Elizabeth Costello as a Socratic Figure

Preferred semantics as socratic discussion

In abstract argumentation theory, preferred semantics has become one of the most popular approaches for determining the sets of arguments that can collectively be accepted. However, the description of preferred semantics, as it was originally stated by Dung, has a mainly technical and mathematical nature, making it difficult for lay persons to understand what the concept of preferred semantics ...

Reflection: A Socratic approach

Reflection is a fuzzy concept. In this article we reveal the paradoxes involved in studying the nature of reflection. Whereas some scholars emphasize its discursive nature, we go further and underline its resemblance to the self-biased dialogue Socrates had with the slave in Plato's Meno. The individual and internal nature of the reflection process creates difficulty for studying it validly and...

Socratic Trees

We consider the method of Socratic proofs (SP-method). SP-method enables a formal explication of the idea of solving logical problems (i.e problems of entailment/ derivability/ theoremhood) by pure questioning, that is, by transforming the relevant initial question into consecutive questions without making any use of answers to the questions just transformed. Our aim is to give a method of tran...

Socratic Proofs

Socratic Learning

Modern machine learning techniques often use discriminative models that require large amounts of labeled data. Since generating labeled training data sets is expensive, an alternative approach is to use a generative model, which leverages a simple heuristic to weakly label data. Domain experts prefer using generative models because they “tell a story” about their data. Unfortunately, generative...