NP: "theory of belief functions"

[Glenn Scheper]

http://www.cs.uu.nl/groups/IS/archive/mehdi/ejor03.pdf 
How to decide what to do?

http://www.glennshafer.com/assets/downloads/article40.pdf
Perspectives on the Theory and Practice of Belief Functions

http://www.econ.upenn.edu/Centers/pier/Archive/04-011.pdf
Rationality of Belief

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~pnp/Papers/robbins2004a.pdf
TO STRUCTURE, OR NOT TO STRUCTURE?
Some accounts of mental content represent the objects of belief as structured,
using entities that formally resemble the sentences used to express and report
attitudes in natural language; others adopt a relatively unstructured approach, typically
using sets or functions....

Classical propositionalism formally characterizes the belief relation in
terms of set containment.2 An agent is correctly reported as believing that
P just in case P holds in every world which is doxastically accessible
to her, where doxastic accessibility is defined as follows: given a pair of
worlds (w1,w2) and an agent A at w1, w2 is doxastically accessible to A
from w1 just in case for all A believes at w1, she might as well be at w2. So,
for instance, if A has no beliefs whatsoever about panda bears and w2 is
accessible, the panda situation at w2 can be any which way, so long as it is
compatible with what A believes about other matters. But if A's beliefs are
inconsistent - that is, if there is no world in which everything she believes
is true - then neither w2 nor any other world is accessible to A.

-- Sounds like our old friend, Melancholia.

Long, Very Interesting: tale of two gods...
Briefly:
1. God on Tall Mountain hurls down Manna.
2. God on Cold Mountain hurls thunderbolts.
But each does not know which God they are!

But genuine competence with the first-person pronoun rules out the sort of
cognitive estrangement embodied by TM's (supposed) failure to recognize
his occurrent utterances as his. In short, only those who can identify
their occurrent tokens of "I" as their own count as competent with "I".

--Clearly a problem within schizophrenia.

If S can introspect her occurrent thoughts, then S can identify
her occurrent thoughts as hers.

--No. Actually, very difficult for me. Cf. liquorish mind, Absalom.

property self-ascriptionism

Of an individual i and an agent A at w, we say that i is doxastically
alternative to A at w just in case for all A believes at w, she might
as well be i. Doxastic inconsistency arises exactly where the properties
an agent self-ascribes are not jointly coinstantiable, in which case A
has no doxastic alternatives.

--This is how I like to misinterpret Heidegger's phrase for death,
"The possibility of the impossibility of being". Hey, here it is!:
http://mail.architexturez.net/+/Heidegger-L/archive/msg04472.shtml

Or, alternative: Christ.

Similarly, if you know all your properties, then in particular you know
all your local properties, positional and otherwise; in which case you
must know everything there is to know about your position in space and
time, and be able to discriminate all other positions from your own.

--Another thing some of my non-local mental experiences must contradict.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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