Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T20:48:55Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Bruno Beltrame.pdf: 550537 bytes, checksum: dd98c2c17868e3f8b2d425a2f8ed1be8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-05-19 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The aim of this dissertation is to inquire in what sense it is reasonable to locate in Kenneth Arrow s social choice theory and in John Rawls theory of justice the two main theoretical roots of Amartya Sen s capability approach. It will be argued that Arrow s social choice theory had the role of revealing the main deficiencies of the welfare economics theory. Thus, Arrow s analysis points the limitations to be fulfilled in order to arrive at satisfactory theory of social choice indicating, in this sense, the paths to be pursued. In the same manner, it is argued that Ralws theory of justice provided important elements that inspirated certain ethical positions present in Amartya Sen s thought, which appear in his approach to the problem of social choice. To conclude, the main features of the capability approach that can be directly associated with these two theoretical origins are exposed, and it is argued that Sen s theory simultaneously solves the deficiencies pointed by him in the theoretical structure of Arrow s social choice and embodies, even though in a modified way, elements of Rawls thought / O objetivo dessa dissertação é investigar em que sentido é pertinente localizar na teoria da escolha social de Kenneth Arrow e na teoria da justiça de John Rawls as duas principais raízes teóricas da abordagem das capacidades de Amartya Sen. Argumentar-se-á que a teoria da escolha social de Arrow cumpriu o papel de explicitar as deficiências da teoria econômica do bem-estar. Desse modo, as análises de Arrow apontam as limitações a serem superadas para se chegar a uma teoria satisfatória da escolha social indicando em certa medida rumos a serem seguidos. Da mesma maneira argumenta-se que a teoria da justiça de Rawls forneceu elementos importantes que inspiraram certos posicionamentos éticos evidentes no pensamento de Amartya Sen e que se refletem em suas análises da escolha social. Por fim são apresentadas as principais características da abordagem das capacidades que podem ser diretamente associados a estas duas origens teóricas, e será argumentado que a teoria de Sen ao mesmo tempo soluciona as deficiências apontadas por ele na estrutura teórica da escolha social de Arrow e incorpora, ainda que de forma modificada, elementos presentes no pensamento de Rawls

In this thesis, a particular class of agent is singled out for examination. In order to provide a guiding metaphor, we speak of control room agents. Our focus is on rational decision- making by such agents, where the circumstances obtaining are such that rationality is bounded. Control room agents, whether human or non-human, need to reason and act in a changing environment with only limited information available to them. Determining the current state of the environment is a central concern for control room agents if they are to reason and act sensibly. A control room agent cannot plan its actions without having an internal representation (epistemic state) of its environment, and cannot make rational decisions unless this representation, to some level of accuracy, reflects the state of its environment. The focus of this thesis is on three aspects regarding the epistemic functioning of a control room agent: 1. How should the epistemic state of a control room agent be represented in order to facilitate logical analysis? 2. How should a control room agent change its epistemic state upon receiving new information? 3. How should a control room agent combine available information from different sources? In describing the class of control room agents as first-order intentional systems hav- ing both informational and motivational attitudes, an agent-oriented view is adopted. The central construct used in the information-theoretic approach, which is qualitative in nature, is the concept of a templated ordering. Representing the epistemic state of a control room agent by a (special form of) tem- plated ordering signals a departure from the many approaches in which only the beliefs of an agent are represented. Templated orderings allow for the representation of both knowledge and belief. A control room agent changes its epistemic state according to a proposed epistemic change algorithm, which allows the agent to select between two well-established forms of belief change operations, namely, belief revision and belief update. The combination of (possibly conflicting) information from different sources has re- ceived a lot of attention in recent years. Using templated orderings for the semantic representation of information, a new family of purely qualitative merging operations is developed. / School of Computing / Ph. D. (Computer Science)