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When adjunction fails

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Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Inteligência Artificial (CENTRIA), Departamento de Informática, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2829-516, Caparica, Portugal

    Choh Man Teng

  2. Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, 40 South Alcaniz Street, Pensacola, FL, 32502, USA

    Choh Man Teng

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  1. Choh Man Teng
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Correspondence to Choh Man Teng.

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Teng, C.M. When adjunction fails. Synthese 186, 501–510 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-0002-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-0002-x

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