Where results make sense

About us   |   Why use us?   |   Reviews   |   PR   |   Contact us

Metaphysics and ‘Valid Inductions’ In a less technical sense she means the explication of "inductive inferences of a kind generally regarded as justifiable" -- inductive inferences to theories and to predictions (3:164). The ‘valid inductive inference’ pattern (2.1) -- abstracted from the passages prior to the passage mentioning the uncertainty of analogy -- suggests that Whitehead’s meaning was simply that if there is analogy, a further condition for making the inference is still required, viz., the internal relationships between entities and environments. But the inference from one environment to another is also grounded in the metaphysical doctrine of internal relations, and this grounding is the prior one. www.religion-online.org /showarticle.asp?title=2410   (3688 words)

Inductive and Deductive Reasoning   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28) "Inductive reasoning" (not to be confused with "mathematical induction" or and "inductive proof", which is something quite different) is the process of reasoning that a general principle is true because the special cases you've seen are true. That is inductive reasoning: constructing a general principle from special cases. The chief function of inductive and abductive inference is to ACQUIRE new knowledge, especially of general patterns, principles, or laws. www.ms.uky.edu /~rayens/USP00/terminology.html   (1247 words)

Inductive reasoning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Inductive reasoning is the complement of deductive reasoning. Induction or inductive reasoning, sometimes called inductive logic, is the process of reasoning in which the premises of an argument are believed to support the conclusion but do not ensure it. Edwin Jaynes, an outspoken physicist and Bayesian, argued that "subjective" elements are present in all inference, for instance in choosing axioms for deductive inference; in choosing initial degrees of belief or prior probabilities; or in choosing likelihoods. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Inductive_logic   (1937 words)

[No title] Thus we should expect cases of inductive inferences that prove to be too hard to characterize, while at the same time we are quite sure of their strength from merely inspecting the particular case. I will seek to show that • each viable inductive inference scheme requires matters of fact to licence it; • the matters of fact are local in character, illustrating how successful functioning requires the sacrifice of universality; and that • the particular material postulates discussed are sufficient to license the relevant induction. Inductive Generalization All members of this family are based on the principle that an instance confirms the generalization. philsci-archive.pitt.edu /archive/00000996/00/Norton.doc   (11222 words)

IRIS   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28) Of course, if we were able to prove the truth of the conclusion, inductive inference would be justified; but the converse does not hold: a justification of the inductive inference does not imply a proof of the truth of the conclusion. If we were able to show that the inductive inference is a necessary condition of success, it would be justified; such a proof would satisfy any demands which may be raised about the justification of induction. We are entitled, therefore, to consider the determination of the limit of a frequency as the aim of the inductive inference. www.csulb.edu /~cwallis/wallis/DATA/382/reichenbach.html   (3074 words)

University of Alberta Dictionary of Cognitive Science: Inductive Inference Inferences are made when a person (or machine) goes beyond available evidence to form a conclusion. An inductive inference is one which is likely to be true because of the state of the world. However, in the case of inductive inferences, we cannot be sure that our conclusion is a logical result of the premises, but we may be able to assign a likelihood to each conclusion. www.bcp.psych.ualberta.ca /~mike/Pearl_Street/Dictionary/contents/I/inductive_inference.html   (171 words)

20th WCP: ‘Probabilist’ Deductive Inference in Gassendi's Logic While something is surely amiss in calling deductivist inference "probabilistic," it seems Gassendi has hit upon a now-familiar, sensible point—namely, the use of deductive reasoning in empirical contexts, while providing certain formal guarantees, does not insulate empirical arguments from judgment by the measure of belief which we invest in their premises. He proposes (quite reasonably) that our inductive inferences lack the information we would need to be certain of claims they suggest, and (a bit more surprisingly) that not even deductivist inference can insure our certainty about empirical claims because the experientially attained premises we adduce in support of such claims are no greater than probable. The measure of strength for such inferences is a function of the degree of clarity and certainty we attribute to the premises, rather the conditional probability of the conclusion given that the premises are true. www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Logi/LogiFish.htm   (2833 words)

Categorization and Reasoning Laboratory One way we have been investigating relations between conceptual systems and inductive reasoning is to assess the degree to which current models of inductive reasoning generalize to populations more knowledgeable than college undergraduates. Most currently proposed models of inductive inference rely heavily on taxonomic relations (such as similarity and category membership) among the concepts involved to predict inductive phenomena. For example, according to premise diversity, an inductive generalization is strong to the degree that the premise categories are representative of, or "cover," the conclusion category. www.psych.neu.edu /coley/projects1.html   (424 words)

Inference Thinking   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28) Inference is one of five basic categories of thinking in the North Carolina 1992-93 booklet on thinking assessment and later retained in the 1994 revisions. In inductive tasks, students are given the evidence or details and are required to come up with the generalization. Inductive and deductive reasoning relate to the Bloom levels of application and synthesis. www.ceap.wcu.edu /Houghton/Learner/think/inference.html   (228 words)

Confirmation Theory In general, inductive reasoning arises out of the fact that certain observations and sets of observations that we make, as we feel, require explanation, and a hypothesis is justified on some evidence when it produces a plausible explanation for what would otherwise be some surprising observations. Inductive inferences are made by conscious beings; these beings are capable of, and do, exercise a certain amount of judgement; sometimes their judgements conflict, sometimes they are uncertain, and sometimes they are wrong. An inductive inference follows the form of inference to the best explanation, and that is not a premise or a presupposition of the argument; it is just the form of the inference. home.sprynet.com /~owl1/confirma.htm   (11859 words)

A FORMAL THEORY OF INDUCTIVE INFERENCE, Part l\thanks{This research was supported by Air Force Office of Scientific ... The author feels that all problems in inductive inference, whether they involve continuous or discrete data, or both, can be expressed in the form of the extrapolation of a long sequence of symbols. The presently proposed inductive inference methods can in a sense be regarded as an inversion of Huffman coding, in that we first obtain the minimal code for a string, and from this code, we obtain the probability of that string. In general, it is impossible to prove that any proposed inductive inference method is "correct." It is possible to show that one is "incorrect" by proving it to be internally inconsistent, or showing that it gives results that are grossly at odds with our intuitive evaluation. world.std.com /~rjs/1964pt1.html   (7322 words)

Inductive Logic Programming - Theory Inductive inference is, in a sense, the inverse of deduction. Deductive inference derives consequences E from a prior theory T. Similarly, inductive inference derives a general belief T from specific beliefs E. In both deduction and induction T and E must be consistent and Inductive inference based on inverting resolution in propositional logic was the basis of the inductive inference rules within the Duce system. web.comlab.ox.ac.uk /oucl/research/areas/machlearn/ilp_theory.html   (2104 words)

Logical Arguments Inductive arguments, then, may meet their standard to a greater or to a lesser degree, depending upon the amount of support they supply. No inductive argument is either absolutely perfect or entirely useless, although one may be said to be relatively better or worse than another in the sense that it recommends its conclusion with a higher or lower degree of probability. Some logicians designate the combination of true premises and a valid inference as a sound argument; it is a piece of reasoning whose conclusion must be true. www.philosophypages.com /lg/e01.htm   (1799 words)

Induction without Probability   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28) Rather the inductive logic appropriate to a given domain is fixed by the particular facts that that prevail there. If one idea about inductive inference has taken root in recent philosophy of science, it is that inductive inference and probability theory are intimately connected. That this circumstance is universally so is the central idea of the "material theory of induction." It says that inductive inferences are not ultimately licensed by universally applicable logical schemas, as is the case in deductive inference. www.pitt.edu /~jdnorton/Goodies/I_without_P/index.html   (3125 words)

The Problem of Induction, by Sir Karl Popper By an inductive inference is here meant an inference from repeatedly observed instances to some as yet unobserved instances. It is of comparatively minor significance whether such an inference from the observed to the unobserved is, from the point of view of time, predictive or retrodictive; whether we infer that the sun will rise tomorrow or that it did rise 100,000 years ago. I hold with Hume that there simply is no such logical entity as an inductive inference; or, that all so-called inductive inferences are logically invalid - and even inductively invalid, to put it more sharply [see the end of this selection]. dieoff.org /page126.htm   (13219 words)

Direct Inference and the Problem of Induction and inductive skeptics stir uneasily in their chairs at the mention of certain mathematical theorems that seem palpably to have bearing on the problem. Unfortunately, as early critics of inverse inference were quick to point out, the left term of the numerator and (tacitly) the denominator both invoke a prior probability that the proportion of X's in the population lies within e of p. Granting that the rationality of direct inference is logically independent of its record of successes, it is subject to what appears at first sight to be a severe limitation: it applies only to the population from which we are sampling, and that population often seems much more restricted than the scope of our conclusions. homepages.wmich.edu /~mcgrew/kyburg7d.htm   (8530 words)

A Logical Framework for Inductive Inference and Its Rationality - Li (ResearchIndex) The rejection of a consequence obtained by inductive inference is formalized by a revision rule. An inductive process is de ned as a sequence of versions of a theory generated by alternatively applying the inductive inference rules and the revision rule. Li, W., A logical Framework for Inductive Inference and Its rationality, Advanced Topics in Arti cial Intelligence, Fu, N.(eds.), LNAI 1747, Springer, 1999. citeseer.ist.psu.edu /li99logical.html   (403 words)

Stove on Hume   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28) The class of inferences we are seeking is, of course, just that proper sub-class of arguments from observational premisses to contingent conclusions, of which the predictive-inductive inference is a typical, and the most important, member. The word 'inductive' was applied to arguments, in the foregoing paragraphs, in what I believe to be the sense which it has customarily had: that of 'arguments from observed to the unobserved instances of empirical predicates'. Consider a typical inductive argument, such as the predictive-inductive inference from 'This is a flame, and all of the many flames observed in the past have been hot' to 'This is hot'. www.cavehill.uwi.edu /bnccde/PH29A/stoveonhume.htm   (4948 words)

The Logical Fallacies: Inductive Fallacies Inductive reasoning consists of inferring from the properties of a sample to the properties of a population as a whole. Then we could infer inductively that half the beans in the barrel (that is, 500 of them) are fl and half are white. Nonetheless, a good inductive inference gives us a reason to believe that the conclusion is probably true. onegoodmove.org /fallacy/induct.htm   (191 words)

Machine Learning/Inductive Inference Inductive inference is the process of reaching a general conclusion from specific examples. Inductive Learning Hypothesis: any hypothesis found to approximate the target function well over a sufficiently large set of training examples will also approximate the target function well over other unobserved examples. The inductive bias of the decision tree ID3 algorithm is a preference for certain hypotheses over others (e.g., for shorter hypotheses), with no hard restriction on the hypotheses that can be eventually enumerated. www.cs.uregina.ca /~dbd/cs831/notes/ml/2_inference.html   (449 words)

Science, Strong Inference -- Proper Scientific Method Strong inference, and the logical tree it generates, are to inductive reasoning what the syllogism is to deductive reasoning in that it offers a regular method for reaching firm inductive conclusions one after the other as rapidly as possible. Of the many inductive procedures he suggested, the most important, I think, was the conditional inductive tree, which proceeded from alternative hypothesis (possible "causes," as he calls them), through crucial experiments ("Instances of the Fingerpost"), to exclusion of some alternatives and adoption of what is left ("establishing axioms"). Nevertheless it is interesting to note that several of the great synthesizers have also shown the strong- inference habit of thought in their other work, as Newton did in the inductive proofs of his Opticks and Maxwell did in his experimental proof that three and only three colors are needed in color vision. 256.com /gray/docs/strong_inference.html   (5779 words)

Inductive Logic (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) The inference to probable guilt or innocence is usually based on a patchwork of various sorts of evidence. The point is that a full account of inductive logic should not be limited to enumerative induction, but should also explicate the logic of hypothetical reasoning through which hypotheses and theories are tested on the basis of their predictions about specific observations. This current usage is misleading since in inductive logic the Bayesian/non-Bayesian distinction should really hang on whether the logic gives Bayes's theorem a prominent role, or whether the logic largely eschews the use of Bayes's theorem in inductive inferences, as does the classical approach to statistical inference. plato.stanford.edu /entries/logic-inductive   (12766 words)

Publications of Ray Solomonoff "Inductive Inference Theory - A Unified Approach to Problems in Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence." (Latex 37k) (pdf 160k) (Postscript 328k) Abstract "Inductive Inference Research Status Spring 1967," (Latex 37k) (pdf 161k) (Postscript 248k) Abstract "A Preliminary Report on a General Theory of Inductive Inference," (HTML 73k) (Latex 47k) (pdf 175k) (Postscript 182k) Abstract world.std.com /~rjs/pubs.html   (600 words)

The Relativistic Bog: Inductive Inference and the Knowledge of God Through inductive inference, our mind observes patterns in human experience and uses those patterns to form reasonable conjectures about unseen or not-yet-seen aspects of the world. However, there are two important limitations or qualifications to this use of inductive inference to establish the nature of ultimate reality. First, inductive inference is inherently limited as a means for discovering answers to all of our existential questions. www.gradresources.org /worldview_articles/bog.shtml   (1468 words)

Inductive Databases and Knowledge Scouts Objectives of this research are to develop, implement, and test a methodology for building inductive databases, which extend conventional databases by integrating inductive inference capabilities. Inductive databases extend conventional databases by integrating in them inductive inference capabilities that allow a database to answer queries that require synthesizing plausible knowledge. Such knowledge is neither directly nor deductively derivable from the database, but can be generated by inductive inference from facts in the database and prior knowledge in the associated knowledge base. www.mli.gmu.edu /nsfreport2001.html   (1538 words)

Three levels of inductive inference   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28) The inductive process is seen as establishing connections between various types of inputs. I argue that depending on which approach to observation is adopted, thoroughly different considerations about inductive inferences come into focus. What is judged to be the salient features of the inductive process depends to a large extent on what an observation is considered to be. www.lucs.lu.se /Abstracts/LUCS_Studies/LUCS09.html   (284 words)

Peter Lipton - Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd edition - Reviewed by Lefteris Farmakis, London School of ...   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28) IBE recently has been championed as a distinctive kind of inductive inference, broadly understood, which has the dual attributes of doing justice to the actual workings of science and the demands for its rational justification. On the inference side, Lipton reviews various accounts of inductive inference and notes their shortcomings, which IBE hopes to overcome. Although Lipton believes that IBE is a distinctive kind of inductive inference, he does not express imperialistic inclinations for it over other forms of inductive inference as Harman (1965) and Psillos (2002) do. ndpr.nd.edu /review.cfm?id=2641   (2308 words)

Inductive Inference DALEY, R.P. and C.H. On the Complexity of Inductive Inference. Inductive Inference of Monotonic Formal Systems from Positive Data. KORNBLITH, H. and H. Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground: An Essay in Naturalistic Epistemology. www.martinsewell.com /inductive-inference   (215 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)

About us   |   Why use us?   |   Reviews   |   Press   |   Contact us   Copyright © 2005-2007 www.factbites.com Usage implies agreement with terms.