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Testability and meaning

Philosophy of Science 3 (4):419-471 (1936)

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  1. Relevance and Verification.Ben Blumson - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (3):457-480.
    A. J. Ayer’s empiricist criterion of meaning was supposed to have sorted all statements into nonsense on the one hand, and tautologies or genuinely factual statements on the other. Unfortunately for Ayer, it follows from classical logic that his criterion is trivial—it classifies all statements as either tautologies or genuinely factual, but none as nonsense. However, in this paper, I argue that Ayer’s criterion of meaning can be defended from classical proofs of its triviality by the adoption of a relevant (...)
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  • Scientific Realism, Metaphysical Antirealism and the No Miracle Arguments.Mario Alai - 2020 - Foundations of Science 28 (1):377-400.
    Many formulations of scientific realism (SR) include some commitment to metaphysical realism (MR). On the other hand, authors like Schlick, Carnap and Putnam held forms of scientific realism coupled with metaphysical antirealism (and this has analogies in Kant). So we might ask: do scientific realists really need MR? or is MR already implied by SR, so that SR is actually incompatible with metaphysical antirealism? And if MR must really be added to SR, why is that so? And which additional arguments (...)
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  • Necessitarianism and Dispositions.Simone Gozzano - 2020 - Metaphysica (1):1-23.
    In this paper, I argue in favor of necessitarianism, the view that dispositions, when stimulated, necessitate their manifestations. After introducing and clarifying what necessitarianism does and does not amount to, I provide reasons to support the view that dispositions once stimulated necessitate their manifestations according to the stimulating conditions and the relevant properties at stake. In this framework, I will propose a principle of causal relevance and some conditions for the possibility of interference that allow us to avoid the use (...)
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  • The American Reception of Logical Positivism: First Encounters, 1929–1932.Sander Verhaegh - 2020 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 1 (10):106-142.
    This paper reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley between 1929 and 1932) and Herbert Feigl (who visited Harvard in the 1930-31 academic year) played a crucial role in promoting the *Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung*, years before members of the Vienna Circle, the Berlin Group, and the Lvov-Warsaw school would seek refuge in the United States. Building on archive material from the Wiener Kreis Archiv, the (...)
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  • Language, Truth, and Logic and the Anglophone reception of the Vienna Circle.Andreas Vrahimis - 2021 - In Adam Tamas Tuboly (ed.), The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave. pp. 41-68.
    A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic had been responsible for introducing the Vienna Circle’s ideas, developed within a Germanophone framework, to an Anglophone readership. Inevitably, this migration from one context to another resulted in the alteration of some of the concepts being transmitted. Such alterations have served to facilitate a number of false impressions of Logical Empiricism from which recent scholarship still tries to recover. In this paper, I will attempt to point to the ways in which LTL has (...)
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  • The Nature of Appearance in Kant’s Transcendentalism: A Seman- tico-Cognitive Analysis.Sergey L. Katrechko - 2018 - Kantian Journal 37 (3):41-55.
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  • Sınıftan Kaçan Çocuk.Ismet Sahin - 2014 - Ankara, Turkey: Praksis.
    8-9 Kasım 2012’de, Hacettepe Üniversitesi İngilizce İktisat Bölümü tarafından düzenlenen “Marx, Marksizmler ve Özgürlük” konferansı uzun zamandır üzerinde çalıştığım konular ile ilgili görüşlerimi sunma fırsatı verdi. Praksis dergisini ilk yayınladığım 1996 yılında aşağıda sunduğum düşüncelerimin temellerini atmıştım aslında. Ancak hala teoride ki sorunu bir bütün olarak, Marx ve Engels’te değil Marksizmin kavranılışında olduğunda ısrarcıydım. Çalışmalarım, Marx’ın tarih, diyalektik yöntem, sınıf savaşımı, kapitalizm eleştirisi ve bilim anlayışı gibi pek çok temel konuda tamamen farklı teorik perspektif ve anlayış geliştirmemle sonuçlandı. Bu görüşlerimi (...)
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  • Carnap’s Logic of Science and Reference to the Present Moment.Florian Fischer - 2016 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 30 (2):61-90.
    The important switch from the so-called old B-theory to the new tenseless theory of time (NTT), which had significant implications for the field of tense and indexicals, occurred after Carnap’s era. Against this new background, Carnap’s original inter-translatability thesis can no longer be upheld. The most natural way out would be to modify Carnap’s position according to the NTT; but this is not compatible with Carnap’s metaphysical neutrality thesis. Even worse, Carnap’s work on measurement theory can be used to develop (...)
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  • Constructing the World and Locating Oneself.Peter Pagin - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (4):827-852.
    In Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Robert Stalnaker describes two opposed perspectives on the relation between the internal and the external. According to one, the internal world is taken as given and the external world as problematic, and according to the other, the external world is taken as given and the internal world as problematic. Analytic philosophy moved from the former to the latter, from problems of world-construction to problems of self-locating beliefs. I argue in this paper that these (...)
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  • The question of realism for powers.Lorenzo Azzano - 2019 - Synthese 196 (1):329-354.
    In recent years, a new dispute has risen to prominence: the dispute between realists and anti-realists about causal powers. Albeit sometimes overlooked, the meta-ontological features of this “question of realism for powers” are quite peculiar. For friends and foes of causal powers have characterized their contrasting views in a variety of different ways; as existence claims, as semantic or truth-making claims, as fundamentality claims, as claims about the nature of certain properties. Not only does this multiplicity of interpretations make it (...)
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  • On the justification of deduction and induction.Franz Huber - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 7 (3):507-534.
    The thesis of this paper is that we can justify induction deductively relative to one end, and deduction inductively relative to a different end. I will begin by presenting a contemporary variant of Hume ’s argument for the thesis that we cannot justify the principle of induction. Then I will criticize the responses the resulting problem of induction has received by Carnap and Goodman, as well as praise Reichenbach ’s approach. Some of these authors compare induction to deduction. Haack compares (...)
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  • Disposition.Marie I. Kaiser & Andreas Hüttemann - 2013 - In Dubitzky W., Wolkenhauer O., Cho K.-H. & Yokota H. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Systems Biology, Vol. X. Springer. pp. 594-597.
    This is a contribution to the encyclopedia of systems biology on dispositions.
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  • Conceptual Analysis Naturalized.Christopher Hitchcock - 2006 - Journal of Philosophy 103 (9):427-451.
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  • (1 other version)In Carnap’s Defense: A survey on the concept of a linguistic framework in Carnap’s philosophy.Parzhad Torfehnezhad - 2016 - Abstracta 9 (1):03-30.
    The main task in this paper is to detail and investigate Carnap’s conception of a “linguistic framework”. On this basis, we will see whether Carnap’s dichotomies, such as the analytic-synthetic distinction, are to be construed as absolute/fundamental dichotomies or merely as relative dichotomies. I argue for a novel interpretation of Carnap’s conception of a LF and, on that basis, will show that, according to Carnap, all the dichotomies to be discussed are relative dichotomies; they depend on conventional decisions concerning the (...)
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  • Neutralism and the Observational Sorites Paradox.Patrick Greenough - manuscript
    Neutralism is the broad view that philosophical progress can take place when (and sometimes only when) a thoroughly neutral, non-specific theory, treatment, or methodology is adopted. The broad goal here is to articulate a distinct, specific kind of sorites paradox (The Observational Sorites Paradox) and show that it can be effectively treated via Neutralism.
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  • American Pragmatism and the Vienna Circle: The Early Years.Thomas Uebel - 2015 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 3 (3).
    Discussions of the relation between pragmatism and logical empiricism tend to focus on the period when the logical empiricists found themselves in exile, mostly in the United States, and then attempt to gauge the actual extent of their convergence. My concern lies with the period before that and the question whether pragmatism had an earlier influence on the development of logical empiricism, especially on the thought of the former members of the “first” Vienna Circle. I argue for a substantially qualified (...)
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  • How (not) to think about idealisation and ceteris paribus -laws.Robert Kowalenko - 2009 - Synthese 167 (1):183-201.
    "Semantic dispositionalism" is the theory that a speaker's meaning something by a given linguistic symbol is determined by her dispositions to use the symbol in a certain way. According to an objection by Kripke, further elaborated in Kusch :156–163, 2005), semantic dispositionalism involves ceteris paribus-clauses and idealisations, such as unbounded memory, that deviate from standard scientific methodology. I argue that Kusch misrepresents both ceteris paribus-laws and idealisation, neither of which factually "approximate" the behaviour of agents or the course of events, (...)
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  • Karl Popper: Philosophy of Science.Brendan Shea - 2011 - In James Fieser & Bradley Dowden (eds.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge.
    Karl Popper (1902-1994) was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to debates concerning general scientific methodology and theory choice, the demarcation of science from non-science, the nature of probability and quantum mechanics, and the methodology of the social sciences. His work is notable for its wide influence both within the philosophy of science, within science itself, and within a broader social context. Popper’s early work attempts to solve the problem of (...)
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  • Dispositions.James M. Bucknell - 2015 - Dissertation, Univeristy of New South Wales
    This thesis proposes that key, competing theories of dispositions mistake and conflate how we identify, designate and talk about dispositions and dispositional terms for the nature of dispositions and the meaning of dispositional terms when they argue that: a) dispositions are extrinsic properties of their bearers (Boyle 1666) b) all properties are purely dispositional (Bird 2007) c) all properties are purely categorical (there are no dispositional properties) (Armstrong in AMP 1996) d) dispositional and categorical properties are separate and distinct properties (...)
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  • Philosophy as conceptual engineering: Inductive logic in Rudolf Carnap's scientific philosophy.Christopher F. French - 2015 - Dissertation, University of British Columbia
    My dissertation explores the ways in which Rudolf Carnap sought to make philosophy scientific by further developing recent interpretive efforts to explain Carnap’s mature philosophical work as a form of engineering. It does this by looking in detail at his philosophical practice in his most sustained mature project, his work on pure and applied inductive logic. I, first, specify the sort of engineering Carnap is engaged in as involving an engineering design problem and then draw out the complications of design (...)
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  • On the Ontology of Linguistic Frameworks Toward a Comprehensive Version of Empiricism.Majid Davoody Beni - 2015 - Philodophia Scientiae 19 (1):115-126.
    Can the abstract entities be designated? While the empiricists usually took the positive answer to this question as the first step toward Platonism, in his ``Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology’’ [Carnap 1950], Carnap tried to make a reconciliation between the language referring to abstract entities on the one hand, and empiricism on the other. In this paper, firstly, I show that the ingenuity of Carnap’s approach notwithstanding, it is prone to criticism from different aspects. But I also show how, even without (...)
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  • La teoría de los grupos de referencia.Cláudio Abreu - 2012 - Agora 31 (2):287-309.
    El objetivo de este artículo es presentar una reconstrucción de la teoría de los grupos dereferencia. La teoría, desarrollada por Robert K. Merton, ha sido largamente utilizada enlos más variados campos de las ciencias sociales, aunque con escasa o nula consideraciónmetateórica hasta ahora. La reconstrucción atenderá a la presentación que de la misma serecoge en sendos artículos de su libro Social Theory and Social Structure, de 1968, a saber:“Contributions to the theory of reference group behavior” y “Continuities in the theory (...)
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  • Philipp Frank’s Austro-American Logical Empiricism.Thomas Mormann - 2017 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 7 (1): 56 - 86.
    The aim of this paper is to discuss the “Austro-American” logical empiricism proposed by physicist and philosopher Philipp Frank, particularly his interpretation of Carnap’s Aufbau, which he considered the charter of logical empiricism as a scientific world conception. According to Frank, the Aufbau was to be read as an integration of the ideas of Mach and Poincaré, leading eventually to a pragmatism quite similar to that of the American pragmatist William James. Relying on this peculiar interpretation, Frank intended to bring (...)
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  • La concezione epistemica dell'analiticità.Alessia Marabini - 2014 - Aracne editrice.
    La rinascita negli ultimi decenni di un nutrito dibattito intorno alla nozione di analiticità dopo le critiche a suo tempo mosse da Quine alla batteria di nozioni utilizzate da Rudolf Carnap (ad esempio, postulati di significato, regole semantiche, definizioni implicite, convenzioni e stipulazioni esplicite) prende le mosse da una riflessione critica sulle argomentazioni di Quine e tenta, da un lato, di approfondire meglio il legame fra analiticità e conoscenza a priori, e, dall’altro, di capire meglio il ruolo che la definizione (...)
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  • The Structure of Scientific Theories.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Scientific inquiry has led to immense explanatory and technological successes, partly as a result of the pervasiveness of scientific theories. Relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and plate tectonics were, and continue to be, wildly successful families of theories within physics, biology, and geology. Other powerful theory clusters inhabit comparatively recent disciplines such as cognitive science, climate science, molecular biology, microeconomics, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). Effective scientific theories magnify understanding, help supply legitimate explanations, and assist in formulating predictions. Moving from their (...)
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  • Asking about data: exploring different realities of data via the social data flow network methodology.Brian Ballsun-Stanton - unknown
    What is data? That question is the fundamental investigation of this dissertation. I have developed a methodology from social-scientific processes to explore how different people understand the concept of data, rather than to rely on my own philosophical intuitions or thought experiments about the “nature” of data. The evidence I have gathered as to different individuals' constructions of data can be used to inform further inquiry of data and the design of information systems. My research demonstrates that people have different (...)
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  • Pluralists about Pluralism? Versions of Explanatory Pluralism in Psychiatry.Jeroen Van Bouwel - 2014 - In Thomas Uebel (ed.), New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 105-119.
    In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...)
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  • Carnap's Forgotten Criterion of Empirical Significance.James Justus - 2014 - Mind 123 (490):415-436.
    The waning popularity of logical empiricism and the supposed discovery of insurmountable technical difficulties led most philosophers to abandon the project to formulate a formal criterion of empirical significance. Such a criterion would delineate claims that observation can confirm or disconfirm from those it cannot. Although early criteria were clearly inadequate, criticisms made of later, more sophisticated criteria were often indefensible or easily answered. Most importantly, Carnap’s last criterion was seriously misinterpreted and an amended version of it remains tenable.
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  • (1 other version)Sobre la unidad de las ciencias biológicas.Pablo Lorenzano - 2001 - Signos Filosóficos 3 (5):121-131.
    The aim of this article is to examine, in the light of some recent works in general philosophy of science and special philosophy of biology, the different forms assumed by the thesis of the unity of science, in order to be able to determine in what sense one can speak of a unity of the biological sciences.
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  • The Demarcation between Philosophy and Science.Gustavo Fernández Díez - 2010 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 10 (2):131-146.
    This paper is based on a criterion recently proposed by Richard Fumerton for demarcating philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I suggest to extend it to a demarcation criterion between philosophy and science in general, and put it in the context of the historical changes of boundaries between the philosophical and the scientifi c fi eld. I point to a number of philosophical claims and approaches that have been made utterly obsolete by the advancement of science, and conjecture that a (...)
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  • Occasions for an Empirical History of Philosophy of Science: American Philosophers of Science at Work in the 1950s and 1960s.Alan Richardson - 2012 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 2 (1):1-20.
    The text- and argument-focused histories of philosophy that we have are mainly interested in teasing out the details of the positions taken on philosophical issues by individual philosophers. But this is a long way from having a historical explanation of the larger-scale trajectory of philosophical development. An empirical history of philosophy, however, examines the institutionalized places and venues for philosophical work that provide a rich, shared structure for the promotion of particular sorts of work. Mid-twentieth-century philosophers of science such as (...)
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  • Realism: Metaphysical, Scientific, and Semantic.Panu Raatikainen - 2014 - In Kenneth R. Westphal (ed.), Realism, Science, and Pragmatism. New York: Routledge. pp. 139-158.
    Three influential forms of realism are distinguished and interrelated: realism about the external world, construed as a metaphysical doctrine; scientific realism about non-observable entities postulated in science; and semantic realism as defined by Dummett. Metaphysical realism about everyday physical objects is contrasted with idealism and phenomenalism, and several potent arguments against these latter views are reviewed. -/- Three forms of scientific realism are then distinguished: (i) scientific theories and their existence postulates should be taken literally; (ii) the existence of unobservable (...)
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  • Innen und außen: zwei Perspektiven auf analytische Sätze.Olaf L. Müller - 2008 - Philosophia Naturalis 45 (1):5-35.
    Man kann die Unterscheidung zwischen synthetischen und analytischen Sätzen aus zwei Perspektiven betrachten – von innen oder von außen: mit Blick auf die eigene Sprache oder mit Blick auf die Sprache anderer. Wer die Außenperspektive einnimmt, sucht eine Antwort auf die deskriptive Frage, welche Sätze einer fremden Sprache als analytisch zu klassifizieren sind. Wer die Innenperspektive einnimmt, sucht dagegen eine Antwort auf folgende normative Frage: Welche Sätze darf ich nicht preisgeben oder zurückweisen – wenn ich keinen Unfug reden will? Die (...)
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  • Semantic approaches in the philosophy of science.Emma B. Ruttkamp - 1999 - South African Journal of Philosophy 18 (2):100-148.
    In this article I give an overview of some recent work in philosophy of science dedicated to analysing the scientific process in terms of (conceptual) mathematical models of theories and the various semantic relations between such models, scientific theories, and aspects of reality. In current philosophy of science, the most interesting questions centre around the ways in which writers distinguish between theories and the mathematical structures that interpret them and in which they are true, i.e. between scientific theories as linguistic (...)
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  • Images and Constructs: Can the Neural Correlates of Self be revealed through Radiological Analysis?Stan Klein - 2013 - International Journal of Psychological Research 6:117-132.
    In this paper I argue that radiological attempts to elucidate the properties of self -- an endeavor currently popular in the social neurosciences -- are fraught with conceptual difficulties. I first discuss several philosophical criteria that increase the chances we are posing the “right” questions to nature. I then discuss whether these criteria are met when empirical efforts are directed at one of the central constructs in the social sciences – the human self. In particular, I consider whether recent attempts (...)
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  • Properties: Qualities, Powers, or Both?Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson - 2013 - Dialectica 67 (1):55-80.
    Powers are popularly assumed to be distinct from, and dependent upon, inert qualities, mainly because it is believed that qualities have their nature independently of other properties while powers have their nature in virtue of a relation to distinct manifestation property. George Molnar and Alexander Bird, on the other hand, characterize powers as intrinsic and relational. The difficulties of reconciling the characteristics of being intrinsic and at the same time essentially related are illustrated in this paper and it is argued (...)
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  • “Logical Positivism”—“Logical Empiricism”: What's in a Name?Thomas Uebel - 2013 - Perspectives on Science 21 (1):58-99.
    Do the terms “logical positivism” and “logical empiricism” mark a philosophically real and significant distinction? There is, of course, no doubt that the first term designates the group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle, headed by Moritz Schlick and including Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Friedrich Waismann and others. What is debatable, however, is whether the name “logical positivism” correctly distinguishes their doctrines from related ones called “logical empiricism” that emerged from the Berlin Society (...)
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  • Science, metaphysics and method.James Ladyman - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (1):31-51.
    While there are many examples of metaphysical theorising being heuristically and intellectually important in the progress of scientific knowledge, many people wonder how metaphysics not closely informed and inspired by empirical science could lead to rival or even supplementary knowledge about the world. This paper assesses the merits of a popular defence of the a priori methodology of metaphysics that goes as follows. The first task of the metaphysician, like the scientist, is to construct a hypothesis that accounts for the (...)
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  • 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, (...)
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  • The Myth of Logical Behaviourism and the Origins of the Identity Theory.Sean Crawford - 2013 - In Michael Beaney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it is misleading, as it is (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • I. Addis on analysing disposition concepts.Fred Wilson - 1985 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 28 (1-4):247-260.
    Addis (1981) has criticized a proposal of ours (Wilson [1969b]) for analysing disposition predications in terns of the horseshoe of material implication, and has proposed a related but significantly different analysis. This paper restates the original proposal, and defends it against Addis's criticisms. It is further argued that his proposal will not do as a general account of disposition predications; that, however, if it is suitably qualified, then it does account for certain special sorts of disposition predication; but that so (...)
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  • (1 other version)Is Freudian psychoanalytic theory really falsifiable?M. A. Notturno & Paul R. Mchugh - 1987 - Metaphilosophy 18 (3-4):306-320.
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  • Scientific Realism and the Rationality of Science.Howard Sankey - 2008 - Ashgate.
    Scientific realism is the position that the aim of science is to advance on truth and increase knowledge about observable and unobservable aspects of the mind-independent world which we inhabit. This book articulates and defends that position. In presenting a clear formulation and addressing the major arguments for scientific realism Sankey appeals to philosophers beyond the community of, typically Anglo-American, analytic philosophers of science to appreciate and understand the doctrine. The book emphasizes the epistemological aspects of scientific realism and contains (...)
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  • The Powerlessness of Necessity.Markus Schrenk - 2010 - Noûs 44 (4):725-739.
    This paper concerns anti-Humean intuitions about connections in nature. It argues for the existence of a de re link that is not necessity.Some anti-Humeans tacitly assume that metaphysical necessity can be used for all sorts of anti-Humean desires. Metaphysical necessity is thought to stick together whatever would be loose and separate in a Hume world, as if it were a kind of universal superglue.I argue that this is not feasible. Metaphysical necessity might connect synchronically co-existent properties—kinds and their essential features, (...)
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  • Dispositions and habituals.Michael Fara - 2005 - Noûs 39 (1):43–82.
    Objects have dispositions. As Nelson Goodman put it, “a thing is full of threats and promises”. But sometimes those threats go unfulfilled, and the promises unkept. Sometimes the dispositions of objects fail to manifest themselves, even when their conditions of manifestation obtain. Pieces of wood, disposed to burn when heated, do not burn when heated in a vacuum chamber. And pastries, disposed to go bad when left lying around too long, won’t do so if coated with lacquer and put on (...)
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  • Carnap's conventionalism.Richard Creath - 1992 - Synthese 93 (1-2):141 - 165.
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  • Theory-dependent terms.David Papineau - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (1):1-20.
    The main puzzle about theoretical definitions is that nothing seems to decide which assumptions contribute to such definitions and which do not. I argue that theoretical definitions are indeed imprecise, but that this does not normally matter, since the definitional imprecision does not normally produce indeterminacy of referential value. Sometimes, however, the definitional imprecision is less benign, and does generate referential indeterminacy. In these special cases, but not otherwise, it is necessary to refine the term's definition.
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  • The logic of discovery.Kevin T. Kelly - 1987 - Philosophy of Science 54 (3):435-452.
    There is renewed interest in the logic of discovery as well as in the position that there is no reason for philosophers to bother with it. This essay shows that the traditional, philosophical arguments for the latter position are bankrupt. Moreover, no interesting defense of the philosophical irrelevance or impossibility of the logic of discovery can be formulated or defended in isolation from computation-theoretic considerations.
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  • Laws and dispositions.Andreas Hüttemann - 1998 - Philosophy of Science 65 (1):121-135.
    Laws are supposed to tell us how physical systems actually behave. The analysis of an important part of physical practice--abstraction--shows, however, that laws describe the behavior of physical systems under very special circumstances, namely when they are isolated. Nevertheless, laws are applied in cases of non-isolation as well. This practice requires an explanation. It is argued that one has to assume that physical systems have dispositions. I take these to be innocuous from an empiricist's standpoint because they can--at least in (...)
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