Huen, Mei Yiu Jenny. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-90). / Abstracts in English and Chinese; appendix also in Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Introduction --- p.9 / Philosophical Origin of Human Finitude in the Literature of Philosophy / The Concept of Human Finitude in Various Fields of Psychology / The Construct of Beliefs in Human Finitude / Beliefs in Human Finitude as a Lay Theory Approach / Using Lay Beliefs of Human Finitude to Predict Behavioral Tendencies / Relationship between Beliefs in Human Finitude and Other Scales / Aims and Overview of the Studies / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Methodology / Study 1 - Development of the Scale --- p.26 / Participants / Procedures / Content Analysis / Pilot Test 1 / Pilot Test 2 / Study 2a - Qualitative Validation of the BHF --- p.40 / Participants and Procedures / Results and Discussion / Study 2b - Quantitative Validation of the BHF --- p.43 / Participants / Procedures / Results and Discussion / Study 3 - Nomological Network of the BHF --- p.50 / Participants and Procedures / Measures / Results and Discussion / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Discussion --- p.77 / General Discussion / Theoretical Significance / Limitations / Future Directions / Human Existence with Human Limitations: Some Concluding Remarks / References --- p.86 / Appendices / Appendix 1: The Extract Presented in Study 1 --- p.91 / Appendix 2a: Raw Set of 205 items in Chinese --- p.92 / Appendix 2b: Raw Set of 205 items in English (translated) --- p.98 / Appendix 3: Percentage of raters who rated each of the 205 items on the 3 essential levels --- p.106 / Appendix 4: Percentage of raters who categorized each of the 205 items into the 3 hypothesized categories or an otherwise specified category --- p.113 / Appendix 5a: Reduced Set of 184 items in Chinese --- p.120 / Appendix 5b: Reduced Set of 184 items in English --- p.126 / Appendix 6: Level of agreement to the 184 items in the reduced set --- p.133 / Appendix 7: Percentage of respondents who categorized each of the 184 items into the 7 hypothesized categories or an otherwise specified category --- p.143 / Appendix 8a: The final version of the BHF scale in four domains (Chinese version) --- p.153 / Appendix 8b: The final version of the BHF scale in four domains (English version) --- p.155 / Appendix 9: Content validity ratio (CVR) of each of the 60 items in the scale --- p.157 / Appendix 10: Percentage of raters who categorized each of the items of the BHF into the 5 hypothesized domains or an otherwise specified domain --- p.159 / Appendix 11: Factor analysis of the BHF --- p.163 / Appendix 12: The original items of essentialism (subscale of biological basis) and the rephrased items --- p.165

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In this thesis, I explore a number of epistemological issues concerning the relations between knowledge, belief and practical matters. In particular, I defend a view, which I call credal pragmatism. This view is compatible with moderate invariantism, a view that takes knowledge to depend exclusively on truth-relevant factors and to require an invariant epistemic standard of knowledge that can be quite easily met. The thesis includes a negative and a positive part. In the negative part (Ch. 1-4) I do two things: i) I critically examine some moderate invariantist accounts of the intuitive influence of practical factors on knowledge ascriptions, and ii) I provide a criticism of the idea that knowledge is the norm of practical reasoning. In Chapter 1, I provide a general overview of the issues that constitute the background for the views and arguments defended in my thesis. In particular, I provide a thorough discussion of two aspects of the relation between knowledge and practical matters: one is constituted by the practical factors' effects on knowledge ascriptions; the other is the intuitive normative role of knowledge in the regulation and assessments of action and practical reasoning. In Chapter 2, I consider and criticize Timothy Williamson's account according to which an alleged failure to acknowledge the distinction between knowing and knowing that one knows generates the intuition that knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to practical factors. In Chapter 3, I argue against the idea that practical reasoning is governed by a knowledge norm. The argument generalizes to other candidate epistemic norms of practical reasoning. In Chapter 4, I criticise a number of accounts which explain effects of practical factors on knowledge ascriptions in terms of the influence of practical factors on belief. These include the accounts of Brain Weatherson, Dorit Ganson, Kent Bach and Jennifer Nagel. In the positive part of the thesis (Ch. 5-6), I develop and argue for credal pragmatism, an original account of the nature and interaction of different doxastic attitudes and the role of practical factors in their rational regulation. On this view, given a certain fixed amount of evidence, the degree of credence of an adaptively rational agent varies in different circumstances depending on practical factors, while the threshold on the degree of credence necessary for outright belief remains fixed across contexts. This account distinguishes between two kinds of outright belief: occurrent belief, which depends on the actual degree of credence, and dispositional belief, which depends on the degree of credence in normal circumstances. In Chapter 5, I present the view and I show how credal pragmatism can explain the practical factors' effects on knowledge ascriptions. In Chapter 6, I develop a fallibilist account of several features about knowledge ascriptions including i) why in folk epistemological practices knowledge is often taken to be a necessary and sufficient epistemic condition for relying on a proposition in practical reasoning; ii) concessive knowledge attributions and related data; and iii) the infallibilist intuition that knowledge excludes error possibilities.

In this thesis, a model for argument revision is presented, in terms of the expansion and contraction of a system of structured argumentation. At its core, the model uses the belief revision concept of minimal change, but without requiring a pre-determined entrenchment ordering to establish minimality. In the first part of the thesis, a model for argument revision is defined and described. Specified in terms of the ASPIC\+ framework for argumentation, the model is divided into two main concepts: argument expansion, whose goal is to make certain arguments acceptable in the system, possibly by adding them; and argument contraction, whose goal is to make certain arguments unacceptable in the system, possibly by removing them. The goal of a revision process can be achieved in multiple different ways, thus a method of choosing which, based on measures of minimal change, is also specified. The second part of the thesis demonstrates two applications of the model in the context of multi-agent dialogue. The first is used to assist a participant when faced with a need to update its commitment store during persuasion dialogue, while the second shows how a participant can use argument revision techniques to both assess and maintain a lie.The main contributions of the thesis are twofold. First, the characterisation of a model for argument revision, based on established belief revision principles but with a key difference. The model for argument revision demonstrates how it is possible to use measurable effects on the system when determining minimal change instead of relying on a pre-determined, qualitative entrenchment ordering.Second, the thesis demonstrates two applications of argument revision in dialogue. The first is in assisting an agent in retracting a commitment that has been defeated, and for which it can offer no defence. When retracting a claim, the participant may also be required to retract other claims from which the defeated one is a consequence. Applying argument revision techniques allow the participant to reason about what constitutes a minimal set of retractions, in terms of current commitments and potential future communications in the dialogue.The second dialogical application relates to the opposite of retraction; instead of choosing to retract an undefended claim, the participant could instead choose to lie in order to defend it. Argument revision allows the participant to not only assess whether or not lying is ``minimal'' (compared to retracting), but to also to maintain the lie, by using the measures of minimal change.Overall, the thesis shows that not only is justifiable argument revision possible without relying on a pre-determined entrenchment ordering, it is also a powerful tool for participants in a dialogue, assisting with dialogue move selection.

The aim of this thesis is to formulate a better definition of religion for legal purposes than the formulation arrived at by the High Court of Australia in the 1983 decision of Church of the New Faith v Commissioner of Pay-roll Tax (Vic). In that case, known in Australia as the Scientology (or Church of the New Faith) case, two of five justices of the High Court of Australia considered belief in a supernatural Being, Thing or Principle to be an essential prerequisite for a belief system being a religion. Two other justices stated that if such belief were absent it was unlikely that one had a religion. There are major problems with the High Court’s formulation in the Scientology case. First, it does not accommodate a number of important belief systems that are generally regarded as being religious belief systems, even though they do not involve any notion of the supernatural in the sense in which that word is ordinarily understood. Secondly, the Court provided little or no guidance as to how one determines whether a particular belief system involves a supernatural view of reality. The guidance that was given is ill-conceived in any event. Thirdly, it is philosophically impossible to postulate a meaningful distinction between the “natural” and the supposedly “supernatural” in a way that would enable the courts and other decision makers to meaningfully apply the “test” enunciated by the Court. The thesis combines a phenomenological approach and the philosophical realism of the late Professor John Anderson with a view to eliciting those things that permit appreciation or recognition of a thing being “religious”. Ultimately, religion is seen to comprise an amalgam of faith-based ideas, beliefs, practices and activities (which include doctrine, dogma, teachings or principles to be accepted on faith and on authority, a set of sanctioned ideals and values in terms of expected ethical standards and behavior and moral obligations, and various experientially based forms, ceremonies, usages and techniques perceived to be of spiritual or transformative power) based upon faith in a Power, Presence, Being or Principle and which are directed towards a celebration of that which is perceived to be not only ultimate but also divine, holy or sacred, manifest in and supported by a body of persons (consisting of one or more faithxvii based communities) established to give practical expression to those ideas, beliefs, practices and activities. The new definition is tested against 3 very different belief systems, Taoism (Daoism), Marxism and Freemasonry.

When triangulating a belief network we aim to obtain a junction tree of minimum state space. Searching for the optimal triangulation can be cast as a search over all the permutations of the network's vaeriables. Our approach is to embed the discrete set of permutations in a convex continuous domain D. By suitably extending the cost function over D and solving the continous nonlinear optimization task we hope to obtain a good triangulation with respect to the aformentioned cost. In this paper we introduce an upper bound to the total junction tree weight as the cost function. The appropriatedness of this choice is discussed and explored by simulations. Then we present two ways of embedding the new objective function into continuous domains and show that they perform well compared to the best known heuristic.

Background: Older Canadian women are not meeting recommended calcium intake levels and therefore require calcium supplementation to maintain bone mass. Objective: To examine factors associated with calcium supplementation among older community-dwelling women, using the Health Belief Model (HBM) as a conceptual framework. Methods: Data previously collected from Ontario community-dwelling women aged 65 to 90 years (n=798) were analyzed. Multivariable logistic regression was utilized to determine HBM factors associated with calcium supplement use. Results: About half (54%) of women reported taking calcium supplements. Positive correlates of calcium supplementation included: perceived osteoporosis susceptibility, perceived calcium benefits, natural health product use, residing in Toronto and general osteoporosis management factors (discussion with a physician or pharmacist, osteoporosis screening, falls history and preventive health check-ups); a negative correlate included: use of etidronate therapy. Conclusion: Only half of older women were taking calcium supplements. Discussions with healthcare practitioners may help to improve recommended calcium intake levels.

Background: Older Canadian women are not meeting recommended calcium intake levels and therefore require calcium supplementation to maintain bone mass. Objective: To examine factors associated with calcium supplementation among older community-dwelling women, using the Health Belief Model (HBM) as a conceptual framework. Methods: Data previously collected from Ontario community-dwelling women aged 65 to 90 years (n=798) were analyzed. Multivariable logistic regression was utilized to determine HBM factors associated with calcium supplement use. Results: About half (54%) of women reported taking calcium supplements. Positive correlates of calcium supplementation included: perceived osteoporosis susceptibility, perceived calcium benefits, natural health product use, residing in Toronto and general osteoporosis management factors (discussion with a physician or pharmacist, osteoporosis screening, falls history and preventive health check-ups); a negative correlate included: use of etidronate therapy. Conclusion: Only half of older women were taking calcium supplements. Discussions with healthcare practitioners may help to improve recommended calcium intake levels.

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Objective¡G Influenza is an important public health problem, and may seriously damage the elderly population. Although influenza vaccination is a safe, and can significantly reduces morbidity and influenza -related complication mortality in elderly people, however, the influenza vaccination rate did not reach expected goals. Therefore, to explore the potential factors that affect the vaccination rate becomes a critical research question. The purpose of this study was to apply the Health Belief Model, which includes demographic, health state and healthy behaviour, knowledge about influenza and influenza vaccine, perceived susceptility, perceived seriousness, perceived benefit and barrier, and cues to action variables, to understand factors motivating the community elderly people to receive influenza vaccination. Design: The sampling designs were stratified and systematic sampling with total 700 sample. During June 2007 , a structured questionnaire was sent to the elderly people¡]¡Ù65 years¡^in Kaohsiung city¡C Result: The male and female sample distribution rates were equally in 50%, average age was 72.87 years old and 59.6% elderly people had chronic disease (such as hypertension, heart disease and diabetes). Chi-square tests showed that ¡§chronic disease¡¨, ¡§health examination¡¨, ¡§always seek care from specific physician¡¨, ¡§exercise ¡§, ¡§ recognize about influenza and influenza vaccination¡¨, ¡§ perceived seriousness¡¨, ¡§ perceived benefit and barrier¡¨, were significantly associated with having ever been vaccinated. Logistic regression results indicated that ¡§think the influenza vaccination can effectively prevent influenza¡¨, ¡§regular health examination¡¨, ¡§cues to action¡¨ and ¡§perceived barriers¡¨ were found to be the significant predictors of acceptance of influenza vaccination. Conclusions¡GThe study results indicated that health care worker¡¦s attitude about influenza and influenza vaccination will directly influence community elderly people's cognition. Therefore, by educating the health care worker about influenza seriousness and the vaccination effectiveness may successfully promote vaccination rate. Through health education activities in the community, it may increase correct cognition about influenza and the benefit of vaccination. In addition, the health department needs to strengthen the health policy marketing in order to increase influenza vaccinations rate, reduce morbidity and influenza -related complication mortality.