Related papers: Pragmatic hypotheses in the evolution of science
Although logical consistency is desirable in scientific research, standard statistical hypothesis tests are typically logically inconsistent. In order to address this issue, previous work introduced agnostic hypothesis tests and proved that…
Although hypothesis tests play a prominent role in Science, their interpretation can be challenging. Three issues are (i) the difficulty in making an assertive decision based on the output of an hypothesis test, (ii) the logical…
The scientific community believes in the theory of evolution with a passion that rivals that of any religious belief. This passion extends beyond the irrefutable evidence of the fossil record to the familiar claims of survival of the…
Recent advances in Bayesian probability theory and its application to cognitive science in combination with the development of a new generation of computational tools and methods for probabilistic computation have led to a 'probabilistic…
Statistical hypothesis testing, as formalized by 20th Century statisticians and taught in college statistics courses, has been a cornerstone of 100 years of scientific progress. Nevertheless, the methodology is increasingly questioned in…
Modern physics is founded on two mainstays: mathematical modelling and empirical verification. These two assumptions are prerequisite for the objectivity of scientific discourse. Here we show, however, that they are contradictory, leading…
Causal models and methods have great promise, but their progress has been stalled. Proposals using causality get squeezed between two opposing worldviews. Scientific perfectionism--an insistence on only using "correct" models--slows the…
Scientific principles can undergo various developments. While philosophers of science have acknowledged that such changes occur, there is no systematic account of the development of scientific principles. Here we propose a template for…
Mathematical proofs are both paradigms of certainty and some of the most explicitly-justified arguments that we have in the cultural record. Their very explicitness, however, leads to a paradox, because the probability of error grows…
The probabilistic description of the time evolution of a physical system can take two conceptually distinct forms: a trajectory of probabilities, which specifies how probabilities evolve over time, and a probability on trajectories, which…
Data analysis requires translating higher level questions and hypotheses into computable statistical models. We present a mixed-methods study aimed at identifying the steps, considerations, and challenges involved in operationalizing…
In view of the paradigm shift that makes science ever more data-driven, in this thesis we propose a synthesis method for encoding and managing large-scale deterministic scientific hypotheses as uncertain and probabilistic data. In the form…
Topological models of empirical and formal inquiry are increasingly prevalent. They have emerged in such diverse fields as domain theory [1, 16], formal learning theory [18], epistemology and philosophy of science [10, 15, 8, 9, 2],…
Established frameworks to understand problems with reproducibility in science begin with the relationship between our understanding of the prior probability of a claim and the statistical certainty that should be demanded of it, and explore…
A substantial school in the philosophy of science identifies Bayesian inference with inductive inference and even rationality as such, and seems to be strengthened by the rise and practical success of Bayesian statistics. We argue that the…
Statistics has moved beyond the frequentist-Bayesian controversies of the past. Where does this leave our ability to interpret results? I suggest that a philosophy compatible with statistical practice, labeled here statistical pragmatism,…
While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic…
In dialogical argumentation it is often assumed that the involved parties always correctly identify the intended statements posited by each other, realize all of the associated relations, conform to the three acceptability states (accepted,…
Mechanized theorem proving is becoming the basis of reliable systems programming and rigorous mathematics. Despite decades of progress in proof automation, writing mechanized proofs still requires engineers' expertise and remains labor…
Temporal logics over finite traces have recently seen wide application in a number of areas, from business process modelling, monitoring, and mining to planning and decision making. However, real-life dynamic systems contain a degree of…