Related papers: The species problem and its logic: Inescapable Amb…
The controversy concerning both the definition of the species and methods for inferring the boundaries and numbers of species has occupied biologists for centuries, and the debate itself has become known as the species problem. The modern…
We study the question of whether a given regular language of finite trees can be defined in first-order logic. We develop an algebraic approach to address this question and we use it to derive several necessary and sufficient conditions for…
A qualitatively new, much more liberal and efficient organisation of science is proposed and justified, in connection with growing debate about further role and development of fundamental science. Although the key ideas can be explained…
A recent paper (Manceau and Lambert, 2016) developed a novel approach for describing two well-defined notions of 'species' based on a phylogenetic tree and a phenotypic partition. In this paper, we explore some further combinatorial…
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
Ambiguity is an critical component of language that allows for more effective communication between speakers, but is often ignored in NLP. Recent work suggests that NLP systems may struggle to grasp certain elements of human language…
The intrinsic difficulties in building realistic climate models and in providing complete, reliable and meaningful observational datasets, and the conceptual impossibility of testing theories against data imply that the usual Galilean…
Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…
When we try to search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, we have to follow some guidelines. The first step is to clarify what is to be meant by "Life" and "intelligence", i.e. an attempt to define these words. The word "definition"…
The topic of diversity is an interesting subject, both as a purely mathematical concept and also for its applications to important real-life situations. Unfortunately, although the meaning of diversity seems intuitively clear, no precise…
The paper adresses the problem of reasoning with ambiguities. Semantic representations are presented that leave scope relations between quantifiers and/or other operators unspecified. Truth conditions are provided for these representations…
The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the…
Strategic Decision-Making is always challenging because it is inherently uncertain, ambiguous, risky, and complex. It is the art of possibility. We develop a systematic taxonomy of decision-making frames that consists of 6 bases, 18…
Numerous definitions for complexity have been proposed over the last half century, with little consensus achieved on how to use the term. A definition of complexity is supplied here that is closely related to the Kolmogorov Complexity and…
The attempt to determine the population growth rate from field data reveals several ambiguities in its definition(s), which seem to throw into question the very concept itself. However, an alternative point of view is proposed that not only…
In the literature two notions of the word problem for a variety occur. A variety has a decidable word problem if every finitely presented algebra in the variety has a decidable word problem. It has a uniformly decidable word problem if…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
Ambiguity is a natural language phenomenon occurring at different levels of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It is widely studied; in Psycholinguistics, for instance, we have a variety of competing studies for the human disambiguation…
Determinism is (roughly) the thesis that the past determines the future. But efforts to define it precisely have exposed deep methodological disagreements. Standard possible-worlds formulations of determinism presuppose an "agreement"…