Related papers: The formal roots of Platonism
On the basis of elementary thinking about language functioning, a solution of truth paradoxes is given and a corresponding semantics of a truth predicate is founded. It is shown that it is precisely the two-valued description of the maximal…
A key assumption fuelling optimism about the progress of large language models (LLMs) in accurately and comprehensively modelling the world is that the truth is systematic: true statements about the world form a whole that is not just…
In many expert and everyday reasoning contexts it is very useful to reason on the basis of defeasible assumptions. For instance, if the information at hand is incomplete we often use plausible assumptions, or if the information is…
With vast amounts of high-quality information at our fingertips, how is it possible that many people believe that the Earth is flat and vaccination harmful? Motivated by this question, we quantify the implications of an opinion formation…
This paper develops a formal account of causal explanation, grounded in a theory of conversational pragmatics, and inspired by the interventionist idea that explanation is about asking and answering what-if-things-had-been-different…
This paper outlines a general formal framework for reasoning systems, intended to support future analysis of inference architectures across domains. We model reasoning systems as structured tuples comprising phenomena, explanation space,…
Argumentation is a non-monotonic process. This reflects the fact that argumentation involves uncertain information, and so new information can cause a change in the conclusions drawn. However, the base logic does not need to be…
In this position paper, we propose a reasoning framework that can model the reasoning process underlying natural language inferences. The framework is based on the semantic tableau method, a well-studied proof system in formal logic. Like…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard…
There is knowledge. There is belief. And there is tacit agreement.' 'We may talk about objects. We may talk about attributes of the objects. Or we may talk both about objects and their attributes.' This work inspects tacit agreements on…
We propose new definitions of (causal) explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion paper. Essentially, an explanation is a…
The paper aims at emphasizing that, even relaxed, the hypothesis of compositionality has to face many problems when used for interpreting natural language texts. Rather than fixing these problems within the compositional framework, we…
Explaining autonomous and intelligent systems is critical in order to improve trust in their decisions. Counterfactuals have emerged as one of the most compelling forms of explanation. They address ``why not'' questions by revealing how…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
This article presents the most interesting philosophical issues as they arise in causal set theory. The first concerns the apparent disappearance of spacetime at the fundamental level. It shows how the looming empirical incoherence is…
Given the large variety of existing logical formalisms it is of utmost importance to select the most adequate one for a specific purpose, e.g. for representing the knowledge relevant for a particular application or for using the formalism…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Metaphysical interpretations of set theory are either inconsistent or incoherent. The uses of sets in mathematics actually involve three distinct kinds of collections (surveyable, definite, and heuristic), which are governed by three…
We extend the meet-implication fragment of propositional intuitionistic logic with a meet-preserving modality. We give semantics based on semilattices and a duality result with a suitable notion of descriptive frame. As a consequence we…