Without inductive reasoning, we couldn't generalize from one instance to another, derive scientific hypotheses, or predict that the sun will rise again tomorrow morning. Despite the widespread nature of inductive reasoning, books on this topic are rare. Indeed, this is the first book on the psychology of inductive reasoning in twenty years. The chapters survey recent advances in the study of inductive reasoning and address questions about how it develops, the role of knowledge in induction, how best to model people's reasoning, and how induction relates to other forms of thinking. Written by experts in philosophy, developmental science, cognitive psychology, and computational modeling, the contributions here will be of interest to a general cognitive science audience as well as to those with a more specialized interest in the study of thinking.

Ebook: The Science of Psychology: An Appreciative View

Stereotyping as Inductive Hypothesis Testing explicates the proposition that many stereotypes originate not so much in individual brains, but in the stimulus environment that interacts with and constitutes the social individual.

Inductive Logic is number ten in the 11-volume Handbook of the History of Logic. While there are many examples were a science split from philosophy and became autonomous (such as physics with Newton and biology with Darwin), and while there are, perhaps, topics that are of exclusively philosophical interest, inductive logic — as this handbook attests — is a research field where philosophers and scientists fruitfully and constructively interact. This handbook covers the rich history of scientific turning points in Inductive Logic, including probability theory and decision theory. Written by leading researchers in the field, both this volume and the Handbook as a whole are definitive reference tools for senior undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in the history of logic, the history of philosophy, and any discipline, such as mathematics, computer science, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, for whom the historical background of his or her work is a salient consideration. Chapter on the Port Royal contributions to probability theory and decision theory Serves as a singular contribution to the intellectual history of the 20th century Contains the latest scholarly discoveries and interpretative insights

From the Preface to the Revised Edition: Since its publication in 2007, Transcendental Phenomenological Psychology has been sold on every continent (except Antarctica), and is in the collections of research libraries in North America, Europe, and Asia. Even so, its presentation to the academic community rightly provoked many comments, corrections, suggestions, and criticisms. Such input, while mostly welcome, provided the impetus to publish a revised edition. A phenomenological explanation of human consciousness has long been sought in regions of psychology since the discipline was first carved out of philosophical concepts and theories about the human condition. In its earliest years, Western psychology was faced with two possible directions for this explanation: an empirical naturalistic approach along with physics and biology, or a non-empirical eidetic approach along with logic and mathematics. Edmund Husserl took up the latter. His phenomenological tradition of inquiry successfully spanned nearly forty years until suddenly stopped and largely suppressed during the Second World War. This book recovers Husserl's revolutionary approach toward the human sciences, just as it was developed, and just as it is presented for further study. Here, the author systematically gathers what Husserl calls the "leading clues" in the phenomenological method proper for a psychology of affective inner experience, and then for the first time applies Husserl's own methodology for introducing a phenomenological psychology in the transcendental register of human consciousness. Unlike contemporary phenomenological psychology in the existential register, transcendental phenomenological psychology is presented as an eidetic non-empirical "act psychology" in Husserl's mature genetic phenomenology. This novel approach takes in the full range of solipsistic and transcendental subjectivity in Husserl's theories of human consciousness, and follows Husserl's lead in presenting phenomenological psychology as an "applied geometry" of intentional experience within a step-wise theory of inquiry. This book is unique in human science today, not only in its presentation of the development and applications of Husserl's key concepts for the discipline of psychology, but also for introducing a psychology that could be intuitively grasped as self-evidently valid wherever one's interest might lie.