display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
6 ideas
| 15708 | Inductive success is rewarded with more induction [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Inductive success is rewarded with more induction. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Broadening') | |
| A reaction: I love this one. Neat, accurate, and central to how we understand the world. I take inductive success to be stored as labels, concepts, categories, words and general truths, which are then our resource for further attempts. |
| 15694 | Children overestimate the power of a single example [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We suggest that children overestimate the power of a single example. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: This conclusion arises from extensive psychological research. 'My grandma smoked, and she lived to be 97' - adults do this too. Wittgenstein says assuming other minds because of your own is induction from one example! |
| 15695 | Children make errors in induction by focusing too much on categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Because of their narrow focus, children's sensitivity to categories as the basis of induction is a reasoning bias that, though useful much of the time, results in systematic errors. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: This is the bad sense of 'essentialism' which worries its opponents. Presumably, though, my favoured scientific essentialism will be 'scientific', and avoid this problem. The relation between categories and induction needs to be clear. |
| 21473 | All knowledge and explanation rests on the inexplicable [Schopenhauer] |
| Full Idea: The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable. It is to this that every explanation, through few or many intermediary stages, leads. | |
| From: Arthur Schopenhauer (Parerga and Paralipomena [1851], I:1) | |
| A reaction: This is obviously true, and the only question is whether it is a necessary or a contingent truth. |
| 15692 | People tend to be satisfied with shallow explanations [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: People tend to be satisfied with rather shallow explanations. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Is essentialism') | |
| A reaction: She cites some psychological research to support this. Pretty obvious really. I take the so-called 'scientific method' to be nothing more than ceasing to be satisfied with such shallowness. |
| 21917 | The four explanations: objects by causes, concepts by ground, maths by spacetime, ethics by motive [Schopenhauer, by Lewis,PB] |
| Full Idea: There are four forms of explanation, depending on their topic. Causes explain objects. Grounding explains concepts, Points and moments explain mathematics. Motives explain ethics. | |
| From: report of Arthur Schopenhauer (Fourfold Root of Princ of Sufficient Reason [1813], §43 p.214) by Peter B. Lewis - Schopenhauer 3 | |
| A reaction: [My compression of Lewis's summary. I'm particularly pleased with this. I have done Schopenhauer a huge favour, should anyone ever visit this website]. The quirky account of mathematics derives from Kant. I greatly admire this whole idea. |