In informal terms, abductive reasoning involves inferring the best or most plausible explanation from a given set of facts or data. This volume presents new ideas about inferential and information-processing foundations for knowledge and certainty. The authors argue that knowledge arises from experience by processes of abductive inference, in contrast to the view that it arises noninferentially, or that deduction and inductive generalization are enough to account for knowledge. The book tells the story of six generations of increasingly sophisticated generic abduction machines and the discovery of reasoning strategies that make it computationally feasible to form well-justified composite explanatory hypotheses, despite the threat of combinatorial explosion. This book will be of great interest to researchers in AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of science.

In informal terms, abductive reasoning involves inferring the best or most plausible explanation from a given set of facts or data. This volume presents new ideas about inferential and information-processing foundations for knowledge and certainty. The authors argue that knowledge arises from experience by processes of abductive inference, in contrast to the view that it arises noninferentially, or that deduction and inductive generalization are enough to account for knowledge. The book tells the story of six generations of increasingly sophisticated generic abduction machines and the discovery of reasoning strategies that make it computationally feasible to form well-justified composite explanatory hypotheses, despite the threat of combinatorial explosion. This book will be of great interest to researchers in AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of science.

PUEBLO SPIRITS is a true story (in graphic novel form) about spirit encounters and Native American religion in the Southwest. It is based on the life of the internationally known anthropologist Dr. Felicitas D. Goodman. Dr. Goodman is famous for her research on altered states of consciousness, and her discoveries of body postures that help people achieve trance experiences of an alternate reality. PUEBLO SPIRITS tells the story of Dr. Goodman's quest for contact with ancient Pueblo Indian spirits in New Mexico and how that quest nearly cost her life. The author is Dr. Goodman's daughter and this version was authorized by Dr. Goodman before her death.

This book records the conclusions that I came to as I thought through the cultural evolution of each of the different sorts of visual art and tried to piece together their story from the perspective of philosophy. Chapter 1 discusses how culture shapes art to be what it is from the outside, like a mold shapes clay, and the great power of art to affect the way we think and to promote cultural change. Chapter 2 discusses the evolution of Fine Art from its birth in the Renaissance to its present old age and decline. Chapter 3 discusses the institutional structures that make art for popular taste its own sort of art, and the culture wars over censorship and whether public art should be Fine Art, or art for popular taste. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the life histories of design and advertising. This book is also the story of how art interacts with technology. In my work in Artificial Intelligence research I saw that there is an intimate connection between the evolution of design in engineering and design in art. In both sorts of design there is a growing understanding of how to make and use levels of packaging, and how to approach things from the functional perspective of the artifact. This is discussed in Chapter 4. My talk in Chapter 1 of how art styles affect us also reflects this functional approach. That is, instead of approaching art styles in the traditional ways, I have approached them in terms of the tasks of vision and how art delivers information packaged to be understood at different levels of visual processing. Using this functional approach, I stress what art does for us rather than what art is. I also tried to address the evolution of culture given the mass media and mass market, and the role of art in the growing marriage between television and computer. As I thought about computers in my work in Artificial Intelligence, I saw that a new sort of idolatry was arising where ^he computers were being asked to be infallible experts giving us advice on everything from taxes to marriage problems and our health. I saw that computers were being used not just as art tools and artists, but also as art objects like the ancient idols. This started me thinking about how other ancient functions of religion were being filled by advertising and the media.