News from Jeff:<\/p>\n
I want to call your attention to the following “brown bag lunch” talk by Greg Wheeler<\/a>,\u00a0Senior Research Scientist and Executive Board Member at the Center for Artificial\u00a0Intelligence (CENTRIA) in Lisbon. The talk should be of interest to researchers from a\u00a0variety of fields that make use of Bayesian methods. The abstract for Greg’s talk is as\u00a0follows:<\/p>\n Coherence at last! Abstract.\u00a0<\/em>Coherentism maintains that coherent beliefs are more likely to be true than incoherent\u00a0beliefs, and that coherent evidence provides more confirmation of a hypothesis when the\u00a0evidence is made coherent by the explanation provided by that hypothesis. Although\u00a0probabilistic models of credence ought to be well-suited to justifying such claims,\u00a0negative results from Bayesian epistemology have suggested otherwise. In this essay we\u00a0argue that the connection between coherence and confirmation should be understood as a\u00a0relation mediated by the causal relationships among the evidence and a hypothesis, and we\u00a0offer a framework for doing so by fitting together probabilistic models of coherence,\u00a0confirmation, and causation. We show that the causal structure among the evidence and\u00a0hypothesis is sometimes enough to determine whether the coherence of the evidence boosts\u00a0confirmation of the hypothesis, makes no difference to it, or even reduces it.\u00a0 We also\u00a0show that, ceteris paribus, it is not the coherence of the evidence that boosts\u00a0confirmation, but rather the ratio of the coherence of the evidence to the coherence of\u00a0the evidence conditional on a hypothesis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" News from Jeff: I want to call your attention to the following “brown bag lunch” talk by Greg Wheeler,\u00a0Senior Research Scientist and Executive Board Member at the Center for Artificial\u00a0Intelligence (CENTRIA) in Lisbon. The talk should be of interest to … Continue reading
\n<\/strong>Gregory Wheeler (joint work with Richard Scheines, Carnegie Mellon)<\/p>\n