The Doomsday argument and anthropic arguments are illustrations of a paradox. In both cases, a lack of knowledge apparently yields surprising conclusions. Since they are formulated within a Bayesian framework, the paradox constitutes a challenge to Bayesianism. Several attempts, some successful, have been made to avoid these conclusions, but some versions of the paradox cannot be dissolved with...

The n-universes are a methodological tool the scope of which proves to be general and which find to apply in the thought experiments underlying philosophical problems. The n-universes have been introduced in Franceschi (2001) in the context of the study of Goodman's paradox and described in more detail in Franceschi (2002), in the context of their application to the paradoxes related to the Doo...

/ \ s k p i sk people about pandemic influenza and you'll likely hear a variety of , responses ranging from those who don't believe it is a real problem to those who envision a doomsday scenario. The truth is that it is prudent to plan for a pandemic occurrence. Faith-based and community-based organizations (FBCOs) are essential partners both in preparations for an influenza pandemic and in pro...

THET H E M E O F ‘‘ORGANIZINGTHE INTERNET’’ brings to mind the late 1950s folk-rock singer Jimmie Rodgers’s song titled “The World I Used to Know.”A great many developments have transpired in the world of information science since the seminal works of S. C. Bradford, Claude Shannon, Vannevar Bush, and numerous other pioneers. To those of us who have been in the information science field for sev...

I consider the puzzles arising from four interrelated problems involving “anthropic” reasoning, and in particular the “Self-Sampling Assumption” (SSA) — that one should reason as if one were randomly chosen from the set of all observers in a suitable reference class. The problem of Freak Observers might appear to force acceptance of SSA if any empirical evidence is to be credited. The Sleeping ...