bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Age of the Universe
Authors: Acock Malcolm 
Published: November 2002

This paper discusses “Russell's hypothesis” that the world sprang into existence five minutes ago. The three most widely accepted “solutions” to the Russell's hypothesis problem are shown to be unsatisfactory.Two main points of interest are involved in the paper's discussion. First, I show all the widely accepted “solutions” to be unacceptable by using the same device—alternatives to Russell's hypothesis. The device, which has never previously been applied to this problem, is a familiar one in discussions of the problem of induction. (Parallels between these two problems are sketched at the paper's end.) Second, the discussion introduces the new concept of crucial consequences for hypotheses that are otherwise different in only trivial linguistic ways.
The Philosophy of Exploratory Data Analysis
Authors: Good I. J. 
Published: November 2002

This paper attempts to define Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) more precisely than usual, and to produce the beginnings of a philosophy of this topical and somewhat novel branch of statistics.Adata setis, roughly speaking, a collection ofk-tuples for somek.In both descriptive statistics and in EDA, thesek-tuples, or functions of them, are represented in a manner matched to human and computer abilities with a view to finding patterns that are not “kinkera”. Akinkusis a pattern that has a negligible probability of being even partly potentially explicable. A potentially explicable pattern is one for which there probably exists a hypothesis of adequate “explicativity”, which is another technical probabilistic concept. A pattern can be judged to be probably potentially explicable even if we cannot find an explanation. The theory of probability understood here is one of partially ordered (interval-valued), subjective (personal) probabilities. Among other topics relevant to a philosophy of EDA are the “reduction” of data; Francis Bacon's philosophy of science; the automatic formulation of hypotheses; successive deepening of hypotheses; neurophysiology; and rationality of type II.
A Conflict between Finite Additivity and Avoiding Dutch Book
Authors: Seidenfeld Teddy , Schervish Mark J. 
Published: November 2002

For Savage (1954) as for de Finetti (1974), the existence of subjective (personal) probability is a consequence of the normative theory of preference. (De Finetti achieves the reduction of belief to desire with his generalized Dutch-Book argument for previsions.) Both Savage and de Finetti rebel against legislating countable additivity for subjective probability. They require merely that probability be finitely additive. Simultaneously, they insist that their theories of preference are weak, accommodating all but self-defeating desires. In this paper we dispute these claims by showing that the following three cannot simultaneously hold:(i) Coherent belief is reducible to rational preference, i.e. the generalized Dutch-Book argument fixes standards of coherence.(ii) Finitely additive probability is coherent.(iii) Admissible preference structures may be free of consequences, i.e. they may lack prizes whose values are robust against all contingencies.
Siegel on Naturalized Epistemology and Natural Science
Authors: Roth Paul A. 
Published: November 2002

What is the relation of epistemology, understood as the study of the evaluation of knowledge claims, and empirical psychology, understood as the study of the causal generation of a person's beliefs? Quine maintains that the relation is one of “mutual containment”.Epistemology in its new setting, conversely, is contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology. … We are studying how the human subject of our study posits bodies and projects his physics from his data, and we appreciate that our position in the world is just like his. Our very epistemological enterprise, therefore, and the psychology wherein it is a component chapter, and the whole of natural science wherein psychology is a component book—all this is our own construction or projection from stimulations like those we were meting out to our epistemological subject. There is thus reciprocal containment, though containment in different senses: epistemology in natural science and natural science in epistemology (Quine 1969, p. 83).
Kyburg on Random Designators
Authors: Levi Isaac 
Published: November 2002

To ground judgments of credal probability on knowledge of chance via direct inference, one should appeal to the information about chances available relative to the most specific description known to be true of the trial event.Thus, to obtain a judgment of credal probability concerning the hypothesis that coin a landed heads at t given that it is known that at t it is known that a was tossed by Levi in 728 Philosophy Hall, the pertinent knowledge of chances concerns the chances of coin a landing heads on a toss of coin a which is (i) a toss at t, (ii) a toss in 728 Philosophy Hall and (iii) a toss by Levi. In many contexts, appeal is made to knowledge of the chance of coin a landing heads on a toss. This appeal, when legitimate, takes for granted that the additional information about the specific tossing listed in (i), (ii) and (iii) is stochastically irrelevant to landing heads and, hence, may be ignored. Such an assumption is a substantive presupposition about chances and not an a priori, self evident or pragmatic principle of methodology.
Chance and Natural Selection
Authors: Beatty John 
Published: November 2002

Among the liveliest disputes in evolutionary biology today are disputes concerning the role of chance in evolution—more specifically, disputes concerning the relative evolutionary importance of natural selection vs. so-called “random drift”. The following discussion is an attempt to sort out some of the broad issues involved in those disputes. In the first half of this paper, I try to explain the differences between evolution by natural selection and evolution by random drift. On some common construals of “natural selection”, those two modes of evolution are completely indistinguishable. Even on a proper construal of “natural selection”, it is difficult to distinguish between the “improbable results of natural selection” and evolution by random drift.In the second half of this paper, I discuss the variety of positions taken by evolutionists with respect to the evolutionary importance of random drift vs. natural selection. I will then consider the variety of issues in question in terms of a conceptual distinction often used to describe the rise of probabilistic thinking in the sciences. I will argue, in particular, that what is going on here is not, as might appear at first sight, just another dispute about the desirability of “stochastic” vs. “deterministic” theories. Modern evolutionists do not argue so much about whether evolution is stochastic, but about how stochastic it is.
Explanatory Asymmetries
Authors: Woodward James 
Published: November 2002

This paper examines a recent attempt by Evan Jobe to account for the asymmetric character of many scientific explanations. It is argued that a purported counterexample to Jobe's account, from Clark Glymour, is inconclusive, but that the account faces independent objections. It is also suggested, contrary to Jobe, that the explanatory relation is not always asymmetric.Sometimes a singular sentence C can figure in a DN derivation of another singular sentence E and E can also figure in a DN derivation of C. Yet while we are inclined to regard the first derivation as an explanation of E, we are not inclined to regard the second derivation as an explanation of C. As Sylvain Bromberger pointed out in a now classic article (1966), one can explain the period of a pendulum by reference to its length and yet, although one can give a DN derivation of the length of a pendulum by reference to its period, this derivation does not seem to represent an explanation.Evan Jobe has recently offered an interesting account of such explanatory asymmetries and Clark Glymour has in turn proposed a counterexample which seems to show that Jobe's account is defective. The aim of this paper is twofold. I shall attempt to show that (a) Glymour's proposed counterexample can be rejected on the grounds that it violates an independently plausible restriction on the role that equalities may play in DN explanation, and that (b) although Glymour's counterexample can be avoided in this way, Jobe's account is defective in several other respects.
Calibration, Coherence, and Scoring Rules
Authors: Seidenfeld Teddy 
Published: November 2002

Can there be good reasons for judging one set of probabilistic assertions morereliablethan a second? There are many candidates for measuring “goodness“ of probabilistic forecasts. Here, I focus on one such aspirant: calibration. Calibration requires an alignment of announced probabilities and observed relative frequency, e.g., 50 percent of forecasts made with the announced probability of .5 occur, 70 percent of forecasts made with probability .7 occur, etc.To summarize the conclusions: (i) Surveys designed to display calibration curves, from which a recalibration is to be calculated, are useless without due consideration for the interconnections between questions (forecasts) in the survey. (ii) Subject to feedback, calibration in the long run is otiose. It gives no ground for validating one coherent opinion over another as each coherent forecaster is (almost) sure of his own long-run calibration. (iii) Calibration in the short run is an inducement to hedge forecasts. A calibration score, in the short run, is improper. It gives the forecaster reason to feign violation of total evidence by enticing him to use the more predictable frequencies in a larger finite reference class than that directly relevant.
Exploratory Statistics and Empiricism
Authors: Mulaik Stanley A. 
Published: November 2002

Exploratory statistics represents the transformation of a realist theory of statistics held by early nineteenth-century astronomers into an empiricist theory of statistics held by biometricians at the turn of the twentieth century. This paper discusses four key ideas in empiricist thought that influenced the form exploratory statistics took: (1) Baconianism, (2) associationism, (3) the search for cognitive calculi, and (4) phenomenalism.Some limitations of and alternatives to exploratory statistics as a hypothesis-generating methodology are discussed.
Perception and Belief: A Regress Problem
Authors: Moser Paul K. 
Published: November 2002

What has belief to do with perception? Some contemporary philosophers have suggested that one's perceiving an object entails one's having a particular perceptual belief, not just some belief or other, about that object. N. R. Hanson, for instance, has illustrated the present view, with respect to visual perception, as follows:What is it to see boxes, staircases, birds, antelopes, bears, goblets, X-ray tubes? It is (at least) to have knowledge of certain sorts. … It is to see that, were certain things done to objects before our eyes, other things would result. … To see an X-ray tube is at least to see that, were it dropped on stone, it would smash. … Seeing a bird in the sky involves seeing that it will not suddenly do vertical snap rolls; and this is more than marks the retina. (Hanson 1958, pp. 20–21)
Intertheoretic Relations and the Future of Psychology
Authors: McCauley Robert N. 
Published: November 2002

In the course of defending both a unified model of intertheoretic relations in science and scientific realism, Paul Churchland has attempted to reinvigorate eliminative materialism. Churchland's eliminativism operates on three claims:(1) that some intertheoretic contexts involve incommensurable theories,(2) that such contexts invariably require the elimination of one theory or the other, and(3) that the relation of psychology and neuroscience is just such a context.I argue that a more detailed account of intertheoretic relations, which distinguishes between the relations that hold between successive theories at a particular level of analysis over time and those that hold between theories at different levels of analysis at the same time, offers grounds for denying Churchland's second and third claims and, therefore, undermines his eliminativism. The paper concludes by suggesting why it is, nonetheless, not unreasonable, given this more detailed model of intertheoretic relations, to expect the eventual elimination of common sense psychology.
Hierarchical Holographic Modeling for Conflict Resolution
Authors: Haimes Y. Y. , Weiner A. 
Published: November 2002

A system as complex as man can be viewed from many sides, and the one or the other axis can be selected to form a theoretical image. Partial truths will emerge, and their mutual intermeshing will gradually raise truth to higher levels. … It has always proven prejudicial to attribute general validity to a partial truth. Yet, a partial truth could not have been reached without overstating its value. Thus the history of truth is intimately interconnected with the history of emotion, but the latter has remained in the dark.Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Critical Notice: Michael Hallett's Cantorian Set Theory and Limitation of Size
Authors: Bunn Robert 
Published: November 2002

The usual objections to infinite numbers, and classes, and series, and the notion that the infinite as such is self-contradictory, may ... be dismissed as groundless. There remains, however, a very grave difficulty, connected with the contradiction [of the class of all classes not members of themselves]. This difficulty does not concern the infinite as such, but only certain very large infinite classes.—Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, p. 362
EPR: The Correlations are Still A Mystery
Authors: Kronz Frederick M. 
Published: November 2002

This paper is a critical discussion of a recent article by Bas van Fraassen (1985) in which he suggests the following view: we should admit that we have no explanation of the EPR correlations, but refuse to consider the correlations as mysterious nevertheless (pp. 126–128). We shall focus on just three of the claims made by van Fraassen in support of this view. The three claims are these:(1)The EPR correlations cannot be explained by signals being transmitted from one component of an EPR compound to the other (pp. 114–115).(2)There is, in the EPR situation, no empirically verifiable action at a distance (pp. 124–126).(3)The demand for an explanation of the EPR correlations is similar to the Aristotelian demand of the post-Newtonian proponents of the law of inertia to explain what keeps a body moving if there are no forces impressed on it (pp. 126–128).
Critical Notice: Patrick Suppes' Probabilistic Metaphysics
Authors: Levi Isaac 
Published: November 2002

In the introduction to Probabilistic Metaphysics (1984), Patrick Suppes declares his intention to refute each of five central tenets of “neotraditional metaphysics”. These tenets run as follows:(1)The future is determined by the past.(2)Every event has a sufficient determinant cause.(3)Knowledge must be grounded in certainty.(4)Scientific knowledge can in principle be made complete.(5)Scientific knowledge and method can in principle be unified.
Critical Notice: John Earman's A Primer on Determinism
Authors: Wilson Mark 
Published: November 2002

Your story is there waiting for you, it has been waiting for you there a hundred years, long before you were born and you cannot change a comma of it. Everything you do you have to do. You are the twig, and the water you float on swept you here. You are the leaf, and the breeze you were borne on blew you here. This is your story and you cannot escape it.—Cornell Woolrich, I Married a Dead Man
Quantum Measurement and the Program for the Unity of Science
Authors: Scharf David C. 
Published: November 2002

It is quite extraordinary, philosophically speaking, that according to the orthodox interpretation:(a)quantum mechanics is a complete and comprehensive theory of microphysics, and yet(b)the role of measurement, in quantum mechanics, cannot be analyzed in terms of the collective effects of the microphysical particles making up the apparatus.It follows that, if the orthodox interpretation is correct, the measurement apparatus and its quantum physical effects cannot be accounted for microreductively. This is significant because it is widely believed that the relation between physical wholes and parts is microreductive. Indeed, many philosophers are persuaded of the inevitability of universal microreduction to the basic elements of microphysics. This is the viewpoint embodied in the program for the unity of science, espoused in recent years, most notably by Robert Causey (1977).
Stable and Retrievable Options
Authors: Rabinowicz Wlodzimierz 
Published: November 2002

An option available to an agent is stable if it maximizes expected utility on the hypothetical assumption that the agent is going to choose it. As is well known, some decision problems lack a stable solution.Paul Weirich (1986 and 1988) has recently proposed a decision principle which prescribes that the option chosen should be at least weakly stable—or “weakly ratifiable”, to use his terminology. According to him, full stability is an excessively strong demand. I shall argue that Weirich's proposal conflicts with the familiar condition of dominance. But I shall also prove that this difficulty can be avoided if we replace weak stability by “moderate” stability—where the latter property is somewhat stronger than the former.It will be seen, however, that this modification does not help against other ailments connected with stability. In particular, to heed the demand of stability (of any kind) is to engage in a form of “wishful acting”. Also, the different stability demands all conflict with a close relative of the dominance condition: the condition of “indifference”. According to this condition, two actions are equally choiceworthy if they would always lead to the same outcomes—whatever state the world is in. On the other hand, the conditions of dominance and indifference would both be satisfied if we replaced a demand for stability (of some kind) by a related but distinct principle of “retrievability”. Retrievability and (full) stability are mutually independent properties of options, but each of them entails moderate stability. The paper ends with a discussion of the relevance of retrievability to theories of choiceworthiness and practical reason.
Induction, Conceptual Spaces and Ai
Authors: Gärdenfors Peter 
Published: November 2002

A computational theory of induction must be able to identify the projectible predicates, that is to distinguish between which predicates can be used in inductive inferences and which cannot. The problems of projectibility are introduced by reviewing some of the stumbling blocks for the theory of induction that was developed by the logical empiricists. My diagnosis of these problems is that the traditional theory of induction, which started from a given (observational) language in relation to which all inductive rules are formulated, does not go deep enough in representing the kind of information used in inductive inferences.As an interlude, I argue that the problem of induction, like so many other problems within AI, is a problem of knowledge representation. To the extent that AI-systems are based on linguistic representations of knowledge, these systems will face basically the same problems as did the logical empiricists over induction.In a more constructive mode, I then outline a non-linguistic knowledge representation based on conceptual spaces. The fundamental units of these spaces are “quality dimensions”. In relation to such a representation it is possible to define “natural” properties which can be used for inductive projections. I argue that this approach evades most of the traditional problems.
Prolegomenon to a Proper Interpretation of Quantum Field Theory
Authors: Teller Paul 
Published: November 2002

This paper digests technical commonplaces of quantum field theory to present an informal interpretation of the theory by emphasizing its connections with the harmonic oscillator. The resulting “harmonic oscillator interpretation” enables newcomers to the subject to get some intuitive feel for the theory. The interpretation clarifies how the theory relates to observation and to quantum mechanical problems connected with observation. Finally the interpretation moves some way towards helping us see what the theory comes to physically.The paper also argues that, in important respects, interpretive problems of quantum field theory are problems we know well from conventional quantum mechanics. An important exception concerns extending the puzzles surrounding the superposition of properties in conventional quantum mechanics to an exactly parallel notion of superposition of particles. Conventional quantum mechanics seems incompatible with a classical notion of property on which all quantities always have definite values. Quantum field theory presents an exactly analogous problem with saying that the number of “particles” is always definite.
Embedding and Uniqueness in Relationist Theories
Authors: Mundy Brent 
Published: November 2002

Relationist theories of space or space-time based on embedding of a physical relational system A into a corresponding geometrical system B raise problems associated with the degree of uniqueness of the embedding. Such uniqueness problems are familiar in the representational theory of measurement (RTM), and are dealt with by imposing a condition of uniqueness of embeddings up to composition with an “admissible transformation” of the space B. Friedman (1983) presents an alternative treatment of the uniqueness problem for embedding relationist theories, developed independently of RTM. Friedman's approach differs from that of RTM in securing uniqueness by adding new primitives to the physical system A in contrast to the RTM approach which adds new axioms. Friedman's proposal has recently been developed and defended by Catton and Solomon (1988).This method of solving the uniqueness problem is here argued to be substantially inferior to the RTM method, both in practice and in principle. In practice we find that in none of the concrete examples offered to illustrate the method is the uniqueness problem actually solved in general. Moreover we find that in the most interesting case (addition to the system A of a finite number of relations of finite degree) the method is in principle incapable of success for mathematical reasons. In addition to these technical difficulties there are compelling methodological reasons for preferring the RTM method to the method of adding primitives.
Approximate Truth and Scientific Realism
Authors: Weston Thomas 
Published: November 2002

This paper describes a theory of accuracy or approximate truth and applies it to problems in the realist interpretation of scientific theories. It argues not only that realism requires approximate truth, but that an adequate theory of approximation also presupposes some elements of a realist interpretation of theories.The paper distinguishes approximate truth from vagueness, probability and verisimilitude, and applies it to problems of confirmation and deduction from inaccurate premises. Basic results are cited, but details appear elsewhere. Objections are surveyed, including arguments by Miller, Laymon, and Laudan. Comparison is made with Niiniluoto's theory of verisimilitude, and the utility of his theory for realism assessed.