Related papers: Pragmatic hypotheses in the evolution of science

We develop a descriptive account of scientific reward in physics based on the concept of the time-dependent Polydoxon, defined as the structured set of empirically viable theories at a given time. We argue that highly rewarded…

Conjecturing formulas and other symbolic relations occurs frequently in number theory and combinatorics. If we could automate conjecturing, we could benefit not only from speeding up, but also from finding conjectures previously out of our…

The evolution of grammatical systems of syntactic and semantic composition is modeled here with a novel application of reinforcement learning theory. To test the functionalist thesis that speakers' expressive purposes shape their language,…

This book presents a methodology and philosophy of empirical science based on large scale lossless data compression. In this view a theory is scientific if it can be used to build a data compression program, and it is valuable if it can…

We extend the theoretical framework of proof mining by establishing general logical metatheorems that allow for the extraction of the computational content of theorems with prima facie "non-computational" proofs from probability theory,…

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…

In this paper we propose a new perspective on the evolution and history of the idea of mathematical proof. Proofs will be studied at three levels: syntactical, semantical and pragmatical. Computer-assisted proofs will be give a special…

One of the main goals of scientific research is to provide a description of the empirical data which is as accurate and comprehensive as possible, while relying on as few and simple assumptions as possible. In this paper, I propose a…

Statistical thermodynamics delivers the probability distribution of the equilibrium state of matter through the constrained maximization of a special functional, entropy. Its elegance and enormous success have led to numerous attempts to…

One way to understand the role history plays on evolutionary trajectories is by giving ancient life a second opportunity to evolve. Our ability to empirically perform such an experiment, however, is limited by current experimental designs.…

This paper introduces epistemic graphs as a generalization of the epistemic approach to probabilistic argumentation. In these graphs, an argument can be believed or disbelieved up to a given degree, thus providing a more fine--grained…

Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication, and present a long-standing challenge for artificial language models. We perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven…

Basic principles of mathematical modeling are reviewed in this book, with the focus on physics and its practical applications, and examples of selected mathematical methods are presented. Most of the models have been imported from physics…

Causality is a fundamental part of the scientific endeavour to understand the world. Unfortunately, causality is still taboo in much of psychology and social science. Motivated by a growing number of recommendations for the importance of…

We propose a conjugate logic that can capture the behavior of quantum and quantum-like systems. The proposal is similar to the more generic concept of epistemic logic: it encodes knowledge or perhaps more correctly, predictions about…

Probabilistic extensions of logic programming languages, such as ProbLog, integrate logical reasoning with probabilistic inference to evaluate probabilities of output relations; however, prior work does not account for potential statistical…

This article aims to develop a new account of scientific explanation for computer simulations. To this end, two questions are answered: what is the explanatory relation for computer simulations? and what kind of epistemic gain should be…

The Simulation Argument has gained significant traction in the public arena. It has offered a hypothesis based on probabilistic analysis of its assumptions that we are likely to exist within a computer simulation. This has been derived from…

Attempts to replicate probabilistic reasoning in expert systems have typically overlooked a critical ingredient of that process. Probabilistic analysis typically requires extensive judgments regarding interdependencies among hypotheses and…

Providing examples is one of the most common way for end-users to interact with program synthesizers. However, program synthesis systems assume that examples consistent with the program are chosen at random, and do not exploit the fact that…