scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1014107
It is a fact that there are few books devoted to a systematic and application-oriented approach to probability logic (PL). Two main reasons decided, the author to provide an elementary introduction to PL: (1) PL brings to human reasoning an important advance compared to modern non-probabilistic logic; (2) The traditional ``truth-conditional approach fails in application to conditionals because of the classical logic's radical separation of pure and practical logic, the way in which ``pure logic conclusions fail to influence the practical decision and action. The author takes into account some of the important theoretical fields that PL influenced directly: philosophical logic; decision theory applied within philosophy of science, philosphy of action, economics, various branches of psychology; linguistics and the philosphy of language; computer science and artificial intelligence, attempting to model the human reasoning processes by non-monotonic reasoning, which is so closed to conditional logic. The book contains nine chapters, nine appendices, answers to selected exercises, references etc. Chapter 2 (Probability and Logic) and Chapter 4 (Conditional Probabilities and Conditionalization) provide the gentle but necessary knowledge on the mathematical background of probability theory. Chapters 3 and 5 answer to the following question: given the probabilities of some premises, which is the probability of the corresponding conclusion based on a deductively valid inference? Chapter 3 (Deduction and Probability. I.) considers the ``static approach, not taking into account the fact that probabilities can change as a result of gaining information of adding new premises. Chapter 5 (Deduction and Probability. II.) introduces a ``dynamic dimension based on Bayes' principle and associated with the non-monotonicity of the inference process. Chapter 6 (Probability Conditionals) and Chapter 7 (Derivations in the Formal Theory of Probability Conditionals) focus on the logic of conditional propositions, relying on the following (controversial) assumption: the probabilities of conditional propositions are conditional probabilities. This kind of probabilities lead to a logic of conditionals radically different from the logic that is based on the assumption that the truth value of an ``if-then proposition is the same as that of a material conditional. Chapter 8 (Truth, Triviality, and Controversy) discusses the Alan Hajek's variant of David Lewis' fundamental Triviality Argument: in certain technical assumptions, if the ``right measure of a conditional's probability is a conditional probability then its probability cannot equal the probability of its being true, no matter how its truth might be defined. Chapter 9 (Practical Reason) gives a brief introduction to the theory of practical reason and shows how conclusions about propositions and their probabilities influence actions. This chapter ends with a philosophical discussion on the pragmatics of probability. Nine useful appendices are enclosed: A1 (Coherent Degrees of Confidence); A2 (Infinitesimal Probabilities and Popper Functions); A3 (David Lewis' Triviality Result); A4 (The Problem of Embedded Conditionals); A5 (`Statistical Reasonableness' of Contraposition); A6 (Counterfactual Conditionals); A7 (Probabilistic Predicate Logic); A8 (Probabilistic Identity Logic); A9 (Approximate Generalizations). The interest area for the readability of this book is prodigious: from philosophers to practitioners, from logicians to economists, and from mathematicians to linguists.
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- Probability logic
- On probability and logic
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- The logic of the future in quantum theory
- Deductive reasoning under uncertainty: a water tank analogy
- Probabilistic inferences from conjoined to iterated conditionals
- A semantic study of the first-order predicate logic with uncertainty involved
- If-clauses and probability operators
- Only countable Reichenbachian common cause systems exist
- Lewis' triviality for quasi probabilities
- What should I believe about what would have been the case?
- Twelve great papers: comments and replies. Response to a special issue on logical perspectives on science and cognition -- the philosophy of Gerhard Schurz
- Credence for conclusions: a brief for Jeffrey's rule
- Acceptance and certainty, doxastic modals, and indicative conditionals
- Three ways of being non-material
- Soundness and completeness results for LEA and probability semantics
- Probabilities of conditionals and previsions of iterated conditionals
- Probabilities of counterfactuals and counterfactual probabilities
- The fall of ``Adams' thesis?
- Probabilistic sentence satisfiability: an approach to PSAT
- Probabilistic satisfiability and coherence checking through integer programming
- Probabilistic argumentation
- Framing human inference by coherence based probability logic
- The quantitative/qualitative watershed for rules of uncertain inference
- Reasoning with conditionals
- Randomization of classical inference patterns and its application
- Theory of truth degrees of propositions in the logic system \(L_{n}^{*}\)
- Bernoulli semantics and ordinal semantics for conditionals
- Ockham's razor in probability logic
- A p-adic probability logic
- Intuitive Probability Logic
- Logic with a probability semantics. Including solutions to some philosophical problems
- A formal approach to the problem of logical non-omniscience
- Logical questions behind the lottery and preface paradoxes: lossy rules for uncertain inference
- The psychology of inferring conditionals from disjunctions: a probabilistic study
- The dialectics of infinitism and coherentism: inferential justification versus holism and coherence
- Credal Calculi, Evidence, and Consistency
- Lossy inference rules and their bounds: a brief review
- On aggregating probabilistic evidence
- Inference in conditional probability logic
- Deduction from conditional knowledge
- Extension of the concept of propositional deduction from classical logic to probability: An overview of probability-selection approaches
- A minimal probability space for conditionals
- Dutch book against Lewis
- Williamson's abductive case for the material conditional account
- A Stalnaker semantics for McGee conditionals
- Is logic distinctively normative?
- On trivalent logics, probabilistic weak deduction theorems, and a general import-export principle
- Conditional probabilities as degrees of similarity and as degrees of entailment
- Williamson on indicatives and suppositional heuristics
- Probabilistic consequence relations
- Degrees of truthlikeness, independence, equality and order in probabilistic propositional knowledge representation
- Assertion, assumption, and deduction
- Probabilistic semantics and calculi for multi-valued and paraconsistent logics
- Conditionals, support and connexivity
- A logical framework for data-driven reasoning
- A Boolean generalization of the information-gain model can eliminate specific reasoning errors
- Conditioning against the grain. Abduction and indicative conditionals
- Conditionals: inferentialism explicated
- Non-propositionalism and the suppositional rule
- The evidential conditional
- An inductive construction of a model for probabilities of complex conditionals
- Reasoning about uncertain conditionals
- Toward a more natural expression of quantum logic with Boolean fractions
- Formal methods in the philosophy of science
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