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Induction and Conceptual Knowledge

Stephens, Andreas LU (2015) KOGM20 20151
Cognitive Science
Abstract
Inductive inferences, centered in semantic memory, play an important role in our everyday lives and in science, enabling us to generalize and predict. However, epistemologists have struggled to find a way to understand and justify induction and the knowledge it provides without making it seem paradoxical or problematic. Traditional approaches have used a propositional perspective focusing on certainty, language, logic, and factual knowledge-that, failing to account for inductive inferences’ inherent connection to probability, pattern recognition, categorization and adaptation. By instead investigating induction with a cognitivist approach, these aspects can be accounted for and inductive inferences are shown to result in categorical or... (More)
Inductive inferences, centered in semantic memory, play an important role in our everyday lives and in science, enabling us to generalize and predict. However, epistemologists have struggled to find a way to understand and justify induction and the knowledge it provides without making it seem paradoxical or problematic. Traditional approaches have used a propositional perspective focusing on certainty, language, logic, and factual knowledge-that, failing to account for inductive inferences’ inherent connection to probability, pattern recognition, categorization and adaptation. By instead investigating induction with a cognitivist approach, these aspects can be accounted for and inductive inferences are shown to result in categorical or conceptual knowledge-what. Although semantic memory is commonly thought to encompass both factual and categorical knowledge, epistemology has almost exclusively focused on the factual aspect. The cognitivist approach motivates a shift of focus to the categorical aspect, moving the factual aspect to episodic memory. Such a shift and an investigation of the evolutionary history of our cognitive faculties and our learning abilities from a cognitivist perspective, elucidated by a theory of conceptual spaces, offers a way of understanding induction and the knowledge(-what) it provides as natural phenomena in the world rather than as problematic phenomena in language. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Stephens, Andreas LU
supervisor
organization
alternative title
Investigating the role of Pattern Recognition, Categorization, Semantic Memory, Adaptation and Knowledge-What
course
KOGM20 20151
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
language
English
id
7448847
date added to LUP
2015-08-21 16:36:58
date last changed
2015-08-21 16:36:58
@misc{7448847,
  abstract     = {{Inductive inferences, centered in semantic memory, play an important role in our everyday lives and in science, enabling us to generalize and predict. However, epistemologists have struggled to find a way to understand and justify induction and the knowledge it provides without making it seem paradoxical or problematic. Traditional approaches have used a propositional perspective focusing on certainty, language, logic, and factual knowledge-that, failing to account for inductive inferences’ inherent connection to probability, pattern recognition, categorization and adaptation. By instead investigating induction with a cognitivist approach, these aspects can be accounted for and inductive inferences are shown to result in categorical or conceptual knowledge-what. Although semantic memory is commonly thought to encompass both factual and categorical knowledge, epistemology has almost exclusively focused on the factual aspect. The cognitivist approach motivates a shift of focus to the categorical aspect, moving the factual aspect to episodic memory. Such a shift and an investigation of the evolutionary history of our cognitive faculties and our learning abilities from a cognitivist perspective, elucidated by a theory of conceptual spaces, offers a way of understanding induction and the knowledge(-what) it provides as natural phenomena in the world rather than as problematic phenomena in language.}},
  author       = {{Stephens, Andreas}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Induction and Conceptual Knowledge}},
  year         = {{2015}},
}