|
Inductive Reasoning
Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which a general principle is derived from a body of observations. It consists of making broad generalizations based on specific observations. Inductive reasoning is distinct from ''deductive'' reasoning. If the premises are correct, the conclusion of a deductive argument is ''certain''; in contrast, the truth of the conclusion of an inductive argument is '' probable'', based upon the evidence given. Types The types of inductive reasoning include generalization, prediction, statistical syllogism, argument from analogy, and causal inference. Inductive generalization A generalization (more accurately, an ''inductive generalization'') proceeds from a premise about a sample to a conclusion about the population. The observation obtained from this sample is projected onto the broader population. : The proportion Q of the sample has attribute A. : Therefore, the proportion Q of the population has attribute A. For example, say there ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Method Of Reasoning
Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, mathematics, and art, and is normally considered to be a distinguishing ability possessed by humans. Reason is sometimes referred to as rationality. Reasoning is associated with the acts of thinking and cognition, and involves the use of one's intellect. The field of logic studies the ways in which humans can use formal reasoning to produce logically valid arguments. Reasoning may be subdivided into forms of logical reasoning, such as: deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and abductive reasoning. Aristotle drew a distinction between logical discursive reasoning (reason proper), and intuitive reasoning, in which the reasoning process through intuition—however valid—may tend toward the personal and the subjectively opaq ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently defined as any fields of study outside of professional training, mathematics, and the natural and social sciences. They use methods that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant historical element—as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences;"Humanity" 2.b, ''Oxford English Dictionary'' 3rd Ed. (2003) yet, unlike the sciences, the humanities have no general history. The humanities include the studies of foreign languages, history, philosophy, language arts (literature, writing, oratory, rhetoric, poetry, etc.), performing arts ( theater, music, dance, etc.), and visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, filmmaking, etc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Organon (Owen)/The Posterior Analytics
The ''Organon'' ( grc, Ὄργανον, meaning "instrument, tool, organ") is the standard collection of Aristotle's six works on logical analysis and dialectic. The name ''Organon'' was given by Aristotle's followers, the Peripatetics. The six works are as follows: Constitution of the texts The order of the works is not chronological (which is now hard to determine) but was deliberately chosen by Theophrastus to constitute a well-structured system. Indeed, parts of them seem to be a scheme of a lecture on logic. The arrangement of the works was made by Andronicus of Rhodes around 40 BC. Aristotle's ''Metaphysics'' has some points of overlap with the works making up the ''Organon'' but is not traditionally considered part of it; additionally, there are works on logic attributed, with varying degrees of plausibility, to Aristotle that were not known to the Peripatetics. # The ''Categories'' (Latin: ) introduces Aristotle's 10-fold classification of that which exists: s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Posterior Analytics
The ''Posterior Analytics'' ( grc-gre, Ἀναλυτικὰ Ὕστερα; la, Analytica Posteriora) is a text from Aristotle's ''Organon'' that deals with demonstration, definition, and scientific knowledge. The demonstration is distinguished as ''a syllogism productive of scientific knowledge'', while the definition marked as ''the statement of a thing's nature, ... a statement of the meaning of the name, or of an equivalent nominal formula''. Content In the ''Prior Analytics'', syllogistic logic is considered in its formal aspect; in the ''Posterior'' it is considered in respect of its matter. The "form" of a syllogism lies in the necessary connection between the premises and the conclusion. Even where there is no fault in the form, there may be in the matter, i.e. the propositions of which it is composed, which may be true or false, probable or improbable. When the premises are certain, true, and primary, and the conclusion formally follows from them, this is demonstratio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Routledge
Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and social science. The company publishes approximately 1,800 journals and 5,000 new books each year and their backlist encompasses over 70,000 titles. Routledge is claimed to be the largest global academic publisher within humanities and social sciences. In 1998, Routledge became a subdivision and imprint of its former rival, Taylor & Francis Group (T&F), as a result of a £90-million acquisition deal from Cinven, a venture capital group which had purchased it two years previously for £25 million. Following the merger of Informa and T&F in 2004, Routledge became a publishing unit and major imprint within the Informa "academic publishing" division. Routledge is headquartered in the main T&F office in Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire. His extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy and politics, and he is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and served as consul in 63 BC. His influence on the Latin language was immense. He wrote more than three-quarters of extant Latin literature that is known to have existed in his lifetime, and it has been said that subsequent prose was either a reaction against or a return to his style, not only in Latin but in European languages up to the 19th century. Cicero introduced into Latin the arguments of the chief schools of Hellenistic philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy within the Lyceum and the wider Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, meteorology, geology, and government. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion. Little is known about his life. Aristotle was born in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eliminative Induction
The Baconian method is the investigative method developed by Sir Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modern science, and thus a first formulation of a modern scientific method. The method was put forward in Bacon's book ''Novum Organum'' (1620), or 'New Method', and was supposed to replace the methods put forward in Aristotle's ''Organon''. This method was influential upon the development of the scientific method in modern science; but also more generally in the early modern rejection of medieval Aristotelianism. Description in the ''Novum Organum'' Bacon's view of induction Bacon's method is an example of the application of inductive reasoning. However, Bacon's method of induction is much more complex than the essential inductive process of making generalisations from observations. Bacon's method begins with description of the requirements for making the careful, systematic observations necessary to produce quality facts. He then proceeds to use induction, the ability to gene ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific Method
The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries; see the article history of scientific method for additional detail.) It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; the testability of hypotheses, experimental and the measurement-based statistical testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. These are ''principles'' of the scientific method, as distinguished from a definitive series of steps applicable to all scientific enterprises. Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, the underlying process is frequently the sa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophy Of Science
Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. This discipline overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and truth. Philosophy of science focuses on metaphysical, epistemic and semantic aspects of science. Ethical issues such as bioethics and scientific misconduct are often considered ethics or science studies rather than the philosophy of science. There is no consensus among philosophers about many of the central problems concerned with the philosophy of science, including whether science can reveal the truth about unobservable things and whether scientific reasoning can be justified at all. In addition to these general questions about science as a whole, philosophers of science consi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Argument Form
In logic, logical form of a statement is a precisely-specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambiguous logical interpretation with respect to a formal system. In an ideal formal language, the meaning of a logical form can be determined unambiguously from syntax alone. Logical forms are semantic, not syntactic constructs; therefore, there may be more than one string that represents the same logical form in a given language. The logical form of an argument is called the argument form of the argument. History The importance of the concept of form to logic was already recognized in ancient times. Aristotle, in the ''Prior Analytics'', was probably the first to employ variable letters to represent valid inferences. Therefore, Jan Łukasiewicz claims that the introduction of variables was "one of Aristotle's greatest inventions." According ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Categorical Proposition
In logic, a categorical proposition, or categorical statement, is a proposition that asserts or denies that all or some of the members of one category (the ''subject term'') are included in another (the ''predicate term''). The study of arguments using categorical statements (i.e., syllogisms) forms an important branch of deductive reasoning that began with the Ancient Greeks. The Ancient Greeks such as Aristotle identified four primary distinct types of categorical proposition and gave them standard forms (now often called ''A'', ''E'', ''I'', and ''O''). If, abstractly, the subject category is named ''S'' and the predicate category is named ''P'', the four standard forms are: *All ''S'' are ''P''. (''A'' form, \forall _\rightarrow P_xequiv \forall neg S_\lor P_x/math>) *No ''S'' are ''P''. (''E'' form, \forall _\rightarrow \neg P_xequiv \forall neg S_\lor \neg P_x/math>) *Some ''S'' are ''P''. (''I'' form, \exists _\land P_x/math>) *Some ''S'' are not ''P''. (''O'' form, \ex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.svg "Click for more on -> Inductive Reasoning")
