Striking coincidences: How realists should reason about them

Coincidences and How to Think about Them Elliott Sober

The naïve see causal connections everywhere. Consider the fact that Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice. The naïve find it irresistible to think that this cannot be a coincidence. Maybe the lottery was rigged or perhaps some uncanny higher power placed its hand upon her brow. Sophisticates respond with an indulgent smile and ask the naïve to view Adams’ double win within a large...

1 Coincidences and How to Think about Them Elliott Sober

The naïve see causal connections everywhere. Consider the fact that Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice. The naïve find it irresistible to think that this cannot be a coincidence. Maybe the lottery was rigged or some uncanny higher power placed its hand upon her brow. Sophisticates respond with an indulgent smile and ask the naïve to view Adams’ double win within a larger perspe...

Using Ontology Graphs to Understand Annotations and Reason about Them

Biomedical ontologies not only capture a wealth of biological knowledge but also provide a representational system to support the integration and retrieval of biological information. Various biomedical ontologies are used by model organism databases to annotate biological entities to the literature and have become an essential part of high throughput experiments and bioinformatics research. We ...

How to Reason about Self-Locating Belief

When reasoning about self-locating belief, one should reason as if one were a randomly selected bit of information. This principle can be considered to be an application of Bostrom’s Strong Self-Sampling Assumption(SSSA)[2] according to which one should reason as if one were a randomly selected element of some suitable reference class of observer-moments. The reference class is the class of all...

Predicted values: how should we use them?