Publisher's Synopsis
This is the long-awaited text edition of Coppedge's valuable philosophical heuristics, designed to aid programmers (and everyone else!) in all matters of knowledge. The contents may be beneficial for economists, programmers, machine learning, and even for political advisory and more common tasks like philosophy and creative writing. This is truly a treasure trove for heuristic analysis! Included at the end are eight or so writings on big ideas to give needed perspective and clarify problems, as well as provide a little education.FROM THE INTRODUCTIONAlan Hájek, who earned his PhD. in philosophy at Princeton in 1993, argues that "philosophy has a variety of heuristics" (1). And goes on to say that "such heuristics can enhance one's ability to make creative contributions to philosophy." (1). As recently as 1972, Karl Popper did not even consider philosophical objectivity (in other words, progress) possible. He writes: "From a rational point of view, we should not 'rely' on any theory, for no theory has been shown to be true, or can be shown to be true." (Popper 21). This is a strange absoluteness to hold, which must be self-contradictory. Typology, which is perhaps the closest to realizing coherence outside of mathematics, emerged as recently as the 1870s (145 years ago) with Charles Peirce. ("This theory of meaning ('speculative grammar') was to provide foundations for his writings in logic" OCP). Nicholas Rescher's book (1973), dates work on coherence somewhat more recently. However, not all heuristics involve coherence. I have made an effort to include anything that might be helpful to my readers.
