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Quantified Probability Logics: How Boolean Algebras Met Real-Closed Fields

Quantified Probability Logics: How Boolean Algebras Met Real-Closed Fields

FromMCMP – Philosophy of Mathematics


Quantified Probability Logics: How Boolean Algebras Met Real-Closed Fields

FromMCMP – Philosophy of Mathematics

ratings:
Length:
51 minutes
Released:
Feb 10, 2015
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

Stanislav O. Speranski (Sobolev Institute of Mathematics) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (4 December, 2014) titled "Quantified probability logics: how Boolean algebras met real-closed fields". Abstract: This talk is devoted to one interesting probability logic with quantifiers over events — henceforth denoted by QPL. That is to say, the quantifiers in QPL are intended to range over all events of the probability space at hand. Here I will be concerned with fundamental questions about the expressive power and algorithmic content of QPL. Note that these two aspects are closely connected, and in fact there exists a trade-off between them: whenever a logic has a high computational complexity, we expect some natural higher-order properties to be definable in the corresponding language. For each class of spaces, we introduce its theory, viz. the set of probabilistic sentences true in every space from the class. Then the theory of the class of all spaces turns out to be of a huge complexity, being computably equivalent to the true second-order arithmetic of natural numbers. On the other hand, many important properties of probability spaces — like those of being finite, discrete and atomless — are definable by suitable formulas of our language. Further, for any class of atomless spaces, there exists an algorithm for deciding whether a given probabilistic formula belongs to its theory or not; moreover, this continues to hold even if we extend our formalism by adding quantifiers over reals. To sum up, the proposed logic and its variations, being attractive from the viewpoint of probability theory and having nice algebraic features, prove to be very useful for investigating connections between probability and logic. In the final part of the talk I will compare QPL with other probabilistic languages (including Halpern's first-order logics of probability and Keisler's model-theoretic logics with probability quantifiers), discuss analogies with research in Boolean algebras and show, in particular, how QPL can serve for classification of probability spaces.
Released:
Feb 10, 2015
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (22)

Mathematical Philosophy - the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy - is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists. The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical methods are used to derive physical predictions from physical laws. Nor is the idea of mathematical philosophy to dismiss any of the ancient questions of philosophy as irrelevant or senseless: although modern mathematical philosophy owes a lot to the heritage of the Vienna and Berlin Circles of Logical Empiricism, unlike the Logical Empiricists most mathematical philosophers today are driven by the same traditional questions about truth, knowledge, rationality, the nature of objects, morality, and the like, which were driving the classical philosophers, and no area of traditional philosophy is taken to be intrinsically misguided or confused anymore. It is just that some of the traditional questions of philosophy can be made much clearer and much more precise in logical-mathematical terms, for some of these questions answers can be given by means of mathematical proofs or models, and on this basis new and more concrete philosophical questions emerge. This may then lead to philosophical progress, and ultimately that is the goal of the Center.