Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground

Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground PDF Author: Hilary Kornblith
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262611169
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Hilary Kornblith presents an account of inductive inference that addresses both its metaphysical and epistemological aspects. He argues that inductive knowledge is possible by virtue of the fit between our innate psychological capacities and the causal structure of the world. Kornblith begins by developing an account of natural kinds that has its origins in John Locke's work on real and nominal essences. In Kornblith's view, a natural kind is a stable cluster of properties that are bound together in nature. The existence of such kinds serves as a natural ground of inductive inference.Kornblith then examines two features of human psychology that explain how knowledge of natural kinds is attained. First, our concepts are structured innately in a way that presupposes the existence of natural kinds. Second, our native inferential tendencies tend to provide us with accurate beliefs about the world when applied to environments that are populated by natural kinds.

Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground

Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground PDF Author: Hilary Kornblith
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262611169
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book

Book Description
Hilary Kornblith presents an account of inductive inference that addresses both its metaphysical and epistemological aspects. He argues that inductive knowledge is possible by virtue of the fit between our innate psychological capacities and the causal structure of the world. Kornblith begins by developing an account of natural kinds that has its origins in John Locke's work on real and nominal essences. In Kornblith's view, a natural kind is a stable cluster of properties that are bound together in nature. The existence of such kinds serves as a natural ground of inductive inference.Kornblith then examines two features of human psychology that explain how knowledge of natural kinds is attained. First, our concepts are structured innately in a way that presupposes the existence of natural kinds. Second, our native inferential tendencies tend to provide us with accurate beliefs about the world when applied to environments that are populated by natural kinds.

Rationality and Reality

Rationality and Reality PDF Author: Colin Cheyne
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402042078
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Alan Musgrave has consistently defended two positions that he regards as commonsensical: critical realism and critical rationalism. In this volume a group of internationally-renowned authors discuss themes that are relevant in one way or another to Musgrave’s work. Rather than a standard celebratory festschrift, this book offers a new examination of topics of current interest in philosophy. The contributory essays are followed by responses from Alan Musgrave himself.

Scientific Realism and the Rationality of Science

Scientific Realism and the Rationality of Science PDF Author: Howard Sankey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317058801
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Scientific realism is the position that the aim of science is to advance on truth and increase knowledge about observable and unobservable aspects of the mind-independent world which we inhabit. This book articulates and defends that position. In presenting a clear formulation and addressing the major arguments for scientific realism Sankey appeals to philosophers beyond the community of, typically Anglo-American, analytic philosophers of science to appreciate and understand the doctrine. The book emphasizes the epistemological aspects of scientific realism and contains an original solution to the problem of induction that rests on an appeal to the principle of uniformity of nature.

Second Thoughts and the Epistemological Enterprise

Second Thoughts and the Epistemological Enterprise PDF Author: Hilary Kornblith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108498515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Collected essays showing how social psychology illuminates epistemological problems, focusing on issues of self-knowledge and the nature of human reason. The book features specific examples of sceptical problems and also includes two entirely new essays. It will appeal to pyschologists as well philosophers.

A Naturalistic Epistemology

A Naturalistic Epistemology PDF Author: Hilary Kornblith
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191021199
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This volume draws together influential work by Hilary Kornblith on naturalistic epistemology. The naturalistic approach sees epistemology not as a matter of analysis of concepts, but as an explanatory project constrained and informed by work in the cognitive sciences. These essays expound and defend Kornblith's distinctive view of how we come to have knowledge of the world. He offers critical discussion of alternative approaches, such as foundationalism, the coherence theory of justification, internalism, and externalism; and he discusses social epistemology, the role of intuitions in philosophical theorizing, epistemic normativity, and the ways in which philosophical theories may be informed by empirical considerations. Kornblith aims to show how an epistemology which is based in the sciences of cognition may provide the understanding and intellectual illumination which has always been the goal of philosophical theorizing.

Inductive Logic

Inductive Logic PDF Author: Dov M. Gabbay
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080931693
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 801

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Book Description
Inductive Logic is number ten in the 11-volume Handbook of the History of Logic. While there are many examples were a science split from philosophy and became autonomous (such as physics with Newton and biology with Darwin), and while there are, perhaps, topics that are of exclusively philosophical interest, inductive logic — as this handbook attests — is a research field where philosophers and scientists fruitfully and constructively interact. This handbook covers the rich history of scientific turning points in Inductive Logic, including probability theory and decision theory. Written by leading researchers in the field, both this volume and the Handbook as a whole are definitive reference tools for senior undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in the history of logic, the history of philosophy, and any discipline, such as mathematics, computer science, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, for whom the historical background of his or her work is a salient consideration. Chapter on the Port Royal contributions to probability theory and decision theory Serves as a singular contribution to the intellectual history of the 20th century Contains the latest scholarly discoveries and interpretative insights

Pragmatism, Logic, and Law

Pragmatism, Logic, and Law PDF Author: Frederic Kellogg
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1793616981
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Pragmatism, Logic and Law offers a view of legal pragmatism consistent with pragmatism writ large, tracing it from origins in late 19th century America to the present, covering various issues, legal cases, personalities, and relevant intellectual movements within and outside law. It addresses pragmatism’s relation to legal liberalism, legal positivism, natural law, critical legal studies (CLS), and post-Rorty “neopragmatism.” It views legal pragmatism as an exemplar of pragmatism’s general contribution to logical theory, which bears two connections to the western philosophical tradition: first, it extends Francis Bacon’s empiricism into contemporary aspects of scientific and legal experience, and second, it is an explicitly social reconstruction of logical induction. Both notions were articulated by John Dewey, and both emphasize the social or corporate element of human inquiry. Empiricism is informed by social as well as individual experience (which includes the problems of conflict and consensus). Rather than following the Aristotelian model of induction as immediate inference from particulars to generals, a model that assumes a consensual objective viewpoint, pragmatism explores the actual, and extended, process of corporate inference from particular experience to generalization, in law as in science. This includes the necessary process of resolving disagreement and finding similarity among relevant particulars.

Are Species Real?

Are Species Real? PDF Author: Matthew H. Slater
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230393233
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
What are species? Are they objective features of the world? If so, what sort of features are they? Slater presents a novel approach to these questions, aiming to accommodating the attractions to both realism and antirealism about species.

Scientific Essentialism

Scientific Essentialism PDF Author: Brian Ellis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521800945
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Examines the laws of nature.

Logic, Deductive and Inductive

Logic, Deductive and Inductive PDF Author: Thomas Fowler
Publisher: Theclassics.Us
ISBN: 9781230266626
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER I. On tfte Nature of Inductive Inference. 'WO bodies of unequal weight (say a guinea and a feather) are placed at the same height under the exhausted receiver of an air-pump. When released, they are observed to reach the bottom of the vessel at the same instant of time, or, in other words, to fall in equal times. From this fact, it is inferred that a repetition of the experiment either with these two bodies or with any other bodies would be attended with the same result, and that, if it were not for the resistance of the atmosphere and other impeding circumstances, all bodies, whatever their weight, would fall through equal vertical spaces in equal times. Now, that these two bodies in this particular experiment fall to the bottom of the receiver in equal times is merely a fact of observation, but that they would do so if we repeated the experiment, or that the next two bodies we selected, or any bodies, or all bodies, would do so, is an inference, and is an inference of that particular character which is called an Inductive Inference or an Induction *. 1 The student must throughout bear in mind the ambiguous use of the words Induction, Inference, &c, as signifying both the result and the process by which the result is arrived at. See Deductive Logic, Preface, and Part III. ch. i. note I. What assumptions underlie this inference, and on what grounds does it rest? My object in placing the two bodies under the receiver was obviously to answer a question which I had previously addressed to myself: viz. whether, when subject to the action of gravity2 only, they would fall in equal or in unequal times. By exhausting the air in the receiver, I am able to isolate the phenomenon, and thus, by removing all circumstances affecting the...