A plausible philosophical characterization of moral reasoning need not be an oracle for the resolution of difficult moral questions for it to be a significant influence in how a person deliberates about such questions. Reflection upon a particular account may, for instance, have consequences for a person’s standing judgments concerning the kinds of consideration that are relevant for thinking a...

tion of William Paley’s design argument. Oppy sets two goals for his article. First, he sets out to challenge the “almost universal assumption” that Paley’s argument is inductive by revealing it actually to be a deductive argument. Second, he attempts to expose Paley’s argument as manifestly poor when interpreted in this way. I will argue that Oppy is unsuccessful in accomplishing his first goa...

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, the sometimes slightly messy application of the conditional rule RC of the logic of inductive generalization is clarified by reducing this rule to a so-called basic schema BS. Next, some common truisms about inductive generalization are shown to be mistaken, but are also shown to be valid in special cases. Finally, and most importantly, it is shown tha...

This essay defends the view that inductive reasoning involves following inductive rules against objections that inductive rules are undesirable because they ignore background knowledge and unnecessary because Bayesianism is not an inductive rule. I propose that inductive rules be understood as sets of functions from data to hypotheses that are intended as solutions to inductive problems. Accord...

A crucial aspect of evidential reasoning in crime investigation involves comparing the support that evidence provides for alternative hypotheses. Recent work in forensic statistics has shown how Bayesian Networks (BNs) can be employed for this purpose. However, the specification of BNs requires conditional probability tables describing the uncertain processes under evaluation. When these proces...

The objective of this work is to interpret inductive results obtained by the unsupervised learning method OSHAM. We briefly introduce the learning process of OSHAM, that extracts concept hierarchies from unlabelled data, based on a representation combining the classical, prototype and exemplar views on concepts. The interpretive process is considered as an intrinsic part in OSHAM and is carried...

In the present paper we introduce a generalization of the well–known Chu– Vandermonde identity. In particular, by inductive reasoning, the identity is extended to a multivariate setup in terms of the fourth Lauricella function. The main interest in such generalizations derives from the species diversity estimation and, in particular, prediction problems in Genomics and Ecology within a Bayesian...

Channel sensitivity in reactive systems arises when the system interacts over multiple interaction channels simultaneously and it is important to distinguish between the many channels. While the design and verification of reactive systems is complex and not amenable to traditional paradigms of inductive reasoning, channel sensitivity adds an additional dimension of complexity. In this paper, we...