Truth-Seeking by Abduction PDF Download

Author: Ilkka Niiniluoto
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319991574
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This book examines the philosophical conception of abductive reasoning as developed by Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. It explores the historical and systematic connections of Peirce's original ideas and debates about their interpretations. Abduction is understood in a broad sense which covers the discovery and pursuit of hypotheses and inference to the best explanation. The analysis presents fresh insights into this notion of reasoning, which derives from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. The author outlines some logical and AI approaches to abduction as well as studies various kinds of inverse problems in astronomy, physics, medicine, biology, and human sciences to provide examples of retroductions and abductions. The discussion covers also everyday examples with the implication of this notion in detective stories, one of Peirce’s own favorite themes. The author uses Bayesian probabilities to argue that explanatory abduction is a method of confirmation. He uses his own account of truth approximation to reformulate abduction as inference which leads to the truthlikeness of its conclusion. This allows a powerful abductive defense of scientific realism. This up-to-date survey and defense of the Peircean view of abduction may very well help researchers, students, and philosophers better understand the logic of truth-seeking.

Author: John R. Josephson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521575454
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This book is about abduction, 'the logic of Sherlock Holmes', and about how some kinds of abductive reasoning can be programmed in a computer. The work brings together Artificial Intelligence and philosophy of science and is rich with implications for other areas such as, psychology, medical informatics, and linguistics. It also has subtle implications for evidence evaluation in areas such as accident investigation, confirmation of scientific theories, law, diagnosis, and financial auditing. The book is about certainty and the logico-computational foundations of knowledge; it is about inference in perception, reasoning strategies, and building expert systems.

Author: David Rohde
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143120050
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The compelling and insightful account of a New York Times reporter's abduction by the Taliban, and his wife's struggle to free him. In November 2008, David Rohde, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times, was kidnapped by the Taliban and held captive for seven months in the tribal areas of Pakistan. In the process, Rohde became the first American to witness how Pakistan's powerful military turns a blind eye toward a Taliban ministate thriving inside its borders. In New York, David's wife Kristen Mulvihill, together with his family, kept the kidnapping secret for David's safety and struggled to navigate a labyrinth of conflicting agendas, misinformation, and lies. Part memoir, part work of journalism, A Rope and a Prayer is a story of duplicity, faith, resilience, and love.

Author: Lorenzo Magnani
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031101359
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 1921

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Book Description
This Handbook offers the first comprehensive reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of abductive cognition, providing readers with extensive information on the process of reasoning to hypotheses in humans, animals, and in computational machines. It highlights the role of abduction in both theory practice: in generating and testing hypotheses and explanatory functions for various purposes and as an educational device. It merges logical, cognitive, epistemological and philosophical perspectives with more practical needs relating to the application of abduction across various disciplines and practices, such as in diagnosis, creative reasoning, scientific discovery, diagrammatic and ignorance-based cognition, and adversarial strategies. It also discusses the inferential role of models in hypothetical reasoning, abduction and creativity, including the process of development, implementation and manipulation for different scientific and technological purposes. Written by a group of internationally renowned experts in philosophy, logic, general epistemology, mathematics, cognitive, and computer science, as well as life sciences, engineering, architecture, and economics, the Handbook of Abductive Cognition offers a unique reference guide for readers approaching the process of reasoning to hypotheses from different perspectives and for various theoretical and practical purposes. Numerous diagrams, schemes and other visual representations are included to promote a better understanding of the relevant concepts and to make concepts highly accessible to an audience of scholars and students with different scientific backgrounds.

Author: I. Niiniluoto
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9789027723543
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
The modern discussion on the concept of truthlikeness was started in 1960. In his influential Word and Object, W. V. O. Quine argued that Charles Peirce's definition of truth as the limit of inquiry is faulty for the reason that the notion 'nearer than' is only "defined for numbers and not for theories". In his contribution to the 1960 International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science at Stan ford, Karl Popper defended the opposite view by defining a compara tive notion of verisimilitude for theories. was originally introduced by the The concept of verisimilitude Ancient sceptics to moderate their radical thesis of the inaccessibility of truth. But soon verisimilitudo, indicating likeness to the truth, was confused with probabilitas, which expresses an opiniotative attitude weaker than full certainty. The idea of truthlikeness fell in disrepute also as a result of the careless, often confused and metaphysically loaded way in which many philosophers used - and still use - such concepts as 'degree of truth', 'approximate truth', 'partial truth', and 'approach to the truth'. Popper's great achievement was his insight that the criticism against truthlikeness - by those who urge that it is meaningless to speak about 'closeness to truth' - is more based on prejudice than argument.

Author: Susan A. Clancy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674029577
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
They are tiny. They are tall. They are gray. They are green. They survey our world with enormous glowing eyes. To conduct their shocking experiments, they creep in at night to carry humans off to their spaceships. Yet there is no evidence that they exist at all. So how could anyone believe he or she was abducted by aliens? Or want to believe it? To answer these questions, psychologist Susan Clancy interviewed and evaluated "abductees"--old and young, male and female, religious and agnostic. She listened closely to their stories--how they struggled to explain something strange in their remembered experience, how abduction seemed plausible, and how, having suspected abduction, they began to recollect it, aided by suggestion and hypnosis. Clancy argues that abductees are sane and intelligent people who have unwittingly created vivid false memories from a toxic mix of nightmares, culturally available texts (abduction reports began only after stories of extraterrestrials appeared in films and on TV), and a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy. For them, otherworldly terror can become a transforming, even inspiring experience. "Being abducted," writes Clancy, "may be a baptism in the new religion of this millennium." This book is not only a subtle exploration of the workings of memory, but a sensitive inquiry into the nature of belief.

Author: Ann Druffel
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307555577
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
“A very powerful book . . . Druffel’s research does us all a great service.”—Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut and author of The Way of the Explorer In 1988 Ann Druffel, who has researched UFOs for forty years, discovered a little-known fact that had been drowned in abduction hysteria—documented evidence that people have successfully fended off attack by the “greys,” the short, big-eyed aliens now familiar through so much popular media. Using her database of 250 case studies, including seventy “resisters,” Druffel has ascertained nine techniques that witnesses use to ward off alien entities and even break off abductions in progress. And perhaps even more astonishing, this evidence points to the possible true identity of the greys and their link to the abducting entities of myth and folklore. How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction covers various resistance techniques, including: • Mental Struggle: Block their mind control • Physical Struggle: Fight back • Righteous Anger: Summon your inviolate rights • Protective Rage: Guard your loved ones • Support from Family Members: Seek strength in numbers • Intuition: Sense them coming • Metaphysical Methods: Create a personal shield • Appeal to Spiritual Personages: Get help from on high • Repellents: Use time-tested fend-off substances Complete with hair-raising true tales of courage and illustrated with eyewitness sketches, How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction is the only book with step-by-step instructions on what to do—and not to do—if aliens come knocking on your door.

Author: Douglas Walton
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817357823
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A study of the role of abductive inference in everyday argumentation and legal evidence Examines three areas in which abductive reasoning is especially important: medicine, science, and law. The reader is introduced to abduction and shown how it has evolved historically into the framework of conventional wisdom in logic. Discussions draw upon recent techniques used in artificial intelligence, particularly in the areas of multi-agent systems and plan recognition, to develop a dialogue model of explanation. Cases of causal explanations in law are analyzed using abductive reasoning, and all the components are finally brought together to build a new account of abductive reasoning. By clarifying the notion of abduction as a common and significant type of reasoning in everyday argumentation, Abductive Reasoning will be useful to scholars and students in many fields, including argumentation, computing and artificial intelligence, psychology and cognitive science, law, philosophy, linguistics, and speech communication and rhetoric.

Author: Ralph Blumenthal
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826362311
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The Believer is the weird and chilling true story of Dr. John Mack. This eminent Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer risked his career to investigate the phenomenon of human encounters with aliens and to give credibility to the stupefying tales shared by people who were utterly convinced they had happened. Nothing in Mack's four decades of psychiatry had prepared him for the otherworldly accounts of a cross section of humanity including young children who reported being taken against their wills by alien beings. Over the course of his career his interest in alien abduction grew from curiosity to wonder, ultimately developing into a limitless, unwavering passion. Based on exclusive access to Mack's archives, journals, and psychiatric notes and interviews with his family and closest associates, The Believer reveals the life and work of a man who explored the deepest of scientific conundrums and further leads us to the hidden dimensions and alternate realities that captivated Mack until the end of his life.

Author: David B. Teplow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009445278
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This book is a novel synthesis of the philosophy and practice of science, covering its diverse theoretical, metaphysical, logical, philosophical, and practical elements. The process of science is generally taught in its empirical form: what science is, how it works, what it has achieved, and what it might achieve in the future. What is often absent is how to think deeply about science and how to apply its lessons in the pursuit of truth, in other words, knowing how to know. In this volume, David Teplow presents illustrative examples of science practice, history and philosophy of science, and sociological aspects of the scientific community, to address commonalities among these disciplines. In doing so, he challenges cherished beliefs and suggests to students, philosophers, and practicing scientists new, epistemically superior, ways of thinking about and doing science.