Related papers: Framework Confirmation by Newtonian Abduction
We suggest a lecture on Newtonian gravity, discussing how the use of the scientific method allows to rule out some of the models for the shape of Earth leaving a spherical Earth as the only possibility, in agreement with empirical…
Weighted abduction computes hypotheses that explain input observations. A reasoner of weighted abduction first generates possible hypotheses and then selects the hypothesis that is the most plausible. Since a reasoner employs parameters,…
We introduce an approach to the foundations of physics that is more in line with the foundations of mathematics. The idea is to examine current theories and find a set of starting physical assumptions that are sufficient to rederive them,…
In settings from fact-checking to question answering, we frequently want to know whether a collection of evidence (premises) entails a hypothesis. Existing methods primarily focus on the end-to-end discriminative version of this task, but…
The capability of making explainable inferences regarding physical processes has long been desired. One fundamental physical process is object motion. Inferring what causes the motion of a group of objects can even be a challenging task for…
Juba recently proposed a formulation of learning abductive reasoning from examples, in which both the relative plausibility of various explanations, as well as which explanations are valid, are learned directly from data. The main…
Abduction is one of the most important forms of reasoning; it has been successfully applied to several practical problems such as diagnosis. In this paper we investigate whether the computational complexity of abduction can be reduced by an…
I argue that John Norton's notions of empirical, hypothetical, and counterfactual possibility can be successfully used to analyze counterintuitive examples of physical possibility and align better with modal intuitions of practicing…
Diagnostic reasoning has been characterized logically as consistency-based reasoning or abductive reasoning. Previous analyses in the literature have shown, on the one hand, that choosing the (in general more restrictive) abductive…
The following three sections and appendices are taken from my thesis "The Foundations of Inference and its Application to Fundamental Physics" from 2021, in which I construct a theory of entropic inference from first principles. The…
Abductive reasoning is a non-monotonic formalism stemming from the work of Peirce. It describes the process of deriving the most plausible explanations of known facts. Considering the positive version asking for sets of variables as…
Any representational enterprise must omit variation in order to function. NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics, though Einstein superseded Newton, and the standard picture of scientific progress cannot explain how. A description that omitted…
According to the observations, in our expansive and isotropic relativistic Universe for the gravitational phenomena in a Newtonian approximation the Newtonian non-modified relations are valid. The Friedmann general equations of isotropic…
In this position paper, we propose a reasoning framework that can model the reasoning process underlying natural language inferences. The framework is based on the semantic tableau method, a well-studied proof system in formal logic. Like…
In the present essay we attempt to reconstruct Newtonian mechanics under the guidance of logical principles and of a constructive approach related to the genetic epistemology of J. Piaget and R. Garc\'ia \citep{piag89}. Instead of…
Abductive logic programming offers a formalism to declaratively express and solve problems in areas such as diagnosis, planning, belief revision and hypothetical reasoning. Tabled logic programming offers a computational mechanism that…
The paper introduces a basic logic of knowledge and abduction by extending Levesque logic of only-knowing with an abduction modal operator defined via the combination of basic epistemic concepts. The upshot is an alternative approach to…
It is a widespread belief that results like G\"odel's incompleteness theorems or the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. As the argument goes, there are…
Constructor theory seeks to express all fundamental scientific theories in terms of a dichotomy between possible and impossible physical transformations - those that can be caused to happen and those that cannot. This is a departure from…
I distinguish two senses in which one can take a given physical theory to be `complete'. On the first, a complete physical theory is one that, in principle, completely describes physical reality. On the second, a complete physical theory is…