Dissipative distinctions

Mechanistic Distinctions

The notion of autocatalysis actually covers a large variety of mechanistic realisations of chemical systems. From the most general definition of autocatalysis, that is a process in which a chemical compound is able to catalyze its own formation, several different systems can be described. We detail the different categories of autocatalyses, and compare them on the basis of their mechanistic, ki...

MULTI-MODAL UTILE DISTINCTIONS Multi-Modal Utile Distinctions

We introduce Multi-Modal Utility Trees (MMU), an algorithm for autonomously learning decision treebased state abstractions in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with multi-modal observations. MMU builds the trees using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistical test. Additionally, MMU incorporates the ability to perform online tree restructuring, enabling it to build and maintain a compact ...

Abduction and its Distinctions

What distinguishes abductive inference from other modes of inference? What distinguishes the different forms of abductive inference? These are perhaps the key questions that face the student of abduction, and the core of Lorenzo Magnani’s book is devoted to them. The book contains, among other things, a defence of several putative distinctions, and it touches on an impressively wide range of pe...

Speci city Distinctions

Conceptual distinctions amongst generics.

Generic sentences (e.g., bare plural sentences such as "dogs have four legs" and "mosquitoes carry malaria") are used to talk about kinds of things. Three experiments investigated the conceptual foundations of generics as well as claims within the formal semantic approaches to generics concerning the roles of prevalence, cue validity and normalcy in licensing generics. Two classes of generic se...