Related papers: In Defence of the Material Conditional
The algorithmic independence of conditionals, which postulates that the causal mechanism is algorithmically independent of the cause, has recently inspired many highly successful approaches to distinguish cause from effect given only…
Nonmonotonic reasoning is a pattern of reasoning that allows an agent to make and retract (tentative) conclusions from inconclusive evidence. This paper gives a possible-worlds interpretation of the nonmonotonic reasoning problem based on…
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…
From classical mechanics to quantum field theory, the physical facts at one point in space are held to be independent of those at other points in space. I propose that we can usefully challenge this orthodoxy in order to explain otherwise…
In this paper, we highlight a profound difference between conditional statements in mathematical logic and natural languages. This difference exists even when the conditional statements are used in mathematical theorems.
We suggest that the question of why is there something rather than nothing can be answered by the existence of two types of nothing. We propose that matter occurs at the boundaries of intersection of both nothings. This accords with the…
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…
The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between various conditions implying essential undecidability: our main result is that there exists a theory $T$ in which all partially recursive functions are representable, yet $T$…
A fundamental question in causal inference is whether it is possible to reliably infer manipulation effects from observational data. There are a variety of senses of asymptotic reliability in the statistical literature, among which the most…
We introduce a tool for analysing models of $\textnormal{CT}^-$, the compositional truth theory over Peano Arithmetic. We present a new proof of Lachlan's theorem that arithmetical part of models of $\textnormal{PA}$ are recursively…
In a decision problem, observations are said to be material if they must be taken into account to perform optimally. Decision problems have an underlying (graphical) causal structure, which may sometimes be used to evaluate certain…
Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…
In recent work, we introduced a new semantics for conditionals, covering a large class of what we call preconditionals. In this paper, we undertake an axiomatic study of preconditionals and subclasses of preconditionals. We then prove that…
A skeleton of the category with finite coproducts D freely generated by a single object has a subcategory isomorphic to a skeleton of the category with finite products C freely generated by a countable set of objects. As a consequence, we…
The nature of the scientific method is controversial with claims that a single scientific method does not even exist. However the scientific method does exist. It is the building of logical and self consistent models to describe nature. The…
The no-supervenience theorem limits the capacity of physicalist theories to provide a comprehensive account of human consciousness. The proof of the theorem is difficult to formalize because it relies on both alethic and epistemic notions…
The reasoning with qualitative uncertainty measures involves comparative statements about events in terms of their likeliness without necessarily assigning an exact numerical value to these events. The paper is divided into two parts. In…
We consider the problem of estimating counterfactual quantities when prior knowledge is available in the form of disjunctive statements. These include disjunction of conditions (e.g., "the patient is more than 60 years of age") as well as…
I defend my arguments in quant-ph/9806002, which have recently been criticized by L. Vaidman (quant-ph/9811092). I emphasize that the correct usage of the ABL rule applies not to a genuine counterfactual statement but rather to a…
Interpretability research takes counterfactual theories of causality for granted. Most causal methods rely on counterfactual interventions to inputs or the activations of particular model components, followed by observations of the change…