Related papers: The formal roots of Platonism
Can multiverse hypotheses ever receive empirical support? Critics argue that multiverse scenarios posit unobservable entities, face severe underdetermination, or fall outside the bounds of science. This chapter challenges that view by…
Real-valued logics underlie an increasing number of neuro-symbolic approaches, though typically their logical inference capabilities are characterized only qualitatively. We provide foundations for establishing the correctness and power of…
I argue that scientific determinism is not supported by facts, but results from the elegance of the mathematical language physicists use, in particular from the so-called real numbers and their infinite series of digits. Classical physics…
We survey the logical structure of constructive set theories and point towards directions for future research. Moreover, we analyse the consequences of being extensible for the logical structure of a given constructive set theory. We…
Most definitions of ontology, viewed as a "specification of a conceptualization", agree on the fact that if an ontology can take different forms, it necessarily includes a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning in…
Free will discourse is primarily centred around the thesis of determinism. Much of the literature takes determinism as its starting premise, assuming it true for the sake of discussion, and then proceeds to present arguments for why, if…
We present a definition of cause and effect in terms of decision-theoretic primitives and thereby provide a principled foundation for causal reasoning. Our definition departs from the traditional view of causation in that causal assertions…
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…
I discuss the historical and conceptual roots of reasoning about the parameters of fundamental physics and cosmology based on selection effects. I argue concretely that such reasoning can and should be combined with arguments based on…
Iterated reflection principles have been employed extensively to unfold epistemic commitments that are incurred by accepting a mathematical theory. Recently this has been applied to theories of truth. The idea is to start with a collection…
We revisit our 2013 claim [arXiv:1303.7476] that the Universe is the result of a conspiratorial plot, and find that it cannot be trusted, because even the belief in this conspiracy likely results from a conspiracy. On the basis of…
Despite the fact that beliefs are mental states that cannot be directly observed, humans talk about each others' beliefs on a regular basis, often using rich compositional language to describe what others think and know. What explains this…
In this article we determine the implicational fragments of most of the known subintuitionistic logics.
We advance a doxastic interpretation for many of the logical connectives considered in Dependence Logic and in its extensions, and we argue that Team Semantics is a natural framework for reasoning about beliefs and belief updates.
The theory of institutions is framed as an indexed/fibered duality, where the indexed aspect specifies the fibered aspect. Tarski represented truth in terms of a satisfaction relation. The theory of institutions encodes satisfaction as its…
We introduce a new semantics for a logic of explicit and implicit beliefs based on the concept of multi-agent belief base. Differently from existing Kripke-style semantics for epistemic logic in which the notions of possible world and…
In this paper, we argue that formal systems of first order Arithmetic that admit Goedelian undecidable propositions validly are abnormally non-constructive. We argue that, in such systems, the strong representation of primitive recursive…
Tarski's semantic definition of truth is the composition of its extensional and intensional aspects. Abstract satisfaction, the core of the semantic definition of truth, is the basis for the theory of institutions (Goguen and Burstall). The…
While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic…
In this paper we provide a first analysis of the research questions that arise when dealing with the problem of communicating pieces of formal argumentation through natural language interfaces. It is a generally held opinion that formal…