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  1. Meaning and Interpretation. I.Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska - 2007 - Studia Logica 85 (1):105-132.
    The paper is an attempt at a logical explication of some crucial notions of current general semantics and pragmatics. A general, axiomatic, formal-logical theory of meaning and interpretation is outlined in this paper.In the theory, accordingto the token-type distinction of Peirce, language is formalised on two levels: first as a language of token-objects (understood as material, empirical, enduring through time-and space objects) and then – as a language of type-objects (understood as abstract objects, as classes of tokens). The basic concepts (...)
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  • Meaning and Interpretation. II.Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska - 2007 - Studia Logica 85 (2):261-274.
    The paper enriches the conceptual apparatus of the theory of meaning and denotation that was presented in Part I (Section 3). This part concentrates on the notion of interpretation, which is defined as an equivalence class of the relation possessing the same manner of interpreting types. In this part, some relations between meaning and interpretation, as well as one between denotation an interpretational denotation are established. In the theory of meaning and interpretation, the notion of language communication has been formally (...)
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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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  • 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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  • Scientific Theories.Hans Halvorson - 2014 - In Paul Humphreys (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 585-608.
    Since the beginning of the 20th century, philosophers of science have asked, "what kind of thing is a scientific theory?" The logical positivists answered: a scientific theory is a mathematical theory, plus an empirical interpretation of that theory. Moreover, they assumed that a mathematical theory is specified by a set of axioms in a formal language. Later 20th century philosophers questioned this account, arguing instead that a scientific theory need not include a mathematical component; or that the mathematical component need (...)
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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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  • 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, (...)
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • (1 other version)Testovateľnosť a význam observačných a teoretických termínov.Lukáš Bielik - 2011 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 18 (3):384-397.
    Carnap’s analysis of the language of science had presupposed too close a connection between the semantics and testability. The core problem of the logical empiricist tradition was to show how to provide the interpretation of theoretical terms and hence the explanation of their application to observable entities by means of observation terms. It is argued that the utilization of a much more expressive semantic theory which identifies meanings with hyperintensional entities leads to a clarification of the competencies of semantics and (...)
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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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  • 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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  • The Semantics of Scientific Theories.Sebastian Lutz - 2014 - In Anna Brożek & Jacek Jadacki (eds.), Księga pamiątkowa Marianowi Przełęckiemu w darze na 90-lecie urodzin. pp. 33-67.
    Marian Przełęcki’s semantics for the Received View is a good explication of Carnap’s position on the subject, anticipates many discussions and results from both proponents and opponents of the Received View, and can be the basis for a thriving research program.
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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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  • Modality and Anti-Metaphysics.Stephen K. McLeod - 2001 - Aldershot: Ashgate.
    Modality and Anti-Metaphysics critically examines the most prominent approaches to modality among analytic philosophers in the twentieth century, including essentialism. Defending both the project of metaphysics and the essentialist position that metaphysical modality is conceptually and ontologically primitive, Stephen McLeod argues that the logical positivists did not succeed in banishing metaphysical modality from their own theoretical apparatus and he offers an original defence of metaphysics against their advocacy of its elimination. -/- Seeking to assuage the sceptical worries which underlie modal (...)
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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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  • (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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Reid's foundation for the primary/secondary quality distinction.Jennifer McKitrick - 2002 - Philosophical Quarterly 52 (209):478-494.
    Reid offers an under-appreciated account of the primary/secondary quality distinction. He gives sound reasons for rejecting the views of Locke, Boyle, Galileo and others, and presents a better alternative, according to which the distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. Primary qualities, for Reid, are qualities whose intrinsic natures can be known through sensation. Secondary qualities, on the other hand, are unknown causes of sensations. Some may object that Reid's view is internally inconsistent, or unacceptably relativistic. However, a deeper understanding shows (...)
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  • Logical Positivism: The History of a “Caricature”.Sander Verhaegh - 2024 - Isis 115 (1):46-64.
    Logical positivism is often characterized as a set of naive doctrines on meaning, method, and metaphysics. In recent decades, however, historians have dismissed this view as a gross misinterpretation. This new scholarship raises a number of questions. When did the standard reading emerge? Why did it become so popular? And how could commentators have been so wrong? This essay reconstructs the history of a “caricature” and rejects the hypothesis that it was developed by ill-informed Anglophone scholars who failed to appreciate (...)
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  • Vindicating the verifiability criterion.Hannes Leitgeb - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (1):223-245.
    The aim of this paper is to argue for a revised and precisified version of the infamous Verifiability Criterion for the meaningfulness of declarative sentences. The argument is based on independently plausible premises concerning probabilistic confirmation and meaning as context-change potential, it is shown to be logically valid, and its ramifications for potential applications of the criterion are being discussed. Although the paper is not historical but systematic, the criterion thus vindicated will resemble the original one(s) in some important ways. (...)
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  • Carnap and the a priori.Benjamin Marschall - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (3):801-819.
    What are Carnap's views on the epistemology of mathematics? Did he believe in a priori justification, and if so, what is his account of it? One might think that such questions are misguided, since in the 1930s Carnap came to reject traditional epistemology as a confused mixture of logic and psychology. But things are not that simple. Drawing on recent work by Richardson and Uebel, I will show that Carnap's mature metaphilosophy leaves room for two distinct notions of a priori (...)
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  • Lewis and Quine in context.Sander Verhaegh - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):1-8.
    Robert Sinclair’s *Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction* persuasively argues that Quine’s epistemology was deeply influenced by C. I. Lewis’s pragmatism. Sinclair’s account raises the question why Quine himself frequently downplayed Lewis’s influence. Looking back, Quine has always said that Rudolf Carnap was his “greatest teacher” and that his 1933 meeting with the German philosopher was his “first experience of sustained intellectual engagement with anyone of an older generation” (1970, 41; 1985, 97-8, my emphasis). Quine’s autobiographies contain only a (...)
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  • New Foundations of Dispositionalism - introduction.Andrea Raimondi & Lorenzo Azzano - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-26.
    As Price (2009) famously mused, if a philosopher were to be magically transported, perhaps through means of time travel, from the 1950s to the modern day, they would indeed be shocked by the resurgence of metaphysics in the analytic tradition. Most of all, perhaps, they would be shocked by the popularity of power metaphysics. What a strange item to have in a philosopher’s curriculum, they might think: after all, didn’t David Hume claim that “[t]here are no ideas which can occur (...)
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