How to define a mereological (collective) set

How to define ‘Moral Realism’

Moral realism is the doctrine that some propositions asserting that some action is ‘morally’ good (obligatory, bad, or wrong) are true. This paper examines three different definitions of what it is for an action to be ‘morally’ good (with corresponding definitions for ‘morally’ obligatory, bad, or wrong) which would make moral realism a clear and plausible view. The first defines ‘morally good ...

How to Define Consciousness—and How Not to Define Consciousness

Definitions of consciousness need to be sufficiently broad to include all examples of conscious states and sufficiently narrow to exclude entities, events and processes that are not conscious. Unfortunately, deviations from these simple principles are common in modern consciousness studies, with consequent confusion and internal division in the field. The present paper gives example of ways in ...

Define and Conquer: How Semantics Foster Progress; A Response to Recent Commentaries

How to define a confidence set for functions: a new justification of the area method

Due to uncertainty, in many problems, we only know the probability of different values. In such situations, we need to make decisions based on these probabilities: e.g., we must tell the user which values are possible and which are not. Often – e.g., for a normal distribution – the probability density is everywhere positive, so, theoretically, all real values are possible. In practice, it is us...

How to Define Certain Answers

The standard way of answering queries over incomplete databases is to compute certain answers, defined as the intersection of query answers on all complete databases that the incomplete database represents. But is this universally accepted definition correct? We argue that this “one-size-fitsall” definition can often lead to counterintuitive or just plain wrong results, and propose an alternati...