No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-69).

The discussion of worldviews is today dominated by two worldviews, Theism and Naturalism, each with its own advantages and problems. Theism has the advantage of accommodating the individual with existential answers whilst having problems with integrating more recent scientific understandings of the universe. Naturalism on the other hand does well by our developments of science, the problem being instead that this understanding meets difficulty in answering some of the essentials of our existence: questions of mentality and morality. These two views differ fundamentally in stances of ontology and epistemology, and seem not in any foreseeable future to be reconcilable. To deal with this issue, Panpsychism is presented here as the worldview that can accommodate for both existential issues and scientific understanding.

Eliminative materialism is a view that has been sparsely acknowledged and often overlooked when it comes to providing us with a criterion of what it takes for you and me to persist over time. This owes much to its counterintuitive belief in the non-existence of folk-psychological notions, such as persons. Against a backdrop of philosophical and scientific inquiry, this paper amounts to providing such a criterion in the form of f-organisms, taking a different route based on emergent descriptions, instead of conventional reductive explanations. The temporal plasticity (change over time) of such f-organisms display stable persistence conditions despite their constant state of reconstruction. What informs the question of identity in such a paradigm is dealt with accordingly, and the notion of the self is put in a context in which it can no longer be said to be the self we are familiar with – a context in which the center fails to hold. The imperative question for any of such criteria will be to accommodate the concept of identity as unconstrained and far away from uncertainty as possible. The main theme will thus be to reassess the general notion of diachronic identity to include our identity over time, and make explicit the various implications for such a view.

No description available.

本篇論文的主要目的是要藉由批判Paul Churchland版本的唯物消除論當中的論證之相關蘊含以及前提，來分析其立場的缺失與不足之處。而為了要達到這個目的，我便將本論文的構成主軸分成兩個部分：第一個部分是由第一章以及第二章所構成，其主要談論過去Churchland (1981)所宣稱的消除論立場以及其論證架構，在這裡除了整理過去眾多哲學家對於他的論證的一些批判與反駁的觀點之外，我也提出自己對於過去消除論之三個主要困境的主張。第二個部分則是由第三章以及第四章所構成，其主要是針對Churchland (2007)現在的唯物消除論之新進觀點來展開論述。當中除了分析他消除論立場的一致性之外，同時也去分析並討論他所提供之支持消除論的新論證，我將之稱作為「動物認知論證」(animal cognition argument) 。我將指出，由於Churchland在該論證當中隱含了一個重要的預設，因而使得該新論證的途徑未必可以合理地推得出其原有的消除論立場。

<p>The inverse base-rate effect is the observation that on certain occasions people classify new objects as belonging to rare base-rate categories rather than common ones (e.g., D. L. Medin & S. M. Edelson, 1988). This finding is inconsistent with normative prescriptions of rationality, and provides an anomaly for current theories of human knowledge representation, such as the exemplar-based models of categorization, which predict a consistent use of base-rates (e.g., D. L. Medin & M. M. Schaffer, 1978). This thesis presents a novel explanation of the inverse base-rate effect. The proposal is that participants sometimes eliminate category options that are inconsistent with well-supported inference rules. These assumptions contrast with those by attentional theory (J. K. Kruschke, in press), according to which the inverse base-rate effect is the outcome of rapid attention shifts operating on cue-category associations. Study I, II, and III verified seven qualitative predictions derived from the eliminative inference idea. None of these phenomena can be explained by attentional theory. The most important of these findings were that elimination of well-known, common categories mediate the inverse base-rate effect rather than the strongest cue-category associations (Study I), that only participants with a rule-based mode of generalization exhibit the inverse base-rate effect (Study II), and that rapid attentional shifts per se do not accelerate learning, but rather decelerate it (Study III). In addition, Study I provided a quantitative implementation of the eliminative inference idea, ELMO, that demonstrated that this high-level reasoning process can produce the basic pattern of base-rate effects in the inverse base-rate design. Taken together, as an account of the inverse base-rate effect the empirical evidence of this thesis suggest that rule-based elimination is a powerful component of the inverse base-rate effect. But previous studies have indicated that attentional shifts affect the inverse base-rate effect, too. Therefore, a complete account of the inverse base-rate effect needs to integrate inductive and eliminative inferences operating on rule-based representations with attentional shifts. The Discussion of this thesis propose a number of suggestions for such integrative work. </p>

The inverse base-rate effect is the observation that on certain occasions people classify new objects as belonging to rare base-rate categories rather than common ones (e.g., D. L. Medin &amp; S. M. Edelson, 1988). This finding is inconsistent with normative prescriptions of rationality, and provides an anomaly for current theories of human knowledge representation, such as the exemplar-based models of categorization, which predict a consistent use of base-rates (e.g., D. L. Medin &amp; M. M. Schaffer, 1978). This thesis presents a novel explanation of the inverse base-rate effect. The proposal is that participants sometimes eliminate category options that are inconsistent with well-supported inference rules. These assumptions contrast with those by attentional theory (J. K. Kruschke, in press), according to which the inverse base-rate effect is the outcome of rapid attention shifts operating on cue-category associations. Study I, II, and III verified seven qualitative predictions derived from the eliminative inference idea. None of these phenomena can be explained by attentional theory. The most important of these findings were that elimination of well-known, common categories mediate the inverse base-rate effect rather than the strongest cue-category associations (Study I), that only participants with a rule-based mode of generalization exhibit the inverse base-rate effect (Study II), and that rapid attentional shifts per se do not accelerate learning, but rather decelerate it (Study III). In addition, Study I provided a quantitative implementation of the eliminative inference idea, ELMO, that demonstrated that this high-level reasoning process can produce the basic pattern of base-rate effects in the inverse base-rate design. Taken together, as an account of the inverse base-rate effect the empirical evidence of this thesis suggest that rule-based elimination is a powerful component of the inverse base-rate effect. But previous studies have indicated that attentional shifts affect the inverse base-rate effect, too. Therefore, a complete account of the inverse base-rate effect needs to integrate inductive and eliminative inferences operating on rule-based representations with attentional shifts. The Discussion of this thesis propose a number of suggestions for such integrative work.

No description available.

Das vorliegende Buch stellt eine überarbeitete und deutlich erweiterte zweite Ausgabe meines gleichnamigen Buches von 2012 dar. Es wendet sich in Form eines Lehrbuchs sowohl an Anfänger wie Fortgeschrittene der Wissenschaftstheorie sowie an Wissenschaftler, die sich dafür interessieren, wann Daten eine bestimmte Theorie begründen und wie stark die Bestätigung der Theorie durch die Daten ist. Im Vordergrund steht dabei immer die erkenntnistheoretische Frage, ob bestimmte Begründungsverfahren die Ziele der Wissenschaften in überzeugender Weise verfolgen oder ob es dagegen substantielle Einwände gibt. Leider wird sich herausstellen, dass kein Verfahren ohne Fehl und Tadel ist, und wir sollten die Schwächen unserer Begründungsverfahren genau kennen, um sie korrekt einsetzen zu können.