The essence of Hume’s eighteenth-century philosophy was that all the sciences were ‘dependent on the science of man’, and that the foundations of any such science need to rest on experience and observation. This title, first published in 1932, examines in detail how Hume interpreted ‘the science of man’ and how he applied his experimental methodology to humankind’s understanding, passions, social duties, economic activities, religious beliefs and secular history throughout his career. Particular attention is paid to the English, French and (...) Latin sources that shaped Hume’s theories. This is a full and fascinating title, of particular relevance to students with an interest in the philosophy of Hume specifically, as well as the philosophy of human nature and the methodologies applied to its study more generally. (shrink)

John Laird was a Scottish philosopher who specialised in metaphysics and moral philosophy. In this early work, which was originally published in 1920, Laird set out to analyse some of the more perplexing problems of philosophical realism. The text includes a brief survey of philosophical realism at the beginning and critical notes throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the works of Laird and the history of philosophy.

The essence of Hume’s eighteenth-century philosophy was that all the sciences were ‘dependent on the science of man’, and that the foundations of any such science need to rest on experience and observation. This title, first published in 1932, examines in detail how Hume interpreted ‘the science of man’ and how he applied his experimental methodology to humankind’s understanding, passions, social duties, economic activities, religious beliefs and secular history throughout his career. Particular attention is paid to the English, French and (...) Latin sources that shaped Hume’s theories. This is a full and fascinating title, of particular relevance to students with an interest in the philosophy of Hume specifically, as well as the philosophy of human nature and the methodologies applied to its study more generally_. _. (shrink)

John Laird was a Scottish philosopher who specialised in metaphysics and moral philosophy. In this book, which was first published in 1929, Laird provides a detailed analysis of the philosophical nature of value. The text begins with a discussion of the main definitions of value, before going through a more detailed examination of the various applications of value in turn. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in value and the history of philosophy.

This article presents a process account of some typicality effects and related similarity-dependent accuracy and response time phenomena that arise in the context of supervised concept acquisition. We describe Symbolic Concept Acquisition (SCA), a computational system that acquires and activates category prediction rules. In contrast to gradient representations, SCA performs by probing for prediction rules in a series of discrete steps. For learning new rules, it acquires general rules but then incrementally learns more specific ones. In describing SCA, we emphasize (...) its functionality in terms of accuracy and efficiency and motivate its design within the set of symbolic mechanisms and memory structures defined by the Soar architecture (Laird, Newell & Rosenbloom, 1987). For replicating human behavior, we first show how SCA exhibits some typicality effects in the course of learning responding faster and more accurately to more typical test examples. Then, using data from human experiments, we evaluate SCA's qualitative predictions on accuracy and response time on individual dataset instances. We show how SCA's predictions correlate with human data across three experimental conditions concerning the effect of instruction on learning strategy. (shrink)

An ethic is rational if it can justify itself rationally—that is to say, if there is a “why” and a “wherefore” in it amenable to reflection, and underivative. An ethic, on the other hand, is irrational if reason and reflection are irrelevant to it, or if, being relevant, they are fundamentally subordinate, and are only the lackeys of a governing consideration which is either irrational or non-rational. The intention of this lecture is to explore the possibilities of rationalism in ethics, (...) supposing that the meaning of rationalism is, broadly speaking, what has just been stated. (shrink)

We present a general cognitive architecture that tightly integrates symbolic, spatial, and visual representations. A key means to achieving this integration is allowing cognition to move freely between these modes, using mental imagery. The specific components and their integration are motivated by results from psychology, as well as the need for developing a functional and efficient implementation. We discuss functional benefits that result from the combination of multiple content-based representations and the specialized processing units associated with them. Instantiating this theory, (...) we then discuss the architectural components and processes, and illustrate the resulting functional advantages in two spatially and visually rich domains. The theory is then compared to other prominent approaches in the area. (shrink)