Related papers: Religious and Scientific Faith in Simplicity
Common knowledge/belief in rationality is the traditional standard assumption in analysing interaction among agents. This paper proposes a graph-based language for capturing significantly more complicated structures of higher-order beliefs…
The (extended) AGM postulates for belief revision seem to deal with the revision of a given theory K by an arbitrary formula, but not to constrain the revisions of two different theories by the same formula. A new postulate is proposed and…
The process of doing Science in condition of uncertainty is illustrated with a toy experiment in which the inferential and the forecasting aspects are both present. The fundamental aspects of probabilistic reasoning, also relevant in real…
This is a philosophy-intense physics article, or, if you wish, a physics-intense philosophy article. Also, being a mathematician, I tend to view the physics, in particular the essence of quantum physics, in emphasizing the mathematical…
Inference is the process of using facts we know to learn about facts we do not know. A theory of inference gives assumptions necessary to get from the former to the latter, along with a definition for and summary of the resulting…
Interpretation of cosmological data to determine the number and values of parameters describing the universe must not rely solely on statistics but involve physical insight. When statistical techniques such as "model selection" or…
Ockham's razor is a heuristic concept applied in philosophy of science to decide between two or more feasible physical theories. Ockham's razor operates by deciding in favour of the theory with least assumptions and concepts; roughly…
Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that…
(l) I have enough evidence to render the sentence S probable. (la) So, relative to what I know, it is rational of me to believe S. (2) Now that I have more evidence, S may no longer be probable. (2a) So now, relative to what I know, it is…
Possible for science itself, conceptually, to have and will understand differently, let alone science also seen as technology, such as computer science. After all, science and technology are viewpoints diverse by either individual,…
The paper defends the thesis that it's possible to maintain some conceptual preconditions of overcoming of relativistic intentions in modern philosophy of science ("there are no any general foundations in philosophy of science"). We found…
Perhaps more than any other of the physical sciences, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern…
Ensemble theories have received a lot of interest recently as a means of explaining a lot of the detailed complexity observed in reality by a vastly simpler description ``every possibility exists'' and a selection principle ({\em Anthropic…
A knowledge system S describing a part of real world does in general not contain complete information. Reasoning with incomplete information is prone to errors since any belief derived from S may be false in the present state of the world.…
When an analyst or scientist has a belief about how the world works, their thinking can be biased in favor of that belief. Therefore, one bedrock principle of science is to minimize that bias by testing the predictions of one's belief…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
Uncertainty may be taken to characterize inferences, their conclusions, their premises or all three. Under some treatments of uncertainty, the inferences itself is never characterized by uncertainty. We explore both the significance of…
This article reviews and develops an epistemological tradition in the philosophy of science, known as convergentism, which holds that inference methods should be assessed based on their ability to converge to the truth across a range of…
Physical laws are strikingly simple, yet there is no a priori reason for them to be so. I propose that nomic realists -- Humeans and non-Humeans -- should recognize simplicity as a fundamental epistemic guide for discovering and evaluating…
Scientists often think of the world (or some part of it) as a dynamical system, a stochastic process, or a generalization of such a system. Prominent examples of systems are (i) the system of planets orbiting the sun or any other classical…