Thomas Reid, the Scottish natural and moral philosopher, was one of the founding members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid believed that common sense should form the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He criticised the sceptical philosophy propagated by his fellow Scot David Hume and the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world did not exist outside the human mind. Reid was also critical of the theory of ideas propagated (...) by Locke and Descartes, arguing that it was incompatible with physical and experiential facts. For Reid, our senses demonstrate that the external world must exist, and this work is organised in chapters examining each of the senses in turn. The book, based on his lectures, was first published in 1764 when Reid was a regent professor at King's College, Aberdeen, and was reissued in 1818. (shrink)

Considers that intuitive predictions follow a judgmental heuristic-representativeness. By this heuristic, people predict the outcome that appears most representative of the evidence. Consequently, intuitive predictions are insensitive to the reliability of the evidence or to the prior probability of the outcome, in violation of the logic of statistical prediction. The hypothesis that people predict by representativeness was supported in a series of studies with both naive and sophisticated university students. The ranking of outcomes by likelihood coincided with the ranking by (...) representativeness, and Ss erroneously predicted rare events and extreme values if these happened to be representative. The experience of unjustified confidence in predictions and the prevalence of fallacious intuitions concerning statistical regression are traced to the representativeness heuristic. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by David Hume. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Our trust in the word of others is often dismissed as unworthy, because the illusory ideal of "autonomous knowledge" has prevailed in the debate about the nature of knowledge. Yet we are profoundly dependent on others for a vast amount of what any of us claim to know. Coady explores the nature of testimony in order to show how it might be justified as a source of knowledge, and uses the insights that he has developed to challenge certain widespread assumptions (...) in the areas of history, law, mathematics, and psychology. (shrink)

Against the traditional view, Alvin Goldman argues that logic, probability theory, and linguistic analysis cannot by themselves delineate principles of rationality or justified belief. The mind's operations must be taken into account.

Hume’s celebrated argument concerning miracles, and an 18th century criticism of it put forward by Richard Price, is here interpreted in terms of the modern controversy over the base-rate fallacy. When considering to what degree we should trust a witness, should we or should we not take into account the prior probability of the event reported? The reliability of the witness (’Pr’(says e/e)) is distinguished from the credibility of the testimony (’Pr’(e/says e)), and it is argued that Hume, as a (...) good proto-Bayesian, argued that the credibility of the testimony should be calculated in terms of both the reliability of the witness and the prior probability of the event reported. (shrink)

find myself believing all sorts 0f things for which I d0 not possess evidence: that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, that my car keeps stalling because the carburetor needs LO be rebuilt, that mass media threaten democracy, that slums cause emotional disorders, that my irregular heart beat is premature ventricular contraction, that students} grades are not correlated with success in the ncmacadcmic world, that nuclear power plants are not safe (enough) . . . The list 0f things I believe, though (...) I have no evidence for the truth of them, is, if not infinite, virtually endless. And.. (shrink)

It is argued that a subject's evidence consists of all and only the propositions that the subject knows.

Thomas Reid , the Scottish natural and moral philosopher, was one of the founding members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid believed that common sense should form the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He criticised the sceptical philosophy propagated by his fellow Scot David Hume and the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world did not exist outside the human mind. Reid was also critical of the theory of ideas (...) propagated by Locke and Descartes, arguing that it was incompatible with physical and experiential facts. For Reid, our senses demonstrate that the external world must exist, and this work is organised in chapters examining each of the senses in turn. The book, based on his lectures, was first published in 1764 when Reid was a regent professor at King's College, Aberdeen, and was reissued in 1818. (shrink)

An account of inductive inference is presented which addresses both its epistemological and metaphysical dimensions. It is argued that inductive knowledge is possible by virtue of the fit between our innate psychological capacities and the causal structure of the world.