Gustavo Lacerda

Newton da Costa reviews "An Architectonic for Science"

Pfeiffer, Niehave - EVALUATION OF CONCEPTUAL MODELS – A STRUCTURALIST APPROACH seems to be about how to evaluate the logic of scientific theories. They compare it with the problem of evaluating software.

Wajnberg, Corruble, Ganascia, and C. Ulises Moulines - A Structuralist Approach towards Computational Scientific Discovery"

Tangent:

Henry Kyburg - Combinatorial Semantics: Semantics for Frequent Validity
The title sounds dumb. But it's Henry Kyburg, and he seems thorough review of previous attempts to combine probability and logic.

Henry Kyburg - Uncertain Inferences and Uncertain Conclusions

Uncertainty may be taken to characterize inferences, their conclusions, their premises or all three. Under some treatments of uncertainty, the inference itself is never characterized by uncertainty. We explore both the significance of uncertainty in the premises and in the conclusion of an argument that involves uncertainty. We argue that for uncertainty to characterize the conclusion of an inference is natural, but that there is an interplay between uncertainty in the premises and uncertainty in the procedure of argument itself. We show that it is possible in principle to incorporate all uncertainty in the premises, rendering uncertainty arguments deductively valid. But we then argue (1) that this does not reflect human argument, (2) that it is computationally costly, and (3) that the gain in simplicity obtained by allowing uncertainty in inference can sometimes outweigh the loss of flexibility it entails.

See http://www.optimizelife.com/wiki/index.php/My_Breathing#Causal_Processes

All the pieces finally fall into place:

Causal diagram of Chronic Rhinitis

Solid lines mean positive influence (+), i.e. more of the source tends to cause more of the target.
Dashed lines mean negative influence (-), i.e. more of the source tends to cause less of the target.


N.B.: I don't suffer from all causes or all symptoms above.

I could add a node for "vasoconstrictor" (e.g. Afrin) right next to "fluticasone", having a negative (e.g. health-positive) effect on "amount of blood in mucosa", but the problem is that vasoconstrictors have a short-term effect that rebound, becoming a positive (e.g. health-negative) effect.

Thanks WikiTex/Wikisophia, for providing me with a sandbox! Wiki code is behind the cut.

Fluticasone appears to be effective in the long run. But if I end up needing to use it for the rest of my life, then I'll go for a ~50% partial turbinectomy (under the knife, since laser seems to damage mucociliary function).

I am interested in the semantics of these diagrams, and how they relate to argument maps and formal proofs.

semantics of diagrams

* Say we want to instantiate a particular allergen and a particular individual: what kind of graph rewriting will we need to do?

* What about expressing the distinction between independent and dependent influences (e.g. conjunction, synergy)?

* What about tagging nodes with information about which leaves are controllable?

* Some effects have preconditions: snoring requires sleeping. Sleeping requires lying down. So we have an implicit relationship in the graph: the consequence is that turbinate enlargement will be worse during sleep. Could conclusions of the kind be drawn automatically, by simply adding to the implicit information to the current representation?


( Read more... )