142 found
Order:
Disambiguations
Michael N. Forster [80]Malcolm R. Forster [24]Malcolm Forster [21]Michael Forster [15]
Margaret Forster [2]Merlin H. Forster [2]Markus Forster [2]Melanie Forster [1]

Not all matches are shown. Search with initial or firstname to single out others.

  1. How to Tell When Simpler, More Unified, or Less A d Hoc Theories Will Provide More Accurate Predictions.Malcolm R. Forster & Elliott Sober - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (1):1-35.
    Traditional analyses of the curve fitting problem maintain that the data do not indicate what form the fitted curve should take. Rather, this issue is said to be settled by prior probabilities, by simplicity, or by a background theory. In this paper, we describe a result due to Akaike [1973], which shows how the data can underwrite an inference concerning the curve's form based on an estimate of how predictively accurate it will be. We argue that this approach throws light (...)
    Direct download (12 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   284 citations  
  2.  66
    Scientific Discovery: Computational Explorations of the Creative Processes.Malcolm R. Forster - 1987 - MIT Press (MA).
    Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative - and hence unanalyzable - whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascinating exploration of how scientific work proceeds argues that however sudden the moment of discovery may seem, the discovery process can be described and modeled. Using the methods and concepts of contemporary information-processing psychology (or cognitive science) the authors develop a series of artificial-intelligence programs that can simulate the human thought (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   130 citations  
  3.  76
    Scientific Discovery: Computational Explorations of the Creative Process. Pat Langley, Herbert A. Simon, Gary L. Bradshaw, Jan M. Zytkow.Malcolm R. Forster - 1990 - Philosophy of Science 57 (2):336-338.
  4.  21
    [no title].Marc Forster - unknown
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   50 citations  
  5.  56
    (1 other version)Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar.Michael N. Forster - 2004 - Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
    What is the nature of a conceptual scheme? Are there alternative conceptual schemes? If so, are some more justifiable or correct than others? The later Wittgenstein already addresses these fundamental philosophical questions under the general rubric of "grammar" and the question of its "arbitrariness"--and does so with great subtlety. This book explores Wittgenstein's views on these questions. Part I interprets his conception of grammar as a generalized version of Kant's transcendental idealist solution to a puzzle about necessity. It also seeks (...)
  6. Hegel and Skepticism.Michael N. Forster - 1989 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
    Forster demonstrates that Hegel did not in fact ignore epistemology, but on the contrary he fought a tireless and subtle campaign to defeat the threat of skepticism. Forster's work should dispel once and for all the view that Hegel was naive or careless in epistemological matters. Along the way, Forster makes much that has hither to remained obscure in Hegel's texts intelligible for the first time.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  7.  86
    Unification, explanation, and the composition of causes in Newtonian mechanics.Malcolm R. Forster - 1988 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 19 (1):55-101.
    William Whewell’s philosophy of scientific discovery is applied to the problem of understanding the nature of unification and explanation by the composition of causes in Newtonian mechanics. The essay attempts to demonstrate: the sense in which ”approximate’ laws successfully refer to real physical systems rather than to idealizations of them; why good theoretical constructs are not badly underdetermined by observation; and why, in particular, Newtonian forces are not conventional and how empiricist arguments against the existence of component causes, and against (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  8. Kant and Skepticism.Michael N. Forster (ed.) - 2009 - Princeton University Press.
    This book puts forward a much-needed reappraisal of Immanuel Kant's conception of and response to skepticism, as set forth principally in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is widely recognized that Kant's theoretical philosophy aims to answer skepticism and reform metaphysics--Michael Forster makes the controversial argument that those aims are closely linked. He distinguishes among three types of skepticism: "veil of perception" skepticism, which concerns the external world; Humean skepticism, which concerns the existence of a priori concepts and synthetic a (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  9.  70
    Hegel’s Idea of a ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’.Michael N. Forster - 1998 - University of Chicago Press.
    In Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit, Michael N. Forster advances an original reading of the work.
  10. The Frugal Inference of Causal Relations.Malcolm Forster, Garvesh Raskutti, Reuben Stern & Naftali Weinberger - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (3):821-848.
    Recent approaches to causal modelling rely upon the causal Markov condition, which specifies which probability distributions are compatible with a directed acyclic graph. Further principles are required in order to choose among the large number of DAGs compatible with a given probability distribution. Here we present a principle that we call frugality. This principle tells one to choose the DAG with the fewest causal arrows. We argue that frugality has several desirable properties compared to the other principles that have been (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  11.  88
    German philosophy of language: from Schlegel to Hegel and beyond.Michael N. Forster - 2011 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    This book not only sets the historical record straight but also champions the Herderian tradition for its philosophical depth and breadth.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  12. (2 other versions)Hegel and Skepticism.Michael N. FORSTER - 1989 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 55 (2):351-352.
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  13. Hegel’s Idea of a ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’.Michael N. Forster - 1998 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 62 (1):145-147.
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  14. Wittgenstein on family resemblance concepts.Michael Forster - 2010 - In Arif Ahmed, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide. New York: Cambridge University Press.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  15.  62
    After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition.Michael N. Forster - 2010 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    In the course of developing these historical points, this book also shows that Herder and his tradition are in many ways superior to dominant trends in more ...
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  16. A Philosopher’s Guide to Empirical Success.Malcolm R. Forster - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (5):588-600.
    The simple question, what is empirical success? turns out to have a surprisingly complicated answer. We need to distinguish between meritorious fit and ‘fudged fit', which is akin to the distinction between prediction and accommodation. The final proposal is that empirical success emerges in a theory dependent way from the agreement of independent measurements of theoretically postulated quantities. Implications for realism and Bayesianism are discussed. ‡This paper was written when I was a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of (...)
    Direct download (11 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  17.  58
    Commonality in Codes of Ethics.Margaret Forster, Tim Loughran & Bill McDonald - 2009 - Journal of Business Ethics 90 (S2):129 - 139.
    We create a database of company codes of ethics from firms listed on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and, separately, a sample of small firms. The SEC believes that "ethics codes do, and should, vary from company to company." Using textual analysis techniques, we measure the extent of commonality across the documents. We find substantial levels of common sentences used by the firms, including a few cases where the codes of ethics are essentially identical. We consider these results in (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  18.  55
    Private and Shared Taste in Art and Face Appreciation.Helmut Leder, Juergen Goller, Tanya Rigotti & Michael Forster - 2016 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 10.
  19. Kant's Philosophy of Language?Michael N. Forster - 2012 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 74 (3):485.
  20. Genealogy.Michael N. Forster - 2011 - American Dialectic 1 (2):230-250.
    Nietzsche and Foucault famously employ a philosophical method of “genealogy” and apply it to the realm of morality in particular. In this article I would like to do two main things: I will begin by offering a contribution toward a sort of “genealogy of genealogy,” that is, toward an account of how the method emerged historically. I will then give an explanation of how the method is supposed to work. In a subsequent, companion article in this journal, “Genealogy and Morality,” (...)
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  21. (1 other version)Predictive accuracy as an achievable goal of science.Malcolm R. Forster - 2002 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3):S124-S134.
    What has science actually achieved? A theory of achievement should define what has been achieved, describe the means or methods used in science, and explain how such methods lead to such achievements. Predictive accuracy is one truth‐related achievement of science, and there is an explanation of why common scientific practices tend to increase predictive accuracy. Akaike’s explanation for the success of AIC is limited to interpolative predictive accuracy. But therein lies the strength of the general framework, for it also provides (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  22.  24
    Herder's Philosophy.Michael N. Forster - 2018 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    Johann Gottfried Herder is a towering figure in modern thought, but one who has hitherto been severely underappreciated. Michael Forster seeks to rectify that situation by exploring the full range of his ideas, and showing their enormous impact in philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and comparative literature.
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  23.  93
    Model selection in science: The problem of language variance.M. R. Forster - 1999 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (1):83-102.
    Recent solutions to the curve-fitting problem, described in Forster and Sober ([1995]), trade off the simplicity and fit of hypotheses by defining simplicity as the paucity of adjustable parameters. Scott De Vito ([1997]) charges that these solutions are 'conventional' because he thinks that the number of adjustable parameters may change when the hypotheses are described differently. This he believes is exactly what is illustrated in Goodman's new riddle of induction, otherwise known as the grue problem. However, the 'number of adjustable (...)
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  24.  27
    1. Wittgenstein’s Conception of Grammar.Michael N. Forster - 2004 - In Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press. pp. 7-20.
  25.  57
    Sober’s Principle of Common Cause and the Problem of Comparing Incomplete Hypotheses.Malcolm R. Forster - 1988 - Philosophy of Science 55 (4):538-559.
    Sober (1984) has considered the problem of determining the evidential support, in terms of likelihood, for a hypothesis that is incomplete in the sense of not providing a unique probability function over the event space in its domain. Causal hypotheses are typically like this because they do not specify the probability of their initial conditions. Sober's (1984) solution to this problem does not work, as will be shown by examining his own biological examples of common cause explanation. The proposed solution (...)
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  26.  73
    Socrates' demand for definitions.Michael N. Forster - 2006 - Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 31:1-47.
  27. How do simple rules `fit to reality' in a complex world?Malcolm R. Forster - 1999 - Minds and Machines 9 (4):543-564.
    The theory of fast and frugal heuristics, developed in a new book called Simple Heuristics that make Us Smart (Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group, in press), includes two requirements for rational decision making. One is that decision rules are bounded in their rationality –- that rules are frugal in what they take into account, and therefore fast in their operation. The second is that the rules are ecologically adapted to the environment, which means that they `fit to reality.' (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  28. Connectionism and the fate of folk psychology: A reply to Ramsey, Stich and Garon.Malcolm Forster & Eric Saidel - 1994 - Philosophical Psychology 7 (4):437 – 452.
    Ramsey, Stick and Garon (1991) argue that if the correct theory of mind is some parallel distributed processing theory, then folk psychology must be false. Their idea is that if the nodes and connections that encode one representation are causally active then all representations encoded by the same set of nodes and connections are also causally active. We present a clear, and concrete, counterexample to RSG's argument. In conclusion, we suggest that folk psychology and connectionism are best understood as complementary (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  29. The golfer's dilemma: A reply to Kukla on curve-fitting.Malcolm R. Forster - 1995 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (3):348-360.
    Curve-fitting typically works by trading off goodness-of-fit with simplicity, where simplicity is measured by the number of adjustable parameters. However, such methods cannot be applied in an unrestricted way. I discuss one such correction, and explain why the exception arises. The same kind of probabilistic explanation offers a surprising resolution to a common-sense dilemma.
    Direct download (10 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  30.  22
    The Autonomy of Grammar.Michael N. Forster - 2017 - In Hans-Johann Glock & John Hyman, A Companion to Wittgenstein. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 269–277.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later works often implies commitment to a doctrine of the autonomy or arbitrariness of grammar. This chapter discusses the conception of grammar that is presupposed in this doctrine and then explains the doctrine itself. The chapter also explains a sense in which grammar is not autonomous or arbitrary for Wittgenstein and discusses some possible criticisms of the doctrine. It should be noted at the outset that this whole area of exegetical concern is one in which the (...)
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  31. Counterexamples to a likelihood theory of evidence.Malcolm R. Forster - 2006 - Minds and Machines 16 (3):319-338.
    The likelihood theory of evidence (LTE) says, roughly, that all the information relevant to the bearing of data on hypotheses (or models) is contained in the likelihoods. There exist counterexamples in which one can tell which of two hypotheses is true from the full data, but not from the likelihoods alone. These examples suggest that some forms of scientific reasoning, such as the consilience of inductions (Whewell, 1858. In Novum organon renovatum (Part II of the 3rd ed.). The philosophy of (...)
    Direct download (9 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  32. Does Gallery Lighting Really Have an Impact on Appreciation of Art? An Ecologically Valid Study of Lighting Changes and the Assessment and Emotional Experience With Representational and Abstract Paintings.Matthew Pelowski, Andrea Graser, Eva Specker, Michael Forster, Josefine von Hinüber & Helmut Leder - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
  33.  31
    Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher.Michael Forster - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  34.  96
    Miraculous consilience of quantum mechanics.Malcolm R. Forster - 2010 - In Ellery Eells & James H. Fetzer, The Place of Probability in Science: In Honor of Ellery Eells (1953-2006). Springer. pp. 201--228.
  35.  27
    The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought.Marina F. Bykova, Michael N. Forster & Lina Steiner (eds.) - 2021 - Springer Verlag.
    This volume is a comprehensive Handbook of Russian thought that provides an in-depth survey of major figures, currents, and developments in Russian intellectual history, spanning the period from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. Written by a group of distinguished scholars as well as some younger ones from Russia, Europe, the United States, and Canada, this Handbook reconstructs a vibrant picture of the intellectual and cultural life in Russia and the Soviet Union during the most buoyant period (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  36.  13
    Introduction.Michael N. Forster - 2004 - In Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press. pp. 1-4.
  37.  75
    Non-bayesian foundations for statistical estimation, prediction, and the ravens example.Malcolm R. Forster - 1994 - Erkenntnis 40 (3):357 - 376.
    The paper provides a formal proof that efficient estimates of parameters, which vary as as little as possible when measurements are repeated, may be expected to provide more accurate predictions. The definition of predictive accuracy is motivated by the work of Akaike (1973). Surprisingly, the same explanation provides a novel solution for a well known problem for standard theories of scientific confirmation — the Ravens Paradox. This is significant in light of the fact that standard Bayesian analyses of the paradox (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  38. On the very idea of denying the existence of radically different conceptual schemes.Michael N. Forster - 1998 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 41 (2):133 – 185.
    It has become very popular among philosophers to attempt to discredit, or at least set severe limits to, the thesis that there exist conceptual schemes radically different from ours. This fashion is misconceived. Philosophers have attempted to justify it in two main ways: by means of arguments which are a priorist relative to the relevant linguistic and textual evidence (and either independent of or based upon positive theories of meaning, understanding, and interpretation); and by means of arguments which are a (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  39. (1 other version)Unification and Scientific Realism Revisited.Malcolm R. Forster - 1986 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986:394 - 405.
    Van Fraassen has argued that quantum mechanics does not conform to the pattern of common cause explanation used by Salmon as a precise formulation of Smart's 'cosmic coincidence' argument for scientific realism. This paper adds to this list some common examples from classical physics that also do not conform to Salmon's explanatory schema. This is bad news and good news for the realist. The bad news is that Salmon's argument for realism does not work; the good news is that realism (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  40. Genealogy and Morality.Michael N. Forster - 2011 - American Dialectic 1 (3):346-369.
    In a previous article in this journal, “Genealogy,” I offered a sort of “genealogy of genealogy,” an account of the method’s development, according to which it mainly grew, not from English or French antecedents, but out of a German tradition that began with Herder and then continued with Hegel before eventually culminating in Nietzsche himself. [...] Presupposing this account of the method of genealogy, the present article will consider the method in relation to one of its most important areas of (...)
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  41.  46
    Johann Gottfried Von Herder.Michael Forster - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  42. The Emergence of the Macroworld: A Study of Intertheory Relations in Classical and Quantum Mechanics.Malcolm R. Forster & Alexey Kryukov - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (5):1039-1051.
    Classical mechanics is empirically successful because the probabilistic mean values of quantum mechanical observables follow the classical equations of motion to a good approximation (Messiah 1970, 215). We examine this claim for the one-dimensional motion of a particle in a box, and extend the idea by deriving a special case of the ideal gas law in terms of the mean value of a generalized force used to define "pressure." The examples illustrate the importance of probabilistic averaging as a method of (...)
    Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  43.  77
    Nietzsche on morality as a “sign language of the affects”.Michael N. Forster - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (1-2):165-188.
    This article argues that Nietzsche’s meta-ethics is basically a form of sentimentalism, but a form of sentimentalism that includes cognitive components in the sentiments that are involved. The article also ascribes to Nietzsche the more original position that the moral sentiments in question vary dramatically between historical periods, cultures, and even individuals, sometimes indeed to the point of becoming inverted between one case and another. Finally, the article also attributes to Nietzsche a hermeneutic insight into certain problems that this situation (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  44. Hermeneutics.Michael N. Forster - 2007 - In Brian Leiter & Michael Rosen, The Oxford handbook of continental philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
    For the purpose of this article, "hermeneutics" means the theory of interpretation, i.e. the theory of achieving an understanding of texts, utterances, and so on (it does not mean a certain twentieth-century philosophical movement). Hermeneutics in this sense has a long history, reaching back at least as far as ancient Greece. However, new focus was brought to bear on it in the modern period, in the wake of the Reformation with its displacement of responsibility for interpreting the Bible from the (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  45. Counterfactual reasoning in the bell-epr paradox.Malcolm R. Forster - 1986 - Philosophy of Science 53 (1):133-144.
    Skyrms's formulation of the argument against stochastic hidden variables in quantum mechanics using conditionals with chance consequences suffers from an ambiguity in its "conservation" assumption. The strong version, which Skyrms needs, packs in a "no-rapport" assumption in addition to the weaker statement of the "experimental facts." On the positive side, I argue that Skyrms's proof has two unnoted virtues (not shared by previous proofs): (1) it shows that certain difficulties that arise for deterministic hidden variable theories that exploit a nonclassical (...)
    Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  46.  31
    Does Western Philosophy Have Non-Western Roots?Michael Forster - 2015 - In Valentin Pluder & Gerald Hartung, From Hegel to Windelband: Historiography of Philosophy in the 19th Century. Boston: DE GRUYTER. pp. 141-158.
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  47.  61
    The debate between Whewell and Mill on the nature of scientific induction.Malcolm Forster - 2004 - In Dov M. Gabbay, John Woods & Akihiro Kanamori, Handbook of the history of logic. Boston: Elsevier. pp. 10--93.
  48. Herder’s Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation: Three Fundamental Principles.Michael N. Forster - 2002 - Review of Metaphysics 56 (2):323 - 356.
    A GOOD CASE COULD BE MADE that Herder is the founder not only of the modern philosophy of language but also of the modern philosophy of interpretation and translation and that he has many things to say on these subjects from which we may still learn today. This essay will not attempt to make such a case, but it will be concerned with some aspects of Herder’s position that would be central to it: three fundamental principles in his philosophy of (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  49.  31
    Ethical position of medical practitioners who refuse to treat unvaccinated children.Melanie Forster - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (8):552-555.
    Recent reports in Australia have suggested that some medical practitioners are refusing to treat children who have not been vaccinated, a practice that has been observed in the USA and parts of Europe for some years. This behaviour, if it is indeed occurring in Australia, has not been supported by the Australian Medical Association, although there is broad support for medical practitioners in general having the right to conscientious objection. This paper examines the ethical underpinnings of conscientious objection and whether (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  50. Socrates' profession of ignorance.Michael Forster - 2007 - Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 32:1-35.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
1 — 50 / 142