Introduction: Contrasts and contests about philosophy

Contrasts in reasoning about omissions

Omissions figure prominently in causal reasoning from diagnosis to ascriptions of negligence. One philosophical proposal posits that omissions are accompanied by a contrasting alternative that describes a case of orthodox (nonomissive) causation (Schaffer, 2005; Bernstein, 2014). A psychological hypothesis can be drawn from this contrast view of omissions: by default, humans should interpret om...

Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy

logical possibility, be two things which had exactly the same predicates, in the narrow sense in which we have been using the word “predicate.” How does our axiom look when we pass beyond predicates in this narrow sense? In the actual world there seems no way of doubting its empirical truth as regards particulars, owing to spatio-temporal differentiation: no two particulars have exactly the sam...

Philosophy of Science: Introduction

Introduction to Philosophy

There are many different kinds of philosophy. For example, there is Indian philosophy (which has its roots in the ancient body of oral tradition known as the Veda), Islamic philosophy, Japanese philosophy and Chinese philosophy. However, none of these have had any real influence on the scientific tradition in which cognitive science has grown up. That scientific tradition is Western science and...

Introduction: The Philosophy of Vectors