4,959 research outputs found
Annotated revision programs
Revision programming is a formalism to describe and enforce updates of belief
sets and databases. That formalism was extended by Fitting who assigned
annotations to revision atoms. Annotations provide a way to quantify the
confidence (probability) that a revision atom holds. The main goal of our paper
is to reexamine the work of Fitting, argue that his semantics does not always
provide results consistent with intuition, and to propose an alternative
treatment of annotated revision programs. Our approach differs from that
proposed by Fitting in two key aspects: we change the notion of a model of a
program and we change the notion of a justified revision. We show that under
this new approach fundamental properties of justified revisions of standard
revision programs extend to the annotated case.Comment: 30 pages, to appear in Artificial Intelligence Journa
The Contextual Character of Modal Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics
In this article we discuss the contextual character of quantum mechanics in
the framework of modal interpretations. We investigate its historical origin
and relate contemporary modal interpretations to those proposed by M. Born and
W. Heisenberg. We present then a general characterization of what we consider
to be a modal interpretation. Following previous papers in which we have
introduced modalities in the Kochen-Specker theorem, we investigate the
consequences of these theorems in relation to the modal interpretations of
quantum mechanics.Comment: 21 pages, no figures, preprint submitted to SHPM
Bohrification of operator algebras and quantum logic
Following Birkhoff and von Neumann, quantum logic has traditionally been
based on the lattice of closed linear subspaces of some Hilbert space, or, more
generally, on the lattice of projections in a von Neumann algebra A.
Unfortunately, the logical interpretation of these lattices is impaired by
their nondistributivity and by various other problems. We show that a possible
resolution of these difficulties, suggested by the ideas of Bohr, emerges if
instead of single projections one considers elementary propositions to be
families of projections indexed by a partially ordered set C(A) of appropriate
commutative subalgebras of A. In fact, to achieve both maximal generality and
ease of use within topos theory, we assume that A is a so-called Rickart
C*-algebra and that C(A) consists of all unital commutative Rickart
C*-subalgebras of A. Such families of projections form a Heyting algebra in a
natural way, so that the associated propositional logic is intuitionistic:
distributivity is recovered at the expense of the law of the excluded middle.
Subsequently, generalizing an earlier computation for n-by-n matrices, we
prove that the Heyting algebra thus associated to A arises as a basis for the
internal Gelfand spectrum (in the sense of Banaschewski-Mulvey) of the
"Bohrification" of A, which is a commutative Rickart C*-algebra in the topos of
functors from C(A) to the category of sets. We explain the relationship of this
construction to partial Boolean algebras and Bruns-Lakser completions. Finally,
we establish a connection between probability measure on the lattice of
projections on a Hilbert space H and probability valuations on the internal
Gelfand spectrum of A for A = B(H).Comment: 31 page
A Fuzzy Logic Programming Environment for Managing Similarity and Truth Degrees
FASILL (acronym of "Fuzzy Aggregators and Similarity Into a Logic Language")
is a fuzzy logic programming language with implicit/explicit truth degree
annotations, a great variety of connectives and unification by similarity.
FASILL integrates and extends features coming from MALP (Multi-Adjoint Logic
Programming, a fuzzy logic language with explicitly annotated rules) and
Bousi~Prolog (which uses a weak unification algorithm and is well suited for
flexible query answering). Hence, it properly manages similarity and truth
degrees in a single framework combining the expressive benefits of both
languages. This paper presents the main features and implementations details of
FASILL. Along the paper we describe its syntax and operational semantics and we
give clues of the implementation of the lattice module and the similarity
module, two of the main building blocks of the new programming environment
which enriches the FLOPER system developed in our research group.Comment: In Proceedings PROLE 2014, arXiv:1501.0169
Generalized probabilities in statistical theories
In this review article we present different formal frameworks for the
description of generalized probabilities in statistical theories. We discuss
the particular cases of probabilities appearing in classical and quantum
mechanics, possible generalizations of the approaches of A. N. Kolmogorov and
R. T. Cox to non-commutative models, and the approach to generalized
probabilities based on convex sets
Many worlds and modality in the interpretation of quantum mechanics: an algebraic approach
Many worlds interpretations (MWI) of quantum mechanics avoid the measurement
problem by considering every term in the quantum superposition as actual. A
seemingly opposed solution is proposed by modal interpretations (MI) which
state that quantum mechanics does not provide an account of what `actually is
the case', but rather deals with what `might be the case', i.e. with
possibilities. In this paper we provide an algebraic framework which allows us
to analyze in depth the modal aspects of MWI. Within our general formal scheme
we also provide a formal comparison between MWI and MI, in particular, we
provide a formal understanding of why --even though both interpretations share
the same formal structure-- MI fall pray of Kochen-Specker (KS) type
contradictions while MWI escape them.Comment: submitted to the Journal of Mathematical Physic
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