46,897 research outputs found
Reasoning of non- and pre-linguistic creatures: How much do the experiments tell us?
If a conclusion was reached that creatures without a language capability exhibit some form of a capability for logic, this would shed a new light on the relationship between logic, language, and thought. Recent experimental attempts to test whether some animals, as well as pre-linguistic human infants, are capable of exclusionary reasoning are taken to support exactly that conclusion. The paper discusses the analyses and conclusions of two such studies: Call’s (2004) two cups task, and Mody and Carey’s (2016) four cups task. My paper exposes hidden assumptions within these analyses, which enable the authors to settle on the explanation which assigns logical capabilities to the participants of the studies, as opposed to the explanations which do not. The paper then demonstrates that the competing explanations of the experimental results are theoretically underdeveloped, rendering them unclear in their predictions concerning the behavior of cognitive subjects, and thus difficult to distinguish by use of experiments. Additionally, it is questioned whether the explanations are rivals at all, i.e. whether they compete to explain the cognitive processes of the same level. The contribution of the paper is conceptual. Its aim is to clear up the concepts involved in these analyses, in order to avoid oversimplified or premature conclusions about the cognitive abilities of pre- and non-linguistic creatures. It is also meant to show that the theoretical space surrounding the issues involved might be
much more diverse and unknown than many of these studies imply
Integrating Learning and Reasoning with Deep Logic Models
Deep learning is very effective at jointly learning feature representations
and classification models, especially when dealing with high dimensional input
patterns. Probabilistic logic reasoning, on the other hand, is capable to take
consistent and robust decisions in complex environments. The integration of
deep learning and logic reasoning is still an open-research problem and it is
considered to be the key for the development of real intelligent agents. This
paper presents Deep Logic Models, which are deep graphical models integrating
deep learning and logic reasoning both for learning and inference. Deep Logic
Models create an end-to-end differentiable architecture, where deep learners
are embedded into a network implementing a continuous relaxation of the logic
knowledge. The learning process allows to jointly learn the weights of the deep
learners and the meta-parameters controlling the high-level reasoning. The
experimental results show that the proposed methodology overtakes the
limitations of the other approaches that have been proposed to bridge deep
learning and reasoning
Query DAGs: A Practical Paradigm for Implementing Belief-Network Inference
We describe a new paradigm for implementing inference in belief networks,
which consists of two steps: (1) compiling a belief network into an arithmetic
expression called a Query DAG (Q-DAG); and (2) answering queries using a simple
evaluation algorithm. Each node of a Q-DAG represents a numeric operation, a
number, or a symbol for evidence. Each leaf node of a Q-DAG represents the
answer to a network query, that is, the probability of some event of interest.
It appears that Q-DAGs can be generated using any of the standard algorithms
for exact inference in belief networks (we show how they can be generated using
clustering and conditioning algorithms). The time and space complexity of a
Q-DAG generation algorithm is no worse than the time complexity of the
inference algorithm on which it is based. The complexity of a Q-DAG evaluation
algorithm is linear in the size of the Q-DAG, and such inference amounts to a
standard evaluation of the arithmetic expression it represents. The intended
value of Q-DAGs is in reducing the software and hardware resources required to
utilize belief networks in on-line, real-world applications. The proposed
framework also facilitates the development of on-line inference on different
software and hardware platforms due to the simplicity of the Q-DAG evaluation
algorithm. Interestingly enough, Q-DAGs were found to serve other purposes:
simple techniques for reducing Q-DAGs tend to subsume relatively complex
optimization techniques for belief-network inference, such as network-pruning
and computation-caching.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
From Observations to Hypotheses: Probabilistic Reasoning Versus Falsificationism and its Statistical Variations
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific
research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about
it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a
stochastic model of causes and effects. Formulated with Poincare's words, the
"essential problem of the experimental method" becomes then solving a "problem
in the probability of causes", i.e. ranking the several hypotheses, that might
be responsible for the observations, in credibility. This probabilistic
approach to the problem (nowadays known as the Bayesian approach) differs from
the standard (i.e. frequentistic) statistical methods of hypothesis tests. The
latter methods might be seen as practical attempts of implementing the ideal of
falsificationism, that can itself be viewed as an extension of the proof by
contradiction of the classical logic to the experimental method. Some
criticisms concerning conceptual as well as practical aspects of na\"\i ve
falsificationism and conventional, frequentistic hypothesis tests are
presented, and the alternative, probabilistic approach is outlined.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures (V2 fixes some typos and adds a reference).
Invited talk at the 2004 Vulcano Workshop on Frontier Objects in Astrophysics
and Particle Physics, Vulcano (Italy) May 24-29, 2004. This paper and related
work are also available at http://www.roma1.infn.it/~dagos/prob+stat.htm
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