1,721,010 research outputs found
Popper and Turing's Challenge
No full textIn Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan M. Turing posed the question "Can machines think?". Popper's answer in The Self and Its Brain is "without hesitation that they cannot", and "Turing's challenge should not be taken up". Why does Popper refuse Turing's challenge? First, we look at what Popper and Turing actually said, in order to put some aspects of the problem in perspective. Second, because Popper's view about mechanical procedures might to some extent match that of Gödel, a glance at Gödel's interpretation of Turing's work may help to find a way through Popper's thought. By this route, we reach the conclusion that Popper fails to see that what Turing was really proposing can be viewed as a genuine application of his own method of conjectures and refutations
Scientific progress
No full textAbstract We deal with the problem of verisimilitude, a notion which, roughly
speaking, tries to capture how close a scientific theory is to the truth. Our starting
philosophical basis is Evandro Agazzi’s approach and his view on scientific objectivity
which relies on his particular meaning of ‘partial truth’. By following an
epistemological approach to the verisimilitude problem and adopting the semantic
view of theories, we develop our epistemological proposal about the comparative
evaluation of scientific theories and cognitive situations. Our proposal allows to
establish, in a qualitative way, in which sense a theory, or a cognitive situation, is
better (more verisimilar) than another
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Verisimilitude from a Model-theoretic Point of View
No full textThe importance of the notion of verisimilitude, or truthlikeness, for a realist conception of knowledge was first realized by Karl Popper when he recognized that only the idea that a false theory can represent a cognitive progress with respect to another theory could reconcile his falsificationist epistemology with his belief in the rationality of science. This paper discusses Popper's 'syntactic' definitions of the comparative and quantitative notions of verisimilitude and then advocates a model-theoretic approach to the task of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of sentences of the form, 'B is truth-increasing with respect to A', where A and B are taken to be sets of structures
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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