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William Baird collection in Social Sciences is the gift of the Estate of William Cameron Baird.

Reasoning. --- Logic.

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Reasoning --- Study and teaching.

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Many systems of logic diagrams have been offered both historically and more recently. Each of them has clear limitations. An original alternative system is offered here. It is simpler, more natural, and more expressively and inferentially powerful. It can be used to analyze not only syllogisms but arguments involving relational terms and unanalyzed statement terms. The book begins with an extensive survey of the history of logic diagrams, including looking at possible diagrams from Aristotle, the development of both linear and closed figure diagrams by Leibniz, Lambert, Euler, Venn's new system, Peirce's Existential Graphs, and Frege's two-dimensional notation as a kind of logic diagram system. During most of the 20th century, there was little regard for efforts to construct logic diagrams. However, since the 1980s there has been an increasing interest in such diagrams. Ever larger numbers of philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, computational scientists, and cognitive scientists have turned their attention to building, analyzing, using, or exploring in other ways systems of logic diagrams. The system offered here makes use of line segments and points and it enjoys a number of important advantages: it is simple, natural, and both expressively and inferentially powerful. It can be used to analyze syllogisms (including those involving relational terms) and arguments involving unanalyzed statements. Understanding such a system can shed valuable light on how ordinary people naturally reason.

Logic diagrams. --- Aristotle. --- diagrams. --- reasoning.

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This text takes up a central question in jurisprudence: What difference can law make to normative reasons relevant to our actions? Following a critical examination of two competing models, an exclusionary model and a weighing model, Gur proposes a third way that aims to capture the strengths of both of these models while avoiding their pitfalls.

Law --- Practical reason. --- Law (Philosophical concept) --- Philosophy. --- Law (Philosophy) --- Philosophy --- Practical rationality --- Practical reasoning --- Rationality, Practical --- Reasoning, Practical --- Reason --- Jurisprudence

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A new approach to Hume's problem of induction that justifies the optimality of induction at the level of meta-induction. Hume's problem of justifying induction has been among epistemology's greatest challenges for centuries. In this book, Gerhard Schurz proposes a new approach to Hume's problem. Acknowledging the force of Hume's arguments against the possibility of a noncircular justification of the reliability of induction, Schurz demonstrates instead the possibility of a noncircular justification of the optimality of induction, or, more precisely, of meta-induction (the application of induction to competing prediction models). Drawing on discoveries in computational learning theory, Schurz demonstrates that a regret-based learning strategy, attractivity-weighted meta-induction, is predictively optimal in all possible worlds among all prediction methods accessible to the epistemic agent. Moreover, the a priori justification of meta-induction generates a noncircular a posteriori justification of object induction. Taken together, these two results provide a noncircular solution to Hume's problem. Schurz discusses the philosophical debate on the problem of induction, addressing all major attempts at a solution to Hume's problem and describing their shortcomings; presents a series of theorems, accompanied by a description of computer simulations illustrating the content of these theorems (with proofs presented in a mathematical appendix); and defends, refines, and applies core insights regarding the optimality of meta-induction, explaining applications in neighboring disciplines including forecasting sciences, cognitive science, social epistemology, and generalized evolution theory. Finally, Schurz generalizes the method of optimality-based justification to a new strategy of justification in epistemology, arguing that optimality justifications can avoid the problems of justificatory circularity and regress.

Induction (Logic) --- Hume, David, --- Inductive logic --- Logic, Inductive --- Logic --- Reasoning --- Hume, David