Download or read book Bayesian Philosophy of Science written by Jan Sprenger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-23 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should we reason in science? Jan Sprenger and Stephan Hartmann offer a refreshing take on classical topics in philosophy of science, using a single key concept to explain and to elucidate manifold aspects of scientific reasoning. They present good arguments and good inferences as being characterized by their effect on our rational degrees of belief. Refuting the view that there is no place for subjective attitudes in 'objective science', Sprenger and Hartmann explain the value of convincing evidence in terms of a cycle of variations on the theme of representing rational degrees of belief by means of subjective probabilities (and changing them by Bayesian conditionalization). In doing so, they integrate Bayesian inference—the leading theory of rationality in social science—with the practice of 21st century science. Bayesian Philosophy of Science thereby shows how modeling such attitudes improves our understanding of causes, explanations, confirming evidence, and scientific models in general. It combines a scientifically minded and mathematically sophisticated approach with conceptual analysis and attention to methodological problems of modern science, especially in statistical inference, and is therefore a valuable resource for philosophers and scientific practitioners.
Download or read book Inference Method and Decision written by R.D. Rosenkrantz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book grew out of previously published papers of mine composed over a period of years; they have been reworked (sometimes beyond recognition) so as to form a reasonably coherent whole. Part One treats of informative inference. I argue (Chapter 2) that the traditional principle of induction in its clearest formulation (that laws are confirmed by their positive cases) is clearly false. Other formulations in terms of the 'uniformity of nature' or the 'resemblance of the future to the past' seem to me hopelessly unclear. From a Bayesian point of view, 'learning from experience' goes by conditionalization (Bayes' rule). The traditional stum bling block for Bayesians has been to fmd objective probability inputs to conditionalize upon. Subjective Bayesians allow any probability inputs that do not violate the usual axioms of probability. Many subjectivists grant that this liberality seems prodigal but own themselves unable to think of additional constraints that might plausibly be imposed. To be sure, if we could agree on the correct probabilistic representation of 'ignorance' (or absence of pertinent data), then all probabilities obtained by applying Bayes' rule to an 'informationless' prior would be objective. But familiar contra dictions, like the Bertrand paradox, are thought to vitiate all attempts to objectify 'ignorance'. BuUding on the earlier work of Sir Harold Jeffreys, E. T. Jaynes, and the more recent work ofG. E. P. Box and G. E. Tiao, I have elected to bite this bullet. In Chapter 3, I develop and defend an objectivist Bayesian approach.
Download or read book Bayesian Epistemology written by Luc Bovens and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-01-08 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probabilistic models have much to offer to philosophy. We continually receive information from a variety of sources: from our senses, from witnesses, from scientific instruments. When considering whether we should believe this information, we assess whether the sources are independent, how reliable they are, and how plausible and coherent the information is. Bovens and Hartmann provide a systematic Bayesian account of these features of reasoning. Simple Bayesian Networks allow us to model alternative assumptions about the nature of the information sources. Measurement of the coherence of information is a controversial matter: arguably, the more coherent a set of information is, the more confident we may be that its content is true, other things being equal. The authors offer a new treatment of coherence which respects this claim and shows its relevance to scientific theory choice. Bovens and Hartmann apply this methodology to a wide range of much discussed issues regarding evidence, testimony, scientific theories, and voting. Bayesian Epistemology is an essential tool for anyone working on probabilistic methods in philosophy, and has broad implications for many other disciplines.
Download or read book The Equation of Knowledge written by Lê Nguyên Hoang and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Equation of Knowledge: From Bayes' Rule to a Unified Philosophy of Science introduces readers to the Bayesian approach to science: teasing out the link between probability and knowledge. The author strives to make this book accessible to a very broad audience, suitable for professionals, students, and academics, as well as the enthusiastic amateur scientist/mathematician. This book also shows how Bayesianism sheds new light on nearly all areas of knowledge, from philosophy to mathematics, science and engineering, but also law, politics and everyday decision-making. Bayesian thinking is an important topic for research, which has seen dramatic progress in the recent years, and has a significant role to play in the understanding and development of AI and Machine Learning, among many other things. This book seeks to act as a tool for proselytising the benefits and limits of Bayesianism to a wider public. Features Presents the Bayesian approach as a unifying scientific method for a wide range of topics Suitable for a broad audience, including professionals, students, and academics Provides a more accessible, philosophical introduction to the subject that is offered elsewhere
Download or read book Bayes Or Bust written by John Earman and published by Bradford Books. This book was released on 1992 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is currently no viable alternative to the Bayesian analysis of scientific inference, yet the available versions of Bayesianism fail to do justice to several aspects of the testing and confirmation of scientific hypotheses. Bayes or Bust? provides the first balanced treatment of the complex set of issues involved in this nagging conundrum in the philosophy of science. Both Bayesians and anti-Bayesians will find a wealth of new insights on topics ranging from Bayes's original paper to contemporary formal learning theory. In a paper published posthumously in 1763, the Reverend Thomas Bayes made a seminal contribution to the understanding of "analogical or inductive reasoning." Building on his insights, modem Bayesians have developed an account of scientific inference that has attracted numerous champions as well as numerous detractors. Earman argues that Bayesianism provides the best hope for a comprehensive and unified account of scientific inference, yet the presently available versions of Bayesianisin fail to do justice to several aspects of the testing and confirming of scientific theories and hypotheses. By focusing on the need for a resolution to this impasse, Earman sharpens the issues on which a resolution turns. John Earman is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.
Download or read book Bayesian Philosophy of Science written by Jan Sprenger and published by . This book was released on 2019-08 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jan Sprenger and Stephan Hartmann offer a fresh approach to central topics in philosophy of science, including causation, explanation, evidence, and scientific models. Their Bayesian approach uses the concept of degrees of belief to explain and to elucidate manifold aspects of scientific reasoning.
Download or read book Bayesian Rationality written by Mike Oaksford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-22 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For almost 2,500 years, the Western concept of what is to be human has been dominated by the idea that the mind is the seat of reason - humans are, almost by definition, the rational animal. In this text a more radical suggestion for explaining these puzzling aspects of human reasoning is put forward.
Download or read book Scientific Reasoning written by Colin Howson and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach explains, in an accessible style, those elements of the probability calculus that are relevant to Bayesian methods, and argues that the probability calculus is best regarded as a species of logic." "Howson and Urbach contrast the Bayesian with the 'classical' view that was so influential in the last century, and demonstrate that familiar classical procedures for evaluating statistical hypotheses, such as significance tests, point estimation, confidence intervals, and other techniques, provide an utterly false basis for scientific inference. They also expose the well-known non-probabilistic philosophies of Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn as similarly unscientific." "Scientific Reasoning shows how Bayesian theory, by contrast with these increasingly discredited approaches, provides a unified and highly satisfactory account of scientific method, an account which practicing scientists and all those interested in the sciences ought to master."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Subjectivity of Scientists and the Bayesian Approach written by S. James Press and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intriguing examination of works by Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, Einstein, Margaret Mead, and other scientists in terms of subjectivity and the Bayesian approach to statistical analysis. "An insightful work." — Choice. 2001 edition.
Download or read book Bayesianism and Scientific Reasoning written by Jonah N. Schupbach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element explores the Bayesian approach to the logic and epistemology of scientific reasoning. Section 1 introduces the probability calculus as an appealing generalization of classical logic for uncertain reasoning. Section 2 explores some of the vast terrain of Bayesian epistemology. Three epistemological postulates suggested by Thomas Bayes in his seminal work guide the exploration. This section discusses modern developments and defenses of these postulates as well as some important criticisms and complications that lie in wait for the Bayesian epistemologist. Section 3 applies the formal tools and principles of the first two sections to a handful of topics in the epistemology of scientific reasoning: confirmation, explanatory reasoning, evidential diversity and robustness analysis, hypothesis competition, and Ockham's Razor.
Download or read book Bayesian Analysis for the Social Sciences written by Simon Jackman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bayesian methods are increasingly being used in the social sciences, as the problems encountered lend themselves so naturally to the subjective qualities of Bayesian methodology. This book provides an accessible introduction to Bayesian methods, tailored specifically for social science students. It contains lots of real examples from political science, psychology, sociology, and economics, exercises in all chapters, and detailed descriptions of all the key concepts, without assuming any background in statistics beyond a first course. It features examples of how to implement the methods using WinBUGS – the most-widely used Bayesian analysis software in the world – and R – an open-source statistical software. The book is supported by a Website featuring WinBUGS and R code, and data sets.
Download or read book Foundations of Bayesianism written by D. Corfield and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an authoritative collection of papers addressing the key challenges that face the Bayesian interpretation of probability today. The volume includes important criticisms of Bayesian reasoning and gives an insight into some of the points of disagreement amongst advocates of the Bayesian approach. It will be of interest to graduate students, researchers, those involved with the applications of Bayesian reasoning, and philosophers.
Download or read book Non Bayesian Decision Theory written by Martin Peterson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-06-06 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For quite some time, philosophers, economists, and statisticians have endorsed a view on rational choice known as Bayesianism. The work on this book has grown out of a feeling that the Bayesian view has come to dominate the academic com- nitytosuchanextentthatalternative,non-Bayesianpositionsareseldomextensively researched. Needless to say, I think this is a pity. Non-Bayesian positions deserve to be examined with much greater care, and the present work is an attempt to defend what I believe to be a coherent and reasonably detailed non-Bayesian account of decision theory. The main thesis I defend can be summarised as follows. Rational agents m- imise subjective expected utility, but contrary to what is claimed by Bayesians, ut- ity and subjective probability should not be de?ned in terms of preferences over uncertain prospects. On the contrary, rational decision makers need only consider preferences over certain outcomes. It will be shown that utility and probability fu- tions derived in a non-Bayesian manner can be used for generating preferences over uncertain prospects, that support the principle of maximising subjective expected utility. To some extent, this non-Bayesian view gives an account of what modern - cision theory could have been like, had decision theorists not entered the Bayesian path discovered by Ramsey, de Finetti, Savage, and others. I will not discuss all previous non-Bayesian positions presented in the literature.
Download or read book Degrees of Belief written by Franz Huber and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-12-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology is the first book to give a balanced overview of the competing theories of degrees of belief. It also explicitly relates these debates to more traditional concerns of the philosophy of language and mind and epistemic logic.
Download or read book Bayesian Statistics for the Social Sciences written by David Kaplan and published by Guilford Publications. This book was released on 2023-10-02 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of this practical book equips social science researchers to apply the latest Bayesian methodologies to their data analysis problems. It includes new chapters on model uncertainty, Bayesian variable selection and sparsity, and Bayesian workflow for statistical modeling. Clearly explaining frequentist and epistemic probability and prior distributions, the second edition emphasizes use of the open-source RStan software package. The text covers Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, Bayesian linear regression and generalized linear models, model evaluation and comparison, multilevel modeling, models for continuous and categorical latent variables, missing data, and more. Concepts are fully illustrated with worked-through examples from large-scale educational and social science databases, such as the Program for International Student Assessment and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Annotated RStan code appears in screened boxes; the companion website (www.guilford.com/kaplan-materials) provides data sets and code for the book's examples. New to This Edition *Utilizes the R interface to Stan--faster and more stable than previously available Bayesian software--for most of the applications discussed. *Coverage of Hamiltonian MC; Cromwell’s rule; Jeffreys' prior; the LKJ prior for correlation matrices; model evaluation and model comparison, with a critique of the Bayesian information criterion; variational Bayes as an alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling; and other new topics. *Chapters on Bayesian variable selection and sparsity, model uncertainty and model averaging, and Bayesian workflow for statistical modeling.
Download or read book The Theory That Would Not Die written by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This account of how a once reviled theory, Baye’s rule, came to underpin modern life is both approachable and engrossing" (Sunday Times). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. In the first-ever account of Bayes' rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the generations-long human drama surrounding it. McGrayne traces the rule’s discovery by an 18th century amateur mathematician through its development by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years—while practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information, such as Alan Turing's work breaking Germany's Enigma code during World War II. McGrayne also explains how the advent of computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes' rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security. Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, The Theory That Would Not Die is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest controversies of all time.
Download or read book Bayesian Epistemology written by Luc Bovens and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2003 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probabilistic models have much to offer to philosophy. We continually receive information from many sources - our senses, witnesses, scientific instruments - and assess whether to believe it. The authors provide a systematic Bayesian account of these features of reasoning.
