David Moshman - From inference to reasoning: The construction of rationality

David Moshman - From inference to reasoning: The construction of rationality
is about the development of meta-cognition.

an interesting quote:

Cultural considerations, such as being indoctrinated in the ways
and/or beliefs of a religious, political, or other group, may also drive systems
of automatic inference and block ideologically unacceptable inferences.
Even as we construct beliefs and values of our own, self-serving biases direct
our inferences to avoid conflict with our identities (Klaczynski, 1997, 2000;
Klaczynski & Narasimham, 1998; Moshman, 2004).

(no subject)

Brazilians surfers held as terrorists for mis-translating "pump".

http://harold.blog.uol.com.br/

Prior to boarding a plane heading to Brazil in Miami, the pair joked with security that they had a bomb--which was really a "suction pump (in Brazilian Portuguese 'bomba')to make surfboards back home--in their baggage. They are being held in Miami Federal Prison by the FBI in reportedly inhumane conditions .

Scientific Discovery

first some
News

Robo-scientist goes it alone
Professor Ross King says the robot is an exciting development. The world's first "robot scientist" that can interpret experiments without any human help has been developed by scientists at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Wired - A Machine With a Mind of Its Own

Its components - the tireless robot arm, an incubator in which cells cultured on the platter either wither or thrive, and a plate reader that examines the little depressions to see whether anything is growing there - are linked up to a much more exceptional brain. The artificial intelligence routines in that brain can look at the results of an experiment, draw a conclusion about what the results might mean, and then set off to test that conclusion.

An Overview of the Area: Lindley Darden - Recent Work in Computational Scientific Discovery


A nice bibliography, by Pat Langley

(no subject)

Richard Stefanik - The Structures of Reality: Truth, Invariance and Scientific Objectivity

why current formal mathematics is different from real human mathematics

There are many languages for formal mathematics, e.g. Coq, Mizar, HOL, Isabelle, but they often don't correspond to mathematicians' cognitive structures.

This is for the following reasons:

* these proofs are currently too low-level (proof plans, proof sketches are possible solutions to this)
* They don't model multiple representations, or semantics (humans integrate algebraic & geometrical reasoning)
* They work from absolute mathematical foundations. As we know, real mathematics existed way before it was given good foundations. Human mathematicians work with relative foundations.