Kenneth A. Presting - Home Page

Last year (2005-6) I completed the MA program in Philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill.  I am currently wrapping up a long-term project to re-describe the Newcomb-style problems of decision theory as paradoxes of self reference.  I hope to show that problems of incompleteness and undefinability occur naturally in decision theory, much as they do in logic.  I am currently in the market for another project, to be my dissertation!

My ongoing interests include many areas of philosophy, including philosophy of biology and application of economic theory to problems of adaptation and natural selection.  I am also interested in the foundations of measurement, confirmation, and evidence, especially techniques of multivariate statistics which can be applied to problems of social science.  

MA Thesis:

Analysis of Conditional Expressions    .pdf file

        submitted to the Philosophy Department, University of North Carolina

        Chapel Hill, NC, April 2006

Publications:

"Embedding a Cylindrical Algebra into a Boolean Algebra"

        Forthcoming, Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 2007

"On the Representation of Decision Problems",     .doc file
        Procceedings of the Rationality and Knowledge Workshop

        Malaga, Spain, August 2006

General Propositions and Triviality

        Proceedings of the Conference on Logical Foundations of Economic Theory

        Liverpool, England,  July 2006

Grants Awarded:

Travel Grant to Second Texas Decision Theory Workshop, October 2006

        From - University of Texas at Austin

        September, 2006

Travel Grant to "Bayesianism, Fundamentally" workshop at University of Pittsburgh

        From - Center for the History & Philosophy of Science, U. Pitt.

        October, 2006

Service and Memberships

Reviewer:    International Conference on Cognitive Science, ICCS2006

                     Cognitive Science Society and Society for Mathematical Psychology

                     Vancouver, Canada,  July 2006 

Member:     Game Theory Society

                    Association for Symbolic Logic

                    Philosophy of Science Association

                    Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineering

                    American Philosophical Association

Refereed Conference Presentations:
 

"On the Representation of Decision Problems",     .doc file
        APA Pacific Division Meeting

        San Francisco, CA.  March 2007

        Society for Exact Philosophy meeting,
        Vancouver, Canada.  March 2003

        North Carolina Philosophical Society
        Davidson, NC.  February 2003
 

"Stability and Biology: The Case of Like-Begets-Like"  .doc file

        APA Pacific Division Meeting

        Portland, OR,  March 2006

“Lange on Stability”    .doc file
         APA Central Division Meeting
         Chicago, IL, April 2006
 

The Valuation of Choices in "The Logic of Decision"

        Society for Exact Philosophy

        San Diego, CA, May 2006

        Foundations of the Formal Sciences V - Infinite Games

        Bonn, Germany, November 2004

“Probability for First-Order Languages”    .ppt file
         International Colloquium on Dutch Book Arguments
         Prague, Czech Republic, August 2005
 

“Linear Representation of Cylindrical Operations”    .ppt file
         Algebraic and Topological Methods in Non-Classical Logic
         Barcelona, Spain, June 2005
 

“Non-Trivial Conditional Probability”    .doc file
         Society for Exact Philosophy
         Toronto, Canada, May 2005              

         North Carolina Philosophical Society
         Durham, NC, February 2005

         Princeton-Rutgers Graduate Conference
         Princeton, NJ  January 2005     
 

“Composition and Substitution: Formal Languages from an Algebraic Point of View”.      .ppt file
         Society for Philosophy and Psychology

         Conference on Compositionality, Concepts, and Cognition,

         Düsseldorf, Germany. February 2004
 

"Computability and Newcomb's Problem",     .doc file
        First European Conference on Cognitive Economics,
        Paris, France, September 2004                                   
 

        Logical Foundations of Economic Theory (LOFT VI),
        Leipzig, Germany, July 2004

        APA Pacific Division Meeting,
        San Francisco, CA, March 2003

“Conditional Probability: The Next Generation”,
        Probability Summer School
        University of Konstanz, Germany, July 2003

        Tennessee Philosophical Association
        Memphis, TN,  November 2003

"Penal Events, or, Rational Choice Theory and the Problem of Punishment",
        APA Pacific Division Meeting

        Portland, OR,  March 1988

"Rationality and Freedom: Words About the Body",
        APA Central Division Meeting

        Chicago, IL, February 1987
 

"Platonism and the Predication Relation",
        APA Pacific Division Meeting, 1987

        San Francisco, CA,  March 1987

My previous career was consulting as a software engineer.

My Resume in Microsoft Word format