Truth, Probability and Paradox

Truth, Probability and Paradox
Author: John Leslie Mackie
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1973
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198244029

Classic work by one of the most brilliant figures in post-war analytic philosophy.

Philosophies, Puzzles and Paradoxes

Philosophies, Puzzles and Paradoxes
Author: Yudi Pawitan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-02-27
Genre:
ISBN: 9781032377407

Aimed at undergraduate students of statistics and researchers interested in the philosophical foundations of statistics. Of interest to philosophers of science, as well as a general audience interested in puzzles and paradoxes.

Philosophies, Puzzles and Paradoxes

Philosophies, Puzzles and Paradoxes
Author: Yudi Pawitan
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2024-03-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1003849032

Unlike mathematics, statistics deals with real-world data and involves a higher degree of subjectivity due to the role of interpretation. Interpretation is shaped by context as well as the knowledge, preferences, assumptions and preconceptions of the interpreter, leading to a variety of interpretations of concepts as well as results. Philosophies, Puzzles and Paradoxes: A Statistician’s Search for Truth thoroughly examines the distinct philosophical approaches to statistics – Bayesian, frequentist and likelihood – arising from different interpretations of probability and uncertainty. These differences are highlighted through numerous puzzles and paradoxes and illuminated by extensive discussions of the background philosophy of science. Features: Exploration of the philosophy of knowledge and truth and how they relate to deductive and inductive reasoning, and ultimately scientific and statistical thinking Discussion of the philosophical theories of probability that are wider than the standard Bayesian and frequentist views Exposition and examination of Savage’s axioms as the basis of subjective probability and Bayesian statistics Explanation of likelihood and likelihood-based inference, including the controversy surrounding the likelihood principle Discussion of fiducial probability and its evolution to confidence procedure Introduction of extended and hierarchical likelihood for random parameters, with the recognition of confidence as extended likelihood, leading to epistemic confidence as an objective measure of uncertainty for single events Detailed analyses and new variations of classic paradoxes, such as the Monty Hall puzzle, the paradox of the ravens, the exchange paradox, and more Substantive yet non-technical, catering to readers with only introductory exposure to the theory of probability and statistics This book primarily targets statisticians in general, including both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers interested in the philosophical basis of probability and statistics. It is also suitable for philosophers of science and general readers intrigued by puzzles and paradoxes.

Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability

Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability
Author: Lee Walters
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198712731

Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability comprises fifteen original essays on themes from the work of Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy at Oxford. Eminent contributors from philosophy and linguistics discuss a range of topics including conditionals, vagueness, knowledge, reasoning, and probability.

Paradox

Paradox
Author: Doris Olin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2014-12-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317489233

Paradoxes are more than just intellectual puzzles - they raise substantive philosophical issues and offer the promise of increased philosophical knowledge. In this introduction to paradox and paradoxes, Doris Olin shows how seductive paradoxes can be, why they confuse and confound, and why they continue to fascinate. Olin examines the nature of paradox, outlining a rigorous definition and providing a clear and incisive statement of what does and does not count as a resolution of a paradox. The view that a statement can be both true and false, that contradictions can be true, is seen to provide a challenge to the account of paradox resolution, and is explored. With this framework in place, the book then turns to an in-depth treatment of the Prediction Paradox, versions of the Preface/Fallibility Paradox, the Lottery Paradox, Newcomb's Problem, the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Sorites Paradox. Each of these paradoxes is shown to have considerable philosophical punch. Olin unpacks the central arguments in a clear and systematic fashion, offers original analyses and solutions, and exposes further unsettling implications for some of our most deep-seated principles and convictions.

Saving Truth From Paradox

Saving Truth From Paradox
Author: Hartry Field
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2008-03-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191528161

Saving Truth from Paradox is an ambitious investigation into paradoxes of truth and related issues, with occasional forays into notions such as vagueness, the nature of validity, and the Gödel incompleteness theorems. Hartry Field presents a new approach to the paradoxes and provides a systematic and detailed account of the main competing approaches. Part One examines Tarski's, Kripke’s, and Lukasiewicz’s theories of truth, and discusses validity and soundness, and vagueness. Part Two considers a wide range of attempts to resolve the paradoxes within classical logic. In Part Three Field turns to non-classical theories of truth that that restrict excluded middle. He shows that there are theories of this sort in which the conditionals obey many of the classical laws, and that all the semantic paradoxes (not just the simplest ones) can be handled consistently with the naive theory of truth. In Part Four, these theories are extended to the property-theoretic paradoxes and to various other paradoxes, and some issues about the understanding of the notion of validity are addressed. Extended paradoxes, involving the notion of determinate truth, are treated very thoroughly, and a number of different arguments that the theories lead to "revenge problems" are addressed. Finally, Part Five deals with dialetheic approaches to the paradoxes: approaches which, instead of restricting excluded middle, accept certain contradictions but alter classical logic so as to keep them confined to a relatively remote part of the language. Advocates of dialetheic theories have argued them to be better than theories that restrict excluded middle, for instance over issues related to the incompleteness theorems and in avoiding revenge problems. Field argues that dialetheists’ claims on behalf of their theories are quite unfounded, and indeed that on some of these issues all current versions of dialetheism do substantially worse than the best theories that restrict excluded middle.

Recent Essays on Truth and the Liar Paradox

Recent Essays on Truth and the Liar Paradox
Author: Robert L. Martin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1984
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

This collection of recent essays includes important and influential work on the concept of truth and the semantic pardoxes. Using techniques of mathematical logic, these philosophers tackle this age-old problem to offer new insights and widely varying analyses.

Truth, Possibility and Probability

Truth, Possibility and Probability
Author: R. Chuaqui
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 505
Release: 1991-06-20
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0080872778

Anyone involved in the philosophy of science is naturally drawn into the study of the foundations of probability. Different interpretations of probability, based on competing philosophical ideas, lead to different statistical techniques, and frequently to mutually contradictory consequences. This unique book presents a new interpretation of probability, rooted in the traditional interpretation that was current in the 17th and 18th centuries. Mathematical models are constructed based on this interpretation, and statistical inference and decision theory are applied, including some examples in artificial intelligence, solving the main foundational problems. Nonstandard analysis is extensively developed for the construction of the models and in some of the proofs. Many nonstandard theorems are proved, some of them new, in particular, a representation theorem that asserts that any stochastic process can be approximated by a process defined over a space with equiprobable outcomes.

Paradoxes in Probability Theory

Paradoxes in Probability Theory
Author: William Eckhardt
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 85
Release: 2012-09-27
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9400751397

Paradoxes provide a vehicle for exposing misinterpretations and misapplications of accepted principles. This book discusses seven paradoxes surrounding probability theory. Some remain the focus of controversy; others have allegedly been solved, however the accepted solutions are demonstrably incorrect. Each paradox is shown to rest on one or more fallacies. Instead of the esoteric, idiosyncratic, and untested methods that have been brought to bear on these problems, the book invokes uncontroversial probability principles, acceptable both to frequentists and subjectivists. The philosophical disputation inspired by these paradoxes is shown to be misguided and unnecessary; for instance, startling claims concerning human destiny and the nature of reality are directly related to fallacious reasoning in a betting paradox, and a problem analyzed in philosophy journals is resolved by means of a computer program.​

Probability and Evidence

Probability and Evidence
Author: Alfred Jules Ayer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2006
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9780231132756

In this new edition of Probability and Evidence, first published in 1972, one of the foremost analytical philosophers of the twentieth century addresses central questions in epistemology and the philosophy of science. Based on Ayer's influential Dewey Lectures of 1970, Probability and Evidence contains revised versions of the lectures and two additional essays. This new edition includes Graham Macdonald's extensive introduction explaining the book's importance and influence in contemporary philosophy.