Defending semantic generalism

Focusing on generalism.

Defending Diversity

Why do some observations lead to broad generalizations whereas other observations do not have as much influence on people's beliefs? One principle of evaluating evidence is the diversity principle, which states that more diverse evidence should lead to stronger inferences than a narrow sample of evidence. For example, if you see someone repeatedly acting aggressively while giving lectures, you ...

Developing generalism in the South African context.

The largest impact on the South African burden of disease will be made in community-based and primary healthcare (PHC) settings and not in referral hospitals. Medical generalism is an approach to the delivery of healthcare that routinely applies a broad and holistic perspective to the patient's problems and is a feature of PHC. A multi-professional team of generalists, who share similar values ...

Defending Abduction

Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called "hypothesis" or "abduction". He characterized abduction as reasoning "from effect to cause", and as "the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis". Peirce's ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning (the method of a...

Defending Extended Cognition

In this paper, we defend extended cognition against several criticisms. We argue that extended cognition does not derive from armchair theorizing and that it neither ignores the results of the neural sciences, nor minimizes the importance of the brain in the production of intelligent behavior. We also argue that explanatory success in the cognitive sciences does not depend on localist or reduct...