|
Overdetermination
Overdetermination occurs when a single-observed effect is determined by multiple causes, any one of which alone would be conceivably sufficient to account for ("determine") the effect. The term "overdetermination" () was used by Sigmund Freud as a key concept in his psychoanalysis, and later by Louis Althusser. In the philosophy of science, the concept of overdetermination has been used to describe a situation in which there are more causes present than are necessary to cause an effect. Overdetermination here is in contrast to ''underdetermination'', when the number or strength of causes is insufficient. Freud and psychoanalysis Freud wrote in ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' that many features of dreams were usually "overdetermined," in that they were caused by multiple factors in the life of the dreamer, from the "residue of the day" (superficial memories of recent life) to deeply repressed traumas and unconscious wishes, these being "potent thoughts". Freud favored interpr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser (, ; ; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. Althusser was a long-time member and sometimes a strong critic of the French Communist Party. His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and Marxist humanism, humanist and reformist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the cult of personality and of ideology. Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism. He later described himself as a social anarchist. Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental il ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Underdetermination
In the philosophy of science, underdetermination or the underdetermination of theory by data (sometimes abbreviated UTD) is the idea that evidence available to us at a given time may be insufficient to determine what beliefs we should hold in response to it. The underdetermination thesis states that all evidence necessarily underdetermines any scientific theory. Underdetermination exists when available evidence is insufficient to identify which belief one should hold about that evidence. For example, if all that was known was that exactly $10 were spent on apples and oranges, and that apples cost $1 and oranges $2, then one would know enough to eliminate some possibilities (e.g., 6 oranges could not have been purchased), but one would not have enough evidence to know which specific combination of apples and oranges were purchased. In this example, one would say that belief in what combination was purchased is underdetermined by the available evidence. In contrast, ''overdetermin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open System (systems Theory)
An open system is a system that has external interactions. Such interactions can take the form of information, energy, or material transfers into or out of the system boundary, depending on the discipline which defines the concept. An open system is contrasted with the concept of an isolated system which exchanges neither energy, matter, nor information with its environment. An open system is also known as a flow system. The concept of an open system was formalized within a framework that enabled one to interrelate the theory of the organism, thermodynamics, and evolutionary theory. This concept was expanded upon with the advent of information theory and subsequently systems theory. Today the concept has its applications in the natural and social sciences. In the natural sciences an open system is one whose border is permeable to both energy and mass. By contrast, a closed system is permeable to energy but not to matter. The definition of an open system assumes that there a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fallacy Of The Single Cause
The fallacy of the single cause, also known as complex cause, causal oversimplification, causal reductionism, root cause fallacy, and reduction fallacy, is an informal fallacy of questionable cause that occurs when it is assumed that there is a single, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes. Fallacy of the single cause can be logically reduced to: "X caused Y; therefore, X was the only cause of Y" (although A,B,C...etc. also contributed to Y.) Causal oversimplification is a specific kind of false dilemma A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false ... where conjoint possibilities are ignored. In other words, the possible causes are assumed to be "A xor B xor C" when "A and B and C" or "A and B and not C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the Psyche (psychology), psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it. Freud was born to Galician Jews, Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Příbor, Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902. Freud lived and worked in Vienna having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. Following the Anschluss, German annexation of Austria in March 1938, Freud left Austria to escape Nazi persecution. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sufficient Causes
In logic and mathematics, necessity and sufficiency are terms used to describe a conditional or implicational relationship between two statements. For example, in the conditional statement: "If then ", is necessary for , because the truth of is guaranteed by the truth of . (Equivalently, it is impossible to have without , or the falsity of ensures the falsity of .) Similarly, is sufficient for , because being true always implies that is true, but not being true does not always imply that is not true. In general, a necessary condition is one (possibly one of several conditions) that must be present in order for another condition to occur, while a sufficient condition is one that produces the said condition. The assertion that a statement is a "necessary ''and'' sufficient" condition of another means that the former statement is true if and only if the latter is true. That is, the two statements must be either simultaneously true, or simultaneously false. In ordinary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Concepts In The Philosophy Of Science
A concept is an abstract idea that serves as a foundation for more concrete principles, thoughts, and beliefs. Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied within such disciplines as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences. The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach, cognitive science. In contemporary philosophy, three understandings of a concept prevail: * mental representations, such that a concept is an entity that exists in the mind (a mental object) * abilities peculiar to cognitive agents (mental states) * Fregean senses, abstract objects rather than a mental object or a mental state Concepts are classified into a hierarchy, higher levels of which are termed "superordinate" and lower levels termed "subordinate". Addit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marxism
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive " Marxist theory". Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts. In addition to the various schools of thought, which emphasize or modify elements of classical Marxism, several Marxian concepts have been incorporated into an array of social theories. This has led to widely varying conclusions. Alongside Marx's critique of political economy, the defining cha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parametric Determinism
Parametric determinism is a Marxist interpretation of the course of history. It was formulated by Ernest Mandel and can be viewed as one variant of Karl Marx's historical materialism or as a philosophy of history. In an article critical of the analytical Marxism of Jon Elster, Mandel explains the idea as follows: Formal rationality and dialectical reason In formal-logical determinism, human action is considered either rational, and hence logically explicable, or else arbitrary and random (in which case human actions can be comprehended at best only as patterns of statistical distributions, i.e. as degrees of variability relative to some constants). But in dialectical determinism, human action may be non-arbitrary and determinate, hence reasonable, even although it is not explicable exclusively in terms of deductive inference. The action selected by people from a limited range of options may not be the "most logical" or "most optimal" one, but it can be shown to be non-arbit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Occam's Razor
In philosophy, Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor or Ocham's razor; ) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements. It is also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony (). Attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, it is frequently cited as , which translates as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity", although Occam never used these exact words. Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred." This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction and both hypotheses have equal explanatory power, one should prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions, and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions. Similarl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multivariate Statistics
Multivariate statistics is a subdivision of statistics encompassing the simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one outcome variable, i.e., '' multivariate random variables''. Multivariate statistics concerns understanding the different aims and background of each of the different forms of multivariate analysis, and how they relate to each other. The practical application of multivariate statistics to a particular problem may involve several types of univariate and multivariate analyses in order to understand the relationships between variables and their relevance to the problem being studied. In addition, multivariate statistics is concerned with multivariate probability distributions, in terms of both :*how these can be used to represent the distributions of observed data; :*how they can be used as part of statistical inference, particularly where several different quantities are of interest to the same analysis. Certain types of problems involving multivariate da ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Counterfactual Conditional
Counterfactual conditionals (also ''contrafactual'', ''subjunctive'' or ''X-marked'') are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactuals are contrasted with indicatives, which are generally restricted to discussing open possibilities. Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood. Counterfactuals are one of the most studied phenomena in philosophical logic, formal semantics, and philosophy of language. They were first discussed as a problem for the material conditional analysis of conditionals, which treats them all as trivially true. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers and linguists developed the now-classic possible world approach, in which a counterfactual's truth hinges on its consequent holding at certai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
