Switch to: References

Citations of:

Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology

Bobbs-Merrill (1950)

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Epistemic Informational Structural Realism.Majid Davoody Beni - 2016 - Minds and Machines 26 (4):323-339.
    The paper surveys Floridi’s attempt for laying down informational structural realism. After considering a number of reactions to the pars destruens of Floridi’s attack on the digital ontology, I show that Floridi’s enterprise for enriching the ISR by borrowing elements from the ontic form of structural realism is blighted by a haunting inconsistency. ISR has been originally developed by Floridi as a restricted and level dependent form of structural realism which remains mainly bonded within the borders of a Kantian perspective. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Counting on Strong Composition as Identity to Settle the Special Composition Question.Joshua Spencer - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (4):857-872.
    Strong Composition as Identity is the thesis that necessarily, for any xs and any y, those xs compose y iff those xs are non-distributively identical to y. Some have argued against this view as follows: if some many things are non-distributively identical to one thing, then what’s true of the many must be true of the one. But since the many are many in number whereas the one is not, the many cannot be identical to the one. Hence is mistaken. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Sellars and Quine on empiricism and conceptual truth.Stefan Brandt - 2017 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (1):108-132.
    I compare Sellars’s criticism of the ‘myth of the given’ with Quine’s criticism of the ‘two dogmas’ of empiricism, that is, the analytic–synthetic distinction and reductionism. In Sections I to III, I present Quine’s and Sellars’s views. In IV to X, I discuss similarities and differences in their views. In XI to XII, I show that Sellars’s arguments against the ‘myth of the given’ are incompatible with Quine’s rejection of the analytic–synthetic distinction.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Sider on the Epistemology of Structure.Jared Warren - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (9):2417-2435.
    Theodore Sider’s recent book, “Writing the Book of the World”, employs a primitive notion of metaphysical structure in order to make sense of substantive metaphysics. But Sider and others who employ metaphysical primitives face serious epistemological challenges. In the first section I develop a specific form of this challenge for Sider’s own proposed epistemology for structure; the second section develops a general reliability challenge for Sider’s theory; and the third and final section argues for the rejection of Siderean structure in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • How Tolerant Can You Be? Carnap on Rationality.Florian Steinberger - 2015 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (3):645-668.
    In this paper I examine a neglected question concerning the centerpiece of Carnap's philosophy: the principle of tolerance. The principle of tolerance states that we are free to devise and adopt any well-defined form of language or linguistic framework we please. A linguistic framework defines framework-internal standards of correct reasoning that guide us in our first-order scientific pursuits. The choice of a linguistic framework, on the other hand, is an ‘external’ question to be settled on pragmatic grounds and so not (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Discarded theories: the role of changing interests.K. Brad Wray - 2019 - Synthese 196 (2):553-569.
    I take another look at the history of science and offer some fresh insights into why the history of science is filled with discarded theories. I argue that the history of science is just as we should expect it to be, given the following two facts about science: theories are always only partial representations of the world, and almost inevitably scientists will be led to investigate phenomena that the accepted theory is not fit to account for. Together these facts suggest (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • The Possibility of Naturalized Metaphysics.Rasmus Jaksland - 2016 - Dissertation, University of Copenhagen
    This project investigates naturalized metaphysics as a recent trend in analytic metaphysics originating in the naturalist attitude of James Ladyman and Don Ross in their seminal work Everything must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (2007). The primary focus, however, will be the more recent article “Neo-Positivist Metaphysics” (2012) by Alyssa Ney that originates in this tradition. The project will conclude that naturalized metaphysics is an unsuccessful attempt at an answer to the question ’how is metaphysics possible’. More precisely, the project will establish (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Philosophy of Curiosity.İlhan İnan - 2011 - New York: Routledge.
    In this book, Ilhan Inan questions the classical definition of curiosity as _a desire to know._ Working in an area where epistemology and philosophy of language overlap, Inan forges a link between our ability to become aware of our ignorance and our linguistic aptitude to construct terms referring to things unknown. The book introduces the notion of inostensible reference. Ilhan connects this notion to related concepts in philosophy of language: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description; the referential and the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • There is No Easy Road to Nominalism.M. Colyvan - 2010 - Mind 119 (474):285-306.
    Hartry Field has shown us a way to be nominalists: we must purge our scientific theories of quantification over abstracta and we must prove the appropriate conservativeness results. This is not a path for the faint hearted. Indeed, the substantial technical difficulties facing Field's project have led some to explore other, easier options. Recently, Jody Azzouni, Joseph Melia, and Stephen Yablo have argued that it is a mistake to read our ontological commitments simply from what the quantifiers of our best (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   109 citations  
  • Bad company and neo-Fregean philosophy.Matti Eklund - 2009 - Synthese 170 (3):393-414.
    A central element in neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics is the focus on abstraction principles, and the use of abstraction principles to ground various areas of mathematics. But as is well known, not all abstraction principles are in good standing. Various proposals for singling out the acceptable abstraction principles have been presented. Here I investigate what philosophical underpinnings can be provided for these proposals; specifically, underpinnings that fit the neo-Fregean's general outlook. Among the philosophical ideas I consider are: general views on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Logically Simple Properties and Relations.Jan Plate - 2016 - Philosophers' Imprint 16:1-40.
    This paper presents an account of what it is for a property or relation (or ‘attribute’ for short) to be logically simple. Based on this account, it is shown, among other things, that the logically simple attributes are in at least one important way sparse. This in turn lends support to the view that the concept of a logically simple attribute can be regarded as a promising substitute for Lewis’s concept of a perfectly natural attribute. At least in part, the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • The varieties of indispensability arguments.Marco Panza & Andrea Sereni - 2016 - Synthese 193 (2):469-516.
    The indispensability argument comes in many different versions that all reduce to a general valid schema. Providing a sound IA amounts to providing a full interpretation of the schema according to which all its premises are true. Hence, arguing whether IA is sound results in wondering whether the schema admits such an interpretation. We discuss in full details all the parameters on which the specification of the general schema may depend. In doing this, we consider how different versions of IA (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • (1 other version)Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings.David John Chalmers (ed.) - 2002 - New York: Oxford University Press USA.
    What is the mind? Is consciousness a process in the brain? How do our minds represent the world? Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings is a grand tour of writings on these and other perplexing questions about the nature of the mind. The most comprehensive collection of its kind, the book includes sixty-three selections that range from the classical contributions of Descartes to the leading edge of contemporary debates. Extensive sections cover foundational issues, the nature of consciousness, and the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   65 citations  
  • The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology.Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • I—The Presidential Address: Being, Univocity, and Logical Syntax.A. W. Moore - 2015 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (1pt1):1-23.
    In this essay I focus on the idea of the univocity of being, championed by Duns Scotus and given prominence more recently by Deleuze. Although I am interested in how this idea can be established, my primary concern is with something more basic: how the idea can even be properly thought. In the course of exploring this issue, which I do partly by borrowing some ideas about logical syntax from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I try to show how there can be dialogue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Debunking Rationalist Defenses of Common-Sense Ontology: An Empirical Approach.Robert Carry Osborne - 2016 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (1):197-221.
    Debunking arguments typically attempt to show that a set of beliefs or other intensional mental states bear no appropriate explanatory connection to the facts they purport to be about. That is, a debunking argument will attempt to show that beliefs about p are not held because of the facts about p. Such beliefs, if true, would then only be accidentally so. Thus, their causal origins constitute an undermining defeater. Debunking arguments arise in various philosophical domains, targeting beliefs about morality, the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Poderes Causales, Tropos, y Otras Criaturas Extrañas: Ensayos de Metafísica Analítica.Ezequiel Zerbudis (ed.) - 2017 - Buenos Aires: Título.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Reconsidering the Carnap-Kuhn Connection.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2015 - In William J. Devlin & Alisa Bokulich (eds.), Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions - 50 Years On. Cham: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 311. Springer.
    Recently, some philosophers of science (e.g., Gürol Irzik, Michael Friedman) have challenged the ‘received view’ on the relationship between Rudolf Carnap and Thomas Kuhn, suggesting that there is a close affinity (rather than opposition) between their philosophical views. In support of this argument, these authors cite Carnap and Kuhn’s similar views on incommensurability, theory-choice, and scientific revolutions. Against this revisionist view, I argue that the philosophical relationship between Carnap and Kuhn should be regarded as opposed rather than complementary. In particular, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Homo deceptus: How language creates its own reality.Bruce Bokor - manuscript
    Homo deceptus is a book that brings together new ideas on language, consciousness and physics into a comprehensive theory that unifies science and philosophy in a different kind of Theory of Everything. The subject of how we are to make sense of the world is addressed in a structured and ordered manner, which starts with a recognition that scientific truths are constructed within a linguistic framework. The author argues that an epistemic foundation of natural language must be understood before laying (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Necessarily Maybe. Quantifiers, Modality and Vagueness.Alessandro Torza - 2015 - In Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers. Themes in Logic, Metaphysics, and Language. (Synthese Library vol. 373). Springer. pp. 367-387.
    Languages involving modalities and languages involving vagueness have each been thoroughly studied. On the other hand, virtually nothing has been said about the interaction of modality and vagueness. This paper aims to start filling that gap. Section 1 is a discussion of various possible sources of vague modality. Section 2 puts forward a model theory for a quantified language with operators for modality and vagueness. The model theory is followed by a discussion of the resulting logic. In Section 3, the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Carnap's External Questions and Semantic Externalism.Andrei Moldovan - 2014 - Prolegomena 13 (2):253-268.
    What is it for an utterance of an expression to lack meaning? In this paper I address the issue along the lines of Carnap’s seminal article “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology”. Carnap provides there an answer to the above question, which he then uses to argue that certain claims of metaphysics are meaningless. In the first section of the paper I present Carnap’s argument for the meaninglessness of certain metaphysical claims. In the second section I argue that, although the argument is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching.Michael R. Matthews (ed.) - 2014 - Springer.
    This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Outscoping and Discourse Threat.Theodore Sider - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (4):413-426.
    Sometimes we give truth-conditions for sentences of a discourse in other terms. According to Agustín Rayo, when doing so it is sometimes legitimate to use the terms of that very discourse, so long as the terms do not occur in the truth-conditions themselves. I argue that giving truth-conditions in this "outscoping" way prevents one from answering "discourse threat" (for example, the threat of indeterminacy).
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Dimensions of scientific law.Sandra D. Mitchell - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):242-265.
    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, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   119 citations  
  • Metaphysical analyticity and the epistemology of logic.Gillian K. Russell - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 171 (1):161-175.
    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.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • Matematický realismus a naturalismus Penelope Maddy1.Vít Punčochář - 2012 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 19:199-226.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • LSL in a Nutshell.Susan Fowler - manuscript
    A short summary of Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Zande Sorites.Roy Sorensen - 2013 - Erkenntnis (S7):1-14.
    When Bertrand Russell alerted Gottlob Frege to an inconsistency in his Grundgesetze, Frege relinquished deep commitments. When Edward Evans-Pritchard alerted the Azande to an inconsistency in their beliefs about witchcraft inheritance, they did not revise their beliefs. Nor did they engage in the defensive maneuvers depicted in Plato’s dialogues. Evans-Pritchard characterized their indifference to contradiction as irrational. My historical thesis is that the ensuing anthropological debate mirrors the debate about the sorites paradox. I favor a simple explanation of this parallelism: (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)Metaphysics for Positivists: Mach Versus the Vienna Circle.Erik C. Banks - 2013 - Discipline Filosophiche 23 (1):57-77.
    This article distinguishes between Machian empiricism and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and associated philosophers. Mach's natural philosophy was a first order attempt to reform and reorganize physics, not a second order reconstruction of the "language" of physics. Mach's elements were not sense data but realistic events in the natural world and in minds, and Mach admitted unobserved elements as part of his world view. Mach's critique of metaphysics was far more subtle and concerned the elimination of sensory (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The role of inductive generalizations in Sellars' theory of explanation.Joseph C. Pitt - 1981 - Theory and Decision 13 (4):345-356.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Syntactic Priority Thesis and Ontological Disputes.George Duke - 2012 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42 (2):149-164.
    The syntactic priority thesis (henceforth SP) asserts that the truth of appropriate sentential contexts containing what are, by syntactic criteria, singular terms, is sufficient to justify the attribution of objectual reference to such terms (Wright, 1983, 24). One consequence that the neo-Fregean draws from SP is that it is through an analysis of the syntactic structure of true statements that 'ontological questions are to be understood and settled' (Wright, 1983, 25). Despite the significant literature on SP, little consideration has been (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Recovering Thomas Kuhn.Joseph Rouse - 2013 - Topoi 32 (1):59-64.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Verbal Disputes and Substantiveness.Brendan Balcerak Jackson - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (1):31-54.
    One way to challenge the substantiveness of a particular philosophical issue is to argue that those who debate the issue are engaged in a merely verbal dispute. For example, it has been maintained that the apparent disagreement over the mind/brain identity thesis is a merely verbal dispute, and thus that there is no substantive question of whether or not mental properties are identical to neurological properties. The goal of this paper is to help clarify the relationship between mere verbalness and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  • A verisimilitudinarian analysis of the Linda paradox.Gustavo Cevolani, Vincenzo Crupi & Roberto Festa - 2012 - VII Conference of the Spanish Society for Logic, Methodology and Philosphy of Science.
    The Linda paradox is a key topic in current debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. We present a novel analysis of this paradox, based on the notion of verisimilitude as studied in the philosophy of science. The comparison with an alternative analysis based on probabilistic confirmation suggests how to overcome some problems of our account by introducing an adequately defined notion of verisimilitudinarian confirmation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Neo-positivist metaphysics.Alyssa Ney - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (1):53-78.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  • Events and times: a case study in means-ends metaphysics.Christopher Hitchcock - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (1):79-96.
    There is a tradition, tracing back to Kant, of recasting metaphysical questions as questions about the utility of a conceptual scheme, linguistic framework, or methodological rule for achieving some particular end. Following in this tradition, I propose a ‘means-ends metaphysics ’, in which one rigorously demonstrates the suitability of some conceptual framework for achieving a specified goal. I illustrate this approach using a debate about the nature of events. Specifically, the question is whether the time at which an event occurs (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • (1 other version)What is the Benacerraf Problem?Justin Clarke-Doane - 2017 - In Fabrice Pataut Jody Azzouni, Paul Benacerraf Justin Clarke-Doane, Jacques Dubucs Sébastien Gandon, Brice Halimi Jon Perez Laraudogoitia, Mary Leng Ana Leon-Mejia, Antonio Leon-Sanchez Marco Panza, Fabrice Pataut Philippe de Rouilhan & Andrea Sereni Stuart Shapiro (eds.), New Perspectives on the Philosophy of Paul Benacerraf: Truth, Objects, Infinity (Fabrice Pataut, Editor). Springer.
    In "Mathematical Truth", Paul Benacerraf articulated an epistemological problem for mathematical realism. His formulation of the problem relied on a causal theory of knowledge which is now widely rejected. But it is generally agreed that Benacerraf was onto a genuine problem for mathematical realism nevertheless. Hartry Field describes it as the problem of explaining the reliability of our mathematical beliefs, realistically construed. In this paper, I argue that the Benacerraf Problem cannot be made out. There simply is no intelligible problem (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   79 citations  
  • Questions about 'Internal and External Questions about God'.Natalja Deng - 2012 - Religious Studies 48 (2):257-268.
    This article is an evaluation of Le Poidevin’s use of Carnap ’s stance on ontology within the philosophy of religion. Le Poidevin claims that 1) theists need to take God to be a putative entity within space-time in order for their claim that God exists to be meaningful, and that 2) instrumentalism about theology is viable. I argue that although Le Poidevin’s response to Carnap ’s argument is no less problematic than that argument itself, his position is in fact thoroughly (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Pragmatics in Carnap and Morris and the Bipartite Metatheory Conception.Thomas Uebel - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (3):523-546.
    This paper concerns the issue of whether the so-called left wing of the Vienna Circle (Carnap, Neurath, Frank) can be understood as having provided the blueprint for a bipartite metatheory with a formal-logical part (the “logic of science”) supporting and being supported by a naturalistic-empirical part (the “behavioristics of science”). A claim to this effect was recently met by a counterclaim that there was indeed an attempt made to broaden Carnap’s formalist conception of philosophy by the pragmatist Morris, but that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Verbal Disputes.David J. Chalmers - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (4):515-566.
    The philosophical interest of verbal disputes is twofold. First, they play a key role in philosophical method. Many philosophical disagreements are at least partly verbal, and almost every philosophical dispute has been diagnosed as verbal at some point. Here we can see the diagnosis of verbal disputes as a tool for philosophical progress. Second, they are interesting as a subject matter for first-order philosophy. Reflection on the existence and nature of verbal disputes can reveal something about the nature of concepts, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   228 citations  
  • Ontology: minimalism and truth-conditions.Juan José Lara Peñaranda - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 162 (3):683-696.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Carnap’s dream: Gödel, Wittgenstein, and Logical, Syntax.S. Awodey & A. W. Carus - 2007 - Synthese 159 (1):23-45.
    In Carnap’s autobiography, he tells the story how one night in January 1931, “the whole theory of language structure” in all its ramifications “came to [him] like a vision”. The shorthand manuscript he produced immediately thereafter, he says, “was the first version” of Logical Syntax of Language. This document, which has never been examined since Carnap’s death, turns out not to resemble Logical Syntax at all, at least on the surface. Wherein, then, did the momentous insight of 21 January 1931 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Against Parthood.Theodore Sider - 2013 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 8:237–293.
    Mereological nihilism says that there do not exist (in the fundamental sense) any objects with proper parts. A reason to accept it is that we can thereby eliminate 'part' from fundamental ideology. Many purported reasons to reject it - based on common sense, perception, and the possibility of gunk, for example - are weak. A more powerful reason is that composite objects seem needed for spacetime physics; but sets suffice instead.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   200 citations  
  • Truth in Fiction.Franck Lihoreau (ed.) - 2010 - Ontos Verlag.
    The essays collected in this volume are all concerned with the connection between fiction and truth. This question is of utmost importance to metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic and epistemology, raising in each of these areas and at their intersections a large number of issues related to creation, existence, reference, identity, modality, belief, assertion, imagination, pretense, etc. All these topics and many more are addressed in this collection, which brings together original essays written from various points of view by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • (1 other version)Toward a Theory of the Pragmatic A Priori. From Carnap to Lewis and Beyond.Thomas Mormann - 2012 - Rudolf Carnap and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism 16:113 - 132.
    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. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Proper Names and their Fictional Uses.Heidi Tiedke - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (4):707 - 726.
    Fictional names present unique challenges for semantic theories of proper names, challenges strong enough to warrant an account of names different from the standard treatment. The theory developed in this paper is motivated by a puzzle that depends on four assumptions: our intuitive assessment of the truth values of certain sentences, the most straightforward treatment of their syntactic structure, semantic compositionality, and metaphysical scruples strong enough to rule out fictional entities, at least. It is shown that these four assumptions, taken (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  • Approaching the truth via belief change in propositional languages.Gustavo Cevolani & Francesco Calandra - 2009 - In M. Suàrez, M. Dorato & M. Rèdei (eds.), EPSA Epistemology and Methodology of Science: Launch of the European Philosophy of Science Association. Springer. pp. 47--62.
    Starting from the sixties of the past century theory change has become a main concern of philosophy of science. Two of the best known formal accounts of theory change are the post-Popperian theories of verisimilitude (PPV for short) and the AGM theory of belief change (AGM for short). In this paper, we will investigate the conceptual relations between PPV and AGM and, in particular, we will ask whether the AGM rules for theory change are effective means for approaching the truth, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Ontological Realism: Methodology or Misdirection?Gary H. Merrill - 2010 - Applied ontology 5 (2):79-108.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics.Craig Callender - 2011 - In Steven French & Juha Saatsi (eds.), Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Science. Continuum. pp. 33--54.
    Philosophy of science appears caught in what Einstein (1933) called the ‘eternal antithesis between the two inseparable components of our knowledge – the empirical and the rational’ (p. 271). It wants to employ metaphysical speculation, but impressed with the methods of the subject it studies, it fears overreaching. Philosophy of science thus tries to walk a fine line between scientifically grounded metaphysics and its more speculative cousins. Here I try to draft some of the contour of this boundary.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   40 citations  
  • Signs, Toy Models, and the A Priori.Lydia Patton - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (3):281-289.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations