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This paper articulates an account of causation as a collection of information-theoretic relationships between patterns instantiated in the causal nexus. I draw on Dennett’s account of real patterns to characterize potential causal relata as patterns with specific identification criteria and noise tolerance levels, and actual causal relata as those patterns instantiated at some spatiotemporal location in the rich causal nexus as originally developed by Salmon. I develop a representation framework using phase space to precisely characterize causal relata, including their degree (...) |
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The explanatory role of natural selection is one of the long-term debates in evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, the consensus has been slippery because conceptual confusions and the absence of a unified, formal causal model that integrates different explanatory scopes of natural selection. In this study we attempt to examine two questions: (i) What can the theory of natural selection explain? and (ii) Is there a causal or explanatory model that integrates all natural selection explananda? For the first question, we argue that (...) |
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This paper argues that a notion of statistical explanation, based on Salmon’s statistical relevance model, can help us better understand deep neural networks. It is proved that homogeneous partitions, the core notion of Salmon’s model, are equivalent to minimal sufficient statistics, an important notion from statistical inference. This establishes a link to deep neural networks via the so-called Information Bottleneck method, an information-theoretic framework, according to which deep neural networks implicitly solve an optimization problem that generalizes minimal sufficient statistics. The (...) |
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Normic Laws and the Significance of Nonmonotonic Reasoning for Philosophy of Science. Normic laws have the form ‘if A then normally B’. They have been discovered in the explanation debate, but were considered as empirically vacuous (§1). I argue that the prototypical (or ideal) normality of normic laws implies statistical normality (§2), whence normic laws have empirical content. In §3–4 I explain why reasoning from normic laws is nonmonotonic, and why the understanding of the individual case is so important here. (...) |
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For the case of statistical theories, the criteria of explanation, prediction, and testability can all be viewed as particular instances of a more general evaluation scheme. Using the ideas of a gain matrix and expected gain from statistical decision theory, these three criteria can be compared in terms of the elements in their associated gain matrices. This analysis leads to (1) further understanding of the interrelationship between the current criteria, (2) the proposal of an ordering for the criteria, and (3) (...) |
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There are two basic approaches to the problem of induction:the empirical one, which deems that the possibility of induction depends on how theworld was made (and how it works) and the logical one, which considers the formation(and function) of language. The first is closer to being useful for induction, whilethe second is more rigorous and clearer. The purpose of this paper is to create an empiricalapproach to induction that contains the same formal exactitude as the logical approach.This requires: (a) that (...) |
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This paper contrasts two information-theoretic approaches to statistical explanation: namely, (1) an analysis, which originated in my earlier research on problems of testing stochastic models of learning, based on an entropy-like measure of expected transmitted-information (and here referred to as the Expected-Information Model), and (2) the analysis, which was proposed by James Greeno (and which is closely related to Wesley Salmon's Statistical Relevance Model), based on the information-transmitted-by-a-system. The substantial differences between these analyses can be traced to the following basic (...) |
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In 1958, to refute the argument known as the theoretician's dilemma, Hempel suggested that theoretical terms might be logically indispensable for inductive systematization of observational statements. This thesis, in some form or another, has later been supported by Scheffler, Lehrer, and Tuomela, and opposed by Bohnert, Hooker, Stegmüller, and Cornman. In this paper, a critical survey of this discussion is given. Several different putative definitions of the crucial notion inductive systematization achieved by a theory are discussed by reference to the (...) |
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This paper is an assessment of an attempt, by James Greeno, to measure the explanatory power of statistical theories by means of the notion of transmitted information (It). It is argued that It has certain features that are inappropriate in a measure of explanatory power. In particular, given a statistical theory T with explanans variables St and explanandum variables Mj, it is argued that no plausible measure of explanatory power should depend on the probability P(Si) of occurrence of initial conditions (...) |
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