Three experiments investigated the proposal that inductive inferences about different properties depend on different measures of similarity. In Experiments 1 and 2, Ss were given the premise that

How do people understand the world of plants and animals and in what specific ways do these understandings vary with culture, experience or expertise? These are the basic questions addressed by researchers in the field of folkbiology, originally by cognitive anthropologists and more recently by cognitive and developmental psychologists. We see our work, like the other chapters in this volume, as bringing together contributions from anthropology and psychology (and perhaps linguistics and philosophy as well) to support an inter-discipli ary cognitive ethnoscience. Each of these disciplines brings strengths--and weaknesses--to the task; by incorporating their complementary perspectives, we gain a clearer vision of the phenomena under study. Cognitive anthropology is responsible for initially mapping out folkbiology as a field of study (Conklin, 1962; Frake, 1962). Anthropological studies reveal the richness of folkbiological thought. They consider context and provide thoughtful, detailed analyses of entire systems of folkbiological categories. By investigating disparate cultures in many parts of the world, this research has also revealed universal principles underlying folkbiological category organization (see Atran, 1990; Berlin, 1992; Malt, 1995, for reviews). However, anthropological research also

, and trees inductively as solutions of logic programs. We use off-the-shelf first-order theorem provers to reason about these specifications. 1

, and we can readily find a perfectly rational, minimax solution to it. But we do not find rational “solutions ” at the depth of Checkers; and certainly not at the still modest depths of Chess and Go. There are two reasons for perfect or deductive rationality to break down under complication. The obvious

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Everyday inductive inferences are often guided by rich background knowledge. Formal models of induction should aim to incorporate this knowledge, and should explain how different kinds of knowledge lead to the distinctive patterns of reasoning found in different inductive contexts. We present a

The aim of this paper is to address an emergent and important area of research, fuzzy control, by means of an inductive reasoning approach derived from the General System Theory, called Fuzzy Inductive Reasoning (FIR). This field has had a growing interest and development in the last years, and has

This paper studies the case where a game is played in a particular context. The context inuences what beliefs players hold. As such, it may a¤ect forward induction reasoning: If players rule out speci…c beliefs, they may not be able to rationalize observed behavior. The e¤ects are not obvious

on combining standard Web search with ontological background knowledge and using standard Web search engines as the main inference motor of Semantic Web search. In this paper, we propose to further enhance this approach to Semantic Web search by the use of inductive reasoning. This adds the important ability

One of the most important open questions in reasoning research is how inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning are related. In an effort to address this question, we applied methods and concepts from memory research. We used 2 experiments to examine the effects of logical validity and premise