Uncertainty, Certainty, and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rani Lill Anjum ◽  
Stephen Mumford
Keyword(s):  
Maximal Degree ◽  
Degrees Of Belief ◽  
Degree Of Belief ◽  
The World ◽  
New Evidence

The issue of probability enters into science because there can be inconclusive evidence, degrees of belief, and chancy phenomena in the world. This is relevant to Bayesian thinking, for example, which accepts that theories should be accepted only tentatively and considered more or less probable in the light of new evidence. Probability can be modelled in a simplified way, such as where a maximal degree of belief is assigned the value 1. A question remains of how well this reflects the reality of epistemic phenomena, which seems to allow cases where there is more than certainty, i.e. where you would still be certain of something even with less evidence than there is.

Probability theory and epistemology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Loewer
Keyword(s):  
Probability Theory ◽  
Rational Belief ◽  
Bayesian Epistemology ◽  
Dutch Book ◽  
Degrees Of Belief ◽  
Rational Person ◽  
Degree Of Belief ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Probabilistic Epistemology ◽  
Instrumental Goal

The primary uses of probability in epistemology are to measure degrees of belief and to formulate conditions for rational belief and rational change of belief. The degree of belief a person has in a proposition A is a measure of their willingness to act on A to obtain satisfaction of their preferences. According to probabilistic epistemology, sometimes called ‘Bayesian epistemology’, an ideally rational person’s degrees of belief satisfy the axioms of probability. For example, their degrees of belief in A and -A must sum to 1. The most important condition on changing degrees of belief given new evidence is called ‘conditionalization’. According to this, upon acquiring evidence E a rational person will change their degree of belief assigned to A to the conditional probability of A given E. Roughly, this rule says that the change should be minimal while accommodating the new evidence. There are arguments, ‘Dutch book arguments’, that are claimed to demonstrate that failure to satisfy these conditions makes a person who acts on their degrees of belief liable to perform actions that necessarily frustrate their preferences. Radical Bayesian epistemologists claim that rationality is completely characterized by these conditions. A more moderate view is that Bayesian conditions should be supplemented by other conditions specifying rational degrees of belief. Support for Bayesian epistemology comes from the fact that various aspects of scientific method can be grounded in satisfaction of Bayesian conditions. Further, it can be shown that there is a close connection between having true belief as an instrumental goal and satisfaction of the Bayesian conditions. Some critics of Bayesian epistemology reject the probabilistic conditions on rationality as unrealistic. They say that people do not have precise degrees of belief and even if they did it would not be possible in general to satisfy the conditions. Some go further and reject the conditions themselves. Others claim that the conditions are much too weak to capture rationality and that in fact almost any reasoning can be characterized so as to satisfy them. The extent to which Bayesian epistemology contributes to traditional epistemological concerns of characterizing knowledge and methods for obtaining knowledge is controversial.

The Metaphysics of Representation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Robert G. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Representational Content ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Degrees Of Belief ◽  
Public Language ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Final Layer ◽  
The World ◽  
Interactive Relationship ◽  
Compositional Interpretation ◽  
The One

What is representation? How do the more primitive aspects of our world come together to generate it? How do different kinds of representation relate to one another? This book identifies the metaphysical foundations for representational facts. The story told is in three parts. The most primitive layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of sensation/perception and intention/action, which are the two most basic modes in which an individual and the world interact. It is argued that we can understand how this kind of representation can exist in a fundamentally physical world so long as we have an independent, illuminating grip on functions and causation. The second layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of (degrees of) belief and desire, whose representational content goes far beyond the immediate perceptable and manipulable environment. It is argued that the correct belief/desire interpretation of an agent is the one which makes their action-guiding states, given their perceptual evidence, most rational. The final layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of words and sentences, human artefacts with representational content. It is argued that one can give an illuminating account of the conditions under which a compositional interpretation of a public language like English is correct by appeal to patterns emerging from the attitudes conventionally expressed by sentences. The three-layer metaphysics of representation resolves long-standing underdetermination puzzles, predicts and explains patterns in the way that concepts denote, and articulates a delicate interactive relationship between the foundations of language and thought.

scholarly journals Early Koranic Manuscripts: The Blue Koran Debate

Elements ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Neumeier
Keyword(s):  
Islamic Art ◽  
The World ◽  
New Evidence

The art of calligraphy and illumination of manuscripts holds a revered place in Islamic art because Musilms believe that God revelaed to them the World through the Prophet Muhammad in the form of the Koran. The beauty of the Blue Koran, one of the most exquisite early manuscripts of the Koran, speaks for itself with its richly dyed parchment with gold and silver inking. But this object of beauty is an object of mystery as well. A century-long debate among scholars centers around the Blue Koran and its provenance. Here their opinions will be weighed and new evidence and theories will be brought to light. This project was begun in anticipatio of the exhibit at the McMullen Museum in the fall of 2006 of the David Collection, an impressive and varied collection of Islamic art.

scholarly journals Privatisation Around the World: New Evidence from Panel Data

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Domenico Siniscalco ◽  
Bernardo Bortolotti ◽  
Marcella Fantini
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
The World ◽  
New Evidence

scholarly journals Brain Concussion: New Classifications and Current Physiopathological Knowledge of the Disease

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (04) ◽  
pp. 284-291
Author(s):  
Daniel Damiani ◽  
Durval Damiani
Keyword(s):  
Review Paper ◽  
Present Review ◽  
Emergency Rooms ◽  
Late Sequelae ◽  
Brain Concussion ◽  
Cerebral Concussion ◽  
High Prevalence ◽  
The World ◽  
New Evidence

AbstractThe present review paper aims to update the definition and classification of cerebral concussion, highlighting its pathophysiological mechanisms. The high prevalence of cerebral concussion in emergency rooms around the world makes it necessary to know its proper management to avoid its late sequelae, which traditionally compromise cognitive aspects of behavior. New evidence on potential neuroprotective treatments is being investigated.

scholarly journals Unpacking piped water consumption subsidies: Who benefits? New evidence from 10 countries

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Abramovsky ◽  
Luis Andrés ◽  
George Joseph ◽  
Juan Pablo Rud ◽  
Germán Sember ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Water Consumption ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Middle Income Countries ◽  
Piped Water ◽  
Poor Households ◽  
The World ◽  
Tariff Structures ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Low And Middle Income

Abstract This paper provides new evidence on the recent performance of piped water consumption subsidies in terms of pro-poor targeting for 10 low- and middle-income countries around the world. Our results suggest that in these countries, existing tariff structures fall well short of recovering the costs of service provision, and that, moreover, the resulting subsidies largely fail to achieve the goal of improving the accessibility and affordability of piped water among the poor. Instead, the majority of subsidies in all 10 countries are captured by the richest households. On average, across the 10 low- and middle-income countries examined, 56% of subsidies end up in the pockets of the richest 20%, but only 6% of subsidies find their way to the poorest 20%. This is predominantly due to the most vulnerable segments of the population facing challenges in access and connection to piped water services. Shortcomings in the design of the subsidy, conditional on poor households being connected, exist but are less important.

Halley’s Atheism and the end of the world

1977 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-40 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Exact Nature ◽  
The Public ◽  
Earth History ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
The World ◽  
Consistent Picture ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
New Evidence

Edmond Halley’s views on theology and natural philosophy have often drawn puzzled attention both from his contemporaries and from subsequent scholars. There has seemed to be a contrast between some public statements he made when under pressure from ecclesiastical authority, and his continued, and privately-held, faith in the over-arching relevance of science (1). However, it now emerges from some unpublished papers which Halley read to the Royal Society in the 1690s that he made public his own debate over such issues as the eternity of the world. This new evidence gives us a much more consistent picture of Halley’s work, and it refutes the view that there were two Halleys—the public orthodox face and the private heterodox one. It is true that the work of Edmond Halley presents us with a picture of considerable diversity. Nevertheless, throughout the 1690s he was primarily concerned with an investigation of Earth history independently of scriptural authority, and this gave some unity to his varied researches. However, there were both ideological and institutional problems with such a programme. The Anglican establishment of the period after 1688 was filled with a sense of threat. This led to a series of statements antipathetic to Halley’s attitude, including a devaluation of the power of unaided reason and an emphasis on the power of God’s Providence. Halley’s failure to obtain the Savilian Chair of Astronomy in 1691/2 was due in part, perhaps, to this antipathy. Yet this failure was also precipitated by the personal antagonism aroused by Halley’s jocular style, and the innate irascibility of Flamsteed. Because of these other sources of controversy the exact nature of Halley’s atheism remains confused. Even his identification with the ‘infidel mathematician’ of Berkeley’s Analyst is problematic. Yet the fact is that Halley took these charges seriously enough to spend several years working to show that one of them was unjustified. He had been accused of believing that the world would continue for eternity, and he was to try and show that it must, in the end, come to a halt.

scholarly journals Halley and the eternity of the world revisited

2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 315-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitri Levitin
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Players ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
The Relationship

Since the publication in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of an article by Simon Schaffer in 1977, it has been a historiographical commonplace that there was an ‘underlying unity’ to the religio-philosophical opinions of Edmond Halley, specifically on issues concerning the age of the world. This article (i) argues that the evidence adduced for this claim—specifically the account of a lecture given by Halley to the Royal Society in 1693—has been misinterpreted, and (ii) brings forward some new evidence concerning the mysterious events surrounding Halley's unsuccessful attempt to secure the Savilian Professorship in Astronomy in 1691 and the nature of his religious heterodoxy, both as it was developed by himself and as it was perceived by contemporaries. It thus functions as a full revisionist account of one of the key players in the destabilization of the relationship between natural philosophy and Genesis in the first decades of the Royal Society.

scholarly journals After Less Than 2 Months, the Simulations That Drove the World to Strict Lockdown Appear to be Wrong, the Same of the Policies They Generated

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 233339282093232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Boretti
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Herd Immunity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Healthy Population ◽  
British Government ◽  
Minimal Impact ◽  
The World ◽  
Sustainable Protection ◽  
New Evidence

Here, we review modeling predictions for Covid-19 mortality based on recent data. The Imperial College model trusted by the British Government predicted peak mortalities above 170 deaths per million in the United States, and above 215 deaths per million in Great Britain, after more than 2 months from the outbreak, and a length for the outbreak well above 4 months. These predictions drove the world to adopt harsh distancing measures and forget the concept of herd immunity. China had peak mortalities of less than 0.1 deaths per million after 40 days since first deaths, and an 80-day-long outbreak. Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, or Great Britain flattened the curve at 13.6, 28.6, 9.0, 10.6, and 13.9 deaths per million after 40, 39, 33, 44, and 39 days from first deaths, or 31, 29, 24, 38, and 29 days since the daily confirmed deaths reached 0.1 per million people, respectively. The declining curve is much slower for Italy, the Netherlands, or Great Britain than Belgium or Sweden. Opposite to Great Britain, Italy, or Belgium that enforced a complete lockdown, the Netherlands only adopted an “intelligent” lockdown, and Sweden did not adopt any lockdown. However, they achieved better results. Coupled to new evidence for minimal impact of Covid-19 on the healthy population, with the most part not infected even if challenged, or only mild or asymptomatic if infected, there are many good reasons to question the validity of the specific epidemiological model simulations and the policies they produced. Fewer restrictions on the healthy while better protecting the vulnerable would have been a much better option, permitting more sustainable protection of countries otherwise at risk of second waves as soon as the strict measures are lifted.

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