How are we able to understand and anticipate each other in everyday life, in our daily interactions? Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, asserts Daniel Dennett in this first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality that he has been developing for almost twenty years. We adopt a stance, he argues, a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people - or other entities - we are hoping to understand and predict.These principles of radical interpretation have far-reaching implications for the metaphysical and scientific status of the processes referred to by the everday terms of folk psychology and their corresponding terms in cognitive science.While Dennett's philosophical stance has been steadfast over the years, his views have undergone successive enrichments, refinements, and extensions. "The Intentional Stance" brings together both previously published and original material: four of the book's ten chapters - its first and the final three - appear here for the first time and push the theory into surprising new territory. The remaining six were published earlier in the 1980s but were not easily accessible; each is followed by a reflection - an essay reconsidering and extending the claims of the earlier work. These reflections and the new chapters represent the vanguard of Dennett's thought. They reveal fresh lines of inquiry into fundamental issues in psychology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory as well as traditional issues in the philosophy of mind.Daniel C. Dennett is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University and the author of "Brainstorms" and "Elbow Room." "The Intentional Stance," along with these works, is a Bradford Book.

The Intentional Stance

A formalism for reasoning about actions is proposed that is based on a temporal logic. It allows a much wider range of actions to be described than with previous approaches such as the situation calculus. This formalism is then used to characterize the different types of events, processes, actions, and properties that can be described in simple English sentences. In addressing this problem, we consider actions that involve non-activity as well as actions that can only be defined in terms of the beliefs and intentions of the actors. Finally, a framework for planning in a dynamic world with external events and multiple agents is suggested.

Towards a General Theory of Action and Time.

http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~lboloni/Teaching/EEL6938_2007/papers/Allen-GeneralTheoryActionTime.pdf

Towards a general theory of action and time

The development of the Internet in recent years has made it possible and useful to access many different information systems anywhere in the world to obtain information. While there is much research on the integration of heterogeneous information systems, most commercial systems stop short of the actual integration of available data. Data fusion is the process of fusing multiple records representing the same real-world object into a single, consistent, and clean representation.This article places data fusion into the greater context of data integration, precisely defines the goals of data fusion, namely, complete, concise, and consistent data, and highlights the challenges of data fusion, namely, uncertain and conflicting data values. We give an overview and classification of different ways of fusing data and present several techniques based on standard and advanced operators of the relational algebra and SQL. Finally, the article features a comprehensive survey of data integration systems from academia and industry, showing if and how data fusion is performed in each.

Data fusion

Across the broad fields of educational theory and research, constructivism has become something akin to a secular religion. In her book Evolution as a Religion (1985), Mary Midgley wrote that the theory of evolution "is not just an inert piece of theoretical science. It is, and cannot help being, also a powerful folk-tale about human origins. Any such narrative must have symbolic force" (1985, p. 1). She might well have written the same about constructivism, which is, whatever else it may be, a "powerful folktale" about the origins of human knowledge. As in all living religions, constructivism has many sects-each of which harbors some distrust of its rivals. This descent into

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Many Faces of Constructivism

Preface to the Two-volume work Preface and acknowledgements 1. Lecture One: Dreams and Philosophy 2. Lecture Two: A Virtue Epistemology 3. Lecture Three: Intuitions 4. Lecture Four: Epistemic Normativity 5. Lecture Five: Virtue, Luck, and Credit 6. Lecture Six: The Problem of the Criterion

A Virtue Epistemology

What modal relation must a fact bear to a belief in order for this belief to constitute knowledge of that fact? Externalists have proposed various answers, including some that combine externalism with contextualism. We shall find that various forms of externalism share a modal conception of "sensitivity" open to serious objections. Fortunately, the undeniable intuitive attractiveness of this conception can be explained through an easily confused but far preferable notion of "safety." The denouement of our reflections, finally, will be to show how replacing sensitivity with safety makes it possible to defend plain Moorean common sense against the spurious advantages over it claimed by skeptical, tracking, relevant-alternative, and contextualist accounts.

How to Defeat Opposition to Moore

PART I: VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY EXTENDED AND UNIFIED PART II: A BETTER VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY PART III: KNOWLEDGE AND AGENCY PART IV: HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS

Judgment and Agency

Contemporary epistemology must choose between the solid security of the ancient foundationalist pyramid and the risky adventure of the new coherentist raft. Our main objective will be to understand, as deeply as we can, the nature of the controversy and the reasons for and against each of the two options. But first of all we take note of two underlying assumptions. TWO ASSUMPTIONS (A1) Not everything believed is known, but nothing can be known without being at least believed (or accepted, presumed, taken for granted, or the like) in some broad sense. What additional requirements must a belief fill in order to be knowledge? There are surely at least the following two: (a) it must be true, and (b) it must be justified (or warranted, reasonable, correct, or the like). (A2) Let us assume, moreover, with respect to the second condition A1(b): first, that it involves a normative or evaluative property; and, second, that the relevant sort of justification is that which pertains to knowledge: epistemic (or theoretical) justification. Someone seriously ill may have two sorts of justification for believing he will recover: the practical justification that derives from the contribution such belief will make to his recovery and the theoretical justification provided by the lab results, the doctor's diagnosis and prognosis, and so on. Only the latter is relevant to the question whether he knows.

The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge

Notes on Contributors. Preface. Part I: Knowledge and Skepticism. Introduction, Matthias Steup (St. Cloud State University). 1. Is Knowledge Closed under Known Entailment?. The Case against Closure, Fred Dretske (Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin). The Case for Closure, John Hawthorne (Rutgers University). Reply to Hawthorne, Fred Dretske (Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin). 2. Is Knowledge Contextual?. Contextualism Contested, Earl Conee (University of Rochester). Contextualism Defended, Stewart Cohen (Arizona State University). Contextualism Contested Some More, Earl Conee (University of Rochester)Contextualism Defended Some More, Stewart Cohen (Arizona State University). 3. Can Skepticism Be Refuted?. The Refutation of Skepticism, Jonathan Vogel (Amherst College). The Challenge of Refuting Skepticism, Richard Fumerton (University of Iowa). 4. Is There A Priori Knowledge?. In Defense of the a Priori, Laurence BonJour (University of Washington). There Is no a Priori, Michael Devitt (City University of New York). Reply to Devitt, Laurence BonJour (University of Washington). Reply to BonJour, Michael Devitt (City University of New York). Last Rejoinder, Laurence BonJour (University of Washington). References. Part II: Foundational Knowledge. Introduction, Matthias Steup (St. Cloud State University). 5. Is Infinitism the Solution to the Regress Problem?. Infinitism Is the Solution to the Regress Problem, Peter Klein (Rutgers University)Infinitism Is not the Solution to the Regress Problem, Carl Ginet (Cornell University). Reply to Ginet, Peter Klein (Rutgers University). Reply to Klein, Carl Ginet (Cornell University). 6. Can Beliefs Be Justified through Coherence Alone?. Non--foundationalist Epistemology: Holism, Coherence, and Tenability, Catherine Z. Elgin (Harvard Graduate School of Education). Why Coherence Is not Enough: In Defense of Moderate Foundationalism, James van Cleve (Brown University). 7. Is There Immediate Justification?. There Is Immediate Justification, James Pryor (Princeton University). Doing Without Immediate Justification, Michael Williams (Johns Hopkins University). 8. Does Perceptual Experience Have Conceptual Content?. Perceptual Experience Has Conceptual Content, Bill Brewer (Oxford University)Perception and Conceptual Content, Alex Byrne (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Part III: Justification. Introduction, Matthias Steup (St. Cloud State University). 9. Is Justification Internal?. Justification Is not Internal, John Greco (Fordham University). Justification Is Internal, Richard Feldman (University of Rochester). 10. Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal?. Truth Is not the Primary Epistemic Goal, Jonathan Kvanvig (University of Missouri). Truth as the Primary Epistemic Goal: A Working Hypothesis, Marian David (University of Notre Dame). 11. Is Justified Belief Responsible Belief?. Justified Belief as Responsible Belief, Richard Foley (New York University). Obligation, Entitlement, and Rationality, Nicholas Wolterstorff (Yale University)Response to Wolterstorff, Richard Foley (New York University). Response to Foley, Nicholas Wolterstorff (Yale University). Index

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Ernest Sosa

Papers

A Virtue Epistemology

How to Defeat Opposition to Moore

Judgment and Agency

The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge

Contemporary Debates in Epistemology