Please join us in Auerbach 320 or online this Wednesday, Sept. 3, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. for our first meeting of the University of Hartford Philosophy Club as Clark Sexton presents: The Paradox of the Ravens—A Challenge to Inductive Reasoning, and a Possible Solution.
Outline:
- Statement of the Raven Paradox (aka Carl Hempel's Paradox of Confirmation)
The paradox arises from three seemingly plausible claims:
- Instance Confirmation: An instance of a general (aka "universal") hypothesis of the form: All X's are Y's, is confirmed (at least to some degree) by the discovery of an instance of the form: This X is Y (or, There is an X which is Y - and we will see later why this slight variation might matter),
i.e., a particular X that is a Y. - The Equivalence Condition: If two hypotheses are equivalent, then any evidence confirming one hypothesis must also (equally) confirm the other (equivalent) hypothesis.
- The Equivalence of (Universal) Contrapositives: A proposition of the form: All X's are Y's is equivalent to a proposition of the form: All non-Y's are non-X's.
But, these three plausible claims imply that, for example, if we discover a non-black thing that is not a raven, this confirms the hypothesis that all ravens are black. In particular, if we find a red chair, this, being an instance of a non-black thing that is not a raven, confirms the hypothesis that all ravens are black. But this seems absurd! Hence, the paradox!
- Some (Seemingly) Plausible Solutions (and Critiques of them)
- Proportional Degrees of Confirmation, Based on the Relative Numbers of Entities
- Logical Relation to Confirming Instances, Superior Alternates to Subalternates
Clark Sexton of Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas, earned doctorates both in Computer Science from Kansas State University and in Philosophy from the University of Kansas. His research in Computer Science was in Artificial Intelligence, and, more specifically, Natural Language Processing. For this research, he implemented an NLP system that could parse a wide range of syntactic structures of English, perform type-checking to determine whether a sentence is meaningful, and disambiguate certain ambiguous expressions.
Clark continued his exploration of the relations of meanings in his dissertation in Philosophy, in which he presented a brief history of the analytic/synthetic distinction, replied to Quine's objections, and provided and presented arguments for his own account of the distinction.
The University of Hartford Philosophy Club has an informal, jovial atmosphere. It is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group.
Presenters may be students, professors, or people from the community. Anyone can offer to present a topic. The mode of presentation may be as formal or informal as the presenter chooses.
Come and go as you wish. Bring friends. Suggest topics and activities. Take over the club! It belongs to you! Just show up! - Brian Skelly bskelly@hartford.edu; 413.273.2273.