scholarly journals Richard Kilvington and the Theory of Obligations

Vivarium ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (2-4) ◽  
pp. 391-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Read
Keyword(s):  
Counterfactual Reasoning ◽  
False Proposition ◽  
Walter Burley

Kretzmann and Spade were led by Richard Kilvington’s proposed revisions to the rules of obligations in his discussion of the 47th sophism in his Sophismata to claim that the purpose of obligational disputations was the same as that of counterfactual reasoning. Angel d’Ors challenged this interpretation, realising that the reason for Kilvington’s revision was precisely that he found the art of obligation unsuited to the kind of reasoning that lay at the heart of the sophismatic argument. In his criticism, Kilvington focused on a technique used by Walter Burley to force a respondent to grant an arbitrary falsehood and similar to Lewis and Langford’s famous defence of ex impossibili quodlibet. Kilvington observed that just as in obligational disputation one may be obliged to grant a false proposition and deny a true one, so in counterfactual reasoning one may be obliged to doubt a proposition whose truth or falsity one knows, on pain of contradiction.

Sit Verum Obligationes and Counterfactual Reasoning

Vivarium ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara L. Uckelman
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Counterfactual Reasoning ◽  
Walter Burley ◽  
Eleonore Stump

In the early 1980s, Paul V. Spade advanced the thesis that obligational reasoning was counterfactual reasoning, based upon his interpretation of the obligationes of Walter Burley, Richard Kilvington, and Roger Swyneshed. Eleonore Stump in a series of contemporary papers argued against Spade’s thesis with respect to Burley and Swyneshed, provisionally admitting it for Kilvington with the caveat that Kilvington’s theory is by no means clear or non-idiosyncratic. In this paper, we revisit the connection between counterfactual reasoning and obligationes, focusing on one particular treatise, the anonymous early twelfth-century Obligationes Parisienses edited by L.M. de Rijk in the late 70s. We show that while positio in this treatise does not involve counterfactual reasoning, the species sit verum or rei veritas apparently does, and it is precisely this which distinguishes the two species in this treatise.

Fraud Risk Awareness and the Likelihood of Audit Enforcement Action

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jared Eutsler ◽  
Erin Burrell Nickell ◽  
Sean W. G. Robb
Keyword(s):  
Financial Reporting ◽  
Financial Distress ◽  
Professional Community ◽  
Securities And Exchange Commission ◽  
Counterfactual Reasoning ◽  
Going Concern ◽  
Enforcement Action ◽  
Fraud Risk ◽  
Regulatory Perspective ◽  
Going Concern Opinion

SYNOPSIS Prior research indicates that issuing a going concern opinion to financially stressed clients generally reduces the risk of litigation against the auditor following a bankruptcy (Kaplan and Williams 2013; Carcello and Palmrose 1994). However, we propose that a going concern report may indicate prior knowledge of financial distress, an important fraud risk factor, and this may have repercussions for the auditor if a fraud is subsequently uncovered. Consistent with counterfactual reasoning theory, experimental research suggests that a documented awareness of fraud risk actually increases the likelihood of litigation against the auditor following a fraud (Reffett 2010). This concern has been echoed by the professional community (AICPA 2004; Golden, Skalak, and Clayton 2006) and may be exacerbated by the current outcome-based regulatory environment (Peecher, Solomon, and Trotman 2013). To examine this issue we review Auditing and Accounting Enforcement Releases (AAERs) issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for alleged financial reporting frauds between 1995 and 2012. Results suggest that going concern report modifications accompanying the last set of fraudulently stated financials are associated with a greater likelihood of enforcement action against the auditor. This finding is consistent with counterfactual reasoning theory and suggests that, from a regulatory perspective, auditors may be penalized for documenting their awareness of fraud risk when financial statements are later determined to be fraudulent.

scholarly journals Naturalizing Logic: How Knowledge of Mechanisms Enhances Inductive Inference

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Paul Thagard
Keyword(s):  
Causal Inference ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Inductive Inference ◽  
Counterfactual Reasoning

This paper naturalizes inductive inference by showing how scientific knowledge of real mechanisms provides large benefits to it. I show how knowledge about mechanisms contributes to generalization, inference to the best explanation, causal inference, and reasoning with probabilities. Generalization from some A are B to all A are B is more plausible when a mechanism connects A to B. Inference to the best explanation is strengthened when the explanations are mechanistic and when explanatory hypotheses are themselves mechanistically explained. Causal inference in medical explanation, counterfactual reasoning, and analogy also benefit from mechanistic connections. Mechanisms also help with problems concerning the interpretation, availability, and computation of probabilities.

Judging the Relevance of Fair Value for Financial Instruments

2011 ◽  
Vol 86 (6) ◽  
pp. 2075-2098 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Koonce ◽  
Karen K. Nelson ◽  
Catherine M. Shakespeare
Keyword(s):  
Value Relevance ◽  
Fair Value ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Financial Instruments ◽  
Counterfactual Reasoning ◽  
Financial Instrument ◽  
Relevance Judgments

ABSTRACT We conduct three experiments to test if investors' views about fair value are contingent on whether the financial instrument in question is an asset or liability, whether fair values produce gains or losses, and whether the item will or will not be sold/settled soon. We draw on counterfactual reasoning theory from psychology, which suggests that these factors are likely to influence whether investors consider fair value as providing information about forgone opportunities. The latter, in turn, is predicted to influence investors' fair value relevance judgments. Results are generally supportive of the notion that judgments about the relevance of fair value are contingent. Attempts to influence investors' fair value relevance judgments by providing them with information about forgone opportunities are met with mixed success. In particular, our results are sensitive to the type of information provided and indicate the difficulty of overcoming investors' (apparent) strong beliefs about fair value. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

Causal inference via string diagram surgery

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Bart Jacobs ◽  
Aleks Kissinger ◽  
Fabio Zanasi
Keyword(s):  
Causal Inference ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Causal Effects ◽  
Stochastic Matrices ◽  
Counterfactual Reasoning ◽  
Special Cases ◽  
String Diagram ◽  
Set Up

Abstract Extracting causal relationships from observed correlations is a growing area in probabilistic reasoning, originating with the seminal work of Pearl and others from the early 1990s. This paper develops a new, categorically oriented view based on a clear distinction between syntax (string diagrams) and semantics (stochastic matrices), connected via interpretations as structure-preserving functors. A key notion in the identification of causal effects is that of an intervention, whereby a variable is forcefully set to a particular value independent of any prior propensities. We represent the effect of such an intervention as an endo-functor which performs ‘string diagram surgery’ within the syntactic category of string diagrams. This diagram surgery in turn yields a new, interventional distribution via the interpretation functor. While in general there is no way to compute interventional distributions purely from observed data, we show that this is possible in certain special cases using a calculational tool called comb disintegration. We demonstrate the use of this technique on two well-known toy examples: one where we predict the causal effect of smoking on cancer in the presence of a confounding common cause and where we show that this technique provides simple sufficient conditions for computing interventions which apply to a wide variety of situations considered in the causal inference literature; the other one is an illustration of counterfactual reasoning where the same interventional techniques are used, but now in a ‘twinned’ set-up, with two version of the world – one factual and one counterfactual – joined together via exogenous variables that capture the uncertainties at hand.

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