Inductive Inference And Its Natural Ground

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.