Reconstructing the Past seeks to clarify and help resolve the vexing methodological issues that arise when biologists try to answer such questions as whether human beings are more closely related to chimps than they are to gorillas. It explores the case for considering the philosophical idea of simplicity/parsimony as a useful principle for evaluating taxonomic theories of evolutionary relationships. For the past two decades, evolutionists have been vigorously debating the appropriate methods that should be used in systematics, the field that (...) aims at reconstructing phylogenetic relationships among species. This debate over phylogenetic inference, Elliott Sober observes, raises broader questions of hypothesis testing and theory evaluation that run head on into long standing issues concerning simplicity/parsimony in the philosophy of science. Sober treats the problem of phylogenetic inference as a detailed case study in which the philosophical idea of simplicity/parsimony can be tested as a principle of theory evaluation. Bringing together philosophy and biology, as well as statistics, Sober builds a general framework for understanding the circumstances in which parsimony makes sense as a tool of phylogenetic inference. Along the way he provides a detailed critique of parsimony in the biological literature, exploring the strengths and limitations of both statistical and nonstatistical cladistic arguments. (shrink)

Introduction 1 1 Inductive Inference: A New Approach 19 2 Luck, License, and Lingo 31 3 Natural Kinds 41 4 Concerning a Fiction about How Facts Are Forecast 57 5 Grue 79 6 Concepts of Projectibility and the Problems of Induction 97 7 Induction, Conceptual Spaces, and AI 117 8 The Projectibility Constraint 135 9 Simplicity as a Pragmatic Criterion for Deciding What Hypotheses to Take Seriously 153 10 A Grue Thought in a Bleen Shade: ’Grue’ as a Disjunctive Predicate (...) 173 11 Entrenchment 193 12 No Model, No Inference: A Bayesian Primer on the Grue Problem 225 13 Bayesian Projectibility 241 14 Learning and Projectibility 263 15 Selecting Variables and Getting to the Truth 273 Annotated Bibliography 281 Index 459. (shrink)

_The Foundations of Knowing _ was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This collection of essays on the foundations of empirical knowledge brings together ten of Roderick M. Chisholm's most important papers in epistemology, three of them published for the first time, the others significantly revised and expanded for this edition. The essays in Part I constitute a (...) thoroughgoing defense of foundationalism—the doctrine that our justification for believing always rests upon a self-evident basis. In Part II, Chisholm applies foundationalist principles to various areas within the theory of knowledge, and in part III he presents a history of twentieth-century American epistemology. "Roderick M. Chisholm's work has been most influential both in the development of epistemology and in the widespread application of his analytic method. I am sure this publication featuring the unification of his views will be of great value to those working on the central issues of philosophy." Hector-Neri Castañeda, Indiana University Roderick Chisholm is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Brown University. Among his books are _Perceiving: A Philosophical Study, Theory of Knowledge, Person and Object_,and _The First Person _. (shrink)

This book is Dewey's most fully developed treatment of logic as the theory of Inquiry. It is a later work which reflects, in part, Dewey's readings of C.S. Peirce during the 1930's. -/- Reprinted in Series: The collected works of John Dewey / ed. by Jo Ann Boydston, 3,12.; The later works, 1925 - 1953, Vol. 12.

Introduction As the title indicates, the chief focus of this book is epistemic justification. But just what is epistemic justification and what is its place ...

A compact, coherent introduction to the study of rational belief, this text provides points of entry to such areas of philosophy as theory of knowledge, methodology of science, and philosophy of language. The book is accessible to all undergraduates and presupposes no philosophical training.

Kant's question 'How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' pre- cipitated the Critique of Pure Reason. Question and answer notwith- standing, Mill and others persisted in doubting that such judgments were possible at all. At length some of Kant's own clearest purported.

This paper is concerned with developing a model of inductive inference of patterns in sets of numbers. In philosophy, this is known as the curve fitting problem, when the sets of numbers are sets of pairs of real numbers. In computer science, this is the standard way of framing the problem of inductive inference, when the sets of numbers are ordered sets of integers. A solution to the curve fitting problem should contribute to the understanding of scientific inference, since much (...) of scientific inference consists of induction of patterns in numerical data. It is proposed that a pattern or theory about a set of numbers must be both accurate and simple. The problem with this proposal is that there is no good definition of simplicity. It is suggested here that simplicity is stability. Stability is the ability to resist damage due to random accidents. This heuristic definition leads to two precise definitions. The first precise definition is a measure of the stability of directed graphs. This is useful for measuring the stability of algorithms, since algorithms are naturally described by directed graphs . The second precise definition is a measure of the stability of linear regression equations. This provides a solution to the curve fitting problem for linear regression equations. (shrink)