Plausibility and probability in juridical proof

Plausibility and probability in deductive reasoning

We consider the problem of rational uncertainty about unproven mathematical statements, which Gödel and others have remarked on. Using Bayesian-inspired arguments we build a normative model of fair bets under deductive uncertainty which draws from both probability and the theory of algorithms. We comment on connections to Zeilberger’s notion of “semi-rigorous proofs”, particularly that inherent...

Probability, Confidence, and Twombly's Plausibility Standard

Similarity, plausibility, and judgments of probability.

Judging the strength of an argument may underlie many reasoning and decision-making tasks. In this article, we focus on "category-based" arguments, in which the premises and conclusion are of the form All members of C have property P, where C is a natural category. An example is "Dobermans have sesamoid bones. Therefore, German shepherds have sesamoid bones." The strength of such an argument is...

What is the plausibility of probability?

We present and examine a result related to uncertainty reasoning, namely that a certain plausibility measure of Cox’s type can be uniquely embedded in a minimal ordered field. This, although a purely mathematical result, can be claimed to imply that every rational method to reason with uncertainty must be based on sets of extended probability distributions, where extended probability is standar...

Inheritance reasoning : psychological plausibility, proof theory and semantics

Default inheritance reasoning is a propositional approach to nonmonotonic reasoning designed to model reasoning with natural language generics. Inheritance reasoners model sets of natural language generics as directed acyclic graphs, and inference corresponds to the speci cation of paths through those networks. A proliferation of inheritance proof theories exist in the literature along with ext...