springer sep 1977 (4 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This book grew out of previously published papers of mine composed over a period of years; they have been reworked (sometimes beyond recognition) so as to form a reasonably coherent whole. Part One treats of informative inference. I argue (Chapter 2) that the traditional principle of induction in its clearest formulation (that laws are confirmed by their positive cases) is clearly false. Other formulations in terms of the 'uniformity of nature' or the 'resemblance of the future to the past' seem to me hopelessly unclear. From a Bayesian point of view, 'learning from experience' goes by conditionalization (Bayes' rule). The traditional stum bling block for Bayesians has been to fmd objective probability inputs to conditionalize upon. Subjective Bayesians allow any probability inputs that do not violate the usual axioms of probability. Many subjectivists grant that this liberality seems prodigal but own themselves unable to think of additional constraints that might plausibly be imposed. To be sure, if we could agree on the correct probabilistic representation of 'ignorance' (or absence of pertinent data), then all probabilities obtained by applying Bayes' rule to an 'informationless' prior would be objective. But familiar contra dictions, like the Bertrand paradox, are thought to vitiate all attempts to objectify 'ignorance'. BuUding on the earlier work of Sir Harold Jeffreys, E. T. Jaynes, and the more recent work ofG. E. P. Box and G. E. Tiao, I have elected to bite this bullet. In Chapter 3, I develop and defend an objectivist Bayesian approach.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Philosophers writing on the subject of human action have found it tempting to introduce their subject by raising Wittgenstein's question, 'What is left over if you subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm ' The presumption is that something of particular interest is involved in an action of raising an arm that is not present in a mere bodily movement, and the philosopher's task is to specify just what this is. Unfortunately, such an approach does not take us very far, since a person could properly be said to raise his (or her) arm while asleep or hypnotized even though he (or she) would not be performing an action in the sense of 'action' with which philosophers are particularly concerned. To avoid this kind of difficulty I shall approach the subject of human action is a more academic way: I shall expound some important rival theories of human action, and introduce the relevant issues by commenting critically on those theories. One of the issues I eventually introduce is a metaphysical one. A theory of action makes sense, I contend, only on the assumption that there are such 'things' as actions (or events). After considering some key arguments bearing on the issue I conclude that, as matters currently stand in philosophy, a metaphysically noncommittal attitude toward actions and events seems justified.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The cornerstone of the radical program of positivism was the separation of science from metaphysics. In the good old days, the solution to this demarca tion problem was seen as a way of separating sheep from goats - ~ynthetic or analytic propositions, which were candidates for truth or falsity, either on empirical or formal grounds, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, those deceptive propositions which appeared to be truth claims, but were instead either meaningless, or nonsensical, or poetical, or merely expressive - i.e. without proper cognitive content and hence not verifiable or falsifiable. In the last half century, analytic philosophy of science, linguistic analysis and logic have formulated and reformulated and reformulated again the distinction be tween science and metaphysics. The outcome was unexpected: metaphysics rather than retreating from the scene, shriveling up, dissolving, has instead re emerged as an acknowledged, even if problematic component of scientific theorizing. This has made some philosophers of science happy, others miserable. For Morris Lazerowitz, it should serve as evidence for his thesis that the sort of philosophical assertions which metaphysics makes about the nature of things are not simply radically undecidable, but persist because they express a deeper and unconscious function in the mental life of philosophers (and presumably, of those scientists who find it necessary to be philosophical in this way, whether self-consciously or tacitly).