Three levels of inductive inference

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the three levels of inductive inference. One of the most impressive features of human cognitive processing is the ability to perform inductive inferences. The three levels of accounting for observations are: the linguistic, the conceptual, and the subconceptual level. In the linguistic level, the way of viewing observations consists of describing them in some specified language. The language is assumed to be equipped with a fixed set of primitive predicates and the denotations of these predicates are taken to be known. In the conceptual level, observations are not defined in relation to some language, but characterized in terms of some underlying “conceptual space.” The conceptual space, which is more or less connected to perceptual mechanisms, consists of a number of “quality dimensions.” In the subconceptual level, observations are characterized in terms of inputs from sensory receptors. The observations are thus described as occurring before conceptualization. This chapter argues that depending on which approach to observations is adopted, thoroughly different considerations about inductive inferences will come into focus.