Philosophy of Information and Information Processing Workshop

August 26th, 2014

Info-Metrics Institute | Workshop, Spring 2015: http://www.american.edu/cas/economics/info-metrics/workshop/workshop-2015-spring.cfm.

Truthlikeness Confirmation?

August 7th, 2014

As has been established in the literature, given some truthlikeness/verisimilitude measure Tr(), theory T and evidence E, we can measure the estimated truthlikeness of T given E with:

$\text{Tr}_{\text{est}}(T | E) = \displaystyle\sum_{i = 1}^s \text{Tr}(T, w_{i}) \text{Pr}(w_{i} | E)$

for each state $w_{i}$ in the logical space.

Now, using a Bayesian confirmation measure such as the following:

$\text{C}(E, T) = \text{Pr}(T | E) - \text{Pr}(T)$

we can combine it with the estimated truthlikeness measure to get a measure of truthlikeness confirmation:

$\text{Tr}_{\text{C}}(T, E) = \text{Tr}_{\text{est}}(T | E) - \text{Tr}_{\text{est}}(T)$

So what can be done with this measure? In A Verosimilitudinarian Analysis of the Linda Paradox, the authors suggest this measure for what they term a ‘verisimilitudinarian confirmation account’ of the Linda paradox (they do so in response to a problem with an earlier proposal of theirs that gives an account of the paradox based on estimated truthlikeness alone). But it seems that this approach is doing nothing that an account of the Linda paradox in terms of confirmation alone isn’t already doing.

Thus it would be interesting to think about this idea of truthlikeness confirmation some more. For starters, clearly confirmation and truthlikeness confirmation do not increase/decrease together. Take a logical space with three propositions p1, p2 and p3 and a uniform a priori probability distribution amongst the eight possible states:

• Whilst $(p_{1} \wedge p_{2} \wedge p_{3}) \vee (\neg p_{1} \wedge \neg p_{2})$ confirms $p_{1} \wedge p_{2} \wedge p_{3}$ it results in a negative truthlikeness confirmation.
• Whilst $p_{1} \wedge p_{2} \wedge \neg p_{3}$ disconfirms $p_{1} \wedge p_{2} \wedge p_{3}$ it results in a positive truthlikeness confirmation.

SEP entry on Truthlikeness

August 5th, 2014

SEP entry on Truthlikeness has been substantially updated: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truthlikeness.

Review of “Quitting Certainties”

August 2nd, 2014

Good book: Review of “Quitting Certainties”.

June 26th, 2014

June 6th, 2014

May 23rd, 2014

April 28th, 2014

April 16th, 2014

Top Ten philosophical issues of the 21st Century

March 12th, 2014

According to this list of the top ten philosophical issues of the 21st century, one of them is:

6. Information and misinformation in the information age.
The 21st century threatens to wreak havoc on the social organization of information and knowledge. We are awash in a glut of information coming at us from all sources — some reliable, some unreliable. But the old top-down authorities that once functioned to certify some information as true and other information as false, are quickly being dismantled. How can we distinguish the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff? We philosophers for a new century thus face epistemological problems hardly imagined by our predecessors.