posted on 2007-12-01, 00:00authored byCharles KempCharles Kemp, Patrick Shafto, Allison Berke, Joshua B. Tenenbaum
<p>Everyday inductive reasoning draws on many kinds of knowledge, including knowledge about relationships between properties and know ledge about relation- ships between objects. Previous accounts of inductive reasoning generally focus on just one kind of knowledge: models of causal reasoning oft en focus on relationships between properties, and models of similarity- based reasoning often focus on similarity relationships between objects. We present a Bayesian model of inductive reasoning that incorporates both kinds of know ledge, and show that it accounts well for human inferences about the properties o f biological species.</p>