Induction and Conceptual Knowledge
(2015) KOGM20 20151Cognitive 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:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/7448847
- 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
- 2015
- 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}}, }