This paper responds to Achinstein’s criticism of the thesis that the only empirical fact that can affect the truth of an objective evidence claim such as ‘e is evidence for h’ (or ‘e confirms h to degree r’) is the truth of e. It shows that cases involving evidential flaws, which form the basis for Achinstein’s objections to the thesis, can satisfactorily be accounted for by appeal to changes i...

1. Background. At least from the time of the ancient Greeks, most philosophers have held that some of our knowledge is independent of experience, or “a priori”. Indeed, a major tenet of the rationalist tradition in philosophy was that a great deal of our knowledge had this character: even Kant, a critic of some of the overblown claims of rationalism, thought that the structure of space could be...

This is the next step of work reported in [Lendaris, Zwick & Mathia, 1993]. The objective has been to develop a constructive method that uses certain a priori information about a problem domain to design the starting structure of an artificial neural network (ANN). The method explored is based on a general systems theory methodology (here called GSM) that calculates a kind of structural informa...

In this paper we propose one possible way to preprocess data according to Activity theory. Such an approach is particularly interesting in Educational Data Mining.