scholarly journals How Not to Know the Principle of Induction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Howard Sankey
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
External World ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Interpretation Of Probability ◽  
Subjective Interpretation ◽  
Objective Interpretation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

Abstract In The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell presents a justification of induction based on a principle he refers to as “the principle of induction.” Owing to the ambiguity of the notion of probability, the principle of induction may be interpreted in two different ways. If interpreted in terms of the subjective interpretation of probability, the principle of induction may be known a priori to be true. But it is unclear how this should give us any confidence in our use of induction, since induction is applied to the external world outside our minds. If the principle is interpreted in light of the objective interpretation of induction, it cannot be known to be true a priori, since it applies to frequencies that occur in the world outside the mind, and these cannot be known without recourse to experience. Russell’s principle of induction therefore fails to provide a satisfactory justification of induction.

Thought Experiments

Philosophy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Robert Brown ◽  
Michael T. Stuart
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiment ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Widespread Agreement ◽  
The World ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Insight Into

Thought experiments are performed in the imagination. We set up some situation, we observe what happens, then we try to draw appropriate conclusions. In this way, thought experiments resemble real experiments, except that they are experiments in the mind. The terms “thought experiment,” “imaginary experiment,” and “Gedankenexperiment” are used interchangeably. There is no consensus on a definition, but there is widespread agreement on which are standard examples. It is also widely agreed that they play a central role in a number of fields, especially physics and philosophy. There are several important questions about thought experiments that naturally arise, including what kinds of thought experiments there are, what roles they play, and how, if at all, they work. This last question has been the focus of much of the literature: How can we learn something new about the world just by thinking? Answers range from “We don’t really learn anything new” to “We have some sort of a priori insight into how nature works.” In between there are a great variety of rival alternative accounts. There is still no consensus; debate is wide open on almost every question pertaining to thought experiments.

Children of the Aimless Chance: Randomness versus Determinism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlatko Vedral
Keyword(s):  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Lunatic Asylum ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
Catch 22 ◽  
Fundamental Law ◽  
To Come ◽  
Controversial Area

In our search for the ultimate law, P, that allows us to encode the whole of reality we have come across a very fundamental obstacle. As Deutsch argued, P cannot be all-encompassing, simply because it cannot explain its own origins. We need a law more fundamental than P, from which P can be derived. But then this more fundamental law also needs to come from somewhere. This is like the metaphor of the painter in the lunatic asylum, who is trying to paint a picture of the garden he is sitting in. He can never find a way to completely include himself in the picture and gets caught in an infinite regression. Does this mean we can never understand the whole of reality? Maybe so, given that any postulate that we start from needs its own explanation. Any law that underlies reality ultimately needs an a priori law. This puts us in a bit of a ‘Catch 22’ situation. So, are we resigned to failure or is there a way out? Is there some fundamental level at which events have no a priori causes and we can break the infinite regression? What does it mean for an event to have no a priori cause? This means that, even with all prior knowledge, we cannot infer that this event will take place. Furthermore, if there were genuinely acausal events in this Universe, this would imply a fundamentally random element of reality that cannot be reduced to anything deterministic. This is a hugely controversial area, with various proponents of religion, science, and philosophy all having a quite contrasting set of views on this. Often people get very emotional over this question, as it has profound implications for us as human beings. Could it be that some events just don’t have first causes? The British philosopher Bertrand Russell thought so. In Russell’s famous debate with Reverend Copleston on the origin of the world, Copleston thought everything must have a cause, and therefore the world has a cause – and this cause is ultimately God himself.

Semantic Pragmatism and A Priori Knawledge (or ‘Yes we could all be brains in a vat’)

2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Jackman
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
The Self ◽  
Semantic Externalism ◽  
Metaphysical Realism ◽  
The World ◽  
Rational Acceptability ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Brain In A Vat

Hilary Putnam has famously argued that we can know that we are not brains in a vat because the hypothesis that we are is self-refuting. While Putnam's argument has generated interest primarily as a novel response to skepticism, he originally introduced his brain in a vat scenario to help illustrate a point about the ‘mind/world relationship.’ In particular, he intended it to be part of an argument against the coherence of metaphysical realism, and thus to be part of a defense of his conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability. Putnam's discussion has already inspired a substantial body of criticism, but it will be argued here that these criticisms fail to capture the central problem with his argument. Indeed, it will be shown that, rather than simply following from his semantic externalism, Putnam's conclusions about the self-refuting character of the brain in a vat hypothesis are actually out of line with central and plausible aspects of his own account of the relationship between our minds and the world.

In Defense of the Explanationist Response to Skepticism

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-50
Author(s):  
Kevin McCain
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
External World ◽  
A Priori Justification ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
External World Skepticism ◽  
A Priori Probability

A promising response to the threat of external world skepticism involves arguing that our commonsense view of the world best explains the sensory experiences that we have. Since our commonsense view of the world best explains our evidence, we are justified in accepting this commonsense view of the world. Despite the plausibility of this Explanationist Response, it has recently come under attack. James Beebe has argued that only a version of the Explanationist Response that provides an a priori justification of inference to the best explanation can hope to respond to two serious objections. Additionally, he has argued that providing such an a priori justification requires an acceptable account of a priori probability and that it is unclear whether such an account can be developed. In this paper I argue that Beebe fails to provide adequate support for either of these claims.

Lotze, Rudolph Hermann (1817–81)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
System A ◽  
The World ◽  
Academic Philosophy ◽  
Teleological Interpretation ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Universe

Lotze was among the pre-eminent figures in German academic philosophy between the demise of Absolute Idealism and the rise of Neo-Kantianism proper. He sought to avoid two extremes: first, that of an idealism which seeks to deduce the world from a single, general principle; and, second, that of a realism which, by divorcing reality from the mind, splits the world into two utterly separate spheres. The search for knowledge should be tempered by a recognition of the results of natural science and sobered by the awareness that reality will, by necessity, always outstrip thought. Furthermore, our mental life cannot be reduced to purely intellectual functions: feelings and evaluations, for example, are also an integral part of human existence. While there can be no a priori deduction of a metaphysical system, a teleological interpretation, which elucidates the ultimate value of man and the world, must supplement purely naturalistic explanation. The universe has the significance of an unfolding plan, where things are subject to the general laws of order, expressing spiritual import. In this way, Lotze combined a kind of respect for the findings of scientific research with his own peculiar idealistic programme.

scholarly journals Escisión, simbolización e integración de la identidad

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-399
Author(s):  
Carlos Rodríguez Sutil ◽  
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Official Language ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

The inner-outer dualism, with its associated conception that the mind is a reality isolated from the world, permeates our everyday thinking. This article begins by demonstrating from the philosophy of the twentieth century the unreality of this separation and the stability of internal constructions. Once we isolate the mind in our imagination, we feel authorized to dream of magical shortcuts to overcome the isolation, such as telepathy or, in the psychotic, transparency or the sounding of thoughts, the theft of ideas, the imposition of ideas from the external world. We are not minds, permanent or eternal, inserted in a world that we see passing around us; we are temporary beings. The self is a representation, an internalized metaphor that we turn into a stable but fragile metaphor in the face of a changing reality, which endows us with immortality and consoles us. The psychotic is the one who lives the split because he has not been able to handle the conventionality of that double language, and accept that reality is at the same time fixed and changing, for this reason they need to adhere to permanent objects, with the quality of stable things. The psychotic is the one who believes in the official language at face value, is sick of conventions. If everyone knows the patient's thoughts, in some way this means that the thoughts are not locked in the head, an idea contrary to cultural belief, which produces terror because it is experienced as unnatural, cancels the division of interior and exterior, which means the experience of loss of identity and agency, the lost of control. Delirium is developed as a way of clinging to reality in the face of extreme disavowal of one's perceptions or feelings.

The Event Universe

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leemon B. McHenry
Keyword(s):  
Electromagnetic Field ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Physical Theory ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
Linguistic Methods

What kinds of things are events? Battles, explosions, accidents, crashes, rock concerts would be typical examples of events and these would be reinforced in the way we speak about the world. Events or actions function linguistically as verbs and adverbs. Philosophers following Aristotle have claimed that events are dependent on substances such as physical objects and persons. But with the advances of modern physics, some philosophers and physicists have argued that events are the basic entities of reality and what we perceive as physical bodies are just very long events spread out in space-time. In other words, everything turns out to be events. This view, no doubt, radically revises our ordinary common sense view of reality, but as our event theorists argue common sense is out of touch with advancing science. In The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Leemon McHenry argues that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a more adequate basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. He investigates the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compares Whitehead’s theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as another key proponent of this theory, W. V. Quine. In this manner, McHenry defends the naturalized and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.

1968: On Social, Epistemic, and Historiographic(?) Revolutions

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto D. Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Young Students ◽  
Historic Significance ◽  
Agent Of Change

This article addresses the meaning and significance of the “world revolution of 1968,” as well as the historiography of 1968. I critically interrogate how the production of a narrative about 1968 and the creation of ethnic studies, despite its world-historic significance, has tended to perpetuate a limiting, essentialized and static notion of “the student” as the primary actor and an inherent agent of change. Although students did play an enormous role in the events leading up to, through, and after 1968 in various parts of the world—and I in no way wish to diminish this fact—this article nonetheless argues that the now hegemonic narrative of a student-led revolt has also had a number of negative consequences, two of which will be the focus here. One problem is that the generation-driven models that situate 1968 as a revolt of the young students versus a presumably older generation, embodied by both their parents and the dominant institutions of the time, are in effect a sociosymbolic reproduction of modernity/coloniality’s logic or driving impulse and obsession with newness. Hence an a priori valuation is assigned to the new, embodied in this case by the student, at the expense of the presumably outmoded old. Secondly, this apparent essentializing of “the student” has entrapped ethnic studies scholars, and many of the period’s activists (some of whom had been students themselves), into said logic, thereby risking the foreclosure of a politics beyond (re)enchantment or even obsession with newness yet again.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document