Related papers: Reviving Frequentism
The decoherent (consistent) histories formalism has been proposed as a means of eliminating measurements as a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics. In this formalism, probabilities can be assigned to any description which satisfies a…
The notion of objective probability or chance, as a physical trait of the world, has proved elusive; the identification of chances with actual frequencies does not succeed. An adequate theory of chance should explain not only the connection…
One cannot justifiably presuppose the physical salience of structures derived via decoherence theory based upon an entirely uninterpreted use of the quantum formalism. Non-probabilistic accounts of the emergence of probability via…
Some possible (re)sources of indeterminism and randomness encountered in physics are enumerated. These gaps in the physical laws, if they exist, could possibly be exploited for dualistic interfaces. We also speculate that physical laws and…
Quantum mechanics is a fundamentally probabilistic theory (at least so far as the empirical predictions are concerned). It follows that, if one wants to properly understand quantum mechanics, it is essential to clearly understand the…
Causality never gained the status of a "law" or "principle" in physics. Some recent literature even popularized the false idea that causality is a notion that should be banned from theory. Such misconception relies on an alleged…
The classical notions of continuity and mechanical causality are left in order to refor- mulate the Quantum Theory starting from two principles: I) the intrinsic randomness of quantum process at microphysical level, II) the projective…
This paper introduces a novel type theory and logic for probabilistic reasoning. Its logic is quantitative, with fuzzy predicates. It includes normalisation and conditioning of states. This conditioning uses a key aspect that distinguishes…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
We give here a constructive account of the frequentist approach to probability, by means of natural density. Using this notion of natural density, we introduce some probabilistic versions of the Limited Principle of Omniscience. Finally we…
People who by training end up dealing with probabilities ("statisticians") roughly fall into one of two camps. One is either a frequentist or a Bayesian. To a scientist, who needs to use probabilities to make sense of the real world, this…
The systematic biases seen in people's probability judgments are typically taken as evidence that people do not reason about probability using the rules of probability theory, but instead use heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable…
Randomness is a central concept to statistics and physics. Here, a statistical analysis shows experimental evidence that tossing coins and finding last digits of prime numbers are identical regarding statistics for equally likely outcomes.…
Many physicists think that the maximum entropy formalism is a straightforward application of Bayesian statistical ideas to statistical mechanics. Some even say that statistical mechanics is just the general Bayesian logic of inductive…
Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do…
This is a general description of a probabilistic formalism of mechanics, i.e., an extension of the Newtonian mechanics principles to the systems undergoing random motion. From an analysis of the induction procedure from experimental data to…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
In classical physics, probabilistic or statistical knowledge has been always related to ignorance or inaccurate subjective knowledge about an actual state of affairs. This idea has been extended to quantum mechanics through a completely…
Statistical science (as opposed to mathematical statistics) involves far more than probability theory, for it requires realistic causal models of data generators - even for purely descriptive goals. Statistical decision theory requires more…
Mechanisms for the automation of uncertainty are required for expert systems. Sometimes these mechanisms need to obey the properties of probabilistic reasoning. A purely numeric mechanism, like those proposed so far, cannot provide a…