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MCMP – Mathematical Philosophy (Archive 2011/12)
MCMP Team
250 episodes
9 months ago
Mathematical Philosophy - the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy - is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists. The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical methods are used to derive physical predictions from physical laws. Nor is the idea of mathematical philosophy to dismiss any of the ancient questions of philosophy as irrelevant or senseless: although modern mathematical philosophy owes a lot to the heritage of the Vienna and Berlin Circles of Logical Empiricism, unlike the Logical Empiricists most mathematical philosophers today are driven by the same traditional questions about truth, knowledge, rationality, the nature of objects, morality, and the like, which were driving the classical philosophers, and no area of traditional philosophy is taken to be intrinsically misguided or confused anymore. It is just that some of the traditional questions of philosophy can be made much clearer and much more precise in logical-mathematical terms, for some of these questions answers can be given by means of mathematical proofs or models, and on this basis new and more concrete philosophical questions emerge. This may then lead to philosophical progress, and ultimately that is the goal of the Center.
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Philosophy
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Mathematical Philosophy - the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy - is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists. The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical methods are used to derive physical predictions from physical laws. Nor is the idea of mathematical philosophy to dismiss any of the ancient questions of philosophy as irrelevant or senseless: although modern mathematical philosophy owes a lot to the heritage of the Vienna and Berlin Circles of Logical Empiricism, unlike the Logical Empiricists most mathematical philosophers today are driven by the same traditional questions about truth, knowledge, rationality, the nature of objects, morality, and the like, which were driving the classical philosophers, and no area of traditional philosophy is taken to be intrinsically misguided or confused anymore. It is just that some of the traditional questions of philosophy can be made much clearer and much more precise in logical-mathematical terms, for some of these questions answers can be given by means of mathematical proofs or models, and on this basis new and more concrete philosophical questions emerge. This may then lead to philosophical progress, and ultimately that is the goal of the Center.
Show more...
Philosophy
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Tracking the Truth Requires a Non-wellfounded Prior!
MCMP – Mathematical Philosophy (Archive 2011/12)
1 hour 31 minutes 54 seconds
6 years ago
Tracking the Truth Requires a Non-wellfounded Prior!
Alexandru Baltag (ILLC Amsterdam) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium titled "Tracking the Truth Requires a Non-wellfounded Prior! A Study in the Learning Power (and Limits) of Bayesian (and Qualitative) Update". Abstract: The talk is about tracking "full truth" in the limit by iterated belief updates. Unlike Sonja's talk (which focused on finite models), we now allow the initial model (and thus the initial set of epistemic possibilities) to be infinite. We compare the truth-tracking power of various belief-revision methods, including probabilistic conditioning (also known as Bayesian update) and some of its qualitative, "plausibilistic" analogues (conditioning, lexicographic revision, minimal revision). We focus in particular on the question on whether any of these methods is "universal" (i.e. as good at tracking the truth as any other learning method). We show that this is not the case, as long as we keep the standard probabilistic (or belief-revision) setting. On the positive side, we show that if we consider appropriate generalizations of conditioning in a non-standard, non-wellfounded setting, then universality is achieved for some (though not all) of these learning methods. In the qualitative case, this means that we need to allow the prior plausibility relation to be a non-wellfounded (though total) preorder. In the probabilistic case, this means moving to a generalized conditional probability setting, in which the family of "cores" (or "strong beliefs") may be non-wellfounded (when ordered by inclusion or logical entailament). As a consequence, neither the family of classical probability spaces, nor lexicographic probability spaces, and not even the family of all countably additive (conditional) probability spaces, are rich enough to make Bayesian conditioning "universal", from a Learning Theoretic point of view! This talk is based on joint work with Nina Gierasimczuk and Sonja Smets.
MCMP – Mathematical Philosophy (Archive 2011/12)
Mathematical Philosophy - the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy - is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists. The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical methods are used to derive physical predictions from physical laws. Nor is the idea of mathematical philosophy to dismiss any of the ancient questions of philosophy as irrelevant or senseless: although modern mathematical philosophy owes a lot to the heritage of the Vienna and Berlin Circles of Logical Empiricism, unlike the Logical Empiricists most mathematical philosophers today are driven by the same traditional questions about truth, knowledge, rationality, the nature of objects, morality, and the like, which were driving the classical philosophers, and no area of traditional philosophy is taken to be intrinsically misguided or confused anymore. It is just that some of the traditional questions of philosophy can be made much clearer and much more precise in logical-mathematical terms, for some of these questions answers can be given by means of mathematical proofs or models, and on this basis new and more concrete philosophical questions emerge. This may then lead to philosophical progress, and ultimately that is the goal of the Center.