Related papers: Religious and Scientific Faith in Simplicity
Defeasible statements are statements that are likely, or probable, or usually true, but may occasionally be false. Plausible reasoning makes conclusions from statements that are either facts or defeasible statements without using numbers.…
For four decades it has been argued that we need to adopt a new conception of science called aim-oriented empiricism. This has far-reaching implications and repercussions for science, the philosophy of science, academic inquiry in general,…
The explicit link between Promise Theory and Information Theory, while perhaps obvious, is laid out explicitly here. It's shown how causally related observations of promised behaviours relate to the probabilistic formulation of causal…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…
The intuitive notion of evidence has both semantic and syntactic features. In this paper, we develop an {\em evidence logic} for epistemic agents faced with possibly contradictory evidence from different sources. The logic is based on a…
The paper discusses the problem of demarcation between the dimensions of natural and the human sciences in contemporary cosmology. In spite of a common presumption that cosmology is a natural science, the specificity of its alleged subject…
Although hypothesis tests play a prominent role in Science, their interpretation can be challenging. Three issues are (i) the difficulty in making an assertive decision based on the output of an hypothesis test, (ii) the logical…
The traditional concept of knowledge is a justified true belief. The bulk of contemporary epistemology has focused primarily on that task of justification. Truth seems to be a quite obvious criterion-does the belief in question correspond…
One aspect of the algorithmic lens in theoretical computer science is a view on other scientific disciplines that focuses on satisfactory solutions that adhere to real-world constraints, as opposed to solutions that would be optimal…
We motivate and describe a theory of belief in this paper. This theory is developed with the following view of human belief in mind. Consider the belief that an event E will occur (or has occurred or is occurring). An agent either…
Information theory provides a mathematical foundation to measure uncertainty in belief. Belief is represented by a probability distribution that captures our understanding of an outcome's plausibility. Information measures based on…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
Decision-makers abhor uncertainty, and it is certainly true that the less there is of it the better. However, recognizing that uncertainty is part of the equation, particularly for deciding on environmental policy, is a prerequisite for…
This paper argues that philosophers of science have before them an important new task that they urgently need to take up. It is to convince the scientific community to adopt and implement a new philosophy of science that does better justice…
An overview of the experimental and observational status in gravitational physics is given, both for the known tests of general relativity and Newtonian gravity, but also for the increasing number of results where these theories run into…
A fundamental question in causal inference is whether it is possible to reliably infer manipulation effects from observational data. There are a variety of senses of asymptotic reliability in the statistical literature, among which the most…
Some criticisms that have been raised against the Cox approach to probability theory are addressed. Should we use a single real number to measure a degree of rational belief? Can beliefs be compared? Are the Cox axioms obvious? Are there…
Belief fusion is the principle of combining separate beliefs or bodies of evidence originating from different sources. Depending on the situation to be modelled, different belief fusion methods can be applied. Cumulative and averaging…
We extend the notion of belief function to the case where the underlying structure is no more the Boolean lattice of subsets of some universal set, but any lattice, which we will endow with a minimal set of properties according to our…
The tremendous popular success of Chaos Theory shares some common points with the not less fortunate Relativity: they both rely on a misunderstanding. Indeed, ironically , the scientific meaning of these terms for mathematicians and…