Related papers: Unknown Truths and Unknowable Truths

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 study knowable informational dependence between empirical questions, modeled as continuous functional dependence between variables in a topological setting. We also investigate epistemic independence in topological terms and show that it…

Awareness has been shown to be a useful addition to standard epistemic logic for many applications. However, standard propositional logics for knowledge and awareness cannot express the fact that an agent knows that there are facts of which…

A model of knowledge representation is described in which propositional facts and the relationships among them can be supported by other facts. The set of knowledge which can be supported is called the set of cognitive units, each having…

Controversy about the significance of underdetermination of theories persists in the philosophy and conduct of science. The issue has practical import when research is used to inform decision making, because scientific uncertainty yields…

Constructivist epistemology posits that all truths are knowable. One might ask to what extent constructivism is compatible with naturalized epistemology and knowledge obtained from inference-making using successful scientific theories. If…

The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with…

The problematic relationship between science and philosophy has, since the beginning of modernity, divided the world into two separate domains: nature and human. Some of today's schools of philosophy and epistemological inquiry have…

According to quantum mechanics, statements about the future made by sentient beings like us are, in general, neither true nor false; they must satisfy a many-valued logic. I propose that the truth value of such a statement should be…

The suggestion that particles of the same kind may be indistinguishable in a fundamental sense, even so that challenges to traditional notions of individuality and identity may arise, has first come up in the context of classical…

For a newcomer, paraconsistent logics can be difficult to grasp. Even experts in logic can find the concept of paraconsistency to be suspicious or misguided, if not actually wrong. The problem is that although they usually have much in…

One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…

For many years, at least since McCarthy and Hayes (1969), writers have lamented, and attempted to compensate for, the alleged fact that we often do not have adequate statistical knowledge for governing the uncertainty of belief, for making…

The process of doing Science in condition of uncertainty is illustrated with a toy experiment in which the inferential and the forecasting aspects are both present. The fundamental aspects of probabilistic reasoning, also relevant in real…

We present a propositional logic to reason about the uncertainty of events, where the uncertainty is modeled by a set of probability measures assigning an interval of probability to each event. We give a sound and complete axiomatization…

The main subjects of this text are: (1) Generalization of concepts and operations, like distance and size, to situations where they are not definable in the usual way. (2) A pragmatic theory of handling contradictions using reliability of…

Uncertainty may be taken to characterize inferences, their conclusions, their premises or all three. Under some treatments of uncertainty, the inferences itself is never characterized by uncertainty. We explore both the significance of…

Expectation is a central notion in probability theory. The notion of expectation also makes sense for other notions of uncertainty. We introduce a propositional logic for reasoning about expectation, where the semantics depends on the…

Nonmonotonic logics are usually characterized by the presence of some notion of 'conditional' that fails monotonicity. Research on nonmonotonic logics is therefore largely concerned with the defeasibility of argument forms and the…

Defeasible logics provide several linguistic features to support the expression of defeasible knowledge. There is also a wide variety of such logics, expressing different intuitions about defeasible reasoning. However, the logics can only…