CHAPTER 7 – Induction

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the different aspects of induction. The ability to generalize from examples is one of the hallmarks of intelligence. The experience of the world is specific, yet one is able to formulate general theories that account for the past, and predict the future. Such reasoning is commonly known as induction. In thinking about induction, it is important to bear in mind that this approach is not necessarily sound. Although an inductive conclusion must be consistent with the sentences in its background theory, and data, it need not be a logical conclusion of those sentences. In other words, there can be models of the premises in an inductive problem that are not models of the conclusion. The basis for model maximization is the observation that some inductive conclusions are less conservative than are others, with the result that they have fewer models. The idea behind model maximization is to order inductive conclusions on the basis of their models.