In a series of articles, Paul Thagard has developed a connectionist''s modelfor the evaluation of explanatory coherence for competing systems ofhypotheses. He has successfully applied it to various examples from thehistory of science and common language reasoning. However, I will argue thathis formalism does not adequately represent explanatory relations betweenmore than two propositions.In this paper, I develop a generalization of Thagard''s approach. It is notsubject to the connectionist paradigm of neural nets, but is based on fuzzylogic: Explanatory coherence increases with (...) the fuzzy truth value of theconjunction of explanans and explanandum and decreases with the value of theconjunction of explanans and the negation of the explanandum. (shrink)

The method of Quasi-Analysis used by Carnap in his program of theconstitution of concepts from finite observations has the following twogoals: (1) Given unsharp observations in terms of similarity relations thetrue properties of the observed objects shall be obtained by a suitablelogical construction. (2) From a single relation on a finite domain,different dimensions of qualities shall be reconstructed and identified. Inthis article I show that with a slight modification Quasi-Analysis iscapable of fulfilling the first goal for a single observable dimension. (...) Weobtain a partition of the so-called Quality Classes representing thepairwise disjoint and exhaustive extensions associated to the ``values'''' ofthe observable. On the other hand, an example demonstrates that the methodfails, as Goodman has pointed out, for a relation expressing similarity withregard to at least one out of many properties.Since it seems to be impossible in general to reconstruct more-dimensionalqualities from a single similarity relation, the constitution of at least asmany similarity relations as there are qualities have to be presumed. Thenit is possible to state adequate sufficient conditions for the dimension ofthe observable space, even if some of the similarity relations might dependon others. The concept of topological dimension cannot be used for thispurpose on finite sets of observations. We replace it by a set-algebraicalcondition on the Quality Classes. (shrink)

An axiomatic basis for a social preference ordering with interval-scaled utility levels satisfying the principles of anonymity and pareto superiority is elaborated. The ordering is required to be sensitive to distributional equality: Redistribution of utility income from poor to rich persons without changing their social rank should lead to a superior evaluation. The axiom of separability is weakened in order to make it compatible with distributional equality. We prove that every continuous ordering satisfying the upper axioms can be represented by (...) a utility function which is positively linear on the convex cone of rank-ordered utility vectors. A modified unnormalized Gini coefficient is one possible choice, but it contradicts, as well as related proposals, the principle of adequacy of means for some distribution problems. (shrink)

It is argued that formal reconstructions of the EPR-argument do not only show semantical incompleteness, but also incorrectness of quantum mechanics together with the projection postulate. The latter has to be rejected because it contradicts Schrödinger's equation. A logical analogon to the problem is given.