Related papers: Naturalness, Extra-Empirical Theory Assessments, a…

Finetuning and Naturalness are extra-empirical theory assessments that reflect our expectation how scientific theories should provide an intuitive understanding about the foundations underlying the observed phenomena. Recently, the absence…

Fine-tuning criteria are frequently used to place upper limits on the masses of superpartners in supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. However, commonly used prescriptions for quantifying naturalness have some important…

The argument from naturalness is widely employed in contemporary quantum field theory. Essentially a formalized aesthetic criterion, it received a meaning in the debate on the Higgs mechanism, which goes beyond aesthetics. We follow the…

A well-known topic within the philosophy of physics is the problem of fine-tuning: the fact that the universal constants seem to take non-arbitrary values in order for live to thrive in our Universe. In this paper we will talk about this…

The sensitivity criterion is widely used in measuring the level of fine-tuning, although many examples show it doesn't work under certain circumstances. We discuss the mathematics behind the fine-tuning problems, explain the mathematical…

Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often…

We review recent results that provide a new approach to the old problem of naturalness in supersymmetric models, without relying on subjective definitions for the fine-tuning associated with {\it fixing} the EW scale (to its measured value)…

Background: Natural or quasi experiments are appealing for public health research because they enable the evaluation of events or interventions that are difficult or impossible to manipulate experimentally, such as many policy and health…

I assess various proposals for the source of the intuition that there is something problematic about contextuality, ultimately concluding that contextuality is best thought of in terms of fine-tuning. I then argue that as with other…

Fine-tuning in physics and cosmology is often used as evidence that a theory is incomplete. For example, the parameters of the standard model of particle physics are "unnaturally" small (in various technical senses), which has driven much…

We consider the bounds imposed by naturalness on the masses of superpartners for arbitrary points in nonminimal supersymmetric extensions of the standard model and for arbitrary messenger scales. This constitutes a significant…

We critically analyze the rationale of arguments from finetuning and naturalness in particle physics and cosmology. Some other numerological coincidences are also discussed.

When a physicist says that a theory is fine-tuned, they mean that it must make a suspiciously precise assumption in order to explain a certain observation. This is evidence that the theory is deficient or incomplete. One particular case of…

Natural revision seems so natural: it changes beliefs as little as possible to incorporate new information. Yet, some counterexamples show it wrong. It is so conservative that it never fully believes. It only believes in the current…

We report an inconsistency found in probability theory (also referred to as measure-theoretic probability). For probability measures induced by real-valued random variables, we deduce an "equality" such that one side of the "equality" is a…

In recent work, Nina Emery has defended the view that, in the context of naturalistic metaphysics, one should maintain the same epistemic attitude towards science and metaphysics. That is, naturalists who are scientific realists ought to be…

It is a well-known empirical phenomenon that natural axiomatic theories are pre-well-ordered by consistency strength. Without a precise mathematical definition of "natural," it is unclear how to study this phenomenon mathematically. We will…

There have been numerous publications on the advantages and disadvantages of estimating natural (pure) effects compared to controlled effects. One of the main criticisms of natural effects is that it requires an additional assumption for…

The ideas of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are widely used to reason about the probabilistic predictions of machine-learning models. We identify incoherence in existing discussions of these ideas and suggest this stems from the…

The quantification of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in terms of conditional entropy and mutual information, respectively, has recently become quite common in machine learning. While the properties of these measures, which are rooted…