posted on 2007-12-01, 00:00authored byCharles KempCharles Kemp, Patrick Shafto, Allison Berke, Joshua B. Tenenbaum
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.