Related papers: The species problem and its logic: Inescapable Amb…
A concept of "guessability" is defined for sets of sequences of naturals. Eventually, these sets are thoroughly characterized. To do this, a nonstandard logic is developed, a logic containing symbols for the ellipsis as well as for…
In the concluding remarks of Ontological Promiscuity Hobbs (1985) made what we believe to be a very insightful observation: given that semantics is an attempt at specifying the relation between language and the world, if "one can assume a…
We introduce and investigate a family of consequence relations with the goal of capturing certain important patterns of data-driven inference. The inspiring idea for our framework is the fact that data may reject, possibly to some degree,…
The central focus is on clarifying the distinction between sets and proper classes. To this end we identify several categories of concepts (surveyable, definite, indefinite), and we attribute the classical set theoretic paradoxes to a…
Ambiguity is shown in the context of the differential calculus of several variables and with the help of the language of category theory, a way to solve it in its most general form is offered. It is also shown that this new definition is…
Abductive explanations (AXp's) are widely used for understanding decisions of classifiers. Existing definitions are suitable when features are independent. However, we show that ignoring constraints when they exist between features may lead…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
To a good extent, words can be understood as corresponding to patterns or categories that appeared in order to represent concepts and structures that are particularly important or useful in a given time and space. Words are characterized by…
Justification theory is an abstract unifying formalism that captures semantics of various non-monotonic logics. One intriguing problem that has received significant attention is the consistency problem: under which conditions are…
Building software-driven systems that are easily understood becomes a challenge, with their ever-increasing complexity and autonomy. Accordingly, recent research efforts strive to aid in designing explainable systems. Nevertheless, a common…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…
Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…
The difficulties of automatic extraction of definitions and methods from scientific documents lie in two aspects: (1) the complexity and diversity of natural language texts, which requests an analysis method to support the discovery of…
This paper examines the processes involved in attempting to capture the subtlest aspects of nature by the scientific method and argues on this basis that nature is fundamentally elusive and may resist grasping by the methods of science. If…
The term complexity derives etymologically from the Latin plexus, which means interwoven. Intuitively, this implies that something complex is composed by elements that are difficult to separate. This difficulty arises from the relevant…
This paper presents a general framework about what is a decision problem. Our motivation is related to the fact that decision analysis and operational research are structured (as disciplines) around classes of methods, while instead we…
The language commonly used in human genetics can inadvertently pose problems for multiple reasons. Terms like "ancestry", "ethnicity", and other ways of grouping people can have complex, often poorly understood, or multiple meanings within…