Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Books

Probably Approximately Correct by Leslie Valiant

Joshua Schrier is approximately correct, probably.

“All by nature desire to know,” said Aristotle, in one of his less contentious remarks. Epistemology is the study of the validity and scope of methods aiming to satisfy that desire to know, including how one distinguishes between knowledge and mere opinion. Being able to make reliable inferences and deductions is quite useful, so epistemology has been central not only to the Western tradition of philosophy but to philosophy globally (For classic non-Western examples, see the Nyaya Sutras, or the works of Dignaga). Also, philosophers of mind as well as religious apologists debate how the capacity to learn (or for that matter, any rational faculties) could possibly emerge from an entirely undirected, that is, irrational, evolutionary process. Computer science may provide new insights into all these philosophical problems, by discovering fundamental limits to the sorts of processes by which a system can learn to predict its environment.

…