Ways Things Can't Be

Ways Things Can't Be

Possible worlds semantics has been very useful in modelling not only the intensionality of necessity and possibility, future and past. It has also found its place in modelling the intentionality of propositional attitudes like belief and knowledge. There is something fruitful in analysing a belief as a set of possible worlds. The belief is the set of possible worlds in which the belief is true....

How Many Ways Can Things Be The Same? Set Theory For Multiple-Site Surveys

This paper describes a rigorous set-theoretic framework for analysing the result of surveys which take place over multiple sites and where the surveyor needs to match surveyed items between more than two of those sites. In the analysis of roadside survey data, it is often desirable to analyse matches between several data sets simultaneously. For example, we might wish to answer questions of the...

On Where Things Could Be

Some philosophers have replied to Leibniz’s “shift” argument against the reality of absolute space by appealing to anti-haecceitist doctrines about possible worlds, influenced especially by David Lewis’s counterpart theory. But separated from Lewis’s distinctive views about what possible worlds are, it is difficult to understand what those doctrines really amount to, and why they are relevant t...

Smarter Ways to Use the Internet of Things

Signi cant Lexical Relationships

We describe a test that can be used to accurately assess the significance of a population model from a data sample using freely available software. We apply this test to the study of lexical relationships and demonstrate that the results obtained using this test are both theoretically more reliable and diierent from the results obtained using previous approaches.