Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks alongside The Open Society and Its Enemies as one of Popper's most enduring books and contains insights and arguments that demand to be read to this day.

Jean Piaget was one of the most salient and inspirational figures in psychological and educational research this century. He was prolific, authoring or editing over eighty books and numerous journal papers which have spawned a huge and fertile continuation of his research over the decades. A major component of any course on children's psychological development and a research tradition that is expanding, scholars need access to the original texts rather than relying on secondhand accounts. Jean Piaget: Selected Works is a (...) chance to acquire key original texts, most of which have been previously unavailable for several years. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a comprehensive theory of mind, encompassing traditional issues of consciousness and free will.

A review of the literature indicates that linear models are frequently used in situations in which decisions are made on the basis of multiple codable inputs. These models are sometimes used normatively to aid the decision maker, as a contrast with the decision maker in the clinical vs statistical controversy, to represent the decision maker "paramorphically" and to "bootstrap" the decision maker by replacing him with his representation. Examination of the contexts in which linear models have been successfully employed indicates (...) that the contexts have the following structural characteristics in common: each input variable has a conditionally monotone relationship with the output; there is error of measurement; and deviations from optimal weighting do not make much practical difference. These characteristics ensure the success of linear models, which are so appropriate in such contexts that random linear models may perform quite well. 4 examples involving the prediction of such codable output variables as GPA and psychiatric diagnosis are analyzed in detail. In all 4 examples, random linear models yield predictions that are superior to those of human judges. (shrink)

The book was planned and written as a single, sustained argument. But earlier versions of a few parts of it have appeared separately. The object of this book is both to establish the existence of the paradoxes, and also to describe a non-Pascalian concept of probability in terms of which one can analyse the structure of forensic proof without giving rise to such typical signs of theoretical misfit. Neither the complementational principle for negation nor the multiplicative principle for conjunction applies (...) to the central core of any forensic proof in the Anglo-American legal system. There are four parts included in this book. Accordingly, these parts have been written in such a way that they may be read in different orders by different kinds of reader. (shrink)

The book was planned and written as a single, sustained argument. But earlier versions of a few parts of it have appeared separately. The object of this book is both to establish the existence of the paradoxes, and also to describe a non-Pascalian concept of probability in terms of which one can analyse the structure of forensic proof without giving rise to such typical signs of theoretical misfit. Neither the complementational principle for negation nor the multiplicative principle for conjunction applies (...) to the central core of any forensic proof in the Anglo-American legal system. There are four parts included in this book. Accordingly, these parts have been written in such a way that they may be read in different orders by different kinds of reader. (shrink)

The tapestry of Wilfrid Sellars’s writings is dauntingly rich in stimulus and suggestion. I shall take up here an intriguing strand of thought that was woven into one of his early papers ‘Language, Rules and Behavior’, and I shall discuss some of the issues to which it gives rise. Sellars was concerned in that paper with the procedures by which people evaluate actions as right or wrong, arguments as valid or invalid, and cognitive claims as well or ill grounded. He (...) sought to map out a true vïa media, in his treatment of such procedures, between rationalistic apriorism and what, for want of a better term then, he called ‘descriptivism’, by which he understood the claim that all meaningful concepts and problems belong to the empirical or descriptive sciences, including the sciences of human behaviour. Sellars was thus led to ask not only ‘What sort of a thing is justification?’ but also ‘How do we come to accept the rules or laws that license justifications?’ And he saw these questions as arising in relation to any dialogue in which one party seeks to justify something to another. With regard to the justification of actions he held that the intuitionism of Ross, Prichard and Ewing was reasonably faithful to the phenomenology of moral thought and experience, though he did not agree with their belief in a nonnatural quality or relation that may belong to actions over and above their empirical characteristics. With regard to the justification of predictions he held that the relevant covering laws are ultimately rendered acceptable by an appeal to instances of their application. But he was reluctant to conceive this kind of appeal as an inductive procedure. Instead he called it an application of Socratic method, since the purpose of this method is to make explicit the rules that we have implicitly adopted for thought and action, and Sellars interpreted our judgments to the effect that A causally necessitates B as the expression of a rule governing our use of the terms ‘A’ and ‘B’: science consists in the attempt, by remodeling human language, to develop a system of rule-governed behaviour which will adjust the human organism to the environment. (shrink)

Chomsky proposes a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes recent developments in the descriptive analysis of particular ...

REPORTS 6 STUDIES USING LABORATORY REPLICAS OF THE SITUATION IN WHICH A BEGINNING CLINICIAN OBSERVES THE DIAGNOSTIC TEST PROTOCOLS OF PATIENTS WITH VARIOUS SYMPTOMS IN ORDER TO DISCOVER THE CHARACTERISTICS OF TEST PERFORMANCE THAT DISTINGUISH PATIENTS WITH EACH SYMPTOM. NAIVE UNDERGRADUATES VIEWED A SERIES OF 45 DRAW-A-PERSON TEST DRAWINGS RANDOMLY PAIRED WITH CONTRIVED SYMPTOM STATEMENTS ABOUT THE PATIENTS WHO DREW THEM. SS "REDISCOVERED" THE SAME RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN DRAWING CHARACTERISTICS AND SYMPTOMS AS CLINICIANS REPORT OBSERVING IN CLINICAL PRACTICE, ALTHOUGH THESE RELATIONSHIPS (...) WERE ABSENT IN THE EXPERIMENTAL MATERIALS. THE REPORTED RELATIONSHIPS CORRESPONDED TO RATED ASSOCIATIVE STRENGTH BETWEEN SYMPTOM AND DRAWING CHARACTERISTIC. (shrink)

APA PsycNET abstract: This is the first volume of a two-volume work on Probability and Induction. Because the writer holds that probability logic is identical with inductive logic, this work is devoted to philosophical problems concerning the nature of probability and inductive reasoning. The author rejects a statistical frequency basis for probability in favor of a logical relation between two statements or propositions. Probability "is the degree of confirmation of a hypothesis (or conclusion) on the basis of some given evidence (...) (or premises)." Furthermore, all principles and theorems of inductive logic are analytic, and the entire system is to be constructed by means of symbolic logic and semantic methods. This means that the author confines himself to the formalistic procedures of word and symbol systems. The resulting sentence or language structures are presumed to separate off logic from all subjectivist or psychological elements. Despite the abstractionism, the claim is made that if an inductive probability system of logic can be constructed it will have its practical application in mathematical statistics, and in various sciences. 16-page bibliography. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

A dissertation in the tradition of logical positivism includes a discussion of the functions and methods of philosophy and a critique of ethics and theology.

Applied a theory of information integration to decision making with probabilistic events. 10 undergraduates judged the subjective worth of duplex bets that included independent gain and lose components. The worth of each component was assumed to be the product of a subjective weight that reflected the probability of winning or losing, and the subjective worth of the money to be won or lost. The total worth of the bet was the sum of the worths of the 2 components. Thus, each (...) judgment required multiplying and adding operations. The multiplying model worked quite well in 4 experimental conditions. The adding model showed more serious discrepancies, though these were small in magnitude. The theory of functional measurement was applied to scale the subjective values of the probability and money stimuli. Subjective and objective values were nonlinearly related both for probability and for money. (shrink)

Thomas Reid was a philosopher who founded the Scottish school of 'common sense'. Much of Reid's work is a critique of his contemporary, David Hume, whose empiricism he rejects. In this work, written after Reid's appointment to a professorship at the university of Glasgow, and published in 1785, he turns his attention to ideas about perception, memory, conception, abstraction, judgement, reasoning and taste. He examines the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, arguing that 'when we find philosophers maintaining that there (...) is no heat in the fire, nor colour in the rainbow … we may be apt to think the whole to be only a dream of fanciful men, who have entangled themselves in cobwebs spun out of their own brain'. Written by one of the Scottish Enlightenment's most important thinkers, this work brings to life the intellectual debates of the time. (shrink)

With this treatise, an insightful exploration of the probabilistic connection between philosophy and the history of science, the famous economist breathed new life into studies of both disciplines. Originally published in 1921, this important mathematical work represented a significant contribution to the theory regarding the logical probability of propositions. Keynes effectively dismantled the classical theory of probability, launching what has since been termed the “logical-relationist” theory. In so doing, he explored the logical relationships between classifying a proposition as “highly probable” (...) and as a “justifiable induction.” Unabridged republication of the classic 1921 edition. (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.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Written by an internationally renowned philosopher, this volume offers a three-part philosophical interpretation of quantum physics. The first part reviews the basics of quantum mechanics, outlining their philosophical interpretation and summarizing their results; the second outlines the mathematical methods of quantum mechanics; and the third section blends the philosophical ideas of the first part and the mathematical formulations of the second part to develop a variety of interpretations of quantum mechanics. 1944 edition.

"This book is valuable as expounding in full a theory of meaning that has its roots in the work of Frege and has been of the widest influence.

Provides comprehensive coverage of logical structure as well as the techniques of formal reasoning.

In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our ...

A collection of all but two of the author's philosophical essays and lectures originally published or presented before August 1976.

No mathematical background is necessary to appreciate this classic of probability theory, which remains unsurpassed in its clarity, readability, and sheer charm. Its author, British logician John Venn (1834-1923), popularized the famous Venn Diagrams that are commonly used in teaching elementary mathematics.

This book traces the development of formal logic from its origins in ancient Greece to the present day. The authors first discuss the work of logicians from Aristotle to Frege, showing how they were influenced by the philosophical or mathematical ideas of their time. They then examine developments in the present century.

In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims.