Epistemic Model Research Articles

Two Tales of Epistemic Models

This short paper has two parts. First,we prove a generalisation of Aumann’s surprising impossibility result in the context of rational decision making. We then move, in the second part, to discuss the interpretational meaning of some formal setups of epistemic models, and we do so by means of presenting an interesting puzzle in epistemic logic. The aim is to highlight certain problematic aspects of these epistemic systems concerning first/third-person asymmetry which underlies both parts of the story. This asymmetry, we argue, reveals certain limits of what epistemic models can be.

Epistemic origins of neo-scholastic interpretation of ontological proof of divine existence and discussions concerning ontologism

Журнал «Вопросы теологии» — международный академический журнал по теологии. Журнал ориентирован на развитие всех направлений и областей, входящих в исследовательскую отрасль «Теология», прежде всего в том варианте, в каком она развивается в светских вузах и научно-исследовательских структурах, а также в духовных академиях.

A Simplicial Complex Model for Dynamic Epistemic Logic to study Distributed Task Computability

The usual epistemic model S5n for a multi-agent system is based on a Kripke frame, which is a graph whose edges are labeled with agents that do not distinguish between two states. We propose to uncover the higher dimensional information implicit in this structure, by considering a dual, simplicial complex model. We use dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) to study how an epistemic simplicial complex model changes after a set of agents communicate with each other. We concentrate on an action model that represents the so called immediate snapshot communication patterns of asynchronous agents, because it is central to distributed computability (but our setting works for other communication patterns). There are topological invariants preserved from the initial epistemic complex to the one after the action model is applied, which determine the knowledge that the agents gain after communication. Finally, we describe how a distributed task specification can be modeled as a DEL action model, and show that the topological invariants determine whether the task is solvable. We thus provide a bridge between DEL and the topological theory of distributed computability, which studies task solvability in a shared memory or message passing architecture.

Rationality, strategic uncertainty, and belief diversity in non‐cooperative games

AbstractI investigate the existence of epistemic models of complete information games that satisfy the following properties: players do not rule out their opponent's use of rational ex ante strategies for deriving their choices; they do not rule out, ex ante, that they can come to know the action profile that is ultimately played; and they do not rule out strategic uncertainty. In this paper I show that for a large class of games there are no epistemic models that satisfy these three properties.

Religious Faith as Political Praxis: Walter Rauschenbusch, Incarnational Religion, and the Social Gospel Cultus

The Social Gospel has been primarily framed through the critique articulated by Reinhold Niebuhr, which cast the movement as theologically utopian and politically naive. Defenders of the Social Gospel contend that the movement demonstrated the vital role of religion in providing moral resources for political action. Departing from the epistemic (or excarnational) model of religion underlying both these positions, I interpret Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch as providing an incarnational conception of religion that foregrounds the embodied dimensions of faith that are crucial in the constitution of political subjects. I argue that the Social Gospel situates Christian faith as political praxis so that piety is realized through democratic engagement and social transformation. This practice of faith is cultivated not simply by beliefs but by liturgical practices. The recovery of this framework reveals a heterodox tradition of Christian thought that resists the privatized vision of religion inherited from liberal secularism.

Steffe의 분할 조작의 관점에서 본 균등 분배 문제 해결 과정 분석과 그 적용

The equal sharing problem has been reported as playing an important role in linking students’ whole number knowledge with fractional knowledge. In the present study, we provide a theoretical analysis of how students solve equal sharing situations based on cognitive models of students’ fraction learning. In terms of Steffe’s epistemic model of students with partitioning operations, equal sharing situations can be solved by implementing either splitting operation for composite units or distributive partitioning operation. We describe students’ cognitive behaviors and quantitative structures entailed when the students solve the problems with each operation. Also, using the results of our theoretical work, we re-categorize students’ various strategies reported in the previous research, followed by implications for instruction.

Seismic fragility analysis with artificial neural networks: Application to nuclear power plant equipment

The fragility curve is defined as the conditional probability of failure of a structure, or its critical components, at given values of seismic intensity measures (IMs). The conditional probability of failure is usually computed adopting a log-normal assumption to reduce the computational cost. In this paper, an artificial neural network (ANN) is constructed to improve the computational efficiency for the calculation of structural outputs. The following aspects are addressed in this paper: (a) Implementation of an efficient algorithm to select IMs as inputs of the ANN. The most relevant IMs are selected with a forward selection approach based on semi-partial correlation coefficients; (b) quantification and investigation of the ANN prediction uncertainty computed with the delta method. It consists of an aleatory component from the simplification of the seismic inputs and an epistemic model uncertainty from the limited size of the training data. The aleatory component is integrated in the computation of fragility curves, whereas the epistemic component provides the confidence intervals; (c) computation of fragility curves with Monte Carlo method and verification of the validity of the log-normal assumption. This methodology is applied to estimate the probability of failure of an electrical cabinet in a reactor building studied in the framework of the KARISMA benchmark.

Reverse Public Announcement Operators on Expanded Models

Past public announcement operators have been defined in Hoshi and Yap (Synthese 169(2):259–281, 2009) and Yap (Dynamic logic montreal, 2007), to describe an agent’s knowledge before an announcement occurs. These operators rely on branching-time structures that do not mirror the traditional, relativization-based semantics of public announcement logic (PAL), and favor a historical reading of past announcements. In this paper, we introduce reverse public announcement operators that are interpreted on expanded models. Our model expansion adds accessibility links from an epistemic model $$\mathcal {M}$$ to a filtrated submodel of the canonical model for $$\mathbf K _g$$ . Here $$\mathbf K _g$$ is the minimal normal modal logic together with $$\mathbf S5 $$ axioms for the universal operator U. This yields a highly general pre-announcement version of $$\mathcal {M}$$ that makes our operators potentially useful for studying non-standard interpretations of rescinded announcements in PAL. Indeed, we find that our reverse announcement operators cannot be represented by product update, and that they have an intimate connection with the knowledge forgetting of Zhang and Zhou (Artif Intell J 173(16–17):1525–1537, 2009). We show that the logic resulting from adding reverse announcements to PAL is sound and complete.

INTERCULTURALIDADE CRÍTICA E DECOLONIALIDADE DA EDUCAÇÃO SUPERIOR

Pretende-se, no presente texto, refletir e promover um debate sobre a decolonialidade da educaçãosuperior numa relação estreita com a problemática da interculturalidade critica. Muitas propostas de uma "educação decolonizadora" pretendem substituir a natureza da educação ocidental pela educação indígena nativa, substituindo a língua oficial por línguas nativas. Embora louvável, esse esforço fica aquém quando se trata da tarefa de uma decolonialidade profunda e estrutural. Os educadores são formados para reproduzir fielmente a epistemologia dominante, numa matriz institucional e curriculardada e herdada da época colonial, com o desejo de "produzir" cidadãos que respondam ao projeto nacional dominante, ele próprio submetido ao projeto internacional dominante. Uma educação decolonial implica a consciência dos etnocentrismos, androcentrismos e antropocentrismos em praticamente todos os sistemas de educação e modelos epistêmicos. Conferir dignidade ontológica aos povos originários e dignidade epistemológica aos seus saberes contribuirá para a construção de uma nova geopolítica do conhecimento.

Optimizing Epistemic Model Checking Using Conditional Independence (Extended Abstract)

This paper shows that conditional independence reasoning can be applied to optimize epistemic model checking, in which one verifies that a model for a number of agents operating with imperfect information satisfies a formula expressed in a modal multi-agent logic of knowledge. The optimization has been implemented in the epistemic model checker MCK. The paper reports experimental results demonstrating that it can yield multiple orders of magnitude performance improvements.

Compreensões de aspectos gerais sobre as condições de produção do conhecimento e a investigação no pré-discurso da Educação Inclusiva: dos sistemas de acomodação/ajuste estrutural das possibilidades de subversão do campo

Este artigo apresenta uma abordagem inicial sobre a caracterização do campo meta-teórico de pesquisa em educação inclusiva e, em particular, examina as forças que produzem seu discurso na pesquisa documental. É reconhecida a necessidade de avançar na exploração de uma perspectiva epistêmica que permita superar o absentismo teórico enfrentado pela educação inclusiva em tempos complexos. O desenvolvimento atual da pesquisa em educação inclusiva é alimentado por vários campos de confluência fora da pedagogia, o que resultou na cristalização de um discurso crítico e não crítico sobre si mesmo. As diferenças entre as perspectivas crítica e acrítica residem na ausência de raciocínio para politizar a discussão sobre a inclusão como mecanismo de transformação de todos os campos da vida do cidadão. Isso confirma a presença de políticas de produção de conhecimento que impõem fundamentos intelectuais binários e poucos pontos de fuga para problematizar as relações estruturais da desigualdade. Soma-se a isso as fortes raízes de padrões que impõem modelos epistêmicos quebrados para pensar nas opressões objeto das diversas identidades que chegam ao espaço escolar e demarcam novas formas de expressão cidadã. Conclui-se com base em um modelo pré-construído de tipo normativo para refletir sobre as questões fundamentais do desenvolvimento humano e cidadão. É necessário promover um processo de descolonização em todos os campos da Ciência da Educação, bem como uma crítica genealógica dos fundamentos híbridos que este modelo propõe, dada a uniformidade de seu discurso em todos os ciclos e níveis de ensino.
 Palavras-chave: educação inclusiva, políticas de produção de conhecimento, epistemologia, identidades e temas educacionais.

Notes on the use of randomised controlled trials to evaluate complex interventions: Community treatment orders as an illustrative case.

Over the past seven decades, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have revolutionised clinical research and achieved a gold standard status. However, extending their use to evaluate complex interventions is problematic. In this paper we will demonstrate that complex intervention RCTs violate the necessary premises that govern the RCTs logic and underpin their rigour. The lack of blinding, heterogeneity of participants, as well as poor treatment standardisation and difficulty of controlling for confounders, which characterise complex intervention RCTs, can potentially be profoundly detrimental to their integrity. Proponents of this approach argue that matching "real world" circumstances, while maintaining the randomised design, enhances external validity. We counter this argument by pointing out that an inverted U relation exists between internal and external validity, and thus relaxing the experimental conditions beyond a certain threshold can potentially paradoxically render the RCT externally invalid, i.e. its results cannot be used anywhere. We shall illustrate the inappropriate use of RCTs to evaluate community treatment orders and propose an alternative epistemic model that is based on mechanistic reasoning and Cartwright's capacity concept.

Dismissing the Moral Sceptic: A Wittgensteinian Approach

Cartesian scepticism poses the question of how we can justify our belief that other humans experience consciousness in the same way that we do. Wittgenstein’s response to this scepticism is one that does not seek to resolve the problem by providing a sound argument against the Cartesian sceptic. Rather, he provides a method of philosophical inquiry which enables us to move past this and continue our inquiry without the possibility of solipsism arising as a philosophical problem in the first place. In this paper, I propose that Wittgenstein’s method of dismissing the Cartesian sceptic can also be applied to the problems posed by the ‘moral sceptic’, who denies the truth of all ethical or moral claims. I will argue that in the same way Wittgenstein’s focus on public language enables us to dismiss the traditional problem of other minds, a focus on public moral practices or language-games also enables us to dismiss the idea that moral claims are always ‘meaningless’, ‘false’ or ‘nonsensical’. On this account, the moral sceptic is misguided in much the same way as the solipsist who implicitly admits the existence of other minds in her practices. The moral sceptic who still engages in moral activities also implicitly admits the existence of meaningful moral positions. Wittgenstein’s dismissal of the Cartesian sceptic, as I understand it, can be broadly divided into two parts. The first part is an account of language acquisition. This part outlines how we might come to see other humans as conscious, thinking, feeling beings from a causal perspective. This suggests that we can arrive at an understanding of other minds as a primary perception itself - without needing to posit this perception as a kind of deductive or inductive hypothesis. Secondly, we can see how this relates to an epistemic model of language. This focuses on the role of language as something which consists of rule-governed activities, where the existence of other minds is embedded in our understanding of the world as a kind of grammatical rule, rather than an observational hypothesis. From both these arguments the Cartesian sceptic is, (on Wittgenstein’s account), irrelevant to some forms of philosophical inquiry. This is because the sceptic takes the existence of other minds to be a rational hypothesis/inference when it is not. I suggest that this approach can be applied to moral scepticism if we take certain normative claims as grammatical dispositions (practical and tautological), rather than rational or metaphysical propositions. Hence, the moral sceptic who offers a rational or logical critique of these moral foundations is not necessarily saying anything relevant to our practices – the moral stances which they refute as rationally meaningless were never based on purely rational or logical hypotheses in the first place.

Emergence of Quantum Mechanics from Theory of Random Fields

Our aim in this paper is to enlighten the possibility to treat quantum mechanics as emergent from a kind of classical physical model, in spite of recent remarkable experiments demonstrating a violation of the Bell inequality. To proceed in a rigorous way, we use the methodology of ontic–epistemic modeling of physical phenomena. This methodology is rooted in the old Bild conception about theoretical and observational models in physics. This conception was elaborated in the fundamental works of Hertz, Boltzmann, and Schrodinger. Our ontic model (generating the quantum model) is of the random field type, prequantum classical statistical field theory (PCSFT). We present a brief review of its basic features without overloading the presentation by mathematical details. Then we show that the Bell inequality can be violated not only at the epistemic level, i.e., for observed correlations, but even at the ontic level, for classical random fields. We devote the important part of the paper to an analysis of the internal energy structure of prequantum random fields and their coupling with the background field of subquantum fluctuations. Finally, we present a unified picture of the microworld based on the composition of prequantum random fields from elementary fluctuations. Since quantum systems are treated as the symbolic representation of prequantum fields, this picture leads to a unifying treatment of all quantum systems as special blocks of elementary fluctuations carrying negligibly small energies.

The Mental Structure of Assessment as a Linguistic and Synergetic Phenomenon

The article deals with the problems of the term mental structure of assessment seen as the main epistemic model in the consciousness of every representative of society on the one hand, and on the other – as a synergetic tool for linguistic analysis of lexical meaning and its connotation as the means of social attitude verbalization. The mental structure of assessment is a concept, which due to its positive features resembles the non-linear open synergetic system. Special attention in this article is paid to the transmission of sense in the discourse as the basic means of understanding connotations and change of lexical semantics.

Quantum epistemology from subquantum ontology: Quantum mechanics from theory of classical random fields

The scientific methodology based on two descriptive levels, ontic (reality as it is ) and epistemic (observational), is briefly presented. Following Schrödinger, we point to the possible gap between these two descriptions. Our main aim is to show that, although ontic entities may be unaccessible for observations, they can be useful for clarification of the physical nature of operational epistemic entities. We illustrate this thesis by the concrete example: starting with the concrete ontic model preceding quantum mechanics (the latter is treated as an epistemic model), namely, prequantum classical statistical field theory (PCSFT), we propose the natural physical interpretation for the basic quantum mechanical entity—the quantum state (“wave function”). The correspondence PCSFT ↦ QM is not straightforward, it couples the covariance operators of classical (prequantum) random fields with the quantum density operators. We use this correspondence to clarify the physical meaning of the pure quantum state and the superposition principle—by using the formalism of classical field correlations.

Exploring Big Data for Development: An Electricity Sector Case Study from India

This paper presents exploratory research into “data-intensive development” that seeks to inductively identify issues and conceptual frameworks of relevance to big data in developing countries. It presents a case study of big data innovations in “Stelcorp”; a state electricity corporation in India. In an attempt to address losses in electricity distribution, Stelcorp has introduced new digital meters throughout the distribution network to capture big data, and organisation-wide information systems that store and process and disseminate big data. Emergent issues are identified across three domains: implementation, value and outcome. Implementation of big data has worked relatively well but technical and human challenges remain. The advent of big data has enabled some – albeit constrained – value addition in all areas of organisational operation: customer billing, fault and loss detection, performance measurement, and planning. Yet US$ tens of millions of investment in big data has brought no aggregate improvement in distribution losses or revenue collection. This can be explained by the wider outcome, with big data faltering in the face of external politics; in this case the electoral politics of electrification. Alongside this reproduction of power, the paper also reflects on the way in which big data has enabled shifts in the locus of power: from public to private sector; from labour to management; and from lower to higher levels of management. A number of conceptual frameworks emerge as having analytical power in studying big data and global development. The information value chain model helps track both implementation and value-creation of big data projects. The design-reality gap model can be used to analyse the nature and extent of barriers facing big data projects in developing countries. And models of power – resource dependency, epistemic models, and wider frameworks – are all shown as helping understand the politics of big data.

Epistemically Robust Strategy Subsets

We define a concept of epistemic robustness in the context of an epistemic model of a finite normal-form game where a player type corresponds to a belief over the profiles of opponent strategies and types. A Cartesian product X of pure-strategy subsets is epistemically robust if there is a Cartesian product Y of player type subsets with X as the associated set of best reply profiles such that the set Y i contains all player types that believe with sufficient probability that the others are of types in Y − i and play best replies. This robustness concept provides epistemic foundations for set-valued generalizations of strict Nash equilibrium, applicable also to games without strict Nash equilibria. We relate our concept to closedness under rational behavior and thus to strategic stability and to the best reply property and thus to rationalizability.

A logic of goal-directed knowing how

In this paper, we propose a decidable single-agent modal logic for reasoning about goal-directed “knowing how”, based on ideas from linguistics, philosophy, modal logic, and automated planning in AI. We first define a modal language to express “I know how to guarantee \(\varphi \) given \(\psi \)” with a semantics based not on standard epistemic models but on labeled transition systems that represent the agent’s knowledge of his own abilities. The semantics is inspired by conformant planning in AI. A sound and complete proof system is given to capture valid reasoning patterns, which highlights the compositional nature of “knowing how”. The logical language is further extended to handle knowing how to achieve a goal while maintaining other conditions.

Deciding Degree of Conservativeness in Initial Design Considering Risk of Future Redesign

Early in the design process, there is often mixed epistemic model uncertainty and aleatory parameter uncertainty. Later in the design process, the results of high-fidelity simulations or experiments will reduce epistemic model uncertainty and may trigger a redesign process. Redesign is undesirable because it is associated with costs and delays; however, it is also an opportunity to correct a dangerous design or possibly improve design performance. In this study, we propose a margin-based design/redesign method where the design is optimized deterministically, but the margins are selected probabilistically. The final design is an epistemic random variable (i.e., it is unknown at the initial design stage) and the margins are optimized to control the epistemic uncertainty in the final design, design performance, and probability of failure. The method allows for the tradeoff between expected final design performance and probability of redesign while ensuring reliability with respect to mixed uncertainties. The method is demonstrated on a simple bar problem and then on an engine design problem. The examples are used to investigate the dilemma of whether to start with a higher margin and redesign if the test later in the design process reveals the design to be too conservative, or to start with a lower margin and redesign if the test reveals the design to be unsafe. In the examples in this study, it is found that this decision is related to the variance of the uncertainty in the high-fidelity model relative to the variance of the uncertainty in the low-fidelity model.