Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

One basically important thing concerning part-whole systems is that the partwhole structure offers the basis for induction: for a property to be instantiated by all the elements of a part-whole system, it is enough to be instantiated by all the simple elements (those which have no parts) and to be inherited from parts to wholes.

The precise inductive definition could run as follows: (basis) if e is simple, then either e is ea and then e[ea/eb]=eb, or e is not ea and then e[ea/eb]=e; and (induction step) if e=Oi(e1,.

His simplified model language with its state-descriptions is aimed primarily not at the general problem of analyticity but at another purpose, the clarification of probability and induction.

Peirce regarded inductive processes as rather marginal to the acquisition of knowledge; in his words, “Induction has no originality in it, but only tests a suggestion already made.

Science," he will say, "is able to claim with ever increasing rational assurance that such and such kinds of events are connected, but with an assurance that is based on empirical evidence and induction, never on self-evidence.

Now it is one thing to recognize that these rules are causally in a privileged position, and quite another to make any concession to pseudo-psychologies of "seeing the universal in the particular" or of "intuitive induction.

Do not primitive and pictorial mis-conceptions of desire, motivation and the role of reward and punishment in shaping behavior stand in the way of a recognition of the true scope of "ideo-motor activity?" 2 In dealing with such situations, philosophers usually speak of inductive arguments, of establishing laws by induction from instances.

Induction is necessary for Blanshard, not because we cannot apprehend universals and their connections, but because only a grasp of the place of each universal in the total scheme would be a total grasp of any universal.

Further, nothing in the concept of life rules out the possibility that there could be living beings that are immortal, and don't reproduce, that are tree-like (so don't locomote), get their energy by electromagnetic induction (so don't digest or excrete), and have no need for any substance in the air (so don't respire).

In particular, when electrical action-at-a-distance became a subject for study in its own right, the phenomenon we now call charging by induction could be recognised as one of its effects.