Related papers: Dismantling the Surprise Test "Paradox"
The answers people give when asked to 'think of the unexpected' for everyday event scenarios appear to be more expected than unexpected. There are expected unexpected outcomes that closely adhere to the given information in a scenario,…
In this paper, we present a paradox arising from the acceptance of the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM) within classical mathematics. Specifically, we construct a nonzero analytic function on a connected open subset of the complex plane whose…
How did humanity coax mathematics from the aether? We explore the Platonic view that mathematics can be discovered from its axioms - a game of conjecture and proof. We describe Minimo (Mathematics from Intrinsic Motivation): an agent that…
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…
Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excellent, if not the best available account of inductive reasoning. This is so because there are general and definite rules for the change of subjective probabilities through…
This paper gives a counterexample to the impossibility, by G\"odel's second incompleteness theorem, of proving a formula expressing the consistency of arithmetic in a fragment of arithmetic on the assumption that the latter is consistent.…
The primary objective of this note is to revisit the two envelope problem and propose a simple resolution. It is argued that the paradox arises from the ambiguity associated with the money content $x of the chosen envelope. When X=x is…
If no optimal propositional proof system exists, we (and independently Pudl\'ak) prove that ruling out length $t$ proofs of any unprovable sentence is hard. This mapping from unprovable to hard-to-prove sentences powerfully translates facts…
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…
Paradoxes are interesting puzzles in philosophy and mathematics, and they could be even more fascinating, when turned into proofs and theorems. For example, Liar's paradox can be translated into a propositional tautology, and Barber's…
The Parrondo's paradox is a counterintuitive phenomenon where individually-losing strategies can be combined in producing a winning expectation. In this paper, the issues surrounding the Parrondo's paradox are investigated. The focus is…
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…
The concept of informal mathematical proof considered in intuitionism is apparently vulnerable to a version of the liar paradox. However, a careful reevaluation of this concept reveals a subtle error whose correction blocks the…
The hidden-variable question is whether or not various properties --- randomness or correlation, for example --- that are observed in the outcomes of an experiment can be explained via introduction of extra (hidden) variables which are…
Real-life conjectures do not come with instructions saying whether they they should be proven or, instead, refuted. Yet, as we now know, in either case the final argument produced had better be not just convincing but actually verifiable in…
Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form $p\wedge\Diamond\neg p$ ('$p$, but it might be that not $p$') appears to be a…
Classical logic predicts that everything (thus nothing useful at all) follows from inconsistency. A paraconsistent logic is a logic where an inconsistency does not lead to such an explosion, and since in practice consistency is difficult to…
This chapter provides a hands-on tutorial on the important technique known as self-reducibility. Through a series of "Challenge Problems" that are theorems that the reader will---after being given definitions and tools---try to prove, the…
Topological models of empirical and formal inquiry are increasingly prevalent. They have emerged in such diverse fields as domain theory [1, 16], formal learning theory [18], epistemology and philosophy of science [10, 15, 8, 9, 2],…