Browsing by Subject "Probability."
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Item The evidential support relation.(2012-08-08) Byerly, T. Ryan.; Kvanvig, Jonathan L.; Philosophy.; Baylor University. Dept. of Philosophy.Evidentialist views in epistemology, like that of Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, define epistemic justification at least partially in terms of evidential support. According to these views, a person is justified in believing a proposition p just when her evidence supports p. The subject of this dissertation is the evidential support relation at the heart of these views—viz., the relation which obtains between a person’s evidence e and a proposition p just when e supports p in the sense required by these views. I engage three initially tempting accounts of this relation in terms of meta-attitudes, explanatory relations, and probabilistic relations, finding all three accounts wanting. I then propose a fourth, causal account. My thesis is that evidentialists like Conee and Feldman should find this causal account of the evidential support relation more attractive than the other three kinds of account.Item Probabilistic Seismic Demand Model and Fragility Estimates for Symmetric Rigid Blocks Subject to Rocking Motions(2013-01-15) Bakhtiary, EsmaeelThis thesis presents a probability model to predict the maximum rotation of rocking bodies exposed to seismic excitations given specific earthquake intensity measures. After obtaining the nonlinear equations of motion and clarification of the boundaries applied to a rocking body to avoid sliding, a complete discussion is provided on the estimation of approximate period and equivalent damping ratio for the rocking motion. Thereafter, instead of using an iterative solution, which was previously proven defective, a new approximate technique is developed by finding the best representative ground motion intensities. Suitable transformation and normalization are applied to these intensities, and the Bayesian Updating approach is employed to construct a probability model. The proposed probability model is capable of accurately predicting the maximum rotation of a symmetric rocking block given displacement design spectra, peak ground acceleration, peak ground velocity, and arias intensity of an earthquake. This probabilistic model along with the approximate capacity of rocking blocks are used to estimate the fragility curves for rocking blocks with specific geometrical parameters. At the end, a comprehensive and practical form of fragility curves and numerical examples are provided for design purposes.