Related papers: The relevance of ontological commitments
Accepting a proposition means that our confidence in this proposition is strictly greater than the confidence in its negation. This paper investigates the subclass of uncertainty measures, expressing confidence, that capture the idea of…
We analyze the informal semantic conception of proof and axiomatize the proof relation and the provability operator. A self referential propositional calculus which admits provable liar type sentences is introduced and proven consistent. We…
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. I show that the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is…
One can argue that one of the main roles of the subject of statistics is to characterize what the evidence in collected data says about questions of scientific interest. There are two broad questions that we will refer to as the estimation…
The ability to conduct logical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of intelligent human behavior, and thus an important problem along the way to human-level artificial intelligence. Traditionally, logic-based symbolic methods from the field…
Our approach is basically a coherence approach, but we avoid the well-known pitfalls of coherence theories of truth. Consistency is replaced by reliability, which expresses support and attack, and, in principle, every theory (or agent,…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
We investigate the reasons of having confidence in mathematical theorems. The formalist point of view maintains that formal derivations underlying proofs, although usually not carried out in practice, contribute to this confidence. Opposing…
The ability to reason under uncertainty and with incomplete information is a fundamental requirement of decision support technology. In this paper we argue that the concentration on theoretical techniques for the evaluation and selection of…
This paper introduces pragmatic hypotheses and relates this concept to the spiral of scientific evolution. Previous works determined a characterization of logically consistent statistical hypothesis tests and showed that the modal operators…
Considering the high heterogeneity of the ontologies pub-lished on the web, ontology matching is a crucial issue whose aim is to establish links between an entity of a source ontology and one or several entities from a target ontology.…
Expectation is a central notion in probability theory. The notion of expectation also makes sense for other notions of uncertainty. We introduce a propositional logic for reasoning about expectation, where the semantics depends on the…
Unlike mathematics, in which the notion of truth might be abstract, in physics, the emphasis must be placed on algorithmic procedures for obtaining numerical results subject to the experimental verifiability. For, a physical science is…
We argue that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a mathematical proof to have epistemic value that it be "correct", in the sense of formalizable in a formal proof system. We then present a view on the relationship between…
Expectation is a central notion in probability theory. The notion of expectation also makes sense for other notions of uncertainty. We introduce a propositional logic for reasoning about expectation, where the semantics depends on the…
Controversy about the significance of underdetermination of theories persists in the philosophy and conduct of science. The issue has practical import when research is used to inform decision making, because scientific uncertainty yields…
A popular scientific contribution should not contradict any established facts and ought to be understandable. I complied with both these requirements and am offering a sufficiently full introduction to probability theory. Furthermore, I…
The analysis of theory-confirmation generally takes the deductive form: show that a theory in conjunction with physical data and auxiliary hypotheses yield a prediction about phenomena; verify the prediction; provide a quantitative measure…
Many formalisms combining ontology languages with uncertainty, usually in the form of probabilities, have been studied over the years. Most of these formalisms, however, assume that the probabilistic structure of the knowledge remains…