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Testability and meaning

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

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  1. 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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  • (1 other version)Why Tolerate Conscience?François Boucher & Cécile Laborde - forthcoming - Criminal Law and Philosophy:1-21.
    In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and secular claims of conscience, highlighting the practical and moral flaws associated with it. We (...)
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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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  • Information is intrinsically semantic but alethically neutral.Bruce Raymond Long - 2014 - Synthese 191 (14):3447-3467.
    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 (...)
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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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  • Classical genetics and the theory-net of genetics.Pablo Lorenzano - 2000 - In Joseph D. Sneed, Wolfgang Balzer & C.-U. Moulines (eds.), Structuralist Knowledge Representation: Paradigmatic Examples. Rodopi. pp. 75-251.
    This article presents a reconstruction of the so-called classical, formal or Mendelian genetics, which is intended to be more complete and adequate than existing reconstructions. This reconstruction has been carried out with the instruments, duly modified and extended with respect to the case under consideration, of the structuralist conception of theories. The so-called Mendel’s Laws, as well as linkage genetics and gene mapping are formulated in a precise manner while the global structure of genetics is represented as a theory-net. These (...)
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  • Can Capacities rescue us from cp Laws.Markus Schrenk - 2007 - In B. Gnassounou & M. Kistler (eds.), Dispositions in Philosophy and Science. Ashgate. pp. 221--247.
    Many philosophers of science think that most laws of nature (even those of fundamental physics) are so called ceteris paribus laws, i.e. roughly speaking, laws with exceptions. Yet, the ceteris paribus clause of these laws is problematic. Amongst the more infamous difficulties is the danger that ‘For all x: Fx then Gx, ceteris paribus’ may state no more than a tautology: ‘For all x: Fx then Gx, unless not’. One of the major attempts to avoid this problem (and others concerning (...)
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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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  • Direct awareness and inference.Judith Economos - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):452.
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  • Are extrageniculostriate pathways nonfunctional in man?M. T. Perenin & M. Jeannerod - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):458.
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  • Quine's Argument from Despair.Sander Verhaegh - 2014 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (1):150-173.
    Quine's argument for a naturalized epistemology is routinely perceived as an argument from despair: traditional epistemology must be abandoned because all attempts to deduce our scientific theories from sense experience have failed. In this paper, I will show that this picture is historically inaccurate and that Quine's argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than the standard conception suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher's quest for foundations is inherently incoherent; the very idea of a self-sufficient sense datum language (...)
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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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  • Carnap and Newton: Two Approaches to the Method of Theory Construction (Part I).Igor Hanzel - 2009 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 16 (2):183-213.
    The paper, as a continuation of the paper Hanzel , provides a methodological generalization of Newton’s method of theory construction as applied in Book I and Book III of his Principia. It reconstructs also the method of measures applied in those books. Finally, it shows how the term “harmonic law” changes its meaning in the Principia.
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  • Fernomenotecnia y conceptualización en la epistemología de Gaston Bachelard.Roberto Torretti - 2012 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 27 (1):97-114.
    Se explican dos ideas capitales de la epistemología de Bachelard y su relación mutua: la ciencia es fenomenotécnica, la ciencia inventa sus conceptos La producción de fenómenos con arreglo a esos conceptos certifica su idoneidad.We explain two main ideas of Bachelard’s philosophy of science and their mutual relation. Science produces phenomena and creates its own concepts. Production of phenomena according to these concepts certifies their aptness.
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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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  • Carnap and the compulsions of interpretation: Reining in the liberalization of empiricism. [REVIEW]Sahotra Sarkar - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (3):353-372.
    Carnap’s work was instrumental to the liberalization of empiricism in the 1930s that transformed the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle to what came to be known as logical empiricism. A central feature of this liberalization was the deployment of the Principle of Tolerance, originally introduced in logic, but now invoked in an epistemological context in “Testability and Meaning”. Immediately afterwards, starting with Foundations of Logic and Mathematics, Carnap embraced semantics and turned to interpretation to guide the choice of a (...)
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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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  • Carnapian and Tarskian semantics.Pierre Wagner - 2017 - Synthese 194 (1):97-119.
    Many papers have been devoted to the semantic turn Carnap took in the late 1930s after Tarski had explained to him his method for defining truth and his work on the establishment of scientific semantics. Commentators have often argued that the major turn in Carnap’s approach to languages had already been taken in the Logical Syntax of Language, but they have usually assumed that Carnap was happy to subsequently follow Tarski and adopt Tarskian semantics. In this paper, it is argued (...)
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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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  • 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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  • Criteria of empirical significance: a success story.Sebastian Lutz - manuscript
    The sheer multitude of criteria of empirical significance has been taken as evidence that the pre-analytic notion being explicated is too vague to be useful. I show instead that a significant number of these criteria—by Ayer, Popper, Przełęcki, Suppes, and David Lewis, among others—not only form a coherent whole, but also connect directly to the theory of definition, the notion of empirical content as explicated by Ramsey sentences, and the theory of measurement; two criteria by Carnap and Sober are trivial, (...)
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  • On a Straw Man in the Philosophy of Science - A Defense of the Received View.Sebastian Lutz - 2012 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 2 (1):77–120.
    I defend the Received View on scientific theories as developed by Carnap, Hempel, and Feigl against a number of criticisms based on misconceptions. First, I dispute the claim that the Received View demands axiomatizations in first order logic, and the further claim that these axiomatizations must include axioms for the mathematics used in the scientific theories. Next, I contend that models are important according to the Received View. Finally, I argue against the claim that the Received View is intended to (...)
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  • On the Aim of Scientific Theories in Relating to the World: A Defence of the Semantic Account.Michael Baur - 1990 - Dialogue 29 (3):323-.
    According to the received view of scientific theories, a scientific theory is an axiomatic-deductive linguistic structure which must include some set of guidelines (“correspondence rules”) for interpreting its theoretical terms with reference to the world of observable phenomena. According to the semantic view, a scientific theory need not be formulated as an axiomatic-deductive structure with correspondence rules, but need only specify models which are said to be “isomorphic” with actual phenomenal systems. In this paper, I consider both the received and (...)
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  • Concepts as Tools in the Experimental Generation of Knowledge in Cognitive Neuropsychology.Uljana Feest - 2010 - Spontaneous Generations 4 (1):173-190.
    This paper asks (a) how new scientific objects of research are onceptualized at a point in time when little is known about them, and (b) how those conceptualizations, in turn, figure in the process of investigating the phenomena in question. Contrasting my approach with existing notions of concepts and situating it in relation to existing discussions about the epistemology of experimentation, I propose to think of concepts as research tools. I elaborate on the conception of a tool that informs my (...)
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  • A semantic analysis of conditional logic.Robert C. Stalnaker & Richmond H. Thomason - 1970 - Theoria 36 (1):23-42.
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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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  • 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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  • When empirical success implies theoretical reference: A structural correspondence theorem.Gerhard Schurz - 2009 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (1):101-133.
    Starting from a brief recapitulation of the contemporary debate on scientific realism, this paper argues for the following thesis : Assume a theory T has been empirically successful in a domain of application A, but was superseded later on by a superior theory T * , which was likewise successful in A but has an arbitrarily different theoretical superstructure. Then under natural conditions T contains certain theoretical expressions, which yielded T's empirical success, such that these T-expressions correspond (in A) to (...)
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  • Dispositions and subjunctives.Jesse R. Steinberg - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 148 (3):323 - 341.
    It is generally agreed that dispositions cannot be analyzed in terms of simple subjunctive conditionals (because of what are called “masked dispositions” and “finkish dispositions”). I here defend a qualified subjunctive account of dispositions according to which an object is disposed to Φ when conditions C obtain if and only if, if conditions C were to obtain, then the object would Φ ceteris paribus . I argue that this account does not fall prey to the objections that have been raised (...)
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  • Le réalisme des hypothèses et la Partial Interpretation View.Philippe Mongin - 1988 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18 (3):281-325.
    The article discusses Friedman's classic claim that economics can be based on irrealistic assumptions. It exploits Samuelson's distinction between two "F-twists" (that is, "it is an advantage for an economic theory to use irrealistic assumptions" vs "the more irrealistic the assumptions, the better the economic theory"), as well as Nagel's distinction between three philosophy-of-science construals of the basic claim. On examination, only one of Nagel's construals seems promising enough. It involves the neo-positivistic distinction between theoretical and non-theoretical ("observable") terms; so (...)
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  • Scepticism, context and modal reasoning.Andrej Ule - 2004 - Acta Analytica 19 (33):9-30.
    I analyze some classical solutions of the skeptical argument and some of their week points (especially the contextualist solution). First I have proposed some possible improvement of the contextualist solution (the introduction of the explicit-implicit belief and knowledge distinction beside the differences in the relevance of some counter-factual alternatives). However, this solution does not block too fast jumps of the everyday context (where empirical knowledge is possible) into skeptical context (where empirical knowledge is impossible). Then I analyze some formal analogies (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Hans Reichenbach.Clark Glymour - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • (1 other version)Carnap’s Logical Empiricism, Values, and American Pragmatism.Thomas Mormann - 2006 - Journal of General Philosophy of Science 38 (1):127 - 146.
    Abstract. Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap’s mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were con-sidered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted from value experiences. About 1930, however, values were banished to the realm of meaning-less me-taphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict emotivism. The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the question why Carnap abandoned his originally positive (...)
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  • (1 other version)On the production, history, and aspects of the reception of the vienna circle's manifesto.Thomas Uebel - 2008 - Perspectives on Science 16 (1):70-102.
    : Considerable unclarity exists in the literature concerning the origin and authorship of Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis, the Vienna Circle's manifesto of 1929 and on the extent of and the reasons for the mixed reception it received in the Circle itself. This paper reconsiders these matters on the light of so far insufficiently consulted documents.
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  • "Coordinative definition" and Reichenbach's semantic framework: A reassessment.Lionel Stefan Shapiro - 1994 - Erkenntnis 41 (3):287 - 323.
    Reichenbach's Philosophy of Space and Time (1928) avoids most of the logical positivist pitfalls it is generally held to exemplify, notably both conventionalism and verificationism. To see why, we must appreciate that Reichenbach's interest lies in how mathematical structures can be used to describe reality, not in how words like 'distance' acquire meaning. Examination of his proposed "coordinative definition" of congruence shows that Reichenbach advocates a reductionist analysis of the relations figuring in physical geometry (contrary to common readings that attribute (...)
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  • Philosophy and meta-philosophy of science: Empiricism, popperianism and realism.C. A. Hooker - 1975 - Synthese 32 (1-2):177 - 231.
    An explicit philosophy and meta-philosophy of positivism, empiricism and popperianism is provided. Early popperianism is argued to be essentially a form of empiricism, the deviations from empiricism are traced. In contrast, the meta-philosophy and philosophy of an evolutionary naturalistic realism is developed and it is shown how the maximal conflict of this doctrine with all forms of empiricism at the meta-philosophical level both accounts for the form of its development at the philosophical level and its defense against attack from nonrealist (...)
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  • Dispositions: Defined or reduced?Fred Wilson - 1969 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2):184 – 204.
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  • Dispositions defined: Harré and Madden on analyzing disposition concepts.Fred Wilson - 1985 - Philosophy of Science 52 (4):591-607.
    If one proposes to analyze dispositions by means of statements involving only the 'if-then' of material implication--that is, for example, to define 'x is soluble' by means of 'x is in water ⊃ x dissolves'--then one faces the problem first raised by Carnap, the match which is never put in water and which therefore turns out to be not only soluble but also both soluble and insoluble. I have elsewhere argued that if one refers to appropriate laws, then one can (...)
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  • Anti-foundationalism and the vienna circle's revolution in philosophy.Thomas E. Uebel - 1996 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (3):415-440.
    The tendency to attribute foundationalist ambitions to the Vienna Circle has long obscured our view of its attempted revolution in philosophy. The present paper makes the case for a consistently epistemologically anti-foundationalist interpretation of all three of the Circle's main protagonists: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. Corresponding to the intellectual fault lines within the Circle, two ways of going about the radical reorientation of the pursuit of philosophy will then be distinguished and the contemporary potential of Carnap's and Neurath's project explored.
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  • Some remarks on problems and methods in the philosophy of science.Patrick Suppes - 1954 - Philosophy of Science 21 (3):242-248.
    What sort of subject is the philosophy of science? It would be difficult to find any sort of agreement on the answer to this question. There are a large number of physicists who have promoted the idea that the subject is a kind of cosmic journalism: any new major discoveries in physics warrant an up-to-the- minute, catch-as-catch-can analysis of the boundaries of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, the Oxonian sirens of ordinary language tell us that any careful scrutiny of (...)
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  • The empirical basis and theoretical structure of psychology.Kenneth W. Spence - 1957 - Philosophy of Science 24 (2):97-108.
    In accepting the invitation of your society to discuss some aspects of the philosophy of science, particularly as they might bear on the problems of an experimental psychologist, I should like from the start to make it very clear that I do not consider myself a philosopher, not even an amateur one. Like most empirical scientists, particularly of the laboratory variety, I usually take it for granted that my world is real and that the things I perceive as existing in (...)
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  • Definition and reduction.Edward H. Madden - 1961 - Philosophy of Science 28 (4):390-405.
    While I do not accept any current analysis of theoretical terms I also reject certain criticisms of them. Specifically, I reject the criticism that the paradoxes of material implication and the counterfactual problem eliminate the explicit definition view; and I also reject the criticism that explicitly defined theoretical terms do not refer to anything which "really exists" or do not have "excess meaning." I do argue, however, that the explicit definition view confuses and conflates the concepts of criterion and meaning (...)
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  • The Meaning of Meaning-Fallibilism.Catherine Legg - 2005 - Axiomathes 15 (2):293-318.
    Much discussion of meaning by philosophers over the last 300 years has been predicated on a Cartesian first-person authority (i.e. “infallibilism”) with respect to what one’s terms mean. However this has problems making sense of the way the meanings of scientific terms develop, an increase in scientific knowledge over and above scientists’ ability to quantify over new entities. Although a recent conspicuous embrace of rigid designation has broken up traditional meaning-infallibilism to some extent, this new dimension to the meaning of (...)
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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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  • What is a disposition?Troy Cross - 2005 - Synthese 144 (3):321-41.
    Attempts to capture the distinction between categorical and dispositional states in terms of more primitive modal notions – subjunctive conditionals, causal roles, or combinatorial principles – are bound to fail. Such failure is ensured by a deep symmetry in the ways dispositional and categorical states alike carry modal import. But the categorical/dispositional distinction should not be abandoned; it underpins important metaphysical disputes. Rather, it should be taken as a primitive, after which the doomed attempts at reductive explanation can be transformed (...)
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