Download or read book Hume s Problem Solved written by Gerhard Schurz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new approach to Hume's problem of induction that justifies the optimality of induction at the level of meta-induction. Hume's problem of justifying induction has been among epistemology's greatest challenges for centuries. In this book, Gerhard Schurz proposes a new approach to Hume's problem. Acknowledging the force of Hume's arguments against the possibility of a noncircular justification of the reliability of induction, Schurz demonstrates instead the possibility of a noncircular justification of the optimality of induction, or, more precisely, of meta-induction (the application of induction to competing prediction models). Drawing on discoveries in computational learning theory, Schurz demonstrates that a regret-based learning strategy, attractivity-weighted meta-induction, is predictively optimal in all possible worlds among all prediction methods accessible to the epistemic agent. Moreover, the a priori justification of meta-induction generates a noncircular a posteriori justification of object induction. Taken together, these two results provide a noncircular solution to Hume's problem. Schurz discusses the philosophical debate on the problem of induction, addressing all major attempts at a solution to Hume's problem and describing their shortcomings; presents a series of theorems, accompanied by a description of computer simulations illustrating the content of these theorems (with proofs presented in a mathematical appendix); and defends, refines, and applies core insights regarding the optimality of meta-induction, explaining applications in neighboring disciplines including forecasting sciences, cognitive science, social epistemology, and generalized evolution theory. Finally, Schurz generalizes the method of optimality-based justification to a new strategy of justification in epistemology, arguing that optimality justifications can avoid the problems of justificatory circularity and regress.
Download or read book Hume s Problem written by Colin Howson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a solution to one of the central, unsolved problems of Western philosophy, that of induction. It explores the implications of Hume's argument that successful prediction tells us nothing about the truth of the predicting theory.
Download or read book Hume s Problems with Induction written by Avi Sion and published by Avi Sion. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hume’s Problems with Induction is intended to describe and refute some of the main doubts and objections David Hume raised with regard to inductive reasoning. It replaces the so-called problem of induction with a principle of induction.
Download or read book The Philosophy Gym written by Stephen Law and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unique and accessible explanations to some of life's biggest questions, obtained through a series of irresistable mental challenges
Download or read book Hume on Causation written by Helen Beebee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Causation is one of the most important and enduring topics in philosophy, going as far back as Aristotle. In this lucid and enthralling account, Helen Beebee covers all the major debates and issues in the philosophy of causation, making it the ideal starting point for those approaching the subject for the first time. Beginning with an introduction to the concept, the book examines the most significant philosopher of causation – David Hume – and assesses the problems of induction and necessary connection in light of his thought. Helen Beebee then investigates different theories of causation and challenges to the Humean approach. She considers the concepts of regularity, causal experience, necessity and essences. Throughout the book, she also critically discusses other key philosophers on causation, including J.L. Mackie, John Wright and Brian Ellis.
Download or read book Knowledge Reason and Taste written by Paul Guyer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-08 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immanuel Kant famously said that he was awoken from his "dogmatic slumbers," and led to question the possibility of metaphysics, by David Hume's doubts about causation. Because of this, many philosophers have viewed Hume's influence on Kant as limited to metaphysics. More recently, some philosophers have questioned whether even Kant's metaphysics was really motivated by Hume. In Knowledge, Reason, and Taste, renowned Kant scholar Paul Guyer challenges both of these views. He argues that Kant's entire philosophy--including his moral philosophy, aesthetics, and teleology, as well as his metaphysics--can fruitfully be read as an engagement with Hume. In this book, the first to describe and assess Hume's influence throughout Kant's philosophy, Guyer shows where Kant agrees or disagrees with Hume, and where Kant does or doesn't appear to resolve Hume's doubts. In doing so, Guyer examines the progress both Kant and Hume made on enduring questions about causes, objects, selves, taste, moral principles and motivations, and purpose and design in nature. Finally, Guyer looks at questions Kant and Hume left open to their successors.
Download or read book Hume s Epistemological Evolution written by Hsueh M. Qu and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Here is a central issue in Hume scholarship: what is the relationship between Hume's early Treatise of Human Nature and his later Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding? Is the Enquiry a mere simplified restatement of the contents of the Treatise, or do the two substantially differ? Here is another critical issue in Hume scholarship: what is the relationship between Hume's scepticism and his naturalism? How can we reconcile Hume's extreme brand of scepticism with his positive ambitions of providing an account of human nature? Hume's Epistemological Evolution argues that these two issues are intimately related. In particular, this book argues that Hume's Enquiry indeed differs from the Treatise, precisely because he changes his response to scepticism between the two works. Because the Treatise has as its primary focus the psychological naturalistic project, its treatment of epistemological issues arises unsystematically from the psychological investigation. Consequently, Hume finds himself forced into an unsatisfactory response to scepticism founded on the Title Principle (THN 1.4.7.11). However, this response is deeply problematic, as Hume himself seems to recognise. In contrast to the Treatise, the Enquiry emphasises the epistemological aspects of Hume's project, and offers a radically different and more sophisticated epistemology. This framework addresses the weaknesses of the earlier one, and also constitutes a 'compleat answer' to two of his most prominent critics, Thomas Reid and James Beattie. Hume's epistemology thus undergoes an evolution between these two works"--
Download or read book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding written by David Hume and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" is a book by David Hume created as a revision of an earlier work, Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature". The argument of the Enquiry proceeds by a series of incremental steps, separated into chapters which logically succeed one another. After expounding his epistemology, Hume explains how to apply his principles to specific topics. This book has proven highly influential, both in the years that would immediately follow and today. Immanuel Kant points to it as the book which woke him from his self-described "dogmatic slumber."
Download or read book Righting Epistemology written by Bredo Johnsen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Righting Epistemology defends an unrecognized Humean conception of epistemic justification, showing that he is no skeptic, and an argument of his that refutes all extant alternative conceptions. It goes on to trace the development of his thought in Sir Karl Popper, Nelson Goodman, W. V. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Download or read book The New Hume Debate written by Rupert Read and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Hume s Problem written by Colin Howson and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Custom and Reason in Hume written by Henry E. Allison and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-09-02 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Allison examines the central tenets of Hume's epistemology and cognitive psychology, as contained in the Treatise of Human Nature. Allison takes a distinctive two-level approach. On the one hand, he considers Hume's thought in its own terms and historical context. So considered, Hume is viewed as a naturalist, whose project in the first three parts of the first book of the Treatise is to provide an account of the operation of the understanding in which reason is subordinated to custom and other non-rational propensities. Scepticism arises in the fourth part as a form of metascepticism, directed not against first-order beliefs, but against philosophical attempts to ground these beliefs in the "space of reasons." On the other hand, Allison provides a critique of these tenets from a Kantian perspective. This involves a comparison of the two thinkers on a range of issues, including space and time, causation, existence, induction, and the self. In each case, the issue is seen to turn on a contrast between their underlying models of cognition. Hume is committed to a version of the perceptual model, according to which the paradigm of knowledge is a seeing with the "mind's eye" of the relation between mental contents. By contrast, Kant appeals to a discursive model in which the fundamental cognitive act is judgment, understood as the application of concepts to sensory data, Whereas regarded from the first point of view, Hume's account is deemed a major philosophical achievement, seen from the second it suffers from a failure to develop an adequate account of concepts and judgment.
Download or read book Hume s Abject Failure written by John Earman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-23 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vital study offers a new interpretation of Hume's famous "Of Miracles," which notoriously argues against the possibility of miracles. By situating Hume's popular argument in the context of the eighteenth-century debate on miracles, Earman shows Hume's argument to be largely unoriginal and chiefly without merit where it is original. Yet Earman constructively conceives how progress can be made on the issues that Hume's essay so provocatively posed about the ability of eyewitness testimony to establish the credibility of marvelous and miraculous events.
Download or read book Hume s Reason written by David Owen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999-12-02 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Owen explores Hume's account of reason and its role in human understanding, seen in the context of other notable accounts by philosophers of the early modern period. Many of the most famous problems that Hume discusses, and many of the positions that he advocates, are expressed in terms of reason. It is central to his arguments about induction, belief, scepticism, the passions, and moral distinctions; to understand Hume's influential views on these matters, we must understand what his view of reason is. The book begins with chapters on the theories of reasoning put forward by Hume's notable predecessors Descartes and Locke. Owen shows that Hume followed them in rejecting a formal, deductive account of inference, in favour of a new naturalistic account. But he went farther, in what we now call the argument concerning induction, by showing that no account of reason as a separate faculty could explain our inferences to beliefs in the unobserved. Hume offers instead an associationist account of probable reasoning and a new theory of belief. The picture of reason as an independent faculty is replaced with an explanation of reasoning in terms of properties of the imagination. Hume's Reason offers a new interpretation of some of Hume's central ideas, and a treatment of reason which will be illuminating not just to historians of modern philosophy but to all philosophers who are concerned with the workings of human cognition.
Download or read book Cognition and Commitment in Hume s Philosophy written by Don Garrett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-28 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely believed that Hume often wrote carelessly and contradicted himself, and that no unified, sound philosophy emerges from his writings. Don Garrett demonstrates that such criticisms of Hume are without basis. Offering fresh and trenchant solutions to longstanding problems in Hume studies, Garrett's penetrating analysis also makes clear the continuing relevance of Hume's philosophy.
Download or read book Collected Papers on Epistemology Philosophy of Science and History of Philosophy written by W. Stegmüller and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These two volumes contain all of my articles published between 1956 and 1975 which might be of interest to readers in the English-speaking world. The first three essays in Vol. 1 deal with historical themes. In each case I as far as possible, meets con have attempted a rational reconstruction which, temporary standards of exactness. In The Problem of Universals Then and Now some ideas of W.V. Quine and N. Goodman are used to create a modern sketch of the history of the debate on universals beginning with Plato and ending with Hao Wang's System L. The second article concerns Kant's Philosophy of Science. By analyzing his position vis-a-vis I. Newton, Christian Wolff, and D. Hume, it is shown that for Kant the very notion of empirical knowledge was beset with a funda mental logical difficulty. In his metaphysics of experience Kant offered a solution differing from all prior as well as subsequent attempts aimed at the problem of establishing a scientific theory. The last of the three historical papers utilizes some concepts of modern logic to give a precise account of Wittgenstein's so-called Picture Theory of Meaning. E. Stenius' interpretation of this theory is taken as an intuitive starting point while an intensional variant of Tarski's concept of a relational system furnishes a technical instrument. The concepts of inodel world and of logical space, together with those of homomorphism and isomorphism be tween model worlds and between logical spaces, form the conceptual basis of the reconstruction.
Download or read book Reason and Prediction written by Simon Blackburn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1973-02-08 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original study of the philosophical problems associated with inductive reasoning. Like most of the main questions in epistemology, the classical problem of induction arises from doubts about a mode of inference used to justify some of our most familiar and pervasive beliefs. The experience of each individual is limited and fragmentary, yet the scope of our beliefs is much wider; and it is the relation between belief and experience, in particular the belief that the future will in some respects resemble the past and the unobserved the observed, which forms the subject of this book. Dr Blackburn's first aim is to state the problem of induction properly, to show that there does exist a genuine problem immune to the solutions in vogue at present, yet no tin principle insoluble. He gives an extended and original account of the concept of a reason and goes on to discuss prediction. In the end Dr Blackburn produces a rationale for belief in certain short-term predictions based on his reinterpretation of the classical principle of indifference. He claims that a justification for induction can be found along the lines he has suggested and must indeed be found there if anywhere.
