A Treatise on the Feasibility of the Unfeasible or Old Ideas Brewed New

by

Tibor Vámos

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This book is an essay on relevant problems of epistemology (the theory of knowledge) which are related to computer science. It draws a continuous line between the earliest scientific approaches of epistemology, starting with the Greek Classics, and the recent practical and theoretical problems of computer modelling, and by that is obtained the appropriate application of computers for our present problems. Uncertainty, logic and language are the key issues of this road leading to some new aspects of cognitive psychology and unification of the different results for a modelling procedure. This book is not a textbook but a critical survey of usual and advertised methods with an evaluation of them from the point of view of their applicability, reliability and limits. Probability, Bayesian, Dempster-Shafer, fuzzy and other approaches are treated in this way in uncertainty, different worlds' concepts, non-monotonic logic and other methods and views in logic. The emphasis in linguistics is put on the meta concept, and in cognitive applications on the pattern concept.

Written mostly in an entertaining style, this book provides a palatable reading of a profound subject.

The drawing on the cover represents the 'brain in a vat' metaphor, described Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

In an imagined situation, a brain is kept alive, out of the body, by artificial means. It is linked to a computer, thus enabling the experimenter to cause the person whose brain it is to have illusions. This illustrates the problems of the relations of our mind to reality and self, from which arise the questions of how we should think about these ambiguous relations and on how we should rely on computers. These form the subject of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vámos, Tibor.
    Computer epistemology : a treatise on the feasibility of the
  unfeasible or old ideas brewed new / Tibor Vámos.
      p.   cm. --(Series in computer science ; vol. 25)
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    ISBN 9810203500.
    1. Computer science.   2. Artificial intelligence.   I. Title.
  II. Series.
   QA76.V325   1990
   004--dc20                                            90-47680
                                                             CIP