Propositions about novelty

The Story About Propositions

Talking even about rather ordinary circumstances appears to implicate directly certain metaphysically loaded identifications. For example, if Dr. Gustav Lauben is a doctor then it seems to follow that he has the property of being a doctor; just as if he is injured, he has the property (or the characteristic) of being injured. Moreover, if Frege should come to believe that the good doctor is inj...

A Puzzle about Truth and Singular Propositions 1 1 . Singular Propositions

My dissertation consists of three essays in the Metaphysics of Modality: In "A Puzzle about Truth and Singular Propositions," I consider two theses that seem to be true and then an argument for the conclusion that they form an inconsistent pair. One thesis is that a proposition that is singular with respect to a given object implies that the object exists. This is so because the proposition pre...

A Bipolar Framework for Combining Beliefs about Vague Propositions

A bipolar framework is introduced for combining agents’ beliefs so as to enable them to reach a common shared position or viewpoint. Our approach exploits the truth-gaps inherent to propositions involving vague concepts, by allowing agents to soften directly conflicting opinions. To this end we adopt a bipolar truth-model for propositional logic characterised by lower and upper valuations on th...

Visualising Pathways for Learning about Novelty in the Rodent Brain

Novelty and Adaptive Novelty

In this paper we briefly describe Novelty and Adaptive Novelty, two high-performance, stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms for SAT. Based on the WalkSAT architecture, these algorithms combine search intensification and diversification feautures that lead to good peformance on a broad range of SAT instances. The performance of the Novelty algorithm critically depends on the setting of a soca...