Este artículo rastrea la presencia del realismo, el empirismo y el sinequismo en las teorías de la cognición de Aristóteles y de Charles S. Peirce. Los dos primeros términos se relacionan comúnmente con ambos autores, pero aquí se quiere precisar en detalle qué semejanzas y diferencias hay entre el realismo y el empirismo de estos dos filósofos. De otro lado, el sinequismo se relaciona solo con Peirce, mientras que a Aristóteles se le ubica precisamente como opositor a cualquier idea de (...) continuidad e infinito. Lo que se quiere mostrar aquí es que, al menos en el ámbito de la cognición, Aristóteles es también un sinequista. Otro punto importante del artículo es que intenta criticar y corregir la interpretación que hace Peirce del empirismo de Aristóteles al intentar erróneamente de afirmar que el filósofo griego es un intuicionista. (shrink)

It is usually accepted that deductions are non-informative and monotonic, inductions are informative and nonmonotonic, abductions create hypotheses but are epistemically irrelevant, and both deductions and inductions can’t provide new insights. In this article, I attempt to provide a more cohesive view of the subject with the following hypotheses: (1) the paradigmatic examples of deductions, such as modus ponens and hypothetical syllogism, are not inferential forms, but coherence requirements for inferences; (2) since any reasoner aims to be coherent, any inference (...) must be deductive; (3) a coherent inference is an intuitive process where the premises should be taken as sufficient evidence for the conclusion, which on its turn should be viewed as necessary evidence for the premises in some modal range; (4) inductions, properly understood, are abductions, but there are no abductions beyond the fact that in any inference the conclusion should be regarded as necessary evidence for the premises; (5) monotonicity is not only compatible with the retraction of past inferences given new information, but it is a requirement for it; (6) this explanation of inferences holds true for discovery processes, predictions and trivial inferences. (shrink)

Louis Loeb has argued that Hume is pessimistic while Peirce is optimistic about the attainment of fully stable beliefs. In contrast, we argue that Hume was optimistic about such attainment but only if the scope of philosophical investigation is limited to first-order explanatory questions. Further, we argue that Peirce, after reformulating the pragmatic maxim to accommodate the reality of counterfactuals, was pessimistic about such attainment. Finally, we articulate and respond to Peirce's objection that Hume's skeptical arguments in T 1.4.1 and (...) his commitment to common sense indicate that Hume was confused about whether we could have stable beliefs at all. (shrink)