Scientific realism is a critical target of anti-representationalists such as Richard Rorty and Huw Price, who have questioned the very possibility of providing a satisfactory argument for realism or any other ontological position. I will argue that there is a viable form of realism which not only withstands this criticism but is vindicated on the antirepresentationalists’ own grounds. This realist position, largely drawn from the notion of the scientific method developed by the founder of philosophical pragmatism, Charles S. Peirce, will (...) further be compared with the accounts of truth and objectivity proposed by the contemporary pragmatists, Rorty, Price, and Robert B. Brandom. (shrink)

Recent work on analyticity distinguishes two kinds, metaphysical and epistemic. This paper argues that the distinction allows for a new view in the philosophy of logic according to which the claims of logic are metaphysically analytic and have distinctive modal profiles, even though their epistemology is holist and in many ways rather Quinean. It is argued that such a view combines some of the more attractive aspects of the Carnapian and Quinean approaches to logic, whilst avoiding some famous problems.

This paper points out a tension between Agustín Rayo's criteria for singulartermhood and his explicit views on the status of Hybrid Identities, that is, identity statements that use singular terms from two different Systems of Representation, such as "7=Julius Caesar" or more suggestively "I am b" where "b" is a singular term referring to my brain. It argues that non-trivial Hybrid Identities are common and important in philosophy and elsewhere, and it suggests a friendly alternative that involves treating Hybrid Identities (...) on the model of Rayo's "Just Is" statements. The last section of the paper points out that even this friendly alternative has counterintuitive consequences when combined with the metaphysical conventionalism that Rayo finds attractive, when it comes to questions of personal identity over time. (shrink)

The interpretive plasticity of Kuhn’s philosophical work has been reinforced by readings informed by other philosophical, historiographic or sociological projects. This paper highlights several aspects of Kuhn’s work that have been neglected by such readings. First, Kuhn’s early contribution to several subsequent philosophical developments has been unduly neglected. Kuhn’s postscript discussion of “exemplars” should be recognized as one of the earliest versions of a conception of theories as “mediating models.” Kuhn’s account of experimental practice has also been obscured by readings (...) that assimilate his views to Quinean holism. Second, three distinctive Kuhnian themes have been insufficiently recognized. Kuhn’s challenge to received philosophical views has been domesticated by reading him as offering an alternative conception of scientific knowledge. Kuhn is better understood as rejecting knowledge-centric accounts altogether, in favor of understanding the practice of research. Kuhn’s conception of that activity, as conceptual “articulation,” has accordingly also not been given its due. Finally, Kuhn’s career-long insistence on the mutual accountability of philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind and language calls attention to the extent to which these fields have now drifted apart. (shrink)

Deduction is important to scientific inquiry because it can extend knowledge efficiently, bypassing the need to investigate everything directly. The existence of closure failure—where one knows the premises and that the premises imply the conclusion but nevertheless does not know the conclusion—is a problem because it threatens this usage. It means that we cannot trust deduction for gaining new knowledge unless we can identify such cases ahead of time so as to avoid them. For philosophically engineered examples we have “inner (...) alarm bells” to detect closure failure, but in scientific investigation we would want to use deduction for extension of our knowledge to matters we don’t already know that we couldn’t know. Through a quantitative treatment of how fast probabilistic sensitivity is lost over steps of deduction, I identify a condition that guarantees that the growth of potential error will be gradual; thus, dramatic closure failure is avoided. Whether the condition is fulfilled is often obvious, but sometimes it requires substantive investigation. I illustrate that not only safe deduction but the discovery of dramatic closure failures can lead to scientific advances. (shrink)

According to Ole Hjortland, Timothy Williamson, Graham Priest, and others, anti-exceptionalism about logic is the view that logic “isn’t special”, but is continuous with the sciences. Logic is revisable, and its truths are neither analytic nor a priori. And logical theories are revised on the same grounds as scientific theories are. What isn’t special, we argue, is anti-exceptionalism about logic. Anti-exceptionalists disagree with one another regarding what logic and, indeed, anti-exceptionalism are, and they are at odds with naturalist philosophers of (...) logic, who may have seemed like natural allies. Moreover, those internal battles concern well-trodden philosophical issues, and there is no hint as to how they are to be resolved on broadly scientific grounds. We close by looking at three of the founders of logic who may have seemed like obvious enemies of anti-exceptionalism—Aristotle, Frege, and Carnap—and conclude that none of their positions is clearly at odds with at least some of the main themes of anti-exceptionalism. We submit that, at least at present, anti-exceptionalism is too vague or underspecified to characterize a coherent conception of logic, one that stands opposed to more traditional approaches. (shrink)

InScience and Values (1984) and other, more recent, works, e.g. (1987a, 1987b, 1989a, 1989b, 1990), Larry Laudan proposes a theory of scientific debate he dubs the reticulated model of scientific rationality (Laudan, 1984, pp. 50–66). The model stands in sharp contrast to hierarchical approaches to rationality exemplified by Popper (1959), Hempel (1965), and Reichenbach (1938), as well as the conventionalist views of rationality defended by Carnap (1950), Popper (1959), Kuhn (1962), and Lakatos (1978). Ironically, the model commits some of the (...) same errors Laudan finds in hierarchicalist and conventionalists approaches to scientific rationality. This paper will show that the model can be fixed by recognizing that criteria of goal assessment have no privileged status. These rules are best viewed as simply rules of rationality (or rules of scientific method) by another name. (shrink)

For Quine, the ontological commitments of a discourse are what fall under its (objectual) quantifiers. The recent literature, however, is beginning to move away from this picture. There are direct challenges to Quine's criterion, and there are also attempts to provide alternatives. Azzouni suggests that the ontological commitments of a discourse should be determined by an existence predicate instead. The availability of this alternative forces an adjudication between Qune's criterion and the predicate approach to ontological commitment. I argue that to (...) adjudicate between these criteria for ontological commitment, we need first to adjudicate between criteria for what exists. (shrink)

In defending so-called global expressivism I have often seen Carnap as an ally. Both Carnap’s rejection of “externalist” metaphysics and his implicit pluralism about linguistic frameworks seem grist for the global expressivist’s mill. André Carus argues for a third point of connection, via Carnap’s voluntarism. I note two reasons for thinking that this connection is not as close as Carus contends.

...its identity in the pragmatics of elucidation, and not in some sort of special knowledge...yer's essay (`Implicit Thoughts: Quine, Frege and Kant on Analytic Propositions...by Quine, and attributed to Kant, Frege and Carnap, has nothing in common..

The aim of this paper is to propose a new reading of eliminative materialism concerning propositional attitudes, along the lines of broadly understood Carnapian metametaphysics. According to the proposed reading, eliminativism should be seen as a normative metalinguistic claim that we should dispose of terms like “beliefs” and associated linguistic rules. It will be argued that such reading allows a significant philosophical problem which besets eliminativism to be solved: the problem of representation. The general idea of the problem of representation, (...) which is taken to be one of the aspects of the celebrated “cognitive suicide” issue, is that an eliminativist has a problem with maintaining that her position represents reality. It will be argued that on the Carnapian reading an eliminativist might put forward a negative ontological claim without the need to invoke any representationalistic notions. (shrink)

This survey article discusses the pragmatist tradition in twentieth century philosophy of science. Pragmatism, originating with Charles Peirce's writings on the pragmatic maxim in the 1870s, is a background both for scientific realism and, via the views of William James and John Dewey, for the relativist and/or constructivist forms of neopragmatism that have often been seen as challenging the very ideas of scientific rationality and objectivity. The paper shows how the issue of realism arises in pragmatist philosophy of science and (...) how some pragmatists, classical and modern, have attempted to deal with it. Various dimensions of the realism dispute are thus discussed, especially realism as contrasted to instrumentalism and realism as contrasted to relativism/constructivism. It is argued that the pragmatist tradition cannot avoid these tensions but is largely constituted by them. (shrink)

Doing Worlds with Words throws light on the problem of meaning as the meeting point of linguistics, logic and philosophy, and critically assesses the possibilities and limitations of elucidating the nature of meaning by means of formal logic, model theory and model-theoretical semantics. The main thrust of the book is to show that it is misguided to understand model theory metaphysically and so to try to base formal semantics on something like formal metaphysics; rather, the book states that model theory (...) and similar tools of the analysis of language should be understood as capturing the semantically relevant, especially inferential, structure of language. From this vantage point, the reader gains a new light on many of the traditional concepts and problems of logic and philosophy of language, such as meaning, reference, truth and the nature of formal logic. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a criticism to a method for metaontology, namely, the idea that a discourse’s or theory’s ontological commitments can be read off its sentences’ truth- conditions. Firstly, I will put forward this idea’s basis and, secondly, I will present the way Quine subscribed to it. However, I distinguish between two readings of Quine’s famous ontological criterion, and I center the focus on the one currently dubbed “ontological minimalism”, a kind of modern Ockhamism applied to the mentioned (...) metaontological view. I show that this view has a certain application via Quinean thesis of reference inscrutability but that it is not possible to press that application any further and, in particular, not for the ambitious metaontological task some authors try to employ. The conclusion may sound promising: having shown the impossibility of a semantic ontological criterion, intentionalist or subjectivist ones should be explored. (shrink)

The mere fact that ontological debates are possible requires us to address the question, what is it to claim that a certain entity or kind of entity exists—in other words, what do we do when we make an existence-claim? I develop and defend one candidate answer to this question, namely that to make an existence-claim with regard to Fs is to claim that we can refer to Fs. I show how this theory can fulfil the most important explanatory desiderata for (...) a theory of existence; I also defend it against the charges of illegitimate ‘semantic ascent’ and of making existence counterfactually dependent on human linguistic ability. (shrink)

The Marburg neo-Kantians argue that Hermann von Helmholtz's empiricist account of the a priori does not account for certain knowledge, since it is based on a psychological phenomenon, trust in the regularities of nature. They argue that Helmholtz's account raises the 'problem of validity' (Gueltigkeitsproblem): how to establish a warranted claim that observed regularities are based on actual relations. I reconstruct Heinrich Hertz's and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Bild theoretic answer to the problem of validity: that scientists and philosophers can depict the (...) necessary a priori constraints on states of affairs in a given system, and can establish whether these relations are actual relations in nature. The analysis of necessity within a system is a lasting contribution of the Bild theory. However, Hertz and Wittgenstein argue that the logical and mathematical sentences of a Bild are rules, tools for constructing relations, and the rules themselves are meaningless outside the theory. Carnap revises the argument for validity by attempting to give semantic rules for translation between frameworks. Russell and Quine object that pragmatics better accounts for the role of a priori reasoning in translating between frameworks. The conclusion of the tale, then, is a partial vindication of Helmholtz's original account. (shrink)

La notion phénoménologique d'intentionnalité suscite certaines énigmes philosophiques assez déroutantes concernant par exemple l'existence d'entités relationnelles ou le statut des objets intentionnels. Il est ici suggéré que ces énigmes, apparemment ontologiques, auraient plus de chances d'être élucidées si elles étaient considérées comme des problèmes sémantiques concernant cette catégorie spéciale d'énoncés que l'on appelle énoncés intensionnels ». Elles pourraient alors être discutées à l'aide de méthodes plus précises comme celles de Carnap, Church ou Quine.The phenomenological notion of intentionality raises a number (...) of rather perplexing philosophical riddles, for instance about the existence of relational entities or about the status of intentional objects. The paper suggests that these seemingly ontological riddles would gain more chances to be elucidated if they were regarded as semantic problems about a special kind of statements called "intensional statements". Thus they could be discussed with the help of some more precise methods such as those of Carnap, Church or Quine. (shrink)

In “Mathematical Truth,” Paul Benacerraf raises an epistemic challenge for mathematical platonists. In this paper, I examine the assumptions that motivate Benacerraf’s original challenge, and use them to construct a new causal challenge for the epistemology of mathematics. This new challenge, which I call ‘Gödel’s Gap’, appeals to intuitive insights into mathematical knowledge. Though it is a causal challenge, it does not rely on any obviously objectionable constraints on knowledge. As a result, it is more compelling than the original challenge. (...) It is also more general; the challenge applies equally to platonistic and non-platonistic accounts of mathematical truth. And it can be generalized beyond the case of mathematical knowledge to pose a challenge for, e.g., moral knowledge. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that many contemporary debates in metaphysics are “illegitimate,” “shallow,” or “trivial,” and that “contemporary analytic metaphysics, a professional activity engaged in by some extremely intelligent and morally serious people, fails to qualify as part of the enlightened pursuit of objective truth, and should be discontinued” (Ladyman and Ross, Every thing must go: Metaphysics naturalized , 2007 ). Many of these critics are explicit about their sympathies with Rudolf Carnap and his circle, calling themselves ‘neo-positivists’ or ‘neo-Carnapians.’ Yet (...) despite the fact that one of the main conclusions of logical positivism was that metaphysical statements are meaningless, many of these neo-positivists are themselves engaged in metaphysical projects. This paper aims to clarify how we may see a neo-positivist metaphysics as proceeding in good faith, one that starts with serious engagement with the findings of science, particularly fundamental physics, but also has room for traditional, armchair methods. (shrink)

Hans Reichenbach’s position in the debate over scientific realism is remarkable. On the one hand, he endorsed the programmatic premises of logical empiricism; on the other, he explicitly employed a realist approach to conceptions such as reference, causality, and inference to the best explanation. How could that work out? It will be shown in the present paper that in Reichenbach’s view scientific realism is not, as frequently assumed, opposed to logical empiricism but rather to logical positivism. A distinction without a (...) difference? Not at all, at least for Reichenbach. As is well known, his particular—probabilistic—variant of logical empiricism was intended to circumvent what he considered the shortcomings of the Vienna Circle’s verificationist approach to the language of science. In Experience and Prediction, Reichenbach became most explicit in this regard. However, I shall argue that his position remained notoriously unstable in the end. It oscillated between a full-fledged scientific realist reading and an eminently pragmatist reading. Nevertheless, Reichenbach’s contribution proved instrumental in preparing subsequent efforts at reconciling logical empiricism and scientific realism. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap’s role in the debate over scientific realism is fairly unclear. In a certain sense, Carnap must be regarded as the one who rendered the whole issue irrelevant. However, it cannot be ignored that Carnap sometimes spoke of himself as an ‘empirical realist.’ So the question to be answered is: in what sense, if at all, did Carnap play a constructive role in the scientific realism debate. It is the aim of the present paper to tackle this question by (...) investigating the relationship between Carnap’s approach toward the realism issue, on the one hand, and the realist positions defended by his logical empiricist fellows Hans Reichenbach and Eino Kaila, on the other. It will be shown that Carnap agreed with Reichenbach that realism has essentially to do with language, but that he disagreed with him over the significance of probability in defending the scientific realist stance. My point will be that realism is not a ‘problem of language.’ Furthermore, it will be argued that Carnap was correctly criticized by Reichenbach for neglecting the role of probability in science. Nevertheless, what can be learned from Carnap’s approach toward the realism issue is that scientific realism cannot be defended in the way that Reichenbach himself suggested, namely by arguing inductively for the adequacy of the realistic ‘language form.’ Rather, scientific realism can only be defended on the ground that language itself is dependent on the ‘structure of the world.’ And this is exactly the point where, eventually, Kaila will enter the scene. (shrink)

Contrary to the common-sense view and positivist aspirations, scientific concepts are often imprecise. Many of these concepts are ambiguous, vague, or have an under-specified meaning. In this paper, I discuss how imprecise concepts promote integration in biology and thus benefit science. Previous discussions of this issue focus on the concepts of molecular gene and evolutionary novelty. The concept of molecular gene helps biologists integrate explanatory practices, while the notion of evolutionary novelty helps them integrate research questions into an interdisciplinary problem (...) New directions in the philosophy of science, Springer, Dordrecht, 2014). In what follows, I compare molecular gene and evolutionary novelty to another imprecise concept, namely biological lineage. This concept promotes two other types of scientific integration: it helps biologists integrate theoretical principles and methodologies into different areas of biology. The concept of biological lineage facilitates these types of integration because it is broad and under-specified in ways that the concepts of molecular gene and evolutionary novelty are not. Hence, I use the concept of biological lineage as a case study to reveal types of integration that have been overlooked by philosophers. This case study also shows that even very imprecise concepts can be beneficial to scientific practice. (shrink)

The most basic divide amongst analytic metaphysicians separates realists from anti-realists. By examining certain characteristic and problematic features of these two families of views, we uncover their underlying metametaphysicalorientations, which turn out to coincide. This shared philosophical picture that underlies both the realist and the anti-realist project we call the Modern Picture. It rests on a crucial distinction between reality as it is for us and reality as it is in itself. It is argued that this distinction indeed generates the (...) realism/anti-realism dichotomy, and is also responsible for the problematic aspects highlighted earlier. We conclude by sketching an alternative philosophical picture that rejects the distinction between reality as it is for us and reality as it is in itself, which we call the Aristotelian Picture, and consider whether it is able to avoid the issues to which the Modern Picture gives rise. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is make a contribution to the ongoing search for an adequate concept of the a priori element in scientific knowledge. The point of departure is C.I. Lewis’s account of a pragmatic a priori put forward in his "Mind and the World Order" (1929). Recently, Hasok Chang in "Contingent Transcendental Arguments for Metaphysical Principles" (2008) reconsidered Lewis’s pragmatic a priori and proposed to conceive it as the basic ingredient of the dynamics of an embodied scientific reason. (...) The present paper intends to further elaborate Chang’s account by relating it with some conceptual tools from cognitive semantics and certain ideas that first emerged in the context of the category-theoretical foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

According to the form of logical pluralism elaborated by Beall and Restall there is more than one relation of logical consequence. Since they take the relation of logical consequence to reside at the very heart of a logical system, different relations of logical consequence yield different logics. In this paper, we are especially interested in understanding what are the consequences of endorsing Beall and Restall’s version of logical pluralism vis-à-vis the normative guidance that logic is taken to provide to reasoners. (...) In particular, the aim of this paper is threefold. First, in Sections 2 and 3, we offer an exegesis of Beall and Restall’s logical pluralism as a thesis of semantic indeterminacy of our concept of logical consequence – i.e. understood as indeterminacy logical pluralism. Second, in Sections 4 and 5, we elaborate and critically scrutinize three models of semantic indeterminacy that we think are fit to capture Beall and Restall’s indeterminacy logical pluralism. Third, in Section 6, following Beall and Restall’s assumption that the notion of logical consequence has normative significance for deductive reasoning, we raise a series of normative problems for indeterminacy logical pluralism. The overall conclusion that we aim to establish is that Beall and Restall’s indeterminate logical pluralism cannot offer an adequate account of the normative guidance that logic is taken to provide us with in ordinary contexts of reasoning. (shrink)

In his “Epistemology Naturalized,” Quine embraces a form of Humeanism. In this paper, I try to work out the significance of this Humeanism. In particular, I argue that it represents an anti-metaphysical position that Quine shares with Carnap. Crucial to my account is that contrary to much contemporary thinking on metaphysics, Carnap, and Quine following him, recognize both an ontological and an epistemological sense of metaphysics. As commentators have frequently acknowledged, Carnap and Quine disagree over rejecting metaphysics in the ontological (...) sense. I will argue, though, that they agree in rejecting metaphysics in their shared epistemological sense of the term. (shrink)

The global relation between logical empiricism and American pragmatism is one of the more difficult problems in history of philosophy. In this paper I’d like to take a local perspective and concentrate on the details that concern the vicissitudes of a philosopher who played an important role in the encounter of logical empiricism and American pragmatism, namely, Ernest Nagel. In this paper, I want to explore some aspects of Nagel’s changing attitude towards the then „new“ logical-empiricist philosophy. In the beginning (...) Nagel welcomed logical empiricism whole-heartedly. This early enthusiasm did not last. At the end of his philosophical career Nagel’s early positive attitude towards logical empiricism shown in the 1930s had been replaced by a much more reserved one. Nagel’s growing dissatisfaction with the Carnapian version of logical empiricist philosophy was clearly expressed in Nagel’s criticism of Carnap’s inductive logic and more generally in his last book Teleology Revisited and Other Essays on History and Philosophy of Science. There he critized harshly Carnap’s philosophy of science in general as ahistoric and non-pragmatist. One of the distinctive features of Nagel’s philosophy of science is the emphasis that he put on the role of history of science for philosophy of science. A compelling evidence for this attitude are his works on the history and philosophy of geometry and algebra One may say that Carnap and Nagel represented opposed possibilities of how the profession of a philosopher of science could be understood: Carnap as a „conceptual engineer“ was engaged in the task of inventing the conceptual tools for a better theoretical understanding of science, while Nagel was to be considered more as a „public intellectual“ engaged in the project of realizing a more rational and enlightened society. (shrink)

Two of Quine's most familiar doctrines are: that there is a distinction between underdetermination and indeterminacy; and that there is no distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. An argument is given that these two doctrines are incompatible. In terms wholly acceptable to Quine and based on the underdetermination/indeterminacy distinction, an exhaustive and exclusive distinction is drawn between two kinds of true sentences, which, it is argued, corresponds to the traditional analytic/synthetic distinction. An appendix is used to develop one aspect of (...) the underdetermination/indeterminacy distinction, as construed here, and to discuss, in passing, some of Quine’s more general views on truth. (shrink)

Nominalizations are expressions that are particularly challenging philosophically in that they help form singular terms that seem to refer to abstract or derived objects often considered controversial. The three standard views about the semantics of nominalizations are [1] that they map mere meanings onto objects, [2] that they refer to implicit arguments, and [3] that they introduce new objects, in virtue of their compositional semantics. In the second case, nominalizations do not add anything new but pick up objects that would (...) be present anyway in the semantic structure of a corresponding sentence without a nominalization. In the first and third case, nominalizations in a sense ‘create’ new objects’, enriching the ontology on the basis of the meaning of expressions. I will argue that there is a fourth kind of nominalization which requires a quite different treatment. These are nominalizations that introduce ‘new’ objects, but only partially characterize them. Such nominalizations generally refer to events or tropes. I will explore an account according on which such nominalizations refer to truth makers. (shrink)

According to the conciliatory view in metaontology, there are multiple possible languages corresponding to the popular positions in ontology. In each of these languages, the term ‘exists’ expresses a distinct “existence-like” property, and consequently the claims associated with each of the rival ontological positions come out true in some such language. Species of the conciliatory view can be distinguished based on claims about how the various existence-like properties are related vis-à-vis metaphysical naturalness. On some versions, all of the existence-like properties (...) are held to be equally natural, such that there is no “metaphysically privileged” language. However on others, there is held to be a most natural existence-like property and hence a most fundamental ontological language. In this paper I defend two views, one metaontological and one ontological. I first defend a version of the conciliatory view according to which there is exactly one perfectly natural existence-like property, but the rest are still “reasonably” natural. I then argue that, assuming this metaontological view, we should accept a permissive ontological view in the fundamental language (i.e. one with a very expansive domain). (shrink)

Biological knowledge does not fit the image of science that philosophers have developed. Many argue that biology has no laws. Here I criticize standard normative accounts of law and defend an alternative, pragmatic approach. I argue that a multidimensional conceptual framework should replace the standard dichotomous law/ accident distinction in order to display important differences in the kinds of causal structure found in nature and the corresponding scientific representations of those structures. To this end I explore the dimensions of stability, (...) strength, and degree of abstraction that characterize the variety of scientific knowledge claims found in biology and other sciences. (shrink)

Quine’s general approach is to treat ontology as a matter of what a theory says there is. This turns ontology into a question of which existential statements are consequences of that theory. This approach is contrasted favourably with the view that takes ontological commitment as a relation to things. However within the broadly Quinean approach we can distinguish different accounts, differing as to the nature of the consequence relation best suited for determining those consequences. It is suggested that Quine’s own (...) narrowly formal account fails. Then a consideration of the necessitation approach championed by Jackson and Lewis shows that it does not do justice to the role of acknowledging consequences in determining rationality. I suggest that an approach which puts a priori consequence as the key relation does a better job. The task of spelling out the nature of a priori consequence is sketched, along with reasons to doubt the adequacy of the double indexing approach to analysing the a priori. The sorts of relations we can stand in to theories which allow us to inherit ontological commitments are touched on with a number of important philosophical strategies for introducing belief-like attitudes which nevertheless avoid ontological commitment. (shrink)

In a series of papers over a period of several years Barry Smith andWerner Ceusters have offered a number of cogent criticisms of historical approaches to creating, maintaining, and applying biomedical terminologies and ontologies. And they have urged the adoption of what they refer to as a “realism-based” approach. Indeed, at times they insist that the realism-based approach not only offers clear advantages and a well-founded methodological basis for ontology development and evaluation, but that such a realist perspective is in (...) fact necessary for understanding and using terminologies and ontologies in science. -/- This paper explores a number of questions surrounding such claims, provides a careful characterization of the type of realism recommended by Smith and Ceusters, and evaluates the role that realism plays in the critiques and recommendations that they offer. The conclusion reached is that while Smith’s and Ceusters’ criticisms of prior practice in the treatment of ontologies and terminologies in medical informatics are often both perceptive and well founded, and while at least some of their own proposals demonstrate obvious merit and promise, none of this either follows from or requires the brand of realism that they propose. (shrink)

Even after Willard Quine’s critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Wilfrid Sellars maintained some forms of analyticity or truth in virtue of meaning. In this article, I aim to reconstruct (a) his neglected account of the analytic-synthetic distinction and the revisability of analytic sentences, (b) its connection to his inferentialist account of meaning, and (c) his response to Quine. While Sellars’s account of the revisability of analytic sentences bears certain similarities to Carnap’s and Grice and Strawson’s (...) accounts, it is still striking in that it is part of his broader picture of how our language develops dynamically in our ongoing inquiry. I aim to show how it relates to his account of how the diachronic continuity in meaning, language, or conceptual framework can be preserved through a revision of analytic sentences and to his evolutionary account of the development of our language or conceptual framework. (shrink)

Metaontology – the study of the nature of ontological issues – has flourished in recent years. The focus of this summary will be on some views and arguments that are central to today’s debate. One theme will be that of how seriously to take ontology: whether there is reason to take a skeptical or deflationary attitude toward ontological claims, as theorists like Rudolf Carnap, Hilary Putnam, and Eli Hirsch in different ways have urged. The other theme will be that of (...) the viability of the Fregean and Quinean approaches to ontology that have been and still are central to analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The indispensability argument is sometimes seen as weakened by its reliance on a controversial premise of confirmation holism. Recently, some philosophers working on the indispensability argument have developed versions of the argument which, they claim, do not rely on holism. Some of these writers even claim to have strengthened the argument by eliminating the controversial premise. I argue that the apparent removal of holism leaves a lacuna in the argument. Without the holistic premise, or some other premise which facilitates the (...) transfer of evidence to mathematical portions of scientific theories, the argument is implausible. (shrink)

In this paper, we first examine the reasons for opposing metaphysics. While assessing these reasons, we intend to reach a plausible stance regarding the relationship between science and metaphysics and its role and importance in scientific activity. There are different views on this old question. We argue that the interaction of metaphysics and science is a complex interaction that can only be defended in the light of a critical approach. In this critical attitude, one should not only pay attention to (...) the role and importance of metaphysics in science but also should have an epistemic humility about his expectations of it. (shrink)

There has been recent interest in the idea that speakers who appear to be having a verbal dispute may in fact be engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation: they are communicating information about how they believe an expression should be used. For example, individuals involved in a dispute about whether a racehorse is an athlete might be communicating their diverging views about how ‘athlete’ should be used. While many have argued that metalinguistic negotiation is a pervasive feature of philosophical and everyday (...) discourse, the literature currently lacks an account of this phenomenon that can be situated within a ‘mainstream’ view of communication. I propose an independently motivated account where individuals reconstruct metalinguistic propositions by means of a pragmatic, Gricean reasoning process. (shrink)

[T]he races of man are not sufficiently distinct to inhabit the same country without fusion; and the absence of fusion affords the usual and best test of specific distinctiveness.The subspecies is merely a strictly utilitarian classificatory device for the pigeonholing of population samples.Did human evolutionary history lead to a natural division of our species into subspecies, the so-called biological human races? The issue seemed to have been beaten to death during the second half of the 20th century. But the situation (...) in the biological sciences changed significantly with the rise of genomic science at the close of the century. The issue of race in science, which most people had deemed passé and obsolete, has .. (shrink)

Carnap suggests that philosophy can be construed as being engaged solely in conceptual engineering. I argue that since many results of the sciences can be construed as stemming from conceptual engineering as well, Carnap’s account of philosophy can be methodologically naturalistic. This is also how he conceived of his account. That the sciences can be construed as relying heavily on conceptual engineering is supported by empirical investigations into scientific methodology, but also by a number of conceptual considerations. I present a (...) new conceptual consideration that generalizes Carnap’s conditions of adequacy for analytic–synthetic distinctions and thus widens the realm in which conceptual engineering can be used to choose analytic sentences. I apply these generalized conditions of adequacy to a recent analysis of scientific theories and defend the relevance of the analytic–synthetic distinction against criticisms by Quine, Demopoulos, and Papineau. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, according to a particular physicalist conception of information, information is both alethically neutral or non-alethic, and is intrinsically semantic. The conception of information presented is physicalist and reductionist, and is contrary to most current pluralist and non-reductionist philosophical opinion about the nature of information. The ontology assumed for this conception of information is based upon physicalist non-eliminative ontic structural realism. However, the argument of primary interest is that information so construed is intrinsically semantic on (...) a reductionist and non-alethic basis where semantic content is constituted by indication along causal pathways. Similar arguments have been presented by philosophers with respect to representation. I suggest the conception of information that I present is correct by the lights of the best applied mathematical and scientific theories of information. If so, there is no need for any separate theory of semantic information. Thus I present a theory of intrinsically semantic information which also constitutes an informational theory of truth where truth reduces to information. In the last section I discuss weakly and strongly semantic information, and reject them in favour of alethically neutral intrinsically semantic information. (shrink)

Buddhist scholars in the West broadly agree with the proposition that Buddhism has a philosophical tradition, in many respects comparable to Western ones, while many claim that it also has a practical or empirical dimension that Western philosophies, especially the analytic tradition, lack. There is also a scholarly consensus that an implicit metaphysical system serves as the foundation for the doctrines and practices of early Buddhism as represented in the Pāli suttas. However, Buddhist scholarship to date has not distinguished clearly (...) between philosophical speculations, on the one hand, and on the other, teachings based on experience and practice. This study explores early Buddhist texts’ concept of “domain” (viṣaya/visaya, 境界), which encompasses both an experiential domain and a linguistic framework; i.e., a word is only valid within its own domain, and fails to refer beyond it. As such, it closely resembles Rudolf Carnap’s ideas of “internal” and “external” questions regarding linguistic frameworks, and his suggestion that metaphysical questions, considered as external questions, are meaningless and cannot be answered. More specifically, the Buddha’s refusal to directly answer the “unanswered” questions may indicate that early Buddhism took an attitude similar to Carnap’s rejection of metaphysics. Moreover, textual evidence suggests that teachings such as impermanence and dependent origination, though they may appear to be “metaphysical” to modern readers, are in fact empirical in the context of the early suttas. (shrink)

in Robin Le Poidevin (ed.) Being: Developments in Contemporary Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peter van Inwagen claims that there are no tables or chairs. He also claims that sentences such as ‘There are chairs here’, which seem to imply their existence, are often true. This combination of views opens van Inwagen to a charge of self-contradiction. I explain the charge, and van Inwagen’s response to it, which involves the claim that sentences like ‘There are tables’ shift their truth-conditions between (...) different contexts of utterance. I present an alternative response which involves the negation of that claim, and argue that it is preferable to van Inwagen’s. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine a case for fundamental indeterminacy (FI) by Elizabeth Barnes and offer my counterarguments. Barnes' account of FI includes both the characterization of FI and why we need to accept it. I argue that her reasons for accepting FI can be challenged even when we accept her characterization of FI. Her main claim is that finding a fundamental proposition that our fundamental theory is indeterminate about (FPF) gives us a reason to accept FI in metaphysics. I (...) challenge her claim by pointing out more plausible options to address FPFs. An FPF may either indicate that the theory is nonfundamental or lead us to accept the antirealist view; there is no room for FI in either option. One may insist on accepting FI, but I argue that it is not theoretically rewarding enough. Hence, Barnes' case for FI can be contested. (shrink)

This paper argues that Carnap both did not view and should not have viewed Frege's project in the foundations of mathematics as misguided metaphysics. The reason for this is that Frege's project was to give an explication of number in a very Carnapian sense — something that was not lost on Carnap. Furthermore, Frege gives pragmatic justification for the basic features of his system, especially where there are ontological considerations. It will be argued that even on the question of the (...) independent existence of abstract objects, Frege and Carnap held remarkably similar views. I close with a discussion of why, despite all this, Frege would not accept the principle of tolerance. (shrink)

This paper will deal with three questions regarding Carnap's transition from the position he held at the time of writing Syntax to the doctrines he held during his semantic phase: (1) What was Carnap's attitude towards truth at the time of writing Syntax? (2) What was Carnap's position regarding questions of reference and ontology at the time of writing Syntax? (3) Was Carnap's acceptance of Tarski's analysis of truth and reference detrimental to his philosophical project? Section 1 of this paper (...) will deal with the first of these questions. Special attention will be paid to identifying what it was that prevented Carnap from defining a truth predicate for descriptive languages in Syntax. Section 2 of this paper will deal with the question of Carnap's attitude towards reference and ontology in Syntax. It will be shown that the attempt in Syntax to address ontological questions is seriously defective. Section 3 of this paper addresses the last of the questions posed above. It is argued that in the light of what is established in Sections 1 and 2, Carnap could not have retained the position of Syntax with respect to truth and reference. (shrink)

In this article I examine “Ontology Matters!” (OM!) arguments. OM! arguments conclude that ontology can contribute to empirical success in social science. First, I capture the common form between different OM! arguments. Second, I describe quantifier variance as discussed in metaontology. Third, I apply quantifier variance to the common form of OM! arguments. I then present two ways in which ontology is prior to social science methodology, one realist and one pragmatic. I argue that a pragmatic interpretation of ontology’s priority (...) gives proponents of realist OM! arguments a special burden that they must meet to render their argument successful. (shrink)

In a series of publications, Eli Hirsch has presented a sustained defense of common-sense ontology. Hirsch's argument relies crucially on a meta-ontological position sometimes known as ‘superficialism’. Hirsch's argument from superficialism to common-sense ontology is typically resisted on the grounds that superficialism is implausible. In this paper, I present an alternative argument for common-sense ontology, one that relies on (what I argue is) a much more plausible meta-ontological position, which I call ‘constructivism’. Note well: I will not quite argue that (...) constructivism is true; merely that it is significantly more plausible than superficialism, and consequently affords a safer route to common-sense ontology. Thus my main goal in the paper is not quite to establish common-sense ontology, nor for that matter to refute Hirsch's argument for it. My goal is, in a way, more expressive than argumentative: I wish to articulate a novel meta-ontological position, one that I take to be in no way obviously less plausible than already familiar positions, and to point out that the position probably leads to common-sense ontology. I open, in section 1, with a discussion of Hirsch's argument and the main objection to it. I then develop, in section 2, a sketch of the alternative meta-ontology I have in mind. I close, in section 3, with the argument that this alternative meta-ontology, too, leads to common-sense ontology. (shrink)