Theories of practical reasoning and rationality have been expounded at least as far back as the Greeks. Beginning with several historical perspectives, I attempt to answer the descriptive and normative questions of practical reasoning and rationality. I then turn to a popular modern attempt, expected utility theory. I conclude that this approach cannot be sustained because of inherent inconsistencies and its inability to generate advice for a class of problems that other decision procedures can handle. I conclude by offering support for a new model of practical reasoning, the practical argument model. I explain the three dimensions of normative assessment for this model: logical, inferential and epistemic. I then show how an expected utility decision-procedure is encompassed by the practical argument model and, therefore, subject to these three levels of assessment. I conclude by offering some directions for future research.

Theories of practical reasoning and rationality have been expounded at least as far back as the Greeks. Beginning with several historical perspectives, I attempt to answer the descriptive and normative questions of practical reasoning and rationality. I then turn to a popular modern attempt, expected utility theory. I conclude that this approach cannot be sustained because of inherent inconsistencies and its inability to generate advice for a class of problems that other decision procedures can handle. I conclude by offering support for a new model of practical reasoning, the practical argument model. I explain the three dimensions of normative assessment for this model: logical, inferential and epistemic. I then show how an expected utility decision-procedure is encompassed by the practical argument model and, therefore, subject to these three levels of assessment. I conclude by offering some directions for future research.

This thesis researches the proposition that student creativity occurs as a function of misrecognition in the culturally situated context of art classrooms. Following Pierre Bourdieu??s socio-cognitive frameworks of the habitus, symbolic capital and misrecognition this study uses these concepts as a means of navigating teacher-student relationships at moments of creative origination. These concepts predict that exchanges between teachers and students are sites for transactions of symbolic capital where the teacher??s pedagogical role is objectively repressed through the mechanism of misrecognition. The study seeks evidence for creative autonomy as misrecognition as it takes place in classroom transactions and that differing levels of ??tact?? are employed in these exchanges. It emerges that the social reasoning that underscores these exchanges is inferentially sensitive to different contextual points of view, expressed in open secrets, repression, denial and euphemisation. The study finds that the artworks produced evidence degrees of originality that vary in character according to the subtlety of misrecognition that is transacted in these pedagogical exchanges. The case of an art teacher and an art class in the final year of schooling is examined in detail. The design employs an idiographic, qualitative methodology. Methods include observations and interviews which are augmented by digital records. Results are interpreted using a form of semantic analysis and triangulation. Four functions are distilled from the results. These functions govern the way in which misrecognition performs as a contradictory logic in the relationships between the teacher and students which works towards affirming the group??s belief in creative autonomy, while paradoxically, all members take advantage of the contextual inputs that are available. Creative autonomy is revealed as a fiction, nonetheless, a fiction worth nurturing for the successful realisation of creative ends. The study concludes that creativity cannot be strictly taught or learned. Nor is it innate and autonomous. Rather it encompasses a socially intelligent uptake in the culture of artmaking. What is possible is dependent on shared beliefs, desires and intentions which are transformed over time. Broader implications are suggested focusing on the significance of collaboration in creative education and the impact for educational systems, schools and undergraduate programs in art education.

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<p>In this dissertation, I advance a new interpretation of the meaning and political implications of Isaiah Berlin's theory of value pluralism. My argument focuses on two puzzles within the literature on value pluralism: first, value pluralist political theorists advance a variety of differing political views on an ostensibly value pluralist basis; second, and more deeply, their writings betray significant ambiguity on what value pluralism means in the first place. I identify two central sources of these problems. First, two distinct sets of ideas in Berlin's work, which I label the "moral-practical" and "societal groupings" versions of value pluralism, are persistently conflated by both Berlin and more recent value pluralist theorists. Second, attempts to justify a political view on the basis of value pluralism run aground on a "priority problem" stemming from the central value pluralist concept of incommensurability. In my approach, I maintain the distinction between the moral-practical and societal groupings theories, focusing on the moral-practical version as a more original and less well-understood contribution of Berlin's thought. I also develop a strategy, which I call "giving incommensurability its due," that avoids the priority problem by focusing on metaethical (or second-order), epistemic, and procedural considerations. This strategy supports two major sets of political implications: a liberal-constitutional framework of basic rights and liberties, and a robust, vibrant form of participatory and deliberative democratic politics. This turn to democracy constitutes an important shift vis-à-vis the current literature, which has, up to now, been preoccupied with value pluralism's relationship to liberalism.</p> / Dissertation

My dissertation develops and defends a contemporary Aristotelian form of political liberalism. I articulate an Aristotelian interpretation of individual autonomy as excellence in deliberating about ends, and develop a decision-theoretic model for representing this type of deliberation. I then provide a precise characterization of individual freedom, building on Amartya Sen’s neo-Aristotelian theory of freedom as capability. I argue that we should understand individual liberty, the guiding value of political liberalism, as a compound of autonomy and freedom as I have articulated these notions. I then argue that liberty in this sense is the proper focus of a liberal theory of distributive justice. I provide a teleological justification of the state’s authority to pursue a liberty-based program of distributive justice, and argue for a liberty-based interpretation of the harm principle as the appropriate limitation on state action. / text

This thesis researches the proposition that student creativity occurs as a function of misrecognition in the culturally situated context of art classrooms. Following Pierre Bourdieu??s socio-cognitive frameworks of the habitus, symbolic capital and misrecognition this study uses these concepts as a means of navigating teacher-student relationships at moments of creative origination. These concepts predict that exchanges between teachers and students are sites for transactions of symbolic capital where the teacher??s pedagogical role is objectively repressed through the mechanism of misrecognition. The study seeks evidence for creative autonomy as misrecognition as it takes place in classroom transactions and that differing levels of ??tact?? are employed in these exchanges. It emerges that the social reasoning that underscores these exchanges is inferentially sensitive to different contextual points of view, expressed in open secrets, repression, denial and euphemisation. The study finds that the artworks produced evidence degrees of originality that vary in character according to the subtlety of misrecognition that is transacted in these pedagogical exchanges. The case of an art teacher and an art class in the final year of schooling is examined in detail. The design employs an idiographic, qualitative methodology. Methods include observations and interviews which are augmented by digital records. Results are interpreted using a form of semantic analysis and triangulation. Four functions are distilled from the results. These functions govern the way in which misrecognition performs as a contradictory logic in the relationships between the teacher and students which works towards affirming the group??s belief in creative autonomy, while paradoxically, all members take advantage of the contextual inputs that are available. Creative autonomy is revealed as a fiction, nonetheless, a fiction worth nurturing for the successful realisation of creative ends. The study concludes that creativity cannot be strictly taught or learned. Nor is it innate and autonomous. Rather it encompasses a socially intelligent uptake in the culture of artmaking. What is possible is dependent on shared beliefs, desires and intentions which are transformed over time. Broader implications are suggested focusing on the significance of collaboration in creative education and the impact for educational systems, schools and undergraduate programs in art education.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-08-20T13:17:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernando Rodrigues Montes Doca_Dissertacao.pdf: 1158926 bytes, checksum: 64106b444d209715694d39cf9eee1adb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-07-16 / The objective of this work is to explain how practical reasoning takes place in Aristotle. This is a delicate and controversial issue of the Aristotelian practical philosophy, since he did not dedicate any moment of his work the Stagirite to closely analyze the practical reasoning. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle deals with deliberation, prudence, and practical syllogism, but we do not see him coordinate these themes as a concluded whole in a theory of the practical reasoning. This research aims to do so in order to precisely determine how the practical reasoning of a moral agent works, since its beginning, in the apprehension of a conception of the good, until its conclusion, in the imminence of an action. To do so this work undertakes an analysis of important conceptions about the theory of practical reasoning. Initially, two preliminary themes are dealt with: happiness and moral virtue, and right in sequence it goes deeper in the theme of practical reasoning analyzing the concepts of deliberate choice, of deliberation, and, most of all, of prudential reason, seeing that its operation covers a considerable part of the practical reasoning of the moral agent. But practical reasoning is not completely explained only by understanding such themes neither can it be limited to the operation of prudential reason. The theory of practical syllogism also appears as an important element in the explanation of how practical reasoning works. As a result of this, a large part of this research is dedicated to discussing the role of practical syllogism in the corpus aristotelicum, as well as to understanding the relationship it establishes with deliberation. Given its role and identified the kind of relationship it has with deliberation a complete map of practical reasoning is finally presented and the question about how practical reasoning in Aristotle works is then answered. / O objetivo deste trabalho é explicar de que modo se dá o raciocínio prático em Aristóteles. Esta é uma delicada e controvertida questão da filosofia prática aristotélica, visto que em nenhum momento de sua obra o Estagirita se dedica a analisar detidamente o raciocínio prático. Em sua Ethica Nicomachea, Aristóteles trata da deliberação, da prudência e do silogismo prático, mas não o vemos coordenar estes temas em um todo acabado, em uma teoria do raciocínio prático. A presente pesquisa propõe-se a fazê-lo a fim de determinar precisamente como se dá o raciocínio prático de um agente moral, desde seu início, quando da apreensão de uma concepção de bem, até o seu término, quando da iminência de uma ação. Para tanto, procede-se a análise de conceitos importantes em torno da teoria do raciocínio prático. Inicialmente tratam-se dois temas preliminares: a felicidade e a virtude moral, e já na sequência se adentra ao tema do raciocínio prático ao se analisar os conceitos de escolha deliberada, de deliberação e, sobretudo, de razão prudencial, visto sua operação cobrir uma parte considerável do raciocínio prático do agente moral. Mas o raciocínio prático não se explica por completo apenas com a compreensão de tais temas e nem ele se resume à operação da razão prudencial. Também a teoria do silogismo prático figura como um elemento importante na explicação sobre como se dá o raciocínio prático. Em decorrência disto é dedicado neste trabalho um amplo espaço à discussão do papel do silogismo prático no corpus aristotelicum, bem como à compreensão de que relação ele estabelece com a deliberação. Determinado seu papel e identificada a espécie de relação que ele mantém com a deliberação, é, finalmente, apresentado o mapa completo do raciocínio prático e é respondida a questão sobre como se dá este raciocínio em Aristóteles.

The goal of this master's thesis is to design and implement agent system for dealing with sportsmen. It will be possible to apply trust and reputation principles on this system. This system is implemented in Jason agent language. Agents there posing as sports club managers. The main target of these managers is to have the maximal profit. The environment of agents is changing by playing the matches between the teams. Players quality evalution follows the played matches. Based on played matches, managers can evaluate the worth of each player and trade them in order to achieve the maximal possible profit. Untrustworthy agents take a place in this system. These agents overvalue their players using inccorect behavior. The experiments will be made within this masters's thesis in order to compare gain of apllication trust and reputation principles.

This work includes an attempt to enhance the autonomy of intelligent agents via real-time learning.In nature, the ability to learn at runtime gives species which can do so key advantages over others. While most AI systems do not need to have this ability but can be trained before deployment, it allows agents to adapt, at runtime, to changing and generally unknown circumstances, and then to exploit their environment for their own purposes. To reach this goal, in this thesis a pragmatic design (ONA) for a general-purpose reasoner incorporating Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS) theory is explored. The design and implementation is presented in detail, in addition to the theoretical foundation. Then, experiments related to various system capabilities are carried out and summarized, together with application projects where ONA is utilized: a traffic surveillance application in the Smart City domain to identify traffic anomalies through real-time reasoning and learning, and a system to help first responders by providing driving assistance and presenting of mission-critical information. Also it is shown how reliable real-time learning can help to increase autonomy of intelligent agents beyond the current state-of-the-art. Here, theoretical and practical comparisons with established frameworks and specific techniques such as Q-Learning are made, and it is shown that ONA does also work in non-Markovian environments where Q-Learning cannot be applied. Some of the reasoner's capabilities are also demonstrated on real robotic hardware. The experiments there show combining learning knowledge at runtime with the utilization of only partly complete mission-related background knowledge given by the designer, allowing the agent to perform a complex task from an only minimal mission specification which does not include learnable details. Overall, ONA is suitable for autonomous agents as it combines, in a single technique, the strengths of behavior learning, which is usually captured by Reinforcement Learning, and means-end reasoning (such as Belief-Desire-Intention models with planner) to effectively utilize knowledge expressed by a designer. / Computer and Information Science