Paradoxes in scientific inference (Q2917595)

Paradoxes have a long history and have greatly influenced our cultural development. They have fascinated human kind from ancient times to the present and continue to challenge our intellectual foundations.NEWLINENEWLINEThe aim of this book is to investigate paradoxes within specific research topics and to use them to shed light onto contradictory or controversial aspects of their theories.NEWLINENEWLINEChapter one serves as an introduction, which aims to spark the interest of the reader by giving a brief overview of many well known paradoxes taken from a wide range of topics. The author adopts a very broad interpretation of paradoxes which extends the standard definition to include counter-intuitive results; he discusses paradoxes of self reference, mathematics, statistics, probability, infinity, economics, etc.NEWLINENEWLINEChapters 2--5 focus on specific topics, i.e., probability, statistics, artificial intelligence, and here paradoxes are discussed with the intent to show their importance in the development and understanding of these subjects.NEWLINENEWLINEThe enthusiasm of the author is tangible throughout the book. With the exception of the chapter on statistical inference, which goes into more detailed analysis of statistical paradigms, the book does not require any specialized background, and it is well suited for a broad audience.