Many who take a dismissive attitude towards metaphysics trace their view back to Carnap’s ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’. But the reason Carnap takes a dismissive attitude to metaphysics is a matter of controversy. I will argue that no reason is given in ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’, and this is because his reason for rejecting metaphysical debates was given in ‘Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy’. The argument there assumes verificationism, but I will argue that his argument survives the rejection of verificationism. The root (...) of his argument is the claim that metaphysical statements cannot be justified; the point is epistemic, not semantic. I will argue that this remains a powerful challenge to metaphysics that has yet to be adequately answered. (shrink)

Grace A. de Laguna was an American philosopher of exceptional originality. Many of the arguments and positions she developed during the early decades of the twentieth century later came to be central to analytic philosophy. These arguments and positions included, even before 1930, a critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, a private language argument, a critique of type physicalism, a functionalist theory of mind, a critique of scientific reductionism, a methodology of research programs in science and more. Nevertheless, de Laguna identified (...) herself as a defender of the speculative vision of philosophy, a vision which, in her words, “analytic philosophy condemns.” I outline her speculative vision of philosophy as well as what is, in effect, an argument she offers against analytic philosophy. This is an argument against the view that key parts of established opinion, e.g., our best theoretical physics or most certain common sense, should be assumed to be true in order to answer philosophical questions. I go on to bring out the implications of her argument for the approaches to philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Willard V. Quine and David Lewis, and I also compare the argument to recent, related arguments against analytic philosophy. I will suggest that de Laguna offers a viable critique of analytic philosophy and an alternative approach to philosophy that meets this critique. (shrink)

A novel account of semantic information is proposed. The gist is that structural correspondence, analysed in terms of similarity, underlies an important kind of semantic information. In contrast to extant accounts of semantic information, it does not rely on correlation, covariation, causation, natural laws, or logical inference. Instead, it relies on structural similarity, defined in terms of correspondence between classifications of tokens into types. This account elucidates many existing uses of the notion of information, for example, in the context of (...) scientific models and structural representations in cognitive science. It is poised to open a new research program concerned with various kinds of semantic information, its functions, and its measurement. (shrink)

CRUICKSHANK J. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 71–82 Positioning positivism, critical realism and social constructionism in the health sciences: a philosophical orientationThis article starts by considering the differences within the positivist tradition and then it moves on to compare two of the most prominent schools of postpositivism, namely critical realism and social constructionism. Critical realists hold, with positivism, that knowledge should be positively applied, but reject the positivist method for doing this, arguing that causal explanations have to be based not on (...) empirical regularities but on references to unobservable structures. Social constructionists take a different approach to postpositivism and endorse a relativist rejection of truth and hold that the task of research is to foster a scepticism that undermines any positive truth claim made. It is argued that social constructionism is a contradictory position. (shrink)

Many of Tarski’s better known papers are either about or include lengthy discussions of how to properly define various concepts: truth, logical consequence, semantic concepts, or definability. In general, these papers identify two primary conditions for successful definitions: formal correctness and material adequacy. Material adequacy requires that the concept expressed by the formal definition capture the intuitive content of truth. Our primary interest in this paper is to better understand Tarski’s thinking about material adequacy, and whether components of his view (...) developed over time. More precisely, we are concerned with how Tarski’s understanding of the content of the common-sense, every-day usage of truth may have developed over time. We distinguish this concern from the character of the extensional criterion of adequacy Tarski proposes: that a materially adequate definition must entail all instances of Convention T. We will develop our reading of Tarski as follows: first, we will review the “Polemical Remarks,” focusing primarily on §§14 and 17, and Tarski’s references to Naess’ empirical research. Next, we will provide a summary and discussion of Naess’ work, especially his findings with respect to Tarski’s definition of truth and his research that suggests there is no single common or everyday concept of truth. Third, we will consider several possible objections to our interpretation of the Tarski–Naess dialectic. We will conclude that Tarski’s conception of material adequacy developed over time, potentially because of what he had learned through his interactions with Naess. (shrink)

The concept of emergence is commonly invoked in modern physics but rarely defined. Building on recent influential work by Jeremy Butterfield, I provide precise definitions of emergence concepts as they pertain to properties represented in models, applying them to some basic examples from space-time and thermostatistical physics. The chief formal innovation I employ, similarity structure, consists in a structured set of similarity relations among those models under analysis—and their properties—and is a generalization of topological structure. Although motivated from physics, this (...) similarity-structure-based account of emergence applies to any science that represents its possibilia with models. (shrink)

On one view of time past, present and future things exist, but their being past, present or future does not consist in their standing in before‐ and after‐relations to other things. So, for example, the event of the signing of the Magna Carta is past, and its being so does not consist in, or reduce to, its coming before the events of 2010.In this paper I discuss arguments for and against this view and view in its near vicinity, perspectival realism. (...) I suggest that perspectival realism is a better view than tense realism. It shares the principal virtues, but not the principal vices, of tense realism. (shrink)

A dilemma has stymied interpretations of the Stranger’s method of dividing kinds into subkinds in Plato’sSophistandStatesman. The dilemma assumes that the kinds are either extensions or intensions. Now kinds divide like extensions, not intensions. But extensions cannot explain the distinct identities of kinds that possess the very same members. We propose understanding a kind as like an animal body—the Stranger’s simile for division—possessing both an extension and an intension. We find textual support in the Stranger’s paradigmatic four steps for collecting (...) a subkind. (shrink)

This article analyses the relationship between the concept of single aspect similarity and proposed measures of similarity. More precisely, it compares eleven measures of similarity in terms of how well they satisfy a list of desiderata, chosen to capture common intuitions concerning the properties of similarity and the relations between similarity and dissimilarity. Three types of measures are discussed: similarity as commonality, similarity as a function of dissimilarity, and similarity as a joint function of commonality and difference. Relative to the (...) desiderata, it is found that a measure of the second type fares the best. However, rather than recommend this measure alone as a measure of similarity, it is suggested that there are at least three separate concepts of single aspect similarity, corresponding to the three types of measures. In light of this proposal, three of the eleven measures (and variants of these) are deemed acceptable. (shrink)

Merely approximate symmetry is mundane enough in physics that one rarely finds any explication of it. Among philosophers it has also received scant attention compared to exact symmetries. Herein I invite further consideration of this concept that is so essential to the practice of physics and interpretation of physical theory. After motivating why it deserves such scrutiny, I propose a minimal definition of approximate symmetry—that is, one that presupposes as little structure on a physical theory to which it is applied (...) as seems needed. Then I apply this definition to three topics: first, accounting for or explaining the symmetries of a theory emeritus in intertheoretic reduction; second, explicating and evaluating the Curie-Post principle; and third, a new account of accidental symmetry. (shrink)

Can philosophy still be fruitful, and what kind of philosophy can be such? In particular, what kind of philosophy can be legitimized in the face of sciences? The aim of this paper is to answer these questions, listing the characteristics philosophy should have to be fruitful and legitimized in the face of sciences. Since the characteristics in question demand that philosophy search for new knowledge and new rules of discovery, a philosophy with such characteristics may be called the ‘heuristic view’. (...) According to the heuristic view, philosophy is an inquiry into the world which is continuous with the sciences. It differs from them only because it deals with questions which are beyond the present sciences, and in order to deal with them must try unexplored routes. By so doing, when successful, it may even give birth to new sciences. In listing the characteristics that philosophy should have, the paper systematically compares them with classical analytic philosophy, because the latter has been the dominant philosophical tradition in the last century. (shrink)

There is a long and distinguished tradition in philosophy and psychology according to which the mind’s fundamental, foundational connection to the world is made by connecting perceptually to features of objects. On this picture, which we’ll call feature prioritarianism, minds like ours first make contact with the colors, shapes, and sizes of distal items, and then, only on the basis of the representations so obtained, build up representations of the objects that bear these features. The feature priority view maintains, then, (...) that our perception/knowledge of objects asymmetrically depends on our perception/knowledge of simple features. This paper has two aims. First, we will present evidence, drawn from a variety of perceptual effects, that feature prioritarianism cannot be true, since there are cases that speak against the priority of feature representations in perceptual processing. Instead, we claim that the evidence supports an alternative —-and more complex—- no-priority view. Second, we will offer a framework for a no-priority view that both captures the cases we cite and provides a more sensible architecture in which to understand a variety of productive projects in perceptual science, and show how the framework cross-cuts some recent discussions in philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Historically, the Vienna Circle and the Dessau Bauhaus were related, with members of each group familiar with the ideas of the other. Peter Galison argues that their projects are related as well, through shared political views and methodological approach. The two main figures that connect the Vienna Circle to the Bauhaus—and the figures upon which Galison focuses—are Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. Yet the connections that Galison develops do not properly capture the common themes between the Bauhaus and Neurath’s philosophical (...) projects. We demonstrate this by considering Neurath’s philosophical commitments. We suggest different connections between Neurath’s projects and the Bauhaus, connections that are both substantive and philosophically interesting. (shrink)

In recent times it has become fashionable to emphasize the role of conceptual change in the history of science. To judge from recent writers, every significant theoretical change in science is first and foremost a revolution in scientific concepts—a conceptual revolution. According to this view, every level of experience is affected by each fundamental theoretical change: physical theory, experimental practice and even perceptual experience. The Aristotelian patrician who watched the sun sink beneath the horizon not only had different beliefs about (...) the phenomenon but actually saw something different from the Newtonian gentleman who saw the horizon rise above his eye-sun line, and the Einsteinian professional who saw the sun's varying geometrical relations to the world light-geodesics on which successive temporal stages of his eye world-line lay. Moreover, such is the completeness of the conceptual-experiential shifts undergone in a fundamental scientific change that it is impossible to meaningfully discuss the one theory within the confines of the other or, indeed, to provide any systematic, cumulative comparison of successive theories. (shrink)

Epistemology and informal logic have overlapping and broadly similar subject matters. A principle of methodological symmetry is: philosophical theories of sufficiently similar subject matters should engage similar methods. Suppose the best way to do epistemology is in highly formalized ways, with a large role for mathematical methods. The symmetry principle suggests this is also the best way to do the logic of the reasoning and argument, the subject matter of informal logic. A capitulation to mathematics is inimical to informal logicians, (...) yet formal methods and mathematical models are an emerging force in epistemology. What is to be done? What’s sauce for the goose of epistemology is sauce for the gander of informal logic. (shrink)

Carnap’s 1931 attack against metaphysics notoriously utilises Heidegger’s work to exemplify the meaninglessness of metaphysical pseudo‐statements. This paper interprets Carnap’s metametaphysics as concerned with delimiting theoretical dialogue in such a manner as to exclude unresolvable disagreements. It puts forth a revised version of Carnap’s argument against the viability of metaphysics, by setting aside his stronger claims that rely on verificationism and focusing instead on his account of metaphysical claims as mere expressions of what he calls “Lebensgefühl,” or a general attitude (...) towards life. Such attitudes, Carnap argues, are unsuitable objects of theoretical dialogue, insofar as disagreements that concern them are unresolvable. Carnap thus recommends abandoning the attempt to resolve metaphysical disagreements as if they were theoretical. As long as it does not enter into unresolvable disagreements, art, rather than theory, is the appropriate medium for expressing Lebensgefühl. (shrink)

The concept of depth is central to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and informed not only his philosophy of perception but also his thinking about psychology, art and politics. This article traces the ways the notion of depth appears in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in these fields, contrasting it with Husserl’s own phenomenological investigations. The article starts with a comparison of the function of perception in Husserl’s phenomenology and then proceeds with an analysis of how the issue of depth reappears in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, (...) phenomenology of art and political philosophy. I argue that while Husserl’s approach to phenomenology led him to analyses of aesthetics stemming from works of art as random examples, and to non-participation in politics, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology leads to the opposite approach, inviting concrete criticism in art and active participation in politics. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s approach is more philosophically consistent. The choice of particular works of art, and the particular political engagements, can retrospectively clarify the transcendental phenomenological investigations themselves. (shrink)

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 (...) logical syntax of LF. Thus, all of the dichotomies directly hinge on the conception of the LF. The LF’s logical structure, in turn, is an immediate consequence of adopting the linguistic doctrine of logical truths. As we will see, no appeal to any of these distinctions is necessary in establishing a LF and all of its components. I will also draw attention to the differences between what Carnap labels a “way of speaking”, “language”, and “artificial language”. Consequently, I will briefly conclude that none of Quine’s major objections address the main points of Carnap’s theory. (shrink)

There appears to be a widespread belief that the social sciences during the 1950s and 1960s can be characterized by an almost unquestioned faith in a positivist philosophy of science. In contrast, the article shows that even within the narrower segment of Cold War social science, positivism was not an unquestioned doctrine blindly followed by everybody, but that quite divergent views coexisted. The article analyses two ‘techniques of prospection’, the Delphi technique and political gaming, from the perspective of a comprehensive (...) set of ideas attributed to ‘positivism’. Both techniques were developed in the early 1950s by researchers at the RAND Corporation, a Californian think tank with tight relations to the US Air Force. Despite the closeness of origin, the two techniques show considerable differences in their basic epistemologies. The article thus concludes that more important than positivism in uniting US Cold War social science was the shared sense of urgency and of the potential of social science to put decision-making in foreign policy on a rational basis. In this sense, as far as the Cold War social sciences were of a piece, they were made so by the sense of danger and urgency of action evoked by the image of the Iron Curtain. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to look at Cassirer's relation to critical philosophy from a new perspective. Most discussions concerning Cassirer's Kantianism have so far centered on his relation to neo-Kantianism and the Marburg school. My focus will not be on neo-Kantianism but on Cassirer's notion of a "critique of culture." In an often cited paragraph from the introduction to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer says that his aim is to broaden Kant's critical approach to all various forms (...) of culture, to language as well as myth and art, and thus to transform the "critique of reason" into the "critique of culture." I will explore Cassirer's concept of the "critique of culture" and suggest that it can best be understood by placing it in the context of early twentieth century German philosophy. More precisely, I will aim to show that Cassirer's critique can be seen as an effort to find a middle path between Lebensphilosophie and the positivism of the Vienna Circle. (shrink)

I argue that the best interpretation of the general theory of relativity has need of a causal entity, and causal structure that is not reducible to light cone structure. I suggest that this causal interpretation of GTR helps defeat a key premise in one of the most popular arguments for causal reductionism, viz., the argument from physics.

By comparing some founding concepts underlying developing interest in the role of signs and symbols in social life, such as the nature of the sign in Charles Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure and in Emile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead, and then exploring recent developments in structuralism and symbolic interactionism, a critical appraisal of their theories of meaning is made in the context of an emerging semiotic sociology.

Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language (1937) contains an unfortunate passage, the ‘Babylon passage’, explaining what it is for a linguistic expression to be about a subject matter. Past criticism has only addressed Carnap's mistaken claim that the occurrence of a denoting term is necessary and sufficient for a linguistic expression to be about the denotatum. But the passage contains further problems: a form‐object confusion due to the ambiguity of ‘lecture’; a use‐mention problem with the word ‘Babylon’; and finally, the fact (...) that its key sentence ????1 is a counterexample to Carnap's own definition of aboutness. These flaws notwithstanding, the passage's ‘non‐formal consideration’ that a statement's truth or falsity should matter to our knowledge about the subject matter's properties, is an important contribution to aboutness theory. This paper discusses all these pros and cons of the passage in depth with a view to their consequences for current work on subject matter. (shrink)

On a widespread reading, the Carnap-Quine debate about ontology concerns the objectivity and non-triviality of ontological claims. I argue that this view mischaracterizes Carnap’s aims in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” : Carnap’s fundamental goal is to free up decisions about scientific language from constraints deriving from ontological doctrine. The contention, based on his internal/external distinction, that ontological claims are either meaningless or trivial was Carnap’s means to achieving this more fundamental goal. Setting the record straight on this point brings out (...) three important and often overlooked features of Carnap’s views on ontology. First, the target of Carnap’s critique in ESO is not Quine’s mature views on ontology, as laid out in “On What There Is”. Rather, Carnap is responding to arguments for nominalism that were given by Tarski, Goodman, and Quine in the 1940s. Second, a more general rejection of conservatism in theory choice is essential to Carnap’s aims and is implicit in his fundamental views on language. Third, even if it turns out to be tenable, the i/e distinction is not adequate for Carnap’s aim in ESO. Drawing on his basic conception of scientific language, I will suggest an alternative approach on his behalf. (shrink)

I present an exegesis of Henri Poincaré’s metaphysical position in three key essays within his book The Value of Science. In doing so, I argue for three theses: (a) that Poincaré’s metaphysical position in these sources is incompatible with his metaphysical position in his earlier book Science and Hypothesis; (b) that the phenomenological relationism defended by Poincaré in these sources is not a form of structural realism but rather a structuralist form of empiricism and (by design) has no greater metaphysical (...) commitments than constructive empiricism; and (c) that Poincaré holds in these sources that the existence of the external world is merely a convention. These theses serve to correct misconceptions about the consistency of Poincaré’s philosophical corpus, his positions on the realism-antirealism landscape, and the scope of his conventionalism. (shrink)

Heidegger's treatment of 'machination' in the Beiträge zur Philosophie begins the critique of technological thinking that would centrally characterize his later work. Unlike later discussions of technology, the critique of machination in Beiträge connects its arising to the predominance of 'lived-experience' ( Erlebnis ) as the concealed basis for the possibility of a pre-delineated, rule-based metaphysical understanding of the world. In this essay I explore this connection. The unity of machination and lived-experience becomes intelligible when both are traced to their (...) common root in the primordial Greek attitude of techne , originally a basic attitude of wondering knowledge of nature. But with this common root revealed, the basic connection between machination and lived-experience also emerges as an important development of one of the deepest guiding thoughts of the Western philosophical tradition: the Parmenidean assertion of the sameness of being and thinking. In the Beiträge 's analysis of machination and lived-experience, Heidegger hopes to discover a way of thinking that avoids the Western tradition's constant basic assumption of self-identity, an assumption which culminates in the modern picture of the autonomous, self-identical subject aggressively set over against a pre-delineated world of objects in a relationship of mutual confrontation. In the final section, I investigate an important and illuminating parallel to Heidegger's result: the consideration of the relationship between experience and technological ways of thinking that forms the basis of the late Wittgenstein's famous rule-following considerations. (shrink)

Space—an essential dimension of our life—is analyzable from different viewpoints, which often gives rise to contrasting conceptualizations. Perceptual analyses shed light on the intrinsic anisotropy and deformations of perceived space, raising the issue of which geometry may be able to represent perceptual space. Pictorial drawings and painting have been relevant sources of information about the nature of living and perceived space. Although the geometry of perceptual space is still in its infancy, contributions are beginning to appear. This special issue contributes (...) to the development of the geometry of perceptual space. (shrink)

The superfunctionality claim is that phenomenal experiences are more than functional (objective, causal) relations. This is one of the most widely used but least attacked claims in the anti-physicalist literature on consciousness. Coupled with one form of structuralism, the view that science only explains functional relations, the superfunctionality claim entails that science will not explain phenomenal experience. The claim is therefore essential to many anti-physicalist arguments. I identify an open question argument for the superfunctionality claim that expresses an intuition deserving (...) of explanation. Using the experience of fear as an example, I show that this intuition cannot distinguish between whether conscious experiences are more than functional relations, or whether instead they are just very complex (including, constituted by very complex functional relations). I give reasons to suspect that the latter is more likely the case. This renders physicalism safe from the superfunctionality claim. This also provides a challenge to the proponents of the superfunctionality claim: they should explain why paradigmatically mysterious phenomenal experiences are correlated with extensive and complex physical correlates. (shrink)

This paper defends the hypothesis that phenomenal experiences may be very complex information states. This can explain some of our most perplexing anti-physicalist intuitions about phenomenal experience. The approach is to describe some basic facts about information in such a way as to make clear the essential oversight involved, by way illustrating how various intuitive arguments against physicalism (such as Frank Jackson.

In this article, I distinguish Wittgenstein's conception of the dissolution of philosophical problems from that of Carnap. I argue that the conception of dissolution assumed by the therapeutic interpretations of the Tractatus is more similar to Carnap's than to Wittgenstein's for whom dissolution involves spelling out an alternative in the context of which relevant problems do not arise. To clarify this I outline a non‐therapeutic resolute reading of the Tractatus that explains how Wittgenstein thought to be able to make a (...) positive contribution to logic and the philosophy thereof without putting forward any (ineffable) theses. This explains why there is no paradox in the Tractatus. (shrink)

This article clarifies and resituates Althusser’s materialist philosophical project in relation not only to such predecessors as V.I. Lenin and Jean-Toussaint Desanti but also to such successors as Pierre Macherey and Pierre Raymond. The thesis of the article is that Althusser’s project to establish a philosophical practice that would be appropriate for Marxism did not simply consist of identifying and defending a ‘materialist’ position in philosophy against external ‘idealist’ challenges or threats. On the contrary, it recognised that there exists an (...) interminable struggle between inextricably linked but ever-shifting materialist and idealist tendencies – a struggle that operates as a defining feature in the history of philosophy. As a result, the problem explored in this article concerns how best to conceptualise this struggle and to determine whether or not the term ‘tendency’ genuinely holds analytical value and can serve as an important conceptual resource for Marxists working within the field of philosophy. (shrink)

I am going to compare the strategies and communication bees use in order to locate and retrieve nectar to the world of science and the scientist. The analogy is intentionally anthropomorphic but I wish to argue that if successful bees made assumptions they would be similar to those of the scientist: flowers can be regarded as facts, nectar as knowledge, honey as technology and their ‘waggle-dance’ as communication of ideas. I would like to say that this is to be used (...) as an analogy and should not be taken to be a statement of the scientific method as an emergent property of nature, as evolution ultimately does not care about what is true or false, whereas science does. However, what i do wish to convey is that in the same way that the life of bees can be limited by the process of their enquiries; science can also limit itself by the assumptions that are taken to be true or worthwhile in the quest for new knowledge. (shrink)

In 1675, Burchard de Volder became the first university physics professor to introduce the demonstration of experiments into his lectures and to create a special university classroom, The Leiden Physics Theatre, for this specific purpose. This is surprising for two reasons: first, early pre-Newtonian experiment is commonly associated with Italy and England, and second, de Volder is committed to Cartesian philosophy, including the view that knowledge gathered through the senses is subject to doubt, while that deducted from first principles is (...) certain. On the surface, it is curious that such a man would bring experiments to university physics. After all, in demonstrating experiments to his students, he was teaching them through their senses, not reason. However, if we consider the institutional context of de Volder’s teaching, we come to see de Volder’s Cartesian experimentalism as representative of a certain form of pre-Newtonian Dutch Cartesian science, as well as part of a larger tradition of teaching through observation at the University of Leiden. Considering de Volder’s institutional context will help us see that de Volder’s experimentalism was not in spite of his Cartesianism, but motivated by it. This paper will describe de Volder’s physics curriculum, the Theatre in which it was taught and how his work predates similar efforts in other European Universities. The second part will consider three aspects of the culture at the University of Leiden: a tradition of teaching through observation, a particular reception of Cartesianism, and an eclectic approach to the New Philosophy. The concluding portion shows how de Volder would have understood his enterprise in Cartesian terms. (shrink)