully realize the mutual gains that cooperation can make possible. However, its underlying commitment to the concepts
 of non-cooperative interaction renders this doubtful. I argue for an alternative theory'the theory of Full Cooperation'that
 avoids this difficulty. As applied to bargaining over the basic political contract, it calls for the selection of the most
 egalitarian of the Strictly Pareto-Optimal outcomes. This is essentially a version of Rawls' principle of Justice as Fairness,
 but it is derived, unlike Rawls' theory, without appeal to a problematic theory of individual decision-making behind the veil
 of ignorance. It also provides an alternative basis for what Hart calls the Principle of Mutual Restrictions, and what Rawls'
 calls the Duty of Fair Play.
 
 
	

  We argue that indeterminate probabilities are not only rationally permissible for a Bayesian agent, but they may even be rationally
 required. Our first argument begins by assuming a version of interpretivism: your mental state is the set of probability and utility
 functions that rationalize your behavioral dispositions as well as possible. This set may consist of multiple probability
 functions. Then according to interpretivism, this makes it the case that your credal state is indeterminate. Our second argument begins with our describing a world that plausibly has indeterminate
 chances. Rationality requires a certain alignment of your credences with corresponding hypotheses about the chances. Thus,
 if you hypothesize the chances to be indeterminate, your will inherit their indeterminacy in your corresponding credences.
 Our third argument is motivated by a dilemma. Epistemic rationality requires you to stay open-minded about contingent matters
 about which your evidence has not definitively legislated. Practical rationality requires you to be able to act decisively
 at least sometimes. These requirements can conflict with each other-for thanks to your open-mindedness, some of your options
 may have undefined expected utility, and if you are choosing among them, decision theory has no advice to give you. Such an option is playing
 Nover and Hájek's Pasadena Game, and indeed any option for which there is a positive probability of playing the Pasadena Game. You can serve both masters,
 epistemic rationality and practical rationality, with an indeterminate credence to the prospect of playing the Pasadena game.
 You serve epistemic rationality by making your upper probability positive-it ensures that you are open-minded. You serve practical
 rationality by making your lower probability 0-it provides guidance to your decision-making. No sharp credence could do both.
 
 
	

  Groups of people perform acts. For example, a committee passes a resolution, a team wins a game, and an orchestra performs
 a symphony. These collective acts may be evaluated for rationality. Take a committee's passing a resolution. This act may
 be evaluated not only for fairness but also for rationality. Did it take account of all available information? Is the resolution
 consistent with the committee's past resolutions? Standards of collective rationality apply to collective acts, that is, acts
 that groups of people perform. What makes a collective act evaluable for rationality? What methods of evaluation apply to
 collective acts? This paper addresses these two questions. Collective rationality is rationality's extension from individuals
 to groups. The paper's first few sections review key points about rationality. They identify the features of an individual's
 act that make it evaluable for rationality and distinguish rationality's methods of evaluating acts directly and indirectly
 controlled. This preliminary work yields general principles of rationality for all agents, both individuals and groups. Applying
 the general principles to groups answers the paper's two main questions about collective rationality.
 
 
	

  In economics and in the social sciences, the study of decision making of the single individual is an important preliminary
 step to provide a sound foundation for the analysis of equilibria in economic and social systems. Neuroeconomic analysis of
 the process has been a recent fruitful development in this direction. In the more recent past a new direction of research
 has emerged, studying the interplay of the decision making of the single individual with the economic and social environment
 that surrounds him. We review some of the results in this field, both theoretical and experimental, and suggest that a closer
 development of these two methods of research will be necessary in the future.
 
 
	

  In this paper we focus on transmission and failure of transmission of warrant. We identify three individually necessary and
 jointly sufficient conditions for transmission of warrant, and we show that their satisfaction grounds a number of interesting
 epistemic phenomena that have not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. We then scrutinise Wright's analysis of
 transmission failure and improve on extant readings of it. Nonetheless, we present a Bayesian counterexample that shows that
 Wright's analysis is partially incoherent with our analysis of warrant transmission and prima facie defective. We conclude
 exploring three alternative lines of reply: developing a more satisfactory account of transmission failure, which we outline;
 dismissing the Bayesian counterexample by rejecting some of its assumptions; reinterpreting Wright's analysis to make it immune
 to the counterexample.
 
 
	

  This article argues against fallibilist evidentialism on the basis of considerations about knowability.
 
	

  The rule of adjunction is intuitively appealing and uncontroversial for deductive inference, but in situations where information
 can be uncertain, the rule is neither needed nor wanted for rational acceptance, as illustrated by the lottery paradox. Practical
 certainty is the acceptance of statements whose chances of error are smaller than a prescribed threshold parameter, when evaluated
 against an evidential corpus. We examine the failure of adjunction in relation to the threshold parameter for practical certainty,
 with an eye towards reinstating the rule of adjunction in some restricted forms, by observing the conditions under which the
 overall chance of error of the joint statements can be variously bounded.
 
 
	

  The aim of this paper is to argue that some objections raised by Jantzen (Synthese, 2010) against the separation of the concepts of ˜counting' and ˜identity' are misled. We present a definition of counting in the
 context of quasi-set theory requiring neither the labeling nor the identity and individuality of the counted entities. We
 argue that, contrary to what Jantzen poses, there are no problems with the technical development of this kind of definition.
 As a result of being able to keep counting and identity apart for those entities, we briefly suggest that one venerable tradition
 concerning the nature of quantum particles may be consistently held. According to that tradition, known as the Received View
 on particles non-individuality, quantum particles may be seen as entities having both features: (i) identity and individuality
 do not apply to them, (ii) they may be gathered in collections comprising a plurality of them.
 
 
	

  This paper proposes a general account of the epistemological significance of inference. This account rests on the assumption
 that the concept of a justified' belief or inference is a normative concept. It also rests on a conception of belief that
 distinguishes both (a) between conditional and unconditional beliefs and (b) between enduring belief states and mental events
 of forming or reaffirming a belief, and interprets all of these different kinds of belief as coming in degrees. Conceptions
 of rational coherence' and competent inference' are then formulated, in terms of the undefeated instances of certain rules
 of inference. It is proposed that (non-accidental) rational coherence is a necessary and sufficient condition of justified
 enduring belief states, while competent inference always results in a justified mental event of some kind. This proposal turns
 out to tell against the view that there are any non-trivial cases of warrant transmission failure'. Finally, it is explained
 how these proposals can answer the objections that philosophers have raised against the idea that justified belief is closed'
 under competent inference.