Greetings all, This coming Monday, 1.00-2.30 in the philosophy common room, Kenny Easwaran (ANU and USC) will talk to us about "Probabilistic Proofs and Transferability".
Astract: In a series of papers, Don Fallis points out that although mathematicians are generally unwilling to accept merely probabilistic proofs of various claims, they do accept proofs that differ from an ideal of certainty in various other ways, being incomplete, long and complicated, or partly carried out by computers. He considers various proposed criteria, and argues that there are no epistemic grounds on which probabilistic proofs can be rejected while these other proofs are accepted. I present a property I call "transferability", which I argue that probabilistic proofs lack and other acceptable proofs have. This property helps ensure that published mathematics is checkable in a very strong way. I also consider what the apparent importance of a property like this in mathematics says about the similarities between mathematics and, on the one hand natural sciences, and on the other hand philosophy. See you all there... Dr. Kristie Miller Australian Research Council Post-doctoral Fellow School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and The Centre for Time The University of Sydney Sydney, Australia Room 411, A18 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ph: (work) 02 9036 9663 Ph: (mobile) 0432 275 286 http://homepage.mac.com/centre.for.time/KristieMiller/Kristie/Home%20Page.html _______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list [email protected] List Info: http://lists.arts.usyd.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/sydphil NEW LIST ARCHIVE: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
