Related papers: How Intellectual Communities Progress
The problem of knowing who knows what is multi-faceted. Knowledge and expertise lie on a spectrum and one's expertise in one topic area may have little bearing on one's knowledge in a disparate topic area. In addition, we continue to learn…
We examine carefully the rationale underlying the approaches to belief change taken in the literature, and highlight what we view as methodological problems. We argue that to study belief change carefully, we must be quite explicit about…
Social and technical trends have significantly changed methods for evaluating and disseminating computing research. Traditional venues for reviewing and publishing, such as conferences and journals, worked effectively in the past. Recently,…
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…
I provide a critical commentary regarding the attitude of the logician and the philosopher towards the physicist and physics. The commentary is intended to showcase how a general change in attitude towards making scientific inquiries can be…
The evolution of a thematic area undergoes various changes of perspective and adopts new theoretical approaches that arise from the interactions of the community and a wide range of social needs. The advent of digital technologies, such as…
This paper brings attention to epistemic injustice, an issue that has not received much attention in the design of technology and policy. Epistemic injustices occur when individuals are treated unfairly or harmed specifically in relation to…
Philosophy of science attempts to describe all parts of the scientific process in a general way in order to facilitate the description, execution and improvements of this process. So far, all proposed philosophies have only covered existing…
Consider the following belief change/merging scenario. A group of information sources gives a sequence of reports about the state of the world at various instances (e.g. different points in time). The true states at these instances are…
In this paper, we generalize epistemic logic so that it can help reason about ways of combining common knowledge and distributed knowledge such as "common distributed knowledge", "distributed common knowledge", "distributed common…
This paper presents and discusses several methods for reasoning from inconsistent knowledge bases. A so-called argumentative-consequence relation taking into account the existence of consistent arguments in favor of a conclusion and the…
We warn against a common but incomplete understanding of empirical research in machine learning that leads to non-replicable results, makes findings unreliable, and threatens to undermine progress in the field. To overcome this alarming…
Technological cumulativeness is considered one of the main mechanisms for technological progress, yet its exact meaning and dynamics often remain unclear. To develop a better understanding of this mechanism we approach a technology as a…
Substantial efforts have been made in developing various Decision Modeling formalisms, both from industry and academia. A challenging problem is that of expressing decision knowledge in the context of incomplete knowledge. In such contexts,…
National science systems have become embedded in global science and countries do everything they can to harness global knowledge to national economic needs. However, accessing and using the riches of global knowledge can occur only through…
The selection of research topics by scientists can be viewed as an exploration process conducted by individuals with cognitive limitations traversing a complex cognitive landscape influenced by both individual and social factors. While…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
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…
Conscious states (states that there is something it is like to be in) seem both rich or full of detail, and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy…
The classical view of epistemic logic is that an agent knows all the logical consequences of their knowledge base. This assumption of logical omniscience is often unrealistic and makes reasoning computationally intractable. One approach to…