Download or read book Understanding Counterfactuals Understanding Causation written by Christoph Hoerl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve essays explore what bearing empirical findings might have on philosophical concerns about counterfactuals and causation, and how, in turn, work in philosophy might help clarify issues in empirical work on the relationships between causal and counterfactual thought.
Download or read book Interpretable Machine Learning written by Christoph Molnar and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2020 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about making machine learning models and their decisions interpretable. After exploring the concepts of interpretability, you will learn about simple, interpretable models such as decision trees, decision rules and linear regression. Later chapters focus on general model-agnostic methods for interpreting black box models like feature importance and accumulated local effects and explaining individual predictions with Shapley values and LIME. All interpretation methods are explained in depth and discussed critically. How do they work under the hood? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can their outputs be interpreted? This book will enable you to select and correctly apply the interpretation method that is most suitable for your machine learning project.
Download or read book Counterfactuals written by David Lewis and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds.
Download or read book Philosophical Knowledge written by Christian Beyer and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophical Intuitions: Their Target, Their Source, and Their Epistemic Status; Naturalism and Intuitions; Intuitions: Their Nature and Epistemic Efficacy; The Nature of Rational Intuitions and a Fresh Look at the Explanationist Objection; Philosophical Knowledge and Knowledge of Counterfactuals; The Possibility of Knowledge; Transcendental Arguments: a Plea for Modesty; A Priori Existence.
Download or read book Williamson on Knowledge written by Timothy Williamson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-10 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteen leading philosophers offer critical assessments of Timothy Williamson's ground-breaking work on knowledge and its impact on philosophy today. They discuss epistemological issues concerning evidence, defeasibility, scepticism, testimony, assertion, and perception, and debate Williamson's central claim that knowledge is a mental state.
Download or read book Causation and Counterfactuals written by John Collins and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-06-25 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One philosophical approach to causation sees counterfactual dependence as the key to the explanation of causal facts: for example, events c (the cause) and e (the effect) both occur, but had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. The counterfactual analysis of causation became a focus of philosophical debate after the 1973 publication of the late David Lewis's groundbreaking paper, "Causation," which argues against the previously accepted "regularity" analysis and in favor of what he called the "promising alternative" of the counterfactual analysis. Thirty years after Lewis's paper, this book brings together some of the most important recent work connecting—or, in some cases, disputing the connection between—counterfactuals and causation, including the complete version of Lewis's Whitehead lectures, "Causation as Influence," a major reworking of his original paper. Also included is a more recent essay by Lewis, "Void and Object," on causation by omission. Several of the essays first appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Philosophy, but most, including the unabridged version of "Causation as Influence," are published for the first time or in updated forms. Other topics considered include the "trumping" of one event over another in determining causation; de facto dependence; challenges to the transitivity of causation; the possibility that entities other than events are the fundamental causal relata; the distinction between dependence and production in accounts of causation; the distinction between causation and causal explanation; the context-dependence of causation; probabilistic analyses of causation; and a singularist theory of causation.
Download or read book IFS written by W.L. Harper and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With publication of the present volume, The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science enters its second phase. The first fourteen volumes in the Series were produced under the managing editorship of Professor James J. Leach, with the cooperation of a local editorial board. Many of these volumes resulted from colloguia and workshops held in con nection with the University of Western Ontario Graduate Programme in Philosophy of Science. Throughout its seven year history, the Series has been devoted to publication of high quality work in philosophy of science con sidered in its widest extent, including work in philosophy of the special sciences and history of the conceptual development of science. In future, this general editorial emphasis will be maintained, and hopefully, broadened to include important works by scholars working outside the local context. Appointment of a new managing editor, together with an expanded editorial board, brings with it the hope of an enlarged international presence for the Series. Serving the publication needs of those working in the various subfields within philosophy of science is a many-faceted operation. Thus in future the Series will continue to produce edited proceedings of worthwhile scholarly meetings and edited collections of seminal background papers. How ever, the publication priorities will shift emphasis to favour production of monographs in the various fields covered by the scope of the Series. THE MANAGING EDITOR vii W. L. Harper, R. Stalnaker, and G. Pearce (eds.), lIs, vii.
Download or read book The Science of Can and Can t written by Chiara Marletto and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young theoretical physicist's guide to how the radical new science of counterfactuals can reveal the full scope of our universe There is a vast class of properties that science has so far almost entirely neglected. These properties are central to an understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of fundamental phenomena, yet they have traditionally been thought of as impossible to incorporate into fundamental explanations. They relate not only to what is true - the actual - but to what could be true - the counterfactual. This is the science of can and can't. Chiara Marletto, a pioneer in this field, explores the promise that this fascinating, far-reaching approach holds not only for revolutionizing how fundamental physics is formulated, but also for confronting existing technological challenges, from delivering the next generation of information-processing devices to designing AI. In each chapter, Marletto sets out how counterfactuals can solve a vexed open problem in science, and demonstrates that by contemplating the possible as well as the actual, we can break down barriers to knowledge and form a more complete and fruitful picture of the universe. 'Clear, sharp and imaginative... The Science of Can and Can't will open the doors to a dazzling set of concepts and ideas that will change deeply the way you look at the world' David Deutsch, bestselling author of The Beginning of Infinity
Download or read book Counterfactuals and Probability written by Moritz Schulz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moritz Schulz explores counterfactual thought and language: what would have happened if things had gone a different way. Counterfactual questions may concern large scale derivations (what would have happened if Nixon had launched a nuclear attack) or small scale evaluations of minor derivations (what would have happened if I had decided to join a different profession). A common impression, which receives a thorough defence in the book, is that oftentimes we find it impossible to know what would have happened. However, this does not mean that we are completely at a loss: we are typically capable of evaluating counterfactual questions probabilistically: we can say what would have been likely or unlikely to happen. Schulz describes these probabilistic ways of evaluating counterfactual questions and turns the data into a novel account of the workings of counterfactual thought.
Download or read book Knowledge of Counterfactuals written by Ana Smaranda Sandu and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We formalize agents' knowledge of counterfactuals in two different settings, players' behavior in extensive-form games and the process of agents' conditioning their beliefs. For extensive-form games, we define the notion of subgame-rationality, where players best-respond to what they believe would happen at any subgame where they are due to play. This approach settles a well-known disagreement in the literature between Aumann and Stalnaker - supporting Aumann - regarding whether common knowledge of rationality leads to the backwards induction solution in perfect information games. Subgame-rationality also makes it easier to relate epistemic characterizations of Nash equilibrium to those of subgame-perfect equilibrium. We also turn our attention to adding counterfactuals to agents' language, which leads to definitions of rationality which use iterated counterfactuals. For conditional beliefs, we propose new public-announcement style semantics which factor out the act of conditioning, using two traditional modalities, beliefs and counterfactuals. We investigate the set of validities for these semantics. We also take a closer look at the relationship between traditional plausibility models for conditional beliefs within Dynamic Epistemic Logic and models which use, instead, explicit counterfactual shifts. We identify properties that counterfactual shifts need to satisfy in order to simulate plausibility models.
Download or read book Middle Knowledge written by William Hasker and published by Peter Lang Pub Incorporated. This book was released on 2000 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -God only knows what I'd be without you-, sang the Beach Boys in 1966. A certain item of knowledge is here attributed to God - knowledge, so it is said, that no-one else possesses. Some say that this knowledge behaves like that of a super-psychologist, while others say that it is -middle knowledge- - God knows what would have become of the singer in a non-actual world, given certain free decisions of others. This book collects all major contributions to the question whether middle knowledge is possible at all, and if so, what help it would be in spelling out, for example, the doctrine of divine providence."
Download or read book Epistemic Uses of Imagination written by Christopher Badura and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-13 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores a topic that has recently become the subject of increased philosophical interest: how can imagination be put to epistemic use? Though imagination has long been invoked in contexts of modal knowledge, in recent years philosophers have begun to explore its capacity to play an epistemic role in a variety of other contexts as well. In this collection, the contributors address an assortment of issues relating to epistemic uses of imagination, and in particular, they take up the ways in which our imaginings must be constrained so as to justify beliefs and give rise to knowledge. These constraints are explored across several different contexts in which imagination is appealed to for justification, namely reasoning, modality and modal knowledge, thought experiments, and knowledge of self and others. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this volume break new ground in explicating when and how imagination can be epistemically useful. Epistemic Uses of Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students who are working on imagination, as well as those working more broadly in epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind. Chapters 6 and 12 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Modal Epistemology After Rationalism written by Bob Fischer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection highlights the new trend away from rationalism and toward empiricism in the epistemology of modality. Accordingly, the book represents a wide range of positions on the empirical sources of modal knowledge. Readers will find an introduction that surveys the field and provides a brief overview of the work, which progresses from empirically-sensitive rationalist accounts to fully empiricist accounts of modal knowledge. Early chapters focus on challenges to rationalist theories, essence-based approaches to modal knowledge, and the prospects for naturalizing modal epistemology. The middle chapters present positive accounts that reject rationalism, but which stop short of advocating exclusive appeal to empirical sources of modal knowledge. The final chapters mark a transition toward exclusive reliance on empirical sources of modal knowledge. They explore ways of making similarity-based, analogical, inductive, and abductive arguments for modal claims based on empirical information. Modal epistemology is coming into its own as a field, and this book has the potential to anchor a new research agenda.
Download or read book Forbidden Fruit written by Richard Ned Lebow and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-07 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists in 1914? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet? Would the Cold War have ended as it did? In Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ned Lebow develops protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and uses them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments like World War I and the end of the Cold War. He uses experiments, surveys, and a short story to explore why policymakers, historians, and international relations scholars are so resistant to the contingency and indeterminism inherent in open-ended, nonlinear systems. Most controversially, Lebow argues that the difference between counterfactual and so-called factual arguments is misleading, as both can be evidence-rich and logically persuasive. A must-read for social scientists, Forbidden Fruit also examines the binary between fact and fiction and the use of counterfactuals in fictional works like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to understand complex causation and its implications for who we are and what we think makes the social world work.
Download or read book Causal Inference in Statistics written by Judea Pearl and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-01-25 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CAUSAL INFERENCE IN STATISTICS A Primer Causality is central to the understanding and use of data. Without an understanding of cause–effect relationships, we cannot use data to answer questions as basic as "Does this treatment harm or help patients?" But though hundreds of introductory texts are available on statistical methods of data analysis, until now, no beginner-level book has been written about the exploding arsenal of methods that can tease causal information from data. Causal Inference in Statistics fills that gap. Using simple examples and plain language, the book lays out how to define causal parameters; the assumptions necessary to estimate causal parameters in a variety of situations; how to express those assumptions mathematically; whether those assumptions have testable implications; how to predict the effects of interventions; and how to reason counterfactually. These are the foundational tools that any student of statistics needs to acquire in order to use statistical methods to answer causal questions of interest. This book is accessible to anyone with an interest in interpreting data, from undergraduates, professors, researchers, or to the interested layperson. Examples are drawn from a wide variety of fields, including medicine, public policy, and law; a brief introduction to probability and statistics is provided for the uninitiated; and each chapter comes with study questions to reinforce the readers understanding.
Download or read book Middle Knowledge written by E. Dekker and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of "Middle Knowledge" ascribes to God a particular type of knowledge - that he sees not simply what each free creature could do in any circumstance, but what it would do in any circumstance. This type of knowledge is claimed to be helpful to explain how God has perfect foreknowledge, while creatures are free. But is such a knowledge possible, even for God? The author argues that the arguments against it do not stand, and that therefore the theory of "Middle Knowledge" is tenable. The arguments against the coherence of "Middle Knowledge" are examined, of which the most important is that counterfactuals of freedom could not exist (chapter 2). Then the arguments against the adequacy of the theory of "Middle Knowledge" are examined, such as whether or not counterfactual power over the past is implied by the theory of "Middle Knowledge" (chapter 3). A separate chapter is devoted to 'background problems', such as the specific concept of freedom, the notion of God's concurrence, and our view on the nature of possible worlds (chapter 4).
Download or read book Showing Sensing and Seeming written by Dominic Gregory and published by . This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Certain representations are bound in special ways to our sensory capacities. What do these representations have in common, and what makes them different from representations of other kinds? Dominic Gregory employs novel ideas on perceptual states and sensory perspectives to explain the special nature of distinctively sensory representations.
