scholarly journals Inferential Internalism and the Causal Status Effect

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-445
Author(s):  
Nicholas Danne ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Inductive Inference ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Human Memory ◽  
External World ◽  
Logical Probability ◽  
Status Effect ◽  
Causal Status ◽  
Complex Features ◽  
Inferential Internalism ◽  
Richard Fumerton

To justify inductive inference and vanquish classical skepticisms about human memory, external world realism, etc., Richard Fumerton proposes his “inferential internalism,” an epistemology whereby humans ‘see’ by Russellian acquaintance Keynesian probable relations (PRs) between propositions. PRs are a priori necessary relations of logical probability, akin to but not reducible to logical entailments, such that perceiving a PR between one’s evidence E and proposition P of unknown truth value justifies rational belief in P to an objective degree. A recent critic of inferential internalism is Alan Rhoda, who questions its psychological plausibility. Rhoda argues that in order to see necessary relations between propositions E and P, one would need acquaintance with too many propositions at once, since our evidence E is often complex. In this paper, I criticize Rhoda’s implausibility objection as too quick. Referencing the causal status effect (CSE) from psychology, I argue that some of the complex features of evidence E contribute to our type-categorizing it as E-type, and thus we do not need to ‘see’ all of the complex features when we see the PR between E and P. My argument leaves unchanged Fumerton’s justificatory role for the PR, but enhances its psychological plausibility.

Epiphanies of alterity: drive

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Stanghellini
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
External World ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
First Case

This chapter explains that we encounter alterity in two main domains: in ourselves, and in the external world. In the first case alterity is in the involuntary dimension of ourselves, as (for instance) our un-chosen ‘character’, including needs, desires, emotions, and habits. In the external world, alterity is encountered in the challenging otherness of the events and in the meetings with other persons that constellate our life. This involuntary dimension of my being the person that I am includes what is a priori given in my existence, the raw material that constitutes the sedimented dispositions of my being and sets the boundaries of my freedom. The roots of the involuntary are my history, my body, and the world into which I am thrown. A relevant part of the involuntary is drive. Drive is the principle of all obscurity in my will. Its two basic profiles are need and desire.

The Anthropology of Misfortune and Cognitive Science. Examples from the Ivory Coast Senufo

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Alice Sindzingre
Keyword(s):  
Ivory Coast ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Adequate Description ◽  
Causal Inferences ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Cognitive Constraints ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Causal Status ◽  
Traditional Societies

The ArgumentThis paper applies the approach developed by the congnitive sciences to a classical field of social anthropology—i.e., the analysis of represetations and behaviors relative to misfortune in “traditional” societies.The initial argument is that the conceptual division and the modes of description and explanation of anthropology suffer from serious weaknesses: these concepts cannot serve to understand empirical phenomena (utterances and/or behavior); they rely on a confused and erroneous conception of the different domains involved and the causalities between them; and they use simplistic hypotheses about the existence and causal status of the entities that usually form the ultima ratio of anthropological reasoning (e.g., lineage organization, ancestors, witchcraft, etc.). These entities would directly “cause” other individual representations or behaviors. This simplification also affects the analysis of states of belief in these entities, to which individuals would supposedly “adhere”.I argue here that the cognitivist approach, within a “methodological individualism” framework, provides a more adequate description of phenomena observed in the field. This enables the various levels and domains to be more finely defined. The analysis of “typical” utterances and inferences in a “tranditional” society, the Senufo of the Ivory Coast, is here used to clarify these anthropological problems. Two levels can be distinguished: (1) a priori representations, which are underdetermined, enabling them to occur within valid inferences; (2) perception and/or action, which obeys different cognitive constraints. The existential status of unobservable entities appearing in causal inferences is not equivalent (“symmetrical”) depending on whether they are determined as antecedent or consequent.This paper suggests a theory of interpretive processes and beliefs having flexible references, because they are incomplete and domain-specific. It allows a comparison with facts observed in Western societies. It is also in contrast to the ordinary conception of religious states of belief — i.e., these states would be purely psychological, states of “adherence,” collective, autonomous, obligatory, part of a systemized set of knowledge; collective notions (of God, church, etc.) would here logically precede individual representations.

scholarly journals Extracting Clinical Features From Dictated Ambulatory Consult Notes Using a Commercially Available Natural Language Processing Tool: Pilot, Retrospective, Cross-Sectional Validation Study (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Petch ◽  
Jane Batt ◽  
Joshua Murray ◽  
Muhammad Mamdani
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Clinical Features ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Text Data ◽  
Complex Features

BACKGROUND The increasing adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) in clinical practice holds the promise of improving care and advancing research by serving as a rich source of data, but most EHRs allow clinicians to enter data in a text format without much structure. Natural language processing (NLP) may reduce reliance on manual abstraction of these text data by extracting clinical features directly from unstructured clinical digital text data and converting them into structured data. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to assess the performance of a commercially available NLP tool for extracting clinical features from free-text consult notes. METHODS We conducted a pilot, retrospective, cross-sectional study of the accuracy of NLP from dictated consult notes from our tuberculosis clinic with manual chart abstraction as the reference standard. Consult notes for 130 patients were extracted and processed using NLP. We extracted 15 clinical features from these consult notes and grouped them a priori into categories of simple, moderate, and complex for analysis. RESULTS For the primary outcome of overall accuracy, NLP performed best for features classified as simple, achieving an overall accuracy of 96% (95% CI 94.3-97.6). Performance was slightly lower for features of moderate clinical and linguistic complexity at 93% (95% CI 91.1-94.4), and lowest for complex features at 91% (95% CI 87.3-93.1). CONCLUSIONS The findings of this study support the use of NLP for extracting clinical features from dictated consult notes in the setting of a tuberculosis clinic. Further research is needed to fully establish the validity of NLP for this and other purposes.

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.

Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin McGinn
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
External World ◽  
The Other ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Knowledge Tradition ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Priori Knowledge

This chapter focuses on philosophical issues in knowledge. Tradition insists that knowledge falls into two broad classes: a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. These categories are conceived as exclusive and exhaustive: no piece of knowledge is both a priori and a posteriori, and any piece of knowledge is one or the other. One can characterize a posteriori knowledge as knowledge acquired by means of the senses (“by experience”) and a priori knowledge as knowledge not so acquired, but rather acquired “by reason alone” or “intuitively.” The chapter then addresses the proof or evidence of the existence of an external world, and looks deeper into what knowledge is and whether knowledge implies truth.

La Critique de la raison pure face aux scepticismes cartésien, baylien et humien

Dialogue ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 47 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 463-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Plinio Junqueira Smith
Keyword(s):  
Critical Period ◽  
A Priori ◽  
External World ◽  
Critical Project

ABSTRACTIn his critical period, Kant thought that scepticism was a threat to the metaphysical enterprise of Enlightenment. He consequently tried to tackle three of its species: Baylean scepticism, which doubts that reason could establish any truth concerning its ideas; Humean scepticism, which must be distinguished from Hume's formulation of the problem if we want to show that synthetic a priori judgements are possible; and Cartesian scepticism, which puts in doubt the reference of empirical concepts to things in the external world. Kant's treatment reveals the fundamental role played by scepticism in his critical enterprise not only as a triple challenge to the critical project, but also as an ally against idealist dogmatism.

scholarly journals Two new properties of mathematical likelihood

1934 ◽  
Vol 144 (852) ◽  
pp. 285-307 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
General Type ◽  
Inductive Inference ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Inverse Probability ◽  
Mathematical Probability

To Thomas Bayes must be given the credit of broaching the problem of using the concepts of mathematical probability in discussing problems of inductive inference, in which we argue from the particular to the general; or, in statistical phraselogy, argue form the sample to the population, from which, ex hypothesi , the sample was drawn. Bayes put forward, with considerable caution, a method by which such problems could be reduced to the form of problems of probability. His method of doing this depended essentially on postualting a priori knowledge, not of the particular population of which our observations from a sample, but of an imaginary population of populations from which this population was regarded as having been drawn at random. Clearly, if we have possession of such a priori knowledge, our problem is not properly an inductive one at all, for the population under discussion is then regarded merely as a particular case of a general type, of which we already possess exact knowledge, and are therefore in a positioin to draw exact deductive inferences. To the merit of broaching a fundamentally important problem, Bayes added that of perceiving, much more clearly than some of his followers have done, the logical weakness of the form of solutiion he put forward. Indeed we are told that it was his doubts respecting the validity of the postulate needed for establishing the method of inverse probability that led to this withholding his entire treatise from publication. Actually it was not published until after his death.

Causal status effect in children's categorization

Cognition ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. B35-B43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Woo-kyoung Ahn ◽  
Susan A Gelman ◽  
Jennifer A Amsterlaw ◽  
Jill Hohenstein ◽  
Charles W Kalish
Keyword(s):  
Status Effect ◽  
Causal Status

scholarly journals HOW EXTENSIVE CREATIVITY IS RELATED TO THE ESCALATION OF VIOLENCE IN ART?

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-257
Author(s):  
Anatoliy Igorevich Stoletov ◽  
Rushana Khusainovna Lukmanova ◽  
Miliausha Faritovna Sirazetdinova ◽  
Ksenia Vyacheslavovna Khramova ◽  
Olesya Gennadyevna Afanasyeva
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
External World ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Postindustrial Society ◽  
The Core ◽  
Cultural Methods ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
Existential Needs ◽  
Ethical Component ◽  
The Relationship

Film, dramaturgy and literature exhibit increasingly more episodes of cruelty in the interactions between the characters. With its focus on the core ideas about escalation of violence, this paper examines the fundamental reasons for the upsurge in depictions of violence in art. The article demonstrates social, cultural and anthropological factors contributed to shaping the technosphere which impedes the comprehension of the relationship and the contrast between life and death. Without this comprehension, a cultural dysfunction entails the existential crisis, hinders feeling fully alive, and provokes a “safe” virtual way to generate a limit situation that restores “life’s integrity” experience. Art that demonstrates violent scenes is one of these methods. In addition, and this is the first paper to analyze this, the extensive type of creativity dominates the postindustrial society culture. Research demonstrates that extensive creativity does not contain an ethical component and nor foster immunity to violence. On the contrary, by directing an individual towards exploring and transforming the external world, it provokes violence, since the nature of expansion is a priori forced. The authors conclude that escalation of violence in art testifies to the deficit of cultural methods that allow to satisfy a person’s existential needs.

The Dogmatists and Wright on Moore’s “Proof”

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark McBride
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
A Priori ◽  
External World ◽  
Modus Ponens

Suppose one has a visual experience as of having hands, and then reasons as follows: (MOORE) (1) I have hands, (2) If I have hands an external world exists; (3) An external world exists. Suppose one’s visual experience gives one defeasible perceptual warrant, or justification, to believe (1) – that is, one’s experience makes it epistemically appropriate to believe (1). And suppose one comes to believe (1) on the basis of this visual experience. The conditional premise (2) is knowable a priori. And (3) can be established by modus ponens inference. If one reasons thus, say one’s engaged in (MOORE)-reasoning. What, if anything, is wrong with (MOORE)-reasoning? I consider two prominent responses to this question – the dogmatists’ and Crispin Wright’s. Each finds fault in (MOORE)-reasoning, but on different grounds. I argue Wright’s response faces a problem which is standardly only taken to be faced by dogmatists.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document