Related papers: Formalism 25
The AMR (Abstract Meaning Representation) formalism for representing meaning of natural language sentences was not designed to deal with scope and quantifiers. By extending AMR with indices for contexts and formulating constraints on these…
Einstein's article on the EPR paradox is the most cited of his works, but not many know that it was not fully representative of the way he thought about the incompleteness of the quantum formalism. Indeed, his main worry was not…
The purpose of this project is to outline various philosophies on the metaphysics of mathematics that have been prominent since the time of Cantor, highlighting some biographical aspects that have influenced these ideas as well. The main…
If there is a "platonic world" M of mathematical facts, what does M contain precisely? I observe that if M is too large, it is uninteresting, because the value is in the selection, not in the totality; if it is smaller and interesting, it…
The quantum formalism is a ``measurement'' formalism--a phenomenological formalism describing certain macroscopic regularities. We argue that it can be regarded, and best be understood, as arising from Bohmian mechanics, which is what…
One of the reasons for the heated debates around the interpretations of quantum theory is a simple confusion between the notions of formalism versus interpretation. In this note, we make a clear distinction between them and show that there…
Issues related to a materialist philosophy are explored as concerns the implied equivalence of computers running software and human observers. One issue explored concerns the measurement process in quantum mechanics. Another issue explored…
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…
Symmetry is often treated in philosophy of physics as an interpretive problem. A particularly lively dispute concerns local symmetries: do they indicate surplus structure that ought to be expunged, or are they merely a harmless redundancy?…
Differents formalismes sont utilises en mecanique quantique pour la description des etats et des observables : la mecanique ondulatoire, la mecanique matricielle et le formalisme invariant. Nous discutons les problemes et inconvenients du…
This position paper provides a critical but constructive discussion of current practices in benchmarking and evaluative practices in the field of formal reasoning and automated theorem proving. We take the position that open code, open…
We study nonlinear gravity theories in both the metric and the Palatini (metric-affine) formalisms. The nonlinear character of the gravity lagrangian in the metric formalism causes the appearance of a scalar source of matter in Einstein's…
In two recent papers, I have proposed a description of decision analysis that differs from the Bayesian picture painted by Savage, Jeffrey and other classic authors. Response to this view has been either overly enthusiastic or unduly…
Translations between different nonmonotonic formalisms always have been an important topic in the field, in particular to understand the knowledge-representation capabilities those formalisms offer. We provide such an investigation in terms…
The paper discusses fundamental problems in mathematical description of social systems based on physical concepts, with so-called statistical social systems being the main subject of consideration. Basic properties of human beings and human…
A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Most requirements are written in natural language, good for understandability but lacking in…
The paper compares dispositionalism about laws of nature with primitivism. It argues that while the distinction between these two positions can be drawn in a clear-cut manner in classical mechanics, it is less clear in quantum mechanics,…
Abraham Robinson's method for finding model completions is refined and and generalized for model companions and is applied to the theory of fields equipped with both a valuation and an automorphism.
When modelling spacetime and classical physical fields, one typically assumes smoothness (infinite differentiability). But this assumption and its philosophical implications have not been sufficiently scrutinized. For example, we can appeal…
In this paper and a companion paper, we attempt to systematically investigate the possibility that the concept of information may enable a derivation of the quantum formalism from a set of physically comprehensible postulates. To do so, we…