These are my links for August 17th through August 20th: Mark Colyvan, A topological sorites | PhilPapers – This paper considers a generalisation of the sorites paradox, in which only topological notions are employed. We argue that by increasing the level of abstraction in this way, we see the sorites paradox in a new, more revealing light—a light that forces attention on cut-off points of vague predicates. The generalised sorites paradox presented here also gives rise to a new, more tractable definition of vagueness. Vincent F. Hendricks, The Bain of two truths | PhilPapers – A view among methodologists is […]
Monthly Archives: August 2009
8 posts
These are my links for July 29th through August 16th: Bayes, Jeffreys, prior distributions, and the philosophy of statistics – In this brief discussion I will argue the following: (1) in thinking about prior distributions, we should go beyond Jeffreys’s principles and move toward weakly informative priors; (2) it is natural for those of us who work in social and computational sciences to favor complex models, contra Jeffreys’s preference for simplicity; and (3) a key generalization of Jeffreys’s ideas is to explicitly include model checking in the process of data analysis. Does Confirmation Work the Same at Every Level of […]