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  1. Abductive reasoning in neural-symbolic systems.Artur S. D’Avila Garcez, Dov M. Gabbay, Oliver Ray & John Woods - 2007 - Topoi 26 (1):37-49.
    Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments (...)
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  • The heuristic conception of inference to the best explanation.Finnur Dellsén - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 175 (7):1745-1766.
    An influential suggestion about the relationship between Bayesianism and inference to the best explanation holds that IBE functions as a heuristic to approximate Bayesian reasoning. While this view promises to unify Bayesianism and IBE in a very attractive manner, important elements of the view have not yet been spelled out in detail. I present and argue for a heuristic conception of IBE on which IBE serves primarily to locate the most probable available explanatory hypothesis to serve as a working hypothesis (...)
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  • Computational Tractability and Conceptual Coherence.Paul Thagard - 1993 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (3):349-363.
    According to Church’s thesis, we can identify the intuitive concept of effective computability with such well-defined mathematical concepts as Turing computability and partial recursiveness. The almost universal acceptance of Church’s thesis among logicians and computer scientists is puzzling from some epistemological perspectives, since no formal proof is possible of a thesis that involves an informal concept such as effectiveness. Elliott Mendelson has recently argued, however, that equivalencies between intuitive notions and precise notions need not always be considered unprovable theses, and (...)
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  • Reactionary responses to the Bad Lot Objection.Finnur Dellsén - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 61:32-40.
    As it is standardly conceived, Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is a form of ampliative inference in which one infers a hypothesis because it provides a better potential explanation of one’s evidence than any other available, competing explanatory hypothesis. Bas van Fraassen famously objected to IBE thus formulated that we may have no reason to think that any of the available, competing explanatory hypotheses are true. While revisionary responses to the Bad Lot Objection concede that IBE needs to be (...)
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  • Ulcers and bacteria I: discovery and acceptance.Paul Thagard - 1998 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 29 (1):107-136.
    In 1983, Dr. J. Robin Warren and Dr. Barry Marshall reported finding a new kind of bacteria in the stomachs of people with gastritis. Warren and Marshall were soon led to the hypothesis that peptic ulcers are generally caused, not by excess acidity or stress, but by a bacterial infection. Initially, this hypothesis was viewed as preposterous, and it is still somewhat controversial. In 1994, however, a U. S. National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Panel concluded that infection appears to (...)
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  • Reasoning From Inconsistency to Consistency.P. N. Johnson-Laird, Vittorio Girotto & Paolo Legrenzi - 2004 - Psychological Review 111 (3):640-661.
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  • Temporal construal.Yaacov Trope & Nira Liberman - 2003 - Psychological Review 110 (3):403-421.
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  • Robustness, Diversity of Evidence, and Probabilistic Independence.Jonah N. Schupbach - 2015 - In Uskali Mäki, Stéphanie Ruphy, Gerhard Schurz & Ioannis Votsis (eds.), Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 305-316.
    In robustness analysis, hypotheses are supported to the extent that a result proves robust, and a result is robust to the extent that we detect it in diverse ways. But what precise sense of diversity is at work here? In this paper, I show that the formal explications of evidential diversity most often appealed to in work on robustness – which all draw in one way or another on probabilistic independence – fail to shed light on the notion of diversity (...)
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  • On the acquisition of abstract knowledge: Structural alignment and explication in learning causal system categories.Micah B. Goldwater & Dedre Gentner - 2015 - Cognition 137 (C):137-153.
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  • Why metaphors make good insults: perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics.Elisabeth Camp - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (1):47--64.
    Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ”framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ”complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically (...)
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  • kohärent/Kohärenz; Kohärenz, explanatorische; Kohärenz, probabilistische.Stephan Hartmann - 2010 - In J. Mittelstraß (ed.), Enzyklopädie der Wissenschaftsphilosophie und analytischen Philosophie vol. 4. Metzler. pp. 250-258.
    Erklärungstheoretisch bestimmter Kohärenzbegriff.
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  • Neural networks and psychopharmacology.Sbg Park - 1998 - In Dan J. Stein & Jacques Ludik (eds.), Neural Networks and Psychopathology: Connectionist Models in Practice and Research. Cambridge University Press. pp. 57.
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  • Empirical investigation or rational reconstruction?Stephen M. Downes - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (4):742-743.
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  • The emperor's new epistemology.Lissa Roberts & Michael E. Gorman - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (4):743-744.
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  • Is human cognition adaptive?John R. Anderson - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (3):471-485.
    Can the output of human cognition be predicted from the assumption that it is an optimal response to the information-processing demands of the environment? A methodology called rational analysis is described for deriving predictions about cognitive phenomena using optimization assumptions. The predictions flow from the statistical structure of the environment and not the assumed structure of the mind. Bayesian inference is used, assuming that people start with a weak prior model of the world which they integrate with experience to develop (...)
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  • Does the environment have the same structure as Bayes' theorem?Gerd Gigerenzer - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (3):495-496.
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  • Normative theories of categorization.James E. Corter - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (3):491-492.
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  • Explanation—Opening Address.J. J. C. Smart - 1990 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 27:1-19.
    It is a pleasure for me to give this opening address to the Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference on ‘Explanation’ for two reasons. The first is that it is succeeded by exciting symposia and other papers concerned with various special aspects of the topic of explanation. The second is that the conference is being held in my old alma mater, the University of Glasgow, where I did my first degree. Especially due to C. A. Campbell and George Brown there was (...)
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  • Resources for Research on Analogy: A Multi-disciplinary Guide.Marcello Guarini, Amy Butchart, Paul Simard Smith & Andrei Moldovan - 2009 - Informal Logic 29 (2):84-197.
    Work on analogy has been done from a number of disciplinary perspectives throughout the history of Western thought. This work is a multidisciplinary guide to theorizing about analogy. It contains 1,406 references, primarily to journal articles and monographs, and primarily to English language material. classical through to contemporary sources are included. The work is classified into eight different sections (with a number of subsections). A brief introduction to each section is provided. Keywords and key expressions of importance to research on (...)
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  • Explanation and Evidence in Informal Argument.Sarah K. Brem & Lance J. Rips - 2000 - Cognitive Science 24 (4):573-604.
    A substantial body of evidence shows that people tend to rely too heavily on explanations when trying to justify an opinion. Some research suggests these errors may arise from an inability to distinguish between explanations and the evidence that bears upon them. We examine an alternative account, that many people do distinguish between explanations and evidence, but rely more heavily on unsubstantiated explanations when evidence is scarce or absent. We examine the philosophical and psychological distinctions between explanation and evidence, and (...)
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  • Use of current explanations in multicausal abductive reasoning.Todd R. Johnson & Josef F. Krems - 2001 - Cognitive Science 25 (6):903-939.
    In multicausal abductive tasks a person must explain some findings by assembling a composite hypothesis that consists of one or more elementary hypotheses. If there are n elementary hypotheses, there can be up to 2n composite hypotheses. To constrain the search for hypotheses to explain a new observation, people sometimes use their current explanation—the previous evidence and their present composite hypothesis of that evidence; however, it is unclear when and how the current explanation is used. In addition, although a person's (...)
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  • Feature Centrality and Conceptual Coherence.Steven A. Sloman, Bradley C. Love & Woo-Kyoung Ahn - 1998 - Cognitive Science 22 (2):189-228.
    Conceptual features differ in how mentally tranformable they are. A robin that does not eat is harder to imagine than a robin that does not chirp. We argue that features are immutable to the extent that they are central in a network of dependency relations. The immutability of a feature reflects how much the internal structure of a concept depends on that feature; i.e., how much the feature contributes to the concept's coherence. Complementarily, mutability reflects the aspects in which a (...)
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  • On the Truth-Conduciveness of Coherence.William Roche - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (3):647-665.
    I argue that coherence is truth-conducive in that coherence implies an increase in the probability of truth. Central to my argument is a certain principle for transitivity in probabilistic support. I then address a question concerning the truth-conduciveness of coherence as it relates to (something else I argue for) the truth-conduciveness of consistency, and consider how the truth-conduciveness of coherence bears on coherentist theories of justification.
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  • Slurring Perspectives.Elisabeth Camp - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (3):330-349.
    Slurs are rhetorically insidious and theoretically interesting because they communicate something above and beyond the truth-conditional predication of group membership, something which typically though not always projects across 'blocking' constructions like negation, conditionals, and indirect quotation, and which is exceptionally resistant to direct challenge. I argue that neither pure expressivism nor straightforward truth-conditionalism can account for the sort of commitment that speakers undertake by using slurs. Instead, I claim, users of slurs endorse a denigrating perspective on the targeted group.
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  • The Influence of Anomalous Data on Solving Human Abductive Tasks.Andreas Keinarh & Josef F. Krems - 1998 - Philosophica 61 (1).
    This paper describes an abductive process model of anomalous data integration. The model makes use of the entrenchment of the current explanation and the probability of alternative explanations. It is hypothesised that increasing confirmation of the anom-aly itself increases the probability of alternative explanations. In an experimental study we found that both the entrenchment of an existing explanation and confirmation of the anomaly clearly influence how people resolve anomalous data. These results are in agreement with the predic-tions of the model.
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  • The pervasive effects of argument length on inductive reasoning.Evan Heit & Caren M. Rotello - 2012 - Thinking and Reasoning 18 (3):244 - 277.
    Three experiments examined the influence of argument length on plausibility judgements, in a category-based induction task. The general results were that when arguments were logically invalid they were considered stronger when they were longer, but for logically valid arguments longer arguments were considered weaker. In Experiments 1a and 1b when participants were forewarned to avoid using length as a cue to judging plausibility, they still did so. Indeed, participants given the opposite instructions did not follow those instructions either. In Experiment (...)
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  • Explanationist rebuttals (coherentism defended again).William G. Lycan - 2012 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (1):5-20.
    An explanatory coherence theory of justification is sketched and then defended against a number of recent objections: conservatism and relativism; wild and crazy beliefs; reliability; warranted necessary falsehoods; basing; distant, unknown coherences; Sosa's “self- and present-abstracts”; and Bayesian impossibility results.
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  • Inference to the best explanation, coherence and other explanatory virtues.Adolfas Mackonis - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):975-995.
    This article generalizes the explanationist account of inference to the best explanation. It draws a clear distinction between IBE and abduction and presents abduction as the first step of IBE. The second step amounts to the evaluation of explanatory power, which consist in the degree of explanatory virtues that a hypothesis exhibits. Moreover, even though coherence is the most often cited explanatory virtue, on pain of circularity, it should not be treated as one of the explanatory virtues. Rather, coherence should (...)
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  • The Instrumental Value of Explanations.Tania Lombrozo - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (8):539-551.
    Scientific and ‘intuitive’ or ‘folk’ theories are typically characterized as serving three critical functions: prediction, explanation, and control. While prediction and control have clear instrumental value, the value of explanation is less transparent. This paper reviews an emerging body of research from the cognitive sciences suggesting that the process of seeking, generating, and evaluating explanations in fact contributes to future prediction and control, albeit indirectly by facilitating the discovery and confirmation of instrumentally valuable theories. Theoretical and empirical considerations also suggest (...)
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  • Epistemological Metaphors and the Nature of Philosophy.Paul Thagard & Craig Beam - 2004 - Metaphilosophy 35 (4):504-516.
    This paper examines some of the most important metaphors and analogies that epistemologists have used to discuss the structure and validity of knowledge. After reviewing foundational, coherentist, and other metaphors for knowledge, we discuss the metaphilosophical significance of the prevalence of such metaphors. We argue that they support a view of philosophy as akin to science rather than poetry or rhetoric. Keywords: epistemology, metaphor, analogy, metaphilosophy, foundations, coherence.
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  • Perspectives in imaginative engagement with fiction.Elisabeth Camp - 2017 - Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1):73-102.
    I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...)
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  • Why Questions, and Why Just Why-Questions?Matti Sintonen - 1999 - Synthese 120 (1):125-135.
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  • Outline of a theory of scientific understanding.Gerhard Schurz & Karel Lambert - 1994 - Synthese 101 (1):65-120.
    The basic theory of scientific understanding presented in Sections 1–2 exploits three main ideas.First, that to understand a phenomenonP (for a given agent) is to be able to fitP into the cognitive background corpusC (of the agent).Second, that to fitP intoC is to connectP with parts ofC (via arguments in a very broad sense) such that the unification ofC increases.Third, that the cognitive changes involved in unification can be treated as sequences of shifts of phenomena inC. How the theory fits (...)
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  • A fuzzy measure for explanatory coherence.Daniel Schoch - 2000 - Synthese 122 (3):291-311.
    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 (...)
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  • Deliberative coherence.Elijah Millgram & Paul Thagard - 1996 - Synthese 108 (1):63 - 88.
    Choosing the right plan is often choosing the more coherent plan: but what is coherence? We argue that coherence-directed practical inference ought to be represented computationally. To that end, we advance a theory of deliberative coherence, and describe its implementation in a program modelled on Thagard's ECHO. We explain how the theory can be tested and extended, and consider its bearing on instrumentalist accounts of practical rationality.
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  • Is Coherentism Coherent?Christoph Jäger - 2007 - Analysis 67 (4):341 - 344.
    In ‘A reductio of coherentism’ (Analysis 67, 2007) Tom Stoneham offers a novel argument against epistemological coherentism. ‘On the face of it’, he writes, ‘the argument gives a conclusive reductio ad absurdum of any coherence theory of justification. But that cannot be right, can it?’ (p. 254). It could be right, but it isn’t. I argue that coherentists need not accept the central premises of Stoneham’s argument and that, even if these premises were acceptable and true, Stoneham’s reductio would not (...)
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  • Scientific explanation and the sense of understanding.J. D. Trout - 2002 - Philosophy of Science 69 (2):212-233.
    Scientists and laypeople alike use the sense of understanding that an explanation conveys as a cue to good or correct explanation. Although the occurrence of this sense or feeling of understanding is neither necessary nor sufficient for good explanation, it does drive judgments of the plausibility and, ultimately, the acceptability, of an explanation. This paper presents evidence that the sense of understanding is in part the routine consequence of two well-documented biases in cognitive psychology: overconfidence and hindsight. In light of (...)
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  • The psychology of scientific explanation.J. D. Trout - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (3):564–591.
    Philosophers agree that scientific explanations aim to produce understanding, and that good ones succeed in this aim. But few seriously consider what understanding is, or what the cues are when we have it. If it is a psychological state or process, describing its specific nature is the job of psychological theorizing. This article examines the role of understanding in scientific explanation. It warns that the seductive, phenomenological sense of understanding is often, but mistakenly, viewed as a cue of genuine understanding. (...)
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  • The conceptual structure of the chemical revolution.Paul Thagard - 1990 - Philosophy of Science 57 (2):183-209.
    This paper investigates the revolutionary conceptual changes that took place when the phlogiston theory of Stahl was replaced by the oxygen theory of Lavoisier. Using techniques drawn from artificial intelligence, it represents the crucial stages in Lavoisier's conceptual development from 1772 to 1789. It then sketches a computational theory of conceptual change to account for Lavoisier's discovery of the oxygen theory and for the replacement of the phlogiston theory.
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  • Scientific rationality and human reasoning.Miriam Solomon - 1992 - Philosophy of Science 59 (3):439-455.
    The work of Tversky, Kahneman and others suggests that people often make use of cognitive heuristics such as availability, salience and representativeness in their reasoning and decision making. Through use of a historical example--the recent plate tectonics revolution in geology--I argue that such heuristics play a crucial role in scientific decision making also. I suggest how these heuristics are to be considered, along with noncognitive factors (such as motivation and social structures) when drawing historical and epistemological conclusions. The normative perspective (...)
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  • Coherence, Truth, and the Development of Scientific Knowledge.Paul Thagard - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (1):28-47.
    What is the relation between coherence and truth? This paper rejects numerous answers to this question, including the following: truth is coherence; coherence is irrelevant to truth; coherence always leads to truth; coherence leads to probability, which leads to truth. I will argue that coherence of the right kind leads to at least approximate truth. The right kind is explanatory coherence, where explanation consists in describing mechanisms. We can judge that a scientific theory is progressively approximating the truth if it (...)
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  • Socializing naturalized philosophy of science.Stephen M. Downes - 1993 - Philosophy of Science 60 (3):452-468.
    I propose an approach to naturalized philosophy of science that takes the social nature of scientific practice seriously. I criticize several prominent naturalistic approaches for adopting "cognitive individualism", which limits the study of science to an examination of the internal psychological mechanisms of scientists. I argue that this limits the explanatory capacity of these approaches. I then propose a three-level model of the social nature of scientific practice, and use the model to defend the claim that scientific knowledge is socially (...)
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  • Formal models of coherence and legal epistemology.Amalia Amaya - 2007 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 15 (4):429-447.
    This paper argues that formal models of coherence are useful for constructing a legal epistemology. Two main formal approaches to coherence are examined: coherence-based models of belief revision and the theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction. It is shown that these approaches shed light on central aspects of a coherentist legal epistemology, such as the concept of coherence, the dynamics of coherentist justification in law, and the mechanisms whereby coherence may be built in the course of legal decision-making.
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  • Philosophy and machine learning.Paul Thagard - 1990 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 20 (2):261-76.
    This article discusses the philosophical relevance of recent computational work on inductive inference being conducted in the rapidly growing branch of artificial intelligence called machine learning.
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  • LA COHERENCIA EN LA ARGUMENTACIÓN JURÍDICA.Amalia Amaya - manuscript
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  • The impact of explanations as communicative acts on belief in a claim: The role of source reliability.Marko Tešić & Ulrike Hahn - 2023 - Cognition 240 (C):105586.
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  • Coherence of Inferences.Matheus Silva - manuscript
    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 (...)
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  • Integrating Philosophy of Understanding with the Cognitive Sciences.Kareem Khalifa, Farhan Islam, J. P. Gamboa, Daniel Wilkenfeld & Daniel Kostić - 2022 - Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 16.
    We provide two programmatic frameworks for integrating philosophical research on understanding with complementary work in computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. First, philosophical theories of understanding have consequences about how agents should reason if they are to understand that can then be evaluated empirically by their concordance with findings in scientific studies of reasoning. Second, these studies use a multitude of explanations, and a philosophical theory of understanding is well suited to integrating these explanations in illuminating ways.
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  • Conceptual Centrality and Implicit Bias.Del Pinal Guillermo & Spaulding Shannon - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (1):95-111.
    How are biases encoded in our representations of social categories? Philosophical and empirical discussions of implicit bias overwhelmingly focus on salient or statistical associations between target features and representations of social categories. These are the sorts of associations probed by the Implicit Association Test and various priming tasks. In this paper, we argue that these discussions systematically overlook an alternative way in which biases are encoded, that is, in the dependency networks that are part of our representations of social categories. (...)
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  • Naturalizing Logic: How Knowledge of Mechanisms Enhances Inductive Inference.Paul Thagard - 2021 - Philosophies 6 (2):52.
    This paper naturalizes inductive inference by showing how scientific knowledge of real mechanisms provides large benefits to it. I show how knowledge about mechanisms contributes to generalization, inference to the best explanation, causal inference, and reasoning with probabilities. Generalization from some A are B to all A are B is more plausible when a mechanism connects A to B. Inference to the best explanation is strengthened when the explanations are mechanistic and when explanatory hypotheses are themselves mechanistically explained. Causal inference (...)
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