Computational psychology

An approach to learning which postulates events in the brain which ‘represent’ inferences and so on. It mediates between methodological behaviorism and a purely introspective approach. It broadens out into cognitive science when it studies artificial intelligence and areas bordering on CYBERNETICS and so on. Also see: connectionism Source: M A Boden and D H Mellor,

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Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was the French naturalist perhaps most responsible for the rise of European interest in natural history during the eighteenth century. His massive Histoire naturelle (36 volumes) set out to organize all that was then known about the natural world. He was the source of important ideas about the

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Conceptualism

Any view which emphasizes concepts when analyzing something. Primarily, conceptualism is a view about universals (things normally denoted in English by words ending in ‘-hood’, ‘-ness’, or ‘-ty’). It says that these are concepts in the mind (though not necessarily confined to an individual mind), and neither non-material objects with a real existence independent

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Confucianism (5TH CENTURY BC)

Body of teaching associated with the Chinese philosopher Confucius (c.551-479 BC). Confucianism was the traditional state religion of China until the Communists suppressed it after the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Confucian ideas are drawn from the five books of ‘Analects’ compiled from the sayings of Confucius himself and his disciples. Although followers acknowledge the existence

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Confucius

Confucius, the great Chinese sage, was born June 19th, 551 B.C. at Shang-ping, in the country of Lu, to a poor descendant of a deposed noble family. His real name was Kong, but his disciples called him Kong-fu-tse, (i.e. Kong the Master, or Teacher,) which the Jesuit missionaries Latinized into Confucius. His father died

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Connexive implication

Term used in a kind of relevance logic, existing in different versions but similarly motivated and using ideas from Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Boethius(CAD 480-524). The relevant kind of implication is defined as holding when the antecedent of a conditional proposition is incompatible with the negation of the consequent. This bans implications of the forms (where P and

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Consequentialism

Doctrine that the moral lightness of an act or policy depends entirely on its consequences; the moral goodness of the agent depending on the act’s expected or intended consequences. This is one form of teleology, utilitarianism is one form of consequentialism. Objections include the apparent moral counterintuitiveness of many consequentialist prescriptions, especially in connection with justice, reward

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Constructivism

A view in the philosophy of mathematics which insists that mathematical entities (numbers, sets, proofs, and so on) can only be said to exist if they can be constructed; that is if some method can be specified for arriving at them on the basis of things we accept already. One advantage of this is

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Contextualism

Any view that sees some phenomenon as relative to a context, or insists on the relevance of context for interpretation. In aesthetics, the doctrine that works of art can be appreciated only by reference to their context, circumstances of production, artist’s intuitions, and so on (also see:ISOLATIONISM). In ethics, the view that values are

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Continental rationalists

Name primarily applied to Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), together with various lesser figures including Cartesians (followers in a general sense of Descartes) like Arnold Geulincx(1625-1669) and Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). Also see: rationalism, occasionalism, double aspect theory of mind, pre-established harmony, British empiricists Continental rationalism is an approach to philosophy based on the thesis that human reason can in principle be the source of all knowledge.

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Law or principle of continuity

Principle of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) which can be roughly rendered as saying that when the difference between two causes is diminished indefinitely, so is the difference between their effects (though Leibniz would not put it in these causal terms, since for him God is the only true cause). ‘Nature makes no leaps’, as he says

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Contractualism

Any theory basing either moral obligation in general, or the duty of political obedience, or the justice of social institutions, on a contract, usually called a ‘social contract’. The idea goes back at least as far as Plato’s Crito (c.395 BC), and contractualists (or contractarians) have also included Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Jean Jacques Rousseau(1712-1778), and various modern

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Law of contradiction

Also called the law (or principle) of non-contradiction. One of the traditional three laws of thought (the other two being the laws of identity and of excluded middle). Variously formulated as saying that no proposition can be both true and not true; or that nothing can be – without qualification – the case and not

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Conventionalism

Any theory appealing to convention to explain something which is not obviously of conventional origin (as, for example, the symbols chosen for some purpose are). Among older writers, conventionalism is associated especially with Jules Henri Poincare (1854-1912) and Pierre-Maurice Duhem (1861-1916); and among modern ones with Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000). In logic and mathematics conventionalism says that a priori

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Convention t

Also called Criterion T. A device due to Polish logician Alfred Tarski (1901-1983) and originally used in defining truth for a formal language, but later used (by American philosopher Donald Davidson (1930-2003)) to give an account of meaning in terms of truth. The details are complex, but roughly: consider the sentence ‘La neige est blanche’ is true

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Correspondence theory of truth

The strictest form of the theory defines truth as a structural correspondence between what is true (a belief, judgment, proposition, sentence, and so on) and what makes it true (an event, fact, state of affairs, and so on). Because of difficulties in defining such a relation (difficulties also facing the PICTURE THEORY OF MEANING),

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Counterpart theory

Term used in connection with the modal realis tanalysis of necessity, possibility, and counterfactual conditional statements (those where the antecedent is presented as being false). Consider ‘If Hitler had invaded England he would have won.’ Assuming his invasion was a possibility, there will be possible worlds in which he does, and in some of these

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Covering law model

A model of explanation associated especially with German logician Carl Gustav Hempel (1905-1997), who regarded it as adequate for all types of explanation. Basically a statement is explained if it is derived from a set of laws together with certain factual statements, as we might explain ‘Fido barks’ by saying ‘All dogs bark and

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Craig’s theorem (1953)

Proof concerning the formal description of scientific theories, expounded by William Craig. According to Craig, a formal expression of a scientific theory is divisible into ‘theoretical’ and ‘observational’ vocabularies, and (since the ‘observational’ terms are all deducible) it follows that a description can be produced that consists only of ‘observational’ terms and in which

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Creative evolution

The theory which French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) substituted for the Darwinian mechanism of his day. Bergson’s theory mediated between the mechanism of natural selection and an outright teleological view, appealing to an dan vital (‘vital impetus’) which guided evolution in a certain direction; not in what he saw as the mechanistic non-explanatory fashion of current

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