Abstract
Arthur Burks is best known among philosophers for his views on induction, probability and causation. He has elaborated and refined these views over many years, and his major work, Chance, Cause, Reason (1977), develops them in great detail and with much subtlety. No less interesting, however, is Burks’s application of automata theory to such philosophical problems as the formalizability of intelligent behaviour, freedom of the will and the dispute between empiricists and rationalists concerning abstract ideas. While automata theory plays a role in Burks’s investigations of causality, chance and inductive reasoning, it becomes especially prominent in his discussion of these other issues. Unsurprisingly, Burks, who is as much a computer scientist as a philosopher, is exceptionally circumspect and scrupulous in bringing computer science to the aid of philosophy.
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Lugg, A. (1990). Finite Automata and Human Beings. In: Salmon, M.H. (eds) The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism. Synthese Library, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_8
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