Postmodernism: philosophical foundations and values

Philosophical Foundations of Probabilities

This document presents some views on the semantic of the probability notion. It's mainly a summary of di erent readings, in particular of a Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy article. Probabilities are daily used in real world application, often without a clear understanding of their mathematical foundation and of the meaning we attach to them. This lack of understanding often leads to bad in...

Philosophical Foundations of AI

Artificial Intelligence was born in 1956 as the off-spring of the newly-created cognitivist paradigm of cognition. As such, it inherited a strong philosophical legacy of functionalism, dualism, and positivism. This legacy found its strongest statement some 20 years later in the physical symbol systems hypothesis, a conjecture that deeply influenced the evolution of AI in subsequent years. Recen...

Philosophical foundations of artificial consciousness

OBJECTIVE Consciousness is often thought to be that aspect of mind that is least amenable to being understood or replicated by artificial intelligence (AI). The first-personal, subjective, what-it-is-like-to-be-something nature of consciousness is thought to be untouchable by the computations, algorithms, processing and functions of AI method. Since AI is the most promising avenue toward artifi...

Philosophical Foundations of Information Modeling

Philosophical Foundations for Causal Networks

Bayes nets are seeing increasing use in expert systems [2, 6], and structural equations models continue to be popular in many branches of the social sciences [1]. Both types of models involve directed acyclic graphs with variables as nodes, and in both cases there is much mysterious talk about causal interpretation. This paper uses probability trees to give precise conditions under which Bayes ...