An argument, different from the Newman objection, against the view that the cognitive content of a theory is exhausted by its Ramsey sentence is reviewed. The crux of the argument is that Ramsification may ruin inductive systematization between theory and observation. The argument also has some implications concerning the issue of underdetermination.

The aims of this chapter are two-fold: first and primarily, to identify and to summarize the development of an important but hitherto unnoticed tradition in 19th-<:entury methodological thought, and secondly, to suggest that certain aspects of the history of this tradition give us a new perspective from which to assess certain strains in contemporary philosophy of science. In Part I below, I at...

We extend the framework of Inductive Logic to Second Order languages and introduce Wilmers' Principle, a rational principle for probability functions on Second Order languages. We derive a representation theorem for functions satisfying this principle and investigate its relationship to the first order principles of Regularity and Super Regularity.

We investigate how different learning restrictions reduce learning power and how the different restrictions relate to one another. We give a complete map for nine different restrictions both for the cases of complete information learning and set-driven learning. This completes the picture for these well-studied delayable learning restrictions. A further insight is gained by different characteri...

Instead of attacking inductive inference problems in piecemeal fashion, one might hope to write a program that synthesizes successful inductive inference machines from input problem descriptions. Such synthesizers might be conceived as accepting information from the user about the nature of the problem to be solved. The present paper examines alternative design specifications for synthesizers o...

An inductive method has been presented for nding Stirling numbers of the second kind Applications to some discrete probability distributions for nding higher order moments have been discussed

A sufficient condition is given for a probability function in Inductive Logic (with relations of all arities) satisfying spectrum exchangeability to additionally satisfy Language Invariance. This condition is shown to also be necessary in the case of homogeneous probability functions.

This editorial explains the scope of the special issue and provides a thematic introduction to the contributed papers.