Dear UAIers,
on the history of "plausibility-like" measures, it may be
of interest to see a fascinating piece by Henry Kyburg Jr.
in SIPTA Newsletter, vol. 1, pp. 2-5, 2003; this issue of
the newsletter is at
http://leo.ugr.es/sipta/news/jan2003.ps.gz
There is a lot of historical information there.
Cheers,
Fabio Cozman
On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Peter McBurney wrote:
> Hello all --
> I have just seen a 1959 paper by the late Australian philosopher and
> computer pioneer, Charles Hamblin, which defines a measure he calls
> "plausibility":
> C. L. Hamblin [1959]: "The Modal "Probably" ", <Mind>, New Series, 68
> (270): 234-240.
> Hamblin defines the plausibility of an event E as a real number between
> 0 and 1 (inclusive) such that:
> (i) the plausibility for a given event is assigned without regard to the
> number and plausibilities assigned to contrary events; and
> (ii) the plausibility assigned is not limited by the usual probability
> additivity rule (that probabilities of the whole space should add to 1).
> He then defines a simple combination rule: the plausibility of a
> disjunction is equal to the largest of the plausibilities of the
> components of the disjunction.
> This would appear to be the first published formal definition of a
> plausibility measure. In the ISI Citations Index, I have only been
> able to find 2 papers since 1981 which cite this paper, and neither
> relates to uncertainty formalisms.
> Does anyone know of any earlier formal treatment of non-probabilistic
> uncertainty? Hamblin cites Shackle's work on uncertainty in economics,
> but I understand that treatment was not formal.
> With thanks,
> -- Peter McBurney
> Department of Computer Science
> University of Liverpool
