Download or read book Belief Evidence and Uncertainty written by Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work breaks new ground by carefully distinguishing the concepts of belief, confirmation, and evidence and then integrating them into a better understanding of personal and scientific epistemologies. It outlines a probabilistic framework in which subjective features of personal knowledge and objective features of public knowledge have their true place. It also discusses the bearings of some statistical theorems on both formal and traditional epistemologies while showing how some of the existing paradoxes in both can be resolved with the help of this framework.This book has two central aims: First, to make precise a distinction between the concepts of confirmation and evidence and to argue that failure to recognize this distinction is the source of certain otherwise intractable epistemological problems. The second goal is to demonstrate to philosophers the fundamental importance of statistical and probabilistic methods, at stake in the uncertain conditions in which for the most part we lead our lives, not simply to inferential practice in science, where they are now standard, but to epistemic inference in other contexts as well. Although the argument is rigorous, it is also accessible. No technical knowledge beyond the rudiments of probability theory, arithmetic, and algebra is presupposed, otherwise unfamiliar terms are always defined and a number of concrete examples are given. At the same time, fresh analyses are offered with a discussion of statistical and epistemic reasoning by philosophers. This book will also be of interest to scientists and statisticians looking for a larger view of their own inferential techniques.The book concludes with a technical appendix which introduces an evidential approach to multi-model inference as an alternative to Bayesian model averaging.
Download or read book Uncertainty written by Kostas Kampourakis and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anti-evolutionists, climate denialists, and anti-vaxxers, among others, question some of the best-established scientific findings by referring to the uncertainties in these areas of research. Uncertainty: How It Makes Science Advance shows that uncertainty is an inherent feature of science that makes it advance by motivating further research.
Download or read book When in Doubt Make Belief written by Jeff Bell and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2011-02-09 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When in doubt, make belief. For author and news anchor Jeff Bell, these are words to live by. Literally. As someone who has spent much of his life battling severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), Bell has had to overcome crippling uncertainty few people can imagine. In this powerful follow-up to his critically acclaimed memoir, Rewind, Replay, Repeat, Bell expounds on the principles of applied belief that allowed him to make such a remarkable recovery from this “doubting disease” and the lessons he’s learned while traveling the country talking about doubt. With the help of more than a dozen leading experts, Bell offers readers practical techniques for pushing through the discomfort of uncertainty — whether it stems from OCD or just everyday worries — and demonstrates how a shift from decisions based on fear and doubt to ones based on purpose and service can transform any life. Featuring interviews with Sylvia Boorstein, Patty Duke, Dan Millman, Leon Panetta, Tom Sullivan, and others
Download or read book Surfing Uncertainty written by Andy Clark and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exciting new theories in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence are revealing minds like ours as predictive minds, forever trying to guess the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. In this up-to-the-minute treatment, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores new ways of thinking about perception, action, and the embodied mind.
Download or read book Moral Uncertainty written by William MacAskill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About the bookToby Ord try to fill this gap. They argue that there are distinctive norms that govern how one ought to make decisions and defend an information-sensitive account of how to make such decisions. They do so by developing an analogy between moral uncertainty and social choice, noting that different moral views provide different amounts of information regarding our reasons for action, and arguing that the correct account of decision-making under moral uncertainty must be sensitive to that. Moral Uncertainty also tackles the problem of how to make intertheoretic comparisons, and addresses the implications of their view for metaethics and practical ethics. Very often we are uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do. We do not know how to weigh the interests of animals against humans, how strong our duties are to improve the lives of distant strangers, or how to think about the ethics of bringing new people into existence. But we still need to act. So how should we make decisions in the face of such uncertainty? Though economists and philosophers have extensively studied the issue of decision-making in the face of uncertainty about matters of fact, the question of decision-making given fundamental moral uncertainty has been neglected. In Moral Uncertainty, philosophers William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord try to fill this gap. They argue that there are distinctive norms that govern how one ought to make decisions and defend an information-sensitive account of how to make such decisions. They do so by developing an analogy between moral uncertainty and social choice, noting that different moral views provide different amounts of information regarding our reasons for action, and arguing that the correct account of decision-making under moral uncertainty must be sensitive to that. Moral Uncertainty also tackles the problem of how to make intertheoretic comparisons, and addresses the implications of their view for metaethics and practical ethics.
Download or read book The Virtue of Uncertainty written by Eugene R Moutoux and published by Butler Book Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Virtue of Uncertainty examines Christianity's origin, its purported revelations, its sacred book, its moral principles, its doctrines, its theology, its history, and its effects on society. The purpose of the book is to show that religious certainty flies in the face of evidence and rational thought, and that doubt ought to be a sine qua non for Christians. The author, Eugene R. Moutoux, spent nine years (1953-1962) preparing for the Catholic priesthood; however, finding it increasingly difficult to believe, and wanting a wife and family, he dropped out of the seminary two months before scheduled ordination. Gene has a Ph.D. in German from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He lives in New Albany, Indiana.
Download or read book Risk Uncertainty and Profit written by Frank H. Knight and published by Cosimo, Inc.. This book was released on 2006-11-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timeless classic of economic theory that remains fascinating and pertinent today, this is Frank Knight's famous explanation of why perfect competition cannot eliminate profits, the important differences between "risk" and "uncertainty," and the vital role of the entrepreneur in profitmaking. Based on Knight's PhD dissertation, this 1921 work, balancing theory with fact to come to stunning insights, is a distinct pleasure to read. FRANK H. KNIGHT (1885-1972) is considered by some the greatest American scholar of economics of the 20th century. An economics professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 until 1955, he was one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, which influenced Milton Friedman and George Stigler.
Download or read book The Geometry of Uncertainty written by Fabio Cuzzolin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2021-12-19 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The principal aim of this book is to introduce to the widest possible audience an original view of belief calculus and uncertainty theory. In this geometric approach to uncertainty, uncertainty measures can be seen as points of a suitably complex geometric space, and manipulated in that space, for example, combined or conditioned. In the chapters in Part I, Theories of Uncertainty, the author offers an extensive recapitulation of the state of the art in the mathematics of uncertainty. This part of the book contains the most comprehensive summary to date of the whole of belief theory, with Chap. 4 outlining for the first time, and in a logical order, all the steps of the reasoning chain associated with modelling uncertainty using belief functions, in an attempt to provide a self-contained manual for the working scientist. In addition, the book proposes in Chap. 5 what is possibly the most detailed compendium available of all theories of uncertainty. Part II, The Geometry of Uncertainty, is the core of this book, as it introduces the author’s own geometric approach to uncertainty theory, starting with the geometry of belief functions: Chap. 7 studies the geometry of the space of belief functions, or belief space, both in terms of a simplex and in terms of its recursive bundle structure; Chap. 8 extends the analysis to Dempster’s rule of combination, introducing the notion of a conditional subspace and outlining a simple geometric construction for Dempster’s sum; Chap. 9 delves into the combinatorial properties of plausibility and commonality functions, as equivalent representations of the evidence carried by a belief function; then Chap. 10 starts extending the applicability of the geometric approach to other uncertainty measures, focusing in particular on possibility measures (consonant belief functions) and the related notion of a consistent belief function. The chapters in Part III, Geometric Interplays, are concerned with the interplay of uncertainty measures of different kinds, and the geometry of their relationship, with a particular focus on the approximation problem. Part IV, Geometric Reasoning, examines the application of the geometric approach to the various elements of the reasoning chain illustrated in Chap. 4, in particular conditioning and decision making. Part V concludes the book by outlining a future, complete statistical theory of random sets, future extensions of the geometric approach, and identifying high-impact applications to climate change, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The book is suitable for researchers in artificial intelligence, statistics, and applied science engaged with theories of uncertainty. The book is supported with the most comprehensive bibliography on belief and uncertainty theory.
Download or read book Uncertainty Based Information written by George Klir and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1999-10-19 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information is precious. It reduces our uncertainty in making decisions. Knowledge about the outcome of an uncertain event gives the possessor an advantage. It changes the course of lives, nations, and history itself. Information is the food of Maxwell's demon. His power comes from know ing which particles are hot and which particles are cold. His existence was paradoxical to classical physics and only the realization that information too was a source of power led to his taming. Information has recently become a commodity, traded and sold like or ange juice or hog bellies. Colleges give degrees in information science and information management. Technology of the computer age has provided access to information in overwhelming quantity. Information has become something worth studying in its own right. The purpose of this volume is to introduce key developments and results in the area of generalized information theory, a theory that deals with uncertainty-based information within mathematical frameworks that are broader than classical set theory and probability theory. The volume is organized as follows.
Download or read book Classic Works of the Dempster Shafer Theory of Belief Functions written by Ronald R. Yager and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 813 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of classic research papers on the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions. The book is the authoritative reference in the field of evidential reasoning and an important archival reference in a wide range of areas including uncertainty reasoning in artificial intelligence and decision making in economics, engineering, and management. The book includes a foreword reflecting the development of the theory in the last forty years.
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 Measuring Uncertainty within the Theory of Evidence written by Simona Salicone and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-23 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph considers the evaluation and expression of measurement uncertainty within the mathematical framework of the Theory of Evidence. With a new perspective on the metrology science, the text paves the way for innovative applications in a wide range of areas. Building on Simona Salicone’s Measurement Uncertainty: An Approach via the Mathematical Theory of Evidence, the material covers further developments of the Random Fuzzy Variable (RFV) approach to uncertainty and provides a more robust mathematical and metrological background to the combination of measurement results that leads to a more effective RFV combination method. While the first part of the book introduces measurement uncertainty, the Theory of Evidence, and fuzzy sets, the following parts bring together these concepts and derive an effective methodology for the evaluation and expression of measurement uncertainty. A supplementary downloadable program allows the readers to interact with the proposed approach by generating and combining RFVs through custom measurement functions. With numerous examples of applications, this book provides a comprehensive treatment of the RFV approach to uncertainty that is suitable for any graduate student or researcher with interests in the measurement field.
Download or read book Middle Way Philosophy written by Robert M. Ellis and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015-07-06 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A departure at right angles to thinking in the modern Western world. An important, original work, that should get the widest possible hearing" (Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and his Emissary) Middle Way Philosophy is not about compromise, but about the avoidance of dogma and the integration of conflicting assumptions. To rely on experience as our guide, we need to avoid the interpretation of experience through unnecessary dogmas. Drawing on a range of influences in Buddhist practice, Western philosophy and psychology, Middle Way Philosophy questions alike the assumptions of scientific naturalism, religious revelation and political absolutism, trying to separate what addresses experience in these doctrines from what is merely assumed. This Omnibus edition of Middle Way Philosophy includes all four of the volumes previously published separately: 1. The Path of Objectivity, 2. The Integration of Desire, 3. The Integration of Meaning, and 4. The Integration of Belief.
Download or read book Faith Is Not Blind written by Bruce C. Hafen and published by . This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philosophy of Information written by and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2008-11-10 with total page 823 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information is a recognized fundamental notion across the sciences and humanities, which is crucial to understanding physical computation, communication, and human cognition. The Philosophy of Information brings together the most important perspectives on information. It includes major technical approaches, while also setting out the historical backgrounds of information as well as its contemporary role in many academic fields. Also, special unifying topics are high-lighted that play across many fields, while we also aim at identifying relevant themes for philosophical reflection. There is no established area yet of Philosophy of Information, and this Handbook can help shape one, making sure it is well grounded in scientific expertise. As a side benefit, a book like this can facilitate contacts and collaboration among diverse academic milieus sharing a common interest in information.• First overview of the formal and technical issues involved in the philosophy of information• Integrated presentation of major mathematical approaches to information, form computer science, information theory, and logic• Interdisciplinary themes across the traditional boundaries of natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
Download or read book Theory of Decision Under Uncertainty written by Itzhak Gilboa and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-16 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the classical axiomatic theories of decision under uncertainty, as well as critiques thereof and alternative theories. It focuses on the meaning of probability, discussing some definitions and surveying their scope of applicability. The behavioral definition of subjective probability serves as a way to present the classical theories, culminating in Savage's theorem. The limitations of this result as a definition of probability lead to two directions - first, similar behavioral definitions of more general theories, such as non-additive probabilities and multiple priors, and second, cognitive derivations based on case-based techniques.
Download or read book A Mathematical Theory of Evidence written by Glenn Shafer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both in science and in practical affairs we reason by combining facts only inconclusively supported by evidence. Building on an abstract understanding of this process of combination, this book constructs a new theory of epistemic probability. The theory draws on the work of A. P. Dempster but diverges from Depster's viewpoint by identifying his "lower probabilities" as epistemic probabilities and taking his rule for combining "upper and lower probabilities" as fundamental. The book opens with a critique of the well-known Bayesian theory of epistemic probability. It then proceeds to develop an alternative to the additive set functions and the rule of conditioning of the Bayesian theory: set functions that need only be what Choquet called "monotone of order of infinity." and Dempster's rule for combining such set functions. This rule, together with the idea of "weights of evidence," leads to both an extensive new theory and a better understanding of the Bayesian theory. The book concludes with a brief treatment of statistical inference and a discussion of the limitations of epistemic probability. Appendices contain mathematical proofs, which are relatively elementary and seldom depend on mathematics more advanced that the binomial theorem.
