The purpose of this document is to give an overview of author's prospective doctoral thesis in terms of goals, plans, adopted methodology and current achievements. The thesis' general focus is the Semantic Web, AI, automatic ontology acquisition and reasoning. When considering ontologies as general knowledge repositories, ideally reflecting substantial amount of information present on the web, ...

Inferential internalism holds that for one to be inferentially justified in believing P on the basis of E one must be justified in believing that E makes probable P. Inferential internalism has long been accused of generating a vicious regress on inferential justification that has drastic skeptical consequences. However, recently Hookway and Rhoda have defended a more modest form of internalism...

the gastric cancer in iran is the fourth in the general population. this study was designed to determine the five-year survival rate of gastric cancer patients, and to assess its associated factors. we analyzed the data using a time-dependent covariates model, and recommend it for analyses of similar data. 281 gastric cancer patients with adenocarcinomatous pathology who had been operated on at...

In “Weak Inferential Internalism” I defended the frequently voiced criticism that any internalist account of inferential justification generates a vicious regress. My defense involved criticizing a recent form of internalism, “Weak Inferential Internalism” (WII) defended by Hookway and Rhoda. I argued that while WII does not generate a vicious regress, the position is only distinguishable from ...

This paper generalizes the authors’ inferential model (IM) framework for priorfree, posterior probabilistic inference about unknown parameters. This generalization is accomplished by focusing on an association model determined by the sampling distribution of a function of the data and parameter. The advantage is that the new association model is generally easier to work with than that determine...

Macromolecular structures calculated from nuclear magnetic resonance data are not fully determined by experimental data but depend on subjective choices in data treatment and parameter settings. This makes it difficult to objectively judge the precision of the structures. We used Bayesian inference to derive a probability distribution that represents the unknown structure and its precision. Thi...

Brain images are used both as scientific evidence and to illustrate the results of neuroimaging experiments. These images are apt to be viewed as photographs of brain activity, and in so viewing them people are prone to assume that they share the evidential characteristics of photographs. Photographs are epistemically compelling, and have a number of characteristics that underlie what I call th...

Given the recent and highly publicized scandals involving psychology researchers who cheated, the proliferation of articles on related topics is unsurprising. As an example, Simons et al. (2011) pointed out subtle ways in which researchers can increase their false positive rate above the nominal level of p < 0.05. From my perspective, a major limitation of the literature on cheating has been a ...