This paper echoes, from a philosophical standpoint, the claim of McCarthy and Hayes that Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence have important relations. Philosophical problems about the use of ’intuition’ in reasoning are related, via a concept of analogical representation, to problems in the simulation of perception, problem-solving and the generation of useful sets of possibilities in consid...

There are three sections in this paper. The first is a philosophical discussion of the general problem of reasoning under limited deductive capacity. The second sketches a rigorous way of assigning probabilities to statements in pure arithmetic; motivated by the preceding discussion, it can nonetheless be read separately. The third is a philosophical discussion that highlights the shifting cont...

Logic plays a fundamental role in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. The general presupposition is that Kant’s logic can be subsumed under the Aristotelian tradition. However, with respect to this presupposition some problems arise in Kant’s philosophy. This thesis takes a new approach to Kant’s logic: Instead of imposing a logical framework on Kant’s thought this thesis aims at deriving the log...

The status of Bayesianism has considerably evolved since the beginning 1990s, when Howson and Urbach published Scientific Reasoning: Bayesian Approach (1989). At time, was a philosophical theory scientific reasoning rival to falsificationism. While it claimed account for important aspects in empirical science solve difficulties such as Duhem’s Problem or Hempel’s Raven Paradox, it hardly used b...

In ever so many philosophical introductions to formal logic the latter is presented as the philosopher’s ars iudicandi, i.e. as the instrument that evaluates the quality of philosophical arguments or, more generally, of informal reasoning. Irrespective of its content, an argument is only worthy of consideration if it is valid, i.e. if the truth of its premise(s) necessitates the truth of its co...

In this paper, we develop a philosophical foundation for qualitative modeling and reasoning methodologies . First, we introduce the Yin and Yang principle and briefly review its origins in Chinese philosophy . We analyze the classical Western science model from a Yin-Yang perspective, and compare Eastern and Western approaches to methods of scientific inquiry. We show that traditional dichotomi...

In ever so many philosophical introductions to formal logic the latter is presented as the philosopher’s ars iudicandi, i. e. as the instrument that evaluates the quality of philosophical arguments or, more generally, of informal reasoning. 1 Irrespective of its content, an argument is only worthy of consideration if it is valid, i. e. if the truth of its premise(s) necessitates the truth of it...

The main thesis of this paper is that mental health practitioners can legitimately infer that a patient's given condition is a case of mental disorder without having diagnosed any specific mental disorder. The article shows how this is justifiable by relying either on psychopathological reasoning, on 'intentional' analysis or possibly on other modes of reasoning. In the end, it highlights the c...

The notions of knowledge and belief play an important role in philosophy. Unfortunately, the literature is not very consistent about defining these notions. Is belief more fundamental than knowledge or the other way around? Many accounts rely on the widely accepted strategy of appealing to the intuition of the reader. Such an argumentative methodology is fundamentally flawed as it lets the prob...