Related papers: On the Limits of Experimental Knowledge
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
Existing physical theories do not predict every feature of our experience but only certain regularities of that experience. That difference between what could be observed and what can be predicted is one kind of limit on scientific…
Although various limits on the predicability of physical phenomena as well as on physical knowables are commonly established and accepted, we challenge their ultimate validity. More precisely, we claim that fundamental limits arise only…
By 'informational entropy', we understand an inherent boundary to knowability, due e.g. to perceptual, theoretical, evidential or linguistic limits. In this paper, we discuss a logical framework in which this boundary is incorporated into…
What would be the consequences if there were fundamental limits to our ability to experimentally explore the world? In this work we seriously consider this question. We assume the existence of statements whose truth value is not…
A century ago, discoveries of a serious kind of logical error made separately by several leading mathematicians led to acceptance of a sharply enhanced standard for rigor within what ultimately became the foundation for Computer Science. By…
Bounds on quantum probabilities and expectation values are derived for experimental setups associated with Bell-type inequalities. In analogy to the classical bounds, the quantum limits are experimentally testable and therefore serve as…
We review recent work that employs the framework of logical inference to establish a bridge between data gathered through experiments and their objective description in terms of human-made concepts. It is shown that logical inference…
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…
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…
Entanglement is not only the resource that fuels many quantum technologies but also plays a key role for some of the most profound open questions of fundamental physics. Experiments controlling quantum systems at the single quantum level…
A scientific reasoning system makes decisions using objective evidence in the form of independent experimental trials, propositional axioms, and constraints on the probabilities of events. As a first step towards this goal, we propose a…
It is widely believed that theory is useful in physics because it describes simple systems and that strictly empirical phenomenological approaches are necessary for complex biological and social systems. Here we prove based upon an analysis…
Scientific hypotheses typically concern specific aspects of complex, imperfectly understood or entirely unknown mechanisms, such as the effect of gene expression levels on phenotypes or how microbial communities influence environmental…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
We study distributed knowledge, which is what privately informed agents come to know by communicating freely with one another and sharing everything they know. Knowledge is not necessarily partitional: agents may be boundedly rational and…
This paper makes a first step towards a logic of learning from experiments. For this, we investigate formal frameworks for modeling the interaction of causal and (qualitative) epistemic reasoning. Crucial for our approach is the idea that…
At any time, there are areas of science where we are standing at the frontier of knowledge, and can wonder whether we have reached a fundamental limit to human understanding. What is ultimately possible in physics? I will argue here that it…
A student's epistemological stance (be it knowledge as memorized information, knowledge from authority, or knowledge as invented stuff) may constrain that student from reasoning in productive ways while also shaping the inferences a…
By nature, transmissible human knowledge is enumerable: every sentence, movie, audio record can be encoded in a sufficiently long string of 0's and 1's. The works of G\"odel, Turing and others showed that there are inherent limits and…